Taiwanese commentary
"Is there no intelligent analysis in the Chinese-language media at all" asked Michael Turton in his blog The View from Taiwan today.
I tend to think the answer is in the negative. I've been translating opinion articles for Taipei Times for the past four years, and only on occassion will you find a thought-through article that offers some incisive analysis, or even makes sense.
One of the more recent I remember was a professor in biomedicine who offered his analysis of the current political situation, and he came to the conclusion that the democratic understanding of the Taiwanese people is too low, something that led them to make the wrong choice in the last couple of elections. Now, if I wrote an article on biomedicine, I'm sure he would discard it as nonsense, and rightly so. He, however, still felt qualified to comment on something far outside his own field of expertise. Of course he came to a naive conclusion.
The problem as I see it is that being an intellectual here in Taiwan -- which means no more than having a PhD of some kind, any kind -- is enough for your opinion to matter (i actually think it goes further back in chinese history, but this will do for the shorter perspective). The fact that you are an intellectual means that you by definition know what you're talking about, and therefore do not have to provide such trivial things as facts and references. Your job is to educate the people who don't know better.
That in itself, I think, is a vestige of the (not so far) past authoritarian dictatorship, when no one had the chance, or rather dared, to try to find out the facts because that would just land you in jail. Instead, you just believed what you were told or ignored it all together and went on doing your own thing.
One has to remember that it's not too long ago that people were thrown in jail for their political opinions or fell off university buildings in the dead of night, with no witnesses, and that seems to still wield an influence over how people think and approach these matters.
In short, one has to look long and hard to find thoughtful, well-written commentary in Chinese-language media in Taiwan.