Taiwanese Internet celebrity Holger Chen (陳之漢), who often uses chauvinistic and vulgar expressions, has changed. After years of portraying himself as being highly critical of politics, he has started siding with certain politicians over others.
Chen is well within his rights to argue that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) should be “discontinued,” while singing the praises of Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), as Taiwan is a democratic and free country.
However, many would say that Chen and Ko are simply using each other to increase their own popularity, and not to further their respective political visions.
On July 16, Chen and former New Power Party legislator Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) collaborated to host a rally. Those in the know understood that the event was meant to elevate the status of the opportunist Ko. As things turned out, when Ko and Chen joined hands, Taiwanese saw how truly misogynistic they were.
Earlier this month, a group for female supporters of Ko’s presidential campaign arranged a performance in which dancers wore sexualized flight attendant outfits. The event was meant to repair Ko’s misogynist image, but it had the opposite effect.
In a livestream, Chen defended the event, saying that DPP Legislator Lai Pin-yu’s (賴品妤) cosplaying also “objectified women.”
It seems that Chen does not know what cosplay is. For years, Lai has been a renowned cosplayer. If Chen has no idea what a cosplayer does, he should have learned some basic information about it before making a comment.
It is almost certain that the number of cosplay fans is larger than that of Chen’s livestream audience. Once Chen’s viewers can no longer stand him, the vocal ones would criticize him directly, and the quiet ones would simply forget him. In any case, Chen’s fan base will decrease day by day, because he has been turning more people away from him.
Hung Yu-jui is a Japanese-language teacher and translator.
Translated by Emma Liu
For Xi Jinping (習近平) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the military conquest of Taiwan is an absolute requirement for the CCP’s much more fantastic ambition: control over our solar system. Controlling Taiwan will allow the CCP to dominate the First Island Chain and to better neutralize the Philippines, decreasing the threat to the most important People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Strategic Support Force (SSF) space base, the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island. Satellite and manned space launches from the Jiuquan and Xichang Satellite Launch Centers regularly pass close to Taiwan, which is also a very serious threat to the PLA,
Taiwan is beautiful — no doubt about it. In Taipei, the streets are clean, the skyline is gorgeous and the subway is world-class. The coastline is easily accessible and mountains can be seen in the distance. The people are hardworking, successful and busy. Every luxury known to humankind is available and people live on their smartphones. As an American visiting for the first time, here are some things I learned about the country. First, people from Taiwan and America love freedom and democracy and have for many years. When we defeated Japan in 1945, Taiwan was freed from Japanese rule. In
The ultimate end of a situation in which communists are in charge of a capitalist economy is economic depression, with China’s economic woes the prime example. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime has suspended monthly reports on youth unemployment, which had previously been at a record high, going beyond 20 percent and rising. It is often joked about in academic circles that when a national laboratory has made a great discovery, the institution will quickly call a news conference to announce it to the world, but when the research has been a total failure, the institution will keep it under wraps. The
Taiwan’s first indigenous defense submarine prototype, the Hai Kun (SS-711), is to be launched tomorrow and undergo underwater testing next month. It is a major breakthrough in upgrading the nation’s self-defense capabilities, and would make it more difficult for China to blockade Taiwan. Facing Beijing’s escalating military threats and ambitions of expanding across the Taiwan Strait, a domestically developed submarine was first proposed in the 1990s under then-president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝). The Indigenous Defense Submarine (IDS) program was formally initiated in 2016, as President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office, with the aim of creating a fleet of eight domestically developed submarines. The