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Will the War in Ukraine Impact Noble Gas Supplies?

The following article appeared in this month’s Taiwan Business TOPICS, the magazine of the American Chamber of Commerce. The impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on supply chains is hitting European countries the hardest, threatening to bring a winter of shortages and high energy prices. But the rest of the world – including Taiwan […]
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The battle for Taiwan’s constitution

The following piece was published on the UnHerd website today: At the Taipei headquarters of the Taiwan Statebuilding Party (TSP), a wall of shame has been erected in dishonour of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) patsies. Towards the bottom of the TSP shit-list sits Elon Musk, whose recent “solution” to the cross-strait standoff was not well-received in Taiwan. […]
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Taiwan in the frame

Among the proselytizers, merchants and adventurers from Europe who inserted themselves into Taiwan’s early modern history, George Psalmanazar is notorious. Centuries before the Chinese Communist Party began faking news about Taiwan, this (most likely) French-born hoaxer, who claimed to be a Formosan and invented his own language to prove it, was regaling eighteenth century London […]
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Assessing Taiwan’s democracy

The following article appeared in today’s Taipei Times: Taiwan ranked eighth in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Democracy Index 2021, behind only New Zealand, Ireland and the Nordic countries. Titled The China Challenge, the report and its accompanying essay touched on notions of a global “democratic recession” and the hope of “democratic renewal” in light […]
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All the World’s a Stage: Shakesepeare and Taiwan

The following book review appeared in today’s Taipei Times: A few years ago, I attended a Shakespeare workshop in Taipei. As someone who only began to appreciate the Bard outside the classroom, I was excited. Several Taiwanese were participating in the four-week course, and I was curious to see what they would make of it. […]
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Democratic maneuvers in the twilight (review of ‘Democracy and Rule of Law in China’s Shadow’ for Taipei Times)

The following book review appeared in today’s Taipei Times: For those countries and states unfortunate enough to lie within China’s penumbral fringes, “the space within which democracy and the rule of law operate is fraught with tensions.” This observation from Amy Barrow’s conclusion to this fine collection summarizes the unifying preoccupation of the book’s 11 […]
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Creating hope: perspectives on reporting from Russia’s war in Ukraine

The following article appeared in N3 Magazine, the magazine/website for the annual conference of the Asian American Journalists Association. “On February 24, all journalists in Ukraine had to become war reporters,” says Ivan Verstyuk, editor of New Voice of Ukraine. “Before that, all of us had different beats. Some of us were writing about politics, […]
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Why is China’s English disinformation still so crude?

The following article appeared in today’s Taipei Times: The comment arrived shortly after I’d posted the link on Facebook. The article, which was my first for Taiwan Business TOPICS, the magazine of the American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan, was about burgeoning trade between Taiwan and Lithuania. Accompanied by the profile picture of an attractive […]
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Conveying the atrocious (review of ‘A Son of Taiwan’ for Taipei Times)

The following book review appeared in today’s Taipei Times: Unlike Transitions in Taiwan, the previous White Terror-themed collection from Cambria, this latest anthology addresses Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) crimes head on. In Wu Chuo-liu’s (吳濁流) almost novella-length “Potsdam Section Chief,” for example, the depiction of protagonist Fan Hanzhi’s wanton venality is unvarnished. He is shown […]
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Taiwan and Ukraine: parallels, divergences and potential lessons

The following piece appeared in the June issue of Global Asia. In the preface to her 2004 work Visible Ghosts, Li Ang explains how the spectral dreamscape that her characters inhabit symbolizes Taiwan. “Such a ghost island is borderless and not a country, and its voices are outside the center of the grand national body and […]
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