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.
A Chinese diplomat’s violent threat against Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi following her remarks on defending Taiwan marks a dangerous escalation in East Asian tensions, revealing Beijing’s growing intolerance for dissent and the fragility of regional diplomacy. Chinese Consul General in Osaka Xue Jian (薛劍) on Saturday posted a chilling message on X: “the dirty neck that sticks itself in must be cut off,” in reference to Takaichi’s remark to Japanese lawmakers that an attack on Taiwan could threaten Japan’s survival. The post, which was later deleted, was not an isolated outburst. Xue has also amplified other incendiary messages, including one suggesting
Chinese Consul General in Osaka Xue Jian (薛劍) on Saturday last week shared a news article on social media about Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s remarks on Taiwan, adding that “the dirty neck that sticks itself in must be cut off.” The previous day in the Japanese House of Representatives, Takaichi said that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute “a situation threatening Japan’s survival,” a reference to a legal legal term introduced in 2015 that allows the prime minister to deploy the Japan Self-Defense Forces. The violent nature of Xue’s comments is notable in that it came from a diplomat,
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
“Si ambulat loquitur tetrissitatque sicut anas, anas est” is, in customary international law, the three-part test of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation. And it is essential to Taiwan’s existence. Apocryphally, it can be traced as far back as Suetonius (蘇埃托尼烏斯) in late first-century Rome. Alas, Suetonius was only talking about ducks (anas). But this self-evident principle was codified as a four-part test at the Montevideo Convention in 1934, to which the United States is a party. Article One: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government;
RSS