Headline in the Taiwan News today: Yao plans to run for Kaohsiung mayor Former Government Information Office minister Pasuya Yao has expressed his intention to run in the year-end election for mayor of Kaohsiung City in spite of the controversy surrounding him during his tenure as a Cabinet member. You just can’t keep a good […]
Pasuya Yao, the head of the Government Information Office, just can’t keep out of the news – and it’s never in a good way. This week, his plans to regulate the amount of Korean and Japanese TV shows that can be shown in Taiwan have already been ridiculed from all quarters. Taiwanese TV already suffers […]
Rank has spotted this gem about Pasuya Yao, the head of the soon-to-be-irrelevant GIO: In a poll of legislators Yao came out top of a list of ‘nightmare ministers’ According to the United Evening News last night, lawmakers cited Yao as being “unprofessional, careless, lazy, rude, and ill-tempered.” No argument here. I was telling this […]
The head of the Government Information Office (GIO) Pasuya Yao has had a rough couple of months: In late August, it was reported that a fund the GIO had setup to help victims of the December Tsunami had not paid out a single dollar. Several charities which had cooperated with the GIO were in serious […]
One of the little political soap-operas that’s been going on in Taiwan is the battle over who should run the national media watchdog. Up until the end of last year, this job was handled by the GIO (Government Information Office), but it has now been passed over to the NCC (National Communication Commission). Unfortunately, we […]
Presidential elections are still two years away. While the KMT nomination is all but decided, there has been plenty of jockeying for position in the DPP to step into Chen Shui-bian’s shoes. Frank Hsieh was a frontrunner until his misfortunes as Premier, but it seems he still has plans: Frank Hsieh is now ready to […]
Any attempt by any government to connect to youth culture is guaranteed to be an embarrassment. A couple of days ago the national college entrance exams contained bizarre questions about internet slang, but the Taipei City Government has gone one better. Today’s front page story on Apple Daily (the biggest selling newspaper in Taiwan) was […]
Taiwan is in the middle of setting up a new National Communication Commission (NCC) – which will take over as a media watchdog from the Government Information Office. Given the incompetence of the current GIO head (my hero Pasuya Yao), and its long history of censorship and oppression, everyone approves of this. However, there have […]
As widely expected, the local elections in Taiwan last weekend proved to be a disaster for the DPP and a triumph for the KMT. The best summary of the results comes from Ma Ying-jeou: “This is not a triumph for the KMT but for the Taiwanese people,” KMT Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said in a […]
What happens when a society gets so advanced that it can predict (and so prevent) a crime before it happens? Philip K. Dick imagined an advanced and generally crime-free society when he wrote ‘Minority Report’, while George Orwell wrote about an efficiently opressive totalitarian state which prosecuted thought-crimes in ‘1984’. The reality in Taiwan is […]