Monday Links

My friend Flora Chen and I went out riding yesterday, and ran into this woman in purple just as we entered the 145 off the 19 near Pitou. "Is this the 1?" she queried in a piteous voice. She was riding round the island, but had never checked a map and had no idea where she was. Some bike group she contacted told her to take the 1, a road unfit for human use, but by great good luck she had hit probably the best road in the area, the 145. Here we are just before the big bridge into Xiluo. She had left her three children in Hsinchu before deciding to venture the Huandao (round the island ride). She had no idea where anything was located relative to what road or town, but had simply launched herself into space hoping for a happy landing. She was so brave.

Enjoy some links, catching up on work today.

• Commonwealth sounds alarm on Taiwan's e-commerce firms vs China's. Recall that the services pact actually puts limits on Taiwan e-commerce firm operations in China.
• Taiwan Review June Issue online.
• US neglects Taiwan ties: Go Julia Famularo!
• Anti-China riots in Vietnam have big costs for Taiwan insurers. You gotta wonder if any factory owners decided to burn their loser factories, blame the rioters, and collect the insurance money as seed money for another factory elsewhere. There was a wave of this in the 1990s as factory owners shifted to China by burning factories in Taiwan to collect the insurance money as seed money for the China move.
• Taiwan academic denied entrance into Hong Kong.
• Quest for Rukai traditions
• Who shot George William Mackay? Tanshui history blog
• Academia Sinica defends its academics' freedom of speech and political action from attacks by pro-China crowd.
• Paul Lin with interesting commentary in TT on China and the Sunflowers. Lin points out that China is DPP-phobic. 
• The shipyards of Nanfangao
• Poagao remarks on the new atmosphere in the metro since the killings. In fact ridership has fallen a bit and I know several students who claim they stopped riding.
• No Nukes Asia visits Taiwan: Wild at Heart
• Tea masters, always a great blog, marks its tenth anniversary. Congratulations, guys.
• Timothy Rich: does the legislature need more legislators? Hell yes it does. And some kind of more democratic election system for them.....
• Taiwan plans $400 million start up fund.
• EVENT: Urban Nomad is coming to Taichung.
• Taiwan's investment climate third in the world. LOL. 
• High Comedy from WantWant on Tsai Ing-wen. Chock full of gems, don't read while drinking or eating.
• Comedy: TaiwanExplorer tweeted around FOARP's "response" to my "analysis" -- a single remark on the poll in the post below this one -- which makes a point I and others have made 100,000 times, that people vote for the KMT for a variety of reasons. Just type "patronage" into the search function at the top of my blog. I was merely noting that there are two ways to look at that data. LOL. 
• More comedy: Remember this 2006 article on Taiwan's Fading Independence Movement by Robert Ross in Foreign Affairs? Yeah, Taiwan's independence movement has faded and the whole island is embracing a pro-China identity. Right? 
• More comedy: Checked the East Asia Forum for any recent pieces reviewing the effects and success of ECFA, which they had pushed a few years ago using the KMT line. As a pro-integration forum, you'd think such an awesome example of the greatness of integration wouldn't go unremarked. Unsurprisingly, there is nothing but a single remark in a piece by Lawrence Vickers. Search yourself. Oh, and where are the pieces pushing that dog of a services pact?

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