Blogs & Ecology

Michael Turton analyses some views of Taiwan from the US establishment. The Far-Eastern Sweet Potato criticises the advice of the European Chamber of Commerce Taipei.

A well-known Chinese blogger WU Jiaxiang （吳稼祥）argues the “riot” that happened at Taipei Hotel November 6 is in fact part of the rampant “political kidnapping” in Taiwan [zh]. The blogger further analyses who are ultimately behind “the political violence” in Taiwan.

It seems that many people, especially if you are outside Taiwan, found the recent protest against Chen Yinlin in Taipei confusing. Bob pointed out that in China, some incidents in the protest were interpreted as democratic violence. Such impression is probably a result of the mainstream media report on the violent scene. You may want to ask what had happened during this long day, Nov 6th? Why did so many people decide to demonstrate in the street? How did the violence happen? Let's take a closer look at and listen to these protesters.

aswing explained why protest:

About 500 students gathered peacefully in front of the Executive Yuan on 11/6 to protest against the current Parade and Assembly Law (集會遊行法). The government abusive use of the law has violated people's rights in protest in the past few days during the visit of Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) Chair Chen Yunlin.

Different from the fierce encounter between protesters and police forces during the day in front of the Presidential Office, there are more than 400 students peacefully gathering in front of the Executive Yuan in order to bring everyone's attention back to the real question: Is the freedom of expression still belong to Taiwanese? And they protest against President Ma and its government for lowering Taiwanese human right standard as to the level in Mainland China(zh).

Wenli is now there and livecasting via Yahoo!Live along with 400 online watchers.

Leonard criticizes Taiwanese protesters' violent action towards mainland journalists and anchors from CCTV, China in the protest against Chen Yun-lin's visit.

Claudia Jean writes about a hunger strike protest for amendment of the referendum law in Taiwan. Memories of Past Tense reports on the final night of the protest with photos.

Several media outlets reported that 600,000 people attended the 1025 Safeguard Taiwan protest on Saturday in Taipei. A-gu live blogged on the protest tracking the news reports of several TV channels. Travels around Taiwan had a post featuring photos of some of the signs at the protest. Memories of Past Tense also has photos of the event.

Zhang Mingqing, vice chairman of China's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS), encountered protests as he visited Tainan for an academic conference. Michael Turton analyses media coverage of the protests. Fili also looks at what happened.

A website has been set up for bloggers to launch sticker action in Taiwan. A most popular sticker is “this blog doesn't contain melamine!” (a total of 805 stickers counted).

This summer, Taiwan original cinema is not just coming back to life, but also shinning like the Sun.

Talking Taiwanese has written a long essay on the importance of mother tongue education. He discusses how the Taiwanese language is neglected in the education system and the implications this has for students' academic achievement and the future survival of the language.

It is almost 65 years since the Cairo Declaration. Jerome Keating looks at the rhetoric of it and asks why the status of Taiwan remains undetermined after all this time.

I would like to introduce you to Leonard Chien, English-Chinese translator and interpreter from Taiwan, and a Lingua powerhouse for Global Voices. At the recent GV Summit in Budapest, Leonard famously announced that we would always know when he had a day off as he would translate more articles of Global Voices that day. In fact, when asked what he would chose for a superpower he said “May I increase my translation rates?” So what more can we learn about Leonard than his love for translating? Read more to find out.

The fourth Global Chinese Blog Award-the biggest blog award in Chinese blogosphere-hosted by Taiwan's Chinatimes.com just finished sign-up stage this evening with a result of more than 10,000 blogs signing in 16 categories. The most competitive category is Art and Culture which has 3,015 contesting blogs while the least is Political Parties and Central Government with only four runners. I was one of the judges in last year contest and I managed to read over 7,500 blogs at that time as if I was mad.