By Chris
Sorry about slacking off on this entry. I'm on vacation in America. I'm leaving to go camping tomorrow for a week. Before I go, let me sketch out some ideas that might be useful for writing English posts on this blog.
Like I mentioned in the e-mail, you can always write a post like Sigrid did—thoughts on the program, upcoming events, etc. But that will get old quickly, so we should try to do something a little more general-interest. Again, if we compile enough of this, and the quality is good, we can start another website for non-FF people.
The rest of this entry deals with how the English-speaking world gets its news about Taiwan. It's long, but if you want to write something in English I think it's important to know this.
_________________NewspapersThere are three English newspapers in Taiwan. The biggest by far is the
Taipei Times, my old employer. The TT is owned by the
Liberty Times (自由時報), so obviously it's pretty Green. Not as Green at the LT, but still pretty Green. It's read by a lot of important people in D.C., though, which can't be said of the other two newspapers.
One of those is the
China Post, which is very Blue, is popular with English teachers, and is despised by its own employees. Foreign media sometimes refer to its articles.
Last (and least) is
Taiwan News, a well-meaning rag that's always about to go out of business. (They say that once it does, the
Apple Daily (蘋果日報) is going to start an English paper, and all the best people from the
TT are going to defect.) Hardly anyone reads
Taiwan News, and its staff seems really stressed out and unhappy.
None of these papers is profitable. The TT stays in business because it's supported by the LT and by Union Bank of Taiwan (聯邦銀行). I
hear the
China Post is only still around because it runs a cram school and pays its editors almost nothing. Who knows what keeps
Taiwan News alive.
Being money-losing enterprises, free-market competition doesn't really force these papers to get better, and in my opinion none of them are all that good (although the TT is probably the most professional newspaper in Taiwan).
All three do a bad job of reporting on the Taiwanese media and Taiwanese society. And the TT (the only one that really matters in terms of international influence) has such a transparent agenda that anyone who pays attention knows that they're biased.
In other words, English speakers have very limited access to (1) what Taiwanese people read and think about, and (2) good coverage and analysis of Taiwanese news.
Foreign mediaSorry, the foreign media doesn't cover Taiwan very much. It doesn't tend to do much with the "Taiwan Question," either, although just about every article on Taiwan needs to include the sentence
Beijing insists that Taiwan is a renegade province of the PRC or something, usually tacked awkwardly onto the end of the story by some editor.
Every once in a while a semi-important regional newspaper will run an editorial on why the US should support Taiwan. For a long time major liberal media like the
New York Times was thought to be pro-China—or at least opposed to the conservative hostility toward Chinese communism, which some liberals saw as a remnant of the Cold War. But China's human-rights situation has been pissing off liberals for a while now. It doesn't necessarily translate into caring about Taiwan, but the NYT has been going after China a lot lately.
CNN, on the other hand, is said to make its reporting more China-friendly in order to get the right to broadcast into China. (I don't know that this is true.)
There are a couple web sites that collect Taiwan-related news from all over the world. They might be useful:
Taiwan'sNews.Net and the
Taiwan section of
Topix.
BlogsThere probably is a demand for decent coverage and commentary on Taiwan. Maybe not enough to sustain a major newspaper, but that's what the internet is for. There is a huge English-language Chinese blogsphere (部落格空間, I think), but the Taiwan blogsphere is relatively small and not well-read.
The main blog that deals with Taiwan is actually a China blog, based in Hong Kong:
ESWN . It is by far the most important English-language blog that covers Taiwan—or China. It provides English translations of Chinese media, and also intelligent commentary. It's more China-oriented, and is sometimes perceived to be anti-Taiwan, or at least anti-Green—although the blogger says he is merely skeptical of Taiwan in many ways and provides a lot of Blue-ish opinions as a counter to the
Taipei Times, and he also includes a lot of criticism of China from a Taiwanese perspective. For example, he translates a lot of Long Yingtai (龍應台).
Even though the main focus is China and the Chinese media, there's a lot of stuff about Taiwan on ESWN that you can't get anywhere else. It has periodic
collections of opinion polls from various newspapers that are really useful, and also talks about pop culture—the kind of stuff that makes the front page of the
Apple Daily.
It's hard to exaggerate the importance of ESWN. It's read by reporters from many major English news services. Lots of major newspapers—the
New York Times comes to mind—get story ideas from ESWN. That's because reporters from these papers either can't understand Chinese or don't have time to pay close attention to what's going on in the Chinese-language media.
All the translations on ESWN are done by one person. Even so, there is no way we match it. Still, check out the website and maybe you'll get some ideas for posts. This type of thing is a good way to attract readers.
The best blog that focusses just on Taiwan is
Jujuflop. For the most part, the writer comments on stories from the
Taipei Times, the
China Post, and on ESWN. What makes the blog so good is his analysis, which often involves research simple research that no one else in the English-speaking world has bothered to do.
Another main blog belongs to
Michael Turton, who is very Green and very critical of ESWN (read his argument
here).
For example, ESWN recently posted
this editorial from Hong Kong's
Apple Daily (written by Be Da-Zhong (卜大中), who writes for Taiwan's
Apple Daily). The article, which attacks Chen Shuibian partly for supposedly planning to change Taiwan's name to "Taiwan," is hard to entirely agree with, since it's not very well-reasoned. But the overall points are valid and I think it's important for English-speakers to be exposed to this point of view. A Green-supporting foreign blogger named
Michael Turton attacked the article (which isn't that hard to do). Then Jujuflop did some research and provided a really excellent piece of writing about the media reports of plans to change Taiwan's name ("
Does Chen Shui-bian want to change the country’s name?"). Again, if you want to do a really useful piece of writing for people outside of the Formosa Foundation, you could do a lot worse than to think up something like this.
Notes for blog entriesIf you're writing in English, provide Chinese names for most proper nouns. People might not know the English name, or they might want to do further research online using Chinese.
It's also important to provide links to whatever articles you need to talk about. If you don't have a link, go find one. If you absolutely can't find one, make sure to write "(no link available)" or something, so people know you're not just being inconsiderate.
Don't repeat yourself, don't do long introductions or use a lot of unnecessary rhetoric.
Be intellectually honest. If you are going to make an argument (e.g. Ma Yingjeou is stealing the public's money), don't take it farther than you have to. If something is an allegation, acknowledge it as such—even if you wish it weren't. Don't call claims "preposterous" or "unbelievable" if they're believed by lots of people. Don't assume the reader agrees with you, and don't cite rumors as if they were definitely true.
