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At a recent seminar hosted by APARCʼs China Program, Professor Jessica Chen Weiss, the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, presented findings from her forthcoming book, Faultlines: The Tensions Beneath China's Global Ambitions (under contract with Oxford University Press), which examines how domestic politics and regime insecurity shape China’s foreign policy ambitions, prospects for peaceful coexistence, and the future of international order. Drawing on research and fieldwork in China, Weiss argued that understanding Beijingʼs behavior on the world stage requires looking beyond ideology to the contested priorities and political calculations that drive decision-making within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Weiss proposed a framework centered on three pillars that have sustained CCP legitimacy since the late 1970s: sovereignty (nationalism), security (civility), and development. Her analysis reveals that China's objectives are not static but moving targets shaped by competing domestic interests, leadership priorities, and international pressures.

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The Sovereignty-Security-Development Paradigm
 

At the heart of Weissʼs argument is the recognition that the CCPʼs foremost concern is domestic survival. In the face of the collapse of most communist regimes, the Party has remained vigilant against what it calls “peaceful evolution” and democratic contagion.

On issues touching core sovereignty concerns – Taiwan, Hong Kong, and maritime territorial claims – China has been “hyperactive” in making demands, even when doing so invites international censure. Weiss explained that the more central an issue is to CCP domestic legitimacy, the harder it becomes to make concessions, and the more likely international pressure is to backfire.

Yet tensions exist between competing priorities. China has compromised on certain border disputes to shore up domestic security, while its evolving stance on climate change reflects a shift from viewing carbon limits as threats to growth to recognizing the greater threat environmental catastrophes present to the nation’s stability.

Beyond the Monolith: China's Internal Contestation
 

Weissʼs research demonstrates that authoritarian China is far from monolithic. Different geographic, economic, institutional, and even ideological interests shape policy debates, even if most actors lack formal veto power. Local governments can resist central directives, as evidenced during the COVID-19 outbreak, when local officials initially withheld information about human-to-human transmission from the central government to prevent panic from disrupting important political meetings.

This pattern of center-local tension extends to China's international commitments. Local officials often game environmental regulations to juice growth and secure promotions, undermining Beijingʼs pledges on carbon emissions. On issues ranging from Belt and Road investments to export controls, implementation frequently diverges from stated policy as local actors pursue their own interests.

Weiss’s framework distinguishes among issues that are both central and uncontested (such as Taiwan), those that are central but contested (like climate change and trade policy), and peripheral issues where Beijing has shown greater flexibility (such as demonstrated by many UN peacekeeping initiatives). This helps explain why international pressure succeeds in some domains but fails spectacularly in others.

"The more central an issue is domestically, the more pressure the government faces to perform, and the harder it is to defy these domestic expectations," Weiss said. As a result, international pressure on these central issues is more likely to backfire, forcing the government to be seen as defending its core interests. She underscored that "even on these central issues, there's often tension with other central priorities, and managing these trade-offs comes with a number of different risks. It also means that sometimes an issue that touches on one pillar of regime support can yield to another."

Nationalism as Constraint and Tool
 

Weiss described nationalism as both a pillar of the CCPʼs legitimacy and a potential vulnerability when the government’s response appears weak. While large-scale anti-foreign protests have become rare, nationalist sentiment remains active online and shapes diplomatic calculations.

During Speaker Nancy Pelosiʼs 2022 visit to Taiwan, Chinese social media erupted with calls for the PLA to shoot down her plane. One interlocutor told Weiss his 14-year-old son and friends had stayed up past bedtime to watch Pelosiʼs plane land, illustrating nationalismʼs penetration into Chinese society.

Survey research reveals Chinese public opinion is quite hawkish, with majorities supporting military spending and viewing the U.S. presence in Asia as a threat. The government often refrains from suppressing nationalist sentiment to avoid backlash, even when doing so creates diplomatic complications. Weissʼs public opinion survey experiments, however, reveal that tough but vague threats can provide the government with wiggle room for de-escalation, although disapproval emerges when action is not sufficiently tough.

Regime Security Without Ideological Crusade
 

Weiss pushed back against arguments that China is bent on global domination or that ideology drives conflict with the West. While the CCP seeks a less ideologically threatening environment, it must balance this against development and market access.

This pragmatic calculus explains China's constrained support for Russiaʼs war in Ukraine — Beijing fears secondary sanctions more than it values autocratic solidarity. Rather than exporting revolution, China has worked with incumbents of all political stripes in the service of its national interests.

Chinaʼs strategy focuses on making autocracy viable at home, not on defeating democracy globally. This suggests room for coexistence if both sides can reach a détente on interference in internal affairs.

“China's activities are making autocracy more viable and, to the extent that China is succeeding, making China's example more appealing as a consequence. But its strategy doesn't hinge on defeating democracy around the world,” argued Weiss. This implies, to her view, that “there is more room for coexistence between autocracies and democracies if these different systems can find or reach a potential détente in the realm of ideas about how countries govern themselves, and importantly, they need to pull back their efforts in other societies across boundaries.”

Interdependence and Future Trajectories
 

Weiss concluded by outlining how her framework suggests different engagement strategies depending on where issues fall within the centrality-contestation matrix. On central but uncontested issues like Taiwan, pressure proves counterproductive, and reciprocal restraint may be most promising. On central but contested issues like currency, multilateral pressure can influence certain Chinese constituencies against others. On peripheral issues, such pressure is most effective unless powerful domestic constituencies subvert implementation.

Addressing questions about U.S.-China decoupling, Weiss noted that both sides recognize there are interdependencies that don’t have quick solutions. Even in a critical area like minerals, diversification will take at least a decade, and Chinese processing will still dominate globally. The goal of diversification should be to preempt coercion, not to achieve true decoupling.

The January 3, 2026, U.S. “Operation Absolute Resolve” in Venezuela to capture and remove President Nicolás Maduro has raised urgent questions about its repercussions for the U.S.-China competition, Taiwan Strait security, American strategic priorities in the Indo-Pacific region, and U.S. allies and partners.

In two new episodes of the APARC Briefing series, Stanford scholars Larry Diamond, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and APARC faculty affiliate Oriana Skylar Mastro, a center fellow at FSI, join host Kiyoteru Tsutsui, the director of APARC, to unravel what happened in Venezuela and the implications of the U.S. actions in Latin America for Taiwan, security and alliances in the Indo-Pacific, and U.S. relations with stakeholders in the region.

Both scholars agree that the U.S. mission in Venezuela is a precedent that likely emboldens rather than deters China in its Taiwan calculus, warning that the shift it represents in U.S. national security policy might detract from American capabilities in the Indo-Pacific region at a crucial moment. They also provide sobering advice for U.S. allies struggling to adjust to rapidly shifting geopolitical realities under the second Trump administration.

A Shocking Action in World Affairs

There is no dispute that the Maduro government has been deeply authoritarian, deeply corrupt, and deeply illegitimate, says Diamond, author of Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency. Yet the United States “has probably violated international law to intervene forcibly in the internal affairs of Venezuela and remove its political leader," creating enormous implications for the international community. If it does not pursue a strategy of systemic democratic change in Venezuela, “all of this will have been for naught, and it will have paid a tragic price in terms of international precedent and international legitimacy,” Diamond argues.

Beijing is already using the operation as a "discourse power win," depicting the United States as crushing sovereignty and international law, Mastro notes. Moreover, in addition to Venezuela, President Trump continues to make statements about Greenland, reiterating its importance for U.S. national security and his interest in acquiring the territory, which has alarmed European partners and exacerbated strains with NATO.

“For the first time since WWII, some European countries have declared the United States to be a security threat,” Mastro says. “So I am curious to see if the Chinese try to bring along the Venezuela case as well, to convince U.S. allies and partners to distance themselves from the United States, which would have significant repercussions for the global order and for the United States' role in it.”

A Risky Strategic Reorientation

By unilaterally bypassing international norms to wield power in its own "backyard," the United States may have set a precedent that China can now exploit to justify its own ambitions in Taiwan as a legitimate exercise of regional dominance.

Diamond remarks on this line of thought: “If the United States, as a hegemon, can just do what it wants to arrest and remove a leader, in its kind of declared sphere of influence, what's to stop Xi Jinping from doing the same in his sphere of influence, and with a democratic system in Taiwan, whose sovereignty he does not recognize?” 

On the other hand, many commentators have argued that Operation Absolute Resolve serves as a deterrent to Chinese aggression. Granted, there is no doubt that the operation was a remarkably successful military attack showcasing the capabilities of U.S. special forces, notes Mastro, who, alongside her academic career, also serves in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she currently works at the Pentagon as deputy director of research for Global China Strategy. Nevertheless, she emphasizes that the United States cannot carry out a similar attack in Asia.

“There is no situation in which we ‘neutralize’ Chinese air defenses and then somehow do some sort of infiltration,” says Mastro, author of Upstart: How China Became a Great Power. The U.S. intervention in Venezuela, therefore, “does not tell us a lot, operationally, about what the United States is capable of in a contingency via China.”

More troubling, Mastro identifies the Venezuela operation as demonstrating a fundamental shift in U.S. strategic priorities, with the raid conducted just weeks after the Trump administration released its 2025 National Security Strategy, which prioritizes restoring “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” Mastro characterizes it as “the one region where U.S. dominance faces no serious challenge.” Thus, Venezuela suggests “the Trump administration means business about the renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere, and, unfortunately, that makes me concerned that there might be strategic neglect of the Indo-Pacific moving forward,” she points out.

Diamond stresses that, virtually throughout the entire presidency of Xi Jinping, dating back to 2012, China has been rapidly building up its military capabilities, prioritizing those specifically suited for coercing, isolating, or potentially seizing Taiwan. Against this backdrop, “I am much more fearful about the future of Taiwan in the week following U.S. military action on January 3 in Venezuela than I was before that action.” 

Mastro agrees with this assessment about the ripple effects of the operation in Venezuela. “I would say that it probably emboldens China.”

Frank Advice for U.S. Allies

For U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, including Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as allies and partners in Europe, both scholars offer pragmatic counsel for coping with the Trump administration.

Diamond urges U.S. allies to manage Trump diplomatically while staying focused on core interests, namely, prioritizing the preservation of the alliances and strengthening autonomous defense capabilities to demonstrate commitment and hedge against potential U.S. retrenchment.

“It takes constant, energetic, proactive, imaginative, relentless, and in some ways deferential working of the relationship, including the personal relationship between these leaders and Donald Trump [...] The future will be better if the leaders of these countries internalize that fundamental lesson about Trump.”

Mastro is equally direct about the limited alternatives ahead of U.S. allies: "You don't really have an option. That Chinese military – if it gives the United States problems, it definitely gives you problems. There's no hope for a country like Taiwan without the United States. There's no hope for Australia without the United States."

Counterintuitively, U.S. assertiveness may indicate its insecurity about the balance of power with China. “It seems to me that the United States also needs to be reassured that our allies and partners support us [...] And if we had that confidence, maybe the United States would be less aggressive in its use of military force.”

Watch the two APARC Briefing episodes:

🔸 What the U.S. Raid in Venezuela Means for Taiwan and Asia - with Larry Diamond >

🔸 Does Venezuela Provide China a Roadmap for Taiwan? – with Oriana Skylar Mastro >

At a seminar hosted by APARC’s Taiwan Program, National Chengchi University’s Hsiao-Hui Lee, a professor of management information systems, dissected how global trade shocks propagate not only through trade flows of physical goods but also through financial flows, particularly trade credit, within supply chain networks. Against the backdrop of shifting U.S. trade policies and geopolitical upheavals, Lee's research offers insights for policymakers and businesses navigating the complex landscape of global trade and supply chain resilience. Through a Taiwan lens, her analysis underscores the importance of managing not just the logistical but also the financial linkages of global supply chain networks.

Global trade is interconnected through global supply chains via direct and indirect trade. Geopolitical events, natural disasters, and unexpected shocks disrupt these connections, creating ripple effects across global supply chain networks. Events ranging from the 2008 financial crisis to the 2011 East Japan earthquake and tsunami, the COVID-19 pandemic, and, more recently, U.S.-China trade tensions, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the Trump administration’s executive orders all accentuated vulnerabilities within these interconnected frameworks.

Lee’s main point is that shocks in an industry or a region can propagate across supply chains not only through transactions but also via the movement of trade credit, which allows firms to buy inventory and delay payments. For suppliers, this mechanism provides a financial buffer that helps maintain liquidity and manage cash flows. Indeed, trade finance supports 80 to 90 percent of global trade, according to the World Trade Organization.

Yet, trade credit comes with its own set of risks that may amplify financial stress across supply chain networks and propagate shocks. And if one firm defaults, then the impact can cascade through the supply chain, affecting multiple sectors. Trade creditors experience substantial losses when debtors fail, and these losses can increase the bankruptcy risk for suppliers, demonstrating how financial stress can spread through trade credit links. For example, during the 2008 financial crisis, a significant contraction in trade finance availability led to a 12% decline in international trade. This shortage of financing disrupted global supply chains, causing widespread economic contraction. 

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Political leaders aiming to secure supply chains have touted risk-mitigating strategies such as reshoring (repatriating raw material production and manufacturing), nearshoring (moving far-flung sourcing points to closer countries and regions), and friendshoring (relocating supply chains to allied countries where the risk of disruption from political chaos is low). Each strategy offers unique potential benefits, like reduced transportation costs or enhanced political stability. For instance, the U.S. CHIPS Act aims to bolster domestic semiconductor manufacturing, while the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) helped facilitate duty-free access to U.S. markets.

Lee’s research, however, is a cautionary examination of the trade credit interdependence inherent in these common outsourcing strategies and their influence on shock propagation. She argues that, while relocating production closer to home or to friendly nations is beneficial, the politics of relocation often overlook the financial linkage risks introduced by extensive trade credit networks. Taiwan’s manufacturing ecosystem – concentrated around semiconductors, electronics, and precision components – is particularly illustrative of this complexity, with high levels of inter-firm trade credit amplifying liquidity stresses during trade shocks.

Using empirical models, Lee’s analysis shows that in-country shock propagation tends to be stronger than cross-border transmission. Yet, the intricate web of cross-border trade credits means that even with reshoring or nearshoring strategies, Taiwanese suppliers, for example, remain financially interlinked with foreign customers, like Apple and Nvidia. Therefore, demand shocks in one region may still create repercussions in Taiwan's local cash flow chains.

Lee suggests that implementing robust risk management practices – such as credit insurance, diversification of credit sources, and realignment of supply chains – can help mitigate these risks.
 

Key Takeaways: Global Trade and Credit-Driven Co-Movement

For Global Stakeholders:
 

1. The Importance of Credit Chain Interdependence: Trade credit chain linkage risks can propagate global trade shocks.
2. Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Strategies: While reshoring, nearshoring, and friendshoring have clear benefits, each also presents unique challenges and risks, particularly due to trade-credit interdependencies.
3. Complexity in Trade-Credit Networks: Extensive trade credit links represent an often-overlooked risk in corporate relocation decisions.
4. Supply Chain Resilience Strategies: Supply chain resilience requires managing not only logistics but also financing networks.

For Taiwan:
 

1. Taiwan’s Manufacturing Ecosystem Dynamics: The island nation’s manufacturing sectors heavily depend on inter-firm trade credit networks, which can amplify liquidity stresses during shocks.
2. Financial Ties Remain Despite Reshoring Efforts: Even with U.S. reshoring or nearshoring efforts, Taiwanese suppliers remain financially tied to foreign customers, making them susceptible to demand shocks abroad.
3. Financial Flexibility for Stability: Firms such as TSMC, Hon Hai, and Delta Electronics leverage factoring and receivables sales to stabilize working capital, indicating that financial flexibility is key to resilience.
4. Enhancing Economic Fortitude: Expanding supply-chain finance platforms and trade-credit insurance could boost Taiwan’s resilience amid export bans or geopolitical disruptions.

The longer these authoritarian parties are in power, the more they eviscerate democratic institutions. But they are not invincible or irreversible. Incipient authoritarianism has been turned back in countries as diverse as Brazil, Poland, Sri Lanka, and Senegal. The slide away from liberal democracy has been reversed recently in Botswana and Mauritius. An executive coup against democracy was defeated in South Korea. Young people in Bangladesh overthrew a dictator last year in a remarkable upsurge of protest. And the longstanding autocracies in Venezuela and Turkey are looking increasingly desperate and unpopular. These examples bear lessons we must learn and promote if we are to ignite — as we surely can — a new era of democratic progress.

First, we must study what it takes to defeat autocrats at the ballot box. Typically, electoral battles are not a straight contrast between democracy and autocracy. Voters weigh their circumstances of life as well. Fortunately, autocrats have other failings besides their corruption, lawlessness, and abuse of power: sooner or later, they fail to deliver on their material promises. Successful democratic campaigns target the populists’ hypocrisy and address not just people’s political rights but their economic and social needs. 

To defeat autocrats, democratic forces must offer specific, credible plans to meet the core policy challenges of economic growth and distribution, fairness and inclusion, education, health care, infrastructure, public safety, and national security. 

But people everywhere also need a vision of what constitutes a good and just form of government. Here, democracies have dropped the ball in making the case FOR democracy as the best form of government. Decades ago, as they fought dictatorships and then came to power, democracies taught their young people the values, ideas, and history of democracy. But as new democracies stabilized, the existence of a democratic culture came to be assumed, and countries forgot the terrible price they paid under dictatorship — the fear, falsehoods, powerlessness, and repression, the lack of accountability, voice, justice, and human dignity. We can make the practical case for democracy — it performs better over time. But we cannot pin the argument on performance, which may fail at specific points in time.
 

Ultimately, the case for democracy is that being able to speak truth to power, to hold it accountable, and to change those who exercise it is a core element of human dignity and a basic human right. The freedoms to speak, publish, pray, organize, and assemble are inalienable human rights. As are the rights to a fair and impartial trial and to have all citizens be treated equally under the law. It is only democracy — never autocracy — that protects these rights and treats citizens with dignity by investing sovereignty in them, not some self-appointed minority. Liberty and democracy are intertwined.

We must make these points relentlessly, creatively, and convincingly, not just in the schools, at successively higher levels of instruction and deliberation, but through the social media platforms where people live their information lives. Russia, China, Iran, and other autocracies wage extensive propaganda campaigns to trash liberal values and institutions. They portray democracy as lacking in dynamism, capacity, and masculine strength. These arguments are false, offensive, and degrading to the human spirit. But they will not fail of their own accord. They need to be defeated by better, more inspiring arguments and narratives about why people need freedom to thrive, and why societies need democracy to have freedom.

Today, there are four arenas of struggle for the future of freedom, and democrats must prevail in all of them. The core battle is now in the countries that have been sliding back from democracy to autocracy. 

In almost every instance where authoritarian projects have been defeated, it has been through elections. Illiberal populists crave the legitimacy that comes from victory in multiparty elections. But corruption and misrule erode their electoral support. So, they need elections that are competitive enough to validate their claim to rule but rigged enough to minimize the risk of defeat. The pathway to restoring democracy is to seize the electoral opportunity, flood the zone with election workers and observers, and wage an effective campaign so that people who have grown weary of authoritarian abuse can defeat it at the ballot box.

To win, democrats must forge a unified coalition across factional and ideological divides. They must offer concrete policy ideas to improve people’s lives. They need a narrative about what has happened to justice and democracy, and why restoring these will help to make the country great again. A campaign is not a legal brief. It must inspire and excite. It requires strong, compelling leadership. It must engage diverse sections of society, including people who once supported the authoritarian populists but are now disillusioned. Democrats must also express patriotism and show that illiberal populists wave a false flag. Democrats are the truer patriots because they recognize democracy and liberty as pillars of national greatness.

These lessons can help to restore democracy where it has been lost and to secure it in a second arena, when it is under challenge from authoritarian populist parties. But there are two other arenas of struggle in which we must prevail. Globally, democrats cannot let the world’s powerful authoritarian states capture and hollow out the global institutions to defend freedom — the UN Human Rights Council, the international and regional instruments of electoral observation and assistance, and the rules that govern the flows of data and information. Neither can we shrink from the global battle to support democratic values and free flows of information, and to lend technical and financial support to peoples, parties, media, and movements around the world struggling for freedom. 

In the face of isolationist efforts to defund and withdraw from this cause, we must convince democratic publics that we can only secure our own freedom by supporting that of others. A more democratic world will be a safer, fairer, less corrupt, more peaceful, and prosperous world.
 

All of that has been under existential challenge in Ukraine since Russia’s brutal invasion in February of 2022. Resisting aggression is the fourth arena of struggle. There is no more urgent priority than to give the Ukrainian people the weapons, resources, and economic sanctions to defeat Russian aggression. Similarly, we must ensure that Taiwan’s democracy does not suffer the same aggression from the People’s Republic of China. Taiwan must have the weapons, trade, and international dignity it needs to survive. We must preserve the status quo across the strait by making clear that the US and other democracies stand behind the resolve of a free people to chart their own destiny in Taiwan — as we do in Ukraine.

We meet here today just a short distance from the grotesque wall that stood for decades as the dividing line between freedom and tyranny. 36 years ago — almost to this day — the wall was torn down. Few imagined it would happen when it did. But it did because of democratic conviction and resolve. Now, we are in a new cold war with global authoritarianism. The history of Berlin should constantly remind us that freedom is fragile, but it can also be resilient. We must never lose faith in the rightness of our cause and the obligation we bear once again to defend freedom in an hour of peril.

Professor Diamond delivered this speech at the Berlin Freedom Conference on November 10, 2025.

We are pleased to share the publication of a new volume, Cold War Refugees: Connected Histories of Displacement and Migration across Postcolonial Asia, edited by the Korea Program's Yumi Moon, associate professor in Stanford's Department of History.

The book, now available from Stanford University Press, revisits Cold War history by examining the identities, cultures, and agendas of the many refugees forced to flee their homes across East, Southeast, and South Asia due to the great power conflict between the US and the USSR. Moon's book draws on multilingual archival sources and presents these displaced peoples as historical actors in their own right, not mere subjects of government actions. Exploring the local, regional, and global contexts of displacement through five cases —Taiwan, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Pakistan — this volume sheds new light on understudied aspects of Cold War history.

The book's chapters — written by Phi-Vân Nguyen, Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, Yumi Moon, Ijlal Muzaffar, Robert D. Crews, Sabauon Nasseri, and Aishwary Kumar — explore Vietnam's 1954 partition, refugees displaced from Zhejiang to Taiwan, North Korean refugees in South Korea from 1945–50, the Cold War legacy in Karachi, and Afghan refugees.

Purchase Cold War Refugees at www.sup.org and receive 20% off with the code MOON20.

The Taiwan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) was pleased to join the North American Taiwan Studies Association (NATSA) as a co-host of NATSA’s 2025 annual conference, Toward an Otherwise in Taiwan and Beyond. Held at Stanford University from June 30 to July 2, the conference continued NATSA’s three-decade tradition of convening Taiwan scholars across disciplines. Stanford East Asia Library and the National Museum of Taiwan Literature were the event’s additional co-hosts.

Organizing the annual interdisciplinary academic forum is a core mission of NATSA, a nonprofit organization operated by North American and overseas Taiwanese doctoral students and recent graduates studying Taiwan. This year’s conference invited participants to engage with the “otherwise,” a framework adopted by fields tied to social movements, including Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, and gender and sexuality studies. Using this framework, the conference aimed to recenter marginalized aspects of Taiwan and challenge conventional methodologies and narratives in Taiwan studies.

The conference opened with welcome remarks by Stanford sociologist and APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin, who also serves as the director of the Taiwan Program. The ensuing agenda explored diverse topics and included roundtables, workshops, a mentoring session, a film screening, and a book display. The conversations underscored the need for scholarship rooted in solidarity, critical inquiry, and imagination. The following are highlights from selected roundtable discussions.

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Reflecting on Three Decades of Taiwan Studies

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The opening signature roundtable, Three Decades of Taiwan Studies, brought together four scholars from different programs to reflect on the historical development of Taiwan studies in North America. It featured Howard Chiang, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara; sociologist Ruo-Fan Liu, the 2024-26 Taiwan Program postdoctoral fellow at APARC; Richard J. Haddock, the assistant director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at the George Washington University, where he is also pursuing a doctorate in public policy and public administration; and University of Washington’s Ellen Y. Chang, a film scholar and art curator/practitioner.

The four speakers traced the transformation of Taiwan studies from its roots in traditional area studies into an interdisciplinary field. They emphasized that, despite growing academic interest in Taiwan and the field’s expansion in both content and relevance, institutional support remains precarious and long-term financial commitment is uncertain.

Taiwan’s Democratic Resilience in the Age of AI

The roundtable AI, Misinformation, and Global Security examined Taiwan’s leadership role in combating digital disinformation and defending democratic institutions. Mei-Chun Lee, an anthropologist at Academia Sinica, introduced Taiwan’s civil society responses to misinformation, including initiatives such as the Fake News Cleanser program, which helps older populations navigate misinformation. She emphasized a "security and care" framework combining fact-checking and civic education networks.

Thung-Hong Lin, a sociologist at Academia Sinica, examined Taiwan’s democratic resilience amid China’s sharp power tactics, sharing findings from a large dataset that tracks cross-Strait informational networks and their influence on voting patterns in Taiwan. 

Herbert Chang, a computational social scientist at Dartmouth College who studies social networks and online politics, analyzed the role of generative AI in misinformation during Taiwan’s 2024 elections. While memes (including AI-generated ones) spread rapidly, his study finds that AI did not significantly shift voting behavior due to entrenched political polarization. 

Yuan Hsiao, a Yale University sociologist studying the intersection of digital media, social networks, and collective action, discussed the emotional effects of misinformation on social media, focusing on how emotional manipulation drives identification with protest movements. He also raised methodological challenges in measuring misinformation.

Imagining Alternative Futures Across Asia

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The roundtable Toward Otherwise Futures in Asia brought together scholars focusing on the intersecting yet distinct cultural and political landscapes of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Tibet. The conversation featured Harvard University’s political theorist Samuel Chan; Cornell University’s doctoral candidate in anthropology Yu Liang, also known as Leeve Palray; Stanford University’s political theorist and postdoctoral scholar Simon Sihang Luo; and Tenzing Wangdak, a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.

Together, they explored how communities in the four distinct regions respond to cultural displacement, political repression, and transnational authoritarianism. The discussion centered on how each place navigates power asymmetries relative to China and whether there is any alternative path to democratization in China. The conversation raised questions about alternative political futures and relational frameworks for understanding different types of power dynamics in East Asia.
 

The Evolving Contours of Taiwan Studies

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The closing forum, Working Across Differences: NATSA and 30 Years of Community-Building, invited three scholars to reflect on the overall theme of the conference, drawing on their disciplinary perspectives and rich engagement with NATSA. The conversation featured anthropologist Mei-Chun Lee of Academia Sinica; legal and public health scholar Po-Han Lee of National Taiwan University; and I-Lin Liu, a doctoral candidate in media studies at Indiana University Bloomington.

The panelists considered NATSA’s unique position as a student-led network that fosters scholarly exchange across disciplines and generations. They discussed the importance of promoting flexibility and inclusiveness as the field of Taiwan studies responds to academic and political shifts. Looking ahead, the speakers called for incorporating marginalized voices from Taiwan.

As Taiwan increasingly gains visibility on the world stage, the conference affirmed the importance of advancing Taiwan studies as an interdisciplinary, justice-oriented, and globally connected field.

This interview first appeared in the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paolo, on April 6. The following English version was generated using machine translation and subsequently edited for accuracy and clarity.

WASHINGTON — The tariff hike against all countries announced last week by President Donald Trump may bolster China's image, but that doesn't mean China or any other country is poised to replace the United States, says Thomas Fingar, Shorenstein APARC Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University.

Fingar, a former chief of the State Department's China Division, among other roles in the U.S. Foreign Service and national intelligence, believes that Trump's tariffs will be bad for all nations.

"I hesitate to predict how other countries will react, except that this has more or less given everyone an incentive to bypass the U.S.," he tells Folha.

Donald Trump announced tariffs this week against virtually every country. China has already announced retaliation, imposing a 34% tariff on American products. Are we facing a trade war?

I don't think the war metaphor works for me. I don't know what Trump is trying to do. One could say that this is a game of imposing an outrageous tariff in the hope that specific targets, which are basically all countries, might give in to what they say are their demands. In doing so, they would reduce barriers to trade with the United States. To me, it doesn't make sense with the vast majority of targets of the 10% tariffs.

Why?

I hesitate to predict how other countries will react, except that this has more or less given everyone an incentive to bypass the U.S., to make the U.S. a supplier of last resort, to hold the line, to have a kind of united front to compete with each other.

If the assessment is that the Dutch or the French or the Germans or the Brazilians or somebody else is talking about doing something to eliminate a 10% tariff to gain a comparative advantage in accessing the U.S. market, if that's the logic, then fine. Maybe there's something rational about that, but I think it's more likely that the targets of those low tariffs are just getting together.

My main trade competitor has the same or higher tariffs levied against them. Why should I give in if we are competing on a level playing field?

I think Trump is going to make the U.S. pay a huge geopolitical price. But what he thinks he will gain from this, I don't know. Is it likely that he will achieve anything really significant from it? I doubt it.

You mentioned a geopolitical price tag for the United States. What would it be?

The tendency of much of the world, most of the time, was to try to work with the United States, to the extent that they couldn't automatically do what Washington wanted, but they were inclined to cooperate because they saw it as benign, if not beneficial, to their interests. I think Trump has reversed that. This is going to lead to a disinclination to work with us, an incentive to try to bypass us. I think the inclination now is going to be: I'm not going to vote with the Americans, I'm going to look elsewhere first, for my investment, for my capital, for the market, for what I'm doing, for partners.

But I don't think that these measures are necessarily going to play in favor of any particular country. Maybe China in some places, the European Union in some places, Japan in some places. It's going to be a very different environment for the United States, for American companies and diplomats to operate in. It's going to be much more difficult.

This tariff strategy that you say is hard to understand is seen by some analysts as part of Trump's isolationist policy.

As my kids would say, this is so last century. This is really 19th century, the idea of bringing industries, manufacturing back to the United States. Very little manufacturing, I think, is going to come back to the United States. We have 4% unemployment. We can't fill the jobs that we have now, imagine bringing back manufacturing of basic commodities like shoes, toys, that kind of thing.

That left the United States a long time ago and went to Japan, moved from Japan to Taiwan, moved from Taiwan to South Korea, moved from South Korea to somewhere else, and then moved to China and then to Vietnam. Those things are not coming back here because there's not enough profitability to justify investing in robots and mechanizing those things to bring them back to the United States. Our workforce is small relative to the size of the economy. It's not coming back.

It's already moving from China because labor costs are so high. The fallacy in Trump's logic is that things like furniture, construction, textiles, clothing, and manufacturing would come back. And the people who would actually do the work are the people he's persecuting with his ridiculous immigration policies.

Trump has argued that he imposed the tariffs to curb alleged abuses against the United States that would benefit China. Is he containing Beijing with this move?

I don't think he really cares about containing China. But the answer is no. These moves boost China's image. Beijing has seized on the rhetoric of defending the open, globalized international trading order that the United States has attacked. They will take advantage of that as much as they can. I don't think the tariffs are part of the U.S. rivalry with China. China's rise has not disadvantaged the United States economically — it has done so to Japan, and, to some extent, South Korea and Taiwan, but not the United States. So Trump is using this argument with false, exaggerated, and distorted statements.

Could we witness a change in the world order, the end of the American era and the beginning of a Chinese era?

No.

Not even as a consequence of tariffs?

Absolutely not. Part of the problem is that China's economy is closed. One of the reasons is that it doesn't have a consumer society because people don't have enough income. That's because of the amount of wealth that the state extracts to pay for high-speed rail, military structures, and energy development. Some of that is good, some of it is excess.

U.S. tariffs won’t create a market that can rival the size and influence of the United States. It would have to be somewhere else that is very rich, and China is not very rich. China is barely in the middle-income category, it has a per capita income at a level that Mexico has been at for decades. It's not binary. So, the U.S. retreat from its leadership position in the world order, which I don't necessarily see as a bad thing, doesn't automatically hand that role over to China, Russia, the European Union, Japan, Brazil, the BRICS, or any other set of players.

Can China gain ground by investing more in countries that are affected by tariffs?

China has invested more in countries that are affected by tariffs, like Indonesia and Vietnam. These countries are very wary of Chinese investment for various historical reasons, and to some extent for ethnic reasons. But China is actually cutting back on its overseas investments because its own population is asking: Why are we giving money to countries that are richer than us? That is a reasonable question.

They have real problems meeting the expectations, demands, and needs of their own population, which is now largely urban. The cities have to function, you can't say, "Go back to the farm and do sustainable agriculture." That phase is long gone in China. So they have to spend more. Half of the population still has rural identity cards. That means they don't get free education beyond primary school. That means 50% of the future workforce won't have more than a primary school education. This is a country with enormous challenges. Can they manage them? Probably yes, but there is not much room for maneuver. Their own slowing economy will be hurt by these tariffs. I don't think that's Trump's intention, but it will hurt them.

What impact might the tariffs have on Brazil and Latin America? Do you think China will become more attractive?

I don't know specific commodities from specific places, but my general starting point is that a 10% distribution across Latin America won't have much of an impact on the price for consumers in those countries. You'll export the same amount; we'll pay more for whatever the commodity is, flowers from Colombia, grapes, wine from Argentina or Chile. Since the tariff is general, it doesn't give Chile an advantage on wine over Argentina, because they both have the same amount. Most of what Latin America exports to the United States doesn't go to China.

In short, what are the main consequences of tariffs in terms of the geopolitical landscape and the domestic landscape?

It destabilizes the international trading system that has benefited most countries for a long time. It will force adjustments, that is number one. And number two is that it undermines the image of the United States, and therefore its influence as a stabilizing, predictable, and broadly beneficial member of the international community. It disrupts economies and undermines American influence and attractiveness.

In the end, does anyone benefit from Trump's tariff policies?

No one. This is not a policy that works to anyone's obvious benefit. It upsets everyone. And there is no alternative to the United States, in the sense that the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. China is not that, and China does not want to be that.

gaps persist between stakeholders. This is exacerbated by the lack of clear, standardized specifications from NATO, leading to inconsistent implementation and operational friction. Second, at its core, this is an intelligence-sharing challenge: member states operate under different national frameworks, threat perceptions, and priorities, which influence what information they are willing (or unwilling) to share. Third, the fragmentation of sharing systems is not merely a technical hurdle but often a deliberate choice made for operational and security reasons, reflecting concerns over sovereignty, data protection, and strategic advantage.

While technological advancements can enhance interoperability, they alone will not drive adoption. Our research highlights that the underlying issue is one of trust and incentives—NATO must establish mechanisms that encourage collaboration beyond just technological solutions. Without a strong foundation of mutual trust, transparency, and shared benefits, even the most advanced systems will face resistance. Creating sustainable incentives for participation—whether through policy alignment, risk reduction assurances, or value-added intelligence sharing—will be essential in fostering a more effective and unified cyber defense posture within NATO.

A key component of our project involves conducting in-depth research and stakeholder interviews focused on Mongolia's "Billion Trees Initiative," where we will be seeking actionable insights to scale up the initiative effectively and sustainably.

influencers work with politicians to coordinate these influence operations and shape public opinion. Our policy recommendations will address how governments and civil societies can work together to tackle this issue.

Australian Space Agency and U.S. Defense Innovation Unit, the goal of this project is to leverage Australia's strategic geographic position and investment in reentry infrastructure to mitigate the hurdles that U.S. commercial startups experience accessing military ranges for reentry. Our project aims to create a robust foundation for the development of orbital return capabilities in Australia, fostering greater commercial and national security collaboration between the U.S. and Australia.

to computational resources acts as a barrier to adoption. India has a thriving tech sector, and openly available AI models have the potential to democratize access to this trailblazing technology. At the same time, AI is expensive to build and deploy, and access to the specialized computational resources needed to do so is limited even for top Indian companies. Our team aims to develop solutions in partnership with Digital Futures Lab that can help bolster the AI ecosystem across India.

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