Taiwan President Lai Ching-te’s recent Pacific tour to Hawai‘i, Guam, and Taiwan’s remaining Asian diplomatic partners – the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, and Palau – was more than a calculated diplomatic tactic; it signified the government’s attempt to brand Taiwan as a Pacific nation. By emphasizing Taiwan’s shared democratic values and common Austronesian heritage, Lai’s Hawaiian Shirt Diplomacy successfully portrayed Taiwan’s Pacific Island identity to its Polynesian and American counterparts.
However, despite the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) continued attempts to boost Taiwan’s footprint in the Asia Pacific – starting with former President Tsai Ing-wen’s New Southbound Policy and now Lai’s Pacific tour – what can be said of the Pacific-oriented worldview of the Taiwanese public? Unfortunately, quite little, as the majority of Taiwanese are unable to relate to Pacific countries let alone express a Pacific identity.
The stark gap between the DPP government’s agenda of integration with the Indo-Pacific and the Taiwanese public’s overwhelmingly China- and Northeast Asia-oriented myopic worldview is an obstacle to building concrete, meaningful ties throughout the Pacific. The cultural repertoire of the average Taiwanese consumer is on display in a day trip in Taipei or any Taiwanese city: streets named after cities in China and lined with regional Chinese-style restaurants; shops touting “directly imported” Japanese brand name products. “Foreign” cuisine usually takes the form of a variety of Japanese or Korean foods, with only a speckling of other international cuisines.
The minimal visible representation of Southeast Asian or Pacific cultures in Taiwanese urban landscapes reinforces an already limited worldview. Although Taiwan is home to approximately 700,000 Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Filipino citizens, most of these residents live in the shadows of mainstream Taiwanese society. Common knowledge about their countries is scarce at best, with cases of discrimination not being uncommon. I have heard Taiwanese acquaintances ask on numerous occasions “what is Filipino food?” or “what is the Filipino language? Isn’t it English?” It’s a case in point that most Taiwanese lack basic knowledge of the Philippines and Southeast Asia at large.
Considering the increasingly important role that the Philippines and the Pacific islands visited by Lai are playing in Taiwan’s defense, more attention on the countries is warranted. The absence of Southeast Asia from the Taiwanese worldview, by extension, implies that the greater Pacific is off their radar. This underscores a challenge for Taiwan’s government to strategically execute a Pacific-oriented strategy based on identity.
The apathy of Taiwanese youth toward global affairs and foreign societies beyond Japan and Korea is not a new issue, but one that has long gone unaddressed. A 2017 survey found that over 50 percent of Taiwanese youth were unfamiliar with geopolitical tensions in the South China Sea, which involves Taiwan, China, and numerous other Southeast Asian countries. Even when accounting for a considerable margin of error, this statistic alone is very telling of the baseline familiarity and interest that Taiwan’s future generations hold regarding the Pacific.
Taiwan’s lack of focus on the Pacific can be attributed to over a century of colonial rule by the Japanese, and later the Kuomintang (KMT). The educational and social systems and language policies put in place during these periods holistically taught the Taiwanese to see the world through respective Japanese and Chinese lenses, while suppressing Taiwan’s Indigenous cultures. In doing so, the Taiwanese created their modern identities around these ethnonationalist paradigms.
Particularly under KMT rule, the legacy of which is more strongly felt to this day, Taiwan was only taught about China. The wider region of which Taiwan is a part was overlooked. Although democratization has imbued Taiwan with the freedom to engage the wider world, most of the focus has been placed on Japan and South Korea, which can partly be attributed to former President Lee Teng-hui normalizing Japanese connections to Taiwan and nostalgia for the Japanese colonial era.
While fostering relations with Japan and South Korea in recent decades has benefitted Taiwan greatly, Taiwanese businesses and citizens are missing out on the opportunities of engaging with high-growth markets in the Indo-Pacific. One could also argue that developing closer ties with Indo-Pacific countries is more than an economic opportunity, but one of geopolitical and security interests.
Having a population that is more multilingual, internationally savvy, and able to tap into multiple cultural identities would allow Taiwan as a whole to better engage with a broader range of countries in the region. Taiwan could look to Singapore and ASEAN countries for inspiration as it learns to develop a new Pacific-oriented identity for itself, in addition to its Chinese and Northeast Asian one.
Overall, the DPP government cannot hope to forge meaningful people-to-people ties with the Pacific, let alone legitimately procure a Pacific identity for Taiwan, if the majority of its citizens lack the ability to relate, communicate, and engage with Pacific societies from the grassroots. Bringing Taiwan’s Indigenous Austronesian heritage into the mainstream along the lines of New Zealand’s progressive Indigenous policies will be essential to supplementing recent government policies that reengage Indigenous communities. Without a concrete set of measures to instill a Pacific-oriented mindset among Taiwan’s youth, which overlaps with bilingual initiatives, educational exchange, and international employment opportunities, the New Southbound Policy will go down in history as an empty shell with no resonance among the average Taiwanese.