E-sports should be touted
Twenty-six-year-old Chen Wei-lin (陳威霖) from the Taiwanese e-sports team Flash Wolves defeated his US competitor in the tournament final of the fourth Hearthstone World Championship on Sunday, becoming the first Taiwanese player ever to win the online collectible card video game. Soon after Chen’s win, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) congratulated him on her official Facebook page. Yet this is not the first time a Taiwanese has won first prize in e-sports competitions.
Back in 2001, Tseng Jeng-cheng (曾政承), with a maturity beyond his tender age, became the champion of Age of Empires II: the Conquerors in the World Cyber Games hosted by South Korea. In Taiwan this victory hardly made a ripple.
By contrast, the South Korean player, Kang Byung-geon, who Tseng defeated that year, was offered a university place and made a lot of money through endorsement contracts, on top of receiving a hero’s welcome. During an interview in 2012, Tseng said that he had to work as a delivery person with a salary of NT$30,000 to support himself.
“The government never paid much attention to us and winning a world championship does not necessarily secure a job in real life,” Tseng said.
The sky is the limit for e-sports. While MLB competitions in the US got viewing figures of 24 million worldwide, and the NBA 18 million, last year, the World Championship for the online game League of Legends held at about the same time was watched by 27 million. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that e-sports is one of the world’s most popular sports.
When it was going through a recession, South Korea was willing to take a gamble on the gaming industry and invested resources into e-sports, eventually receiving tangible returns from the virtual world of video gaming. E-sports culture and its industry have become one of South Korea’s major exports.
In Taiwan, the government has, in the past few years, started taking an interest in e-sports, creating an integrated policy approach to helping e-sports players navigate legal issues and obligations in terms of military service and schooling. If gaming does take off here, it may be another opportunity for the nation.
Taiwan needs more asset-light industries to add to its quiver, areas in which it can excel and set its sights on the global market. Perhaps e-sports will become a major export for Taiwan in the future and create a Taiwan frenzy in other countries.
Shih Mao-teng
Taichung
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past
President-elect William Lai (賴清德) is to accede to the presidency this month at a time when the international order is in its greatest flux in three decades. Lai must navigate the ship of state through the choppy waters of an assertive China that is refusing to play by the rules, challenging the territorial claims of multiple nations and increasing its pressure on Taiwan. It is widely held in democratic capitals that Taiwan is important to the maintenance and survival of the liberal international order. Taiwan is strategically located, hemming China’s People’s Liberation Army inside the first island chain, preventing it from