US Cities And States In Taiwan’s Quest For International Space

>> Kharis Templeman: My name is Kharis Templeman. I am the program manager of the project on Taiwan in the Indo Pacific region and a research fellow here at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. I want to welcome our audience out there, wherever you may be, either in Asia or on the east coast or even in Europe or elsewhere, to our afternoon seminar today.

We're very pleased to welcome Sarah Nuland here to speak about US cities and states in Taiwan's quest for international space. Before I give her a further introduction, I do want to note we have a further we have one more event in our winter quarter speaker series that will be on March 3 at noon.

Caitlin Tallmadge will be speaking for our project. So Sarah Nuland is an assistant professor of government at Smith College. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. So we're welcoming her back to the Sunny Bay area today. And she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Asch center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard's Kennedy School government.

She conducts research on local governance in mainland China and in Taiwan, and on sub national diplomacy between the US, the People's Republic of China, and Taiwan. Her work has been published in Governance specific Review, China Quarterly, and the Journal of Political Science Education. And I would note she's got a lovely new article out in the China Quarterly on the effect of changing Taiwan's local governance structure of officials from elected to appointed.

And she finds an interesting result there, that she's actually got more responsive, there's more responsive bureaucrats in appointed rather than elected positions. So perhaps in Q and A, we can discuss that a little further. She is also a public intellectuals program of the National Committee on US China Relations fellow, and she is a member of the US Taiwan Next Generation Working Group.

And so both of us are part of that group. We'll be going to Taiwan later this year as part of those activities. And if you haven't heard of that group, I'd encourage you to check out the website it's hosted at Berkeley that describes the US Taiwan next generation program in more detail.

Without further ado, I think I'll turn it over to Sarah. The floor is yours. We'll let you speak for as long as you want. And then one last note to our online audience. I'll be monitoring the chat here. So if you would like to pose a question during her prepared remarks, just go ahead and put it in the q and a box, and I'll go ahead and, and monitor that and feed it to her after her prepared remarks are done.

So without further ado, over to you. Sarah, thank you.

>> Sarah: Great. Thanks so much, Kharis. I really appreciate the kind introduction and invitation to be here. So today I'll be speaking about US cities and states in Taiwan's quest for international space. I have some work on this topic that's published in Pacific Review and then some ongoing projects on the ways in which sub national governments in the US, China, and Taiwan engage with each other.

And so I want to first contextualize this topic in a context that is probably familiar to many people who are watching, which is the sort of gradual shrinking of Taiwan's diplomatic space over time, especially if we think about it in terms of the list of countries that treat Taiwan as a formal diplomatic ally.

So this map is now a couple of years, or the set of maps is a couple of years old, and there's actually even less blue today than there was in 2018. But you can see that the countries that recognize Taiwan, the Republic of China, Taiwan as a diplomatic ally represented in blue on these maps, shrink dramatically from 1949.

And then really, I think the sort of key turning point is in the 1970s. In 1971, the People's Republic of China gains the United Nations China seat. And really at that point, there's a kind of flood of countries that begin to recognize the People's Republic of China rather than Taiwan.

And we've seen, I think, particularly in the last few years since Tsai Ing-wen was elected in 2016, renewed pressure by the People's Republic of China to try to sort of peel off Taiwan's remaining allies. So at this point, Taiwan only has 14 formal diplomatic allies, and those countries tend to be countries that are small and not geopolitically incredibly important, although to Taiwan they remain important.

And so what can a place like Taiwan do in this kind of context, where it has fewer and fewer formal diplomatic partners in the world? So what I want to sort of talk about today is the fact that Taiwan engages in multipronged forms of diplomacy and this question of sort of state to state ties, right.

Formal diplomatic alliances is one component of that diplomacy. A second component that has also gotten a fair amount of attention in the last few years is Taiwan's efforts. And for the most part, I would say unsuccessful efforts to be included in international organizations has pushed for things like membership in the World Health Organization, making the argument that Taiwan can be a vital contributor.

And in particular, Taiwan's successes in addressing Covid indicate that it has a great deal to offer the international community. China in general has been quite effective at using its position within international organizations to prevent Taiwan from gaining formal access. And so today I'm going to focus on a kind of third option that is available to Taiwan that I don't think substitutes for this sort of international organization level or for state to state ties, formal diplomatic alliances, but is really important as a way that Taiwan seeks to carve out international space for itself.

And so this third way is what I'll refer to as paradiplomacy or sub national diplomacy. This is the idea of formal mechanisms of engagement between governments. So it's government to government engagement. Today I'll particularly talk about the US and Taiwan. But Taiwan does this kind of engagement with other countries as well.

And these governments are at a sub national level. So it could be cities or states, counties in some cases. You might have like a district that's engaging in this kind of tie. So my big questions for today are, first of all, just what is paradiplomacy and what role does it play?

That should not say us China. Sorry. That should say us Taiwan relationship. I will talk about the US-China relationship and some work with Kyle Jaros in the future, but today I'm not going to talk about that work. And then the second question is how and why has us Taiwan paradiplomacy changed over the past 50 years?

So I'm going to make sort of two arguments throughout the course of my talk. The first is that because of its exclusion from traditional forms of diplomacy, so whether those are participation in international organizations or formal diplomatic alliances, paradiplomacy has been a major. Component of Taiwan's diplomatic efforts, particularly since the 1980s.

So 1979, when the US normalized its relationship with the People's Republic of China, became a really key turning point. And I think after that point, Taiwan really began to invest very significantly in paradiplomacy. And the forums that paradipomacy have taken have really changed over time. There's some continuity, some forms that Taiwan is engaging in today that it was also engaging in in, say, 1980.

But there have been new forms that have evolved with the sort of evolution of the international order and of things like communications technologies. A second part of my argument is that US Taiwan paradipomacy is driven both by diplomatic innovation. So by, in particular, MofA officials, I think finding new ways that they can try to engage with local governments.

But also political incentives for local officials in the US and Taiwan are a really important part of the story. When you have cities and states engaging and those folks are run in the US and in Taiwan by elected officials, ultimately there has to be some payoff for those officials, some reason why they want to participate.

And so I think we see some ebbing and flowing in the US-Taiwan paradiplomatic relationship, depending on how local officials perceive paradipomacy to potentially hurt or help them. So first, I just want to give a kind of rich sense of what exactly paradipomacy looks like. So in terms of the definition that I'm working with, I talk about it as diplomatic engagement between state actors in the US and Taiwan.

So there has to be government involvement on both sides. But at least one of the government actors who is involved is at the sub national level. So in some cases, you might have something like the government of Taiwan as a whole, often represented by the ministry of Foreign affairs engaging with a us state or us city.

In other cases, you have ties between cities on both sides, as in the case of a sister city relationship. But there has to be at least some component of sub national government. And I look at this to include things like public universities, and there's now some engagement with k twelve public school systems because those are government funded.

I treat those as an entity of the local government and consider those as examples of paradiplomacy. And I'd be happy to answer questions about what is or isn't included in this definition. So we have a wonderful team of research assistants from Smith College, where I'm a professor. I've been tracking different forms of paradiplomacy and want to give a sense of what some of the most dominant forms are.

So one form that I think has long been used is trade delegations or buying delegations that come often from Taiwan to sign agreements with the governors of us states. I think these have been a crucial form of engagement, especially with states that are agricultural producers. Taiwan is very dependent on food imports, and so it imports a lot of things like corn, wheat from us states.

And so in some cases, Idaho is a great example. This photo on the right is the governor of Idaho signing a wheat buying agreement. These missions come to Idaho often about every two years and sign financially pretty significant agreements to buy Idaho wheat. There are other kinds of buying delegations as well, some for mechanical products, but in general, many of these tend to be agricultural.

There also are sort of similar delegations of US companies that go to Taiwan, often led by the governor of a US state or the lieutenant governor in some cases that might go to Taiwan and meet with companies in Taiwan about setting up trade and investment relationships. I always have to show the photo on the left.

I was telling Kharis before this, my favorite photo to put on slides about paradipomacy of a very young Bill Clinton, who I think had just been elected governor of Arkansas in this photo, signing a trade agreement with a Taiwanese official in 1979. So these kinds of, you know, sort of economic or trade agreements that are facilitated by governors have a long history.

But the photo on the right is from just a year or two ago. So these remain really important. Another form that has been pretty consistent over time is US governors, governors of US states going to visit Taiwan. They often get kind of star billing when they're there. So governors typically meet with the president.

This is the governor of Utah meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen. One, this is something that I think we're seeing a lot of now as interest in Taiwan and concern over Taiwan's safety and security have risen in the US. Just as members of Congress are expressing increased interest in visiting Taiwan, a number of governors visited, I believe three governors visited last year despite some of the pandemic related restrictions.

This is, again, something that has been going on really for the last several decades. Another development that is also relatively old is the existence of us state trade offices in Taipei. I'll talk about this a little bit more later. But especially in the 1980s, MofA worked quite hard to encourage states to set up these trade and export promotion offices.

They were given subsidized office space in the World Trade Center in Taipei. And initially there was a kind of rush to set up these offices. I'll talk about the sort of temporal patterns of closing and opening of these offices in a little while. This is one of my favorite examples.

The Wyoming office has been very active, and that's the director wearing a cowboy hat. He wears cowboy hats in lots of photos. These offices play an important economic role in serving as a kind of matchmaker between companies from their state and companies in Taiwan that might be able to work together, but they also, in some cases, serve a political role.

So, for instance, if officials from Taiwan were to go to visit Wyoming, this office would help to set up some of the arrangements. Or similarly, if a delegation from Wyoming was gonna come to Taiwan, this office serves a kind of role as an intermediary in helping to set that up.

So sister city agreements are often treated as the kind of iconic example of paradiplomacy, not just relating to Taiwan, but more generally. The organization, Sister Cities International, was set up by president and then Eisenhower as a way to kind of encourage interpersonal contact, especially at a time when political contact in the context of the Cold War was really difficult.

And so these were supposed to be a sort of apolitical form of contact across borders. There are many sister city agreements between cities in Taiwan and cities in the US. Some of them have existed for a long time, but there are continuing to be new agreements signed. Just recently, in December of last year, there's a new sister city agreement between in the city of Long Beach in California and Taoyuan.

This city, the Rockville, Maryland, and Elon Agreement I love to put up this slide because I think it's so cool. They have a bubble tea festival every year that's sort of put on as a result of this sister city agreement, which was created about five years ago. So these, in some cases, become a vessel for economic cooperation between cities.

More frequently, they become a vessel for kind of person-to-person ties where a cultural group might go from one city to visit its partner. Students might go like high school students might go to visit the partner. Sister city. Sometimes there might be a donation of something like a park or, you know, another public service, some funding for city beautification from one city to another.

And I think some of these agreements have really come under pressure from the PRC in recent years. So cities are being pressured not to engage in new or not to sign new sister city agreements. But it does seem like some cities are still continuing to sign them despite that pressure.

So those are all forms of paradiplomacy that I think have been pretty consistently used since the 1980s. There are also some new forms. So one thing that we've seen during the Covid-19 pandemic is the use of mask diplomacy, donations of PPE, especially early in the pandemic, when Taiwan was able to ramp up its production of masks and other equipment quite quickly.

And in the US, people were, sewing masks at home on their sewing machine, in their attic. There was often, those sister city relationships became a mechanism for donations. So cities in Taiwan would donate masks and PPE to their sister cities in the US. Another relatively new form of paradiplomacy is driver's license reciprocity agreements.

The first one of these with the us state was signed in 2013. And at this point, I think it's about half the US has this kind of agreement. This is basically a bureaucratic agreement. It's typically signed by the DMV in the US, and it basically makes it possible if someone has a driver's license from, say, Vermont, and they move to Taiwan, they can turn it in for a driver's license there without having to take the road test and vice versa for someone who's coming from Taiwan.

So it just makes it a little smoother to move between two places. And Taiwan really has been a leader in this. There's only a couple other countries that have these kinds of agreements. Typically it's Germany and Japan, and they don't have nearly as many as Taiwan. So this sister city agreements are something that lots of countries around the world have, but driver's license reciprocity agreements are something that is pretty unusual to Taiwan.

And then another new form of paradiplomacy. This is really, I think, quite new. And so it's something that I'm starting to watch, but I don't have a ton to say about it yet, is that in the wake of the creation of the US-Taiwan Education Initiative in 2020, there have started to be Memorandums of Understanding signed between Taiwan and US states, and in some cases, between cities in Taiwan and cities in the US, or even the school districts of those cities to create educational partnerships.

So the US Taiwan Education Initiative will create funding for things like bringing english teachers to Taiwan, bringing chinese teachers to the US. And so some states are beginning to assign sort of concrete memorandums of understanding that would lay out the details of what that would look like for their particular state.

So I think a lot of these forms are things that we see in a lot of parts of the US, but there is substantial state level variation in terms of engagement with Taiwan. So this is a map of different forms of. So this is really looking at four different forms.

So sister city arrangements, governor's visits, driver's license reciprocity agreements, and trade offices. And it's just sort of counting how many of those different things each state has. And so there's some kind of interesting outliers here. Idaho is very deeply engaged with Taiwan for reasons I'd be happy to talk about in the Q-and-A.

There are some states that you might think would have a lot of engagement, like New York has actually very little engagement with Taiwan. And then there's kind of a range beyond that. What I want to focus on a little bit more today is that there's substantial variation over time as well.

I apologize for how tiny the labels on these are, but what I want to show you in these graphs is these are basically graphing instances of those four types of paradiplomacy that I mentioned before, beginning in 1980 and going through early 2021. And I think there are a couple of things to sort of notice here.

One is that there's a big spike in nearly all of these in the 1980s and early 1990s. That really is kind of the golden age of paradiplomacy between the US and Taiwan. Not all of them completely correlate. Right. So driver's license reciprocity agreements, as I mentioned before, are almost all, or they're all in the last ten years at a time when other forms of paradiplomacy were relatively quiet.

But so you can see here that there are some lulls and some spikes. And so I want us to think a little bit about what might explain some of those patterns. And so I want to kind of focus the rest of my discussion on three different moments. And so the first moment I want to think about is the sort of high tide of paradiplomacy in the 1980s.

And so we have to think about the context of what was happening in the 1980s. Right. So in 1979, the formal diplomatic relationship between the US and Taiwan ends when the US normalizes relations with the PRC. This creates a lot of anxiety, frustration, anger and anxiety on the part of Taiwan.

Right. Not knowing exactly what its future is going to look like, both in terms of its relationship with the US, but also, you know, it suddenly is in a much more isolated position in the world and much more vulnerable. And so Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs really begins to very aggressively promote sub-national engagement, as a way of maintaining ties to the US when those national-level ties are no longer possible.

And so MOFA begins to use paradiplomacy to try to forge kind of enduring relationships with city- and state-level policymakers. And I think they try to do this for a couple or in a couple of different ways. So one thing that I think they did quite effectively was to try to identify politicians who are relatively low level politicians but seem likely to move up in the political hierarchy.

And foster what? And foster strong relationships with him. Yes. Yes. So Bill Clinton, I would say, is actually maybe not a super successful story of that, but I think he's a great example. So there are a number of politicians who, when they were in positions like being the governor of a relatively small state, so someone who probably would be ignored by most countries in the world, got a lot of attention from Taiwan, took many trips to Taiwan, and then in some cases, those folks then went on to become senators and people of influence in Washington.

And I think the hope was that they would develop a sort of pro Taiwan sensibility and bring it with them. And so the example that I tend to talk about as a success story is actually not Bill Clinton, but Jay Rockefeller from West Virginia. Jay Rockefeller was the governor of West Virginia.

He made lots of trips to Taiwan. He had a close relationship with policymakers from Taiwan. There were some major Taiwanese investments that were in West Virginia. And so then Jay Rockefeller, he eventually went and opened West Virginia's trade office in Taiwan. He later is elected to the Senate.

And once he's in the Senate, he's one of the founding members of the Senate Taiwan caucus. And so he's someone who I think really had this by the time he got to a position in Washington. He had many years of contact with Taiwanese business and the political community and had developed quite a sort of pro Taiwan sensibility.

And then that was reflected in the policy choices that he made. I think a second way that MOFA tried to use paradiplomacy during this period was to create a sort of virtuous cycle where one form of engagement would then spur other forms of engagement. And so in some cases, this was done, I think, with pretty explicit use of incentives for states to engage in paradiplomacy.

So I'll give you one concrete example. So I mentioned before that MOFA created incentives or made it easy for states to set up trade offices in Taiwan. And this was really the period when many states were beginning to set up those trade offices. So one way that MOFA made that possible was by highly subsidizing the office space and in some cases, helping with things like staffing.

And so states were not footing the full bill. It was very cheap for them to set up a trade promotion office in Taiwan. However, in order to qualify for those benefits, states needed to have a sister state relationship with Taiwan. So what you saw was this flood of states signing sister state relationships with, at that point, Taiwan province.

And then once they had that sister state relationship, then they were eligible for the subsidized office space. Then states that have that office space, that trade office in Taiwan, also became the states that were visited more frequently by the buying delegations, trade delegations that would come from Taiwan to buy stuff from the US, right?

And so you wind up with this one form of paradiplomacy leading to other forms of paradiplomacy. And in some cases, leading to really very frequent contact between officials from a particular state and officials in Taiwan. I think Idaho is a great example of this, where in some cases, you have nearly yearly contact with people at the governor level in Idaho and officials from Taiwan.

And that, I think, is the kind of regular, sustained contact that Taiwan was afraid it was going to lose when it lost the formal diplomatic relationship with the US in 1979. So I think it's easy to understand why it made sense from the Taiwanese perspective to make these investments at a time when Taiwan was very isolated and vulnerable.

But then there's also this question of what was in it for the US, right? Why did US politicians want to sort of agree to these forms of engagement? And I think in the 80s, this was a pretty easy sell for a couple of reasons. So one was that there were lots of US politicians at the subnational level who were quite critical of the US' change in policy toward China at the national level, right?

So we're thinking about this is still in the Cold War context. There are a lot of people who really wanted to continue to support a country that they had seen as a longtime reliable ally and an ally in the fight against communism. They were critical of the decision to normalize relations with the PRC and saw maintaining a relationship with Taiwan as a way to sort of indicate that critique in a materially important way.

The other thing was that Taiwan and the other East Asian Tigers were booming, right? And so from the perspective of the business community, they really wanted ways to get into or get involved in the Taiwan market. And so setting up a trade office, especially if it's heavily subsidized by MOFA, is a very easy sell, right?

Businesses want that access to Taiwan and governors could say, look, we're providing that for you by opening this trade office. State legislators also could kind of take credit for it because those offices tended to be, in some cases, they're voted on, but also they're funded fairly through a budget that gets voted on by the state legislature.

And so this was an easy thing that officials could then take claim credit for. I think the mood shifts substantially over time. And so you wind up with quite a different situation in the 2000s, and I would say really, the kind of early part of the 2000s through about 2010.

This is a period that I think is a relative low point in Taiwan's paradiplomacy for a few different reasons, and you can kind of see it. So this graph here is, again, apologies for the tiny labels. This is a graph of the state trade offices in Taiwan that are open at any given point.

And so you can see that the first offices begin to open in 1987, that's the sort of left hand side of the x-axis. Very quickly, you rise up by about 1990 to the peak of something like 20 or 21 offices, and then you have, like, you know, there's a little bit of ebbing and flowing, but that level of offices stays fairly high until around 2000 and then begins to rapidly decline.

And by about 2010, you're at a real low point where there's maybe, I don't know, only six or so offices. We'll talk about how it's rising again in a little bit. But so thinking about that sort of secular decline beginning in around 2000, I think there are a few reasons for this.

So one is the context of what's happening in US China relations at the time. So there's a really strong interest in the early two thousands in engagement with China. Tons of students wanna go and study Chinese, businesses wanna get into the Chinese market. And so there's not really very much in terms of that sort of business pressure to continue to engage with Taiwan that I was talking about in the 80s.

That has really faded. And I think the business community is saying what we want is access to the PRC. So they were pressuring officials to create sister city relationships with Mainland Chinese cities to open trade offices in Shanghai. And there wasn't as much pressure coming, especially from the business community, to prioritize ties with Taiwan.

A second really important component of what happens is that states begin to face fiscal pressures relating first to the recession in 2000 and 2001, but then, more importantly, to the global financial crisis beginning in 2007. And there's just a lot of belt tightening at the state level. And so you begin to see critiques that these state trade offices are not paying for themselves.

They're wasting taxpayer money, that they're claiming credit for investments that would have been made even if the offices hadn't existed. There were a couple of sort of high profile cases of, like, mismanagement offices that seem to be, you know, spending their funds poorly. And so, for instance, California closed all of its trade offices in 2003 or 2004 at once.

It had something like 12 or 15 around the world, it closed them all at once. And so in general, that doesn't have too much to do with Taiwan in particular. But I think that was part of what was driving a lot of those closures was just state legislators saying, like, why should we be paying for this office?

And the offices, in some cases, they were still subsidized. I think the subsidies were typically only guaranteed for the first few years. But even at a subsidized rate, in a time of fiscal austerity, it was just hard to justify some of those expenses. I think another important thing to keep in mind is this change that has happened in Taiwan politically, which is that in the 1980s, Taiwan was not yet a full democracy.

And, you know, I think the sort of national government could really exert a significant amount of control even over things like sister city agreements by the two thousands. Taiwan is a democracy, and so officials are much more accountable, even in something like foreign policy, to voters. And so signing something like a sister city agreement, paying to send officials to visit the US, that's something that officials don't just have carte blanche to do.

They have to justify to voters that there's something in it for them. And I think in some cases, that sort of slowed down or impeded the process of signing more agreements. And the same is true on the US side, too, right, where in some cases, voters or politicians might be worried that voters will look at a sister city agreement and say, why are you spending money to go and take a flight to Taiwan instead of spending that money on an after school program for kids in our community?

And so I think that kind of dynamic started to be more important in this period. At the same time, it is important to note that there were still some forms of paradipomacy that were really continuing to sort of march along. And I think this is a good example of what I talked about before as kind of innovation by diplomats.

Driver's license reciprocity agreements are something that doesn't cost very much money. I think there are clear when they kind of eliminate a bureaucratic hurdle for the people who care about them, lots of people don't even know they exist, right? So the people who don't care about them don't really mind.

And so they're a forum that really was moving along and picking up even in what was otherwise a relatively fallow period in US-Taiwan paradiplomacy. So that kind of brings us to the moment that we're in now, which I think, I don't want to be too hasty, but I think that I feel fairly confident in saying that I think we're in a new moment of renewed interest, of sort of increasing interest in paradipomacy with Taiwan.

And if you look again at this graph of the trade offices, I think you really see that pickup at the end. So in the last three years, there have been a number of offices that were closed and have reopened. The Montana office, for instance, closed in 2012 and then reopened in 2021.

Some new offices have opened. Guam just opened a trade office in Taiwan, for instance. And several states are somewhere in the process of exploring opening a trade office in the future. So there's been some activity in the state legislatures in Kentucky and Oklahoma, in Tennessee, either resolutions sort of advocating for the creation of a trade office or in one of those states, there actually was a bill last year.

I don't think it passed, but it got through the first vote, the first committee vote or something to create a trade office. And so my guess is that we will begin to perhaps see even more of these offices reopening. I think the pandemic context is a little complicated because, of course, it dramatically shrank opportunities for person-to-person ties.

There just wasn't really any travel between Taiwan and the US. And so that inhibited some forms of paradiplomacy that also created new opportunities. I think Taiwan was quite effective in positioning itself as a good actor on the global stage in the pandemic. This kind of Taiwan can help hashtag on Twitter was a good example of that.

I mentioned mask diplomacy before. I think those kinds of donations to sister cities and sister states were a way that Taiwan could kind of amplify its message and sort of show, like, we're here to help. We have these partnerships, let us be a good partner. And then probably the most important change is just the changing anti China mood in the US, that right now we're in a moment where there's not very much interest in engagement between the US and China.

There's a lot of suspicion of China's motives. And I think for a lot of people, there is a sense, for a lot of politicians, there's a sense that they can score points by proving that they are very anti China. And so I think that those things have combined to create electoral incentives for American politicians to engage with Taiwan.

So, for instance, when you see governors, members of Congress kind of lining up to visit Taiwan, in some cases, I think those forms of engagement are because they really do deeply care about Taiwan. And in other cases, I think they're a kind of performative way to show that they are anti China by showing that they are pro Taiwan.

And so my expectation is that we will continue to see state governors, for instance, wanting to go and visit. I think the other thing is that as the mood toward China and the US has soured, that has created some new opportunities for Taiwan to kind of insert itself into this space and for that kind of innovation to happen quickly.

And I think the educational space is a great example of this. So the Confucius institutes were a very, very important avenue for Chinese language teaching and sort of more generally teaching about Chinese culture often attached to public universities in the US. There were hundreds of them. Now there's essentially none.

And so I think that Taiwan is beginning, although it's in the very early stages of this, to kind of move into this space with some of the educational mous that it's signing and the sort of hopes that it can present itself as a free and democratic place where one could study Chinese and also a place that is creating a chinese language curriculum that is not linked to the political values of the CCP.

And so I think that that's an opportunity that we're just beginning to see Taiwan sort of taking advantage of, and I expect we'll see even more of that. So I'm going to stop there, and I'm very curious to hear thoughts, comments, questions. Thank you.

>> Kharis Templeman: Thank you. So once again, I want to invite our online audience.

If you have a question, go ahead and type it into the Q and A box, and I'll be monitoring that here. As the moderator here, I wanted to take the prerogative to ask the first question. And there's a lot about Taiwan here, but looming in the background, unspoken is the PRC reaction to all of this activity.

And so I wonder if that part of the equation, if that variable has changed a lot over time and whether you see in certain periods, like say, 2008 to 2016, a willingness on the PRC side to kind of turn a blind eye to this stuff. Or even maybe to encourage or cooperate with the Taiwan side on this and whether there's an administration in Taipei that Beijing doesn't like, whether they single out states for punishment or trying to intervene in certain ways.

 

>> Sarah: Yeah, it's a really great question. It's something that I write about a little bit in the Pacific review paper on this topic. So I would say that I have not identified a clear temporal pattern. I think that there have been isolated instances for the whole time that Taiwan has been engaging in this kind of paradiplomacy of very, very forceful reactions from the PRC and then other instances in which there's no reaction and it's a little bit hard.

Hard to predict which ones are going to wind up being the thing that gets a big reaction. So the governor of Mississippi went to Taiwan a few years ago and was threatened by the PRC that Chinese investment was all gonna get pulled out of Mississippi, right? Other governors go and as far as I've heard, they have not gotten similar threats.

And I actually think we're in a moment when a lot of politicians, they like to tell people when China yells at them, right? And so I don't think that they're hiding it. I think that that for whatever reason, that Mississippi visit got a more vociferous reaction. You know, I talked to officials from two cities that had signed sister city or friendship city agreements with cities in Taiwan within the course of a couple of years.

One said that there was zero critical reaction from the PRC and the other had like an enormous. There was an enormous blow up and, angry letters, calls, knocks on the door. And so I think that there's a real range. You know, my sense is that it's very important to pay attention to the incentives for individual politicians and bureaucrats, right?

And so I think that just as I was saying, you know, mayors or governors, they're thinking about their electoral incentives. I think that's true for people who are on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs staff, a consular staff for Chinese consulates, right? And I think some people feel like if they don't throw a big stink, right, anytime the word Taiwan is mentioned, they're putting their own career at risk, right?

They're gonna get in trouble for not having been sufficiently nationalistic or sufficiently pro-China, anti-Taiwan. And then other people maybe interpret their brief differently and they don't feel like they need to throw that big a stink. So I do think occasionally you sort of read news stories. I read a story from the 80s where a Chinese consular official said, yeah, we don't mind if cities in Taiwan sign sister city agreements with the US.

As long as, you know, they're person to person and they're not political, it's fine. And then obviously there are some sister city arrangements that wind up getting these huge angry critiques from Chinese officials. So, you know, I think it would be. I would love to know if there is a sort of underlying pattern there, but I have not seen one.

I think it's pretty, yeah, sort of, maybe not random, but lots of variation over time.

>> Kharis Templeman: Great questions from our in person audience. Yes, we've had a lot. Okay, we'll start with Matt.

>> Matt: Thank you so much for the talk. I was wondering towards whether this model of sub national diplomacy between the US and Taiwan has been implemented or tried with other countries besides the US.

I'm thinking in particular in, say, Europe or East Asia, if we're talking about, say, South Korea or Japan. There's a lot of conversations going on about Japan and Taiwan's relationship. And then whether Taiwan sees this paradipomacy model as a viable model for extending to other countries in, say, East Asia or-

 

>> Sarah: Yeah, it's a great question. So there's a real range in terms of the degree to which different countries empower local governments to engage in foreign affairs. So in general, I think this model is a more viable model for engagement with countries with federal systems, right. Where local governments tend to be much more empowered.

And so a lot of countries in Asia have unitary systems, and so there's just not that much room for engagement with local governments. But Japan is a good example of a place that does have a lot of sub national diplomacy with Taiwan, and I think has had some similar challenges to US-Taiwan paradiplomacy.

So there are lots of sister city or sister city agreements between japanese and taiwanese cities. In some cases, japanese cities that have signed that kind of agreement have been punished in some way by chinese officials who've threatened to cancel a sister city agreement with the chinese city or things like that.

So, yeah, that's definitely something that exists for some places. Canada, a number of Canadian provinces have driver's license reciprocity agreements with Taiwan. The driver's license thing is, I think, not super widely used yet, but certainly sister cities. And we're starting to see a lot of politicians from countries that didn't used to care about Taiwan wanting to go to Taiwan, right?

And so I was in Taiwan a few weeks ago, there was a German delegation that was there. You know, I would not be at all surprised if we start to see more interest at the sub national level from politicians in lots of other countries, you know, in a way that, like, national level politicians did not used to be.

Interest from those countries were not interested in going to Taiwan ten years ago, and now they're very interested. And so I think it's maybe inevitable that we're gonna start to see a little bit more kind of bubbling down as well.

>> Kharis Templeman: Okay, great, Jason.

>> Jason: Hi, thank you for being here.

I have a two part question. So in terms of paradiplomacy, as you very well know, there's constitutional limits on states' powers on foreign affairs. And with the increase in paradipomacy and a lot more states being involved, how is this being interpreted? Are the lines being blurred somewhat? And then the second part is how often is there a policy mismatch?

I mean, I'm sure when governors go, not all of their talking points are synchronized with state, so how often have you seen there's a policy mismatch?

>> Speaker 5: So do you mean in terms of things like what they are saying about US policy toward Taiwan or.

>> Sarah: Yeah, yeah, so I think that the, sorry, what was your first question?

It was about-

>> Speaker 6: It was about the increasing paranormal policy. How is that, is that being kind of interpreted more loosely now or is it more stricter? Because obviously there's constitutional limits, pretty strict on what states can and can't do in foreign affairs.

>> Sarah: Yeah, I mean, US cities and especially states have been engaging in foreign affairs for a long time, right?

I mean, this is something that just setting aside the Taiwan context, there's lots of states that do this in a variety of ways, whether it's around environmental cooperation, around trade. I can't say that I've seen very much in terms of states bumping up against limits of what they're allowed to do.

There is this new office of sub national diplomacy at state that was just created in the fall. And so my sense is that part of what they are hoping to do is to provide more guidance to us localities about what they can and can't do. The policy mismatch question is really interesting.

And I think that there, so I think that as more and more politicians perceive it as being in their interest to go to Taiwan, we're gonna see more and more people who don't really know anything about Taiwan going, right? And so I think that there have been some notable tweets by members of Congress who have gone and refered to the Republic of Taiwan, for instance.

And I think that my sense is those kind of get ignored. Like, everyone knows that they don't know. Know what they're talking about. And it gets ignored a little bit. I do think that there's one area of real concern, which is that in the sister city agreements, when US cities sign a sister city agreement with a city in the PRC, they are often asked to include language that sort of reflects China's One China principle.

And especially smaller cities, they don't have a dedicated international affairs staff. They don't necessarily know anything about the history of the relationship between China and Taiwan or about the US's Taiwan policies. And so there have been some cities where someone has kind of signed on to an agreement, and then there's been a controversy where the city council holds up the agreement that the mayor signed onto and said, what on earth did you just sign?

Or where a city will have a sister city arrangement with a city in the PRC. And then will try to create a sister city arrangement with a city in Taiwan. And chinese consular officials come calling and they say, you're violating our agreement because you said that there is only one China and Taiwan is part of China.

And so my sense is that this is something that probably that office of subnational diplomacy needs to work on is to just sort of get a little bit more knowledge and education out there. But, yeah, I do think that those policy mismatches, especially at the city level, happen a lot.

States have a pretty sophisticated within the sort of trade and economic development arm of the state government. There often is a pretty sophisticated apparatus for dealing with international policy. And my experience in conducting interviews has been that the folks who are working on trade promotion in Asia at the state level often are quite knowledgeable.

They understand Taiwan. They understand what's complicated about engaging with Taiwan and the potential minefields around US policy toward Taiwan. I think they understand that pretty well. But at the city level, I think understandably, the level of knowledge and experience is lower. And there have been definitely some blow ups and huge problems, yeah.

 

>> Speaker 7: Hi, thank you so much for coming. I was sort of curious about the distribution of these so-called rising stars and people that Taiwan is successfully creating sister relationships with the sort of general narrative that you see for domestic politics in the US. Is that one of the most bipartisan things is that our elected officials are very anti-China and thereby, you could say, maybe pro-Taiwan.

And so in terms of these sort of rising stars and where you see a lot of these successful examples, do you notice any big differences in terms of, like, what political party they might belong to? I have some ideas just looking at, you know, the examples that you've given, and if so, do you think there's some kind of reasoning behind this?

 

>> Sarah: Yeah, I mean, I guess I would say, like, I think, I think Taiwan tries to foster relationships with lots of politicians at the local level. Right. So one example is the Taiwanese government brings over members of state legislatures on these sort of visit tours where they learn about Taiwan.

They meet with lots of people. There are lots of countries that encourage governors to visit or might encourage US senators to visit. But to target down to the state legislative level of Rhode Island, right, these tiny US states, that's something that is pretty distinctive to Taiwan. Think that they're just targeting Republicans or just targeting Democrats.

I think they're trying to foster relationships with lots of politicians. And then, you know, I think someone like Bill Clinton, my guess is it was clear that he was a talented person and was going to do well in politics if he didn't get in his own way pretty early on, right?

And so, you know, I'm sure that there are particular efforts around people like Bill Clinton who then, you know, he went to Taiwan many, many times. But, yeah, I mean, I think that there are, at this point it's true. There are strong relationships between Taiwan and Republicans and Democrats.

Historically, that wasn't quite as true, right? I think the sort of anti-communist bent of the Republican Party meant that that was an important support base for Taiwan during the Cold War. But, yeah, now I think it's much more bipartisan, and I don't have firm data. But my guess is that those are relationships that the taiwanese government is trying to build kind of across the political spectrum.

 

>> Kharis Templeman: Great, I have a couple questions from our online audience. And again, for those watching online, I encourage you to type your question into the Q&A box here. One is, let me summarize it as non governmental organizations in Taiwan. So civil society groups, maybe religious organizations, do they play an important part in this sort of paradiplomacy or are they not really part of the story?

 

>> Sarah: Yeah, I would say that they're not really part of this story. I mean, and in part, this is about the data that I'm focusing on, right? So I'm looking specifically at sort of government to government ties. You know, there has been more room. So in the US, I think groups like civil society groups have played an important role, especially in pushing for sister city arrangements.

So in some cases, it's been driven by a Taiwanese heritage community has created a sister city association that's a nonprofit organization that has tried to do the legwork of creating a sister city agreement in partnership with the city government. And my sense is that there isn't as much of a tradition of those kinds of organizations in Taiwan.

And so as a result, like, they're not playing the same role that those efforts to create sister city relationships are really primarily being led there by the city council or the mayor's office and things like an environmental ngo or things like that. They're not really part of the story.

And I think those are a very important potential site of collaboration and communication between the US and Taiwan. But it's just a little bit of a different mechanism than what I'm looking at in this project.

>> Kharis Templeman: Related to that business groups, there's a big push now to attract taiwanese investment in the semiconductor industry in this country.

And that's something that state politicians love to talk about, trumpet to their voters that they brought all this investment in. To what extent do you see that? Well, I'm curious. Variation over time, too. Is that a new thing or has that been part of the picture the whole time?

 

>> Sarah: Yeah, I think that that is, I think that's been an important part of the picture all along that, you know, if you look at the creation of trade offices in Taiwan in the 1980s, a lot of that was because the business community was saying, we want more access to Asia.

And there was a kind of competitive dynamic, right? So you can look at these old historical news stories and someone will say, like, well, Washington has an office in Taiwan. Why doesn't Oregon have an office? We're gonna lose out, right? Look at all these other states or op eds critique.

A governor for not going to Asia enough, being lazy and staying home and not going to Asia enough to drum up business. So definitely, I think pressure from the business community was leading to some of those relationships. And then the sort of lack of pressure when all of a sudden everyone wanted to be in China, right?

And businesses were saying, we need you to open an office in Shanghai. And, like, you can close that office in Taiwan. It's fine. We really want the office in Shanghai. So I do think that that's an important piece of the story. I think the other thing also is that the business community is often involved when there are these trips that are led.

So, like when a us state governor or lieutenant governor goes to Taiwan, it often is on a trade mission where companies from the state will be invited to participate. So they'll issue a public call and they'll bring, you know, top leadership from ten major businesses in the state along with them.

And so I think that that sort of business government partnership is an important part of what's going on here.

>> Kharis Templeman: So I want to ask a policy question. Taiwan has limited resources. This kind of paradiplomacy takes a lot of work. And it takes a lot of man hours in state capitals.

Do you think it's a worthwhile use of those limited resources? And maybe, let me rephrase the question. If you could recommend Taiwan spend their limited resources on one new thing in this area, what would the thing be? What is the most efficient or the most effective way to get greater engagement with the US?

 

>> Sarah: Hard question, Karas.

>> Sarah: Yeah, so I'm not sure that I can give anything like an evidence-based answer for where the most bang for Taiwan's buck would be. I think of these forms of engagement as being really important because I think ultimately, Taiwan needs the rest of the world to care about it.

And I think the more people you can convince, the more people you can sort of educate about Taiwan and show the value, right? Whether it's materially, there are business opportunities that are being created by this office in Taiwan that wouldn't exist otherwise. Or through more sort of interpersonal cultural means like, our life is enriched by bringing this dance troupe over from Taiwan.

I think the more people you can expose to those kinds of things, the more people maybe will see why Taiwan is worth defending. And I think that's really important. That said, I take your point and that resources aren't infinite and some of these things are expensive, right? And bringing over groups of state legislators from every state in the US, that costs money that could be spent on weapons.

And so I do think that those are real trade offs. But I think it's so important for Taiwan to sort of find ways to tell its story. Because ultimately, if people are invested in Taiwan, I think that makes the prospect of invading a lot more complicated and expensive for Beijing, right?

So yeah, but, dollar for dollar, I don't know. I don't know, yeah.

>> Kharis Templeman: Any other questions from the floor here? Yes.

>> Speaker 8: Thank you so much for being here, this has been really fascinating. I noticed in the map that you showed that Idaho was kind of that outlier.

And I know that you said in the q and a that you might want to get into the story of Idaho and Taiwan relations. So now we have a moment, I'd love to-

>> Sarah: Yeah, yeah, I have a wonderful student who has been doing a very deep dive into Idaho and learning a lot about Idaho's relationships with Taiwan.

So I think part of the story is in some ways a story of Idaho being the kind of state that a lot of places don't pay attention to, right? And so it's not on a coast. It doesn't have that many people. It's not like a super important us state.

And so in some ways, I think it's an easy, it's low hanging fruit for Taiwan. But the other piece is that I think it's a little bit of a story about gubernatorial leadership, right? So there have been some governors of Idaho that were quite pro Taiwan and, went to Taiwan multiple times, published op eds talking about the importance of Taiwan.

And then I mentioned at the beginning this sort of cascading, one form of paradiplomacy begetting another. I think those gubernatorial relationships then became the basis for these very regular buying missions, agricultural buying missions. So Taiwan buys a ton of wheat from Idaho. Basically every two years there's a new agreement to buy more wheat.

And so I think part of that is just Idaho grows a bunch of wheat, but it can't fully be explained by that. There's lots of other states that grow a lot of wheat, too. And so I think part of it is just this sort of leadership and support by particular governors saying, like, this is important, laying the groundwork, creating those relationships that then make it easy to kind of go back over and over.

The other thing is Idaho has a very active trade office in Taiwan. It's had one that's long standing. And so I think that also has played a kind of important one.

>> Kharis Templeman: Interesting, I'm curious about religious organizations that do missions in Taiwan and whether that has affected which states get involved.

 

>> Speaker 9: Yeah.

>> Kharis Templeman: Because you had Idaho up there, and my first thought was, well, that's Mormon missionaries. Mormons, yeah. But then I looked at Utah-

>> Sarah: Utah is not an active, yeah. And it's not, and so Yeah, yeah That's a great question. And honestly, it's something I haven't looked at at all.

So it's something that I wish I had something to say about, because it is very interesting. And certainly that could be playing an important role in sort of person to person forms of contact that I'm not picking up in this project. But yeah, I'll have to think about that part, yeah.

 

>> Kharis Templeman: Food for thought.

>> Sarah: Yeah.

>> Kharis Templeman: Okay, we'll take one last question.

>> Speaker 10: I wanted to bring up universities for a second.

>> Sarah: Yeah.

>> Speaker 10: Because you brought up paradiplomatic engagement, trained actors. One of those could be public universities. Yes. But then extending that maybe to private universities too, or when we're talking about, say, Stanford or Berkeley.

Yeah. How do you see greater engagement between, say, Taiwanese universities and US universities over time, especially since the 1980s? We can talk more about recent development, say, like Harvard's Taipei Academy since 2021. And also, do you see those relationships going somewhere specific in the next few years or decades?

 

>> Sarah: Yeah, yeah, so I think there's sort of two different dynamics which I'd like to try to keep separate. So one is just the fact that, for the last three years, it has not been possible for students to go study Chinese in mainland China, right? And I think you universities are rightly concerned about some of, in addition to the COVID restrictions, like the political restrictions of an increasingly repressive environment, they're concerned about sending students there.

And so it makes sense to me that there has been a movement, there's dramatic increases in interest in studying Chinese in Taiwan. Right, lots of the students who would have gone to study in Beijing now are moving. The Harvard program that you referenced has moved to Taiwan. And I think that those.

My expectation is, there's gonna continue to be students who are interested in going to Taiwan. My sense is the Fulbright applications to Taiwan have dramatically increased. You know, lots of evidence that, in lots of different ways, some portion of the student interest in studying in China has now shifted to Taiwan.

Maybe it'll shift back now that the zero COVID policies in China have been lifted. And I think some of those study abroad programs will begin to open back up. But given the political mood in the US, I don't think all of it will shift back, right? I think that's a slightly separate question, though, than this question of paradiplomacy.

So something like a private university like Harvard deciding to move its language program, I wouldn't consider that paradiplomacy. I definitely think it's an important thing to think about in terms of just the broader, like, us China Taiwan relationship. But, yeah, I'm really most closely following the ways in which public universities are now beginning to create formalized programs with either universities in Taiwan or with the Taiwan Ministry of Education.

This is not entirely new. So there are some funny examples. I'm blanking on which state it was. Maybe South Carolina used to have a program where Taiwanese students qualified for in-state tuition, even if they had not lived in Taiwan before. Is this right, that it's, do you know?

 

>> Speaker 5: Yeah.

>> Sarah: Really, okay.

>> Kharis Templeman: Wow.

>> Speaker 5: Well, actually, I think many states offer that in-state tuition not for all Taiwanese, but at least for a diploma like us.

>> Sarah: Okay, so that, I think, is separate, but yeah. So, although that's something that's interesting. I didn't know about that, but, yeah, so there were a couple states that had.

It was like, any Taiwanese student who went there or could get the in-state tuition rate. My understanding is that those programs now have gone away. But so there have been these one-off relationships before. And obviously, Taiwanese students coming or Taiwanese teachers, Taiwanese language teachers coming to the US to teach Chinese that's not new.

And so the education initiative that was signed in 2020 I think that's creating a framework for a new set of programs. But it will be building on other forms of educational cooperation between Taiwan and the US that did exist before.

>> Kharis Templeman: Right, great. So I am gonna close off the session now.

I wanna remind you you've been watching US cities and states in Taiwan's international diplomacy. Speaker Sarah Nuland, is an assistant professor, assistant professor at Smith College. We're very glad to have her with us in person here at the Hoover Institution today. And this talk has been sponsored by the program on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific region here at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you'll join us next time on March 3 for Caitlin Tallmadge.