It is gratifying to announce two items of positive news at the beginning of the journal’s new volume. First, the International Journal of Taiwan Studies (ijts) has been accepted for inclusion in Scopus. The Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board has praised the journal’s meticulous peer review and quality management. It has acknowledged that ijts publishes articles that are academically rigorous and internationally relevant as evidenced by citations in other journals currently included in Scopus. The fact that ijts has been recognised by two vital abstract and citation databases—Web of Science and Scopus—within its first four years of operation is a powerful testament to the dedication and professionalism of scholars in Taiwan studies. Without the support of this research-active community, the ijts would not achieve such excellence.

The second item of good news is that we organised the 2021 ijts Research Article Competition with sponsorship from the European Association of Taiwan Studies and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. We are pleased to offer a First Prize, a Second Prize, and three Merit Awards. Our Assistant Editor, Dr John Wood, has identified two trends that have emerged from the articles submitted to this competition, namely a renewed interest in Cold War-era cultural history (broadly defined) and continuous scrutiny of cross-Strait relations. This observation fits in with the wider trends of the ijts, where cross-Strait relations remains a popular subject in articles submitted to the journal. Another trend is the increase in quality submissions from the field of indigenous studies, and this is demonstrated by the entries to this competition. Meanwhile, the number of articles interested in the Southbound Policy has increased in the past two years—but we received no entries from this particular area to our competition. We have also found that more contributors are using responses to/and changes resulting from the covid pandemic as a lens to explore new areas across a wide range of topics.

Looking at the content of this issue (volume 5, issue 1), one can certainly see some of these trends. Derek Sheridan’s research article, ‘Diplomats, Activists, and the Haunt-ology of American Empire in Martial Law Taiwan’, provides an insight into how the US presence in Taiwan during the Cold War impacted on politics. Jiunn-Cherng Teng’s paper, ‘Behind the Leverage of Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy: New Market Opportunities and Disproving Confrontation’, compares and analyses the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road and the New Southbound Policy. It focuses on the New Southbound Policy from the perspective of cross-Strait relations. Po-Han Lee et al.’s report, ‘“The Future of Taiwan Studies in the Post-covid World”: Online Series on “covid and Governance: Global and Social Solidarity”’, presents several scholars’ attempts to reconsider their research ‘post-covid’ even though the pandemic continues. The second report published in this issue—Isabelle Cheng’s ‘A Report on a Conference That Never Was: Connections, Collaboration, and Solidarity among the Taiwan Studies Community’—is also a direct response to covid and articulates a common experience shared by many academic associations and conferences worldwide.

In addition, we include two further fascinating articles in this issue: Vincent Rollet’s paper on ‘Taiwan’s Participation in the World Organization for Animal Health (oie): Modalities, Utility, and Challenges’, and Axel Klein et al.’s ‘Populism in East Asian Democracies: Report on the International Lecture Series of the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany (Oct 2020–Feb 2021)’. These papers echo one significant, emerging research agenda in area studies in recent years—to paraphrase the term, ‘global Asian studies’, one may call it ‘global Taiwan studies’, which helps to facilitate and generate ‘globally relevant findings with the potential to restore an intellectual foundation for connectedness in an increasingly divided world’ (Sato and Sonoda, 2021: 207).

This issue of ijts also includes a topical section, titled ‘Education and Society in Contemporary Taiwan’, guest edited by Professor Edward Vickers and Dr Tzu-Bin Lin. This is an area that the ijts has not touched upon so far and so we feel very fortunate to dedicate substantial space to address this important subject by several experts: Tzu-Bin Lin and Chia-Kai Huang investigate ‘Taiwanese Higher Education in Times of Change: The Implications of the New Policy 2018’; Li-Yi Wang analyses ‘English Language Education in the National Development Planning of Modern Taiwan’; and Alessandra Ferrer explores ‘Language Policy in Public Compulsory Education Systems: Multiculturalism and National Identity in the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China’. We hope this topical section may inspire further submissions that consider the role of education has played in Taiwan.