What Future for Taiwan? Sino-Taiwanese Relations: Divergent Perspectives

We don’t see it as the role of Futuribles to report on elections, but they can sometimes prompt us to reflect on possible futures. This is perhaps the case with this January’s elections in Taiwan, an island of 23.5 million inhabitants split between advocates of rapprochement with China and others convinced of its own special identity, who want to defend it and ensure its independence in the long run. Taiwan is an important strategic player in Sino-American competition in the Asia-Pacific region, but it also ranks alongside Hong Kong as one of the bastions of Western-style democracy in the Chinese world. For that reason, it is useful to gain a better understanding of its specificity and the broad developmental trends at work. This is the aim of Inès Cavalli’s article in the wake of the elections that occurred on 11 January 2020.