Timed to coincide with her arrival in Taipei, US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Washington Post op-ed, “Why I’m leading a congressional delegation to Taiwan,” was an unequivocal and impassioned declaration of US support for Taiwan.
Drawing an explicit parallel to Ukraine, a democratic state attacked by an authoritarian regime, Pelosi warned that Taiwan’s “vibrant, robust democracy — named one of the freest in the world by Freedom House and proudly led by a woman, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) — is under threat” from China.
I am an American professor in Taipei to study “academic freedom” in Taiwan’s universities and colleges. “Academic freedom” is a term typically understood to refer to the right of university professors to research and teach freely, without political interference. Were China to occupy Taiwan, Taiwanese faculty would lose this right, just as faculty in Hong Kong lost theirs after the National Security Law was passed in 2020.
This disastrous outcome — essentially, the end of intellectual freedom in Taiwan — is obvious to all the Taiwanese professors I speak with. What is not clear to them, and what strikes them as incredible, is that those of us who research and teach in the US are struggling with our own authoritarian incursion — and losing.
Taiwanese have heard about “the big lie,” former US president Donald Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. They know about the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol, and even the hearings recently conducted to investigate the attack, but they seem largely unaware of the authoritarian tactics to control knowledge at colleges and universities in the US.
This is hardly surprising, given all that is going on in the world, but for me here in Taipei, watching Pelosi come to Taiwan as a kind of standard-bearer for democracy has a certain irony when I know firsthand how deeply imperiled US democracy is from its own homegrown variants of authoritarianism.
Democratic societies build in protections for university faculty so that they are not at the whims of whichever political party holds power. The idea is that democracies, unlike dictatorships, recognize a distinction — however contestable in specific instances and at particularly volatile historical moments — between knowledge and propaganda. Knowledge remains knowledge regardless of what the king (or president) might prefer the citizens to believe.
Put another way: If I am a scholar who works on the history of slavery in the US, my research stays the same whether Republicans or Democrats have a majority in my state legislature. I can write about and disseminate my findings in the classroom even when those findings reveal aspects of US history that some Americans would prefer not to know.
Yet, shockingly, this is no longer true in 19 US states where legislative restrictions on the freedom to read, learn and teach are now the law. If I work at a public university in one of these 19 states, and my research and teaching is deemed to be “divisive” by a student or student’s parent, or some other so-called stakeholder, I am vulnerable to being fired or to seeing my program defunded.
Faculty in Republican-dominated states are self-censoring, changing their syllabi and altering their research agendas to protect themselves. This is the kind of thing that people raised in the US never imagined our professors and teachers would be forced to do.
I and my peers came of age during or soon after the Cold War, and 1984 was the novel we all read in middle school to congratulate ourselves on our democratic superiority. Americans never thought they would see laws banning the teaching of particular subjects such as “critical race theory” (which is not what red-state politicians would have you believe it is) or declaring that only one version of US history (sufficiently patriotic in its affirmation of American exceptionalism) can be taught.
The non-profit organization PEN America calls the laws that have been passed “education gag orders” and has done admirable work tracking their spread across the US. Faculty are mobilizing to fight these authoritarian tactics, but the long-term prognosis for academic freedom in the US is far from clear.
The US does not have an authoritarian bully looming over it the way Taiwan has the People’s Republic of China, but it has homegrown bullies increasingly willing to use authoritarian tactics to achieve undemocratic ends.
The US sees this in the flouting of the rule of law by Trump and others to corrupt elections. It is also seen in the denial of human rights in the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn a landmark abortion rights law, and in the education gag orders restricting research and teaching in areas pertaining to race, gender and sexuality.
Perhaps Tsai might consider visiting the US to rally support within the US for its own vulnerable democracy?
Jennifer Ruth is a professor in the Portland State University School of Film, and a Ministry of Foreign Affairs fellow in Taipei through September.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long been expansionist and contemptuous of international law. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the CCP regime has become more despotic, coercive and punitive. As part of its strategy to annex Taiwan, Beijing has sought to erase the island democracy’s international identity by bribing countries to sever diplomatic ties with Taipei. One by one, China has peeled away Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners, leaving just 12 countries (mostly small developing states) and the Vatican recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. Taiwan’s formal international space has shrunk dramatically. Yet even as Beijing has scored diplomatic successes, its overreach
In her article in Foreign Affairs, “A Perfect Storm for Taiwan in 2026?,” Yun Sun (孫韻), director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington, said that the US has grown indifferent to Taiwan, contending that, since it has long been the fear of US intervention — and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) inability to prevail against US forces — that has deterred China from using force against Taiwan, this perceived indifference from the US could lead China to conclude that a window of opportunity for a Taiwan invasion has opened this year. Most notably, she observes that
For Taiwan, the ongoing US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets are a warning signal: When a major power stretches the boundaries of self-defense, smaller states feel the tremors first. Taiwan’s security rests on two pillars: US deterrence and the credibility of international law. The first deters coercion from China. The second legitimizes Taiwan’s place in the international community. One is material. The other is moral. Both are indispensable. Under the UN Charter, force is lawful only in response to an armed attack or with UN Security Council authorization. Even pre-emptive self-defense — long debated — requires a demonstrably imminent
Since being re-elected, US President Donald Trump has consistently taken concrete action to counter China and to safeguard the interests of the US and other democratic nations. The attacks on Iran, the earlier capture of deposed of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and efforts to remove Chinese influence from the Panama Canal all demonstrate that, as tensions with Beijing intensify, Washington has adopted a hardline stance aimed at weakening its power. Iran and Venezuela are important allies and major oil suppliers of China, and the US has effectively decapitated both. The US has continuously strengthened its military presence in the Philippines. Japanese Prime
RSS