Notes from Central Taiwan: Violent delights, violent ends

The toll rolls on. A gunman walks into a place where humans are peacefully gathering and slaughters them for a militantly-avowed racially-based nationalism, presented in a long manifesto. We are quickly told that the gunman was mentally ill. Obviously — who but a madman could do such a thing? The newspapers dust off one of their “education of a killer” pieces, change the names and run another 1,200 words useful only to those cultivating such killers. The latest of these attacks, on Taiwanese churchgoers in Laguna, California, has spurred much discussion of the long record of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) violence against Taiwanese. It is indeed related to that, in the same way that the actions of the killer in Buffalo last week are the bastard children of the ideology of white supremacist violence and authoritarian surveillance of the slave-owning South. ‘STOCHASTIC TERRORISM’ These killers are engaged in what is known as “stochastic terrorism,” a useful term for killings not intended to accomplish a specific political purpose (the way the murder of Chinese-American journalist Henry Liu (劉宜良) in California in 1984 silenced a dissident voice or the beatings administered to Taiwan independence activists at Little League championships in the 1970s punished them), but to simply spread their ideology of murderous hate. They kill so that others will kill, a steady drip-drip of terrorism. The manifesto is thus as important to the purpose of the killer as the dead bodies — the dead are glittering trophies, empirical demonstration of the power of the ideology, meant to grab the attention of the media and prospective adherents, enabling the ideology in the manifesto to replicate itself. Unlike state-orchestrated violence, stochastic terrorism is ideologically driven and presents itself in the form of an unpredictable “lone wolf” killer. People who forward these terrorist ideologies across the Internet know

By Michael Turton

Taiwan in Time: Blood-stained unrest in Yunlin

May 23 to May 29 After holding out for seven years, more than 250 Yunlin-based resistance fighters were finally persuaded to surrender in six separate ceremonies on May 25, 1902. The Japanese had subdued most of the Han Taiwanese within six months of their arrival in 1895, but intermittent unrest continued — in Yunlin, the Tieguoshan (鐵國山) guerillas caused the new regime much headache through at least 1901. These surrender ceremonies were common and usually conducted peacefully, but the Japanese had different plans for these troublemakers. Once the event concluded, they gunned down every single attendee with machine guns. Only Chien Shui-shou (簡水壽) survived because he left early, but he was caught and executed along with several other leaders three months later. The remaining commanders either fled to China or went into hiding, drawing an end to this chapter of anti-colonial resistance in the area that included the bloody Yunlin Massacre of 1896, where countless combatants and civilians were killed indiscriminately and thousands of homes were burned down. The event was reported in Hong Kong and British newspapers, causing an international outcry, and Yunlin subprefecture head Yunoshin Matsumura was stripped of his honors and sent back to Japan. The Japanese took a more tempered approach after that, preferring to force combatants to surrender so they could help fight other rebels, but as the massacre showed, they were still ruthless against anyone who pushed them too far. STIFF RESISTANCE The Japanese arrived in Taiwan in May 1895 after the Qing Empire ceded the island to them through the Treaty of Shimonoseki. After taking Taipei without a hitch, they encountered stiff resistance as they made their way south, with the biggest clash occurring three months later in Changhua, just north of Yunlin. There were already many armed militias and bandit groups in the Yunlin area as Han

By Han Cheung

That bacon, chicken and beef won’t get cheaper anytime soon

Producing the world’s meat has rarely been this expensive. In southern Calgary, Don Lowe, who’s been a cattle rancher for 40 years, had hoped to expand his herd of 800 beef cows this year, but with feed prices skyrocketing, he’s struggling to hang on to the animals he has. Across the ocean in East Yorkshire, England, pig farmer Kate Moore says the upkeep of her 32,000-strong herd is becoming exceedingly hard. “It’s horrendous,” said Moore, who is now is chalking up a loss of about ￡60 (US$75) per animal because of the soaring cost of feeding and taking care of them. “There’s no light at the end of the tunnel at the moment. The British pig industry will never be the same.” Farmers across the world — with more than 40 billion pigs, cows, buffalo, sheep, goats and poultry — are contending with near-record prices for livestock feed as supplies of grains and soy shrink. Bills for everything from the electricity that keeps their barns well-lit and warm to truckers that haul their animals to abattoirs have also soared. Crop and energy costs surging in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine have compounded their woes even as they struggle with everything from droughts curbing grazing lands to bird-flu outbreaks from North America to Europe that wiped out millions of poultry. Hit from all sides, many farmers are selling livestock or breeding fewer, showing output will be capped in the longer-term. The number of beef cows being slaughtered in the US is the highest since records started in 1986, and those cows not giving birth to calves will result in smaller herds. That means meat prices — already at record highs — won’t fade fast, further weighing on household budgets that are straining under higher costs for other staples and necessities. The UNs’ Food

Performing artists push for copyright protection from AI deepfakes

When a friend messaged voice actor Bev Standing to ask whether she was the voice of TikTok’s text-to-speech feature, the Canadian performer’s surprise soon turned to irritation. She had never done work for the popular social media platform, yet the voice was unmistakably hers. Standing concluded that speech recordings she had done for another client years earlier had somehow been obtained by TikTok, and fed into an algorithm which allows users to turn written text into a voiceover for video clips in the app. She sued TikTok in a case that was settled in September — one that performing artists say was symptomatic of the growing challenges artificial intelligence (AI) poses to creatives. “I am a business. I need to protect my product, and my product is my voice,” Standing said. “They [TikTok] weren’t my client. It’s like me buying a car and you driving it away. You didn’t buy it, you don’t get to drive it.” From digitally resurrecting dead celebrities to improving lip sync for movies dubbed in foreign languages, AI has been increasingly deployed in the movie and audio industry in recent years, sparking debates around ethics and copyright issues. A documentary on the late chef Anthony Bourdain faced a backlash after using AI to recreate his voice. Working actors and other performing artists say they are also concerned about the impacts of AI on their livelihoods, with some calling for creators to be given more rights over their work and how it is used. British actor and comedian Rick Kiesewetter signed away all rights to recordings of his voice and face movements in a job for a tech firm several years ago. Now he feels somewhat uneasy about it. “I just don’t know where this stuff is going to end up ... It could even end up in porn as far as I know,” he said. LEGAL

By Umberto Bacchi

Highways & Byways: Where the fire never goes out

In one of the most remote parts of Chiayi County, a hamlet shares the exact same name as a well-known center of tea production in New Taipei City. Pinglin (坪林) in Dapu Township (大埔) is around 550m above sea level. The road to it is good enough for any car or motorcycle, and so few people live there that it’s an ideal place for the virus-afraid to go sightseeing. I rode in from Yujing District (玉井) in Tainan, taking Provincial Highway 3 through Nansi (楠西) and above Zengwen Reservoir (曾文水庫). At the entrance to Chiayi Farm (嘉義農場), I halted briefly, curious if this government-owned attraction — 40 hectares of orchards and formal gardens — would soon reopen. There was no one around I could ask, but nothing I saw hinted that it’ll come back to life in the near future. A little further on, the turnoff to Pinglin, opposite the km341 marker on Highway 3, is clearly marked in English as well as Chinese. Less than 2km up the road to Pinglin, Chiayi Local Road 147 (嘉147), I stopped to inspect a sign I don’t think I’d seen before. It wasn’t, as I first assumed, a reminder that the Buddhist practice of fangsheng (放生, the “merciful release” of captive creatures into the wild to accrue merit) can wreak ecological havoc. Instead, it was a warning from the Forestry Bureau’s Chiayi District Office that anyone caught catching or trading protected turtle species could be sentenced to a jail term of up to five years, and fined between NT$300,000 and NT$1.5 million. Among the species it specifically mentioned were the Yellow-margined box turtle (食蛇龜, “snake-eating turtle,” Cuora flavomarginata) and the Yellow pond turtle (柴棺龜, Mauremys mutica). A short distance further on, where the cliff-and-creek scenery is especially delightful, I came across what could be evidence of

By Steven Crook

Movie review: Letter to A’ma

I usually get lost in long documentaries that stitch together numerous storylines, characters and artistic elements without much of a direct plot, but Chen Hui-ling (陳慧齡) does it just right in Letter to A’ma (給阿媽的一封信), which took her 10 years to make. The editing is superb, melding everything into a poignant and layered composition that’s enjoyable and illuminating to watch without having to fully follow every subject and catch every bit of information. In place of a gripping narrative is a powerful emotional buildup that slowly draws the viewer in and hits hard later. It’s not difficult to see why it was nominated for Best Documentary in last year’s Golden Horse Film Festival. Featuring young people trying to understand the experiences of their grandparents through interviews, writing, art and music, Letter to A’ma is a beautiful and compelling ode to those who went through Taiwan’s turbulent past and lived on to share their memories, no matter how painful. Due to the political climate, the grimier parts of Taiwanese history were rarely discussed at the dinner table or taught in schools. Chen is seen in the film leading her “The Island’s Collective Memories Project” (島嶼的集體記憶計畫) classes in various schools, where students ask their grandparents questions, present their findings and create drawings based on their impressions. Chen never got to do this herself, and the stories are interspersed with images of her reading a poem to her deceased grandmother: I can’t seem to be able to see you, so I can only try to view you through other people’s eyes, she says in one line. But as the film goes on, it’s evident that the purpose of this exercise goes beyond just getting to know one’s grandparents. It’s about trying to patch together these buried memories from different groups in Taiwan — Hoklo,

By Han Cheung

Race satire meets teen buddy comedy in ‘Emergency’

Emergency begins like any coming-of-age buddy comedy. But its young heroes’ night of party-hopping hi-jinks quickly takes a more serious and sinister turn — in large part because they are black. Unlike white characters from genre classics like Superbad who emerge unscathed from playful interactions with bemused cops, college students Sean and Kunle panic when they find a high-school girl passed out on their living room floor. Fearing what might happen if they dial 911 in such a compromising scenario, they rope Latino housemate Carlos into helping ferry her to hospital, setting off a series of hilarious and terrifying consequences. “It seems like it’s gonna be a Superbad or a Booksmart type of movie — I feel like even the characters want this so badly to be like a teen comedy,” the movie’s writer KD Davila said. “They want it to be that, but it’s not, it can’t be. Which is a fucked-up, bitter reality of what it’s like for a lot of people,” agreed director Carey Williams. At the heart of Emergency, currently in Taiwan’s theaters and on Amazon Prime Video next week, is the constant and everyday burden placed on young men of color whom society is quick to perceive as a threat. Growing up, Davila said she “saw this phenomenon where my dad and other men in my family, especially the ones who were darker skinned, had to do this strange calculation every time we went anywhere, [of] considering how they’re being perceived.” “You can make those calculations and you can do your best to project ‘innocence’ or whatever. But it doesn’t matter sometimes. You can still get pulled over and searched for no reason.” Davila and Williams turned those observations into a short film, winning awards at festivals including Sundance and SXSW in 2018, before Amazon and a cast including pop star Sabrina Carpenter

Taiwan’s pandemic payout panic

A post titled “I want to get COVID-19 to pay off my debts” caused a stir on popular Internet forum Dcard last month, as the anonymous user asked for the blood or saliva of the infected so she could claim her pandemic insurance payout of NT$75,000. She had paid just NT$809 for the policy. Although the user later clarified that the post was made in jest to criticize the government’s handling of the ongoing insurance crisis, it’s entirely plausible that some would get infected on purpose to receive their payout — especially given that over 99 percent of the reported Omicron cases have been mild or asymptomatic. The issue is so sensitive that when entertainer Chen Chia-hsing (陳嘉行) was accused last week of indirectly encouraging people to proactively contract the virus, one of the main points in his denial was “I did not buy pandemic insurance.” None of this was a problem for the insurance companies who sold policy after policy when Taiwan was a zero-COVID success story — until early last month, that is. They didn’t seem to mind that roughly 40 percent of those who bought the insurance purchased policies from multiple providers; one individual was reportedly insured by 11 of the 12 companies offering pandemic insurance. The climb in local cases sparked another buying frenzy, but by April 20, all local property insurance companies had halted their policies for quarantined people. They had sold a total of 1.65 million COVID-19 policies up to that point. There were 1,727 new cases that day — which seems like nothing now as the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday reported 85,356. However, the CECC’s prediction that the infection rate could climb to 15 percent caused them to panic. On Saturday, Fubon Life Insurance (富邦人壽) announced that it was rejecting and refunding all pending

By Han Cheung

End of the line nears for NASA InSight Mars lander

After some four years probing Mars’ interior, NASA’s InSight lander will likely retire this summer as accumulated dust on its solar panels saps its power. The lander will, however, leave behind a legacy of data that will be tapped by scientists around the world for years to come, helping to improve our understanding of planet formation, NASA said, while announcing on Tuesday the imminent end to InSight’s science operations. Equipped with an ultra-sensitive seismometer, InSight recorded more than 1,300 “marsquakes,” including a magnitude 5 quake on May 4, the largest so far. But around July, the seismometer will be turned off. The lander’s energy level will then be checked about once a day, and some pictures may still be taken. Then by the end of this year, the mission will be completely stopped. The cause: the accumulation over months of Martian dust on the lander’s two solar panels, each measuring about 2.2 meters wide. InSight, which is already running on only a tenth of the energy it had at the beginning, will soon find its batteries drained. The speed at which dust accumulated corresponded more or less to what had been estimated by NASA. The lander got a new lease on life around a year ago, when its robotic arm was put to new and unplanned use to remove some dust from the solar panels, extending the mission. The maneuver — employed six times successfully — saw the arm use dust itself to clear the panels, as it scooped up some martian soil and gently dropped onto the robot so the dirt was blown across the solar panels, clearing parts of their surface. Adding something to the lander specifically to clean the panels was forgone due to costs, explained Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, during a press conference Tuesday. Such a mechanism would

Zelenskyy opens Cannes Film Festival, links war and cinema

The 75th Cannes Film Festival kicked off Tuesday with an eye turned to Russia’s war in Ukraine and a live satellite video address from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who called on a new generation of filmmakers to confront dictators as Charlie Chaplin satirized Adolf Hitler. After tributes and musical numbers, Zelenskyy was streamed live for the formally attired audience who had gathered for the premiere of Michel Hazanavicius’ zombie comedy Final Cut. Zelenskyy, dressed in his signature olive green shirt, drew a thunderous standing ovation and and spoke at length about the connection between cinema and reality. He referenced films like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator as not unlike Ukraine’s present circumstances. Zelenskyy quoted Chaplin’s final speech in The Great Dictator, which was released in 1940, in the early days of World War II: “The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people.” “We need a new Chaplin who will demonstrate that the cinema of our time is not silent,” implored Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president pushed filmmakers not to “stay silent” while hundreds continue to die in Ukraine, the largest war in Europe since World War II, and show that cinema “is always on the side of freedom.” The war is to be a regular presence in Cannes, where the festival has barred Russians with ties to the government from attending this year. Set to screen are several films from prominent Ukrainian filmmakers, including Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary The Natural History of Destruction. Footage shot by Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravicius before he was killed in Mariupol in April will also be shown by his fiancee, Hanna Bilobrova. Even Final Cut,” the latest film from The Artist filmmaker Hazanavicius, was renamed from its original title, Z, after Ukrainian protesters noted

By Jake Coyle

Book review: The many faces of Taiwan

Taiwan the betrayed lover, Taiwan the neglected son, Taiwan the objectified sex toy — these are among the literary identities explored in this engaging and original study by Wu Chia-rong (吳家榮). Perhaps the most resonant metaphor is the hearing-impaired mechanic Saburo, from Wu Ming-yi’s (吳明益) novel Routes in the Dream. Having served in the Japanese navy in World War II, Saburo suffers partial hearing loss in a bombing raid, after which his life is “plagued by miscommunication with his own family and the outside world.” Saburo can thus be seen to represent Taiwan itself — riven by internal social division and ignored by the world at large. Quoting from an essay by Chen Hsiu-lin (陳秀玲), Wu highlights how the familial breakdown represents “the historical rupture between generations.” This, of course, presages a similar rupture between the Martial Law era generation and those who grew up during Taiwan’s democratization. As for the second part of the equation — Taiwan’s external relationships — although Wu does not dwell on this, the import is obvious: Saburo’s “soundless condition” renders him a nonentity to outsiders. ‘GHOST ISLAND’ This idea of Taiwan as a mute, impotent witness is echoed in Wu’s analysis of Sung Tse-lai’s (宋澤萊) 1985 work Taiwan in Ruins. The novel depicts a nuclear apocalypse that turns “the nation-state of silence” in a wasteland that is “truly a ghost island.” The “ghost island” trope — a self-deprecating term used by Taiwanese to refer to their homeland — is given further attention in the opening chapter, where Wu looks at Visible Ghosts, a short-story collection by the feminist writer Li Ang (李昂). “Li’s ghost narrative,” writes Wu, “recognizes Taiwan’s national status as one in crisis and problematizes its national identity.” Her portrayal of Taiwan as a borderless entity from which indistinct “ghost voices” emanate again

By James Baron

Why do people, like, say, ‘like’ so much?

I’m listening to BBC Radio 1, where they are interviewing the 26-year-old actor and singer Dove Cameron about her globally successful hit, Boyfriend. The DJ, Melvin Odoom, asks her, “Do you think that your acting career has helped you with, kind of, like, your music career?” “For me they’re, like, the same energy,” replies Cameron. “Which is, like, when people are, like, ‘You have to choose,’ I’m like, ‘They feel the same!’” It’s the most predictable celebrity interview exchange ever uttered, remarkable only for one word that repeats and repeats. ‘A BIT DUMB’? “It’s a really funny one,” says Fiona Hanlon, who has worked at the station for more than 10 years, including producing Nick Grimshaw’s breakfast show and Maya Jama’s weekend show. “If a guest says ‘like’ too much, we’d get texts from the listeners. If a DJ says it too much, sometimes a boss might pop in and mention it … It’s just seen as a bit lazy, a bit dumb. I was always very aware of it.” Why do people have such a problem with “like”? Is it because it simply won’t go away? In 1992, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a robust defense of the word and the way it carries “a rich emotional nuance,” responding to what had already been a decade of criticism. This did nothing to settle the debate. Linguists agree that usage of the word has increased every year since then, to the point where in one five-minute exchange on Love Island in 2017, the word was uttered 76 times, once every four seconds. By the time I was at secondary school in the early 2000s, “like” was just a natural part of speech. Transcribing the interviews I did for this piece, I say it constantly. When I do, I find it a friendly crutch, signaling to the person I’m

By Sam Wolfson

Women’s stamp on Taiwan’s history

You’ll need good eyesight to fully browse the Her stories on the postage stamps (真善美:方寸之間的女性形象特展) exhibition. Although some are shown with zoomed in replicas or feature blown up elements, most of the stamps are presented in their original 3cm-by-4cm size. What makes this fully-bilingual exhibition fascinating, however, are the original artifacts and artwork that many of the stamps are based on, as it’s a collaboration between the Postal Museum, National History Museum and women’s rights groups. For history buffs, it’s a unique way to browse through Chunghwa Post’s ideas of female representation since it took over the nation’s mail service after World War II. The exhibition also provides a glimpse of women on postage stamps in other countries. Having visited the National 228 Memorial Museum numerous times, I’ve never entered the Postal Museum, which is across the street. It’s six spacious floors feature everything you’ve ever wanted to know about stamps and the mail in Taiwan, China (where Chunghwa Post originated) and the world, including an entire level for kids. I now know what the world’s most expensive stamp looks like, and who is featured in Chunghwa Post’s Philatelic Hall of Fame. I didn’t have time to finish looking at everything before closing time — but I’ll definitely be back. The museum opened another branch in the historic Taipei Beimen Post Office in 2015, and there’s a new railway-oriented exhibition that opened last week. It’s quite small and there’s no English, so only visit if you’re really into trains, stamps or old buildings. But what this location offers that isn’t available at the main museum are … magnifying glasses! Even if you have perfect vision, it’s always more enriching to be able to inspect tiny objects in detail, and it’s head-scratching why the main branch doesn’t have them. Perhaps I’ll bring my

By Han Cheung

Notes from Central Taiwan: Screeching at the future

“Long as I remember, the rain’s been coming down,” the song says. The last couple of weeks of wet certainly make it feel that way. The global media has recently observed the change of hitting a 1.5 Celsius degree rise in average temperatures in the next five years has risen to 50 percent. As many scientists have observed, once that level of warming is hit, the planet will reach a slew of tipping points. 1.5C is thus a major threshold. Nature has been sending us ever more urgent distress signals: murderous heatwaves across the Indian subcontinent, giant sandstorms in Iraq, collapsing ice shelves, houses on Cape Hatteras in North Carolina sliding slowly into the rising ocean. Ironically, in 2012 North Carolina passed a law banning the state from using the latest science to evaluate its coastal resource policies. Now they just need to elect a horse as state senator to finish making America great again. The rain currently landing on us here, traditionally called the “plum rains” (meiyu, 梅雨), is also being shaped by human heating of the earth. A recent paper by a group of scholars out of the National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction in Taipei contends that the active phase of the East Asian Summer Monsoon (EASM) is changing in our rapidly warming climate: it is dumping more water on Taiwan. The paper was stimulated by the 2017 meiyu rainfall event in northern Taiwan that did millions in agricultural damage after three hours of a pounding downpour inundated the area with over 200mm of rain. This effect, they note, is driven by two factors: the Clausius–Clapeyron relation, under which rain increases when the lower atmosphere is heated, and anomalies in the circulation that cause moisture to pool over Taiwan. While these predictions are likely to hold, especially

By Michael Turton

Taiwan in Time: From village strongman to imperial commander

May 16 to May 22 Lin Wen-cha (林文察) and his “Taiwanese braves” (台灣勇) arrived in Fujian Province’s Jianyang District (建陽) on May 19, 1859, eager for their first action outside of Taiwan. The target was local bandit Guo Wanzong (郭萬淙), one of several ruffians who had taken advantage of ongoing Taiping Rebellion to establish strongholds in the area. A strongman leader of the notable Wufeng Lin Family (霧峰林家), Lin had impressed Qing Dynasty rulers five years earlier by helping expel the remnants of Small Knife Society (小刀會) rebels from Keelung. Lin’s forces routed Guo’s gang in just 11 days, earning a formal military position and the heroic title “baturu.” Hsu Hsueh-chi (許雪姬) writes in the Lin Wen-cha and the Taiwan braves — a preliminary study on Taiwan Braves deployed to the mainland (林文察與台勇 — 台勇內調出探) that this was the first time Taiwanese fighters were summoned to China. The Qing Dynasty needed them because they were preoccupied with the Taiping rebellion. Additionally, Lin’s fighters were skilled and experienced as they were constantly clashing with rival Han clans and indigenous warriors back home. They were also familiar with mountainous warfare, which proved beneficial in Fujian. Lin fought numerous battles for the Qing Dynasty on both sides of the Taiwan Strait over the next five years, finally falling against a Taiping army in December 1864. He was only 36. He was posthumously elevated to general — the second highest rank ever achieved by a Taiwanese during Qing rule. LOCAL STRONGMEN As Hsu Hsueh-chi writes in Lin Wen-cha and the Taiwan braves, the word yong (勇, “braves”) generally referred to irregular troops who fought for the Qing. They were not heavily used until the Lin Shuang-wen (林爽文) rebellion of 1768 in Taiwan. With the Qing forces unable to gain the upper hand, commander Fukanggan (福康安) recruited local braves to help

By Han Cheung

‘Sydney Daddy:’ Australia’s Chinese-language shock jock

In the world of Chinese-speaking media, “Sydney Daddy” is an Australian YouTube phenomenon: a kind of Alan Jones for Mandarin-speakers, who has found unexpected success, not just in Australia but throughout the diaspora. From his home in Sydney, Edgar Lu, 41, does a talk-back style program two or three times a week, interviewing politicians and local community figures or ranting on issues he cares about. “I think by Australian standards, I’m center-right,” he says. He says he’s not “anti-CCP [Chinese Communist Party], but at the same time, I don’t particularly care what they think.” YouTube offers a platform that is free from the censorship that applies to the popular China-based WeChat, allowing Lu to build his rightwing profile and earning him a sizable audience. But some are less than enamored of Lu and his pro-Trump views, accusing him of confecting a rightwing stance in order to attract eyeballs. On Twitter, the Chinese-Australian dissident artist and political cartoonist Badiucao (巴丟草) has engaged in vigorous criticism of Lu, despite both parties being less than enamored of the CCP. Recently it has boiled over into threats of legal action by Badiucao over Lu using his artwork on his channel. ECLECTIC TOPICS Lu’s topics are an eclectic mix. During the election he has aired a commentary video about politician Gladys Liu, stating that although Liu had been accused of being “a CCP spy” (something she denies) he would suggest voting for her in comparison to Labor’s Carina Garland who “allegedly supported Black Lives Matter.” He has done an interview with former Chinese diplomat Han Yang, who is a Labor supporter. As they discussed why Yang was supporting Labor, Sydney Daddy made it clear he was a Liberal supporter. More controversially on Twitter, he has resurrected allegations made by a former member of Young Labor, Kathy Sherriff, about an alleged historical rape by former leader Bill

By Anne Davies and Wing Kuang

Germans rethink their way of death

Germans are finding that death no longer quite becomes them. Europe’s biggest economy is rethinking its way of death, with one start-up claiming to have found a way of prolonging life — digitally at least — beyond the grave. Youlo — a cheery contraction of “You Only Live Once” — allows people to record personal messages and videos for their loved ones, which are then secured for several years in a “digital tombstone.” Unveiled at “Life And Death 2022” funeral fair in the northern city of Bremen this month, its creators claim it allows users to have their final word before they slip gently into the good night. Traditionally, Lutheran northern Germany has long had a rather stiff and stern approach to death. But as religion and ritual loosened their hold, the crowds at the fair show people are looking for alternative ways of marking their end — a trend some say has been helped by the coronavirus pandemic. “With globalization, more and more people live their lives far from where they were born,” said Corinna During, the woman behind Youlo. When you live hundreds of kilometers from relatives, visiting a memorial can “demand a huge amount of effort,” she said. And the COVID-19 pandemic has only “increased the necessity” to address the problem, she insisted. NO LONGER TABOO During lockdowns, many families could only attend funerals by video link, while the existential threat coronavirus posed — some 136,000 people died in Germany — also seems to have challenged longtime taboos about death. All this has been helped by the success of the German-made Netflix series The Last Word — a mould-breaking “dramedy” hailed for walking the fine line between comedy and tragedy when it comes to death and bereavement. Much like British comedian Ricky Gervais’ hit series After Life, which turns on a husband grieving the loss