Notes

Being Taiwan. On January 13, in one of this year’s first major elections, voters chose Lai Ching-te—also known as William Lai—as the next president of Taiwan. Lai belongs to the Democratic Progressive Party, which has now won the the country’s last three presidential elections.

In October, Hsin-Hsin Pan, sociologist at Soochow University in Taipei, explored how last week’s vote would be fundamentally a referendum on Taiwan’s relationship with China, why Taiwanese public opinion has been steadily shifting away from unification with the mainland, and why more and more people on the island are fearing an invasion by China.