Learning Taiwan’s Concepts of Social Justice: My Fulbright Journey at National Chengchi University
It was a colder night than usual in Kaohsiung. For me, it was mildly warm, but the locals all had to wear coats because they are used to scorching hot weather. We were sitting in a tightly packed living room with a mini projector discussing a strategy to get Taiwan’s legislators to promote basic income. I was nervous because I was organizing my first ever large-scale conference based on basic income research in the Asia Pacific, and the date was quickly approaching. This was my first glimpse at the enthusiasm among Taiwan’s activists toward the idea of basic income, even though the idea was not well known in early 2017. Although the meetings did not produce much in terms of feasible strategy, it did calm my nerves that there may be potential for enough support in Taiwan to create a sustainable organization for basic income. Fast forward to 2020 and I have been re-elected to my second term as chairman of the UBI Taiwan NGO, which researches and promotes discussion of Unconditional Basic Income (UBI). We legally founded the NGO in 2018, although we had been actively holding conferences and writing white paper policy proposals well before then. In the
