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The aim of this paper is to assess the change in the cyberpower dynamics between Taiwan, the US, and China. Given Taiwan’s decision to establish the Information, Communications and Electronic Warfare Command to counter China’s cyberthreat in 2017, there is very little scholarly work regarding the context of Taiwan’s cybersecurity challenge. Not only are cyberweapons and capabilities not viewable and quantifiable in the direct sense as numbers of submarines or aircraft, but also the problem of attribution in cyberspace creates an epistemological limitation in explaining the origin of cyberattacks. Hence, this paper engages with Taiwan’s conception of cyberspace and submits a general review of cyberpower. It concludes that the shift in the cyberpower dynamics between Taiwan, the US, and China has contributed to Taiwan’s fear and changed Taiwan’s threat perception.
Democracy in Taiwan today appears consolidated and of high quality. Much writing on Taiwan’s democratisation explains this outcome by pointing to aspects of its modernisation, but an underappreciated cause is its well-institutionalised party system, which in comparison to most other Third Wave democracies is a model of competitiveness, consistency, and stability. The sources of party system institutionalisation (psi) in Taiwan can be traced back to two factors: the legacies of the martial-law-era kmt regime, and the emergence of the China question as a fundamental, polarising divide in Taiwanese politics. High psi has ensured a credible alternative to incumbents in each election, enhanced the responsiveness of governments to citizen demands, and encouraged the greater provision of public goods and development of broad, programmatic policies rather than narrowly targeted, clientelist ones. Thus, Taiwan’s democracy is consolidated because of, rather than despite, the legacies of the pre-democratic era and the China factor.
What explains Taiwan’s vacillating support for same-sex marriage? Despite earlier favourable public opinion and a Constitutional Court decision in 2017 in favour of legalisation, anti-lgbt referendums in 2018 found overwhelming support. We argue that the framing of same-sex marriage as undermining traditional family structures allowed opponents to shift the national discussion on legalisation. Our results suggest that supporters and the Tsai administration may have overestimated the extent to which opinions on legalisation were firm.
Since the 1990s, Taiwan has achieved an impressive democratisation that has made it one of the most vibrant democratic societies in Asia. Most of the existing research about Taiwan’s foreign policy and cross-strait relations neglects how Taiwan’s identity and role as a democratic and pluralistic state influences the island’s external relations. This article analyses how Taiwan’s achievements in the field of democracy and human rights affect Taiwan’s foreign policy and its identity in world politics, and why democracy and human rights are important for it and its external relations. The analysis uses role theory and the three roles of normative power, civilian power, and Global Good Samaritan.
This paper discusses two major ways in which the introduction of Christianity exerted an important influence on the Bunun language. In the second half of the twentieth century, Christian churches were instrumental in the protection of indigenous languages, including Bunun, against the cultural and linguistic unification policies of the Taiwanese government. In a different way, work on Bible translation in Bunun has resulted in the creation of a pan-dialectal religious vocabulary and led to the creation of a de facto standard variant of the language based on the Isbukun dialect. Today, a complex relationship exists between this written standard and other Bunun dialects.