My piece
@Guardian
describes how Taiwan's rebellious history has been forged through social movements. In its unprecedented third term the DPP must dare to take risks to win the hearts of young people.
About that awful piece in
@TheAtlantic
. It suggests that
@chesaboudin
created the Tenderloin (she's gotta be joking; we all know what it was like before), it makes SF an object of nostalgia (hasn't she ever read joan didion on haight ashbury?), it describes Asian Americans as
a monolithic bloc (I feel used). And it makes some stunning omissions. It omits how under Chesa an innocent man who spent 32 years in prison was exonerated. It omits protections created for the most vulnerable workers. It omits how police unions gave $700,000 in
at the Safeway. But then I realized she wants that naked man ... to be sent to a mental institution? to prison? The thing I want to say is that no conversation about crime can ever be real or honest or searching if you don't talk about the violence of prison. Of being severed
attack ads. It omits stats that show crime has risen marginally.
But for me the most unforgivable omission has to do with prison, the violence of prison. At first I thought she actually cared about the homeless man dying & the naked man
The unexplored and unarticulated principle of this piece is that people who commit crime—as well as those who make you feel uncomfortable because they are homeless, using drugs, or mentally ill—should be locked up. Then you can tell yourself that they're "getting help."
from loved ones, deprived of fresh air. Of being subject to random violence. To solitary for talking back to a guard. To a room where you share a toilet with 40 other people. I am open to talking about how to address theft and robbery (and willing to set aside the point
that crime has not risen significantly). But I don't think this writer is interested in solutions. You can tell because she speaks of enhancements praisingly and diversion programs glancingly. You can tell because she does not talk to a single person who has committed a crime.
As
@larabazelon
says, voters for Chesa's recall believe "they'll magically wake up" with all the problems gone but will actually be waking up to "the same mayor, the same incompetent police with a 9 percent clearance rate."
(See interview
@democracynow
)
She hides this principle with a faux-compassionate writing style that almost tricked me into thinking she cares about vulnerable people. But the substance of this piece boils down to nostalgia-tinged, reactionary politics.
Read
@larabazelon
on Joaquin Ciria, now a free man:
Read
@adamjohnsonNYC
on how "true reform has always been a marathon, not a sprint"
Read Julie Ting on how the recall will hurt AAPI communities:
I've read nothing like this before—a painfully honest piece about the cruelty and patriarchy of academia, viewed through the lens of a grieving wife. Lang Chen remembers the last days of husband
@Xiaohong__Xu
, a brilliant, beloved sociologist from China who passed away at age 45.
This video shows KMT legislators deliberately pushing
@pumashen
over a ledge. Puma was taken out on a gurney and had to go to the hospital, where he is now. Hope you recover soon
@pumashen
, the people are on your side.
These KMT legislators should be arrested for assault.
Dear
@BonnieGlaser
,
@jessicacweiss
, Tom Christensen, I ask respectfully that you retract this ideologically loaded, anti-intellectual, and factually incorrect line: “Tsai has allowed the teaching of Taiwan’s history separate from the history of China in high schools."
1/
In Taiwan a friend tells me he won’t try to leave if China invades; he plans to die defending his native land. “I couldn’t live in exile,” he says. “I couldn’t live knowing that my native land has disappeared.” Another agrees. “I’m happy to die,” she says.
I'm turning 40 this year & moving to Taiwan. Writing this piece forced me to work through so many uncomfortable issues: status anxiety, impasses in marriage, my American insularism, & hierarchical assumptions that the way upward is from East to West.
“I was 37 when I was arrested and I’m 73 now.” Su Ping-kun spoke to 200 law students at NTU about being waterboarded by police, arrested, convicted, imprisoned, eventually pardoned, then retried, and at last exonerated by a court of law. This excruciating process took 32 years.
I can't stop thinking about this bit below in which a person with a Harvard doctorate at a big U.S. thinktank says he's "hesitant to look at Taiwan sources" because "they all tend to slant in one political direction or another." This is bizarre, defamiliarizing, and troubling.
Tsai can’t “allow” or disallow the teaching of history, as she isn’t a dictator; the fight over how to teach the Taiwanese history textbooks began as soon as martial law was lifted. 2/
If you want to understand Taiwan's presidential elections and how the past eight years have led us to this precarious moment, a must-read book is Rex How (郝明義)'s TAIWAN UNBOUND, published this fall in Mandarin and just released in English as an e-book. 🧵1/
Your line insults the dignity of people to determine collectively what they want their children to learn. It insults teachers who teach Taiwanese history. It insults every dead Taiwanese (and Chinese) person who would get nixed from a CCP-approved “Chinese history” textbook. 3/
"Suppressing Americans’ access to videos about Tiananmen Square might not sound like a big deal but consider what TikTok would do in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan ...Imagine anti-Taiwan videos flooding TikTok, threatening to send the President’s poll numbers plunging"
TikTok's desperate attempt to co-opt kids into lobbying for it just demonstrates how powerful and dangerous the app would be in the event of a U.S.-China war.
It insults countless scholars who have created and built the field of Taiwanese history. They study maritime history, environmental history, indigenous history, Hakka migration. They study martial law, White Terror, Japanese colonial history, Dutch and Spanish colonial history.
“What’s clear is that nobody will come to our aid,” said a protester who admired the bravery of Ukrainians. "We have to fight for ourselves."
Both Taiwan & Ukraine are young democracies where the memory of authoritarian rule is still fresh.
@albertowu
religion, language, medicine. Though the history of China is intertwined with Taiwanese history, it does not and should not subsume it. A Taiwan history scholar’s work is as rigorous as anybody else's and should not be dismissed, reduced, or manipulated for political purposes.
“The silence about Pelosi’s visit in Taiwan is an expression of contempt, a condemnation of the game these Great Powers are playing.”
We dream of a world where politicians treat Taiwan as a true actor, which it has always been.
Our latest w
@albertowu
:
Abuse in immigrant detention in Taiwan must end. This past July guards beat a Vietnamese migrant worker, put him a bedless cell, and chained his hands and ankles. “I could only take out the chains once, when I showered,” he said. “Even when I was sleeping, I was chained twice.”
The first beating took place on June 15. N., a Vietnamese worker, had already been detained for five weeks.
Read
@kuokuomich
and Fr. Peter Hung Nguyen on a physical abuse case for which Taiwan's Immigration Agency claims no evidence of wrongdoing:
"When I hear snippets of Cantonese on the streets of Taipei, it feels like a small catastrophe." A beautiful personal essay by
@rhodakykwan
deals with the loss of Hong Kong and the experience of Hong Kongers in Taiwan.
She loved him deeply and was proud of his work. Observing how "humble" American headstones are—they rarely name the deceased's occupation—she writes, "As shallow as I am, I'd love to carve a QR code on his headstone so that all curious passers-by can read his papers."
Lang Chen's remembrance is in Mandarin, so I read this with the help of Deepl and
@albertowu
.
Here it is:
@THiS_TheHisSoc
And you can read his obit here:
The true story is: following decades of martial law, its people made an extraordinary transition to a democratic society.
The true story is: This society takes citizenship, scholarship, and a balanced educational curriculum seriously.
13/
They study feminist movements. They record oral histories. They recover suppressed local stories. They preserve languages. They study how democratic culture emerged. They study the history of Taiwan’s relations with other countries. They study histories of art, film, music,
This line insults indigenous people in Taiwan who fought to be accorded a place in its history. It insults second & third gen waishengren who see themselves as part of Taiwan history; it insults second gen children of immigrants from Southeast Asia who call themselves Taiwanese.
As
@shu_wang_gong
writes, "The idea that Taiwan can assure China by teaching its students Taiwanese history as part of Chinese history is so ludicrous that it is beneath contempt."
15/
The beloved & eloquent
@miaopoya
mesmerized a crowd of over 3,000 outside the legislature. "It's been ten years. I didn't give up, right? I didn't turn my head and leave, right? It's because we're all people who really love Taiwan." Everybody cheered like crazy. ❤️❤️🔥
"While having no authority at all within Taiwan’s territory, Beijing is able to cower the international community into accepting ... an official fiction about Taiwan’s reality. Rather than this being China’s power over Taiwan, it is ... the power China has over the rest of us."💯
A piece of mine for
@LowyInstitute
on how the Taiwanese people and the world loses from Taiwan's exclusion from international organisations, and why China's power is not actually over Taiwan, rather it is over the rest of us in our submission to falsehoods
The true story is: Arguments about history textbooks are a messy, divisive part of the public sphere. Yet people co-exist, debate, vote, and overwhelmingly send their kids to public school.
The true story is: there’s excellent and exciting scholarship on Taiwan’s history.
14/
should stop teaching Ukrainian history because it might provoke Russia?
It insults the resilience & persistence of people who forged the field of Taiwanese history against dominant currents of scorn and skepticism. 9/
But I expect better from prominent scholars in the field.
Your piece hurts. You’ve hurt Taiwanese people with it. Maybe you think you’re helping Taiwan by describing deterrence strategies that protect it. But when you fail to tell a true story about Taiwan, you hurt it.
12/
It's typical for those of my parents’ generation to say—always with a contemptuous laugh—“What, Taiwanese history? There’s no such thing! This land is so small. You’re saying that indigenous people have a history compared to China?” I think we can agree this is a repellent
It insults anticolonial activists across time who see the act of defining one’s own collective history as a process of becoming. Of gaining self-respect, self-knowledge. Of dislodging violently enforced attitudes of civilizational superiority. Would you tell Ukrainians that they
attitude. And yet you inadvertently validate it.
I don’t blame my parents' gen too much. They grew up under dictatorship and with martial law textbooks. They’re not historians or archivists, who understand history is rich, specific, variable, surprising, contradictory.
11/
I wrote about the re-release of City of Sadness in
@parisreview
, a canonical film in Taiwan. Though it failed to show the scale or barbarity of the killings of 2/28, it did succeed in describing the inherent worth of preserving a free mind amid totalitarian conditions.
“City was the first film in Taiwan to represent the events of 2/28—a sequence of numbers known to every Taiwanese person today, though for decades it could barely be whispered.”
@kuokuomich
on City of Sadness.
At the solidarity protest with Ukraine in Liberty Square in Taiwan, hundreds listen as
@olekshyn
speaks of the “courage of our people back home who manifest their desire and will.”
to be happy marrying someone who shares the same passions and desires. You want the same thing, but someone has to take care of the kids, file the taxes, manage the money, and cook, so it becomes a zero-sum game .... The more successful he is, the more miserable you are."
In our latest newsletter,
@albertowu
and I discuss how pro-China media in Taiwan has reported on Ukraine. It has tried to delegitimize Zelensky, avoided discussing Russia’s role, and avoided showing Ukrainian resistance or international solidarity.
Last, sorry to be vengeful but ...
#Sociology
twitter, can you help publish his papers posthumously and see if the aforementioned reviewers were wrong?
Loved this story about a guy who takes an Uber to the protest and then bonds with the driver about how much they dislike Huang Kuo-Chang. Driver decides he can’t stand it anymore, parks the car near Taipei Main and then they walk over together
Such a joy to hear
@olekshyn
, a Korean-Ukrainian student living in Taiwan, share how his Ukrainian identity has changed & deepened. "We grew up with an ingrained perception that everything about Ukrainian is substandard—that it’s deviant & not as perfect as Russian," Olek said.1/
Thank you
@kuokuomich
and
@albertowu
. I hadn’t fully reflected on some of these topics myself, but I’m happy I could do that in the process of this very friendly conversation with you. I hope your readers find much meaning in this story and hear the voices I thrive to represent🌻
"Although the ‘one China’ narrative portrays Taiwan as eternally Chinese land ... large-scale Han Chinese settlement in Taiwan is not ancient, but dates to the early 17th century – to the same period when Europeans began settling overseas in what is now the U.S. and Canada."
My 1st academic essay on Taiwan is out w/
@HistoricalJnl
. I argue that TW's history of conquest, settler colonialism, democratization & incomplete nation-building, combined w/the PRC's ambitions towards it, renders it both a colonial & post-colonial space.
"A few weeks before he died, he made an unprecedented statement about his boredom with academia, saying that in the time he had left, he would write something for his daughter. Neither of us knew that the 'time left' would be so short. So far I haven't found any message for her."
The Taipei book fair was a dizzying and inspiring six-day mega event, drawing readers of all ages and from all walks of life. The exhibit celebrating Poland, this year's guest of honor, was especially fun. Here's my paean to the fair, with
@albertowu
:
Shout-out to Taiwan Innocence Project for its dogged work in exonerating wrongfully convicted people, and thank you Mr. Su for sharing his story and to my students for helping to organize.
at any conference, everyone finds it interesting, but they just won't give me a pass. I was at my wit's end, and there was only one voice in my mind: I hate the academic system. Another article rejection occurred on the day he finished chemotherapy, when he was at his weakest."
He sympathized with her but he couldn't stop working. "This is a man who is trying to be a feminist within a patriarchal structure—it's an awkward position. The position demands so much of him, so unrealistically high."
She gave up a tenure track professorship in HK for his job at Michigan and switched to a career in clinical social work. While he worked to get tenure, she did the bulk of household labor & care for their nine-year-old daughter. "I used to tell my therapist it's impossible
If you're in Taipei, I'll be in conversation with 郝明義 (Rex How) at the wonderful, chaotic Taiwan International Book Fair at 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM. A new edition of the translation (陪你讀下去) of my book is coming out. I'll be in the blue salon; the event will be bilingual.💜
It is absolutely bonkers and yet unsurprising that none of the KMT legislators, save one, showed up to the inauguration yesterday. It’s graceless. Why can’t they rally around the common good in the most simple way? Is it that hard to sit through a ceremony?
Fantastic thread. Where does the KMT-TPP think the 2 trillion NTD will come from? It will mean public debt, less social spending, and more crooked dealings with the PRC.
Read this essential thread to understand how the KMT has abused state power to smear and humiliate. It’s ugly and it destroys lives. I think they especially relish targeting public servants who are genuinely civic-minded and decent.
1/ The announcement yesterday of fishing expeditions led by Fu Kun-chi against the Tsai Administration is a spectacular example of history rhyming. Back in the Ma Administration.....
@christinelu
i'm so sorry for your loss, and i wish i had a chance to know your sister. i would love to learn more about her and what she cared about. thank you so much for sharing this and for all the work that you do to speak truth!
@sadarlo1
@AutumnL82159281
@KimberlyNFoster
I agree with everyone here. She was gaslighting a person she knew was unstable, friendless, and 'uncool.' Then she gets all indignant, trying to make it about race and artistic license.
Listen to
@pumashen
, who is on fire, speak. Judicial form "means the legislators must self-discipline, not leak confidential information ... What is KPP and TPP’s reform really about? It is about using legislative reform to grant unlimited power for legislators. They
Ten Taiwanese American thinkers, writers and journalists discuss representation, identity, coalition building and responsible media coverage that they hope to see!
@kuokuomich
@albertowu
@catielila
@jessicadrun
In his final days, she writes, he was lucid and calm, often lecturing on the hospital bed, saying things like, 'We can think about how to read Weber from a feminist perspective.'
What should teenagers and college students do when they want to change the world — but fear losing their parents’ love? Here is some advice on how to rebel, from someone who did.
His story is told in the film “Haven’t Stopped Lamenting” (從那天起我們開始哭泣). In Taiwanese and Mandarin he told students, “Some of you will become judges, prosecutors. There are evil ones—don’t be like them. Take time with each case, remember it’s a person. Have integrity.”
Three or four days before a stomach surgery intended to remove his tumor, he was rejected by an academic journal—by "the same reviewer, even after he had revised it according to the reviewer's comments. He wondered if the reviewer who rejected him knew about his cancer.""
“Taiwan in Asia is a revolutionary country. It’s very rebellious,” says Freddy Lim, who believes the DPP needs to rediscover its radical roots and remind young people of the DPP era’s legalisation of same-sex marriage, transitional justice, and other social reforms.
Less than 24 hours until Taiwan's election, here's our big piece on the colour and mood of this chaotic campaign season, and a vote that's too close to call. With
@amyhawk_
and
@chihui__lin
, on the ground in a bunch of places across Taiwan
it makes me so happy that people who don’t know much about Taiwan responded with such emotion to the film INVISIBLE NATION. Directed by
@VHopeful
, it describes the determination of Taiwanese people to stay free.
Thank you Mill Valley Film Festival. 🙏❤️
Right after he got the rejection: "I accompanied him on a walk to a nearby park, where it was cloudy and cold and there was hardly anyone. Xiaohong burst into tears on the hillside. It was a beastly howl. He said: why why why why, why is it that when I present this research
"This is the first time I have come back here in 30 years. And I can't quite explain what's taken me so long except that I always thought of Taiwan as the place my parents left behind." I love the openness & honesty of
@ailsachang
at NPR, with thanks to
@JocelynSChung
& Rosa. 💜
As we explored identity throughout this trip, we ask what it means to be both Taiwanese AND American, and to choose to build a new future in the place of your parents past. Produced/edited by
@jojom8ah
@mallory_yu
@patrickjaren
@npratc
The Taiwanese media's disturbing attacks on the lone anti-death penalty NGO in Taiwan make it impossible to have a real dialogue about violent crime. Whether the death penalty is really a form of justice deserves our most searching, careful consideration.
Have been thinking about polarization of the Taiwanese diaspora a lot these days, and the devastating news about a shooting near my parents' neighborhood really brought it home. Prayers for the family of John Cheng, 52, husband and father of two, and for the grieving loved ones.
On this aspect, a point about the diaspora--if a second-generation waishengren hate crime against benshengren may seem inexplicable today, my own experience is that the politics of diaspora sometimes gets frozen from when they leave Taiwan--whether in terms of racial politics
“A Taiwan-centric identity grew to become a majority position within Taiwanese. Younger Taiwanese … associate the idea of being Chinese with the period of colonial rule imposed by an authoritarian government.”
Thank you
@jamestwotree
for this characteristically lucid piece.
@millypunkrock
@TheAtlantic
@chesaboudin
yes—you are so right about that. She said nothing about the extensive power that prosecutors already have and how enhancements work to annihilate any hope for fair bargaining. And nothing about Three Strikes laws that punish people for life.
For Mother’s Day support our book drive for women incarcerated with their children in Taiwan prisons. We especially need picture books for kids under 3. You can ship books or bring them to the Forward Alliance office by next Tuesday. Go
@Enoch_TW
for this initiative! 📚📕❤️
Finally some good news. I hear from students and faculty at NTU that this guy is a toxic, unethical person who abuses his power as dean and faculty. He also openly punishes students who disagree with his deep blue politics.
NTU Dean of Social Sciences Hung-dah Su (蘇宏達) fails to win a new term. Just yesterday, he was in the news objecting to the new NTU diploma format because ROC calendar years have been removed, leaving only the Western Gregorian calendar dates.
Su told students he isn’t who he used to be. He lost his job, sense of humor & optimism. He wasted decades clearing his name, trying to overcome anger. But he likes talking to young law students—it gives him hope they’ll be better than the judges, prosecutors who stole his life.
My favorite moment was when Mr. Su introduced each person in his family pic on the day he was exonerated. He described how he missed his son’s graduation while in prison and how his wife never stopped fighting for him.
This riveting, must-read piece by Rachel Aviv convinced me that the British nurse Lucy Letby is innocent. A combination of factors, among them misogyny, a rapacious media, and doctor-consultants who failed to acknowledge systemic failures, led to this wrongful conviction.
Rachel Aviv on the case of British nurse Lucy Letby, convicted of killing seven babies. The evidence against her gave "an impression of mathematical clarity and coherence, distracting from another possibility: that there had never been any crimes at all."
@albertowu
and I have been thinking all week about the shootings at Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church last week. In this piece we work through our confusion and think about possible ways to grieve.
No need to apologize,
@miaopoya
. It was a tough district, and you were tireless & brilliant. You gave so many of us energy and faith. This is just the beginning.
Also: I got my blue parents to vote you and am very proud of them. 🥰
“The American sinologist Lucian Pye famously said that China is a 'civilisation pretending to be a nation-state.’ But it is precisely the opposite: China is a modern nation-state that pretends to be an ancient civilisation—when it suits its expansionist ambitions." Great piece
Have a piece in
@guardian
today responding to the PRC's claims that Taiwan belongs to China since time immemorial, when this is an invented nationalist history
Thanks to
@bonny_ling
and
@newbloommag
for today’s event on justice for migrant workers.
Abolish monthly fees, end debt bondage, and create a system in which workers do not bear the cost of their recruitment.