The rain didn’t stop around 200 people from having a good time on Saturday at Taiwan Peace Festival 2008, which took place at the Kunlun Herbal Gardens in Taoyuan County. Revelers waded barefoot in the deep mud that covered the soccer-field length area in front of the main stage. Many danced throughout the afternoon to a clutch of bands including the Rising Hedons, High Tide and my band, the Muddy Basin Ramblers.
In the late afternoon, the Dream Community Samba Drummers, a group of elementary school kids from a nearby Aboriginal village, gave a spirited performance. They paraded through the mud in front of the stage dressed in traditional garb with Gordon Tsai (蔡聰明) of the Dream Community (夢想社區), an artists’ village in Syijhih (汐止), who led the procession while performing fire-breathing tricks. The kids charmed the festivalgoers, many of whom clapped along and snapped photos.
Friday evening, however, was far from peaceful for those campers who suffered a sleepless night due to 10 straight hours of what one described as the “worst techno” she had ever heard.
PHOTO: DAVID CHEN, TAIPEI TIMES
“It was music for angry robots,” said Mac Wooley of the band New Hong Kong Hair City.
There was also grumbling about communications from pizza vendor Rock Starkey. He said that the organizers weren’t clear enough on their policies about selling beverages. He found out he couldn’t sell bottled drinks just as he arrived, which he felt to be an inconvenience.
At dusk on Saturday, around 100 people linked hands for the “peace circle.” An Amis shaman sang a song as a “call to the spirits,” and there was a short moment of silence, except for a chorus of chirping crickets. The silence was broken as one drunk reveler (presumably from the UK) yelled “Liverpool!”
PHOTO: DAVID CHEN, TAIPEI TIMES
The primaries for this year’s nine-in-one local elections in November began early in this election cycle, starting last autumn. The local press has been full of tales of intrigue, betrayal, infighting and drama going back to the summer of 2024. This is not widely covered in the English-language press, and the nine-in-one elections are not well understood. The nine-in-one elections refer to the nine levels of local governments that go to the ballot, from the neighborhood and village borough chief level on up to the city mayor and county commissioner level. The main focus is on the 22 special municipality
In the 2010s, the Communist Party of China (CCP) began cracking down on Christian churches. Media reports said at the time that various versions of Protestant Christianity were likely the fastest growing religions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The crackdown was part of a campaign that in turn was part of a larger movement to bring religion under party control. For the Protestant churches, “the government’s aim has been to force all churches into the state-controlled organization,” according to a 2023 article in Christianity Today. That piece was centered on Wang Yi (王怡), the fiery, charismatic pastor of the
Hsu Pu-liao (許不了) never lived to see the premiere of his most successful film, The Clown and the Swan (小丑與天鵝, 1985). The movie, which starred Hsu, the “Taiwanese Charlie Chaplin,” outgrossed Jackie Chan’s Heart of Dragon (龍的心), earning NT$9.2 million at the local box office. Forty years after its premiere, the film has become the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s (TFAI) 100th restoration. “It is the only one of Hsu’s films whose original negative survived,” says director Kevin Chu (朱延平), one of Taiwan’s most commercially successful
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) invaded Vietnam in 1979, following a year of increasingly tense relations between the two states. Beijing viewed Vietnam’s close relations with Soviet Russia as a threat. One of the pretexts it used was the alleged mistreatment of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. Tension between the ethnic Chinese and governments in Vietnam had been ongoing for decades. The French used to play off the Vietnamese against the Chinese as a divide-and-rule strategy. The Saigon government in 1956 compelled all Vietnam-born Chinese to adopt Vietnamese citizenship. It also banned them from 11 trades they had previously
RSS