Written by Tom Wilson. Urban resilience drills in Taiwan have been promoted as a cornerstone of President Lai’s whole-of-society approach to preparing for contingencies and crises. How do they look in practice? Drawing on observations of the urban resilience exercise in Douliu, this article explores how everyday state-society relationships can shape and complicate efforts to build resilience.
Written by Dr Madhukar Shyam and Manya Singhal. This article argues that Taiwan’s foreign policy towards the Indo-Pacific should be analysed within the framework of the New Southbound Policy and President Lai’s NSP+. The FOIP strategy is perceived by Taiwan as an approach that will ensure its sovereignty. Beyond condemning China’s expansionism, Taiwan should adopt the “porcupine strategy”, invest more in defence equipment and build whole-of-society resilience.
Written by Lucy Best. This article argues that issues of everyday governance, such as budgets, industrial development, and energy availability, that underpin Taiwan’s strategic success have become increasingly important for Taiwan’s partners to understand. Taiwan’s resilience is a question of whether its democratic institutions can continue to manage disagreement, produce effective policy and maintain public trust.
Written by Thomas J. Shattuck. This article argues that local and foreign diplomats and politicians should not see Taiwan as a small country and therefore believe it has little chance against the PRC. There is so much more to geopolitical influence than landmass. When considering population, the stock market, per capita GDP, defence, and foreign relations, Taiwan plays a larger role in the world than one might expect.
Written by Dr Kristina Kironska. This article identifies three observations of the week-long interdisciplinary visit to Taipei, namely the centrality of resilience, Taiwan’s self-perception of being a small country and the prominence of AI across diverse settings and policy domains. The Taipei meetings offer the opportunity to observe Taiwan through multiple institutional lenses in a compressed period of time.
Written by Matthew Lorence. This article compares Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement in 2014. This comparison illustrates how the structural differences between a sovereign democracy and a semi-autonomous territory operating under Beijing’s ultimate authority shaped the fate of each protest. The divergent fates of the two territories reflected precisely what the young people feared and fought so passionately to prevent.
