English-language analysis of Taiwan has improved and diversified, with current analysts structuring their arguments around a pro-Taiwan stance and doing so through writing, television, podcasts and YouTube
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By Courtney Donovan Smith 石東文 / Staff Columnist
The most popular Taiwanese political commentators are not that good in my opinion. Most of the time they just state the obvious. This is not to say that excellent Taiwanese political analysts do not exist, but they are usually only found in more obscure media outlets.
I could name perhaps one or twenty native speakers of English whose analysis is as good as, if not better than, that of the most popular Chinese commentators in Taiwan. The existence of a group of analysts of Taiwanese politics writing such high quality in English did not happen in a vacuum, and took decades to develop.
PRO TAIWAN
Photo: Lin Yi-chang, Taipei Times
Before the democratic era, the politics of “Free China” was viewed through various lenses, usually academic, diplomatic, or through political activism, and it was mainly people from those fields who wrote about the subject. Diplomat George Kerr wrote Formosa Betrayed, political activists like Lynn Miles wrote for Amnesty International and, together with Linda Arrigo, served as conduits to smuggle out information (which was extremely difficult in the days when telephones were tapped and they were limited to physical paper only). ) and later Gerrit van der Wees’s Taiwan Communique smuggled information into Taiwan.
With the two English-language newspapers, the China Post and the China News, both propaganda outlets for the authoritarian Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the only way to get regular political news was to be physically in Taiwan. and experience it first hand or talk to the locals.
When Taiwan transitioned to democracy, we were fortunate that academics like Shelley Rigger and Dafydd Fell came to study this process, and for the most part we were among the first to study Taiwan as an independent subject and not as a subset of China.
Photo: CNA
The democratization also spawned a wave of translations of historical works, as interest in Taiwan’s past and developing identity began to rise. This provided insight into the politics of the Japanese, Qing dynasty, Tungning Kingdom and Dutch colonial period, although I don’t remember seeing much about the Spanish colonial period.
The late 1990s brought two important developments in English-language news. The first was that I-Mei Foods (義美食品) bought China News in 1997 and renamed it Taiwan News, and adopted a pro-Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) stance to balance the China Post’s pro-KMT editorial line. to take.
Then, in 1999, the Chinese-language, pro-DPP news outlet Liberty Times launched this publication and staffed it with a strong team and the very best analysts in Taiwan. It has raised the bar dramatically.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
The Taipei Times was a hit, with a fresh, stylish design, helpful touches including names in Chinese in brackets, and interesting and insightful columns and editorials. To this day, the humorous – yet insightful – political column titled “Johnny Neihu” still comes up in conversations.
BEYOND THE MILLENNIUM
The turn of the millennium brought with it the newly introduced terms ‘pan-blue’ and ‘pan-green’ and the widespread adoption and adaptation of the Internet. Previously, you had to physically buy or subscribe to newspapers and magazines, which could be very expensive if done internationally.
It became significantly easier to conduct broader analysis on content from across the political spectrum and to create new content. The oldest blog I know of that lasted for many years was Dateline Taipei, which specialized in translating deep blue editorials from Chinese-language media such as the China Times and United Daily News. This was very useful for analysis, and even if I read the Chinese-language media every day, I still read it because my reading speed is still faster in English.
It would be the creation of the pan-green blog The View from Taiwan by current Taipei Times “Notes from Central Taiwan” columnist Michael Turton that set the place on fire. People forget how controversial it was.
For those of us on the pan-green end of the spectrum, it was hugely influential, including on this column. We appreciated his deft interweaving of history, culture, business, society and politics into well-crafted work that not only made profound or illuminating points, but did so in a way that brought context and understanding in a way not yet it had been done before, so it was done before.
It was also often funny, and its takedowns of bad takes were – and still are – masterful. His work was and is often prophetic.
His opponents essentially called him a partisan stooge and there were long, drawn-out fights in online forums filled with all kinds of unpleasantness. He was a lightning rod, people seemed to either love his work or hate it. Around the time of the Sunflower Movement, the center of political gravity shifted to what had previously been pale green territory, and in quite a short time a fair number of us no longer came across as radical.
Likewise, Jenna Lynn Cody’s Lao Ren Cha blog was highly controversial for a time, especially in the Facebook age, for the same reasons as Turton, but also because of her irreverent writing style. Cody continues to bring interesting perspectives and insights from Taipei that might not occur to us Taichung-based guys.
FROZEN GARLIC
Of the English-speaking analysts I can think of who are as good or better than the popular local analysts, besides being native English speakers, there are only four things they all have in common. As a group we come from different countries, ethnicities and backgrounds. The group is skewed, but not exclusively, pan-green, Taiwanese-American or white and male, but will be more female and much more ethnically diverse in the coming years, judging by the younger emerging talents who have reached out. for me.
All these analysts have a passion for Taiwan and must have read many books to understand the background. We also all read and professionally prepare Chinese-language media in English for readers in various formats such as writing, radio, television, podcast and YouTube content.
The last thing we almost certainly have in common, regardless of our political leanings, is that we are all students at what I call the “Frozen Garlic Academy of Taiwan Political Science.” The Frozen Garlic blog (frozengarlic.wordpress.com) by Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica and Jointly Appointed Associate Research Fellow at the Election Study Center, National Chengchi University Nathan Batto is the gold standard and benchmark for all us in the analysis of electoral politics, and anyone who claims not to have been influenced by it is fooling themselves.
Without a doubt, Batto is better than most – and possibly all – of the popular local analysts, and he has raised the bar much, much higher. Crucially, like any great teacher, he has taught us not only an enormous amount, but also how to approach the subject like a political scientist observing politics in real time and with a style much closer to that of the local media . I would say that his work was – and still is – the cornerstone of all that came before it and allowed English-speaking analysts to compete with Chinese-language analysts.
Regular readers of my work know that I often delve deep into various aspects of local politics, strategy, the legal framework, party finances, opinion polls and so on, digging deep into government archives, the constitution and election laws, driven by curiosity. and questions about how it shapes politics and strategies. As far as I know, my predictions in the recent elections easily defeated the local pundits.
Frozen Garlic dramatically accelerated my learning curve. He also inspired me by making the best election prediction I have ever seen. In the chaotic 2016 elections, where everyone predicted that the KMT would win more than 40, 50 or even 60 parliamentary seats, I privately predicted 28-32, but publicly and brazenly to provoke discussion I predicted under 30, which is completely incongruous. conflicted with everyone else’s prediction, which was still, as far as I know, the second best prediction.
Available information on all legislative races has been sparse, as polls are sporadic. In conversation with Nathan we bet a bottle of wine on my prediction. I lost, his prediction was ‘mid 30s’, which is 35 plus or minus a few. To this day, I remain amazed at how he did a perfect job in such a wild election wave. They immediately won 35.
ENGLISH ANALYSIS TODAY
After the Sunflower Movement, a series of new sources, blogs and writers appeared on the scene, making it possible to gain enough knowledge to fundamentally understand local politics through the available English-language sources, although being able to read Chinese helps to understand the granularity of details into Taiwanese politics and to gain access to certain research materials.
Another problem is that while pan-blue writers and content exist, there is no longer much deep-blue content being produced in English, without which it is more difficult to do a proper analysis of the KMT. While I’m pan-green, I think the end of Dateline Taipei, the China Post, and the English-language portion of the KMT website is a loss for people who really want to understand Taiwan’s full political spectrum, though one can still access to archived content on Dateline Taipei and the KMT website to get a sense of their worldview.
A book worth recommending to beginners and experts alike is Dafydd Fell’s Government and Politics in Taiwan, Second Edition, published by Routledge Research. For beginners it explains the context and background and for specialists it serves as an excellent overview, reminding us of events we may have forgotten and in context. Fortunately, unlike most academics, Fell writes with actual reader pleasure and understanding in mind.
Donovan’s Deep Dives is a regular column by Courtney Donovan Smith (石東文), who writes in-depth analysis on all things Taiwan’s political scene and geopolitics. Donovan is also the central Taiwan correspondent at ICRT FM100 Radio News, co-publisher of Compass Magazine, co-founder Taiwan Report (report.tw) and former chairman of the Taichung American Chamber of Commerce. Follow him on X: @donovan_smith.