Freddy Lin, head of the Taiwan Rock Alliance (TRA), is fond of saying that one doesn't need to be anti-China to be pro-Taiwan. But venting some spleen against China once a year at the Say Yes to Taiwan festival isn't entirely out of bounds either. And if a band actually from China is on hand, as Guangzhou-based punk trio Pangu (
Falling on the historically significant date of Feb. 28, the festival commemorates the 228 Incident of 1947. That incident has taken on powerful meaning, especially since the rise of the DPP, as an enormous wedge between the ethno-cultural entities described by the terms Mainlanders (外省人) and Taiwanese (本省人).
So, when China is evoked in raucous, expletive-filled choruses at the concert, the word refers to those jerks across the Strait pointing all those missiles our way as much as it does to the Chinese cultural nationalist ideology of no small number of KMT supporters.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TRA
"The KMT was the murderer behind the 228 Incident. They don't want Taiwanese people to remember that. They keep saying, `oh, we should forget the past and move on.' But the murderers have to admit to what they did and apologize before we can do that," Freddy said.
Over the past three years, Say Yes to Taiwan has been held in 228 Memorial Peace Park. This year, though, the venue for the show has been moved to the plaza in front of the Presidential Palace.
"We got that venue because the DPP supports our stance on the issue of 228, not because we [the TRA] support their stance on anything," Freddy said.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TRA
With such strong political undertones it's almost easy to forget about the powerful line-up of 14 bands that will be playing.
This year, groups will be converging on Taipei from Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, the US, and all over Taiwan.
Headlining the show will be Akiakane, the new incarnation of Tokyo's cutesy girl punk band Softball. Softball played Say Yes to Taiwan for the past three years and last week Akiakane organized their own Say Yes to Taiwan festival in Tokyo, inviting Taipei indie rock band Nipples and Freddy Lin's band Chthonic (
In a break from years past, when the line-up was heavily tilted toward rock, this year includes Dog G (
But rock has been and remains the main draw of the show, with South Korea's hugely popular nu-metal band Nevada 51 and Liquid Gardens from the US, Akiakane and Pangu rounding out the foreign rock acts this year, with local bad boys LTK and a handful of other heavy-riffing bands representing the hometown.
Even if you don't care much for punk music, seeing Pangu play in front of the Presidential Office should be reason enough to come out for the show.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ!). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a