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In this article, I examine the ROC president's discursive response to PRC efforts to limit Taiwan's future possibilities and undermine confidence in Taiwan's future. I argue that the capacity to imagine the future, and perceiving agency to affect future outcomes, is crucial for national resilience. Since Taiwan is routinely exposed to factors known to cause reduced self-efficacy and morale – uncertainty, threat, marginalization, restricted agency, circumscribed action repertoires – it is crucial that Taiwanese people have a meaningful sense of “what are we striving for?” and confidence that they have the agency to realize these aspirations. The article sets out an empirical examination of discursive constructions of the future as a vector for enhancing cohesion and resolve in Taiwanese society. Foregrounding a novel dimension in the study of Taiwan, the article contributes both an interpretivist account of President Tsai Ing-wen's discourse and opens a new avenue for research on the largely neglected issue of futurity in cross-Strait relations.

Taiwan, one of Asia's fullest democracies, is the target of China's most aggressive attempts to exert authoritarian influence. Chinese influence operations started to receive special attention by members of civil society and nongovernmental organizations (NGO) after the 2016 national election in Taiwan. China's efforts to penetrate, coopt, and weaken Taiwan's political institutions, society, election integrity, and civic organizations have constituted a major aspect of its overall strategy toward Taiwan. This essay aims to identify influence operations used by the Chinese Communist Party against Taiwan, and to elucidate the responses from Taiwan's robust and vibrant civil society to defend its democracy.

TAIWAN’S CLIMATE DIPLOMACY: ON THE WAY TO CLIMATE NEUTRALITYThe aim of this paper is to present the Taiwan’s policies and actions relating to climate change. Despite the exclusion from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Taiwan has voluntarily ratified global climate conventions and has implemented a number of legislative, technical and organizational measures to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gasses and reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Tackling both climate change and minimizing its effects is a priority for Taiwan. In order to achieve the sustainable development goals Taiwan treats renewable energy as a critical solution in combating climate change and ensuring energy security by adding diversity to an overall electricity mix.

Upon assuming office in 2016, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s administration revitalized the Southbound Policy (SP), rebranding it as the New Southbound Policy (NSP). While both the SP and NSP share a common objective — to reduce Taiwan’s heavy reliance on the Chinese market — the NSP, unlike its predecessor, places a dual emphasis on enhancing economic ties and concurrently spreading Taiwan’s soft power across the designated markets. Despite being one of the target markets under the NSP, Malaysia did not consistently experience a surge in the proportion of Taiwan’s total trade volume as a result of the policy. This paper aims to assess the performance of Taiwan-Malaysia trades in the context of NSP initiatives and elucidate how the soft power that Taiwan has implemented in Malaysia since the 1950s contributed to such an outcome. The trading outcomes between Taiwan and Malaysia indicate that Taiwan did not receive substantial support from the entities it targeted with its soft power initiatives. This suggests that the China complex within the Chinese ethnic population in Malaysia is challenging to uproot due to their historical and cultural ties with China. Keywords: New Southbound Policy, Malaysia, Taiwan, China, soft power

Tensions between China and Taiwan have escalated, particularly during President Tsai's tenure. Following World War II, China endured the Chinese Civil War between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang (KMT). The KMT's defeat in 1949 marked the end of the conflict, after which it retreated to Taiwan and became an opponent force to Beijing. Since then, Cross-Strait relations have remained tense. Under President Tsai, the issue has become more apparent as she consistently rejects China's reunification agenda while strengthening Taiwan's ties with Southeast Asian countries and the United States (U.S.) in particular. This paper also adopts a qualitative desktop research, relying on secondary data collection method which includes treaties, white papers, policy documents, defense reports, and news articles. This paper is also significance because Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) prioritizes safeguarding Taiwan's autonomy and democratic values and the Kuomintang (KMT) advocates for closer ties with China. Concurrently, scholarly attention to the contemporary dynamics of Cross-Strait relations remains insufficient. Existing studies often focus on outdated analyses, such as the deficiencies in Taiwan's 2012 elections, rather than the policies and developments under Tsai Ing-wen's administration (2016-2024). Therefore, this paper examines China- Taiwan relationship during Tsai's presidency demonstrates the significance of defending Taiwan's democracy and maintaining its status quo as an autonomous territory within China.

This paper investigates the relationship between candidates' online popularity and election results, as a step towards creating a model to forecast the results of Taiwanese elections even in the absence of reliable opinion polls on a district-by-district level. 253 of 354 legislative candidates of single-member districts in Taiwan's 2016 general election had active public Facebook pages during the election period. Hypothesizing that the relative popularity of candidates' Facebook posts will be positively related to their election results, I calculated each candidate's Like Ratio (i.e. proportions of all likes on Facebook posts obtained by candidates in their district). In order to have a measure of online interest without the influence of subjective positivity, I similarly calculated the proportion of daily average page views for each candidate's Wikipedia page. I ran a regression analysis, incorporating data on results of previous elections and available opinion poll data. I found the models could describe the result of the election well and reject the null hypothesis. My models successfully predicted 80% of winners in single-member districts and were effective in districts without local opinion polls with a predictive power approaching that of traditional opinion polls. The models also showed good accuracy when run on data for the 2014 Taiwanese municipal mayors election.

Externally, Taiwan in 2019 was strongly influenced by China’s campaign for unification and the collateral impacts of the trade war between the US and China. The external factors further intertwined with domestic party politics ahead of the 2020 presidential and legislative elections.

For the leadership of Taiwan, the significance for Taiwan's relationships with the US and China of the end of the Trump administration and the arrival of the Biden administration formed the defining concern as 2021 began. Taiwan welcomed two steps that the Trump administration took in its waning days: announcing a visit to Taiwan by the US ambassador to the UN (even though it was later cancelled) and repudiating the longstanding Taiwan Contact Guidelines, which was widely seen in Taiwan as overly restrictive. Taiwan's anxieties regarding the Biden administration were quickly allayed, as incoming senior officials repeatedly called US support for Taiwan \"rock solid\" and issued new far less restr ictive Guidelines. Taiwan also benefited from unusually direct expressions of support from Japan and other international partners.

Contrary to foreign media narratives that emphasize the importance of Taiwan-China tensions in Taiwans politics, the 2024 elections reveal the importance of local governance, economic concerns, and partisan dynamics in determining electoral outcomes. This is underscored by voters electing a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate for the presidency and an opposition coalition-controlled Legislative Yuan. The DPP's allegations of Chinese interference in the elections had minimal influence on voters preferences. This demonstrates that Taiwanese politics are predominantly shaped by internal factors and challenges narratives that prioritize Taiwan's geopolitical context over its domestic realities.