The International Political Science Association (IPSA) is a unique case against the common perception that Beijing has the upper hand when the two regimes by the Taiwan Strait contest to join international (non-governmental) organisations. Beijing relentlessly pushes international organisations to acknowledge the One China principle; Taipei also relentlessly denies this principle while it seeks to join. In the 1980s, Chinese and Taiwanese political scientists, representing their own regimes, applied Track II diplomacy to compete over membership of this organisation. IPSA membership mattered to both regimes and their political scientists. After many years of Track II competition, The Chinese Association of Political Science in Taipei became a “collective” member without compromising on how to name itself in April 1989. As a result, Beijing's counterpart withdrew from the IPSA. This situation has now persisted for over thirty years. The IPSA case not only challenges the current understanding of Cross-Strait relations but also throws light on the theoretical understanding of Track II diplomacy.

Since 2016, China has been conducting military flybys around Taiwan, while the US has approved arms sales to Taiwan on several occasions and sent warplanes and battleships through the Taiwan Strait. How does Taiwanese public opinion respond to the Chinese and US military presence in the Strait? Is the public likely to become less supportive of de jure independence for Taiwan on account of China's military deterrence or more supportive owing to a perceived likelihood of US military assistance? In this report, we provide answers to these questions based on evidence from a survey experiment conducted in Taiwan in October–November 2020. We find that Taiwanese are less sensitive to the Chinese military presence in the Taiwan Strait but have become more supportive of de jure independence after seeing the US aircraft in the area. Our findings contribute to studies of cross-Strait relations and US foreign policy on the Taiwan Strait.

Taiwan's opposition to PRC demands such as acceptance of the ‘92 Consensus’ and ‘One Country, Two Systems’ formula since 2016 has invited a series of retaliatory measures from Beijing, designed to coerce Taiwan into compliance. Given the stark asymmetry in economic size, military capability, and diplomatic status, Taiwan provides a case for studying coercive diplomacy that takes the form of threats to punish. Material differences suggest that Taiwan should capitulate, and ‘cheap talk’ theses expect PRC threats to have no discernible effect, while balance of threat arguments expect resolve. In this article, we use the survey data collected in the 2016, 2019, and 2020 rounds of the Taiwan National Security Study to examine how Taiwanese respond to China's intensifying and expanding threats. Our paper identifies four strategies that the public sees as responses to PRC coercion: isolation, bandwagon with China, balance against China by allying with the USA and Japan, and hedge by deepening economic ties with China while aligning with the USA and Japan against China. We show that the popular support for balancing against China rises as PRC coercion grows and Taiwanese citizens increasingly perceive China to be a threat. Our findings imply that citizens in a liberal democracy can develop the will to pushback against pressure from an authoritarian regime despite sharp asymmetries in capabilities and material limitations.

Fifty years after the current “one China” framework emerged in international politics, the cross-Taiwan Strait “one China” dispute has transformed from its historical nature of indivisible sovereignty. As Taipei has stopped competing internationally to represent “China” since 1991, Beijing now worries that compromising its “one-China principle” in cross-Strait reconciliation would enhance Taiwan's separate statehood internationally and enable the island to push towards de jure independence. In contrast, Taipei worries that any perceived concessions on the question of “one China” would enhance China's sovereignty claim over Taiwan and enable Beijing to push for unification coercively with fewer concerns about international backlash. Improved cross-Strait relations thus rely on circumventing this quintessential commitment problem in international politics.

This lead article surveys the history and evolving policy legacies of the “one China” framework 50 years after US President Richard Nixon's historic 1972 visit to China. It begins by introducing key concepts and highlighting the crucial difference between Beijing's self-defined “one-China principle” and the US's, Japan's and key other countries’ variable “one China” policies as it relates to Taiwan. It argues that three seminal 1970s developments consolidated the “one China” framework as an informal institution of international politics. The ambiguity baked in by Cold War-era geopolitical necessity provided flexibility sufficient to enable diplomatic breakthroughs between erstwhile adversaries, but also planted seeds for deepening contestation and frictions today. Recent developments – especially Taiwan's democratization and Beijing's increasingly bold and proactive assertion of its claim to sovereignty over Taiwan – have transformed incentive structures in Taipei and for its major international partners. The net effect is that the myth of “consensus” and the ambiguities enabling the framework's half-century of success face unprecedented challenges today.

One source of the idea that Taiwan independence would be politically desirable is belief in the concept of “Taiwan subjectivity,” which indicates that Taiwan is not an appendage of China but instead an autonomous actor charting its own course – or trying to do so in the face of huge difficulties. The ruling (since 2016) Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) pledges fealty to the goal of ultimately realizing subjectivity but cannot aggressively pursue the agenda because of opposition from the People's Republic of China (PRC), the United States, and some in Taiwan itself. What might that agenda be? Using a Structural Topic Model, we excavate the subjectivity discourse as it developed from 2008 to 2020 in the mainstream DPP-supporting newspaper, the Liberty Times. We find fourteen topics associated with the concept, the most prevalent of which in recent years warn of threats to subjectivity's realization in the political and sociocultural spheres.

It is both academically and practically valuable to construct a multi-dimensional scale to assess the effectiveness of the Communist Party of China's (CPC) policy toward Taiwan. The author constructed a One China identity scale based on national identity theory and the CPC's political advocacy and actions toward Taiwan. Using panel data from 271 members of Taiwanese student delegations to Mainland China from 2016 to 2017, this study explored the changes in their sense of a One China identity. The results showed a significant increase (0.11, 5.19%) in the average ratings of the investigated students' One China identity. The regression equation constructed by the current study was able to explain 10.94% of the total variance of the One China identity scale, and all three hypotheses were supported. Following the exchange program, Taiwanese students appeared to have a greater sense of a One China identity. Their impression of Mainland China had improved, their acceptance of the CPC's regime had increased, and their preference for authoritarianism had increased.

The 2014 Sunflower Movement succeeded in blocking Taiwan's Congress from ratifying the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement (CSSTA), a bill that proposed to liberalize trade with China. Since most of the participants in this movement were students and NGO members, they had limited economic and political resources to influence policy change, which makes their success in stopping a trade deal remarkable. Many attribute this important success to an elite alliance with politicians inside the government, fueled by a personal rivalry between political elites. However, I argue that changing public opinion is the more important force behind the creation of the alliance. With original data from interviews with political elites, their staff members, and activists in Taiwan, in addition to secondary information, I confirm public opinion to be the major reason for the political alliance. This case illustrates that in some circumstances, public opinion outweighs the importance of elite rivalry in influencing political elite decision-making, and it could represent a key mechanism of democratic policy-making.

Are Taiwanese voters polarized? By presenting four novel visualizations based on a factor analysis of Taiwan National Security Surveys from 2002 to 2017, this article describes the contours of structural change in Taiwan politics. Overall, the cross-strait position among Taiwanese voters can be described by a stable inverted U shape over time. This arises from the fact that most nonpartisans—typically neglected in the literature on polarization—are moderate. Before 2008, increasing polarization among partisans can be attributed to pan-green voters moving toward independence. Between 2008 and 2014, decreasing polarization stems from moderates self-identifying as pan-blue supporters. Since 2014, a record-breaking number of nonpartisans have left the pan-blue camp, and more extreme pan-blue voters have contributed to a return of polarization among partisans. The results yield important implications for the study of polarization and populism, as well as for the future of Taiwanese politics.

China's trade with Taiwan has a political motive: winning the hearts and minds of the Taiwanese people. The effectiveness of China's economic statecraft can be examined in the Syuejia (Xuejia) case, where Taiwan put up strong resistance to the generous benefits offered by China. This article investigates the political implications of the Chinese-designed contract farming programme in Syuejia and argues that if economic favours are delivered, and positive impressions also created, political attitudes can be revised. Without these two prerequisites, however, replicating the Syuejia results elsewhere and thus disturbing the cross-Strait status quo will be difficult. When put in a theoretical context, the changes in the political landscape of Syuejia illustrate the interplay of economic interests and political identity.

Segregation has long been recognized as a source of ignorance which breeds negative feelings and hostility. This view maintains that interactions between members of different groups can foster social bonds and promote positive group relationship. Employing recently collected survey data, this study examines the effect of cross-Strait contacts on Taiwan citizens’ negative views toward Chinese citizens and the Beijing government. The empirical results show that casual encounters have no effect on the island residents’ general perception of China. Serious interactions in the form of friendship moderate their unfavorable feelings of Chinese citizens but have no effects on the perception of a hostile Beijing. Unless contacts can invoke true social bonds, frequent interactions do not have transformative effects on individuals’ political views. The moderating effect of contacts at the personal level is not transferable to a political entity when the latter is perceived as a suppressing agent.

Debates about whether China's rise poses a threat or an opportunity for Taiwan have settled into a realist assumption that Beijing will continue to upset the balance of power and a liberal approach that believes the benefits of economic interdependence are leading to greater gains. Missing from this debate is a nuanced consideration of how Taiwan's policy elites view themselves and their position in cross-Strait relations. Taiwan's decision makers' views are deeply affected by, and interact with, factors and institutions on and beyond the island. This article offers a model of political processes – the staying power of the status quo and order of movement – as a possible route towards an explanation for Taiwan's position on cross-Strait negotiations. The conclusion is that the status quo position – de facto but not de jure independence – is becoming more entrenched with time. Taiwan's colours of partisanship, Blue and Green, are blending into Aquamarine.

Taking a broader perspective to explore the relations between Taiwan's globalization, social justice issues and the DPP's political and economic nationalism, this study aims to understand the DPP's resurgence in local elections since 2008, and its defeat in the 2012 presidential election. Increasing capital flight from Taiwan to mainland China has contributed to Taiwan's rising unemployment and income inequality. Less privileged Taiwanese, having stronger nationalist sentiments and concerns about the Taiwanese government's open-door China policy, switched their support from the KMT to the DPP during the DPP administration of 2000–2008. Since 2008, the DPP's better balance between its political and economic nationalism has been instrumental in securing popular support, especially at the local level. Nevertheless, in the 2012 presidential election, the DPP failed to convince the majority of Taiwanese voters that its moderate political nationalism could maintain the significantly improved cross-Strait relations vital for Taiwan's economic revival under the current bleak world economic conditions.

In “Diversionary Dragons, or ‘Talking Tough in Taipei’” (Journal of East Asian Studies 9, 3: 369–398), Yitan Li, Patrick James, and A. Cooper Drury presented a newly created data set to show that Chen Shui-bian used independence rhetoric and confrontation with the mainland as a diversionary tactic in the face of domestic political difficulties. In the present exchange, Jonathan Sullivan challenges the authors' understanding of how the Democratic Progressive Party used the Taiwan independence issue—and the authors' interpretation of independence—and raises questions about the coding of press coverage as a means of identifying underlying preferences. The authors respond, concluding that the future use of such diversionary tactics is by no means foreclosed.

Much has been written on the triangular, and increasingly high-profile, China-Taiwan-US relations. However, scholars have yet to apply Diversionary Theory to the China-Taiwan dyad. DT argues that leaders may resort to international conflict when domestic political and economic situations become troublesome, aiming at directing public attention away from problems at home. While creation of explicit military conflict in the Taiwan Strait by Taipei is deemed quite unlikely, more subtle processes of diversion might be expected instead. This article applies a variant on DT to assess whether leaders in Taipei have used rhetoric about Taiwan independence or unification as a distraction from domestic problems during the years leading up to Taiwan's 2004 presidential election. We find that, as the president's approval sinks, pro-independence rhetoric becomes more likely. Overall, the results of this study confirm extension of DT to the case of Taiwan and encourage further research applied to middle powers.

Most of the contemporary policy debate regarding economic interdependence and peace has focused on devising responses either in favor of or in opposition to the prevailing notion that trade is positively and unconditionally correlated with peace. The China and Taiwan case—noteworthy for the simultaneous presence of an ever-increasing economic interdependence and an adversarial political relationship—provides an interesting counterexample to the leading positions in the literature. What is missing in the literature is a model that studies states' decisions to trade and initiate conflict as a function not only of their own utility but also of their perceptions about how their opponent will respond. States' decisions to trade depend on the likelihood that their prospective trade partner will initiate a conflict, and decisions to initiate a conflict depend on perceptions of the likelihood that the target will concede. In this article, the authors develop a model that expands the domain of the trade-peace analysis by endogenizing and analyzing states' decisions to trade and initiate conflicts.