Written by Ting-Sian Liu
Image credit: As we discussed Taiwan’s uncertain and gloomy future in the classroom, the sun shone brightly outside the window. Photo by Ting-Sian Liu
The Taiwan Europe Connectivity Workshop, held each year by the ERCCT at the University of Tübingen, brought together PhD students and early-career scholars from Taiwan and Europe for a week of in-depth reading and discussion of each other’s research. This year’s workshop theme was “the development of Taiwan-EU relations under China’s gaze.”
Our workshop’s discussions on Taiwan’s future in the eyes of high politics feel gloomy, in contrast to the bright, beautiful sunshine that accompanied us. Throughout my years at the European Institution, I observed that Cross-Straits Relations, security, and geopolitics remain defining elements of Taiwan Studies and the annual focus of the ERCCT Taiwan-Europe Workshop. While Taiwan faces mounting geopolitical pressure and needs significant insights to navigate its way out, I couldn’t help but wonder how the focus on high politics continues to reproduce the coloniality of knowledge production in Taiwan.
Colonial relations that shaped our connectivity
An underlying colonial relationship shaped Taiwan’s connection to Europe. European institutions continue to serve as the centre of academic knowledge production. This power relationship, described by Peruvian sociologist Quijano as the coloniality of power, prompts me to think more deeply about how the dominant European framework on Taiwan reproduces its colonial unknowing and obscures the Han settler colonialism that shaped the coloniality of Taiwan Studies. Our connectivity continues to tease out and pose the question of the underlying tension between how Taiwan is understood at the high-politics level and at the grassroots level.
Throughout the workshop, people who studied Taiwan from various perspectives gathered. It is thus interesting to see how different, and sometimes competing, epistemologies of Taiwan coexist within the space of the Taiwan-European Connectivity Workshop. However, this phenomenon is not unique to this workshop; rather, this productive tension remains the norm across the international field of Taiwan Studies. Rather than treating these tensions between high politics and low politics as non-communicative in Taiwan Studies, I framed them as productive sites of reflection and conversation.
Connectivity as a site of productive tension
These reflections and conversations continued throughout the workshop. As someone who doesn’t work on high politics, I have noticed that most research focuses on Taiwan’s geopolitical situation. When I sat down with Pei-Ying on the first day, whose research focuses on the youth prison system, she said it seemed like we were the only two people not working on high politics. The underlying feelings continued to shape our observation throughout the workshop.
The workshop consists of researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds, methodological approaches, and relationships to Taiwan, all of which shaped the researchers’ epistemology and positionality. This year’s workshop included participants from Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, China, and South Korea, making it an interesting space for situating Taiwan within regional relations with other Asian countries. Our workshops consist of discussing drafts, followed by a 30-minute Q&A session with a few guest lectures in between.
When Hao-Hsiang from National Chengchi University presented his research on the EU regulation of Combating Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing in Taiwan, his approach drew not only people from backgrounds in diplomacy and international relations but also those working in human rights law and rights activism. These conversations centred on how human rights organisations were also pushing for legalisation and on the roles of civil society and fishing companies in implementing these regulations. Afterwards, when chatting with Hao-Hsiang, he shared with me that as someone who is trained in diplomacy and political science, he has been used to seeing things through the lens of high politics; however, throughout the proceedings of the workshop and other Q&A discussions, learning from other people’s perspectives made him rethink the role of low politics in his research.
Another discussion that lingered in my mind was Prof. Schubert’s roundtable session on Taiwan’s Current Geopolitical Condition. This session discussed how Taiwan once had some space in International Relations. Still, as both the US and China become more aggressive, Taiwan has little room to navigate between two imperial powers. The discussion was rather gloomy, with everyone falling into a blank silence at first. Some people proposed that Taiwan could refuse to be a good student and instead follow other countries in becoming a maritime chokepoint during wartime to sustain its agency. Some proposed that, at the grassroots level, circulating the little orange book (小橘書, Taiwan’s National Public Safety Guide) and the work of other local civil defence organisations could offer a way out of the current political deadlock. Having not been exposed to predominantly high-politics settings for a long time, I have come to see how bleak Taiwan’s future seems to international relations theorists.
I began to think the workshop’s uniqueness lies in creating space for high-politics and low-politics researchers to sit down, learn what each other thinks, perhaps start a conversation, and not have to reach consensus. Unlike academic conferences, where you often choose only the panel you are interested in or that relates to your research field, the Taiwan-Europe Connectivity Workshop is a space where people read each other’s drafts and are encouraged to listen to one another. I continued to feel grateful for how these workshops provided me with space to learn and stay curious, yet I also thought about how these sessions and research on the geopolitical condition require more active engagement with minoritised and grassroots communities in Taiwan. People who are the most vulnerable to geopolitical tensions in Taiwan, including Indigenous peoples, women, queers, Southeast Asian migrants, people with disabilities and other minoritised groups, continue to be invisibilised by the dominant framework of International Relations and Security Studies. With feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe articulating how the experience of war and conflict is gendered, it is also raced and classed. When the looming crisis overshadows Taiwan, it is thus a reminder for high-politics scholars to understand how these dynamics affect and continue to shape human lives and their strategies of resistance on the ground. Low politics is thus not irrelevant to high politics; instead, feminist IR scholars argue that we cannot understand international politics without understanding how women and other minoritised groups experience it. The personal is thus international.
Connectivity as the space to stay in curiosity
This reflection piece is not meant to critique IR research on Taiwan or the workshop itself. It is my personal reflection on how Taiwan Studies is often perceived and understood in Europe, and how I think we can critically approach this Western-dominant construction of Taiwan Studies. While International Relations overshadows studies on Taiwan, we no longer need to separate International Relations from domestic politics in the study of Taiwan; we need a space that puts them in conversation and lets us stay curious. Connectivity thus moves beyond a superficial understanding of connection to a meaningful, political one when we consider how the coloniality of power and colonial unknowing shaped our understanding of Taiwan, enabling us to think about alternative futures Taiwan holds but has not yet been written.
Ting-Sian (she/they) is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on the coloniality of rights politics and activism in Taiwan through centring the lifeworlds of Indigenous queer people and queer Indigenous activism. She explores how settler/colonialisation shaped queer lives and the question of non-Indigenous decolonial solidarities in East and Southeast Asia.
This article was published as part of the special issue on Connectivity: Tübingen ERCCT Taiwan-Europe Workshop.