Since this is one of those calendrically coincidental days, the 10th day of the 10th month, which 3CM the loser sometimes likes to use for historical trivia taken from the previous centuries with the 10-10-15 dates, one would think that this would be the default option for this SNLC. However, I remembered also that October 10 marks the founding of the Republic of China, known variously as the "National Day of the Republic of China", or "Double Tenth Day", after the Wuchang Uprising on October 10, 1911. The island of Taiwan is, of course, the site of the government of the ROC after Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang (KMT) fled the mainland after losing to Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communist Party in the resumption of the civil war in China after WWII.
It also occurred to me that I've been completely out of touch with matters Taiwanese for a while now. So, c/o two favorite e-rags, from the NYT and The Guardian.....
The one truly loser story about Taiwan from August is the story of the 12-yo kid who accidentally punched a hole in a 350-yo Pablo Porpora oil canvas, reported by Oliver Holmes in The Guardian here and by Katie Rogers in the NYT here.
Holmes: "The boy joins a short, cringing list of art fumblers. In 2006, a man tripped over his shoelace in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in the UK and smashed three 300-year-old Chinese vases. In 2010, a woman at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art fell into a Picasso, causing a 15cm tear."
At the opposite extreme is Typhoon Dujuan from last month, which made landfall in north Taiwan on September 28, as noted by Cassie Bell at
The Guardian here:
"The heaviest rain was in north-east Taiwan in the mountainous Wulai district where more than 90cm (35in) fell – nearly a third of the country’s annual rainfall. Dujuan is the 21st typhoon of the season. It developed from a tropical depression to a category 4 typhoon before it reached Taiwan, where it weakened, becoming a tropical cyclone as it moved into mainland China."
Typhoon Dujuan is one obvious manifestation of climate change (the bigoted swift-boating in person of the Sierra Club president by "Calgary" Cruz aside). An
NYT "Sinosphere"
blog report by Austin Ramzy noted another phenomenon related to climate change, with respect to increased incidents of dengue fever in Taiwan:
"Tainan has been the center of the outbreak, with 8,666 of the 9,862 cases reported in Taiwan since May 1, including 237 reported on Monday.....
In recent decades, the disease, which is caused by a virus carried by Aedes mosquitoes, has risen sharply around the world because of urbanization, population growth, climate change, increasing international trade and an explosion in trash that mosquitoes can use as breeding sites, according to the World Health Organization."
On the happier sociological side, though, perhaps the most interesting political development recently in Taiwan is that the two largest Taiwanese political parties have both nominated women as their presidential candidates for the January 2016 election, namely:
Hung Hsiu-chu, KMT candidate, age 67
Tsai Ing-wen, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate, 58
DIfferent articles from each paper note various characteristics of each candidate, and also aspects of how this phenomenon of two women as Taiwan's presidential candidates came about:
(a) Tom Philips, The Guardian:
"Tsai, currently the party’s chairwoman, is a trained lawyer who studied at Cornell University and the London School of Economics before forging a career in academia and politics back home."
(b)
Austin Ramzy,
NYT
'Ms. Tsai and Ms. Hung are markedly different in style. Ms. Tsai, who served as minister of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council and as vice premier during the Chen Shui-bian administration, from 2000 to 2008, has degrees from Cornell University Law School and the London School of Economics. She has been described as shy for a politician, and when speaking in public, she sometimes comes across like a schoolteacher.
Ms. Hung has been called “little hot pepper” for her fiery speeches, and she rose through the ranks of the Kuomintang. She received a graduate degree from Northeast Missouri State University, first won a seat in the legislature in 1990 and has since served seven terms in the chamber.'
Interesting to read that Missouri connection for Hung Hsiu-chu. What's also interesting is to see how Taiwan/the ROC got women more involved in legislative politics, which essentially involved a quota system, as noted by Ramzy:
'Efforts to bring more women into the political system began when the 1951 Constitution set aside a small number of legislative seats for women in what was then an authoritarian state. By the time democratization began, the idea that women should have a certain level of participation was already well established.
Democratization also coincided with a growing feminist movement, and women played a crucial role in organizing against the authoritarian government in the 1970s and ’80s.
The first and biggest opposition group, the Democratic Progressive Party, set its own minimums for gender representation in 1996, decreeing that a quarter of its nominees for elected office had to be women. Two years later, it expanded that quota to candidates for elected party positions.
“The D.P.P. is, after all, a party that started from social movements of advancing political and social rights and equality, so it’s natural that gender rights were part of the platform,” said Ketty W. Chen, senior deputy director of the party’s department of international affairs.'
Of course, in the USA now, the idea of quotas is so politically incorrect as to be downright toxic, an expression of the historical ignorance of wingnuts who deny past oppression and minimization of women and other minorities in the political process. Things are infinitely better now, of course, in the USA, but we're certainly not at the point of Taiwan or Europe (or even Canada or Australia - remember that they've each had one female Prime Minister, Kim Campbell and Julia Gillard, respectively) when it comes to the idea of a female President. In an ideal world, we wouldn't have sexism and racism, and quotas wouldn't be needed. But that's not the real world, of course.
So there we are: some snippets here about some happenings Taiwanese for this national holiday of theirs. With that, time for the standard SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories for the week....