Taiwan / Asia

An independent and lively press remains a bedrock of Taiwan’s democratic society, though debates over the limits of free expression persist. The media’s penchant for covering scandals was checked by a high-profile lawsuit lodged by the vice president and by an attack on the racy tabloid Taiwan Next. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s acute concern about safeguarding national…

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemns today’s raid on the weekly Taiwan Next magazine, which government authorities have accused of endangering national security.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is writing to condemn the recent attack on the office of the magazine Taiwan Next (Taiwan Yi Zhoukan), and to ask your government to ensure that the police investigation into the attack is thorough and professional.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned about the continued imprisonment of author and journalist Wu Jianming, a U.S. citizen, on charges of spying for Taiwan and “collecting information that endangers state security.”

TAIWAN’S FREEWHEELING MEDIA GENERALLY OPERATE with little interference from a government that presents itself as a model for democracy in the region. However, the young administration of President Chen Shui-bian and his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) did suffer a few embarrassments arising from its treatment of (and by) the press. Chen narrowly won election in…

Relations between the press and the Hong Kong government have deteriorated sharply in the two years since Britain returned the former colony to China. While the Hong Kong press remains one of the freest and most aggressive in the region, the strains of the “one-country-two systems” formula devised by communist China to govern the capitalist…

The handover of the former Portuguese colony of Macau to China on December 20 effectively ended the last vestige of European rule in Asia. Macau, a tiny island territory whose principal industry is casino gambling, is now a Special Administrative Region of China, to be governed in the same general manner as its larger neighbor,…

Taiwan, with its lively and diverse media, reveled in its reputation as a bastion of free speech and democracy. Government leaders made numerous public pronouncements on the importance of promoting press freedom, and advertised their efforts to strengthen civil liberties. In January, the legislature abolished a draconian publishing law that had been used to control…

I am very happy to announce that self-censorship, a phenomenon that has been disturbing the journalistic circle in Hong Kong for many years, is dead. As a matter of fact, it never existed. Let’s be realistic. We should stop calling the sickness “self-censorship” and name it what it really is‹censorship. Front-line journalists seldom censor themselves.…