Taiwan is home to thousands of foreign residents who build careers, families and lives here. However, what happens when one of those residents loses the ability to prove his identity — not because he has broken Taiwan’s laws, but because his own government refuses to renew his passport? That is the situation my husband, Matteo (not his real name), a Nicaraguan national, has found himself in. After about three years of attempts to renew his passport, our future in Taiwan remains uncertain. It all comes back to Taiwan’s giant geopolitical issue: the multitude of countries cutting diplomatic ties with Taiwan
The devastation in Tibet from flooding caused by a glacial collapse in the Himalayas was immediate and profound. Entire communities were left in shock, families were torn apart and countless lives were disrupted. That was followed by deafening silence from the Chinese authorities. No official tally of the missing, no acknowledgment of the dead — only a void filled with rumor, grief and suspicion. Disasters demand transparency. The first responsibility of the state is to inform its citizens of the scale of tragedy. By withholding that information, Beijing reduces Tibetan lives to abstractions, erasing their suffering from public record. The refusal to
Well, sort of. Tomorrow is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed by forty-nine nations on September 8, 1951. The Republic of China wasn’t one of them. Article 2(b) of the Treaty reads: “Japan renounces all right, title and claim to Formosa and the Pescadores.” So, tomorrow would be the Diamond Jubilee of Formosa’s freedom from Japanese sovereignty. As my good friend and former Examination Yuan President Yao Chia-wen (姚嘉文) voiced in these pages last year (“San Francisco treaty should be taught: adviser”, Sept. 7, 2025), the Japan peace treaty should be taught in all Taiwan schools to
A Taiwanese national studying overseas had, for a period of time, submitted regular opinion pieces to the Taipei Times commenting about Taiwanese politics and current affairs. These informed and well-written articles, demonstrating a profound love for the nation, were valuable because they represented a Taiwanese voice who had maintained a deep interest in what was happening in their home country, even as they pursued their studies abroad. For this reason, many were published on this page. Several months ago, this person contacted the Taipei Times and requested that the articles be unpublished. A member of their family was seeking employment
RSS