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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.
Abstract
The article analyses the rise and fall of the Kuomintang candidate in the 2020 Taiwanese presidential election, Han Kuo-yu. It examines how three leading Taiwanese newspapers, the China Times, the Liberty Times, and the United Daily News, have reported about him and his populist strategy and style. Han Kuo-yu is almost uniformly viewed as a populist due to his anti-elite discourse, self-styling as a common man, and use of simple and direct language. The analysis of Han Kuo-yu and the media coverage about him is based on three leading approaches to defining and understanding populism—the ‘ideational’, ‘political-strategic’, and ‘socio-cultural’ approaches—and academic definitions of populism that have been used and invented by scholars in Taiwan since the island’s democratisation in the 1990s.