Taiwan’s relationship with China, and lack of formal international recognition elsewhere, mean that its own ability to influence the world is dramatically limited, and that its survival is contingent on interacting with those outside its borders. It’s an island, but it can’t afford an island mentality.
“It’s always been the case that Taiwan’s looking on the outside, looking to international exposure because of its lack of recognition,” journalist Brian Hioe summarized to Domino Theory via phone call. This extends to both Taiwan’s government and its civil society, and is now the case more than ever, given the context of hardening U.S.-China relations, he said.
However, how international pressure ultimately interacts with Taiwan’s society remains more complex than it might appear. The well-known spectacle of outgoing president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) politely entertaining endless rounds of U.S. politicians represents one simple side of this story, but it is not the whole deal. From the popularity of South Korean fashion to recent international media coverage of road safety issues, attitudes and discourse within Taiwanese civil society are intensely exposed to commentary and political and economic decisions from elsewhere. But that doesn’t mean the way the interior and exterior tangle together and rebound off one another is always straightforward.
“There’s a domestic civil society that has its own internal dynamic,” Hioe said. “National civil society emerged after democratization, so the internal trends and dynamic of civil society has much more to do with that.”
One extremely visible burst of international pressure from December 2022 is an instructive example. The publication of a CNN article on Taiwan’s road traffic was widely cited and discussed by Taiwanese media, alongside new travel advice issued by the Canadian government warning about road safety in Taiwan. Then, within a few months, a mass, pro-pedestrian protest was held and attended by all of the presidential election candidates, who all made pledges for reforms as a part of their platforms. But when Domino Theory spoke to the organizers of that protest, the connection between the external coverage and the internal outcome was muddier than it might seem.
“I think to some extent when foreign media makes these kinds of reports on Taiwan it can have an effect, but I think the effect is sort of one that is very limited,” organizer and long-time Taiwan resident Jonathan Knowles told Domino Theory via video call. Emphasizing that the protest resulted from long-term work by organizers building networks inside Taiwan, and that outside media pressure tended to result in quick bursts of superficial reaction from local officials rather than deeper change that stuck, he added: “The only thing that’s really going to make a difference is if this is something Taiwanese people care about themselves. The effort to change something has to be grassroots. And it has to be something that a critical mass of Taiwanese people care about.”
Another organizer of the same protest, Yixian Zhang (張苡絃), said she believed outside commentary only got attention when people were ready to talk about the issue within Taiwan. “I think you cannot… get people’s attention if the problem isn’t already there,” she said. “The reason [people have paid attention this time] is because the problem was there for a long time, and I view this quite positively, because people from more developed countries, they know what a good road environment looks like. So for Taiwanese people I think it’s an empowerment… It makes them ask questions. I don’t think it’s a bad thing.”
A different kind of relationship is apparent in something like Taiwan’s environmental policy, but it’s also not simple. On the one hand, it has been claimed that Taiwan’s climate policy may have been affected by being kept out of international systems, such as the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Taiwan’s response is characterized as passively fulfilling minimum requirements within agreements it is not obliged to follow rather than showing much political ambition and this may be because its isolation insulates it from direct interactions with key institutions. However, on the other hand, the introduction of the European Union’s import tariff on carbon-intensive goods and carbon zero policies from companies like Apple are widely viewed as having motivated Taiwan’s government to introduce a carbon levy this year, and having motivated the likes of TSMC to pursue carbon neutral policies of their own.
Is this ideal? Richer governments and corporations passively dictating Taiwan’s environmental policy because Taiwan relies on them so much as customers? Most would say no, but there are those within Taiwan who say it is better than inaction. “I would love to see the [Taiwanese] government being more proactive. But do I see international pressure as a good thing or a bad thing? I think overall it’s a good thing,” John Chung-En Liu (劉仲恩), an associate professor at National Taiwan University told Domino Theory via video call. “It’s helped us to motivate those businesses in the private sector to take this thing more seriously.”
To add to this mixed bag, it also needs to be said that although Taiwan’s political vulnerability makes it particularly susceptible to outside influence, that doesn’t mean it all goes in one direction.
The Sunflower Movement is a key example of this. As described in the book “Social Forces in the Re-Making of Cross-Strait Relations: Hegemony and Social Movements in Taiwan,” activists who successfully fought back against a controversial trade deal with China were extremely conscious about using international media to help achieve their own goals within Taiwan, translating the movement’s press releases into 14 languages and crowdfunding the publication of a full-page advertisement in the New York Times.
Additionally, there do still remain large cultural spaces where the outside world isn’t at the forefront of people’s thinking at all. Within Taiwanese filmmaking, for instance, a slew of films focused almost exclusively on local issues have been produced in recent years, aimed at what Taiwanese film critic CJ Sheu (許景順) described as a “sufficient domestic market” via video call.
What’s interesting about that is that while that local focus may have contributed to a lack of Western critical or awards success, it hasn’t always curtailed international commercial success. The film “Marry My Dead Body,” for instance, recently hit Netflix’s weekly global top ten list. Brian Hioe told Domino Theory that “I think Taiwanese identity internationally is ‘having a moment’” with films and other cultural products such as food.
Where does this more unselfconscious success come from? Hioe explained it might be that, ironically, Taiwan benefits from changing relationships between China and elsewhere. “Where are you going to put your resources if you can’t get to China, for example? That ends up being Taiwan. I think sometimes companies [such as Netflix] are putting resources into Taiwan because that’s the best they can do in terms of Chinese language content, and so it’s a kind of interesting topic. But I think what you can say is that what does get attention internationally are things that are especially or uniquely Taiwanese, and I think that is quite interesting.”
So, by necessity, Taiwan does a lot of looking out. But it’s no blank canvas for external influence, and that’s reflected in the real interest from outside when it does its own thing.
Photo: AFP Photo/Taiwan’s Presidential Office
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