In December 2003 during his meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at the White House, then U.S. President George Bush said that the United States opposed “any unilateral decision by either China or Taiwan to change the status quo.” Nearly two decades later, that message hasn’t changed. At the end of last month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is reported to have made it “crystal clear” in his talks with Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi that the United States opposes any unilateral change to the status quo.

Is this evidence of a consistent, clear American position on the cross-Strait question? Or is it the expression of a weak policy formula, in which status quo simply means no war?

How the Status Quo Has Changed

One way to approach the question might be to simply ask: Was the status quo in the Taiwan Strait in 2003 when then Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian’s actions were the object of Bush’s comments, the same as the status quo today? The answer is obviously no. But if that is the case, then what is the meaning of “status quo?”

Status quo simply means the existing situation — it is a concept without content. One way of giving it content would be to devise a continuum that ranges from “stable status quo” on one end, where all involved parties accept and support the current situation, to a “conflictual status quo,” where all parties reject the existing situation and are in conflict.

To go one step further with this analogy, I would argue that in the years since 2003, the indicator of status quo has moved in a direction away from the “stable pole” toward the “conflictual pole.”

In 2003, the status quo in the Taiwan Strait was one of mutual frustration. Neither Taiwan nor China could achieve its desired outcome. The United States was stuck in the middle of a continuing manifestation of the Chinese civil war. However, a shared desire to avoid an armed conflict generated implicit and explicit rules of behavior that allowed everyone’s frustration to be managed.

U.S.-China Negotiations on Taiwan Have Become More Dangerous

In the years since 2003, things have changed. Under President Xi Jinping, China has adopted a more assertive external policy, while the United States under the Trump administration adopted an increasingly confrontational approach toward China. Meanwhile, both nations have wielded their respective policies toward Taiwan as an instrument to express opposition toward the other. Taiwan, at the same time, took a less passive position in the triangle, seeking to take advantage of Sino-American differences. A status quo of mutual antagonism has emerged since the rules that made earlier management possible have been undermined.

Recently there has been much attention on Chinese actions in the so-called gray zone — competitive moves that sit in the fuzzy space between war and peace, such as the People’s Liberation Army’s flight incursions over Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. However, allow me to suggest a different zone — the red zone. In American football, the red zone designates the last 20 yards on a 100-yard field before crossing into the end zone. It seems to me that the danger today is that all three actors are pursuing policies that challenge the rules that made possible the previous management of a status quo of mutual frustration. Their actions in the red zone are moving the needle toward a conflictual end of the status quo spectrum.

How to Better Manage the Crisis

Our colleague, the late Alan Romberg, wrote a book entitled “Rein In at the Brink of the Precipice” that warned of the dangers that could result from mismanagement of the cross-Strait question. We should heed his warning today. There is nothing inevitable about war in the Taiwan Strait. The crisis today is caused by the mismanagement of a difficult issue. The present status quo is not something any party should seek to sustain. Indeed, the formulaic repetition of the importance of upholding that status quo is not only dangerous but exposes the poverty of diplomatic efforts in the area.

What can be done? To be sure, given the events of the recent past, it will not be easy to move the needle back in the direction of a less conflictual status quo. The challenges are greater than in the past. Domestic factors — Chinese nationalism, anti-China sentiment in the United States, and growing Taiwan identity — all limit diplomatic flexibility. However, on the most fundamental level, a significant start would be if the Taiwan issue would cease being a surrogate in a Sino-American conflict, as was the case during the 1950s, and be treated by all sides as a complex and dangerous historical legacy that needs careful and skillful diplomatic management.

      

As tensions rise over the Taiwan Strait, the urgent sense of threat is increasing in Japan. So is the realization that trilateral cooperation with the United States and Taiwan is needed.

Preventing and coping with the military crisis across the Taiwan Strait has been regarded as one of the main raisons d’être of the Japan-U.S. alliance for decades, along with the defense of Japan and the Korean Peninsula. North Korea has long been Japan’s number one threat, but now China has replaced it. In a recent public opinion poll in Japan, 80% of respondents answered that they felt threatened by China. Those polled were not even asked if they felt threatened by North Korea.

Why Japan is worried

The reason why the threat from China is getting increased attention in Japan is not just China’s tenaciously aggressive activities around the Senkaku Islands. It’s also the emerging perception that Taiwan’s problem is also Japan’s problem. If Taiwan were to be attacked, Japan would inevitably be attacked as well, mainly because Japan hosts the U.S. Armed Forces at several major bases and facilities throughout the country, including the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Taiwan and Japan are situationally in the same operational theater when it comes to facing potential aggression from China.

This kind of view gained further traction when then Japan Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and U.S. President Joseph Biden put out a joint statement after their first meeting in April that said, “We underscore the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.” Another poll conducted soon after this meeting showed that 74% of the Japanese public — an overwhelming majority — supported this commitment.

How Japan has supported Taiwan

This strong support, along with the Japanese public’s perception of the threat from China, has given rise to a sentiment of “resist China and assist Taiwan.” When China imposed sanctions on the import of pineapples from Taiwan, Japanese consumers responded by voluntarily purchasing Taiwanese pineapples. When Taiwan was struggling to secure COVID-19 vaccines, partly because China allegedly blocked their import, the government of Japan quickly and repeatedly donated some of its inventory to Taiwan. When Taiwan decided to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade framework, Japan immediately expressed support.

These examples are clear manifestations of the consensus view that Japan should support Taiwan in the face of mounting pressures and intensifying intimidation from China. Behind such consensus is, of course, a realization that supporting Taiwan is not just a demonstration of goodwill to a democratic neighbor but also necessary to protect Japan’s interests from China, whose strategic intentions raise fundamental doubts and fears among the Japanese population.

However, beyond support for pineapples, vaccines, and CPTPP, if Japan wants to substantiate its commitment to the “peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait” at the policy level, it has no choice but to turn to the Japan-U.S.-Taiwan trilateral framework with the United States at its center.

Why Japan needs to cooperate with the United States on Taiwan

The need for this trilateral framework stems from Japan’s limits to having only “working relations on a non-governmental basis” with Taiwan, a consequence of switching its diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing five decades ago, when the expectation for the relationship with China was much more optimistic. Under this self-imposed restriction, there is no way for Japan to conduct direct and meaningful policy coordination with Taiwan, much less to work together militarily to deter or repel an invasion by China. Japan does not even have an active-duty defense attaché in Taipei. In the Ministry of Defense in Tokyo there is no section or even a single official who is formally tasked with managing the relationship with Taiwan. The official communication channel is close to nonexistent.

The only way to overcome this systemic challenge and to coordinate effectively with Taiwan is to go through the United States, which has a much deeper wide-ranging relationship with Taipei based on the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA). The law stipulates that it is the policy of the United States to assist Taiwan to defend itself. For example, it was recently reported that the United States sent a special operations unit and a contingent of Marines to Taiwan to train Taiwanese military forces.

Japan’s intention to institutionalize the trilateral relationship is clear. It was demonstrated when Japan joined the Global Cooperation and Training Framework (GCTF), which was originally launched by the United States and Taiwan. The Japan-Taiwan Exchange Association, which is the unofficial representative of the Japanese government in Taiwan, has co-hosted all GCTF workshops since 2019. This has created a trilateral framework, even though it is non-governmental and non-military.

Japan has a legal and policy framework to respond to military confrontations that involve foreign countries other than the United States, when such situations pose serious threats to Japan’s security. In reality, however, it is hard for Japan to conduct such military operations alone.

This institutionalization of the Japan-U.S.-Taiwan relationship is by no means an easy task. The fundamental challenge is to have a unified view on strategic objectives and the best way to achieve them. This seems simple and self-evident, but it is not necessarily so.

The difficulty of finding a consensus on Taiwan

The long-held U.S. approach to Taiwan issues is to commit to helping Taiwan with its self-defense capability, as is stipulated in the TRA. The Trump administration broke away from this policy when it declassified the “U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific” a week before handing over power to the Biden administration. It said, “Devise and implement a defense strategy capable of defending the first-island-chain nations, including Taiwan.” This could be understood as meaning that the United States itself would take direct military action to defend Taiwan, instead of just helping Taiwan to defend itself. Biden seemed to imply that his administration has a similar approach on a couple of recent occasions, most recently during a CNN town hall on October 21. Asked if the United States would come to the defense of Taiwan, he said, “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.” But the White House immediately clarified his statement to say that the president did not announce any change in the U.S. policy and that “we will continue to support Taiwan’s self-defense.” This rather suggests that the official policy of the United States stays with the TRA, and the United States maintains its so-called strategy of ambiguity.

Japan’s position is more conservative. It does not go beyond the commitment that Japanese Prime Minister Suga made in the joint statement with Biden, which is to “underscore the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and encourage the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues.” A prominent Taiwan scholar in Japan emphasized that this is not a pledge that Japan would defend Taiwan. Of course, it made big news when then Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso stated a couple of months after the Suga-Biden summit that Japan “would have to defend Taiwan” with the United States if the island is invaded by mainland China, but his statement was never endorsed by the Japanese government.

For now, neither Japan nor the United States clearly pledges that it would directly intervene in a military conflict to defend Taiwan.

Taiwan’s changing defense strategy

The other potential problem is the defense strategy of Taiwan itself.

Taiwan’s defense strategy is now going through a rather confusing transition. The Overall Defense Concept (ODC), which was launched in 2017 and was described as a “revolutionary new approach to Taiwan’s defense” by a former senior U.S. Department of Defense official, suddenly disappeared from the 2021 Quadrennial Defense Review of Taiwan, which was released in March this year.

It once looked as if Taiwan was fundamentally restructuring and updating its defense strategy under the ODC by employing an asymmetrical approach to overcome its decisive resource gap with China. The essence of Taiwan’s asymmetric capabilities is to equip the military forces with “a large number of small things,” such as sea mines and anti-ship cruise missiles instead of advanced fighter jets and heavy tanks. This basic direction may not change, but now it is hard to predict where the transition will eventually end up. A fierce battle over strategic thinking within Taipei’s national security policy circle is reported in the Taiwanese media.

The question is whether Taiwan can come up with a new systemic defense strategy based upon this asymmetric approach. The jury is still out.

Uncertainty over this strategic transition in Taiwan makes it more challenging for Japan and the United States to conduct meaningful strategic coordination with Taiwan and to eventually establish a workable, efficient trilateral framework. If Japan and the United States do not know how Taiwan will fight, they cannot help Taiwan.

More coordination is also needed in other less politically charged domains, such as humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and cybersecurity. Japan should probably aim to set up cooperation in these areas as a first step to improve trilateral cooperation.

      

Taiwan got a burst of attention earlier this year when The Economist labeled the island “the most dangerous place on earth.” Many Taiwan residents rolled their eyes at that characterization, but it struck a chord with readers accustomed to hearing Taiwan referred to as a “flashpoint” and the place “most likely to spark a war between the U.S. and China.”

The idea that Taiwan is on the verge of a military conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is widespread. In March, Admiral Phil Davidson, the outgoing commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) forces, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the PRC was likely to attack Taiwan within six years. The reason for Taiwan’s perilous condition is typically put down to two factors. First, the PRC government’s determination to unify — or annex, if you prefer — Taiwan and merge it into the PRC, and second, the Taiwanese people’s unwillingness to be unified — or annexed.

A recent survey shows that Americans are clearly worried about the threat to Taiwan. Yet strategic discussions on the potential for conflict leave out crucial voices in the matter: do people on Taiwan share those concerns about imminent military conflict?

Many U.S. officials tend to think that Taiwan residents are too nonchalant about this looming threat. Common wisdom often has two connected explanations. The first is that after 70 years, the military threat is so routine that most Taiwanese people no longer notice or react to it. The second explanation is that Taiwanese people believe an attack would be irrational, and is thus unlikely.

But common wisdom aside, how do people on Taiwan actually see the PRC’s military intimidation tactics? Do they believe military conflict is a possibility? How do their views align with American officials’ conventional wisdom?

In May 2021, we surveyed 1000 Taiwanese residents and found that, contrary to popular belief, the Taiwanese are not only far more cognizant of military activity than we might think, but their concerns about potential conflict are also stronger than we typically perceive.

Taiwanese are not immune to threats of war

While it is true that Taiwanese people live their lives largely unhindered by the looming threat of war, they are by no means unaware of that threat. In our study, 57.6% of respondents said they worry that war is a distinct possibility. When broken down by party identification, we found both a majority of DPP and KMT respondents are concerned about a possibility of war. KMT respondents however are more worried about war than DPP respondents, but both parties’ respondents share the concern, showing that that fear of military conflict spans Taiwan’s political aisle despite a typically high degree of partisanship.

The fear of conflict is not only limited to older Taiwanese people who remember when the two sides of the Strait had no direct contact and even considered themselves at war. Breaking the responses down by age, we find a striking consistency in responses across age groups. While respondents above 50 are slightly more worried about the possibility of war, younger generations all maintain about the same level of worry. This finding pushes back against portrayals of Taiwanese youth as naive or less aware of Taiwan’s political realities.

Rising military pressure, rising concern – but no sign of panic

We also asked whether respondents felt military threats from China had increased in the previous six months. Instances of military intimidation — intrusions into Taiwan’s airspace, military exercises in the Taiwan area — had in fact increased in that period, but we were curious to know whether Taiwanese people noticed or felt their increased numbers. They did.

An overwhelming majority – 79% – of our respondents recognized that the frequency of Chinese military actions aimed at Taiwan had increased in the previous six months. This finding indicates that Taiwanese people can feel a difference in the relative level of peace within the Taiwan Strait from before the escalation began to today. Although there is not often a large reaction from civil society when the PRC flies warplanes through Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), these occurrences are certainly being noticed by Taiwan’s domestic audience.

Noticing that the PRC has stepped up its military pressure has not made most Taiwanese people fearful that an attack is imminent. When asked whether they are more worried than they were six months ago, only 30% of respondents said yes. Asked whether they think Xi Jinping is more likely or less likely to attack Taiwan than he was five years ago, 46% of respondents said he is more likely, while 45% said the probability hasn’t changed.

These results show that Taiwan residents are aware of, but do not necessarily worry about immediate military conflict with the PRC. They also are far more aware of increased military pressure from the PLA than many U.S. policymakers seem to realize. Not all Taiwanese people, however, internalize these threats as dire. They are worried, but the majority do not think it’s time to panic.

As the PRC has ramped up the pressure on Taiwan in recent years through both its rhetoric and in its military activity, Tsai Ing-wen’s government has responded by seeking to upgrade Taiwan’s military capabilities and to garner more civil society support for the armed forces.

Our results offer a mixed review. Despite President Tsai’s efforts, Taiwanese people do not see the island’s defense capabilities improving. When asked how they feel about their government’s own ability to defend Taiwan in light of Beijing’s increased intimidation, respondents are pessimistic. Barely a quarter – 25.8% – see Taiwan’s defensive capacity improving, while 35% believe Taiwan is less able to defend itself than before, and 40% say there is no change in Taiwan’s defense capabilities. Clearly, further efforts are needed to persuade Taiwan residents that their military is fully capable of protecting them.

Downplaying the U.S. factor

Previous studies have found that a key factor in whether Taiwanese people believe they can be successfully defended is whether they think the U.S. will step in to help. Media and expert reports drawing parallels between Afghanistan and Taiwan have resurfaced the debate over whether the U.S. can and will come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of military conflict.

President Tsai has tackled that question head on. Instead of encouraging her people to count on an outside protector, she is emphasizing that Taiwanese people must be able to protect themselves. To do so, she advocates allocating more resources to defense and also encouraging the military to demonstrate to Taiwan residents that it is capable of defending them.

“It is not an option for Taiwan to not take any actions on its own and merely rely on others to protect us,” Tsai wrote in an August 18 Facebook post. She added, “Taiwan’s only option is to make itself stronger, more united and more determined to defend itself.”

Taiwanese people recognize the PRC as a threat. But they do not have high confidence in their own armed forces. Still, their pessimism is not preventing them from, for example, investing billions in new semiconductor manufacturing capacity. For Americans who see Taiwan through the lens of strategic conflict, this is hard to understand. Why aren’t Taiwanese people as worried about their security as we are?

Our research suggests that while conflict in the Taiwan Strait is possible, few Taiwanese people believe it is imminent or inevitable. Nonetheless, it is on the minds of both the Taiwanese government and the Taiwanese people. The silver lining for the Tsai government is that concern about military threat is shared across party lines and age groups. It is rare that civil society converges across these demographics. That finding is a positive sign that there could be political support for strengthening military preparedness. Persuading Taiwan residents to support the military, however, remains an important challenge for the Tsai administration and its successors.

In sum, Taiwan residents may not react as strongly as Americans to Beijing’s escalating intimidation, but that is not because they are unaware of it. While Taiwanese people may not be panicking, they are far more aware of their geopolitical surroundings than American observers appreciate. The stereotype of the Taiwanese people blithely ignoring an existential threat is simply not accurate.

      

Lev Nachman recently returned to the United States after living in Taipei for more than two years, where he was a Fulbright scholar and studied social movements and political parties in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Nachman who also previously lived in Taiwan, is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. In a conversation with Brookings Senior Fellow and Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies Ryan Hass, Nachman provides insights on the relationship between Taiwanese identity and support for Taiwan independence, factors that motivate Taiwan voters, and prospects for Taiwan’s 2024 presidential election.

RYAN HASS:
You have studied Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement and Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement. What do the results of these two social movements tell us about the political direction of developments in Hong Kong and Taiwan? And how — if at all — do you see developments in Hong Kong influencing political trends in Taiwan going forward?

LEV NACHMAN:
In 2014, both the Sunflower and Umbrella movements mobilized over fears of systemic changes that would give the PRC [People’s Republic of China] dangerous amounts of agency over their political systems. Both had lasting impacts on each other’s political systems. Both were important antecedents to Hong Kong’s 2019 anti-extradition protests. The most obvious impact Hong Kong activism had on Taiwan recently was during Taiwan’s 2020 presidential election. [President] Tsai Ing-wen made the Hong Kong protests a central frame of reference for her reelection campaign, and every political party (even the KMT [Kuomintang]) at least offered rhetorical support for the Hong Kong protesters.

With the introduction of Hong Kong’s National Security Law, Hong Kongers look to Taiwan as their ideal choice for a new home, which has created a new domestic political issue in Taiwan about how to address the large number of Hong Kongers looking to permanently emigrate to Taiwan. Ultimately, Hong Kong is a “canary in the coal mine” for Taiwanese people. The worse Hong Kong’s system becomes, the more it will push Taiwanese from the PRC.

RYAN HASS:
Taiwan will hold a series of referenda this year. Why have referenda become such a popular governance mechanism in Taiwan? What social forces do you anticipate will influence the outcome of these referenda?

LEV NACHMAN:
Referendums and recalls have become a popular political tool in Taiwan, but not necessarily in the most productive way. It started in 2017 when Taiwan pushed changes to laws that were championed by “pan-green” parties, including both the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and New Power Party. Their goal was to create a mechanism that would allow for civil society to push politicians to pass more progressively pro-Taiwan policy. The act significantly lowered the necessary signatures needed to put an issue to vote via a referendum.

But ironically, those who have taken advantage of such rule changes have been largely opposition “pan-blue” forces such as the Kuomintang (KMT) Party, who use referendums to attack or disrupt the DPP’s agenda. The specifics of the referendums this year are particularly complicated and are fraught with the DPP and KMT switching stances. For example, ractopamine meat imports and building an energy pipeline on an algal reef are both opposed by the KMT and supported by the DPP. But 10 years ago, the DPP was against the same policies and the KMT was for them. The ractopamine vote is particularly fraught because allowing the import of ractopamine-treated pork was considered necessary for Taiwan to begin bilateral trade talks with the United States, so if it passes, it will be a bad look for future trade talks.

RYAN HASS:
What does public opinion survey data actually tell us about Taiwan’s preferences on managing cross-Strait relations and on evolving views of Taiwanese identity?

LEV NACHMAN:
There is reliable polling data that demonstrate the number of Taiwanese identifying as exclusively Taiwanese, not Chinese, is rising, while the number of people identifying as exclusively Chinese, not Taiwanese, remains at a negligible number. But this does not translate into the number of Taiwanese voters supporting immediate independence increasing at the same rate.

One longitudinal study at National Chengchi University shows that the vast majority of Taiwanese support some version of the status quo, not immediate independence. “Status quo” like independence or unification is of course a spectrum — for example, one can be status quo and independence later, or status quo and unification later. This at the very least tells us that Taiwanese voters are far more pragmatic than we typically assume in light of an increasing number of “Taiwanese only” identifiers. Taiwanese live in a context in which any immediate independence path will likely lead to deadly conflict with the PRC, so it is unlikely that a push for formal independence will happen any time soon — precisely because Taiwanese voters value living in a conflict-free status quo.

RYAN HASS:
Looking ahead to presidential elections in 2024, what issues do you predict will drive the political debate? Do you have any expectations of which politicians might be best positioned to speak to the moment?

LEV NACHMAN:
We know from extensive political science research that the dominant political factor in every Taiwanese election is the China factor. All other issues are secondary or filtered through the China factor lens. It’s no secret the two front runners in the DPP are current Vice President William Lai and Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan. From the KMT, Hou You-yi is in a strong position as the New Taipei mayor, but given the KMT’s current internal strife over its next party chair, we are still a year off of knowing who their real frontrunner will be. We also have the unknown variables of Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je and businessman Terry Gou, who may run again in 2024.

RYAN HASS:
Richard Bush and Maggie Lewis have each written and spoken of the need for Taiwan to nurture and strengthen its vitality, including by forging political consensus to address internal challenges like job creation, energy, etc. How optimistic are you that Taiwan’s leaders will be able to overcome partisan divisions to address these internal challenges?

LEV NACHMAN:
This remains the biggest challenge for a contested state like Taiwan whose political spectrum is defined by its relationship with China — how to mobilize voters and politicians to take action on critical political issues that may not win them votes or matter during election times. It is difficult to convince the KMT and DPP to work together (as it is with most two-party dominant political systems) but increasingly so on contemporary social issues that have little to do with the PRC.

One recent example is the treatment of Southeast Asian migrant workers during the COVID-19 spike, who were banned from leaving their factory dorms. Some DPP politicians spoke out against such treatment, but ultimately little was done to fix any of the repressive rules governing Southeast Asian migrant workers. There is little incentive to do so — only politicians who recognize the moral obligation to improve the livelihoods of Taiwan’s growing workforce will push for policy changes.

Until China becomes less important for Taiwan’s domestic politics, which unfortunately will not happen any time soon, I struggle to see voters calling for major social reform on these kinds of issues.

This does not mean Taiwanese do not care about social reform. But, when it comes to national elections, voters vote on China, not domestic performance.

      

The Taipei hospital across the street from our apartment has seen a jolt of activity with increased COVID-19 testing and now vaccinations. In contrast, much of Taiwan’s capital has been in a soft-lockdown lull since its most severe outbreak — peaking at a 7-day average of 600 new cases a day — flared up in mid-May.

The vibrancy of Taiwan’s oft-termed “vibrant democracy” may have been temporarily muted, but it will be back: cases are falling, testing capacity is expanding, and vaccinations are increasing. What the outbreak has highlighted are challenges to Taiwan’s vitality.

In “The Vitality of Taiwan” — a 2012 edited volume featuring an all-star line-up in the field of Taiwan studies — Steve Tsang wrote, “Much as the people of Taiwan have every reason to be proud of their democracy and economic achievements, what really marks Taiwan out is the sheer vibrancy and vitality of the place and its people.”

These sources of pride remain true in 2021, but there are growing reminders that short-term vibrancy (pulsating with life, vigor, or activity) is easier to achieve than long-term vitality (the capacity to live and develop, the power of enduring). More than a month into Taiwan’s most stringent COVID-19 containment measures, many preexisting challenges are coming to the fore.

Most glaringly, rather than generating a constructive, fact-based debate about the policies of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the outbreak has fueled political polarization. That the two municipalities at the center of the outbreak — Taipei and New Taipei City — have independent and Kuomintang (KMT) mayors, respectively, was bound to create tensions with the Tsai administration. Tension is a sign of healthy debate, but quarreling among some members of the pan-blue (KMT-led) and pan-green (DPP-led) camps undermines Taiwan’s ability to tame the pandemic.

Fierce critics of President Tsai Ing-wen have even called her administration a “vaccine beggar” and amplified existing problems with prevalent misinformation and disinformation. Worryingly, some media reports have intimated that the AstraZeneca vaccine caused deaths without delving into the normal death rates for certain ages, especially for people with preexisting conditions.

Misinformation and disinformation also won’t dissipate as the outbreak is controlled. If anything, past elections forebode that the run up to next year’s midterm elections for local positions could see an uptick in efforts by domestic and foreign sources to undermine Taiwan’s democratic process.

The outbreak has further darkened trends already clouding Taiwan’s demographic future. At 1.07 births per woman, Taiwan ranked last globally in the most recent CIA World Factbook ranking of fertility rates. The Tsai administration announced plans in April to boost spending for raising children and, after schools closed in mid-May, a one-time NTD10,000 ($357) per-child subsidy focused on primary school and younger kids. There remains, however, a lack of robust discussion about supporting parents who are juggling work and remote learning or plans to reopen schools when the new term starts in late summer.

These pandemic-parenting burdens are indicative of a veneer of child friendliness without the necessary social infrastructure to make having children an attractive or even viable choice. I would have cried with joy if, when my kids were babies, the New York City subway had private nursing spaces like the Taipei Mass Rapid Transport (MRT) does. Such efforts are helpful but do not address deeper issues: a shortage of affordable, non-family-centric childcare options plus burdens of traditional views of a mother’s role.

Moreover, Taiwan has failed to embrace and assist all people who desire to be parents. Despite the well-deserved praise for legalizing same-sex marriage, Taiwan has stalled when it comes to expanding options for family building by LGBT couples and single women. The Tsai administration has failed to push for adoption-friendly policies and expanded access to assisted reproductive technologies.

Immigration is, of course, an obvious means to adjust the shape of Taiwan’s increasingly inverted population pyramid. But the harsh lockdowns in crowded dormitories of mostly Southeast Asian workers at some technology manufacturing companies have underscored the discrimination that has long been present in Taiwan against peoples of certain nationalities, especially when coupled with low socioeconomic status. The temporary stay granted to these workers, as well as those who work in elder care and other critical jobs, is rarely a permanent welcome.

On the higher-wealth end of the spectrum, AmCham Taiwan has emphasized the need to internationalize Taiwan’s startup ecosystem. Last year, a rush of foreigners who obtained residency status through the “gold card” program and returning overseas Taiwanese brought hope for a shot of adrenaline to achieving this goal. In 2020, approximately 270,000 more Taiwanese entered Taiwan than left.

It is too early to know the extent to which the spike in U.S.-bound air travel indicates short-term vaccine tourism versus more permanent departures, but there is an atmosphere of a missed opportunity to deepen diasporic ties.

In addition, drought and rolling blackouts alongside the outbreak have reminded that climate change and energy security are growing concerns. Given TSMC’s dominant role in Taiwan’s economy, that semiconductor manufacturing requires substantial water and electricity makes these challenges even more acute.

Important for the energy question are August referenda on resuming construction of a nuclear power plant and building an liquefied natural gas terminal. An additional two referenda address the timing for voting on referenda and importation of U.S. pork containing the leanness-promoting additive ractopamine, an issue that has bedeviled U.S.-Taiwan relations for many years.

Midterm elections are still well over a year away, but the results of these referenda on which the DPP and KMT have opposite views will help set the stage by giving a direct read on voters’ views. The upcoming but outbreak-delayed KMT party chair election is also important in shaping who will lead the party into the next election season, with the 2024 presidential election in sight.

This list of concerns is not written as a recipe for despair but rather offered as hope that Taiwan is past its darkest period in the pandemic and will emerge with renewed determination. Addressing these issues requires domestic political resolve and a desire by the electorate to put collective prosperity over partisanship.

As an American, I am not part of that electorate, but I am heartened that stronger U.S.-Taiwan ties within the framework of the longstanding unofficial relationship are contributing to Taiwan’s health both figuratively and literally. I was working on this essay as 2.5 million doses of U.S.-government-donated Moderna vaccine arrived in Taiwan — one facet of what Daniel Kritenbrink, nominee for U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, described as efforts to strengthen ties “in every sector.”

The cultivation of the U.S.-Taiwan relationship in every sector requires a return to the pre-pandemic flow of people. A side benefit of Taiwan achieving a high vaccination rate should be a gradual move toward 2019 numbers of over 600,000 visitors from the United States. Concluding a comprehensive bilateral trade agreement, expanding Fulbright Taiwan, introducing the Taiwan Fellowship Program for U.S. federal government employees, encouraging U.S. universities to shift Mandarin language programs to Taiwan, and other efforts could push this number even higher.

The outbreak has also accentuated the importance of ties beyond the United States, including donations of AstraZeneca vaccine from Japan (1.2 million doses) and Lithuania (20,000 doses). Because, at base, vitality means “life.” And Taiwan will best thrive if it can tackle the many challenges it faces in an ecosystem of supportive interrelationships.

      

John Culver retired in 2020 after a distinguished 35-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency. During that time, he analyzed East Asian affairs, including security, economic, and foreign policy dimensions. As national intelligence officer for East Asia from 2015 to 2018, he drove the intelligence community’s support to top policymakers on East Asian issues. He routinely participated in meetings at the White House, with leaders throughout the United States government, and with foreign government officials. In a conversation with Brookings Senior Fellow and interim Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies Ryan Hass, the two discussed the risk of future conflict in the Taiwan Strait, how Taiwan is responding to rising pressure from China, and steps the United States could take to support Taiwan in consideration of its interests.

Ryan Hass: How do you see cross-Strait issues playing in China’s domestic politics? Is Taiwan policy a high priority or a source of debate? And do you expect the role of Taiwan in China’s politics to change as the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) draws nearer in fall 2022?

John Culver: One of my core assumptions is that things said by the CCP about Taiwan are generally not directed solely or principally at the Taiwan public, but instead at China’s own domestic population, or at the U.S. government and a few other foreign governments — principally Tokyo and Canberra. This reflects the fact that Taipei has not taken highly provocative or precipitous actions since 2008, when then-President Chen Shui-bian stirred controversy by advocating, through a public referendum, for Taipei to pursue U.N. membership under the name “Taiwan.”

In this vein, I don’t expect the role of Taiwan in China’s politics to change due solely — or even mostly — to the 20th Party Congress in 2022, unless provoked by Taiwan’s own election cycle, which would be gearing up for the January 2024 polls. Thinking back over the past 30 to 40 years, we’ve seen street demonstrations in China (officially the People’s Republic of China, or PRC) — some violent — over Japan and domestic local issues (land use, pollution, ethnic strife). Some have even been directed at the United States, after events like the 1999 accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade or the 2001 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy fighter collision with a U.S. EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft. But I don’t recall ever seeing a major protest in China over Taiwan policy, which to me says that the PRC public isn’t on tenterhooks over the issue and generally thinks that the CCP’s policies toward Taiwan are “tough enough” and correct. In other words, President Xi Jinping and the CCP are not facing much domestic pressure to do something, or at least to do something different. But galvanizing Chinese public opinion to justify harsher policies is a card Beijing could always play — we should keep in mind that it has not.

RH: Part of China’s strategy appears to be placing psychological stress upon the people of Taiwan, both to raise perceptions of the costs and risks of independence and also to seed the idea that unification ultimately is inevitable. Do you agree? If so, how (in)effective do you China’s efforts have been?

JC: Taiwan is an issue that the CCP sees as a threat to its legitimacy, not an opportunity to be seized. That has meant that CCP policy toward Taiwan is largely about what it wants to avoid, not what it wants to achieve — reactionary, not exploitative. But that is changing, especially since Xi in 2019 and more recently has framed “reunification” as a requirement for achieving the “China Dream” tied to the CCP’s longstanding goals for 2049, the 100th anniversary of the PRC’s founding. We should worry that Xi may decide to take risks that his more constrained predecessors since Mao Zedong would not.

I don’t think China today actually seeks to place severe psychological stress on Taiwan. Most of its actions are more formal and symbolic — like the current “pineapple boycott” — and are meant to stay ahead of Chinese domestic opinion, or warn against exploitation by the United States or another outside power. Beijing is rigorous about cataloging and protesting every “improper” action by the United States, Taiwan, or occasionally by third parties, to ensure that it is vocal in opposition to continued erosion. And yet, by most measures, the situation continues to erode. For Washington, dating back almost a decade now, there are diminishing incentives to “please Beijing” by not doing something with Taiwan — they’re going to protest anyway, even to modest arms sales, official visits, etc.

Some have interpreted President Xi’s 2017 19th Party Congress report as setting a deadline for reunification by 2049, when he stated that “complete national reunification is an inevitable requirement for realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

I approach the “deadline” interpretation with caution, since there’s a pattern of previous leaders setting somewhat vague deadlines or timelines in order to look tough about “solving” the problem while at the same time kicking the can down the road for the successors. In other words, “deadlines for unification” typically have been driven more by internal CCP leadership dynamics and legacy-making than ordering a firm set of multi-domain operations to commence to produce something the CCP can call “unification” by a certain date.

I don’t dismiss Xi’s 2049 framing for the party’s lofty ambitions that would include Taiwan. At some point in the not-too-distant future, perhaps 2030 or 2035, the PLA probably will have the organizational and warfighting capacity for a Taiwan operation that it has always lacked. China will probably be the largest economy, and an even more dominant trading and advanced manufacturing powerhouse. Weakness could no longer be an excuse for an increasingly nationalistic population that has only known China’s rise.

As I noted in an article last year about China’s “unfinished civil war,” the CCP’s ultimate objective isn’t invasion but instead a process between China and Taiwan authorities to negotiate the formal, long-term political relationship across the strait. Military, economic, information, and diplomatic coercion and inducements would all be in play, and the red line for threatened military force would shift from preventing permanent separation to a refusal by Taipei to begin the political process — there is language in the 2005 anti-secession law along these lines.

If 2049 is the CCP’s goal for beginning a formal unification process, China’s cross-strait policies would clearly break from the past sometime after 2030. China’s proposals initially could be fairly lenient, not dissimilar from the CCP’s 1979 letter to the Taiwan compatriots, but a key condition would be the end of a U.S.-Taiwan security framework without Beijing’s explicit approval.

Perhaps a longer-term U.S. goal, short of war, should be a strategy designed to change the CCP’s definition of “unification” to something like a commonwealth or confederation, or even one similar to the U.S.-Canada arrangement. But even that would be a fraught domestic political step for the United States. It would require a consensus here that “solving” the Taiwan issue should even be our goal. Like so many of our culture-war issues in the U.S., there are powerful interests that are deeply invested in not solving these problems.

RH: How do you expect Taiwan will respond to rising Chinese pressure in the next year?

JC: It’s become very common in the United States to frame Taiwan as the embattled, doughty democracy withstanding building pressure from the authoritarian mainland lusting to launch an invasion. We seem to yearn for a second cold war, because we think we know how to “fight” and win that scenario, so it’s tempting to cast Taiwan as another Hungary or Czechoslovakia.

In reality, and in the history of the past 40 years, Taiwan has emerged as a vibrant democracy, and polling indicates that most Taiwanese don’t feel very threatened — there’s little domestic pressure to massively increase military spending or return to lengthy universal conscription. Most Taiwan people aren’t worried about imminent attack, because 40 years since U.S. derecognition of the Republic of China (ROC) have passed without war, but also because some think that Taiwan could not prevail without massive U.S. military intervention so there’s little point in building up Taiwan’s own military. The Taiwan public also continues to mistrust its military as an institution because of the ROC military’s standing as a pro-Kuomintang (KMT) mainlander-dominated stronghold.

In reality, and in the history of the past 40 years, Taiwan has emerged as a vibrant democracy, and polling indicates that most Taiwanese don’t feel very threatened.

RH: There is growing talk in the United States about the rising risk of conflict in the Taiwan Strait. U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Commander Philip Davidson recently expressed concern publicly about the potential for conflict in the next six years. Where do you fall in this debate?

JC: I disagree with the tone and import of recent public pronouncements by Davidson or former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster that war is likely in a defined span of a few years. Intentionally or not, they convey that China has a fixed timeline and agenda for compelling Taiwan, whether based on some assumption that as soon as the PLA is “ready,” China will launch an invasion, or that the CCP will launch an opportunistic war to shore up domestic legitimacy. None of this is true in terms of China’s goals, its view of the usefulness of military force, or how the CCP’s legitimacy has been trending or is likely to trend over the decade.

I’m not predicting or forecasting that war won’t happen. I’m just saying that war isn’t “the plan” for the CCP. The real danger is that all of the factors that tended to preserve the status quo since U.S.-China diplomatic recognition in 1979 have eroded and are likely to continue to erode. These include the military balance — which has swung decisively in China’s favor — but in many ways that’s the least consequential change in and of itself because even now, China is not building the invasion fleet. The more destabilizing factors driving the dynamic are:

• Taiwan’s domestic political and identity development, where even the KMT is unlikely to sustain its prior position on the “1992 consensus.” To avoid political oblivion, the KMT continues to transition into a fully Taiwan-centric party that must appeal to domestic sentiment, which is turning even more strongly against any form of unification under any timeline.
• The emergence of full-blown U.S.-China strategic rivalry, which increases Taiwan’s attraction to both major U.S. political parties as a litmus test of “standing up to China.” There’s a myth that the main constraint against Taiwan independence has been the threat of Chinese military action. At least since the mid-1990s, the main constraint against more independence-focused policies and election outcomes on Taiwan has been pressure on Taipei by Washington — this is really clear from U.S. policies and actions over the course of the Chen Shui-bian and Ma Ying-jeou administrations. We are much more incentivized today and looking forward to “play the Taiwan card” due to our own bipartisan political dynamic than because of actions by even an explicitly pro-independence leader in Taipei (which President Tsai Ing-wen is not).
• China’s own emergence as a great power with clear military dominance over Taiwan and seeming parity versus the U.S. The CCP no longer has the excuse of not acting violently because it is “weak.” Chinese domestic public opinion has grown more nationalistic as its relative governance success compared to the United States throughout the trade war and the pandemic have played out.

RH: In the face of rising pressure from China on Taiwan, how should the United States most effectively signal support and reassurance to Taiwan in a manner that advances U.S. interests?

JC: Foremost, the United States should try to separate its growing appetite for great power competition with China as much as possible from Taiwan policy. For me this means not falling victim to the recent preoccupation with imminent conflict due to the designs of the CCP. Washington’s actions to enhance Taiwan’s freedom from Chinese coercion should be driven by substance, not symbolism. If the United States previously erred on the side of “pleasing China” by treating Taipei in ways that Taipei found insulting, it should resist the strong temptation to take actions primarily to antagonize and insult Beijing.

[Washington should] not falling victim to the recent preoccupation with imminent conflict due to the designs of the CCP.

U.S. policy for Taiwan should follow the Tsai administration’s example of basing its legitimacy on the vibrant quality of its democracy and economic freedom. There are an array of steps the United States can take with regard to Taiwan on trade, multinational democratic forums, health policy, and even security affairs that neither stretch Washington’s standard invocation of the Three Communiques, the Taiwan Relations Act, and other assurances nor risk abandonment.

And especially with regard to U.S. security policy toward Taiwan, cooperation with Taipei should focus on steps that make a use-of-force decision by Beijing a difficult one, fraught with risk, that relies less on big-ticket, budget-busting weapons purchases and more on public determination and capacity to resist military force. This should include U.S. advice and assistance to enhance the credibility of Taiwan’s military as a Taiwanese institution, not a legacy of the Chinese civil war that enforced martial law on the island until the late 1980s. Building public trust in the Taiwan military is essential to overcome lack of serious focus on the threat of military conflict and defeatism.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position or views of the U.S. government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.

Adrien Chorn provided editing assistance on this piece.

      

To many observers, both in Taiwan and elsewhere, Taiwan is a multi-faceted success story. Thirty years after democratization, Taiwan has shown that a Chinese democracy can govern effectively, and a high-income economy can continue to grow even as the world suffers from a severe pandemic.

Taiwan has managed the spread of COVID-19 far better than most: It suffered only seven deaths among its 23.5 million people in 2020. Except for a few short weeks of soft lockdown in March last year, life in Taiwan has been normal. Schools, offices, and restaurants have been open as usual, although with temperature screening, hand sanitizing, and social distancing. Live concerts by Yo-Yo Ma and performances of “Phantom of the Opera” have attracted thousands of people into indoor arenas. Taiwan’s ability to fight COVID-19 illustrates its excellent public health infrastructure and health policy expertise, supported by extensive data and digital technology. Taiwanese people have also demonstrated a high level of trust toward both their government and their fellow citizens, applying lessons learned fighting the SARS pandemic in 2003 to prevent the spread of this latest virus.

With COVID-19 effectively contained and economic activity uninterrupted, Taiwan’s economy grew over 3% last year — higher than its neighbors Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, which all declined 5% or more. Despite a weak global economy, Taiwan enjoyed record exports thanks to surging global demand for its technology components and products because of the need to work and study from home. Taiwan is home to the world’s leading semiconductor industry, feeding an insatiable market for the most advanced chips for automobiles, 5G, and smart devices. When other export-oriented countries suffered from the decoupling of U.S.-China relations, Taiwan’s economy actually benefited, with Taiwan’s technology companies emerging as global leaders in digitization. Taiwan’s GDP growth forecast for 2021 is the highest in seven years.

In short, Taiwan has become a poster child for economic resilience and good public health. But what has been a success story so far may be only a fine line away from calamity because of Taiwan’s overreliance on China and its relatively weak connections with the rest of the world.

Concentration on the technology sector and the Chinese market poses risks

China is, of course, a natural trade and investment partner for Taiwan, given its common language and culture, its proximity, and the attraction of its lower wages and large market. Nonetheless, dependence poses risks for all of China’s trade partners, as the U.S. trade war with China has shown and as China uses economic dependence for political leverage. It is therefore wise for Taiwan to diversify its commercial relationships.

Taiwan has episodically tried to do so, first under former Present Lee Teng-hui’s “Go South” policy in 1993 and now under current President Tsai Ing-wen’s “New Southbound Policy” since 2016. Both policies tried to steer Taiwanese trade and investment away from China and back to Taiwan or to Southeast Asia. Due to rising costs in China and the U.S.-China trade war, Taiwanese investments in China have indeed declined. However, trade with China keeps growing, reaching the highest point in the 40 years since economic relations across the Taiwan Strait resumed. China and Hong Kong combined now represent 34% of Taiwan’s overall trade, compared with 13% with the United States and 11% with Japan. Despite policy incentives, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) share of Taiwan’s total trade volume has actually dropped from 16% in 2017 to 14% today.

Taiwan’s continued dependence on China is partly due to the fact that China was the only major economy to rebound from the pandemic and expand in 2020. It is projected to grow 8% this year, according to the World Bank. Although they may resist, young Taiwanese looking for work may find China to be one of their best options, and Taiwanese exporters will likely remain tied to China.

Just as the destinations of Taiwan’s exports are geographically concentrated, so too are the sectors from which they come. Most of Taiwan’s impressive export growth is from the information and communication technology sector, with little from textiles, agriculture, small and medium businesses, or traditional manufacturing, all of which remain important parts of the Taiwanese economy. Workers in Taiwanese technology titans are working overtime and receiving huge year-end bonuses, while the rest of Taiwan continues to face the wage stagnation that has persisted since 2000. Unemployment for the youngest group is 12%, three times the national average. In the travel industry, Taiwan has spent the last few years diversifying away from China and welcomed nearly 12 million visitors in 2019, even after Beijing reduced Chinese tourists going to Taiwan. But as a result of the pandemic, the number of overall visitors to Taiwan declined by 88% in 2020, crippling its hospitality sector.

And within the technology sector, the oversized role of the semiconductor industry carries high risks. Taiwan’s semiconductors are key to the ambitions of Washington and Beijing in advanced technologies ranging from self-driving cars to artificial intelligence to 5G telecommunications. But making products attractive to both superpowers may not be as enviable as it appears. A recent report from the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence expressed concern about American overreliance on Taiwan, warning that the United States must try to onshore semiconductor production to manage risks and ensure supply. China is also investing heavily in indigenous production of integrated circuits to become more self-sufficient, as stated in its “Vision 2035” development strategy. If and when China gains ground and reduces its dependence on Taiwanese chips, it will not only buy less from Taiwan, but may also become a competitor for Taiwanese firms, eventually even including the flagship Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

Taiwan’s failure to more fully diversify its trade and investment partners has several causes. Despite spectacular reports to the contrary, in reality little is the result of Chinese interference in potential export markets. Larger problems include the low level of internationalization of Taiwanese society and its business community. Moreover, China’s natural gravitational pull is so large that it is still an easier source of growth than trying to find new markets elsewhere.

Overreliance on China exacerbated by strained cross-strait relations

The risks from Taiwan’s continued economic dependence on China are exacerbated by the strained political relationship between Taiwan and the mainland. After Taiwan democratized, it developed a different set of political and civic values from those in China. Now only 1% of Taiwanese people support immediate unification with the mainland, and Xi Jinping’s goal of unification with Taiwan within his lifetime appears increasingly elusive.

Moreover, in January 2019, Xi announced that, after unification, Taiwan would be governed by the same “one country, two systems” formula that was put in place when Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Despite Beijing’s promise to keep Hong Kong’s political and economic systems largely unchanged, it has been trying to increase the economic and political influence of the mainland and to ensure both that young Hong Kongers are educated to become more patriotic and that older Hong Kongers selected for government positions can be trusted to act as “patriots.” Faced with widespread protests in Hong Kong since 2016, China has used the police and the judiciary to implement a national security law to end the protests and completely expel pro-democracy individuals from positions in government. The recent National People’s Congress annual meeting in China announced reforms to Hong Kong’s electoral system that signal an end to truly contested elections by requiring that all candidates be vetted by a government selection committee.

These developments have made Taiwanese people resist unification even more. In response, Beijing has shown an increasing willingness both to use threats of military force and to weaponize Taiwan’s dependence on China to convince Taiwanese people that they have no choice but to acquiesce to Beijing’s terms. China has already demonstrated what some call a deliberate “QiongTai” (make Taiwan poor) strategy by reducing the level of Chinese tourism in Taiwan in 2016 and 2019, either to protest the results of a recent election or to influence the outcome of an upcoming one. Beijing also constantly harasses Taiwanese businesses in mainland China if they seem sympathetic to the Democratic Progressive Party, the current majority ruling party that Beijing has long accused of being pro-independence. Giving only three days’ notice, Beijing announced that all imports of Taiwanese pineapple would be banned as of March 1, allegedly on public health grounds, sending another sobering signal to Taiwanese people of their vulnerability to China’s coercive trade measures. While China has exerted similar economic pressure on Australia and South Korea, the stakes are even higher for Taiwan because China wants to subsume it politically. This has brought the cross-Strait political atmosphere to perhaps its lowest point since they resumed relations in the 1990s.

The risks for Taiwan from its strained relationship with China have also been evident in signs of fragility in Taiwan’s impressive resilience in healthcare, another key element in its success story. There has been no public discussion of using Chinese vaccines on Taiwan, and in any event, the Taiwanese are uninterested in receiving them. Excluded from the World Health Organization (WHO), Taiwan does not seem to have received much, if any, vaccine support through the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access initiative. The government has not bid successfully for adequate doses of non-Chinese vaccines, although some will eventually arrive later in 2021. While Taiwan’s effective prevention measures may halt any upsurge in infection even without vaccines, Taiwanese people risk being trapped on the island with few visitors coming in and greater difficulties going out, while the rest of the world starts traveling again. This may affect Taiwan’s economic prospects and also reduce confidence among the Taiwan public.

Solutions for Taiwan’s domestic problems urgently needed

All this puts Taiwan in a grim position. It has successfully escaped the middle-income trap that has plagued many emerging economies, with its political system democratized, high-value-added technology industries nurtured, and levels of economic inequality reduced. But it is falling into a high-income trap, characterized by demographic decline, greater inequality, and growing polarization. With lower fertility and improved longevity, the island’s population started declining in 2020 and Taiwan will see its workforce reduced by half, to 8.6 million people, around 2065. The situation is exacerbated by the accommodative monetary policy adopted worldwide to address first the global financial crisis and now the pandemic, which have fueled asset inflation and housing prices. According to Taiwan’s Central Bank, household debt as a percentage of GDP has reached 86.7% in 2019, much higher than the global average. While older generations enjoy entitlements and are asset-rich, young people are relying either on debt or support from their families for a longer period of time. Accordingly, generational and rural-urban inequality will continue to widen, just like in the U.S. and Europe.

Taiwan is searching for solutions to its high-income trap and ways to address the decline of its middle class. China appears to be an answer but may also prove to be a danger. Increased Chinese influence may give it the opportunity to undermine the institutions that are key to the success of democracy. Just this month, two chip design companies in Taiwan indirectly owned by a Chinese cryptocurrency firm have been charged with poaching hundreds of Taiwanese engineers to work in China. In addition to hacking to steal sensitive information and potentially to disrupt critical infrastructure, China also uses social media, influence over traditional media companies, and intimidation of Taiwanese companies with China exposure to gain an invisible hold over all of Taiwan.

As Taiwan’s interest in unification collapses, Beijing has increasingly concluded that the process is likely to be involuntary, whether peaceful or not. This makes Taiwan a potential flashpoint as the People’s Liberation Army increases its ability both to attack Taiwan and to deter the United States from coming to the island’s defense. But the restriction of Taiwan’s international space and the use of political warfare and economic coercion are even bigger dangers than outright military assault.

For Taiwan’s success story to be sustainable, Taiwan must retain its leadership position in semiconductors, diversify its economy so that a broader segment of society enjoys its success, and strengthen its relations with more economic partners. To advance these goals, the United States and Taiwan need to reach a bilateral trade agreement, especially given that President Tsai has expended much of her political capital to allow the American pork and beef imports that had been the American precondition for achieving it.

Taiwan must also become more fully integrated into the international community, including joining the WHO to prepare for the next pandemic and becoming part of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership to prepare for changes in the global supply chain. Taiwan’s path toward a sustainable economic future depends not only on a capable government, a hardworking population, and a more global outlook, but also on the support of the international community. Taiwan cannot resist the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy unless like-minded democracies, which may all eventually face their own versions of Taiwan’s China dilemma, make a concerted effort to work together to protect Taiwan’s autonomy and prosperity.

      

There are historical, national security, and economic reasons behind Taiwan’s support for the United States. Though the Taiwanese population had been nonchalant throughout the past few U.S. elections, the 2020 U.S. presidential election was highly anticipated. According to a YouGov poll conducted prior to the election, Taiwan was perhaps the only close U.S. ally, other than Israel, whose citizens expressed overwhelming support for President Trump’s reelection. The reasons may vary, but the predominate reason lies in popular concerns about China’s ambitious rise — which most Taiwanese perceive as a threat.

Trump changed the style of U.S. global leadership by shifting from multilateralism to focusing on bilateral relations, significantly impacting the post-World War II world order. Many Taiwanese viewed this shift favorably and dubbed Trump as a “pro-Taiwan American president” who worked to contain China to protect Taiwan’s security and democracy. Contrary to popular belief in Taiwan, however, Biden’s “substance over symbolism” approach could return the international order closer to pre-Trump normalcy, a foreign policy move that could help further elevate the U.S.-Taiwan relationship. A hopeful and healthy rebalance in U.S. foreign policy in terms of ends, ways, and means can benefit Taipei, Washington, and Beijing.

Taipei, Washington, and Beijing

In 2014, then-Secretary of State John Kerry referred to U.S.-China ties as a special and important relationship. He witnessed the relationship develop from a bilateral one to a complex global one. This transformation would be an understatement in describing the current global situation amidst a COVID-19 pandemic that has taken 2020 by storm. Beijing’s declaration of the “Chinese dream” and the growth of Chinese ambition since the 19th Party Congress has fundamentally impacted the world. Taiwan stands on the front line against regional hegemony, which is a precondition to China’s global rise, in Beijing’s revisionist view.

President-elect Biden respects multilateralism and a rules-based international system. Through leading by example and seeking collaboration with U.S. allies, the United States has the opportunity to once again restore its image as the leader of the free world, a step that would strengthen its ability to address the so-called China threat.

American scholars might see the China threat as the Chinese government’s efforts to game its exports; target businesses, academic institutions, researchers, and lawmakers; and pursue technical espionage and high-tech competition. For Taiwan, China is viewed as a threat to its democracy and national security. Taiwan’s concerns about China align with Washington’s geopolitical and ideological concerns.

Though not all Taiwanese have given up the idea of a peaceful reunification with a democratic China, supporters of reunification have been mostly silenced by the Chinese government’s aggressive behavior in recent years. The anti-China sentiment in Taiwan snowballed as people witnessed developments in Hong Kong.

Despite a longstanding relationship with alternating political parties in power, Taiwan and the U.S. are naturally closer when their views of the Taiwan-U.S.-China triangular relationship converge. Now, an increasingly assertive China across the board is viewed as a common challenge by both Washington and Taipei. There is reason to believe that the incoming Biden administration will tread more carefully and strategically to prevent U.S.-China tensions from escalating into a hot war — what former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt M. Campbell and Jake Sullivan described as competition without catastrophe.

The Biden administration will prioritize “substance over symbolism” when engaging with Taiwan and other allies. Its broader policy platform will not be nearly as vocal and demanding as the previous administration. Biden’s national security adviser nominee Jake Sullivan wrote in May 2020: “So long as Washington retains a strong military position along the first island chain, regional powers — from Vietnam to Taiwan to Japan — will try to resist China’s rise rather than accommodate it.” From this, it could be inferred that the U.S. will help Taiwan bolster in its asymmetrical military capabilities, strengthening the island’s defensive deterrence against Beijing — the “substance” of the matter. In addition, the Biden administration likely will be more reserved in signaling official gestures between itself and Taipei to avoid stirring up direct confrontation in a geopolitical hotspot — “symbolism” downplayed.

Though Biden does not intend to normalize official U.S.-Taiwan relations, he has long shown a strong preference for both strategic ambiguity regarding Taiwan and maintaining the cross-strait status quo. This is reassuring for both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Taiwanese people. After a sense in Taiwan that its fate was left undecided and unattended to, there is a prospect of restored stability — the triad will maneuver carefully around the demarcation set by the status quo.

The one thing Americans across the political spectrum have in common right now is unwavering support for a hardline policy against China. In all likelihood, the U.S. will continue to press hard against China on contentions of human rights abuses and unfair trade practices. No swift removal of sanctions is expected anytime soon, and technological decoupling (especially in the semiconductors industry) and tariffs will remain for the time being. At the current stage, the domestic political capital that Biden will lose if he undoes Trump-era China policies is too costly for the new administration.

Taiwan has become a major beneficiary during the U.S.-China decoupling process for two reasons. First, the U.S. has been encouraging a supply-chain transfer away from mainland China to Taiwan and other allies in the Indo-Pacific. Second, this is a good opportunity for Taiwan to shift its economic dependence on China elsewhere, mitigating risks of political uncertainty. Both trends are likely to continue.

Since the root of the conflict between the United States and China stems from shifting power dynamics and the closing power gap between them, tension and competition will not be resolved with Biden as president. However, due to the particularity of Trumpism, Biden will try to adjust his China policy in three important ways.

First, the strategic hawks will overwhelm the mercantilist economic hawks. The United States will place greater relative emphasis on strategic security; tariffs will not serve as the primary tool for dealing with China. The focus will be on reducing trade deficits, protecting intellectual property rights, opposing forced technology transfer, and opening up the market. Second, more support will be given to the United States’ traditional and strategic allies. Third, the United States will seek cooperation with mainland China on a number of issues (such as environmental protection, climate change, and even the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic). Even with these shifts, though, there will not be a “fresh start” or “reset” in U.S.-China relations because of broader dynamics in the Indo-Pacific.

Even with these shifts, though, there will not be a “fresh start” or “reset” in U.S.-China relations because of broader dynamics in the Indo-Pacific.

The domestic politics factor

U.S.-China great power competition has also been, in part, the result of the shifting power dynamic between Taiwan’s traditional Kuomintang Party (KMT) to the young Kuomintang (representing the younger generation), which fostered an anti-CCP mentality. Traditional KMT voices position the party as the “strategic ally” to the United States and perceive the party as the legally constituted authority of China and a contender to the CCP. The young Kuomintang presents itself as a “democratic ally” to the United States for the sake of security, while at the same time engaging with mainland China under the “1992 Consensus, one China with different interpretations” as a buzzword for “risk aversion.” Further, KMT traditionalists’ ultimate goal is to reunify China under the Republic of China, whereas the younger generation treats reunification as one potential option but sees maintaining a peaceful status quo as the crown jewel. The younger generation of the KMT sees the door for reunification as unlikely but not fully closed. This policy stance creates a strategic ambiguity, attracting economic centrist voters who value stability, thus positioning the KMT to be less confrontational towards Beijing.

The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), on the other hand, prioritizes siding with the U.S., front-and-center, to fend off Chinese pressure. This leaves little room for risk aversion with Beijing. Therefore, the DPP matches U.S. policy every step of the way. During Trump’s administration, as U.S.-China relations drastically deteriorated, the CCP constantly placed Taiwan under great pressure. Beijing abandoned its earlier tolerance of “different interpretations” of the 1992 Consensus. This provided the DPP an opportunity to equate the 1992 Consensus with the “one country, two systems” formula that Beijing had previously applied to Hong Kong. As the ruling DPP adopts a more nationalistic position just short of de jure independence towards China, the party has won over the hearts and minds of the majority of Taiwan’s younger generation, who predominantly support Taiwan independence.

Traditionally, the social values of the KMT and DPP aligned closely with America’s Republicans and Democrats, respectively. But in recent years, the China issue has realigned the parties. With four years of Trump’s hardline rebuke of Beijing and the CCP, the current political environment starkly juxtaposes Beijing and Taipei. This has led the DPP to somewhat accept the Republicans’ position that Taiwan acts as an example for Chinese democracy, an old KMT position. Interestingly, both the pan-Blue camp (generally pro-KMT) and pan-Green camp (generally pro-DPP) in Taiwan, though concerned, also see the China threat as a political opportunity. The Green camp sees this as a chance to encourage the U.S. to support and incentivize its pro-independence cause. The Blue camp sees the situation as an opportunity to encourage other major powers to pivot away from China and upgrade its relations with Taiwan. Further, with Biden’s pragmatic, risk-averse, yet principled and firm China policy, it is likely that both major parties in Taiwan would adopt a more centrist position vis-à-vis China, or ideally act as propellants of China’s democratization.

Tension between the United States and China seemed to have come to a head under the Trump administration. Trump has made a return to the status quo impossible, but so far, Biden’s stance towards Beijing and his commitment to a values-based foreign policy is promising. Taiwan should follow suit and take a pragmatic approach, and avoid becoming what Graham Allision described as “a ticking time bomb that could lead to a tragic conflict [between the United States and China].” But in this context, Taiwan should reevaluate its grand strategy to closely align with the United States, which is a policy that has full support across the partisan spectrum in Taiwan. It is important to resist the chauvinistic desires and zealous nationalism in domestic politics on all sides of U.S.-Taiwan-China trilateral relations. The players should work to achieve a détente in economic areas that allow win-win-win situations, while maintaining credible deterrence in security arenas to demonstrate the wisdom of “agree to disagree” (求同存異).

The future under Biden

U.S.-China relations are a two-way street, but China’s definition of cooperation means “do as I say,” and “win-win” means “China gets the upper hand.” If the CCP wants to repair relations with the United States and Taiwan, the first thing it should do is stop flexing its muscles in the Taiwan Strait. With the current situation in Hong Kong, Beijing should cease to promote the “one country, two systems” formula, or the Taiwan cause might be lost forever. Even though Xi Jinping and Joe Biden are not strangers, both China and the U.S. will need to walk a careful line.

Beijing also will need to adjust its expectations. During the presidential campaign, Biden vowed to be tough toward China. Now, he will need to follow through. Beijing cannot expect to see a return of “friendly Joe.”

At the same time, the United States needs to increase trade and military cooperation with Taiwan, further promote bilateral investment flows, and further integrate Taiwan into the international market economy. If the U.S. and China find a new framework to cooperate, Taiwan can be a U.S. rebalancing partner and the pivot for the Taipei-Washington-Beijing triangular relationship.

Taiwan should expect a weather but not atmosphere shift from Trump-era policies. As the Biden administration must prioritize its domestic policies over foreign affairs until the U.S. manages the COVID-19 pandemic, and is more “reserved in adopting high-profile gestures,” Taiwan should continue to work closely with Washington and keep a relatively lower profile than during the previous four years. Taiwan must readjust its pace with a new Biden administration in power and handle the Chinese pressure at the same time. This is the biggest challenge for the Taiwan government. Taiwan is accustomed to traveling on a tailwind. Now the island must withstand headwinds to manage risks while it strives to seize new opportunities.

      

On a recent trip to Taiwan, Brown Professor of Political Science at Davidson College Shelley Rigger got an on-the-ground view of the local political and social mood. In a conversation with Brookings Fellow and interim Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies Ryan Hass, transcribed with light edits below, the two discussed shifting public attitudes in Taiwan, the Kuomintang’s posture toward cross-Strait relations, and President Tsai Ing-wen’s current areas of policy focus.

One of the foremost experts in the United States on Taiwan’s politics, Rigger is the author of numerous books on Taiwan, including most recently “Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011). Note: In this interview, the word “Taiwanese” refers to residents of Taiwan regardless of when members of their families, living or dead, first arrived. The word is not used in a manner that is synonymous with “native Taiwanese.”

Hass: You were recently in Taiwan for field research. You have spent considerable time in Taiwan before. How would you compare the overall mood in Taiwan during your most recent trip to previous visits?

Rigger: I spent seven months in Taiwan, from September 2019 through March 2020. The majority of that time was very much in pre-election mode, as Taiwan had general elections (president and legislature) in January. The mood was fun. People on both sides of politics were excited about the election, and while they took their respective candidates very seriously, the atmosphere was positive. I remember attending a big rally for the Kuomintang (KMT) candidate just before the election, and people were clearly having a great time. Then I went back to the same place at the same time a couple of nights later and did it all again with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate’s supporters, who also clearly were having a great time.

Hass: How have public attitudes in Taiwan toward China changed over the past year? What factors are influencing the shift in views? How enduring do you expect this shift to be?

Rigger: We don’t have a lot of survey data on this question — survey questions tend to focus on specific issues rather than the broad sentiment toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC) — but my perception from the public conversation, my private conversations, and focus groups is that attitudes are more negative than they’ve been in a long time. There are a few drivers, but three that have played an especially important role in the past year are the Hong Kong crisis, China’s increasing pressure on Taiwan, and changes in the global economy, including the trade war.

The protests in Hong Kong had a lot of support on Taiwan, where people tend to value freedom and the rule of law, and also to believe the worst about Beijing. Most people viewed the protests as Hong Kongers fighting to keep rights and liberties they already had, not some kind of unreasonable demand for something more. What has happened most recently, with the passage of the National Security Law, just confirms what Taiwanese suspected: Beijing has no qualms about eliminating freedom by force when it can, and the CCP’s promises are worthless. People believed that before, but watching the evidence accumulate in Hong Kong has reinforced and amplified those feelings.

The increasing pressure on Taiwan, including military threats as well as attacks on Taiwan’s diplomatic space, further reduces the PRC’s attractiveness to islanders. I think most Americans are surprised that Taiwanese are not more frightened by Beijing’s military activities, which really are accelerating, but Taiwanese have been living with this for 70 years. They can’t imagine that Beijing would ever actually use force, because doing so is so irrational and unnecessary. At least, that’s how Taiwanese see it. Nonetheless, just because people are used to it doesn’t mean they like it. The more the PRC presses, the more Taiwanese resist.

Finally, opportunities for Taiwanese companies in the PRC are not as rich as they used to be. Part of that is PRC policy, including things like the campaign for domestic content in the high-tech sector. Another part is just rising production costs in the PRC, which is a trend that’s been underway for a while now. China is no longer the cheapest place in the world to manufacture, and a lot of Taiwanese companies are very cost-conscious. And of course, the U.S.-China trade war has made a lot of Taiwanese firms look for ways to get the “Made in China” label off their products. All of these developments shrink the constituency for cross-Strait engagement even more.

Hass: Do you expect the KMT’s posture toward cross-Strait relations to evolve to reflect shifting sentiments in Taiwan toward China?

Rigger: The KMT is already changing its position, because the idea that it’s possible to leverage engagement to stabilize and secure Taiwan’s political autonomy is no longer persuasive. Just this week, the KMT legislative caucus proposed legislation calling on the Tsai government to ask the U.S. for closer relations. Part of their motivation was to embarrass Tsai, but the action shows just how far the KMT has deviated from the positions it took when Ma Ying-jeou was president, from 2008 to 2016.

The reason for this change is that Beijing has become so relentlessly hostile toward Taiwan that it’s no longer plausible to imagine that a more China-friendly leadership will reverse that trend.

What does the KMT have to gain from continuing to try to pacify Beijing? It feels kind of hopeless, so the KMT’s logical response is to look for new issues and angles it can use to contest for power, while joining the DPP at the center on cross-Strait relations. What we saw in the 2018 local elections is that there are issues and angles that open space for the KMT (2020 showed us some issues and angles that work for smaller parties as well). Taiwan needs a viable competitor to the DPP, and I expect the KMT will find a way to be that competitor. But it is unlikely that old-school KMT positions on cross-Strait relations (e.g., the 1992 Consensus) are going to be the focal point.

Hass: How much of a window does President Tsai have left before the race to succeed her swings into full gear and she gets pushed into lame duck status? Where do you expect President Tsai to focus her agenda during this period?

Rigger: Tsai Ing-wen is an extraordinary politician in many ways, but perhaps her most unusual trait is her willingness to invest political capital in initiatives that are unlikely to pay off while she’s in office.

In her first term she devoted an enormous amount of effort to the “New Southbound Policy,” a package of policies that diversify Taiwan’s economic and political connections in South Asia and Southeast Asia. There was no way Taiwan was going to see a lot of benefit from that in just four years’ time, but she invested in it anyway.

Her decision to bite the bullet and get pension reform done is another example. She knew it would cost her a lot politically, and she knew that failure to do it would produce a fiscal crisis that would almost certainly not blow up until she was out of office, but she did it anyway.

Most recently, Tsai broke the political capital bank when she abandoned the policy that prevented Taiwan from importing certain beef and pork products from the U.S. Her party has been against this for ages; changing her position was a huge boon to her opponents. But she recognized that pursuing an economic deal with the U.S. was more important to Taiwan’s long-term future than sticking to her guns for another four years, so she did it anyway.

In short, I don’t think Tsai has ever cared as much as other politicians about hoarding her political capital for some big initiative that’s always just around the corner. She does what she thinks needs to be done. I expect she’ll keep doing that until it’s time to turn over the keys to the next occupant of the presidential office.

Adrien Chorn provided editing assistance on this piece.

      

As the world continues to struggle with managing the myriad challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic — public health, economic, socio-political — Taiwan’s response has stood out as a model of excellence. Contributing factors well-covered in the media include an early and forceful response and the integration of tech tools with new rules and procedures. But while Taiwan’s policy decision making process since January 2020 is a commendable feature of its response, the roots of its success in implementing those decisions were in the making for years.

Taiwan was suffering from extremely low public trust in government when President Tsai Ing-Wen came to power in 2016, due to complaints manifested in the Sunflower Movement opposing the Ma Ying-jeou administration’s more opaque approach to managing cross-Strait relations. The movement’s occupation of the Legislative Yuan for more than three weeks in 2014 and its success in pausing the cross-Strait trade services agreement buoyed Tsai’s electoral victory in 2016 and gave new energy to citizen participation in politics, including the formation of new political parties.

However, that election was no panacea: Increased citizen participation did not lead to a bipartisan reconciliation between the two major parties, nor did a change in political power ease cross-Strait tensions. In fact, quite the opposite — identities hardened on both partisan extremes (although the number of non-partisan moderates grew) and cross-Strait exchanges were increasingly shut down as Beijing sought to, in its view, deter Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) from taking further steps toward de jure independence.

The thrust of disinformation campaigns — which Taiwan analysts and others attributed to mainland China’s malign activities — further targeted public trust in government, generally, and in President Tsai, personally. During the 2018 local elections, Tsai was accused of fabricating her academic credentials, and photos featuring her campaign activities were doctored to insinuate, for example, callousness in the face of natural disasters.

Is any of this sounding familiar to U.S. readers yet?

Although problems of tone and accuracy in public discourse are shared across many democracies and open societies, Taiwan views eroding public trust as an extension of its main existential threat — absorption or hostile takeover by Beijing. Because the threat of public distrust is so salient, Taiwan has taken drastic but extremely innovative measures to address disinformation and to expose its constituencies to the sometimes difficult realities of policy decision making at all levels of government. The cycle of trust and transparency built through these measures very likely contributed to compliance with COVID-19 protocols and eased anxieties about personal protective equipment availability. And the best part of Taiwan’s experience is that it can be replicated elsewhere, including in the United States.

In 2016, Tsai appointed the autodidactic and endlessly tech-savvy Audrey Tang as a minister without portfolio; she assumed the title of digital minister in 2018. Minister Tang took the position under some curious conditions for a high-ranking government official — she would have no access whatsoever to classified information and would insist on releasing a transcript of every conversation held in her official capacity. Furthermore, Minister Tang developed a practice of reserving an entire day each week for “open office” hours, in which anyone could bring a problem or issue related to governance to her attention.

The goal was to reduce the space between policymaking and citizen participation. The methods, including the ones above and others, were formed through the Taipei-based g0v (gov-zero) global movement, which seeks to “fork” the government. This isn’t a euphemism taken from scripts of the TV show “The Good Place” to sanitize a familiar four-letter word, but a process of taking government-issued information and making it more visually and contextually accessible to average citizens. So, for example, it might involve creating visually appealing and interactive tables and graphics for government budgets, in which one could see the proportion of various spending categories or click through to find the specifics of a spending program. The methodology involves creating a copy of “.gov” pages with a “.g0v” web address, releasing the revamped content and working toward integrating that content back into the .gov address, with much of this work being done by interested volunteers. In this way, forks in the path eventually re-merge to marry the accessible content back into standard channels.

A major aspect of transparent digital governance is to both find and build upon consensus. As tech researcher Carl Miller outlines in detail, citizen hackers of the g0v movement worked with local officials to build a platform — Pol.is — which aggregates consensus rather than emphasizing division. There is a gaming element to these interactions as citizens attempt to frame issues and phrase statements in a way that attracts the greatest consensus. Not only, as Miller points out, can these statements then be translated into effective domestic policy, but there is also a data trail justifying this policy direction and proving that detractors were indeed the outliers and not the mean. The loudness, or weight, of the argument is in consensus, not in invective.

Using technological tools and meeting people where they are “at” digitally also helped to reduce space between officials and citizens. Great efforts were made to stream all public forums and to include online participation; methods that Minister Tang found contextualized policymaking for locals, allowing citizens to listen in real time as officials went through the pros and cons of any specific decision. These interactions resulted in greater empathy for both public servants and between neighbors. It brought elements of conflict mediation into public discourse.

Another replicable aspect of Taiwan’s digital security push is its response to disinformation campaigns. Data-driven analysis from the Taiwan government’s partnerships with Line, Facebook, and the Internet Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) shows that counter-disinformation techniques have the greatest impact when they happen very quickly — within one hour of the disinformation going viral. After about five hours, there is almost no impact to responses, although the malign information can live online and recirculate for 18 months or more. But the features of public communication common to official statements are often lost in translation to the general public because of their formality or because of being buried in the signal-to-noise ratio of social media discourse.

Taiwan has a two-pronged solution for these challenges. First, it has embedded creative teams — graphic designers, comedy writers, etc. — inside government ministries to make memes challenging disinformation. Second, it has dedicated channels to report suspected disinformation directly to the relevant ministry, whose representatives are required to craft a response as soon as possible — ideally within 60 minutes, to meet the window of impact. In some cases, Taiwan has worked with citizen hackers and social media companies, like the very popular Line, to add fact-check-bots directly to their app or to further investigate fake pages and likes.

Another challenge of the social media world is that much of the disinformation is shared in closed groups like alumni associations or family networks. Bringing the response directly to where the interaction is happening — through in-program reporting and through potentially viral responses from the government — helps to bridge the gap between privacy protections and policy response.

Is any of this sounding good to U.S. readers yet?

Of course, no strategy to build trust in government can paper over real governance problems, like the disorganization and competing priorities evident in the U.S. response to the COVID-19 crisis. Governments that do not fulfill their basic function to provide security and prosperity for citizens will not regain trust through clever jokes and hackathons. And no one, including the most dedicated Taiwan civil servants, has a clear remedy for how to address those who knowingly share disinformation because of the emotional satisfaction that the story provided, even if they suspect the content is false. More work needs to be done on these fronts.

But it is possible that there is more to governance challenges than is immediately apparent, and that leaning into a radically transparent form of governing — one that embraces citizen participation, trusts its audience to parse or at least understand policy trade-offs, and meets constituencies in the platforms and communication styles of the digital era — can bring trust in U.S. government back from the abyss. And, as recent papers and articles have argued, restoring trust in the American model is one of the biggest policy challenges of the next generation.

None of these methods are particularly costly, especially when compared to the alternatives. Now is the time to familiarize ourselves with Taiwan’s digital governance success and adapt the methodology into what works for the U.S. system. Taiwan may not have fully eradicated social polarization, and it still faces growing pressure from Beijing, but its people are demonstrably safer and its government stands at the forefront of 21st-century opportunities and challenges as a result of its innovative policy choices.

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