David on Formosa

It’s been another busy week on the Taiwan blogs. Michael Turton will be back with the links next week. Patrick Cowsill gives a history lesson on why the Dutch came to Taiwan. Taiwan in Cycles has all the information you ever need about carrying bikes on trains. Lao Ren Cha likes the Breeze Food Court [...]

I had a letter published in the Taipei Times today. The letter suggests holding a referendum on combining the presidential and legislative elections. I believe this is one of several referendums that could be held in conjunction with the forthcoming presidential and legislative elections. The most important one would be a referendum to amend the [...]

Michael Turton is taking a break from blogging for a few weeks so I am going to post a weekly collection of links in the interim. Before he went on holidays Michael wrote a wonderful article about cycling in Taiwan on the Huffington Post. Let’s check out the latest on the Taiwan blogs. Letters from [...]

Freedom House released its Freedom in the World 2011 report yesterday. The report’s key finding was that freedom declined globally for the fifth consecutive year. Freedom House noted that authoritarian regimes like those in China, Egypt, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela continued to step up repressive measures with little significant resistance from the democratic world. Taiwan’s [...]

China has the 50 Cent Party (五毛黨) to regulate and control content on the internet. Now it seems Taiwan has its own version labelled the $5,000 Party (五千黨). The latter term was coined by convenor of the Taiwan Green Party Pan Han-shen (潘翰聲) on his blog in response to an incident where a group of 20 bloggers [...]