After winning three awards at the closing ceremony of the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday, filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang (
Miao died Saturday evening of lymph cancer at Taipei's Veteran's Hospital (
The actor gained fame for his role as the villain in the martial-arts classic Dragon Inn (
Before dying, Miao wrote a note to his wife saying: "I will be strong. I'm always a tough guy," his wife Liu Mei-lin (
Miao's last film was Tsai's Goodbye Dragon Inn (不散). In the film, Miao sits in the movie theater watching himself in Dragon Inn. In the last scene he holds his grandson as he walks down the hallway of the theater in one of the most classic shots of all his movies.
Miao's original name is Miao Yen-lin (
Miao retired in 1987 and rejected numerous offers until Tsai convinced him to play the father in Rebels of the Neon God (
Off-screen, Miao was affectionately called Papa Miao (苗爸) or Uncle Miao (苗叔) by Tsai, who considered him a father not only in his films, but also in real life.
"I felt that he had silently given me a blessing from heaven, helping me to win the awards," Tsai said upon his arrival yesterday at CKS International Airport from Berlin.
This month the government ordered a one-year block of Xiaohongshu (小紅書) or Rednote, a Chinese social media platform with more than 3 million users in Taiwan. The government pointed to widespread fraud activity on the platform, along with cybersecurity failures. Officials said that they had reached out to the company and asked it to change. However, they received no response. The pro-China parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), immediately swung into action, denouncing the ban as an attack on free speech. This “free speech” claim was then echoed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
Exceptions to the rule are sometimes revealing. For a brief few years, there was an emerging ideological split between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that appeared to be pushing the DPP in a direction that would be considered more liberal, and the KMT more conservative. In the previous column, “The KMT-DPP’s bureaucrat-led developmental state” (Dec. 11, page 12), we examined how Taiwan’s democratic system developed, and how both the two main parties largely accepted a similar consensus on how Taiwan should be run domestically and did not split along the left-right lines more familiar in
Most heroes are remembered for the battles they fought. Taiwan’s Black Bat Squadron is remembered for flying into Chinese airspace 838 times between 1953 and 1967, and for the 148 men whose sacrifice bought the intelligence that kept Taiwan secure. Two-thirds of the squadron died carrying out missions most people wouldn’t learn about for another 40 years. The squadron lost 15 aircraft and 148 crew members over those 14 years, making it the deadliest unit in Taiwan’s military history by casualty rate. They flew at night, often at low altitudes, straight into some of the most heavily defended airspace in Asia.
Many people in Taiwan first learned about universal basic income (UBI) — the idea that the government should provide regular, no-strings-attached payments to each citizen — in 2019. While seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2020 US presidential election, Andrew Yang, a politician of Taiwanese descent, said that, if elected, he’d institute a UBI of US$1,000 per month to “get the economic boot off of people’s throats, allowing them to lift their heads up, breathe, and get excited for the future.” His campaign petered out, but the concept of UBI hasn’t gone away. Throughout the industrialized world, there are fears that
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