On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region.
The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers.
Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does not have official relations. Another diplomatic device used to great effect recently has been parliamentary diplomacy, or “paradiplomacy” — parliament-to-parliament exchanges in the absence of formal diplomatic relations — which has seen the nation deepen ties with fellow liberal democracies, such as Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Estonia.
Think tank diplomacy has also been used to great effect at the grassroots level in the US. In 2016 in Washington, Taiwanese-Americans founded the Global Taiwan Institute (GTI), a think tank dedicated to ensuring the nation is not drowned out by China’s relentless drive to shut down debate about Taiwan, deepening exchanges and “promoting better public understanding about Taiwan and its people.”
While the GTI is not funded by the government, its success as a think tank dedicated to Taiwan issues — helping facilitate intellectual exchanges and providing a platform to deepen knowledge about the strategic challenges facing the nation — is a public diplomacy template that Taipei should consider emulating.
Although there are some international affairs think tanks in Taiwan, such as the Institute for National Defense and Security Research and the Taiwan Center for Security Studies, these are small-scale and lack adequate funding to compete on the world stage or publish many reports in English.
Other government-funded institutions, such as Academia Sinica’s law institute and its Institute of Political Science, provide cutting-edge, high-quality and independent work in their spheres, but although they are interconnected with global elite knowledge networks, they do not engage in the type of public-facing diplomacy that characterizes think tanks.
In light of the GTI’s success, the government should consider founding a Taiwan-based international affairs think tank that is editorially independent, guided by liberal democratic values and would serve as a host of cutting-edge knowledge production about Taiwan’s strategic challenges and inform the international community about those challenges.
Taiwan is an outlier compared with other liberal democracies in that it does not have a significant national think tank that performs this role.
Lithuania’s Eastern Europe Studies Centre, which publishes in English, is dedicated to analyzing Lithuania’s role in the world and how it can contribute. The Polish Institute of International Affairs and France’s Institut Montaigne are similar. They offer a model Taiwan could learn from.
With China’s increasing belligerence and its seeming determination to burn all bridges with the democratic world, there is plenty of goodwill to learn more about Taiwan and give it the discursive platform that it has been unjustly denied for many years.
The nation has already capitalized on this interest with the founding of TaiwanPlus — an editorially independent platform dedicated to on-the-ground reporting and telling informative stories about Taiwan.
The next project should be an independent, properly funded Taiwan-based international affairs think tank — a host of cutting-edge research on Taiwan’s foreign policy and international role that enhances international understanding and the nation’s status and visibility.
Weeks into the craze, nobody quite knows what to make of the OpenClaw mania sweeping China, marked by viral photos of retirees lining up for installation events and users gathering in red claw hats. The queues and cosplay inspired by the “raising a lobster” trend make for irresistible China clickbait. However, the West is fixating on the least important part of the story. As a consumer craze, OpenClaw — the AI agent designed to do tasks on a user’s behalf — would likely burn out. Without some developer background, it is too glitchy and technically awkward for true mainstream adoption,
A delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) officials led by Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) is to travel to China tomorrow for a six-day visit to Jiangsu, Shanghai and Beijing, which might end with a meeting between Cheng and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). The trip was announced by Xinhua news agency on Monday last week, which cited China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) Director Song Tao (宋濤) as saying that Cheng has repeatedly expressed willingness to visit China, and that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee and Xi have extended an invitation. Although some people have been speculating about a potential Xi-Cheng
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) is leading a delegation to China through Sunday. She is expected to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing tomorrow. That date coincides with the anniversary of the signing of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), which marked a cornerstone of Taiwan-US relations. Staging their meeting on this date makes it clear that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intends to challenge the US and demonstrate its “authority” over Taiwan. Since the US severed official diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979, it has relied on the TRA as a legal basis for all
The ongoing Iran conflict is putting Taiwan’s energy fragility on full display — the island of 23 million people, home to the world’s most advanced semiconductor manufacturing, is highly dependent on imported oil and gas, especially that from the Middle East. In 2025, 69.6 percent of Taiwan’s crude oil and 38.7 percent of liquified natural gas were sourced from the Middle East. In the same year, 62 percent of crude oil and 34 percent of LNG to Taiwan went through the Strait of Hormuz. Taiwan’s state-run oil company CPC Corp’s benchmark crude oil price (70 percent Dubai, 30 percent Brent)
RSS