TAICHUNG (Taiwan News) — People love competitions; it seems to be in our nature. For some it is sports, for others it might be talent shows, pageants, reality shows or even dog shows — everyone has some sort of contest they follow or participate in.
Not all contests are fun or entertaining, such as the ultimate contest: War. However, war’s precursor — politics — can be very entertaining and interesting, especially in Taiwan.
Following politics in Taiwan is quite a popular pastime for many. Considering the population, Taiwan has a staggering number of newspapers, news sites, magazines, news stations on radio and TV and talk shows galore, many of which have extensive political coverage, often in near real-time.
All the drama, the colorful characters, intense battles, betrayals, alliances, downfalls, victories and plot twists and turns are covered extensively across the partisan spectrum. There is copious amounts of speculation and interviews with “insiders” on all sorts of political topics. For example, on who will be the Kuomintang’s (KMT) presidential nominee or even very downstream issues like does one Taipei city councillor really get along with another one, or does she secretly hate her.
Political pundits and pollsters are stars, even though many of them aren’t very good. Often, taxi drivers, who listen to the radio news all day, are better political analysts than some of the so-called professionals.
There are so many ongoing stories and dramas, and with the plethora of media outlets, following Taiwan politics is easy. That is if you speak and read Chinese.
Harder to follow in English at the same depth
It’s much harder to follow in English, and impossible for those who speak other languages, with the possible exception of Japanese. I gather Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong and Macau get pretty good coverage on Taiwan, though.
I was strongly reminded of this when working on my previous column on the drama surrounding the KMT’s central election strategy committee, black gold (corrupt) politics and a revolt in the party against party chair Eric Chu (朱立倫). As boring as an election committee might sound, it was actually a gripping drama full of twists and turns, colorful characters like the King of Hualien, vicious attacks, a struggle for power and dominance, and the result of which could be very consequential for Taiwan in general.
The entire thing played out over only three days, but it dominated the news. There were interesting new developments coming out constantly in near real time and hundreds of articles, columns and op-eds must have come out covering it all during that short time.
Aside from that column, chances are if you only follow English media you’d have no idea it was going on. My column only hit all the key points, plot twists and some of the more important quotes and statements, but there were many more key politicians weighing in, other political party’s reactions (which were pretty predictable) and the memes and jokes floating around (which would have been difficult to explain in English).
Interestingly, English language coverage of business, especially tech, and foreign affairs is pretty good. Business sites like Digitimes can narrowly focus on tech, and can profit by paywalling it as business executives are willing to pay for it, because they need it and Digitimes provides good intelligence.
Foreign affairs has an international audience because of our unpleasant neighbor and there is almost always an English source text to work from. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Presidential Office provide plenty to write about, and stories are often picked up both locally and internationally.
Three problems facing English media
But when it comes to local politics, what appears in English is often in summary form or not mentioned at all. There are three main reasons for this.
The big reason is that there are only six main English general news sources. These are for reading Taiwan News, the government-run Central News Agency’s Focus Taiwan and Taipei Times, and for broadcast news ICRT Radio (I’m part of their news team), RTI and the newly established TaiwanPlus TV station.
The resources available to these outlets are a tiny fraction of what is available to Chinese news outlets, and those three broadcast news sources have limited news content. If you put all the news resources of all six of those outlets together, it is highly unlikely that it would rival even one of the smaller Chinese-language news outlets.
This is, of course, due to the fact that the English language market is tiny by comparison. It is only in the low hundreds of thousands at most if all Westerners, Filipinos and Indians and other English speakers are added together, and assuming they all consume news, which is unlikely.
Then there is the comprehension problem. This is a chicken and egg problem. Without knowing the background on something, it’s harder to understand something happening now.
Comprehension problem
For example, the primary season is around the corner, and recently Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chair and presidential candidate Lai Ching-te (賴清德) met with former transportation minister Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍). Most Taiwanese would immediately grasp the importance and significance of this.
They know that in Taiwan, which primary method is chosen, and for what races, has a significant impact on how candidates are chosen. They also know that, as party chair, Lai has the power in this situation, but that Lin has a powerful seat at the table and considerable negotiating power of his own.
This is because Lin is head of an important DPP faction, the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA, 正常國家促進會, usually abbreviated to 正國會), which is the second most powerful in the party. Lai is from the rival New Tide (新潮流系統, usually abbreviated to 新系) faction, which is the most powerful.
The factions in the DPP are a big deal in Taiwan politics, especially when they’re battling it out in the primaries and when government positions are being handed out. Yet, you never hear of them in English.
The problem is that while a Taiwanese reader will know all of that, to an English language reader it is meaningless. So, when writing an article, a journalist would have to fill in an excessive amount of context for it to make any sense, which simply isn’t feasible.
To try to help with this problem, I have written about the strategic primary method choices in Taiwan politics and two columns on the DPP factions (here and here). But those three columns took a few thousand words to provide the context, so you can see why local English language journalists aren’t really able to realistically squeeze that into a standard news report.
Hoping to help
That’s just one example, there are many more examples like it. One of the reasons I wrote those columns specifically was to hopefully help writers, allowing them to provide minimal context combined with links to get the full picture, and to my immense gratification, I have seen some of them used precisely that way.
All that being said, it is possible to get a pretty good general idea of what is going on in Taiwan politics. There are some excellent books that provide background and context, blogs and podcasts that cover some topics, and the English news outlets here are good at covering the most important stories, if lacking some granularity.
And of course, there is this column.