Written by Anthony Ho-fai Li.
Image credit: 03.28 副總統出席「淨零城市國際峰會」by 總統府/ Flickr, license: CC BY 2.0.
Introduction
Taiwan has almost tripled its proportion of energy generation from renewable sources in about a decade, rising from 4.2% in 2015 to 11.9% in 2024. However, the process was anything but free of controversies, ranging from communal conflicts over solar energy installation, the referendum on the role of renewable energy in facilitating the phase-out of nuclear energy in earthquake-prone Taiwan, to misinformation campaigns related to renewable energy. Regardless, the central government under the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) showed a steadfast commitment to energy transitions with an aggressive target of 20% energy generation from renewables by 2025. Why does the DPP find it politically beneficial to stick to its controversial energy policy? While some critics argue that the DPP has been driven by nothing but ideological obsession with getting rid of nuclear energy, this article suggests that the DPP can also have practical reasons to promote domestic renewable energy aggressively. On top of enhancing Taiwan’s economic competitiveness and energy security as the two oft-cited reasons, another reason can be attributed to the discursive utility of Taiwan’s energy transitions in the context of the tense cross-strait relations.
Escalation of geopolitical tensions
Since the presidency of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) under the DPP in 2016, cross-strait relations have been tense. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) accused the Tsai Administration of not recognising the “One-China Principle” underlying the “1992 Consensus”, which is seen as a progression toward secession from the perspective of the PRC. In response, the PRC stepped up its efforts in luring Taiwan’s diplomatic allies into switching recognition, leading to a drastic decrease in countries recognising Taiwan from 22 in 2016 to 12 in 2024. It also effectively barred Taiwan from participating in the agencies of the United Nations, such as the World Health Organization as an observer after the Tsai Administration staunchly refused to be admitted under the name “Chinese Taipei”, and took retaliatory measures against countries such as Lithuania that attempted to elevate the official status of Taiwan. In recent years, the PRC also flexed its muscles with more intensive military drills around Taiwan in 2022-2024, signalling to Taiwan’s informal military allies, such as the United States (US), its increasing willingness to take over Taiwan by force when necessary. The escalation of the cross-strait tensions worries some in Taiwan about the repercussions of an increasingly outright confrontation with the PRC.
Taiwan can green, and Taiwan is greening
Under the increasing geopolitical pressure, Taiwan deployed non-traditional diplomatic strategies to broaden its international support from a wider array of countries around the world to keep its precarious position. As the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Wu Chih-chung (吳志中) recently notes, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) adopts the “working-official model” (官式運作模式), which fosters a pragmatic partnership with other countries in the areas of innovation, trade, technology and democratic values even in the absence of diplomatic recognition. This model can be illustrated by the “Taiwan Can Help (and Taiwan is helping)” campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which Taiwan actively delivered medical supplies and other types of support to over 80 countries. In general, the narrative of “Taiwan can help” is underscored by the messages that 1) Taiwan is valuable to the international community with its advanced public health system; 2) Taiwan is willing to and capable of giving help to other countries in need; and 3) Taiwan welcomes new exchanges and collaboration with countries even short of diplomatic recognition.
A preliminary content analysis of the diplomatic activities released by the MOFA in 2023-2024 shows that Taiwan’s narrative of energy transitions bears a resemblance to that of “Taiwan Can Help” in several ways. First, in official documents such as Taiwan’s Pathway to Net-Zero Emissions in 2050, the central government pledges to be a valuable member of the international community by reducing carbon emissions with relentless renewable energy production. This message is relayed by NGOs representing Taiwan at the side meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the MOFA’s promotion materials, such as “Green Action Taiwan!”. In the past, Taiwan was once a significant exporter of solar energy panels in the world’s market, accounting for about 15% of the global photovoltaic production capacity in the early 2010s. With the rise of the gigantic photovoltaic firms from the PRC, Taiwanese firms have been outcompeted due to their higher cost of production, especially in the upstream of the supply chain, where Chinese corporations now occupy over 90% of the global market. The central government’s policy intervention to boost domestic solar energy installation helps its photovoltaic industry recover from the partial loss of the global market, allowing Taiwan to preserve a rather complete supply chain of the photovoltaic industry from upstream to downstream. The UNFCCC provides an important venue for Taiwan not only to demonstrate solidarity with other countries in upholding the principle of “common but differentiated responsibility” in climate change abatement, but it also showcases its admirable technological capability in renewable energy. However, its overall performance in carbon reduction may not qualify it to be the champion of climate change mitigation.
Second, the narrative of energy transitions suggests that Taiwan is willing to provide technological assistance to countries in need of renewable energy. Since the 2010s, Taiwan has shifted its focus of foreign aid from maintaining diplomatic recognition to aiding the development of like-minded countries. The strong presence of the photovoltaic industry gives Taiwan valuable leverage to provide relevant solar energy technologies to underdeveloped countries of diplomatic importance, such as Tuvalu, as an act of benignity. Third, its strength in the photovoltaic industry enables new business collaboration with developed countries in Asia-Pacific and Europe. In 2025, the neoliberal form of globalisation as we know it has undergone a substantial change with more protectionist flavours. Transnational corporations and small countries that hold strategic assets are among the first to face the heat of the Sino-American rivalry, as evident in the deal over the sale of Panama ports owned by a Hong Kong-based transnational corporation. While cost reduction remains a major concern for renewable energy firms, it becomes increasingly important to diversify the political risks of disruption in the global supply chain for the development of low-carbon energy infrastructure. For firms from developed countries, doing business in democratic countries with less economic power can be a practical way to reduce the political risks of policy uncertainty. This bolsters green investment as well as business confidence in Taiwan, playing out to the advantage of Taiwan in its international competition with the PRC. As such, advertising that “Taiwan can green” with the achievements in domestic energy transitions enhances Taiwan’s power by positive attraction on the international stage.
Home-grown renewable energy technologies as Taiwan’s pride
At the domestic level, the narrative of “Taiwan can green” is framed as Taiwan’s pride in “Made-in-Taiwan” (MIT) renewable energy technologies, which is appealing to the increasing proportion of people in Taiwan who identify themselves as Taiwanese in tandem with their prevailing support for energy transitions after 2018. The DPP-led government shapes itself as the guardian of such pride through nurturing Taiwan’s global economic competitiveness with advanced technologies, which helped it to cope with the mounting public grievances about its perceived incompetency in handling domestic economic issues and its suspected complicity in crimes related to local mafia and solar energy, followed by the intensified misinformation campaigns against the DPP from the mainland. For many years, how to handle cross-strait relations with the PRC has been a core issue in the presidential elections in Taiwan, which is often portrayed as a difficult trade-off between the economic benefits offered by the PRC and the political autonomy of Taiwan. Deep ideological division along the partisan line is salient, with the supporters of the KMT preferring a closer economic and political relationship with the PRC and those of the DPP supporting an arm’s length distance from it. Historically, one important source of support for the DPP in presidential elections stemmed from its ideological conviction in Taiwan’s distinctiveness from the PRC in political and economic aspects. According to the China Impact Survey by the Academia Sinica, the majority of the respondents in 2019-2023 regarded the issue of “national sovereignty” as more important than “economic benefits” when it came to cross-strait interactions, contrasting the majority’s preference for the latter in 2013-2018. The DPP’s promotion of the narrative of “Taiwan can green” in conjunction with the pride in home-grown renewable energy strength consequently plays out to the advantage of the DPP to survive elections, as it resonates with Taiwan’s distinctiveness from the PRC.
Concluding remarks
Noting Taiwan’s extraordinary performances in many areas of global affairs, President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) remarked in the Third National Climate Change Committee in January 2025 that “in the eyes of the international community, today’s Taiwan is not the Taiwan of the past. We must be even more proactive as we work to fulfil our international responsibilities.” It shows that the ideational power of “Taiwan can green” continues to be deemed useful for Taiwan to attract the attention of the international community, especially when the support from the US under the Biden Administration, with the rhetorical removal of strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan, has now gone. Meanwhile, it is unclear whether the ideational power of “Taiwan can green” could be as useful as before for the DPP to attract voters when it continues to be discursively linked to Taiwan’s distinctiveness from the PRC. The China Impact Survey aforementioned reveals that the attitude of people in Taiwan has abruptly changed in 2024, with about 70% of the respondents seeing both issues of “national sovereignty” and “economic benefits” as equally important in cross-strait relations, compared to less than 10% who said the same over the past decade. This change could indicate that the majority of people in Taiwan started to have a higher level of uneasiness about the practical ramifications of over-emphasising Taiwan’s distinctiveness from the PRC amidst the heightened geopolitical tensions. Such uneasiness is unlikely to dissipate for the near future with the growing scepticism of the US’s commitment to Taiwan under the second Trump Administration.
Anthony Ho-fai Li finished his PhD in environmental governance at the University of Hong Kong. He specialises in institutional analysis, collaborative governance, and Taiwan’s energy transitions. He is also an Adam Smith Fellow (2022-23) and a Research Fellow of Earth System Governance.
The article is published as part of a joint issue “Green Synergies: Sustainability, Security and Taiwan-Europe Collaboration” between CHOICE and Taiwan Insight.
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