Tea Leaf Nation

The island of Lanyu lies not far off the southeast coast of Taiwan — a small, bucolic island with a population barely exceeding 4,000. Aboriginal Tao people make up nearly 60% of the population, with the rest being mainly Han Chinese. Residents also share the island with a more unwelcome neighbor – the Lanyu Nuclear [...]

Fast vehicles and racy women have always been the playthings of the rich. But when a car is too fast to handle, the driver may find himself and his exotic cargo just where he didn’t want to be: the limelight. On the afternoon of April the 5, Yeh Mao-hong (葉茂宏), president of Architecture World (葉財建設), [...]

This article also appears on the Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. A newly released survey conducted by the Ministry of Culture in Taiwan reports that the Taiwanese read only two books a year on average. While the well-known Chinese adage “with just one book, a man is never poor” offered some comfort to [...]

Imagine a city flush with both renminbi and Taiwan dollars, one where Chinese and Taiwanese managers, designers, researchers, and officials work together to create a harmonious “home,” and where children from both sides of the Straits play together at summer camps. Does such a city exist? Not quite yet. But Pingtan—an island located in China’s [...]

This article also appears on Tea Leaf Nation partner sites ChinaFile and  The Atlantic. Within twenty-four hours of registration, Sina Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) deleted the microblog account of Frank Hsieh, former premier of Taiwan’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Ironically, Hsieh’s last tweet before he lost the power to post on Weibo was: [...]

One day after the Chinese microblog account was verified by Sina Weibo as belonging to Frank Hsieh, the former presidential nominee of Taiwan’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), it was stealthily erased. But the disappearance did not go unnoticed; instead, it brought a tidal wave of online comments on China’s social media. No doubt the account [...]

It was an interesting November for spectators on the island of Taiwan. Taiwan’s media has been paying close attention to the results of the U.S. presidential election and the recently-concluded 18th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Taiwan is awkwardly positioned between two giants, having close relations with the U.S. and an undetermined political [...]

Over the past few weeks, Taiwanese legislators and citizens have engaged in an increasingly heated debate about whether or not to make Chinese students eligible for Taiwanese National Health Insurance (NHI).  The controversy’s roots date back to the period between 2009 and 2011, when Taiwan passed a series of education laws that ultimately allowed Chinese [...]

Democracy isn’t just an ideological choice–it’s a lifestyle. And that, in so many words, is why Lung Ying-Tai (龙应台) believes that Taiwanese do not want to unify with China. Ms. Lung, a Taiwanese author well known within mainland China, argued in a recent opinion piece published on Chinese news sites (full text here) that democracy confers [...]

BBC News in Taipei recently published an article celebrating one full year of Chinese student enrollment in Taiwanese universities. The widely-reposted article’s catchy headline poses the question, “Is Taiwanese democracy changing Chinese students?”  Those Chinese students who started their studies in Taiwan last year were not only able to gain a new perspective on Taiwan, [...]

Taiwan has now joined the U.S. visa waiver program. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security officially announced on October 2 that beginning December 1, Taiwanese may travel to the U.S. and stay there for 90 days without a visa. But Chinese netizens had mixed reactions to the news since, as the Washington Post succinctly noted, [...]

On August 9, the two sides of the Taiwan Strait made yet another stride towards economic cooperation by signing the Cross-Strait Investment Protection and Promotion Agreement. The agreement is the culmination of the most recent official trade talks, and provides a framework for settling trade disputes, shortening the time needed for products to clear customs, [...]