This coming week is the 4th World Congress of Taiwan Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle campus. WCTS is the seminal gathering of academics and practitioners working in the Taiwan studies field. The first meeting was in 2012 in Taipei at Academia Sinica, the second in 2015 in London, and the third also at Academia Sinica in 2018. This meeting has been delayed a year because of the COVID pandemic -- well worth the wait, however, because we actually get to do this in person. For many of us this will be the first time seeing each other in almost three years. 

On Monday, June 27 I'm going to be presenting a new paper at the WCTS that attempts to evaluate the quality of democracy in Taiwan. The initial inspiration for this research was a talk that Larry Diamond gave in 2001, which provides a very useful snapshot of Taiwan's democratic strengths and weaknesses. Diamond highlighted five problem areas: 

1. Political corruption and "black gold" (黑金) politics
2. Weak rule of law, including insufficient judicial independence and professionalism and widespread distrust of the courts
3. Growing partisan polarization, especially around national identity (Taiwanese vs Chinese) and ethnicity (benshengren vs waishengren)
4. Constitutional defects, including ambiguity over whether Taiwan is a presidential or semi-presidential system, and a problematic electoral system (SNTV).
5. Weak support for democratic values among the mass public. 

Twenty years later, it is fascinating to look back on this catalog of serious problems and consider how much things have changed, often in ways that are imperceptible or under-appreciated by Taiwanese themselves. In the paper, I make the case that Taiwan's political system has undergone significant improvements in all five of these areas. I won't repeat here the qualitative evidence -- see the paper for that -- but I will post a few figures that I found to be especially interesting.  

Comparative Indices
Here's the ranking and score for four prominent democracy indices used to rank overall quality of liberal democracy: 

• Freedom House: Taiwan is 94/100, tied for 19th with Chile and Germany
• Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index: 8.99/10, 8th. 
• Bertelsmann Transformation Index, 9.60/10, 3rd (of 137 non-OECD countries)
• Varieties of Democracy Liberal Democracy Index, 0.7/1, 32rd. 

All four of these score Taiwan as a full liberal democracy, and all four record improvements over the last decade. 

V-Dem is noticeably more negative than the other three on Taiwan (and much more positive on South Korea, for reasons that aren't clear to me.) So keep that in mind as we look at some of the V-Dem indicators below -- if there's systematic bias in the V-Dem estimates, they're probably too low rather than too high. 

Political Corruption and Black Gold Politics
Here's the Varieties of Democracy indicator for vote-buying, 1969-2021, which shows some real improvement after  2015. 

And here's V-Dem's political corruption score over the same time period. Almost imperceptible changes up to 2014, followed by real declines in corruption. 

Political Polarization
Finally, here's V-Dem's political polarization measure. The trend here is counter-intuitive -- it shows the Chen Shui-bian era as not particularly polarized, and significantly less than the previous Lee Teng-hui era, followed by a further decline in polarization until 2013, then significant increases since then. 

This looks weird to me -- I've long thought the CSB era was the peak for polarization, and that it has declined since then -- but that's what the data show. 

I've put two other countries on here for reference -- compared to South Korea and the United States, Taiwan doesn't look especially polarized at any point in the last 20 years. So despite the increases on this indicator in recent years, political polarization doesn't look like the fundamental threat to democracy that Diamond worried it might be back in 2001. 

What's It All Mean?
The paper has a lot more, but summarizing: 

• Comparative indices generally show Taiwan to be a high-quality liberal democracy, and one that has registered important improvements since 2015. 
• Since 2001, Taiwan has made significant progress in Diamond's five problem areas. 
• The remaining weaknesses -- e.g. media sensationalism, distrust of judiciary, "direct democracy" agenda gone haywire -- are not especially unique to Taiwan and don't (so far) threaten the integrity of the democratic system. 
• The biggest threat to democracy in Taiwan now comes from the People's Republic of China across the Strait, including CCP-backed influence campaigns. 

Finally, this paper was inspired partly by accusations coming from some quarters in Taiwan that it is now an "illiberal democracy" or "electoral autocracy" under President Tsai Ing-wen and the ruling DPP. I wrote a blog post last December rebutting some of these accusations; this paper builds on the data and arguments there. The conclusion is the same: you really have to stretch to argue that Taiwan is in democratic decline. Most of the data point in the other direction: Taiwan's democratic system has addressed many of its most serious weaknesses since 2001, and even since 2015.  

On behalf of The Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region (PTIP) and its National Security Task Force, the Hoover Institution invites you to Taiwanese at the UN: The Use and Abuse of UN Resolution 2758​ on Tuesday, May 31, 2022 from 11:30am-12:45pm PDT. 

In 1971, UN Resolution 2758 granted the seat occupied by the Republic of China in the General Assembly and the Security Council to the People's Republic of China (PRC). In recent years, the PRC has attempted to reinterpret this resolution as an endorsement of its "One China Principle," and it has promoted the fallacy that UN member states came to a determination that Taiwan was a part of the PRC. Yet, as the historical official records show, member states made no such determination about Taiwan's international status.

This effort around Resolution 2758 is part of a broader campaign by the PRC to expand its influence in UN-affiliated bodies. Taiwan remains the foremost target of this campaign. Since 2016, at Beijing's behest, Taiwanese representatives have been blocked from participating even as observers in international organizations such as the World Health Assembly (WHA) and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The PRC has institutionalized and normalized its stance on Taiwan within these organizations by signing secret agreements, restricting the access of Taiwan nationals to the UN and its facilities, and embedding PRC nationals across various levels of UN staff. The UN and its specialized agencies have not made the texts of these agreements available to the public or to any entity beyond the main signatories, though leaked guidance memos provide insights into the scope of MOU contents.
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In this event, Jessica Drun will discuss Beijing’s efforts to “internationalize” its “One China Principle" and to conflate it with UN Resolution 2758. Her remarks will draw on a recent report, co-authored with Bonnie Glaser of the German Marshall Fund, that documents Beijing’s expanding influence in UN-linked organizations. She will be joined by Chih-Fu Yeh, a PhD candidate in biology at Stanford University, who in December 2020 was improperly barred from joining a UNESCO-backed winter school session because of his Taiwanese nationality. Mr. Yeh will describe his own experience and highlight how overly strict interpretations of UN regulations and guidelines continue to impose real costs on Taiwanese citizens.

In 2020, 93 percent of the energy consumed in Taiwan came from imported fossil fuels: oil, coal, and liquid natural gas. Taiwan’s government is also phasing out nuclear power, with the last nuclear generation unit scheduled to be shut down in 2025. This overwhelming reliance on imports is at odds with Taiwan’s pledges to reduce its carbon emissions to net-zero by 2050. It also presents a serious security vulnerability: a prolonged disruption of energy supplies could quickly bring Taiwan’s economy to a halt, including its strategically important semiconductor industry.

In this event, three experts on Taiwan’s energy policies will discuss Taiwan’s changing energy mix, its ambitious plans for developing renewable energy sources and lessening dependence on imports, and how Taiwan’s exclusion from important international energy bodies such as the International Energy Agency adds to its energy security challenges.

I note in my review several things that make Taiwan's human rights regime unusual.

First, because of its diplomatic isolation, Taiwan isn't party to the key UN human rights conventions and treaties, but despite (because?) of that isolation, international law has been especially influential in the transformation of the human rights regime. For instance, in 2009 (when the KMT was the ruling party), the Legislative Yuan adopted into domestic law the two major human rights covenants, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and empowered Taiwan's courts to nullify other legal statutes inconsistent with provisions in the two treaties. Several chapters also focus on the efforts to turn the Control Yuan into a human rights commission or ombudsman that would give it a role more in line with international practices in other liberal democracies.

Second, Taiwan's legal system still rests on the foundations of the 1947 Republic of China constitution. In a rather odd twist, the protections for human rights enshrined there were actually quite advanced for its time, and that has helped to strengthen civil liberties in the democratic era. In particular, the survival of the ROC constitutional framework gave the constitutional court an outsized role in shaping the pace and direction of human rights reforms: in the 1990s, the court began to breathe life into constitutional aspirations that went mostly unfulfilled during the pre-democratic era and set legal practices and protections on a more liberal trajectory.

Third, Taiwan's current legal system is a remarkable mix of at least three very different traditions:  Chinese Confucianism; European continental law (much of that itself first refracted through Japanese practice before coming to the ROC, or directly to Taiwan during colonial rule); and Anglo-American practices, most notably in the applications of US First Amendment jurisprudence to libel and free-speech cases. It is a truly unique concoction of influences, and as a result it is fascinating to watch debates over legal reforms play out there now.  

I came away from this book convinced that in addition to the economic and political "miracles" that get most of the attention in scholarship on Taiwan's ROC-era transformation, there is also a human rights miracle that deserves separate consideration. Taiwan and Human Rights will be an important reference for anyone interested in Taiwan's evolution from a serial violator of human rights to one of its most enthusiastic proponents. ​

​​In an editorial that came out on December 9 in Taiwan's United Daily News, former President Ma Ying-jeou called Taiwan an "illiberal democracy," blamed President Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP for taking actions that undermine freedom and the rule of law, and laid out a long list of complaints. ​(English version here).

Before I get into the rest of this, let me just say up front: no, Taiwan is not an illiberal democracy. It's as liberal, robust, and resilient as any of the Third Wave cases, and it's made major strides over the last 20 years in addressing some of its remaining democratic shortcomings, from strengthening the rights of criminal defendants to reducing the prevalence of vote-buying in elections. Ma has been hammering away at this theme for at least three years now (for instance, see here, here, here, and here), but his evidence of a DPP turn toward illiberalism in Taiwan has always been exceptionally weak, and until now I've considered this claim to be partisan political rhetoric intended solely for a domestic audience and not worth taking seriously.

​Taiwan at the Summit for Democracy
But this time is different. The Biden administration just hosted its Summit for Democracy, which has helped intensify an international debate about what democracy is, how it should be strengthened, and which countries are falling short of the democratic ideal. Taiwan got invited to the summit, and a Taiwan official, Audrey Tang, was given a prime speaking slot to talk about digital democracy. (Beijing of course did not get invited and is pretty salty about the whole thing.) The timing of this op-ed, and the fact that Ma's office has translated it into English, suggests he really does want to tap into this debate and attract the attention of a foreign audience.  

In that context, Ma's latest piece really sticks in my craw. He's asserting that the DPP government has "abandoned 'democracy' in favor of 'illiberal democracy'" and isn't a "worthy participant" in the Summit for Democracy. And yet, by most comparative measures, Taiwan's democracy is at or near the best shape it ever has been in. It has a freewheeling media ecosystem with many outlets that are highly critical of the government, frequent public demonstrations, broad protection for academic freedom and speech, and a judiciary that is far more independent of partisan politics than those in Korea, Malaysia, or Singapore. The Tsai Ing-wen administration's behavior in office is worlds apart from the illiberal tendencies of governments in Hungary or Turkey or the Philippines: nobody in Taiwan is shutting down universities or imprisoning journalists or murdering civil society activists, and that's something to celebrate, not pick at. 

I have a lot of respect for former president Ma, and I think a lot of what he accomplished during his presidency is undervalued or under-appreciated. He was certainly subject to a lot of accusations that he was destroying democracy in Taiwan, too--also mostly unwarranted. But I think he's pretty off base here.  And it's rather disappointing that he's chosen to stay involved in partisan politics like this after leaving office, rather than playing a post-partisan, elder statesman role. 

For those interested in a more detailed rebuttal, hit the jump. 

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.
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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. 

On March 18, the Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific will host an event examining the state of and challenges to Taiwan's media freedom. In December 2020, Taiwan’s National Communications Commission (國家通訊傳播委員會) voted to deny a broadcast license to CTiTV (中天電視), a pro-China news channel that had been highly critical of the Taiwanese government and ruling party, the DPP. This decision marks the first time a TV channel has been forced off the air for violation of the terms of its license since Taiwan became a democracy. CTiTV is part of the Want Want China Times media group, a media conglomerate owned and run by the pro-unification snack foods magnate Tsai Eng-meng, and it has been accused of coordinating its reporting with the Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing. However, until being forced off the air, it was also a popular source of news among supporters of the opposition KMT and an important voice in Taiwan’s diverse and critical TV landscape.

In this moderated discussion, three panelists from Taiwan will consider the complex issues this decision raises and debate when -- and if -- it is ever appropriate for government to regulate media content and limit access to the broadcast spectrum in a liberal democracy. Registration is free and open to the public.

​Some additional somewhat disjointed thoughts follow...