In the 1956 horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a small-town doctor (played by the inimitable Kevin McCarthy -- no not that Kevin McCarthy) discovers that people in his town are being replaced by emotionless, alien-controlled duplicates grown from plant-like pods. These "pod people" take over human bodies and erase their original personalities. As more and more of the townspeople are replaced, the doctor becomes increasingly desperate to warn the the community, but his pleas are met with skepticism, and then creepy indifference. The movie ends with the pod people, who now make up almost all of the town, chasing the doctor into a highway, where he spots a passing truck filled with yet more pods destined for who knows where. In the final scene he looks at the camera in panic and screams "You're next!!!" 

(The 1978 remake, set in San Francisco, is great, too -- including a cameo by the original Kevin McCarthy and a memorable performance by Donald Sutherland). 

Can the TPP Snatch Away the KMT Vote? 
In previous posts I speculated that the Taiwan People Party's (TPP) long-term growth strategy is different from other Taiwanese third parties that have come before. It has started in the center of the political spectrum rather than on one of the flanks. And it is now aiming to attract new support from the KMT's (mostly older) base while holding onto its (mostly younger) supporters.

It is, in other words, pursuing a party-snatching strategy. 

Now, I should have noted at the outset of these posts that this broader observation about the TPP's strategy is not in any way, shape or form unique to me; people in Taiwan have been ascribing some version of this motive to the party almost since the day Ko Wen-je founded the TPP in 2019. (For examples, see here, here, here, here, and here). 

I should also note there's a long tradition of wishcasting for a new "third force" to emerge in Taiwan politics that would break up the green-blue divide, eliminate the KMT, and realign politics around competition among multiple "Taiwan-centric" parties (in this framing the KMT is almost always described as "pro-China," pro-unification, or even pro-CCP), and compete with what these advocates see as an increasingly conservative and even plutocratic DPP. For a while after it was founded, the TPP looked like the most promising candidate to pull this off, which may explain some of the vitriol directed towards Ko and now new party leader Huang Kuo-chang for their cooperation with the KMT over the last year. 

But assertions that the KMT's destruction would come at the hands of a "third force" that was both more pro-independence and more progressive than the DPP have never made much sense to me, because they never spelled out exactly how the KMT's core supporters would be persuaded to switch to a new party whose positions on the China issue are so far away from their own. For instance, despite all the bravado surrounding the emergence of the NPP out of the Sunflower Movement, it always presented a much larger electoral threat to the DPP than the KMT -- one that Tsai Ing-wen as party chair recognized and smartly headed off through a pre-electoral coalition in 2016. The KMT has long had many electoral problems, but losing chunks of its base to upstart progressive pro-independence parties has never been a big concern for it.

Instead, the biggest threats to the KMT in the past have come from party defectors who walk and talk a lot like the official nominees but reject control from the party leadership -- think Terry Gou, or James Soong, or way back in the 1990s, Lin Yang-kang and Hau Pei-tsun. So if you want to build a party that can convince life-time KMT supporters to defect en masse in a national election, that party has to look a lot like the KMT. It has to be firmly in the pan-blue camp. It has to take a position on the China question that is more China-friendly than the DPP. And most of all, it has to actively oppose the DPP at every turn--despise it, even.  

I do not think it is a coincidence that the TPP is looking more and more like this party. I am skeptical they can actually succeed in causing a political realignment in which they replace the KMT as one of the Big Two. But they are certainly behaving in a way that makes sense if this is their ultimate goal. And, given Taiwan's institutional context, it is probably the TPP's best shot to survive past the next election. 

My thinking about this possibility has been influenced a lot by Gary Cox's work on elections as coordination games. The classic illustration of a coordination game is the so-called Battle of the Sexes. In this game, a man and a woman must independently choose whether to attend a baseball game or an opera performance. The man prefers the baseball game, while the woman prefers the opera, but both would rather spend time together than go to their preferred entertainment alone.

Putting aside the unfortunate sexist stereotypes of this example, the essence of a coordination problem is nicely demonstrated here; to quote Cox, "the players in the game would prefer to coordinate their actions on...one of two...possibilities, but they disagree over which of these possibilities ought to be the one on which they coordinate. There is thus an admixture of common and divergent interests, and the possibility of both successful coordination (to the relative advantage of one or more of the players over the others) and failed coordination (to the disadvantage of all)." 

Later in the book, Cox considers the possibility of partisan realignments as coordination problems. "Realignment projects," he writes, "require that a large number of politicians and voters change their behavior in a coordinated fashion." And not all realignments are equally plausible or consequential. Realignments in majoritarian electoral systems, Cox suggests, are both more difficult to pull off and more consequential if they succeed or fail. He illustrates the point with a discussion of the Liberal Party in Great Britain in the 1910s and 1920s, and the attempt by its dominant figure, David Lloyd George, to realign British politics along a socialist/anti-socialist axis.  

In Cox's telling, Lloyd George attempted to manipulate perceptions of the potential alternatives to the Liberal Party, which he believed to be facing an existential threat from the rise of the Labour Party. As prime minister leading a war-time coalition government, Lloyd George used his privileged position to communicate with his own Liberals and members of the Conservative Party to try to convince them to join forces after the end of World War I against Labour. His efforts to achieve an anti-Labour coalition had their greatest success in the December 1918 "Coupon Election," when the coalition Liberal-Conservative government that had just won the war endorsed a subset of members from both parties, isolating and defeating the Liberal faction led by Lloyd George's predecessor and rival, H.H. Asquith. But the coalition eventually broke apart in 1922, and the subsequent election saw the Conservatives contest and win on their own. The Liberals were reduced to minor party status and never recovered their previous position, as voters opposed to Labour converged on Conservative, rather than Liberal, candidates. And Lloyd George never again served in government. 
 
Cox portrays this failed attempt as a specific example of a realignment coordination game, with Lloyd George serving in the critical role of a "heresthetician" (to use William Riker's term) or "focal arbiter" (Thomas Schelling's): 

​Why am I going on about this example from early 20th century Britain? Well, I think there are some useful parallels here with Taiwan. 

First, in both cases there is a party that the protagonists view as being in long-term decline because of shifting demographics -- the Liberals in the UK and the KMT in Taiwan. Second, in both there is high PSI, high nationalization, and a majoritarian electoral system -- less majoritarian in Taiwan than in the UK circa 1920, but as I noted in Part 2, still sufficiently so to deny a third party much of a future unless it replaces one of the Big Two parties. And third, one of the Big Two parties looks like a lot harder target to break apart than the other -- Labour in the UK, and the DPP in Taiwan. ​

I also find this framework helpful for clarifying the challenge Ko Wen-je faced as he sought to win the presidency in 2024. As mayor of Taipei for two terms, and then the leader of the TPP, Ko had a prominent position from which to try to reshape expectations among both political elites and the mass public about his electoral viability. He first tried to leverage this platform to convince KMT elites to coordinate on him for the presidential election--apparently under the belief that KMT leaders would recognize him, not Hou Yu-ih, as the stronger general election candidate. When that attempt failed, he then fell back on trying to persuade pan-blue voters to coordinate on him rather than Hou. Unfortunately for both Ko and Hou, that didn't happen: the anti-Lai vote ended up split between both. And doubly unfortunate for Ko, that split favored Hou over him; pan-blue and swing voters did not support him in large enough numbers even to bump him into second place.

So that left Ko and the TPP with a fairly hollow result: despite doing better than any third-party presidential candidate since James Soong in 2000, and winning a critical block of seats in the LY, the TPP still didn't eclipse the KMT in either the presidential or the LY PR vote. And in the current legislature, they may have the most influence that any third party has ever had -- but they're still the third party, not the second. To have a future, they need to move into second place. And the best way to do that is not self-evident.

Now, if you were leading the TPP, how would you try to grow from here? What Ko -- and now Huang Kuo-chang, since he has replaced Ko as party chair -- seem to have decided on is to try to execute a realignment of pan-blue voters away from the KMT and to the TPP. If that really is their ultimate goal, then they need to execute a two-pronged and somewhat contradictory strategy. First, they need to convince pan-blue voters that the TPP is one of them. And second, they need to find ways to weaken the KMT, or at least change core supporters' perceptions of the party, to the point that it looks less viable than the TPP in SMD elections -- the mayor's races in 2026, and the presidential and SMD LY races in 2028. 

I think we can see evidence of both prongs of this strategy in the TPP's behavior over the last year. I'll pick that up in Part 4. 

​In the previous post, I described what I think is the biggest mystery in Taiwan politics right now: the behavior of the Taiwan People's Party. The party is the kingmaker in the legislature but doesn't appear to have maximized its leverage over the last 18 months, and I have had trouble understanding what its strategy is.

I think I understand now. The TPP is all-in on votes, not offices or policy, but they are pursuing votes in an unusual way: rather than try to pull equally from both blue and green camps, which is what most observers thought they were doing in the run-up to 2024, they are now prioritizing pan-blue votes. The reason is that they are trying to take over the KMT's space in the political spectrum through a fundamental realignment of the pan-blue camp. 

So, rather than be a swing bloc in the legislature jumping between the camps issue by issue, they have instead decided for the moment to mimic the KMT. Even though most of their members are not ideologically aligned with the KMT--especially on the China issue--they nevertheless need to sound and act like a pan-blue party because they want deep blue voters to consider voting for their candidates in the future. 

To see both the rationale for this kind of strategy in Taiwan, and why the party's recent behavior and rhetoric makes sense if replacing the KMT is their ultimate goal, we first need to understand the political context in which they are operating.

There are three things about Taiwan's party system that make it rather distinct among young democracies, and hard for third parties to survive for long:

1. It has high party system institutionalization. Taiwan is unusual among young democracies in having a well-institutionalized party system. Party system institutionalization, or PSI, is the extent to which a party system is stable, predictable, and characterized by established patterns of interaction between political parties. We can measure PSI by looking at electoral volatility across elections, at the level of partisanship in the electorate, and the degree of coherence and organization of the individual political parties. On all these measures, Taiwan looks more like a mature democracy than a young Third Wave one -- it has relatively low electoral volatility, high partisanship, and well-organized and hierarchical political parties that compete with one another almost everywhere. 

2. It tends toward two-partism. Taiwan's effective number of parties (ENPs) in the legislature this term is 2.38. Since the new electoral system was used for the first time in 2008, this number has never exceeded 2.5: it was 2.44 in 2020; 2.17 in 2016, 2.23 in 2012, and 1.75 in 2008. The same two parties that finished 1-2 in 1992, the KMT and DPP, finished 2-1 in 2024, and they have been the top two vote and seat-winners in every legislative election in between. They also are almost always the top two finishers in mayoral races around the island. There are not many other Third Wave democracies that have had such a consistent pattern of two-party competition, and even among older democracies, the persistence of the same two parties winning in every election for 30 years is quite unusual.  

3. Voting patterns are highly nationalized. Party system nationalization refers to how consistent voting patterns are across a country. It has two components: static nationalization, or how much party vote shares vary across different localities or regions, and dynamic nationalization, or how much vote swings between the parties vary across these same jurisdictions. On the first, static, nationalization measure, although the two major parties have regional strongholds -- the DPP in the south, the KMT in the rural north, east coast, and offshore islands -- they both compete everywhere. There is no regionally-based party akin to the Parti Quebecois in Canada, or the Scottish National Party in the UK, or DMK, Shiv Sena, or Trinamool Congress Party (among many) in India. Nor do Taiwan's regional party strongholds look anywhere near as extreme as South Korea's, where the liberal camp routinely wins 80+% of the vote in the southwest (Jeolla), and the conservative camp wins 80+% in the southeast (Gyeongsang). And on the second, dynamic, nationalization measure, the swing between the DPP and KMT in each election has been remarkably consistent across the island. For instance, in the 2016 election, Tsai Ing-wen improved her vote share over her 2012 campaign in every single jurisdiction in Taiwan, and that increase varied only from about 5% in Penghu to about 12% in Taipei. 

Why does Taiwan's party system look this way? Three reasons. First, Taiwan's unusual pattern of bottom up democratization, starting with electoral competition at the local level and gradually culminating in direct election of the LY and the president, plus the survival of the formerly authoritarian KMT into the democratic era, led to the emergence of two big parties with strong grassroots chapters, a hierarchical structure, and similar party organizations. For the last 30 years, KMT and DPP candidates have run against each other almost everywhere in Taiwan, and they also dominate the majoritarian elections for the president, legislature, and city and county executives.

Second, the China question is by far the most salient issue in Taiwan politics and the only one on which all major political parties take distinct positions. The DPP and KMT are distinguished mostly by their different approaches to managing relations with the PRC; on most other policy issues, the Big Two are as divided internally as they are with each other. 

Third, and most important for present purposes, are Taiwan's electoral institutions. The LY is about 65% elected from single-member districts (SMDs) under plurality rule; about 30% from a proportional representation closed-list tier elected via a second party list ballot with a 5% threshold; and about 5% from two reserved indigenous multi-member districts (MMDs) using single-non-transferable vote (SNTV), each with three seats (M=3). The president is directly elected under plurality rule with no runoff, as are all local chief executives. And local councils are still elected using SNTV in relatively high-magnitude MMDs (typically M≥5). 

​​The consequences of this institutional setup are twofold. First, it is relatively easy for small parties to win a few seats in the legislature through the PR tier, and in local councils because of the high district magnitudes (meaning a lower share of the vote is needed to win a seat). The electoral systems for assemblies at both levels are permissive enough to allow the most successful third parties to survive for a while, and they can even occasionally end up in a kingmaker role controlling the balance of power, as the TPP has managed to do in the current legislature. But third parties face a much more daunting challenge if they want to become more than just small niche parties: they also have to win some of the SMD plurality races outright and not simply play a spoiler role in these elections. And to date, no third party in Taiwan has managed to succeed at this challenge. ​

Run on a Second Dimension Issue, or Be More Extreme
Most new parties in Taiwan have responded to this electoral context by adopting one of two strategies. Some of them have chosen to play down or ignore the China question altogether and campaign solely on a second-dimension issue: labor rights, environmental protection, religion, LGBTQ issues, indigenous rights, health care and social welfare, and so on.

A good example of this type of party is the Green Party Taiwan, whose history is detailed in Dafydd Fell's new book. The GPT was founded in the 1990s, and although it has stuck around much longer than most other third parties from that era, it has never succeeded in winning more than a single LY seat over that time period. And yet the Green Party Taiwan is actually one of the most successful examples of parties choosing this path, which is littered with electoral failures. There are hundreds of second-dimension parties that ran on an issue orthogonal to the China question and did not attract sufficient attention or votes to break through in races for the legislature or for local councils. Today, most of them are long gone and forgotten. 

The other strategy has been to take a more extreme position than the Big Two on the China question. This path has been more successful, and it is the one that the small parties people have actually heard of have used. For instance, to the pro-independence side of the DPP are the Taiwan Independence Party 建國黨, the Taiwan Solidarity Union 台聯, the New Power Party 時代力量, and the Taiwan State-Building Party 台灣基進黨; to the more pro-unification side of the KMT are the New Party 新黨, the People First Party 親民黨, and the China Unification Promotion Party 中國統一促進黨. (These are what Dafydd Fell, following Paul Lucardie, calls "purifier" parties).

Some of these parties have also leaned into a second-dimension issue on which one of the big parties is divided; for instance, the TSU was more protectionist and socially conservative than the DPP, and as Lev Nachman's new book details, the NPP was more socially liberal and pro-environment. Going further back in Taiwan, in the 1990s the New Party was pro-democratic reform and anti-corruption and sometimes teamed up with the DPP against the KMT on these issues, even though the two held polar opposite positions on the China question.  

The Small Party "Valley of Death" in Taiwan Politics
The problem for parties following the second path has been how to grow beyond the extremist fringe. When small parties have attempted to expand beyond the relative safety of MMDs to compete in SMDs, time and time again they have fallen into the "valley of death" (to borrow a term from the venture capital world): they cannot ever break through in enough single member district races to convince voters they are on track to replacing one of the Big Two, and they instead lose support and fade away. 

This pattern of failure occurs for two reasons. First, the Big Two don't just stand idly by. When third parties that are more extreme on the China issue run candidates in SMDs, they pose a more serious threat to the big party in their camp than simply competing in the PR list or local council races. Sometimes this party responds by offering a pre-electoral coalition, as the DPP did with the NPP in 2016, and the KMT did with the PFP in 2008; in both of these cases, the small party later got mostly absorbed into the larger party. Other times the big party goes on the offensive and attempts to knock out the smaller challenger, rallying its voters against the small party by portraying it as a traitor to the cause, as the DPP did with the Taiwan Independence Party in the late 1990s. But either way, the small party runs up against an insurmountable wall: they cannot win in the single member districts without attracting votes from some of the big party's supporters, and the big party has both the incentives and the means to prevent defections like this in most cases. 

Second, small parties are consistently disadvantaged by strategic voting. In Taiwan, the China factor is so important to so many voters that the incentives for strategic voting are quite strong in the SMD races: for the president and legislature for sure, and even occasionally in the local city and county executives. Voters don't want to waste their votes on a third-party candidate if it will throw the election to the big party they hate, so third party candidates have to convince people they are running not just to play spoiler but to actually win a three-way race against both of the Big Two. And breaking through in these single-member district elections is hard: there's a discontinuity between being perceived as the likely 2nd-place party and being in 3rd or lower. (The jargon-y political science term for this pattern is the M+1 rule: in any district of magnitude M, there will be at most M+1 viable candidates because most voters will ignore or abandon the rest). 

Put differently, although Taiwan's electoral institutions consistently provide some space for small parties to compete and win a few seats here and there, they do not provide room for more than two big parties -- at least as long as the party system remains highly institutionalized and voting patterns are nationalized. That means that if you lead a small party and hope to stick around in politics for the long term, you have only two choices: (1) join one of the big parties, or (2) replace one with your own. 

Now, with this context in mind, consider again the position of the Taiwan People's Party. The TPP is yet another third party trying to grow into a serious challenger to the Big Two. But since Ko Wen-je founded it in 2019, it has pursued a different strategy from other third parties: it positioned itself as centrist on the China issue, to the point where it adopted aquamarine (neither blue nor green) as its party color. And in addition to playing to the middle on China, it also leaned heavily on Ko's personal appeal to attract votes. 

By historical standards, this strategy worked. In the 2024 elections the party garnered over 20% of the party list vote, eight seats in the LY, and a kingmaker position in the LY for four years. No other party since 2008 has pulled that off. It's an impressive achievement!

And yet, it's not enough. All of the LY seats the TPP holds are via the party list; it didn't win a single district race. For a third-party candidate, Ko Wen-je did remarkably well in the presidential election -- but he still came in third. And now that he is detained indefinitely while he faces corruption charges, the TPP cannot count on Ko to win votes for them in the future and has to find some other way to appeal to the electorate. The party also no longer holds any local executive offices -- in 2022, Ko's preferred successor in Taipei, Huang Shan-shan, came in third behind the KMT's Chiang Wan-an and the DPP's Chen Shih-chung, and the party's one success story that year, Kao Hung-an's upset victory in the mayor's race in Hsinchu City, has effectively been reversed by Kao's subsequent suspension for padding her salary through reimbursements to non-existent staff while she was a legislator; she is likely to be recalled as mayor later this month.

So, despite holding a prime position in the LY right now, the TPP is also facing existential challenges. Can it reinvent itself as something more than the Ko-P party, now that Ko Wen-je is indefinitely sidelined? And if it wants not only to survive but also to thrive, it needs to find a way to displace one of the Big Two in some of the SMD seats. And what's the best strategy for that? Does it remain a free agent, swinging between green and blue depending on the issue, and get squeezed out in the next election (a la James Soong and the PFP)? Does it enter a pre-electoral coalition with one or the other, at the risk of absorption (like the NPP in 2016)? Or is there a third option? 

​I think they've decided on a more ambitious strategy: replacing the KMT. 

​For more on that strategy, see Part 3. 

For the past 18 months, the biggest puzzle in Taiwan politics has been the curious behavior of the Taiwan People's Party (TPP). In the 2024 elections, the TPP did very well for a third party, winning 22 percent of the party list vote and eight seats -- enough to break through the DPP-KMT duopoly to deny either of the two major parties a majority for the first time since the Chen Shui-bian era. That made it the kingmaker in the Legislative Yuan and gave it significant bargaining power over the other two parties in this term -- if they were able to exploit it.

The puzzle is that the TPP does not appear to have maximized its leverage in the current legislature. The party's leaders turned down opportunities to grab the speaker or deputy speaker positions or to negotiate for cabinet positions in a Lai government, and over the last year they have instead prioritized opposition to the DPP administration rather than conditional cooperation with the ruling party. More surprising still, they have publicly aligned themselves with the KMT on many of that party's most controversial policy initiatives -- even when those policies are broadly unpopular. 

This transformation of the TPP in the public eye from a centrist swing party to a "pan-blue subsidiary" has generated a widespread sense of angst and betrayal among pan-green commentators, who have accused the TPP of "subordinat[ing] itself blindly" and "march[ing] in lockstep with the KMT," and even tacitly cooperating with the CCP to oppose the DPP and the Lai administration. The TPP's public image has shifted so dramatically that many observers of Taiwan politics now simply assert that the legislature is "KMT-controlled."

The problem with this assertion is that it's wrong. The TPP legislative caucus is not actually marching in lockstep with the KMT on every issue, as I'll argue in what follows. On the contrary, it holds preferences that are quite distinct from the KMT, it has acted as a significant check on that party's legislative caucus, and its public cooperation with the KMT against the ruling DPP will be temporary and limited, rather than comprehensive and indefinite. But for their own reasons, neither the KMT nor the TPP want to advertise this fact. For the moment, they both would rather have everyone believe they are a unified pan-blue team cooperating to stop DPP overreach.

​No other explanation is consistent with the political outcomes of the last 18 months. 

The Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region held Boom or Bust: Can Taiwan Secure the Energy Supplies It Needs to Meet Its High-Tech Aspirations? on Thursday, April 10, 2025 from 3:30-5:30 pm PT at Shultz Auditorium, George P. Shultz Building.

The prowess of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry puts it at the center of the AI boom. Chips made in Taiwan power most of the leading AI platforms, and its data centers are expanding at a rapid pace, driven by tech giants in cloud computing, AI, and the semiconductor industry. But this boom is also straining Taiwan’s energy supplies: the surge in electricity demand is happening while the transition to zero-carbon sources of energy has fallen behind schedule, and its final nuclear plant is scheduled to be shut down this year. Taiwan also faces a rising military threat from the People’s Republic of China, and its heavy reliance on imported energy supplies is a serious security vulnerability.  
​
This event featured several experts with industry experience discussing these two parallel trends in Taiwan – the rapid AI-driven increases in demand for electricity, and the lagging development of new, more secure sources of carbon-free energy.  

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Peter Wu is the CEO of ASUS Cloud and Taiwan AI Service Corporation. He has led the development of AI Foundry Service (AFS), which advances on-premises AI deployment, cloud-based AI applications, and generative AI ecosystem to implement trust-worthy AI 2.0. In 2013, Dr. Wu represented Taiwan at the WTO Business Forum where he shared ASUS's development experience in cloud services, and he was appointed as a member of the Advisory Committee on Bio Taiwan Committee by Taiwan’s Executive Yuan in 2017 and 2019. In this capacity, he provided guidance and advice on the strategic direction of the biotechnology industry in Taiwan. From 2018 to 2020, he also managed the biggest AI supercomputer project in Taiwan, helping it to achieve its best-ever ranking of 20th in the TOP500. The project was then spun off into Taiwan AI Service Corporation, the first commercial AIHPC supercomputer cloud service provider in the Asia-Pacific. Dr. Wu is actively involved in various organizations and committees, including serving as the chairman of the Taiwan AI Alliance, and holds prominent roles in the fields of Smart Medical, AI, cloud computing, and others. 

Jane Yung-Jen Hsu is a professor and department chair of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Taiwan University. Her research interests include multi-agent systems, intelligent data analysis, commonsense knowledge, and context-aware computing. Prof. Hsu is the director of the Intel-NTU Connected Context Computing Center, featuring global research collaboration among NTU, Intel, and the National Science Council of Taiwan. She is actively involved in many key international AI conferences as organizers and members of the program committee. In addition to serving as the President of Taiwanese Association for Artificial Intelligence (2013-2014), Prof. Hsu has been a member of AAAI, IEEE, ACM, Phi Tau Phi, and an executive committee member of the IEEE Technical Committee on E-Commerce (2000) and TAAI (2004-current).

Li-fu Lin is an adviser to Formosa Heavy Industries. He previously served as the vice chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission – recently renamed the Nuclear Safety Commission – which supervises Taiwan’s nuclear power plants, nuclear facilities, and the use of radioactive material in commercial and research activities. From 2009-2013, he was the program manager of Taiwan’s National Energy Program, leading the National Science and Technology Council’s Clean Coal Projects. He spent more than 30 years as a researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Research, including serving as general manager from 2004-2007. He holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering from University Karlsruhe in Germany. 

​Gwenyth Wang-Reeves is the Engagement Director for GE Vernova in Taiwan. She is responsible for establishing, and driving GE’s advocacy initiatives in Taiwan, engaging with local and central governments and other stakeholders on important public policy challenges, as well as advising the GE businesses on a broad range of regulatory issues. Prior to joining GE Vernova, Gwenyth was the Senior Director of Government and Public Affairs at the American Chamber of Commerce Taiwan. She has also held several senior policy roles at Taiwan’s National Security Council and Presidential Office, as well as the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Taiwan. Gwenyth holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the National Taiwan University, Master’s degrees in Political Communication at the Royal Holloway, and Democracy and Democratisation at the University of London and University College London, as well as a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Warwick.

Vincent Chen, a Taiwan native, is an energy investment and policy specialist with a decade of experience in the private sector. From 2020 to 2023, he served as an investment manager at GSSG Solar, a U.S.-based renewable energy private equity fund, where he led the development of its power generation portfolio in Taiwan. His work included building Taiwan’s first hybrid solar energy and aquaculture project backed by a foreign investor. Before joining GSSG, Vincent led business development and fundraising at Jupiter Intelligence, a climate risk analytics provider, and Lucid Motors, an electric vehicle manufacturer. His research interests encompass power markets, environmental markets, and carbon border adjustments. He holds a master’s degree in international development economics from the Harvard Kennedy School and a bachelor’s degree in environmental economics from Stanford University.

The Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region hosted Trump and Taiwan: A Big, Beautiful Relationship or the Deal Maker’s Ultimate Bargaining Chip? on Tuesday, April 8, 2025 from 4:00-5:15 pm PT at Shultz Auditorium, George P. Shultz Building.

We are only in the first quarter of the first year of President Trump’s second term, but we’ve all already experienced a dizzying pace of activity. Whole federal agencies have been shuttered, some longstanding agency core missions have been upended, and we are suddenly in a trade war with unknown consequences. Ukraine has been dumped, then courted again. Canada is threatened with annexation, Greenland with invasion.

In the midst of this chaotic approach to governance, the U.S. Indo-Pacific policy is still to be defined. There are some disruptions such as new tariffs (though forecasted long ago), and the suspension of development assistance, but one could also cite policy continuity (e.g. AUKUS and the Quad) and a slew of traditional, conventional practices (e.g. leader visits with joint statements and annual military exercises). Yet absent the release of strategic documents such as a national security strategy, and absent a major address by the President or Cabinet official, the overriding feelings in the region are uncertainty and unease.

​This very much includes Taiwan. While Taiwan has pro-actively taken steps to earn the “right” kind of attention of the new U.S. Administration such as announcing major investments in the United States and increases to its defense budget, many critical questions remain. Are we on the cusp of a closer, stronger relationship with Taiwan with enduring commitments, or are we building trade space for President Trump’s next big deal with China? Mr. Schriver will explore these important topics based on his three decades of policy work related to Taiwan and the Indo-pacific, as well as his services as a senior official in the first Trump Administration.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
​
Mr. Randall Schriver is the Chairman of the Board of the Project 2049 Institute and a Partner at Pacific Solutions LLC.  In January 2022, he was appointed as a Commissioner to the U.S. – China Security and Economic Review Commission and currently serves the Commission as the Vice Chairman.  He is also a lecturer for Stanford University’s “Stanford-in-Washington” program, is on the Board of Advisors to the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA, and Board of Directors of the US-Taiwan Business Council.

Mr. Schriver served from 2018-19 as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs. He also served from 2003-05 as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, during which his portfolio included China, Taiwan, Mongolia, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. From 2001 to 2003, he was Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of State. From 1994 to 1998, he worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, including as the senior official responsible for U.S. bilateral relations with the People's Liberation Army and the bilateral security and military relationships with Taiwan.

Prior to his civilian service, he served as an active-duty Navy Intelligence Officer from 1989 to 1991, including a deployment in support of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. After active duty, he served in the Navy Reserves for nine years, including as Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an attaché at U.S. Embassies Beijing and Ulaanbaatar.

The Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region held a Conversation with Representative Alexander Tah-Ray Yui, Taiwan’s Chief Diplomatic Officer in the United States, on Friday, February 28, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. PT.

​Representative Yui assumed his position as the head of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Washington, D.C., in December 2023. He previously served in a similar role as the Representative to the European Union and Belgium. His 35-year career in Taiwan’s Foreign Service has included appointments to posts in New York, San Salvador, and Geneva, and a three-year term as the Ambassador to Paraguay. From 2021-23, he served as Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs.  

On December 20, amid shouting, shoving, fistfights, and broken furniture, Taiwan’s opposition-controlled legislature passed by a show of hands three controversial bills that threaten to kneecap its government. The first raised the threshold to recall elected officials. The second required the Constitutional Court to have a 2/3 quorum to hear constitutional cases and imposed a supermajority threshold to invalidate a law. And the third shifted the central-local revenue-sharing formula to give local governments (mostly KMT-run) 40 percent of all government revenues, up from 25 percent, at the expense of the DPP-run central government.
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Four days later, the same opposition majority in the legislature voted down all seven of President Lai’s nominees to the Constitutional Court, leaving it with only eight justices and unable to meet the new quorum requirement for hearing a case. It is now effectively paralyzed. The DPP government has nevertheless requested that the court meet and rule anyway on whether the amendments to the Constitutional Court Act are themselves unconstitutional. This increasingly destructive partisan political conflict has put Taiwan on the brink of a constitutional crisis with no obvious way to resolve it. 

This confrontation is also taking place in a democracy that Freedom House last year ranked as the second-best in Asia, behind only Japan, and significantly above the United States and most of Europe. Taiwan's political system has proven remarkably resilient to PRC influence operations over many years, and it has a capable and effective state and vibrant economy despite its diplomatic isolation. So why is it facing a political crisis now?

​The simplest answer is divided government. For the first time in 16 years (and only the second time in its democratic history), Taiwan's legislative and executive branches are controlled by different parties: the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People's Party (TPP) together hold a majority in the Legislative Yuan, and they are locked in a fierce power struggle with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government.  

This conflict was not inevitable. In the January 2024 presidential and legislative elections, the DPP's Lai Ching-te (賴清德) won the presidential election but with only 40% of the vote, and the DPP lost its majority in the legislature. The KMT ended up with 52 seats (plus two blue-leaning independents), the DPP won 51, and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je's (柯文哲) centrist TPP won eight (all via the party list vote). That left no party with a majority and made the TPP the crucial swing voting bloc in the LY. In theory, the TPP could have exploited that leverage to extract significant concessions from the ruling DPP -- on policy, legislative leadership, or cabinet positions. But instead, negotiations between the DPP and TPP went nowhere, and President Lai missed his chance to head off the last year of partisan warfare.   

The formation of battle lines first became apparent on February 1, when the new legislature was seated. Its first order of business was to elect a speaker and deputy speaker. Curiously, the TPP  ultimately decided not to support either of the major party nominees -- the party's eight legislators voted for TPP member Huang Shan-shan (黃珊珊) in the first round, and abstained in the second.  As a result, the KMT's Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) won the speaker's race, and KMT legislator Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) was elected as his deputy. Despite providing crucial help to the KMT, the TPP did not manage to win even the deputy speaker as the price for their support. Nor did they strike a deal with the DPP, either, although that should have secured at least one of the leadership positions for the party. Given that the TPP held the crucial votes that could have denied control of the legislature to either major party, this outcome seems like a major missed opportunity for both them and the DPP. 

I've heard competing explanations for this bargaining failure. One story is that the refusal came from the DPP side -- ruling party legislators were engaged in quiet conversations with the TPP about a possible power-sharing deal, but Lai Ching-te intervened to stop the negotiations. Reporting at the time suggested that the TPP's price for cooperation in the run-up to February 1 was for the DPP to support Huang Shan-shan for speaker -- a price the DPP was apparently not willing to pay, but which in hindsight they probably should have. That interpretation is also consistent with the public comments offered by party caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) that "A DPP-TPP partnership is only possible if the TPP voluntarily comes to us."​So maybe this was a strategic mistake by the DPP caucus (and ultimately, Lai himself), and they are suffering the consequences. 

But another possibility is that the TPP was just never seriously interested in cooperating with the DPP no matter what they offered -- even before  Ko Wen-je's detention in a corruption investigation several months later turbocharged the TPP's animosity toward the DPP government. Although the KMT-TPP negotiations for a joint presidential ticket broke down in spectacular public fashion in November 2023, the two parties did still enter into a pre-election coalition for the legislative races and even campaigned together, so perhaps TPP leaders had already made up their minds to team up with the KMT after the elections, too, and there really was no chance the DPP could have enticed them to defect.  

Whatever the reason, ever since the new legislature was seated on February 1, the TPP has consistently chosen to act as the KMT's junior partner and supported the opposition party's confrontational approach to the DPP government. And as the partisan divide has hardened, it has also transformed into an inter-branch conflict between the KMT-TPP majority in the legislature and the DPP in the executive. The partisan maneuvering that has followed has escalated over the last year to a level of open political warfare that is posing a severe test for Taiwan's democratic institutions. And it is a test they are failing.

The Hoover Institution Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and the Program on the US, China, and the World invite you to Guardians of Economic Sovereignty: How Taiwan and Singapore Navigate Chinese Capital Through National Security Review.

This event is free and open to the public. It will be held at the Hoover Institution in HHMB 160 on Wednesday, January 16 from 4:00-5:15pm. Register to attend in person or virtually. 

Professor Chen will discuss two distinct strategies for scrutinizing outbound investment from China, as adopted by Taiwan and Singapore—both key trade partners of China. Growing concerns over Chinese investment have led to stricter national security reviews worldwide, yet the actual enforcement of these reviews remains understudied, particularly outside the U.S. context. He contrasts Singapore's reliance on ex post monitoring with Taiwan's emphasis on ex ante screening. Additionally, he highlights how Singapore leverages privatized monitoring to reinforce investment scrutiny, while Taiwan incorporates elements of private enforcement. The discussion underscores the importance of utilizing market intermediaries as enforcement agents, serving as a crucial supplement to the traditional framework of national security reviews. Both cases demonstrate how the private sector can take a proactive role in enforcing national security reviews.

Speaker Bio
Weitseng Chen is a faculty member at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law, specializing in law and economic development, law and politics, and legal history in the context of Greater China. He has recently published several books, including Regime Type and Beyond: The Transformation of Police in Asia (CUP, 2023), Authoritarian Legality in Asia: Formation, Development and Transition (CUP, 2019), The Beijing Consensus? How China Has Changed the Western Ideas of Law and Economic Development (CUP, 2017), Property and Trust Law: Taiwan (with Yun-Chien Chang & Y. J. Wu, Kluwer, 2017), and Law and Economic Miracle: Interaction Between Taiwan’s Development and Economic Laws After WWII (in Chinese, 2000). Weitseng Chen earned his JSD from Yale Law School. Prior to joining NUS, he served as a Hewlett Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and practiced as a corporate lawyer in the Greater China region with Davis Polk & Wardwell.

The Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region  and the Stanford Taiwan Science and Technology Hub held Enhancing Energy Security in a Time of Rapid Change: Perspectives from the US and Taiwan on Wednesday, November 13th, 2024 from 4:45 pm - 7:15 pm PT.

Over the next decade, the world will face a major energy challenge. Most of the world’s advanced economies are trying to manage a transition to net-zero emissions at the same time that electricity demand is projected to surge. In particular, the recent emergence of artificial intelligence as a rapid growth industry, and its associated electricity-hungry data centers, has led many tech companies to secure long-term carbon-free sources of electricity for their activities – including nuclear power.
In this event, we will hear from people in the energy and technology fields in both the US and Taiwan about how the surge in AI-related electricity demand – and the related impacts on semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan – is affecting energy security in both countries. We especially want to call attention to the way that new technologies may require changes in the planned transition to zero-carbon energy sources.
 
This event was hosted online and live-streamed to the public. It is co-sponsored with the Stanford Taiwan Science and Technology Hub.

Featuring
Paul Dabbar, CEO, Bohr Quantum Technology
Jared Dunnmon, Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives, Defense Innovation Unit
Jennifer Huffstetler, Chief Product Sustainability Officer and VP/GM of
Intel Future Platform Strategy and Sustainability
Gwenyth Wang-Reeves, Engagement Director, GE Taiwan
Kuor-hsin Chang, Independent Board Member, Sentelic, Inc. 
Tsaiying Lu, Research Fellow, Research Institute for Democracy, Society,
and Emerging Technology 

The Stanford Global Digital Policy Incubator, the Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region, the Research Institute for Democracy, Society, and Emerging Technology (DSET), and the Taiwan Science and Technology Hub invite you to an engaging discussion on generative artificial intelligence and democracy. Join us on Tuesday, October 29, 2024, from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM (Pacific) in the Philippines Conference Room at Encina Hall. DSET is a think tank established in 2023 under the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) of Taiwan. Its future-oriented vision of science and technology policies aim to safeguard democratic values.

During this event, Dr. Kai-Shen Huang, Research Fellow at DSET, will launch their new report, "GenAI and Democracy: AI-Driven Disinformation in Taiwan’s 2024 Presidential Election and Lessons for the World." Dr. Huang will discuss Taiwan's experience using regulation to counter disinformation and he will offer technical solutions available to other democratic societies. Following the report presentation, a panel of experts from the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and the Hoover Institution will provide feedback and share their thoughts on the future of AI development and regulations globally.

Opening Remarks  
Larry Diamond,  Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Mosbacher Senior Fellow of Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

Introduction
Jeremy Chang, Research Fellow & CEO, DSET

Report Presentation
Kai-Shen Huang, Research Fellow, DSET

Panel Discussion - Generative AI, regulation, and its impacts globally

Panelists
Kai-Shen Huang, Research Fellow, DSET
Florence G’Sell, Visiting Professor, CPC
Sergey Sanovich, Hoover Fellow
Margaret Tu, University of Washington

Moderator
Charles Mok, Research Scholar, GDPi

Participant Bios

Charles Mok is a Research Scholar at the Global Digital Policy Incubator of the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society, and a board member of the International Centre for Trade Transparency and Monitoring. Charles served as an elected member of the Legislative Council in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, representing the Information Technology functional constituency, for two terms from 2012 to 2020. In 2021, he founded Tech for Good Asia, an initiative to advocate positive use of technology for businesses and civil communities.

Kai-Shen Huang graduated from the University of Oxford and National Taiwan University, possessing interdisciplinary training in both anthropology and law. His research expertise includes China’s critical technology policies, the application of artificial intelligence in dispute resolution and public administration, and legal anthropology.

Florence G’sell is a visiting professor of private law at the Cyber Policy Center, where she leads the Program on Governance of Emerging Technologies. She also holds the Digital, Governance, and Sovereignty Chair at Sciences Po (France) and is a professor of private law at the University of Lorraine (currently on leave). G’sell began her academic career focusing on tort law, judicial systems, and comparative law. In recent years, her work has concentrated on digital law, particularly in the regulation of online platforms, the legal challenges posed by emerging technologies such as blockchain and the metaverse, and the concept of digital sovereignty.

Sergey Sanovich is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Before joining the Hoover Institution, Sergey Sanovich was a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. Sanovich received his PhD in political science from New York University and continues his affiliation with its Center for Social Media and Politics. His research is focused on disinformation and social media platform governance; online censorship and propaganda by authoritarian regimes; and elections and partisanship in information autocracies. 
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Margaret Tu also known as Nikal Kabala'an, hailing from Taiwan's Indigenous communities, is a dynamic young leader with a passion for interdisciplinary pursuits. She actively engages in Indigenous self-determination and decolonization, contributing to social justice movements and curating exhibitions at prestigious institutions like the Burke Museum and the Tateuchi East Asia Library. Margaret is an accomplished legal researcher with expertise in Intellectual Property laws and a keen interest in technology-related policies, including Artificial Intelligence and Data Governance.