The Writing Baron |

Latest Headlines

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 […]
Read More
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. […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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, […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
When the KMT called the shots in the Philippines (review of ‘Diasporic Cold Warriors’ for Taipei Times)

The following book review appeared in today’s Taipei Times. In 1950, the overseas Chinese community of the Philippines numbered 230,000 — just over 1 percent of the country’s population. This made it among the smallest overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. In comparison, Thailand had more than 3 million Chinese residents that same year. Yet, […]
Read More
Ukraine disinformation fight sounds warning bells for Taiwan

The following article was published today on The Diplomat’s website. Taiwanese see propaganda everywhere. Decades of Martial Law will do that. Under the Kuomintang (KMT) dictatorship, indoctrination saw a generation of Taiwanese rendered “politically and socially inert,” to quote sociologist Hsiau A-chin. With that dark experience in living memory, the democratization of the 1980s and […]
Read More
An interdisciplinary treasure trove of learning (review of ‘Maritime Landscapes’ for Taipei Times)

The following book review appeared in today’s Taipei Times. Now and then a work appears that ruthlessly exposes the limits of one’s knowledge. Even seasoned students of Taiwan’s history are likely to find this book doing so repeatedly. Whether speculating on the origins of the Pisheye (毗舍耶) raiders who terrorized coastal Fujian in the twelfth […]
Read More