Ballots & Bullets

Professor Alex Danchev attended the annual awards dinner of the Political Studies Association at Church House, Westminster, on 29 November, to pick up the Association’s 2011 Award for Innovation in Teaching.

The citation highlighted the course in Political Biography Professor Danchev has developed, in collaboration with Ion Trewin, formerly editor-in-chief of the publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson and now administrator of …

Ever since Taiwan held its first direct presidential election in 1996, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has tried to influence the outcome of elections on Taiwan through implicit and explicit means. Many of you will remember the missile threat authorized by the CCP in 1996. And perhaps too, the harsh warning made by former Premier Zhu Rongji (朱鎔基) during Taiwan’s …

Once referred to as ‘interesting but insignificant’, the British Communist Party has been the subject of many academic studies that have explored its chequered history.

Emily Robinson, a post-doctoral researcher based in the Centre for British Politics has just published an article that looks at the party’s dissolution in 1991, something which brought to an end just over 70 …

Here is the complete video of Hsiao Bi-khim’s talk at Columbia. Many thanks to Mike Fu, Program Coordinator at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

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Ms. Bi-khim Hsiao 蕭美琴, spokeswoman and advisor for the Tsai Ing-wen Presidential Campaign, recently spoke at Columbia University. The event took place on 16 November 2011 and was organized by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Ms. Hsiao was invited to speak as a prominent alumna, who graduated with an M.A. in political science in 1995. Political Science Department Professor Andrew …

Minimalist shorts today (not because Australian Masterchef beckons, but because the candidates are serving up some tasty quotes that work better without my insouciant waffling).

For starters, how about this zinger from Tsai Ing-wen talking about agriculture in the South: Ma “reads the data of his public opinion polls more carefully than economic data.”

Extracted from Time interview: Ma: “Many …

Ma Ying-jeou spent fifteen minutes at Ai Weiwei’s ‘Absent‘ exhibit at Taipei’s Museum of Fine Art on Friday. Hours before Ma’s visit, I posted this piece by Harry Wu criticising the human rights situation in Taiwan during the Ma administration. In that post, Wu wrote of “the silence of government associated sectors on the persecution of Chinese dissidents, …

‘We campaign in poetry, but when we’re elected we’re forced to govern in prose’. So said then-New York Governor Mario Cuomo in 1985.

As someone interested in political fiction of different kinds – films, novels, television dramas and plays – I have shied away from poetry. However, I know it’s out there. Spike Milligan for example wrote a …

Yesterday I wrote that Ma’s campaign is a car wreck and suggested that to get it back on track, his team should get on message, and self-promote and attack on the economy. Instead, they have decided to fall back on a tactic that predates the first presidential election in 1996 and has been present ever since. Namely, invoking the “DPP …

Approaching the Universal Human Rights Month, both the Ma Ying-jeou and Tsai Ing-wen camps are endeavouring to build their own images by presenting their human rights manifestos. The current ruling party KMT announced that it would implement no more executions (literally) of the death penalty before the election: in contrast to the impression it had given the voters previously, concerning …