Taiwanese environmental groups demonstrated in front of their Ministry of Foreign Affairs building in Taipei to protest against a proposed plan by the Japanese government to dump 1.2 million tons of wastewater from the 2011 Fukushima disaster into the Pacific Ocean.
Some have hailed the end of sham democracy in Hong Kong, with the remaining fifteen pan-Democratic legislators in the Hong Kong Legislative Council resigning en masse.
According to organizers, over 130,000 marched in the annual pride parade in Taipei on Saturday. Lower turnout had been expected due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and in fact numbers were down from the record 200,000 participants in the October 2019 event.
The Chinese government has begun parading imprisoned Taiwanese on television with the claim that they are Taiwanese spies. Televised confessions of guilt have been broadcast in order to reinforce this claim.
The Nationalist Party (KMT) caused surprise last week by proposing two resolutions regarding diplomatic ties with the United States that passed unanimously in the Legislative Yuan, a rare show of bipartisanship in Taiwanese politics.
Chinese military activities around Taiwan have visibly escalated in past weeks. Apart from military exercises conducted in the area, a visit to Taiwan by US Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment Keith Krach saw consecutive days of warplanes sent into Taiwanese airspace.
A political spat between high-ranking Nationalist Party (KMT) and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) politicians broke out last month after comments by former President Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT regarding Taiwan’s national defense.
The Tsai Ing-wen administration surprised last week with the announcement that it intended to open Taiwan up to beef and pork imports from the United States. This move is clearly aimed at removing one of the major political hurdles to a bilateral trade agreement with Washington, which had made this a precondition for a bilateral trade agreement with Taiwan for well over a decade.
It took few by surprise that Chen Chi-mai of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was the winner of the Kaohsiung mayoral by-election.
An ongoing corruption probe into a group of pan-Green and pan-Blue politicians accused of taking bribes in a case related to the ownership of the Pacific Sogo department store chain has the potential to be a major scandal faced by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party and for the Tsai Ing-wen administration.
