Itamar Waksman is a journalist based in Taiwan. He reports on Taiwanese indigenous issues, politics, and society.
In the 1920s, Taiwan had a radical anti-colonial movement similar to those in other parts of the colonized world — and central to it was a powerful organized labor movement. Today, with a weak and divided left, that memory needs to be recovered.
Taiwan’s indigenous people have long been subject to mistreatment by companies seeking to extract resources from their land and integrate Taiwan into the world capitalist system. Now their resistance takes a new form: an organized political assembly.