Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

On Friday I published a reading round-up previewing Taiwan’s presidential election, which took place yesterday. Lai Ching-te (William Lai), Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate and current vice-president, came away as the winner, securing more than 40 percent of the vote. While the DPP will now hold the presidency for a third consecutive term, it lost its previous majority of seats in the Legislative Yuan.

News stories published by Western publications tend to lead with statements that Lai’s victory will anger China, signal future tense relations with Beijing, are a blow to China, etc. Approaching the election from this angle, however, risks over-emphasizing the factor cross-strait relations play in people’s votes. As political scientist Lev Nachman wrote on Bluesky last week, “There’s a sense that international observers just want to hear Taiwanese people just say ‘I’m terrified of Xi and China!’ but that’s not really how the China factor works. It is more about who can keep Taiwan free and functional than it is about Xi or the PRC directly.” Voters in Taiwan have plenty of domestic issues to weigh, and don’t necessarily cast their ballots with China at the top of mind.

Further Reading

Chris Buckley, Amy Chang Chien, John Liu and Damien Cave, “In a Setback for Beijing, Taiwan Elects Lai Ching-te as President”
Irene Chan, “‘I am Taiwanese now’: Hongkongers who have moved to the democratic island cherish their right to vote”
Hillary Leung, “No Taiwan election study tour this year for University of Hong Kong students”
Mallory Yu, Ailsa Chang, Jonaki Mehta, and Patrick Jarenwattananon, “Costumes, color and singing candidates — welcome to a Taiwanese election”

Recommendations

China Stories

James T. Areddy, “China’s Messaging to the U.S.: Don’t Rock the Boat”
Bloomberg News, “Xi’s Empty Dream City Shows Limits of His Power, Even in China”
Cai Yineng, “How China Became a Car Country” — interview with anthropologist Zhang Jun, author of Driving toward Modernity: Cars and the Lives of the Middle Class in Contemporary China
Chris Lau and Simone McCarthy, “China feels the country isn’t patriotic enough. A new law aims to change that.”

… young audiences are increasingly turning to social media for news and information about the world. […] The media landscape in Taiwan has remained relatively stagnant and is not something people feel positively about. It’s only natural that young people are accessing information on social media, as their distrust of traditional media grows.

Lingua Sinica, “Bringing News in Chinese to the Instagram Generation” — interview with Kassy Cho, founder of the Taiwan-based media startup Almost

Liyan Qi and Shen Lu, “China Is Pressing Women to Have More Babies. Many Are Saying No.”
Karen Weise, Cade Metz and David McCabe, “Microsoft Debates What to Do With A.I. Lab in China”
Chun Han Wong, “China Doesn’t Want You to Say ‘Tibet’ Anymore”

Wanderings Around the World

Chevengur shows how an embrace of violence destroys the soul of a nation, and lays bare humanity’s inexhaustible capacity for carnage in the search for a better future. Terror isn’t a side effect of the Revolution, the novel suggests, but rather something endemic to Russian society. In Chevengur’s Russia, centuries-old injustices translate into merciless anger, human life has no value, and absurd ideas are worth dying for. The ease with which Putin’s Russia accepts and perpetuates brutality ceases to confound once one has witnessed Platonov’s rendering of a country that seems to run on violence.

Anastasia Edel, “A Vision of Russia as a Country That Runs on Violence”

Alan Burdick (text) and Nicholas J.R. White (photographs), “The Trees Saved Me” — “In Romania, a walk in the woods blossomed into a mission to safeguard centuries-old beeches and the history that shaped them.”
Lizzie Johnson and Kamila Hrabchuk, “She’s 16. The war in Ukraine wrecked her city — and her childhood.”

Linda Kinstler, “The Woman Fighting Russia’s Carceral State”
Danielle Kurtzleben, “One Cheer for Lean In: I reread the book. I still kind of like it. I swear I’m not a bad feminist.”

Her life reads like an epic. Born in South Asia during the early 17th century, she was captured by the Portuguese at age 8 and sold to Spaniards in the Philippines. Spanish merchants then traded her across the Pacific to Mexico, where she became a free woman and a spiritual icon, famous in the city of Puebla for her devotion to Catholicism. As a scholar of colonial Latin America, I believe she deserves to become a household name for anyone with even a passing interest in Asian American history or the history of slavery.

Diego Javier Luis, “From South Asia to Mexico, from slave to spiritual icon, this woman’s life is a snapshot of Spain’s colonization – and the Pacific slave trade history that books often leave out”

Nora Neus, “‘The fullness of life’: preserving a historic Black neighborhood in Brooklyn”
Norimitsu Onishi, “Quebec Still Longs for Its Lost Hockey Team, a Nationalist Symbol”

Standout Story

Summer Brennan, “My Year of Writing Dangerously”

I read this short essay by Summer Brennan very early this morning, the sky still dark and a cup of coffee next to my computer. I love the way she describes January at the beginning of the piece:

January is one of my favorite months. This may sound odd, but I have my reasons. I like the dark early mornings. I like getting up before the dawn and feeling like the responsibilities of the day are still miles away, like those hours before the sun comes out are mine and mine alone. There’s a feeling that you can get sometimes after the holidays, when the bustle of celebration and gathering is finally over, and the time has come to dig in, get cozy with a bowl of soup or a mug of hot chocolate, and disappear into a really good book. It’s a clean month, a private month. It’s a virtuous month, made for fresh starts and new projects. The days are slowly getting longer, and the wheel of the seasons has turned once again, so that you can look down the long corridor of winter and see spring waiting for you at the other end of it.

The “long corridor of winter” feels endless right now in Michigan (snow, wind, and cold, cold, cold), but otherwise I wholeheartedly agree with Brennan about the coziness and possibilities of January.

Even more than that first paragraph, I appreciate the self-reflection Brennan goes on to undertake in the remainder of the essay. She looks back at her 2023 writing challenge, which she did not accomplish, and how it still yielded new directions for her work.

It has taken me so many years to figure this out, but telling myself that I need to do something (writing, reading, yoga, walking, etc.) every day only results in feelings of failure and frustration. It’s difficult to keep up that kind of streak, and missing one day … two days … three days … makes it easier to give up on the project altogether. But some days aren’t conducive to meeting goals, whether for logistical reasons or internal ones. I’ve learned, slowly, to accept that some mornings I’d rather get an extra hour of sleep than spend an hour reading; that some days I need to leave the office and go home to veg on the couch instead of hitting the gym. As Brennan does, I now know to reframe practices in terms of quality over quantity, growth and progress rather than meeting an arbitrary goal of doing something on X number of consecutive days:

I was reminded how much one can achieve with consistent effort meted out in small increments. I failed more often than I succeeded, and on the days when I did keep up with the project, my average output was less than 500 words. Even then, I still managed to produce the equivalent of a full-length book, and found a new project—a memoir—that I’m excited about in the process.

Feature Photo: Skyline of Taipei, Taiwan viewed from Mount Elephant, August 9, 2020. Photo by 毛貓大少爺 via Wikimedia and used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.