Back in the days before China was open to Americans for language study – and before so many U.S. high schools and colleges began offering Mandarin as a foreign-language option – Taiwan was the default destination for budding Sinologists. The most prestigious institution for pursuing Chinese language studies in that era was the Inter-University Program…
More international students are coming to pursue graduate degrees, but a more global outlook will be needed to capitalize on this trend. Tomas Swinburne came to Taiwan by way of Beijing, where he found life stifling. “Taiwan is just a lot more pleasant,” says the 25-year-old Irishman, who won a scholarship from the Ministry of…
Electriciy act amendments pass The Legislative Yuan in January passed revisions to the Electricity Act liberalizing the power market and mandating the cessation of nuclear power. The amendments stipulate that all nuclear power will cease operation by 2025 and that state-owned monopoly power provider Taiwan Power Co. (Taipower) will be transformed within six to nine years…
“History-writing is a way of getting rid of the past,” the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said. Not in Taiwan, though, where a complicated past continues to intrude on the politics of the present, as witnessed in last summer’s student protests against proposed changes to the high school history curriculum. The Ministry of…
Senior high-school students opposed to the allegedly “China-centric” new curriculum guidelines developed by the Ministry of Education (MOE), as well as the non-transparent way that the guidelines were established, have staged a series of rallies and protests. On July 23, a late night attempt by protestors to storm the MOE headquarters was met with resistance…
