Swing your way through old Taipei as the Bubble Pop Lindy Exchange kicks off today for a three-day dance and music extravaganza with an infusion of local culture and history. Visitors will get to take dance lessons, watch professional performances, shop at vintage and food markets, attend seminars and go on cultural tours of historic neighborhoods.
Established swing dance groups from across Taiwan will converge in the capital to share their expertise with attendees and dazzle them with their moves. Live bands such as TPO (踢霹歐), Lady & Knight (女爵騎士), the Flat Fives and the Lin Liang-yu Trio (林亮宇爵士三重奏) will provide the lively soundtrack, and TPO band leader Jim Geddes will offer a seminar about the history of jazz.. Sing Yuen Lim, a dance veteran of 30 years, will share her experiences and rich knowledge of swing dancing.
Popular walking tour group Like It Formosa will take people back in time, visiting sites such as Bopoliao (剝皮寮), Nishi Honganji Temple (西本願寺), Yongle Market (永樂市場) and the Railway Department Park (鐵道部園區).
Photo courtesy of Bubble Pop Lindy Exchange
The main event of each night is the dance party at the Red House Theater, which will rage on until 1:30am. Keep note of the dress codes for each day.
■ Most events are free at the Red House Theater’s north plaza, 174, Zhonghua Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市中華路一段174號). The dance party is on the second floor of the building, admission is NT$1,400 per night and NT$4,500 for three nights
■ Today through Sunday, for full schedule visit www.bubblepop.tw
Photo courtesy of Bubble Pop Lindy Exchange
Photo courtesy of Bubble Pop Lindy Exchange
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence