Alright, will be live-tweeting the presidential debate this afternoon, which is starting now. The order, based on drawing lots, will be Lai Ching-te, Hou You-yi, and Ko Wen-je This will have a round of opening statements, a round of media questioning, a round of exchanges between candidates, and closing statements. The debate is jointly organized by eleven media including Liberty Times, China Times, TTV, PTS, TVBS, etc.

Ma Ying-jeou has now accompanied Hou You-yi to the Grand Hyatt

udn.com/vote2024/story… And now....Hou and Eric Chu are waiting for Ko and Gou???? Who were supposed to already be there?

Ko press conference starts, goes over that the respective polling experts did not reach consensus by 2:30 AM yesterday. They explain the difference between the experts was regarding integrating landlines and cell phones Other differences regarding the margin of error

The tankie mentality of basically claiming the US is the worst in the world and no other struggle or context matters in comparison is first world narcissism at its best, lol It's interesting to think through the failure of international solidarity there where they make it into a game of one-upmanship in which they want to claim the top position of victimhood, as a claim to moral superiority

New Qiao just dropped, lol. Like come on, the CCP is willing to subject entire cities to rolling lockdowns even when this leads to food shortages, western politicians aren't even willing to make their constituents wear face masks. "More responsive", lol Regarding this, it's almost like they can't distinguish between how a specific locality might take a slightly different line than other places, which is what I think was the significance of this. China is just one undifferentiated mass to them, lol

Rather amazing statements coming out of the Taiwanese pro-unification left these days on the protests in China. The usual suspects that sniped at any mass movement in Taiwan in past years are basically doing the same for mass movements in China, and hey, they identify with China It all goes to show that human lives are for them simply an abstraction, they never cared--it's just a way to position themselves as edgy, more radical-than-thou, and intellectually and morally superior to elsewhere. Pure moral bankruptcy at work there

I can only imagine this will contribute to the ongoing situation in China, particularly with some looking back at Jiang's period of rule in a nostalgia light in past years--particularly from young people

https://twitter.com/XHNews/status/1597871563944099847

A piece on that in @Diplomat_APAC

thediplomat.com/2019/02/why-ch…

Remembering how the Taiwanese government has treated Chinese and Hong Kong asylum seekers in the past (I mean, remember those two Chinese men in Taoyuan Airport for over 100 days? Or Li Jiabao?), I'm concerned about Chinese students in the current solidarity protests here We know that the Chinese government monitors students here. Chinese academic institutions researching Taiwan even took an active interest in the phenomenon of Chinese students participating in the Sunflower Movement

If they need ways to stay, will the government provide that?

So have police cars been going around with lights blaring all night as they drive around other parts of Taipei since COVID started, or is this just a Wanhua thing? Though I do see that less now, more recently There's a lot of police activity in Wanhua I just don't see in other parts of Taipei. Like police regularly go around my building distributing pamphlets about fraud to the elderly residents--but I often suspect this is a pretext to see who lives in the apartment units

Wrote about the resonances of of everyday objects in protests--as a sign of how demonstrators are regular people appropriating objects from their ordinary environments to make political demands--with regards to the current protests in China

https://twitter.com/newbloommag/status/1597576119183704065

This is basically my tweet thread from earlier as an article. I also find the symbolic import of the blank piece of paper with no slogan on it--as a reaction against censorship, but also since everyone knows what it would read

For @UoNARI_Taiwan, I wrote on the election results over the weekend and comparisons to 2018. The results are comparable in terms of disparity between votes for KMT and DPP, as well as the DPP winning five municipalities this time compared to six in 2018

https://twitter.com/UoNARI_Taiwan/status/1597515751594004481

But the biggest factor may be the absence of any "Han wave", since there was no KMT candidate with a large populist following the manner of Han to define the election cycle. Likewise, that issues up for referendum were not hotly contentious was another factor

I'm started to get a bit confused about the number of solidarity events in Taiwan for what's going on in China, so maybe a thread is useful. These are the ones I know of. There's one tonight in about an hour in Liberty Plaza at 7 PM There's one tomorrow at 8 PM at National Taiwan University

With 13 months until presidential and legislative elections in Taiwan, I think it can be expected that cross-strait relations/the independence vs unification cleavage enters into the equation to a greater extent in the next year in a way they were not for the midterm elections I'm wondering if the protests in China currently will become a focal point for concerns about cross-strait relations and independence vs unification to crystallize around, much as Hong Kong played in the lead-up to 2020

I was thinking about the "A4 Revolution" in China--it's interesting the way that commonplace objects, like umbrellas, beverages (say, milk tea), or decorations (any flower or plant-based theme movement) take on significance for social movements. The commonplace availability of that object gestures towards the low barrier for entry into that movement and its mass nature, that it is composed of average, regular people, and that the movement synthesizes the everyday concerns of everyday people into something of larger social significance

Regarding the current protests in China, basically whatever the path forward, there will be turmoil. Let's say the CCP does relax COVID-zero--there will be an uptick of cases that the medical system may not have capacity to handle. Consequently, the economy will also take a hit

https://twitter.com/newbloommag/status/1597213726221926400

All this will further damage the credibility of the CCP, which has staked so much political capital on COVID-zero. I don't hazard predictions, by principle, and neither am I an optimist, but that may lead to further dissent

Wrote for @popula on post-Musk Twitter. For those living in geopolitical flashpoints as me, the potential for disinformation is dangerous. Are we going to see fake accounts for the Taiwanese Ministry of Defense alleging that a Chinese attack is imminent?

popula.com/2022/11/10/twi… But Musk has opened the doors to that. Moreover, activists the world over are now at risk of impersonation or, given his ties to authoritarians, of having their information directly handed to such governments, when the platform previously served to amplify disenfranchised voices

Retract this article @taipei_times All you needed was to Google search, but...

On that point, I've always found those scholars that try to paint ancient China as some kind of queer utopia or otherwise some kind of non-heteropatriarchal polity as often verging into homonationalism Interesting to think about homonationalism on contemporary and modern forms as well as these versions which are, obviously, also contemporary and modern but involve this appeal to premodern antiquity

Alright folks, I'll be live-tweeting that cursed Qiao Collective/Code Pink event on Taiwan which is starting now. No YouTube link for streaming for some reason, despite this being advertised in the event

codepink.org/11182021 They're starting now, with a few minutes delay

Over the weekend, nuclear advocate Huang Shih-hsiu took out a wine glass and cheered Presidential Offrice spokesperson Kolas Yotaka in the middle of the televised debate on Reactor No. 4, given her criticisms of nuclear waste storage on Indigenous land

tw.stock.yahoo.com/news/%E8%BE%AF… What a disgrace, that'll do little against the charge of Han chauvinism. He later claimed this was grape juice, since he doesn't drink and drive. Who brings a wine glass to a televised national debate on policy just for such theatrics?

Over 1,000 police carried out to carry inspections of hostess bars and other establishment for drugs, etc., following the relaxation of restrictions on them

tw.appledaily.com/local/20211117… Frankly, moving large numbers of police from crowded establishment to crowded establishment sort of defeats the point of social distancing to prevent the spread of COVID at establishments where spread due to grounds originally