Ketagalan Media: Recent Episodes
Ketagalan Media
The Ketagalan Media is a media project that brings more Taiwan news and commentary to the English speaking audience. We believe that there is more room for quality coverage of Taiwan in English, and that news on Taiwan can use more historical, ideological and international context. The Ketagalan Project is named after the Ketagalan Austronesian people in Taiwan whose language has become extinct, as well as the Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei.
We ask Mike Lee, the founding chairman of Entrepeneur+, a non-profit helping and training people who want to turn their ideas into a viable business. He is also the business development and marketing at a new medical venture, Toothfilm, in Taiwan. We ask him about the state of entrepreneurship in Taiwan today, and how they see the current economic debates going on there.
From Cape No. 7, to Seediq Bale, the movies of director Wei Te-sheng all seem to talk about stories long forgotten since the Japanese colonial period. He has fans and detractors alike, but how does Director Wei himself see them? There is glory, pain, and blood in the past, how do we learn from them? His latest movie Kano is about the underdog baseball team from Chiayi Agricultural School becoming the multicultural team to make it to the Japan national championships. How can such a story, which was unknown to most people, help us realize who we are?
Le Flanc Radical, or the Radical Wing, was founded with a left-wing and Taiwan independence agenda. We ask Kaohsiung city council candidate Dr. Hsin-yu Chen about policies for Kaohsiung and the future of the organization.
We chat with Victor Stevenson, coordinator of Taiwan International Queer Film Festival, about movies and the state of queer and LGBT communities in Taiwan, and why he is optimistic about Taiwan becoming more progressive.
For anyone interested in Taiwan, China is the big, fat dragon in the room. We caught up with China commentator Gordon Chang right after the protests in Hong Kong two weeks ago. Gordon has written a book called The Coming Collapse of China in 2001, and writes for Forbes, World Affairs Journal, and other foreign policy publications. We ask him about geopolitics in Asia, what advice he gives to the next US and Taiwan presidents, and how he responds to criticism that he is a China alarmist.
As part of our 2014 Taiwan mid-term local elections coverage, we caught up with the mayor of Tainan Lai Ching-te (賴清德) right before his flight while visiting the San Francisco Bay Area. He is generally seen as a potential future leader of the party, but some have also criticized him as pro-business and too soft on China---until a few months ago in June, he said that Taiwan independence is a societal consensus, at a public event in Shanghai.
We talk to the two public faces of the movement---Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) and Chen Wei-ting (陳為廷), in this exclusive interview. We ask them just how they have been pushing for their goals, even as the student activist coalition ended; we ask them whether they will run for office; and what they thought about Chinese students increasingly becoming active in Taiwan. In short, all of us want to know: how do you go from protester to political leader? Click above to listen to the interview in Mandarin, or read the transcripts below.
We have a special occasion to talk to Mr. Wolf Wu in his campaign headquarters in Yunlin, to find out about local politics in Taiwan. Wolf is the Democratic Progressive Party’s nominated candidate for County Council in Yunlin’s 3rd district.
The Third Son is an American novel that tells the story of a boy who grew up in between the Japanese colonial period, and the early years of Chinese Nationalist rule in Taiwan. Chieh-Ting Yeh and Jonathan Lee talk to the author Julie Wu in an irreverent conversation about literature, history, movies and everything in between.
Migrations in Taiwan are not just historical facts, but an ongoing reality. Why are graduates of top universities moving to other countries? How does the increase of foreign spouses and laborers from Southeast Asia changing Taiwan’s local communities? Would trade agreements with China really open the door to mass influx of Chinese immigrants? What policies should Taiwan’s government pursue, to solve these issues? We talk to Professor Ji-Ping Lin, of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, to answer these questions.
We talk to filmmaker Anita Chang, a documentary filmmaker who has also taught in universities in Taiwan and Hawaii. Her film “Tongues of Heaven” explores the stories of four young women in Taiwan and Hawaii in search of their native languages, which are facing extinction. We talk about her vision when she started out making the film, the issue of the will of our generation to re-learn those languages, and how does that will respond to the pressure of communicating in the modern world. Of course, Anita also shares her own personal experiences of dealing with multiple languages, in her own heritage.
Exactly because Taiwan’s society is so pragmatic, that it sometimes worry so much on what is available and forget to see what is possible. And in a time like this when Taiwan is under pressure from all sides, when there isn’t much more available, Mr. Candle reminds us to focus instead on what is possible.
We ask guest Ben Goren, the author behind the popular blog Letters from Taiwan, about what it is like being a Westerner living in Taiwan, and just how he got into the fray of Taiwan’s controversial political scene. We also talk shop about politics—just a little bit.
35 years after the Taiwan Relations Act, how has the relationship between the US and Taiwan evolved, and how have people worked on shaping it? Shortly after the student protesters occupied Taiwan’s parliament in April, we talked to Coen Blaauw and Gerrit van der Wees from the Formosan Association for Public Affairs, or FAPA.
Today, Taiwanese Americans range from doctors, lawyers, engineers, business leaders, entrepreneurs, fashion designers, musicians, chefs, and sports players. There are organizations promoting culture, professional careers, public policy, and all sorts of issues. Helping us make sense of all this is HoChie Tsai, who is practically an institution within the Taiwanese American community. We’ll also talk about whether Taiwanese Americans should, or have a right to, be involved in affairs in Taiwan, and about what the third and even fourth generation might do.
What do you think of when we mention “Taiwanese food?” Is Taiwanese food limited to bubble tea and stinky tofu? We ask food author Elizabeth Kao about fine dining in Taiwan, how history shaped food in Taiwan, and some thoughts on the future.
How did the Sunflower Movement gather almost 500,000 people to take to the streets, organize a month-long sit-in at the parliament, and capture the attention of an entire generation of young Taiwanese people? Technology, especially social media, played a crucial role. We talk to Sean Su, a Taiwanese American activist and part of the media and tech team for the Sunflower Movement, about all the technology that helped shape the movement's messages and image.
We are joined by University of Toronto Political Science PhD student Ching-Fang Hsu as we ponder the end of student demonstrators' occupying Taiwan's parliament for 24 days. We think about questions such as: What is the long term meaning of the Sunflower Movement? How will this new political generation answer the unholy trinity of "Governance + China + Globalized Capitalism"?
On March 16, right before the Sunflower Movement occurred, we interviewed Kharis Templeman, a Social Science Research Associate at Stanford University with thought-provoking questions focused on democratization in Taiwan in the 90s, how that compares with other countries' experiences, and the future of democratic consolidation.
We follow the ongoing story of demonstrators storming and occupying Taiwan's parliamentary floor over the imminent ratifying of the services free trade agreement with China, as well as Crimea's independence and annexation by Russia, US and Taiwan's healthcare systems, pig farmers' struggles in Taiwan and India competing with China to do business in Africa.
Education is the very foundation of society. Currently, Taiwan's education system is failing 1 in every 9 children, because there are not enough teachers in resource-poor communities. Teach For Taiwan’s mission is to close this achievement gap by placing talented and committed young leaders to teach in high-need classrooms. We talk to founder Anting Liu about the organization, education for remote areas, and some ideas on education direction.
We discuss Aboriginal and indigenous civilizations in Taiwan and elsewhere with Tony Coolidge, the son of a US military serviceman in Taiwan and an Atayal aboriginal Taiwanese. As the founder of ATAYAL, Tony is committed to building bridges that link indigenous communities around the world, including his recent project to bring students from the New Zealand Maori tribe to spend time with aboriginal students in Taiwan.
Crystal Boys, a classic novel about Taiwan's gay subculture in the 1970s, is also about family, authority and freedom. To find out more about an upcoming stage adaptation at the National Theater, we talk to director 曹瑞原, actors 莫子儀 and 陸一龍, and the author 白先勇 himself.
We talk to Victoria Linchong, who is the director of the documentary "Almost Home: Taiwan" in which she takes us on a family visit to Taiwan that turns out to be much more about history, identity and making these big questions personal. To promote the film, she is also hosting an art tour with famous artists in the US making resistance style posters for a Free Taiwan.
In this special episode, host Chieh-Ting Yeh and guest Jou Yi-cheng go over the history of Dihua Street in the old Dadaocheng neighborhood in Taipei. Known for its specialty shops, we take you on a journey into the 1920s, when Dadaocheng was the cosmopolitan center of Taiwan, connecting it to the rest of the world in the Roaring 20s. We also ponder what that means for Taiwan going into the 2020s and beyond.
For the first interview of the new year, we tackle the questions of Taiwan's economy and free trade. We ask Prof. Peter Chow of City College of New York about trade with China, Taiwan's strategy in joining regional trade blocs, and whether free trade is ultimately good for Taiwan.
In this first episode of the Ketagalan Project, co-hosts Chieh-Ting Yeh, Jonathan Lee, and Tim Suen talk with US foreign affairs expert on East Asia Julia Famularo on current policy debate on Taiwan in Washington, the pivot to Asia, reaction from China and predictions for the future.
The Ketagalan Project is a media project that brings more Taiwan news and commentary to the English speaking audience. We believe that there is more room for quality coverage of Taiwan in English, and that news on Taiwan can use more historical, ideological and international context. The Ketagalan Project is named after the Ketagalan tribe (an Austronesian people in Taiwan whose language has become extinct), and the Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei.