The Divide

Do you know how many days Taiwan’s current energy reserves could last under a blockade? Which energy resources are the main source of our electricity? And how much imported energy accounts for Taiwan’s total consumption? These are the questions Stella Robertson, a journalist with The Domino Theory, is trying to answer. In this episode, Stella shares her findings about Taiwan's vulnerab...

Online harassment, sexualized insults, and AI-generated nudes... These are the realities faced by women human rights activists when they challenge authoritarian power. How do we stop this? And why do autocrats turn misogyny into a political weapon when confronted by women? In this episode, Marcus Michaelsen of the Citizen Lab explains the logic of digital transnational repression, why authoritaria...

Carmen Lau left her homeland, Hong Kong, in 2021 after her government decided that her pro-democracy activism was a crime under the national security law. Lau moved to the United Kingdom, where she continued to speak out against authoritarian rule over her beloved city. She has dealt with death threats, a bounty placed on her head, and all kinds of harassment one can imagine from a dictatorship&rs...

At 4 a.m. local time on Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced on his social media platform, Truth Social, that his administration had “carried out a large-scale strike” against Venezuela. Trump said the U.S. military had also captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and flown the couple out of the country. What does this mean for the millions of Venezuelans who f...

As we wrap up 2025, we are taking a moment to return to the conversations that challenged us, informed us, and reframed how we think about power, accountability, and the people caught in between.  Throughout this year, The Divide has sat down with voices who lived these tensions every day, from Mark Clifford's reflection on press freedom and the cost of speaking out to Chien Chi-sheng's accou...

On December 15, 2025, a three-judge national security panel in Hong Kong found pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai guilty of conspiring to publish seditious materials and colluding with foreign forces. Police arrested Lai in August 2020 and shut down his newspaper the following year. In the verdict, one name is mentioned 160 times and vaguely accused of being the “foreign f...

On November 26, Taiwan President Lai Ching-te convened a high-level meeting outlining two major pillars for safeguarding Taiwan: a comprehensive democratic defense and the development of full-spectrum military capabilities. As part of the initiative, many families in Taiwan have received a little orange book in their mailboxes. The book, titled " In Case of Crisis: Taiwan Public Safety Guide," off...

She only wanted one thing: an apology. Instead, she lost her career in football. In this episode of The Divide, whistleblower Chien Chi-sheng speaks out about the forced human experiments at National Taiwan Normal University—how years of coerced blood draws, institutional denial, and public scrutiny still haunt her today.

“I was shouting and asking for help, but no one helped me,” said one of the victims-turned-whistleblowers of the forced human experiments at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), Chien Chi-sheng. Chien was a student-athlete on the university’s women’s football team, whose coach and professor coerced players into giving blood for seven years. It wasn’t until last N...

The diplomatic relationship between Belize and Taiwan has grown stronger over the past 36 years, grounded in shared values and mutual respect. In this episode, H.E. Katherine Vanessa Meighan, Belize’s new ambassador to Taiwan, reflects on what makes this partnership so unique. She also shares her personal journey, from student to diplomat, and explains why expanding trade, advancing gender e...

“Bubble tea,” or “hand-shaken tea,” has become a daily essential for many Taiwanese people over the past decade. It starts with one key ingredient: tea. According to the Agriculture Ministry, Taiwan’s tea drink industry is experiencing a new trend of “returning to locally sourced ingredients,” with producers and consumers demanding domestically grown tea l...

Every year, the National Taiwan Normal University's female football team prepared themselves for a two-week intensive summer training course. They sprinted and practiced from dawn to dusk. The players, all student athletes, expected the training to be hard, challenging, perhaps pushing them to their physical limits. What they didn’t expect was blood drawing. Daily. For at least two weeks. In...

Across Taiwan, reports of abuse in “sports class” programs are mounting. Many student athletes come from marginalized or low-income communities with limited academic support, and see sports as a pathway to scholarships, housing, social mobility, and sometimes the only viable future. But instead of support, they have been subjected to violent physical punishment, psychological coercion,...

Last week, we spoke with Frances Hui, policy and advocacy coordinator at the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, about the Foundation’s investigative report “We Were Made to Suffer: Systemic Abuse and Political Control Inside Hong Kong’s Prisons.” The report documents how Hong Kong’s prisons have become instruments of political repression, where political p...

According to the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation (CFHK), an organization founded in 2022 to advocate for Hong Kong and its people following China’s national security crackdown, more than 1,900 people have been imprisoned on political charges in Hong Kong since 2019 — many without trial. Nearly 800 of them remain behind bars for their pro-democracy activism.  In this...

In today's information-saturated world, truth is harder than ever to define. With viral falsehoods and AI-generated "slop" spreading faster than facts, how can we know what, or who, to trust? In this episode, Chris Morris, the BBC’s first on-air fact checker and now CEO of Full Fact, talks about how fact-checking became a frontline defense for democracy, and why transparency and accountabili...

In March this year, the Trump administration issued an executive order dismantling the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the federal body that oversaw outlets like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. The move reflects a troubling global trend: governments slashing funds for public media, leaving critical news organizations weaker just as authoritarian states pour billions into their own internationa...

When most of our news now comes through social media feeds, integrity often takes a back seat. Behind many of these headlines lie undisclosed interests and algorithms that decide what we see, as well as what we don’t. So how do we know if the information we consume is accurate, balanced, and truly in the public’s interest? In this episode, Harry Lock, Head of Content and Engagement at...

For more than a quarter of a century, the case of Pinar Selek has haunted Turkey’s courts and human rights defenders around the world. A feminist, sociologist, and outspoken anti-militarist, Selek has faced repeated prosecutions and life-threatening charges despite the absence of evidence, ultimately forcing her into exile. Her story is not an anomaly. Around the world, countless scholars ha...

France’s higher education sector is undergoing major growth and transformation. Today, more than 2.9 million students are enrolled across 72 universities, over 200 engineering schools, 220 business and management schools, and dozens of specialist art and architecture institutions. The number of students has doubled since 1980, reflecting both the demand and the ambition of France’s aca...

On July 26 and August 23, Taiwanese voters faced a stark choice: recall 32 opposition lawmakers—or keep them. Voters chose to keep them, dealing a surprise blow to recall organizers and resetting the island’s political calculus for the next three years. What do these results say about Taiwan’s democracy, its security debates, and the risks of turning recalls into a partisan weapo...

12 years ago, Jewher Ilham, the daughter of prominent imprisoned Uyghur economist Ilham Tohti, watched her father taken away by Chinese authorities at Beijing International Airport. At her father’s insistence, she boarded a plane bound for the United States. That was the last time she ever saw him. In the years since, Jewher has endured Beijing’s psychological manipulation, repeatedly...

On January 15, 2014, Beijing police arrested Ilham Tohti at his home and shut down Uighurbiz.org, the Uyghur language website he had created. He was held in pre-trial detention for eight months before being sentenced to life in prison. The website, also known as Uyghur Online, was published in Chinese and Uyghur. It focused on social issues and on building understanding between Han Chinese and Uyg...

16 years ago, in Shaoguan City of the Southern Guangdong province, a Uyghur man was wrongfully accused of raping a Han Chinese woman at a factory. The accusation ignited a brawl between Han Chinese and Uyghur factory workers, leading to the death of two Uyghur men. Their deaths were ignored by police in Shaoguan City, almost as if the Uyghur lives were expendable in the eyes of Chinese authorities...

In 2016, there were only five international hotels in the Uyghur Xinjiang Autonomous Region. Today, that number has increased tenfold -- and continues to grow. Accor, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, Marriott, Minor Hotels, and Wyndham are all opening and operating in the region, where the United States, the United Kingdom’s Parliament, and the European Parliament have stated that genocide is being commi...