Written by Simon Delpeuch
Image credit: The National Museum of Prehistory, Photo by Simon Delpeuch
Between Heritage and Politics
On 5 June 2026, President Lai Ching-te delivered a speech to the Pacific Cultural Gala in Taipei, invoking the shared Austronesian heritage, mentioning “the courage of Austronesian ancestors who sailed the vast ocean”, before continuing on concrete cooperation in medicine, undersea cables and maritime rescues. While the cultural and strategic registers are presented here as complementary rather than hierarchical, their juxtaposition illustrates the constant ambiguity inherent in Taiwan’s Austronesian diplomacy: a genuine historical and linguistic connection with the Pacific and Southeast Asia, mobilised since the 2000s as another instrument to face Taiwan’s diplomatic isolation. This connection, documented through archaeological and linguistic evidence, is undoubtedly real, but the question remains whether Austronesian diplomacy serves the communities it invokes or only Taiwan’s institutional narrative.
Located on the east coast of the island, facing the rising sun, a detail of importance in Austronesian culture, the National Museum of Prehistory (NMP) in Taitung is, this article argues, a living illustration of this tension by gradually adopting an informal and communities-centred logic in its exchanges with the Southeast Asian and Pacific worlds.
Austronesian Diplomacy: A Necessary but Ambiguous Practice
Taiwan’s use of soft power is a necessity rather than a choice. Only recognised by twelve states and excluded from most international organisations and forums, Taiwan can no longer compete with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in “chequebook diplomacy” to assure the loyalty of its remaining allies, as the diplomatic switches by the Solomon Islands and Kiribati in 2019 demonstrated. Cultural diplomacy, partially based on Taiwan’s democratic model and Austronesian heritage, offers an alternative channel less dependent on formal recognition.
Nonetheless, the state’s use of this heritage remains ambiguous. As anthropologist Guo Pei-yi reminds us, “Austronesian” is above all a language family, rather than a homogeneous cultural or ethnic group connecting Pacific and Southeast Asian peoples to Taiwan, a distinction easily forgotten when serving diplomatic purposes. Huang Shu-mei even offers an institutional critique of Taiwan’s Austronesian diplomacy, showing that this strategy reduces indigenous communities to symbolic resources of Taiwan’s legitimacy in the region, without constructing genuine reciprocal exchanges between the communities, which state institutions always overshadow.
This is precisely where museum diplomacy distinguishes itself from institutional tendencies. Institutions like the NMP acquire their legitimacy from scientific and cultural authority, which allows them, according to Nadia Grincheva, to become spokespersons for heritage rather than pure instruments of state policy. In the NMP’s context, museum diplomacy combines with indigenous diplomacy, described by J. Marshall Beier as based on communities’ networks, shared experiences, and customary protocols, rather than formal channels. Together, these two modes of diplomacy give the NMP diplomatic legitimacy and channels of access the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) simply cannot replicate.
The NMP’s Answer: Reciprocity Over Origin
The NMP’s scientific authority is based on singular archaeological foundations, most notably the Beinan site, discovered in 1980 and remaining Taiwan’s largest prehistoric settlement. A collection of jade artefacts, excavated as far as the Philippines and Vietnam, along with the linguistic research of scholars like Peter Bellwood and Robert Blust, further documented the connection between Taiwan and the Austronesian world.
Nonetheless, the NMP distinguishes itself not by its purely scientific record but by its ongoing works of self-criticism and narrative repositioning since its three-year renovation from 2020 to 2023. According to an anonymous NMP official interviewed at the museum in May 2026, the reopening marked a rupture: the museum changed its framing of Taiwan as the “cradle” or “birthplace” of the Austronesian world, which implicitly positions Taiwan as an elder sibling to the region, in favour of a more reciprocal narrative, well-illustrated by its new motto, “Where Taiwan Meets the World” (在這裡，臺灣與世界相遇). This change of mindset has also affected its internal structure, with two of the museum’s four managerial departments now being led by young indigenous professionals, as part of a broader effort to integrate indigenous communities into decision-making processes.
This narrative repositioning also demonstrates a diplomatic practice that operates largely in the absence of MOFA’s control. Partnerships, such as memoranda of understanding with the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and the Belau National Museum (previously Palau Museum), are built through informal relationships between researchers, curators and indigenous communities around common and practical subjects of concern, far from mere distant Austronesian links: identity, the experience of colonisation, environmental questions, health condition, traditional ecological knowledge, the legacy of nuclear testing and waste disposal in the Pacific and shared artisanal knowledge. As the museum’s official noted, every partnership or programme involving an indigenous community requires consent expressed through the community’s own customary form, such as a direct oral response, or an object, rather than a signed administrative paper. Thus, consent is a part of diplomacy’s substance, in an effort to preserve authenticity and further integrate the indigenous communities.
The Limits: Navigating Institutional and Geopolitical Issues
This informal model of the NMP carries two tensions that remain its main limitations.
Firstly, the gap between the NMP and MOFA remains wide. For the NMP, Austronesian exchanges are an end in themselves, but for MOFA, as Lai’s June 2026 speech illustrates, they remain a narrative to serve mainly political and economic objectives in its bilateral relations in the region. The Christian Science Monitor highlights this contradiction through Taiwanese indigenous voices: the government invokes indigenous heritage abroad while doing less to address the issue of indigenous political representation.
Secondly, the NMP remains constrained by Taiwan’s diplomatic isolation. Curators and officials were blocked by Malaysian authorities from travelling to Taiwan for a cooperation project in 2025. In 2024, China opened the Keqiutou Site Museum in Pingtan, Fujian, its own rival institution to propose Fujian as an alternative Austronesian point of origin. However, the NMP’s interviewed official underscored the limits of Beijing’s narrative, reproducing the “elder brother” rhetoric that Taiwan precisely abandoned, a top-down stance that will likely meet resistance from Pacific communities.
Nonetheless, the NMP case demonstrates how informal diplomacy constitutes not only an alternative, but also a necessity for Taiwan’s Austronesian diplomacy, moving beyond a state-centric logic and embodying a genuinely reciprocal and fair representation of the interests of the indigenous communities involved. Yet, the limits of this model are real. As illustrated by the brutal interruption of exchanges with the Solomon Islands and Kiribati in 2019 and the constant pressure on Southeast Asian partners, the NMP’s informal diplomacy does not escape the geopolitical forces at work in the Indo-Pacific. Still, the museum’s trajectory offers a lesson to MOFA: authenticity in Austronesian diplomacy eludes pure institutional logic and must be cultivated outside the constraints of traditional diplomacy.
Note: This article is partially based on an interview conducted at the National Museum of Prehistory in Taitung in May 2026, as well as a site visit by the author. The identity of the interviewee has been anonymised at their request; the interview was not recorded, and references reflect the content and spirit of the exchange rather than direct quotations.
Simon Delpeuch is a graduate student at Sciences Po Lyon in the Master of International Affairs. This article draws on a final paper written for a course on Taiwan’s Foreign Policy taken during a university exchange at NSYSU in Kaohsiung.