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michaelturton Profile picture
michaelturton
@michaelturton
Playing boardgames. Writing about Taiwan every Monday and Thursday in the Taipei Times.
Sep 15 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
1/ Wow. There's stupid. There's really stupid. And then there is this crap from NYT opinion.
nytimes.com/2025/09/15/opi… 2/ First, in "analyses" like this it is always important to note what's not invoked: there's no mention of Japan or Philippines, or any other regional power that will be affected if the PRC occupies Taiwan. No mention of the PRC's promised follow on wars.... notably...
Jun 18, 2024 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
@Beefeater_Fella 1/ Beefy, the PRC has no valid claims to this area, historical or otherwise. In 17th C the Manchus, a northern non-Chinese people, conquered China. For the 250 years "China" existed as part of a great empire, the way India was part of the British Empire. At end of 19th C... @Beefeater_Fella 2/ ...Han nationalists began to realize Manchu empire was tottering. Debates broke out: we set up Han state, said some. But that will be smaller than the Ming, the last Chinese empire, argued expansionists. The expansionists won, and reconfigured who was "chinese"...
Jun 3, 2024 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
1/ Fu Kun-chi promises his Three Transportation Projects -- the highway down the Rift Valley, another over the mountains from Taichung to the Rift Valley, and the round-the-island HSR, will be done by Jul 16. To me this is a very scary program -- a thread... Image 2/ Fu's dream will cost a couple trillion NT. Thus, it faces a constitutional test: Article 70, which forbids the legislature from changing the budget submitted by the executive. To get around that, Fu is proposing a Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) program

tw.news.yahoo.com/%E6%B0%91%E9%8…
Jan 8, 2024 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
1/ There was always a lot wrong with the establishment embrace of social housing, and now I think I know why.
taipeitimes.com/News/feat/arch… 2/ The fundamental problem, the bedrock of the housing price issue, is the explosive combo of cheap money and low taxes on real estate assets. It costs very little to own a house....
Dec 3, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
(1) Ms. Glaser, you've damaged your credibility as a neutral speaker. Your co-author is a pro-PRC writer whose main goal, publicly declared, is to annex Taiwan to the PRC. You have now picked a side, whatever you might say/not say. History will not look kindly on that choice... (2) Moreover, this analysis is ahistorical and naive. Throughout the 90s the US assurances were there but the PRC military buildup continued apace, and it elevated its threat via the infamous 'missile tests".

Nor did PRC lawfare and grayzone warfare diminish...
Oct 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
1/ Any journalist who wants something to write on might consider Taiwan's youth mental health crisis, a totally silent crisis that insiders are likening to a pandemic. The system does almost nothing for treatable issues such as ADHD, never mind more complex problems like BPD. 2/ The problem is compounded by the recent changes to the law that make it impossible for schools to reject students even when they have obvious and severe problems that the school cannot handle.