​​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... 

On February 18, I had the privilege of joining a strong group of witnesses in testifying before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission on the topic of "Deterring PRC Aggression toward Taiwan." The USCC has a congressional mandate "to monitor, investigate, and submit to Congress an annual report on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, and to provide recommendations, where appropriate, to Congress for legislative and administrative action."

I can still remember when I first became familiar with the depth and quality of USCC's annual report, when I was an undergraduate taking -- what else? -- Chinese politics with Melanie Manion at the University of Rochester. Parts of it were assigned reading then, and parts no doubt still are now, 20 years later, in the many Chinese security and politics courses around the country. So it is gratifying and a bit humbling to be in a position to contribute in some small way to the next iteration.

I also want to note here that, while I was an undergraduate, I received crucial funding from the National Security Education Program (NSEP, now known as the Boren Awards) to study abroad in Beijing and Taipei. That experience kindled my interest in Taiwan, set me on my current trajectory and, quite literally, changed my life. I hope that robust funding for studying the language and culture of countries that have national security implications for the United States will be available for years to come--it is a smart investment in our future, and an increasingly important incentive to learn a foreign language in an era when the numbers of American students studying abroad in China has dropped precipitously. 

I would not be in a position today to contribute to the public conversation on Taiwan's security issues without the help of the Boren program, and I hope my testimony last week will go some small way toward repaying the investment NSEP made in me and my career.  

​The full video of the panel and the written testimony, including my own, are available at the USCC hearing website. In addition, since it is much abridged from the written testimony, I have posted my oral remarks below. 

The Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region will host a virtual event tomorrow (register at the link), Tuesday, December 8 at 4pm, the Dynamics of Democracy in Taiwan: The Ma Ying-jeou Era.This event will cover some of the findings from a recent new book that I have co-edited with Yun-han Chu and Larry Diamond. We're fortunate to have three of the contributors to the book able to join us for the discussion. They are: 

Szu-yin Ho, Professor of Strategic and International Affairs at Tamkang University, Danshui, Taiwan, and the former  deputy secretary-general of the National Security Council during the Ma Ying-jeou presidency. He'll be speaking about the legacies of President Ma's cross-Strait policies. 

Austin Horng-en Wang, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UNLV. He'll provide some remarks about the emergence of Tsai Ing-wen as the unquestioned leader of the DPP during the Ma era. 

Shih-hao Huang, Post-Doctoral Fellow in political science at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. He'll present data that show the challenges the Ma administration had getting priority legislation approved by the Taiwan's Legislative Yuan, despite enjoying a large KMT majority there for both his terms. He will also compare legislative success rates under Ma to the Tsai Ing-wen era, and reflect a bit on what the differences can tell us about executive-legislative relations in Taiwan. 

For more on the book, and a link to the first chapter, see this previous blog post. 

This will be the last event of the calendar year for PTIP. Keep an eye out for announcements about our 2021 activities, coming soon. 

Finally, on a personal note, this event is my first as the Program Manger of the Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific. After being out of that role for over a year, as of November 1 I've stepped back in to take over the day-to-day management of the current incarnation of the Taiwan program at its new home at the Hoover Institution. Many thanks to Glenn Tiffert for his great stewardship of PTIP over the past year while juggling many other responsibilities--including, not coincidentally, the China Global Sharp Power project.    

The American Political Science Association (APSA) annual conference was supposed to be in held in San Francisco this year, until COVID-19 hit. So, like everything else, it's moved online. That's probably just as well, because over the last month the Bay Area has turned into a post-apocalyptic hellscape of raging fires, record heat, and choking smoke. We've even broken some of the all-time temperature records that were set the last time APSA was in San Francisco, in 2017. Yay. At this rate it might be wise to put San Francisco (or anywhere in California, really) on the same repeat-offender list as New Orleans and never hold APSA here again. (Seattle has never looked better.) 

Anyway. It turns out we'll still have a strong lineup of Taiwan-related programming in the virtual conference. The Conference Group on Taiwan Studies (CGOTS) is sponsoring seven panels on Taiwan politics, spread out over four days (Thursday-Sunday, September 10-13, 2020). Details are at the CGOTS website, and reposted below. Note that you have to be registered for the conference to join the virtual sessions, but that they're otherwise open to all participants. If you'd like to see the latest Taiwan politics research, come check us out online.