Forum: A Commemoration and a Celebration

Taiwan: Seventy Years On — A Difficult Anniversary

by Mark Harrison

ON 28 FEBRUARY 1947, in Taiwan’s capital Taipei, two customs guards accosted a widowed woman, Lin Jiang-mai, selling unlicensed cigarettes at the Tianma Teahouse on present-day Nanjing Road. In the ensuing confrontation, one of the guards struck the woman; an angry crowd gathered, and one of the guards fired his pistol and killed a bystander. This set off a riot, and then an island-wide uprising by the Taiwanese people against the Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintang) government on Taiwan.

Rainbow Connections

by Paul J. Farrelly

ON 20 MAY 2017, a group of parents went to the People’s Park 人民广场, Shanghai’s ‘dating park’, to advertise their single sons and daughters to the parents of prospective partners. Unlike most other parents there, however, their children identified as LGBTQI. Their presence upset some other parents, and police ultimately ordered them to leave the park on the grounds that, in distributing printed material with commercial logos, they had not registered properly.