Former minister of culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) has long wielded influence through the power of words. Her articles once served as a moral compass for a society in transition.
However, as her April 1 guest article in the New York Times, “The Clock Is Ticking for Taiwan,” makes all too clear, even celebrated prose can mislead when romanticism clouds political judgement.
Lung crafts a narrative that is less an analysis of Taiwan’s geopolitical reality than an exercise in wistful nostalgia.
As political scientists and international relations academics, we believe it is crucial to correct the misconceptions embedded in her article, not because we oppose peace, but because we believe that peace must be built on political clarity, not cultural sentimentality.
Lung suggests that a wave of anti-Americanism or “suspicion of the US” is sweeping through Taiwan. However, her evidence is an anecdotal encounter with a cabdriver, an unscientific student poll and a pervasive, yet unsubstantiated, air of disillusionment. While public skepticism toward any great power is natural in a democracy, this hardly constitutes a national consensus.
Reliable polling from the Institute for National Defense and Security Research conducted in October last year showed that more than 70 percent of Taiwanese respondents are willing to defend their homeland, and trust in the US-Taiwan partnership remains high, even amid complex geopolitical tensions. The narrative that Taiwan is turning away from the US is not just misleading — it is dangerous.
Lung’s invocation of “Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow” is equally problematic. The analogy, while emotionally evocative, fails to recognize the vast structural, geopolitical and historical differences between the two cases. Ukraine shares a land border with Russia and was embroiled in years of contested buffer-zone politics before the 2022 invasion.
Taiwan is an island democracy with a formidable tech economy, a globalized strategic position and an increasingly entrenched identity of defending the nation. Furthermore, Taiwan’s geostrategic value in the Indo-Pacific region —notably in the semiconductor sector — makes any potential abandonment by the US far less likely, regardless of who occupies the White House.
Moreover, US President Donald Trump’s posture toward Ukraine should not be casually conflated with a betrayal of small nations. While Trump’s actions reflect a transactional worldview, they do not imply a definitive retreat from US commitments.
Suggesting otherwise implies a fatalistic worldview that plays into Beijing’s strategic messaging rather than resisting it.
Taiwan must prepare for all contingencies, but it must not succumb to the false binary that peace can only be purchased by surrender. If there is a lesson to be drawn from recent US diplomacy, it is that genuine and lasting peace comes from strength and strategic consistency, not capitulation to the nearest autocratic power.
Lung romanticizes the so-called “golden era” of cross-strait relations under former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), but fails to mention that this era coincided with a more benign Chinese foreign policy under then-Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and the early, still-cautious phase of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) rule.
The conditions that made diplomatic and economic detente possible no longer exist. Xi’s China is now more assertive, more authoritarian and more willing to use military and economic coercion. The idea that Taiwan can simply return to the “status quo” ante by embracing Beijing’s preferred narratives is at best naive, at worst, a prescription for strategic vulnerability.
Many Taiwanese today view the Ma administration’s overly deferential policy toward Beijing as one of the root causes of Taiwan’s current economic overreliance on China and the hollowing out of local industries.
The so-called “diplomatic truce” turned out to be an illusion, one that collapsed the moment Taiwan elected a government unwilling to parrot Beijing’s “one China” principle. Beijing’s punitive diplomatic and military responses were not triggered by provocation, but by Taiwan’s assertion of democratic choice.
Lung also accused the administration of President William Lai (賴清德) of fueling tensions through inflammatory rhetoric. What she omits is China’s increasingly provocative military behavior, including live-fire exercises, economic coercion, cyberintrusions and political warfare.
Lai’s characterization of China as a “foreign hostile force” was not a provocation; it was a diagnosis rooted in empirical behavior. To ignore Beijing’s actions while castigating Taipei’s rhetoric is to invert cause and effect.
As for Lung’s conclusion — that without peace there can be no democracy — we suggest the inverse is equally, if not more, true: without democracy, there can be no peace worth having.
Peace that comes at the cost of agency, freedom and sovereign identity is not peace; it is submission.
The West learned this lesson at Munich in 1938. Taiwan, too, has learned from history, including its own. The island’s painful legacy of martial law and authoritarian control makes it particularly sensitive to narratives that call for stability at the price of liberty.
If Lung is correct in one respect, it is that the clock is ticking — but not only for Taiwan. It is ticking for China as well, whose economic headwinds, demographic decline and authoritarian rigidity make its current course unsustainable.
It is also ticking for the global community, which must decide whether it will defend the values it claims to uphold when challenged by autocratic revisionism.
We respect Lung’s right to voice her views, as befitting a pluralistic democracy, but we also believe that romantic pessimism must not be mistaken for strategic foresight.
Taiwan is not a tragic heroine awaiting rescue or capitulation. It is a resilient democracy, capable of agency, defense and charting its own future — one built not on fear, but on resolve.
It is not the clock that defines Taiwan’s fate, but the clarity of its vision and the courage of its people.
Wang Hung-jen is executive director of the Institute for National Policy Research. Kuo Yu-jen is vice president of the institute.
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