Hopefully Going Bananas: Taiwan’s Sinophone (Queer) Science Fiction
Membranas
In April 2024, the Taiwanese drag queen Nymphia Wind became the first East Asian winner of the RuPaul Drag Race.[1] Videos of her in a galactic golden suit went viral, putting Taiwan in the international media spotlight and enshrining her as a sort of queer ambassador for Taiwanese realness to the rest of the world, or, as she has said, like a wai jiao guan 外焦官 – ‘external banana official’, a punning homophone for ‘ambassador’ 外交官. Back at home, Nymphia was invited to perfo...
Recent
How Taiwan Debates the Death Penalty and its Abolition
In April 2024, the Taiwan Constitutional Court held a hearing on whether the death penalty violates constitutional guarantees of human rights. On 20 September i... more
Linguistic Hierarchies in Yunnan Province: A Case Study of Yi Groups in Heqing
With 281 languages from nine language families,[1] China has a high degree of linguistic diversity. The distribution of speakers of these languages is greatly u... more
Is China’s Social Credit System As We Know It Dead?
Government digitisation initiatives worldwide are infamous for budget overruns, delays and failures to deliver on promises. China is no exception. Hundreds of h... more
Hong Kong’s Long Struggle for Democracy
I was one of the organisers of the 2014 pro-democracy Umbrella Movement and was sentenced to sixteen months of imprisonment for inciting people to join a sevent... more
