Written by Dr Josie-Marie Perkuhn & Professor Dr Christian Soffel.
Image credit: TAP.
Over the past four years, Taiwan as a Pioneer (TAP) has become a familiar reference point within the Taiwan Studies community in Europe. The project began from a straightforward observation with wide implications: Taiwan’s local innovations—whether social, cultural, political, or technological—often illuminate broader global “megatrends” in unusually clear ways. At a time when academic work is under pressure to show both intellectual rigour and social relevance, TAP set out to do two things in parallel: to develop Taiwan-focused research across disciplines, and to build structures that would strengthen the field beyond the lifetime of a single grant. After finishing the initial project phase, against the background of global power turmoil with the island at the frontlines, researching Taiwan remains timely and in demand for lasting institutionalisation and structural funding.
TAP was conceived as an interdisciplinary and interregional postdoctoral research project designed to strengthen research on Taiwan in general, and particularly within the wider framework of academic Sinology and adjacent area studies. It aimed to foster an internal network across major subject fields—including cultural studies, literature, history, sociology/anthropology, and political science—while also connecting Taiwan Studies to broader disciplinary conversations. The project was funded for four years (February 2022 to January 2026) by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF; renamed in spring 2025 as the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, BMFTR).
Origins and project set-up
Preparatory work began in late 2020, when research planning still had to contend with the restrictions and uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite these constraints, the TAP core team—supported by three senior scholars based in the field of Sinology and Taiwan Studies, Prof. Christian Soffel (Trier), Prof. Christine Moll-Murata (Bochum) and Prof. Gunter Schubert (Tübingen)—secured funding for the project, which Dr Josie-Marie Perkuhn led. Alongside this core group, colleagues including Prof. Dr Kristin Shi-Kupfer contributed valuable advice during the planning phase.
From the outset, TAP treated Taiwan’s “pioneering” status not as a slogan but as a research question: where, how, and under what conditions do innovations emerge, travel, and become legible across national and disciplinary boundaries? The project’s first digital preparatory workshop (May 2021), held before the final research proposal was completed, already mapped a range of innovative practices realised in Taiwan over the past century. This early workshop helped establish a shared vocabulary across disciplines. It clarified the project’s ambition: not only to produce specialist research, but also to create a networked environment in which Taiwan Studies could be taught, discussed, and developed across fields.
Publications and early outputs
In spring 2022, with support from the TAP team based at the Research Unit for Taiwanese Culture (TRU) in Bochum, TAP published its first joint output: the booklet Taiwan: Melting Pot and Innovation Hub, edited by Prof. Dr Christine Moll-Murata. The booklet was presented at the annual conference of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS) in April 2022 in a dedicated book launch format. As is common in multi-year research initiatives, the composition of the postdoctoral team also changed over time. Dr Chen Kuan-fei was replaced by Dr Chien Hung-yi, and Dr Beatrice Zani was succeeded by Dr Amélie Keyser-Verrault. These changes brought new perspectives to the project and widened TAP’s professional networks.
The early period of TAP also coincided with heightened international attention to Taiwan’s digital capacities, especially in the wake of Taiwan’s early pandemic response and the visibility of its civic tech landscape. (Please see also Perkuhn 2020, “How is Taiwan Facing the Coronavirus”.) While TAP did not reduce Taiwan to a “model case”, these developments reinforced the project’s core premise: Taiwan offers unusually rich empirical material for examining the relationship between local innovation and global dynamics.
Workshops as the project’s backbone
The annual international workshop became TAP’s central instrument for network-building and scholarly exchange. Each year, the team held internal meetings to discuss research developments and plan a workshop designed to widen the network and increase the visibility of Taiwan-focused research across subfields. These workshops were not simply occasions for presenting papers: they were designed as structured encounters across disciplines, intended to support collaboration, identify shared teaching needs, and develop outputs that could circulate beyond a single event.
In the first project year, TAP focused on mapping networks and rebuilding face-to-face scholarly exchange after pandemic restrictions were eased. The aim was both practical and intellectual: to bring researchers together, exchange perspectives on the state of the field, and identify where cross-disciplinary conversations were most urgently needed. In total, over 25 participants joined the first international workshop – either in person or by a digital presence.
In 2023, under the lead of Dr Keyser-Verrault, the workshop supported the collection and development of contributions for a larger joint publication on Taiwan Studies aimed at students and early researchers. For this, TAP issued a call for contributions to broaden the range of their network and invited twenty-one scholars from Europe, North America and Taiwan. This handbook, expected to appear with Routledge in 2026, reflects a recurring gap in the field: the need for accessible, research-led teaching material that can serve readers entering Taiwan Studies from different disciplinary backgrounds.
The third year’s event turned explicitly towards digital humanities and teaching resources. During this period, the team launched the TAPHub Database, a digital platform designed to facilitate the exchange of research material and teaching resources. While digital infrastructure is now frequently invoked in academia, TAPHub responded to a concrete need in the field: enabling scholars working across institutions and countries to share materials in a structured way and making it easier to develop Taiwan-focused teaching content that is not limited to a small number of specialist centres.
The final workshop shifted emphasis towards collaboration and synthesis, highlighting joint projects that emerged from the network built over the project period. Examples included work on World War II memories in early post-war Taiwanese folklore literature (presented by Dr Thomas Fliß and Dr Hsu Yu-yin), and collaborative research engaging with the Anthropocene (presented by Dr Keyser-Verrault, Dr Fliß and Dr Perkuhn). These presentations underscored one of TAP’s central lessons: sustained, structured contact across subfields can produce research questions and methods that would be unlikely to emerge in isolation.
Teaching Taiwan Studies: didactics and community building
In addition to the annual international workshops, TAP organised a dedicated didactic workshop in autumn 2024, led by Dr Thomas Fliß, to discuss challenges and best practices for teaching Taiwan Studies both as a subject in its own right and within Sinology curricula. The workshop responded to a recurring issue in the European context: Taiwan is increasingly recognised as essential to contemporary scholarship, yet it is not always represented proportionately in teaching programmes or syllabi.
Participants in the didactic workshop contributed to the spring 2025 special issue “Teaching Taiwan”, with articles by Thomas Fliß, Chan-yueh Liu and Dafydd Fell. Together, these contributions addressed the practical and conceptual questions that often shape the field in the classroom: how to teach Taiwan beyond the logic of “case studies,” how to integrate Taiwan into broader thematic modules (democratisation, migration, culture, environment), and how to provide students with pathways into Taiwan-focused research.
To support early-career engagement, TAP also helped to initiate a Taiwan Working Group within the German Association for Taiwan Studies (DVCS). One core activity was the jointly organised lecture series “Taiwan in Geschichte und Gegenwart” (“Taiwan in history and today”), offered mainly in German during the spring semester of 2024. Beyond its immediate content, the lecture series demonstrated the value of collaboratively designed teaching formats, particularly in contexts where Taiwan Studies is growing but remains unevenly institutionalised.
Field research and engagement in Taiwan
A further defining feature of TAP was the emphasis on field research and sustained engagement with Taiwan-based scholarly communities. All four postdoctoral researchers conducted field research in Taiwan and elsewhere in East Asia to gather first-hand material and to engage directly with academic networks and research sites. Across subfields, being present mattered—not only for access to archives and collections, but also for understanding rapidly evolving infrastructures and platforms that can be difficult to study from afar.
A case in point is Taiwan’s public petition platform Join (公共政策網路參與平臺). Such platforms are widely discussed in Taiwan’s civic and specialist communities, yet remain less accessible to external audiences without contextual knowledge, language competence, and an awareness of local research debates. TAP’s fieldwork therefore served not only the collection of data, but also the cultivation of interpretive frameworks that can connect Taiwan-based developments to wider scholarly questions.
Supporting new research: travel grants
To extend the project’s reach beyond the three German partner universities, TAP established a small travel grant programme for students and young scholars researching Taiwan. Each year, up to three grants supported research stays and fieldwork, helping early-career researchers gain access to material, networks, and opportunities to present their work. Of the total number of eleven travel grant recipients, several shared findings in TAP contexts and, in some cases, published them in peer-reviewed outlets. One example is Fréderic Krumbein’s article “Leaving the dragon’s shadow — Normative Power Europe and the emergence of a Taiwan policy in the EU” in the Journal of European Integration (2024).
What TAP contributed
TAP’s impact is best understood as a combination of research contributions and infrastructure-building. Substantively, the project took part in—and helped to sharpen—ongoing debates about why Taiwan Studies should be integral to contemporary scholarship. This includes broader reflections such as Wen-chi Li’s “Why Do We Need Taiwan Studies in the Twenty-First Century?”, as well as TAP-linked arguments for cross-cutting interdisciplinarity as a guiding principle for Taiwan research within and beyond Sinology. (See also Chien Hung-yi and Josie-Marie Perkuhn.)
Institutionally, TAP demonstrated the value of carefully designed academic connectedness: annual workshops that created durable contacts across fields, teaching initiatives that translated research into curricula, a digital platform intended to facilitate resource exchange, and travel support that widened access for emerging scholars. The project’s central contribution, then, lies not in claiming to have “solved” the challenge of Taiwan’s visibility in academia, but in showing what becomes possible when Taiwan-focused research is treated as a shared, interdisciplinary enterprise with an infrastructure that supports it.
Looking ahead
As TAP concludes its funded period in January 2026, several outcomes are intended to endure: collaborative relationships formed through the workshop series, the teaching community strengthened through didactic exchange, and shared resources developed through TAPHub. With the Routledge handbook expected in 2026, TAP’s work will continue to circulate in classrooms and research environments. Just started in February 2026, Josie-Marie Perkuhn continues with a one-year funding to transfer the merits of the initial phase among the Taiwan Studies communities and adjacent academic fields, including creating a sustainable web interface for the networked community, a young scholar workshop and an international conference are in planning for this year. Stay tuned!
More broadly, TAP points to a simple proposition with lasting relevance: Taiwan’s local innovations are not only significant in themselves, but also analytically powerful for understanding the dynamics of global change. An outcome of this research endeavour for the future is the vision of a more sustainable structure to prolong impactful and socially required research in Taiwan. As unique and supporting such project conception is for postdocs, being continually under pressure for securing another position undoubtedly creates interruptions in the synergy of research agendas. When scholars build durable networks and shared infrastructures around that proposition, the field becomes more visible—and, crucially, more capable of sustaining the next generation of research and teaching.
Dr Josie-Marie Perkuhn 雷 瑪 麗 leads the joint postdoc research project Taiwan as a Pioneer (TAP) at Trier University and is a non-resident fellow at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University (ISPK). She graduated in Political Science and Chinese Studies. Her postdoc interest is in Maritime Security and Peace Studies, Digitalisation, Climate Change, Energy Supply and Global Health. She is one of the 100-Top-of-the-Table on China-related matters as nominated by China. Table in 2024, and a member of the German-Taiwanese Dialogue Platform, DTDP.
Christian Soffel is Professor of Sinology at the University of Trier (Germany). His main research interests lie in Chinese cultural history, particularly Confucianism from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, traditional Chinese literature, and the continuing influence of traditional culture across the contemporary Chinese cultural sphere. Over the course of his academic career, he has spent several extended periods researching and teaching in Taiwan, including at Academia Sinica, National Taiwan University, and National Taiwan Normal University. He maintains an interdisciplinary network of collaborators across Taiwan. He served as President of the German Association of Chinese Studies (Deutsche Vereinigung für Chinastudien, DVCS) from 2013 to 2019 and as Secretary of the European Association of Chinese Philosophy (EACP) from 2017 to 2023 and is currently a board member of the European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS).
This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘Taiwan as a Pioneer (TAP): Visions and Practices’.
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