This essay ran in the National Taiwan Normal University International Taiwan Studies Center newsletter in November 2021.
National Taiwan Normal University International Taiwan Studies Center
Email Newsletter November 2021 (Vol. 0 Issue 2)
Kharis Templeman
Kharis Templeman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and part of the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific. Templeman is a political scientist (Ph.D. 2012, Michigan) with research interests in Taiwan politics, democratization, elections and election management, party system development, dominant party systems, and politics and security issues in Pacific Asia, among other topics. From 2016-18, he was the coordinator of the Conference Group on Taiwan Studies (CGOTS), a Related Group of the American Political Science Association.
Email Newsletter November 2021 (Vol. 0 Issue 2)
Kharis Templeman
Kharis Templeman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and part of the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific. Templeman is a political scientist (Ph.D. 2012, Michigan) with research interests in Taiwan politics, democratization, elections and election management, party system development, dominant party systems, and politics and security issues in Pacific Asia, among other topics. From 2016-18, he was the coordinator of the Conference Group on Taiwan Studies (CGOTS), a Related Group of the American Political Science Association.
Golden Age of Taiwan Studies in the US
The founding of the Taiwan Studies Center at National Taiwan Normal University is an encouraging sign that Taiwan studies is maturing into a respectable academic subfield. Presently, Taiwan Studies not only has its own centers, but also topics of inquiry, a flagship journal, and even degree programs. For those of us who specialize in the study of Taiwan as a place, a people, and a distinct political, economic, social, and cultural system, it feels like a golden age.
The Decline and Resurgence of Taiwan Studies in the United States
But things looked very different not too long ago. I started tracking other Taiwan programs in 2013, when I first joined the Taiwan Democracy Project at Stanford as a research fellow. At the time, I found a lot of signs Taiwan studies was in long-term decline, at least in the United States. The websites of other Taiwan programs around the country were littered with broken links and descriptions of initiatives that had already concluded, centers that were no longer active, and events that had happened years in the past. In addition to the Taiwan Democracy Project at Stanford, there were only a handful of other programs that remained truly active and visible to an outside audience: the Harvard’s Fairbanks Taiwan Studies workshop, the UC Santa Barbara Center for Taiwan Studies, George Washington University’s Taiwan Education and Research Program, and the Brookings Institution’s Taiwan programming. The number of faculty who had expertise on Taiwan also appeared to be shrinking year by year, and the number of courses offered had dropped significantly since the heydays of the 1990s.
The picture among disciplinary associations was not any better. The American Political Science Association’s (APSA) annual conference, the most prominent event in my own discipline, featured no more than a dozen presentations on Taiwan in 2014—and that number far exceeded those presented in the annual North American history, sociology, and anthropology conferences. More alarming, there were almost no papers on Taiwan presented at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual conference in 2014, or published in the association’s flagship Journal of Asian Studies. The only disciplinary group that seemed to be going strong was the North American Taiwan Studies Association(NATSA), but as a graduate student-run forum, it was not well-placed to strengthen the position of Taiwan studies at academic institutions. At that time, Taiwan studies did not appear to be a promising field to try to make one’s career in.
Sources of the Decline
The decline of Taiwan studies in the United States had at least three major causes. One was the overreliance on funding from the Taiwan government. The main funders of Taiwan programs have long been the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Education, and (later) the Ministry of Culture, supplemented in some cases by grants from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. Government funding for projects was distributed through the individual Taiwan consulates throughout the United States, with each providing some support for one or two programs in its geographic area. This funding model had the effect of spreading resources that were already limited too thinly, and it gave priority to short-term projects (events, exhibitions, courses, workshops, and so forth) that could be completed in one academic year over longer term objectives. In some cases, private money supplemented these initiatives, but too often these donations went to endow positions without much strategic thought, and were ultimately captured by other university interests. (In one particularly egregious example, the Taiwan government endowed four chairs at Stanford in the early 1990s to honor the postwar economic planner K.T. Li (李國鼎): one each in medicine, engineering, Chinese literature, and economic development. Today, none are held by an expert on Taiwan.)
Another structural problem was generational change among U.S. China scholars. The tenured faculty who received their doctorates prior to the 1980s typically had spent a lot of time in Taiwan for language study, even if they subsequently went on to specialize in something else—and many retained an interest in Taiwan for the rest of their careers. At a minimum, they could serve as faculty leaders for Taiwan programs and offer classes on Taiwan that were supported by government grants. But as these professors retired, the younger China studies faculty hired to replace them usually had a much different profile: they had done field work in the People’s Republic of China, many were PRC nationals, and few had expertise or interest in continuing programs on Taiwan. This infusion of new talent was beneficial to Chinese studies as a whole, but it further marginalized the study of Taiwan in the U.S. academy.
A third cause of the decline was politics. Beginning in 2008, the Ma Ying-jeou administration sought to return to the earlier framing of Taiwan studies as a subset of Chinese studies. In programs such as the Taiwan Academy, it marketed Taiwan as a repository of “traditional Chinese culture” and prioritized programs that fit with its embrace of the Republic of China identity and cross-Strait rapprochement. In the United States, too, interest in Taiwan receded among policymakers. U.S. government and academic attention has long been determined by concerns about Taiwan’s geopolitical position, and in the 2010s it looked like Taiwan would be ever less relevant to U.S.-China relations in the future. Policy programs and DC think tanks moved on to other more pressing issues, and expertise and interest in Taiwan faded.
An Unexpected Resurgence
However, even as I was bemoaning the state of affairs in the U.S., all of these trends reversed. For one, in Europe, the picture was quite different, as Dafydd Fell, the director of the preeminent center outside of Taiwan, noted in 2017. Interest in Taiwan there had never been as conditional on geopolitics as in the United States, and both resources and expertise increased more or less organically over the 2010s. Major milestones included the founding of the European Association for Taiwan Studies (EATS), the first World Congress for Taiwan Studies (hosted in London at SOAS in 2015), and the creation of a new journal dedicated to the field, the International Journal of Taiwan Studies. Thus, the center of gravity of the field shifted from North America to Europe over this decade.
The rising geopolitical competition between the United States and PRC also pushed cross-Strait issues to the top of many foreign policy concerns in Washington, which again raised Taiwan’s profile. Rather suddenly, Taiwan expertise that a decade ago was dismissed as too unimportant or esoteric to be worth supporting has now come into great demand in the U.S. While it is unfortunate that perceptions of the PRC threat to Taiwan are driving much of this new interest, it is nevertheless a welcome shift.
Taiwan studies has also benefited from the deepening crackdown on academic exchange and people-to-people ties within the PRC. In a pattern reminiscent of the 1970s or right after Tiananmen Square in 1989, Taiwan has again become a hot destination for researchers and students unable, or unwilling, to pursue their work in the PRC—and, tragically, now even in Hong Kong.
These structural factors have led to a real resurgence of interest in Taiwan studies in the United States, helped along by some astute shifts in programing and funding patterns from the Tsai Ing-wen administration. Private donors have stepped up in recent years to fund new Taiwan positions at the University of Washington, UC San Diego, and the RAND Corporation, providing badly needed support for the sort of tenure-track faculty lines that are essential to sustain academic careers and programs over the long term. The Taiwan government also supplemented its annual funding with new grants large enough to endow and expand Taiwan studies programs at several universities including Harvard, UCLA, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Washington.
A Healthy Present, But an Uncertain Future
These new initiatives have elevated Taiwan studies to a place of prominence that it has not enjoyed since the 1990s, if ever. For instance, Taiwan is again a hot topic at the APSA annual conference—this year Taiwan was featured in ten full panels of research presentations, up from just one in 2014. There is now so much academic work coming out of the Taiwan Studies Centre at SOAS, including a remarkable array of new books in the Routledge Taiwan series, that it is hard to keep up with it all. The IJTS is putting out strong issues featuring an amazing breadth of cross-disciplinary work. And the World Congress of Taiwan Studies is set to meet again in 2022 for the fourth time at, fittingly, one of the newest up-and-comers of all the Taiwan programs, at the University of Washington in Seattle.
All this points to a healthy and exciting present for those interested in Taiwan studies. But as the previous period of stagnation and decline suggests, the long-term future of the field remains uncertain. Shifts in domestic politics, geopolitics, and funding streams could again rapidly undercut much of the gains of the last decade. Another weakness remains, too: the development of Taiwan studies in North America and Europe has been too detached from developments inside Taiwan. The bulk of expertise and talent in the field rightly rests in Taiwanese academic institutions—but cross-institutional and cross-national collaboration between Taiwan studies programs and scholars does not happen nearly as much as it should. There are tremendous advantages to be gained from research collaboration, co-authorship, and joint events.
My hope is that this becomes a point of emphasis in both old programs, such as my own at Stanford, and new ones such as NTNU’s Taiwan Studies Center. With the inauguration of this newsletter, we are off to a good start.
The Decline and Resurgence of Taiwan Studies in the United States
But things looked very different not too long ago. I started tracking other Taiwan programs in 2013, when I first joined the Taiwan Democracy Project at Stanford as a research fellow. At the time, I found a lot of signs Taiwan studies was in long-term decline, at least in the United States. The websites of other Taiwan programs around the country were littered with broken links and descriptions of initiatives that had already concluded, centers that were no longer active, and events that had happened years in the past. In addition to the Taiwan Democracy Project at Stanford, there were only a handful of other programs that remained truly active and visible to an outside audience: the Harvard’s Fairbanks Taiwan Studies workshop, the UC Santa Barbara Center for Taiwan Studies, George Washington University’s Taiwan Education and Research Program, and the Brookings Institution’s Taiwan programming. The number of faculty who had expertise on Taiwan also appeared to be shrinking year by year, and the number of courses offered had dropped significantly since the heydays of the 1990s.
The picture among disciplinary associations was not any better. The American Political Science Association’s (APSA) annual conference, the most prominent event in my own discipline, featured no more than a dozen presentations on Taiwan in 2014—and that number far exceeded those presented in the annual North American history, sociology, and anthropology conferences. More alarming, there were almost no papers on Taiwan presented at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual conference in 2014, or published in the association’s flagship Journal of Asian Studies. The only disciplinary group that seemed to be going strong was the North American Taiwan Studies Association(NATSA), but as a graduate student-run forum, it was not well-placed to strengthen the position of Taiwan studies at academic institutions. At that time, Taiwan studies did not appear to be a promising field to try to make one’s career in.
Sources of the Decline
The decline of Taiwan studies in the United States had at least three major causes. One was the overreliance on funding from the Taiwan government. The main funders of Taiwan programs have long been the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Education, and (later) the Ministry of Culture, supplemented in some cases by grants from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. Government funding for projects was distributed through the individual Taiwan consulates throughout the United States, with each providing some support for one or two programs in its geographic area. This funding model had the effect of spreading resources that were already limited too thinly, and it gave priority to short-term projects (events, exhibitions, courses, workshops, and so forth) that could be completed in one academic year over longer term objectives. In some cases, private money supplemented these initiatives, but too often these donations went to endow positions without much strategic thought, and were ultimately captured by other university interests. (In one particularly egregious example, the Taiwan government endowed four chairs at Stanford in the early 1990s to honor the postwar economic planner K.T. Li (李國鼎): one each in medicine, engineering, Chinese literature, and economic development. Today, none are held by an expert on Taiwan.)
Another structural problem was generational change among U.S. China scholars. The tenured faculty who received their doctorates prior to the 1980s typically had spent a lot of time in Taiwan for language study, even if they subsequently went on to specialize in something else—and many retained an interest in Taiwan for the rest of their careers. At a minimum, they could serve as faculty leaders for Taiwan programs and offer classes on Taiwan that were supported by government grants. But as these professors retired, the younger China studies faculty hired to replace them usually had a much different profile: they had done field work in the People’s Republic of China, many were PRC nationals, and few had expertise or interest in continuing programs on Taiwan. This infusion of new talent was beneficial to Chinese studies as a whole, but it further marginalized the study of Taiwan in the U.S. academy.
A third cause of the decline was politics. Beginning in 2008, the Ma Ying-jeou administration sought to return to the earlier framing of Taiwan studies as a subset of Chinese studies. In programs such as the Taiwan Academy, it marketed Taiwan as a repository of “traditional Chinese culture” and prioritized programs that fit with its embrace of the Republic of China identity and cross-Strait rapprochement. In the United States, too, interest in Taiwan receded among policymakers. U.S. government and academic attention has long been determined by concerns about Taiwan’s geopolitical position, and in the 2010s it looked like Taiwan would be ever less relevant to U.S.-China relations in the future. Policy programs and DC think tanks moved on to other more pressing issues, and expertise and interest in Taiwan faded.
An Unexpected Resurgence
However, even as I was bemoaning the state of affairs in the U.S., all of these trends reversed. For one, in Europe, the picture was quite different, as Dafydd Fell, the director of the preeminent center outside of Taiwan, noted in 2017. Interest in Taiwan there had never been as conditional on geopolitics as in the United States, and both resources and expertise increased more or less organically over the 2010s. Major milestones included the founding of the European Association for Taiwan Studies (EATS), the first World Congress for Taiwan Studies (hosted in London at SOAS in 2015), and the creation of a new journal dedicated to the field, the International Journal of Taiwan Studies. Thus, the center of gravity of the field shifted from North America to Europe over this decade.
The rising geopolitical competition between the United States and PRC also pushed cross-Strait issues to the top of many foreign policy concerns in Washington, which again raised Taiwan’s profile. Rather suddenly, Taiwan expertise that a decade ago was dismissed as too unimportant or esoteric to be worth supporting has now come into great demand in the U.S. While it is unfortunate that perceptions of the PRC threat to Taiwan are driving much of this new interest, it is nevertheless a welcome shift.
Taiwan studies has also benefited from the deepening crackdown on academic exchange and people-to-people ties within the PRC. In a pattern reminiscent of the 1970s or right after Tiananmen Square in 1989, Taiwan has again become a hot destination for researchers and students unable, or unwilling, to pursue their work in the PRC—and, tragically, now even in Hong Kong.
These structural factors have led to a real resurgence of interest in Taiwan studies in the United States, helped along by some astute shifts in programing and funding patterns from the Tsai Ing-wen administration. Private donors have stepped up in recent years to fund new Taiwan positions at the University of Washington, UC San Diego, and the RAND Corporation, providing badly needed support for the sort of tenure-track faculty lines that are essential to sustain academic careers and programs over the long term. The Taiwan government also supplemented its annual funding with new grants large enough to endow and expand Taiwan studies programs at several universities including Harvard, UCLA, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Washington.
A Healthy Present, But an Uncertain Future
These new initiatives have elevated Taiwan studies to a place of prominence that it has not enjoyed since the 1990s, if ever. For instance, Taiwan is again a hot topic at the APSA annual conference—this year Taiwan was featured in ten full panels of research presentations, up from just one in 2014. There is now so much academic work coming out of the Taiwan Studies Centre at SOAS, including a remarkable array of new books in the Routledge Taiwan series, that it is hard to keep up with it all. The IJTS is putting out strong issues featuring an amazing breadth of cross-disciplinary work. And the World Congress of Taiwan Studies is set to meet again in 2022 for the fourth time at, fittingly, one of the newest up-and-comers of all the Taiwan programs, at the University of Washington in Seattle.
All this points to a healthy and exciting present for those interested in Taiwan studies. But as the previous period of stagnation and decline suggests, the long-term future of the field remains uncertain. Shifts in domestic politics, geopolitics, and funding streams could again rapidly undercut much of the gains of the last decade. Another weakness remains, too: the development of Taiwan studies in North America and Europe has been too detached from developments inside Taiwan. The bulk of expertise and talent in the field rightly rests in Taiwanese academic institutions—but cross-institutional and cross-national collaboration between Taiwan studies programs and scholars does not happen nearly as much as it should. There are tremendous advantages to be gained from research collaboration, co-authorship, and joint events.
My hope is that this becomes a point of emphasis in both old programs, such as my own at Stanford, and new ones such as NTNU’s Taiwan Studies Center. With the inauguration of this newsletter, we are off to a good start.
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