The Taiwan posts
Three classics from the Noahpinion archive
I’ve done New Years in Taiwan twice in a row now, and I definitely intend to go next year again. If you haven’t been, I heavily recommend it — it’s quite a party. This year, my friends and I gathered together a group of about 60 people to go to Taiwan from the U.S., and next year I expect the pilgrimage to be even larger. I think I’ll also do a meetup with Substack readers while I’m there!
Anyway, my New Year’s essay this year was about the possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan:
But I don’t think people should only — or even mainly — think of Taiwan in terms of its role in a possible war. There’s plenty to appreciate about this unique little island nation. In fact, I’ve written three posts about Taiwan in the past — one in 2021 before I even went, based on things my Taiwanese friends told me, and two others when I went there for the first time in 2022. Most of what I wrote then is still relevant today, so I thought I’d re-up those three posts for all my new readers to check out.
Taiwan is a civilization
In my experience, Americans tend to have more awareness of some countries than others. Consider the rich countries of East Asia. The American mental image of Japan, though inaccurate in many ways, is pretty well-formed. Americans generally know that anime and video games and manga — things an increasing number of Americans enjoy — come from Japan, and they often have a mental image of dense, neon-lit Japanese cities and fast, efficient Japanese trains. Decades of exposure to Japanese popular culture, combined with a tourism boom in that country, have made Americans generally cognizant of Japan’s existence. Now, the boom in Korean pop culture is similarly making Korea a place that Americans think about.
But I don’t think Taiwan is on that list yet. You don’t really hear about Taiwanese pop music, TV, or other pop culture. Taiwanese food exists, but except possibly for bubble tea, most Americans probably wouldn’t recognize it.
This seems like something that ought to change. Most importantly, because Taiwan seems really cool. But also because it’s geopolitically important, because it’s probably the most likely flashpoint for great-power war.
Taiwanese people generally don’t think of themselves as “Chinese” anymore (Update: Here is a brief blog post of history explaining some of the reasons for this):
But China’s government disagrees pretty vehemently. In recent years, China has increased its bellicose and threatening rhetoric toward Taiwan. Its military has stepped up incursions into Taiwan’s airspace, and has modernized its amphibious forces for a possible invasion. In response, the U.S. has moved to establish closer ties with Taiwan, ramped up our own rhetoric against Chinese aggression. The U.S. is not sworn to defend Taiwan (as we are sworn to defend Japan), but as Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has stated forcefully that the U.S. will help Taiwan defend itself, and has warned China against an attack.
This means that there is a nonzero chance that the U.S. might find itself embroiled in a superpower conflict on Taiwan’s behalf sometime in the next decade. Which is a good reason for Americans to learn more about Taiwan.
But an even better reason is just that Taiwan is a very interesting and unique place. People can argue all day about whether it’s really a country (it is), but what’s more important is that Taiwan is a civilization.
Anyway, I myself am a complete newbie to Taiwan; I’ve never even been there. So here are just a few quick things I have learned about Taiwan since I started paying more attention to it over the last year. Obviously this is no real guide to Taiwan, just the very tip of the iceberg. But something to get Americans thinking.
Superior public health
Besides tensions with China, there was another big news item that made me more aware of Taiwan this year: Public health. Taiwan handled the COVID-19 pandemic better than just about any other nation, probably rivaled only by New Zealand. While Americans huddled inside their homes for fear of the deadly virus still rampaging through the population, Taiwanese people were eating in restaurants and partying in clubs by the fall. The U.S. has suffered more deaths from COVID-19 than it did in all of World War 2. Taiwan has suffered a total of 7.1
How did Taiwan do it? If it was just a matter of being a small island, Ireland wouldn’t have been hit hard. The painful experience of the SARS scare in 2002-3, combined with a highly competent bureaucracy, allowed Taiwan to respond quickly and effectively.
First, Taiwan’s leaders and people both understood that short-term pain would help prevent greater pain in the long run. The legislature passed a law giving the government sweeping new powers to fight the pandemic. Strict social distancing measures were implemented, along with comprehensive travel restrictions — two things America notably failed to do. It used digital tools to monitor people under home quarantine and implement a program of thorough and extensive contact tracing. Of course it tested people proactively, not waiting until they had symptoms. And the government’s high state capacity allowed it to enforce home quarantine effectively.
Of course, Taiwan’s people helped too. Instead of squabbling for months over whether masks worked, Taiwanese people simply went ahead and wore them as a precaution. You don’t see screaming anti-maskers getting violently thrown out of stores in Taiwan. You also didn’t see Taiwanese people rebelling against social distancing. They understood that a bit of pain today meant far less pain down the road. Americans refused to delay gratification; Taiwanese people sacrificed for a short time and reaped enormous benefits over the long term.
I firmly believe that America, despite doing some things well, has much to learn from other civilizations. And Taiwan’s public health system is a great example. It also has one of the world’s best health care systems overall, if not the best.
But note that despite Taiwan’s amazing public health care system and COVID-19 success, the World Health Organization won’t allow it in, due to Chinese political pressure.
Great urbanism
As you can see in the fun video above (made by the Taiwan Street Dance Art Association, and filmed in one take!), Taiwan’s capital Taipei is a very dense city, but also a beautiful one with lots of greenery and a fair number of traditional-style buildings as well. Though I’ve never been there, you can get a good idea for what the city feels like from scrolling through the @TaipeiUrbanism Twitter account or watching YouTube videos. Actually, this music video gives a great sense of the landscape, including some shots of apartment interiors. It’s immediately noticeable that the city resembles Japanese cities, but with more trees and grass.
A great quick primer on Taipei’s history and planning is this thread by urbanist Alfred Twu. Unlike San Francisco, but more like Paris, Taipei has a lot of 5 to 7 story residential buildings. They generally don’t look as shiny and new as those of Tokyo (which scraps and rebuilds most buildings every 30-40 years), but Taiwanese interior design is pretty legendary. The abundance of greenery combined with the slightly dilapidated dense architecture gives much of the city a very solarpunk look.
In order to promote efficient land use, Taipei uses policies best described as Georgist, discouraging empty lots and having the government lease buildings to the private sector. In fact, Georgism is part of Taiwan’s history, with agricultural land reform policies famously documented in the book How Asia Works.
Taipei is a very walkable city, with great public transit, including one of the world’s best subway systems. As Twu notes, there are lots of businesses on side streets. The Ximending shopping district reminds me a bit of Shibuya in Tokyo — a dense neon maze of multi-floor retail (but again, with more trees than Japan).
As a result of dense urban planning and high-quality transit, middle-class and working-class people are able to live in the city center. As Twu shows, the income variation along Taipei’s metro lines is much less than in Hong Kong or the San Francisco Bay Area. Unfortunately, housing costs are a problem, as in most big cities nowadays; unlike Tokyo, Taipei hasn’t been able to build itself out of trouble. But homeownership rates are very high — 84%, compared to 33% in New York City.
Taipei is not large — just 2.6 million people in the city proper, and 7 million total in the metropolitan area. But it seems like it deserves to be higher on people’s list of tourist destinations, and deserves to be included in conversations about how to build a functional, inclusive, beautiful city.
For much more, just check out @TaipeiUrbanism.
A progressive, tolerant, liberal society
Taiwan has one of the most progressive societies, if not the most progressive, in Asia. It was the first Asian country to legalize gay marriage, and sports a vibrant gay culture. Taiwan ranks as one of the most gender-equal societies in the world, equivalent to Norway and higher than France on the commonly used GII scale. The President, Tsai Ing-Wen, is a woman, and women make up 42% of the legislature. The country has actively pushed for gender equality in business, and the gender pay gap, at 14% in 2018, is smaller than in the U.S.
Taiwan has also made vigorous attempts to recognize, celebrate, and preserve the culture of its indigenous people, who make up 2% of the population (and have a political party that holds 7% of the seats in the legislature). The island is also starting to open up to immigration.
As a result of all this and more, Taiwan is gaining a reputation as a tolerant, progressive society — a rarity in mostly conservative East Asia.
It’s difficult to say why this is true, but according to my Taiwanese friends, part of it might stem from the island’s history. Though independent for most of its history, it was colonized multiple times — by the Netherlands in the 1600s, China in 1683, and Japan in 1895. This forced it to deal with social frictions between the various waves of colonizers, immigrants, and settlers, and also gave it a yearning for self-determination and freedom from outside powers.
Though Taiwan was a dictatorship for decades after being invaded and settled by the defeated Nationalists of China in 1949, it began democratic reforms in the 1980s. In 1990, student movements protested for full democracy and direct elections, and they won. Today it’s one of the world’s most democratic places, with a Polity score of 10 (compared to the U.S.’ 8) and a Freedom House score of 93 (compared to the U.S.’ 86).
Democracy isn’t just a system in Taiwan; it’s an ideology. Instead of cracking down on protesters, the government has made strenuous attempts to listen to their concerns. In a world struggling with the challenge of social media-driven unrest, Taiwan is experimenting with new forms of radical digital democracy. Some legislation in Taiwan is now effectively crowdsourced via an online platform called vTaiwan and a discussion platform called Polis that is explicitly designed to foment understanding and (eventually) consensus instead of dunks and meme wars.
At the forefront of the movement for digital democracy is Audrey Tang, one of the country’s most heroic figures.
A legendary hacker (who also happens to be transgender and identifies as “post-gender”), Tang was once a protester, but was later invited into the government as a minister without portfolio, where she has worked to implement digital democracy and also helped with the COVID-19 response. It was in part thanks to the efforts of Tang and the far-sighted liberalism of the Taiwanese government that Taiwan was able to impose strict distancing measures in a way that still made the populace feel included and heard. (You really should read or listen to this podcast, where Tang offers thoughts on many aspects of Taiwan that I discuss in this post, and more besides!)
Taiwan’s dedication to democracy and inclusion has effectively become an ideological battle with China — and an extension of the conflict embodied in the Hong Kong protests. In a recent interview, Tang declared: “The crackdown of Hong Kong is hinged on the premise that, if you have too much democracy, it will hurt, I guess, stability, harmony, economy…We have a responsibility to show that democracy works, and not just lockdown or top-down or takedown.”
There are even some signs that Taiwan may end up exporting its ideology of participatory democracy to other parts of the region. Already, Tang is getting a lot of attention in Japan, where the Hong Kong protesters have already attracted a sympathetic following among the youth. If there is an East Asian ideology of radical democracy emerging as a counter to China’s vision on authoritarian stability, Taiwan will likely be at the center of it.
Legendary nightlife
This is all very serious stuff, but Taiwan is also famous for fun. And the two most famous fun things to do in Taiwan are food and clubbing.
Taiwanese food is a blend of Chinese and Japanese cuisine. Noodles and hot pot feature prominently. Street food is also popular, especially in Taiwan’s famous night markets, where you can just wander from stall to stall eating delicious stuff.
Here’s Anthony Bourdain’s episode in Taipei.
The other legendary piece of Taiwanese nightlife is the clubbing scene. I haven’t experienced this myself, obviously, but I had a number of friends who moved to Taiwan during the pandemic who sent back copious photos and reports. Anyway, here is a video where a slightly goofy European man takes you on a quick and spectacular tour through the Taipei nightclub scene. The big “mega clubs” seem to be especially popular.
So Taiwan is a pretty impressive civilization. Why aren’t more Americans aware of it? The island’s small population — just 24 million people, less than half the size of South Korea — and its disputed independence are probably part of the reason. Another is that despite having very cool urbanism, food, nightlife, and a liberal society, Taiwan doesn’t have a world-beating entertainment industry like Korea or Japan. If I were in the Taiwanese government, I would be thinking hard about how to get Taiwanese entertainment products onto teenagers’ cell phones around the world.
Another thing the government could do is to increase tourism from regions outside East Asia.
The food, nightlife, beautiful scenery, hiking, and rich history and culture should be enough of a draw (I certainly plan to go as soon as I can), but the government needs to advertise.
In any case, I’m optimistic about Taiwan’s mindshare in America. The pandemic, and Taiwan’s stellar performance, hopefully marked a turning point. It’s my hope that in the years to come, more and more Americans are going to start paying attention to this small but plucky island civilization, because it’s really pretty cool.
Taipei urbanism
When I first set foot in Taipei, I had a disorienting sense of being back in Japan — so much so that I kept expecting people to drive on the left side of the street. So much of the infrastructure in Taiwan looks and feels Japanese — the pavement, the building materials, the signs at the airport. People cite this as a residue of the colonial period, but given that the colonial period ended 77 years ago, it’s probably more due to Taiwanese architects, urban planners, and engineers continuing to look to Japan for inspiration.
After a few minutes, however, the sense of Japan-ness faded, crowded out by two key features of the Taipei landscape: lush greenery and shabby building facades.
Taipei is much greener than any Japanese city I’ve seen — towering trees line thoroughfares, dense bushes sprout next to storefronts, vines and houseplants explode from balconies, there are patches of grass over which Japanese developers would have long ago poured concrete. This gives Taipei a very natural feel, unlike Japanese cities, which can feel like being inside a giant spaceship.
Conversely, where nearly every exterior surface in Japan looks immaculate and new, Taipei is filled with buildings that look like they haven’t been refurbished since the 1960s — bare concrete streaked with stains and pockmarked with crumbling patches, ancient window-shaker AC units sprouting from dingy balconies. There are plenty of new buildings too, but not enough to overcome the sense of lush decay that one gets whenever one looks up at the building facades. The overall aesthetic is that of a ruin in a rainforest.
This is all during the day, of course; at night you can’t see the towering concrete, and the electric signs light up, and the city acquires more of the standard “Asian megacity” feel of Hong Kong or Seoul.
At ground level, Taipei offers a unique shopping experience. The streets are lined with nice little shops and restaurants — and when I say “little”, I mean tiny even by Japanese standards. These are almost all on the first floor, as in most cities. Unlike the concrete facades of many buildings, these shops are fresh and cheery and clean and new-looking. There are far fewer boutique clothing stores than in Japan, but restaurants seem to largely make up the difference. The food is every bit as good as you’ve heard — eating is one of Taiwan’s favorite pastimes. Craft stores are also common, and the quality seems very high. I noticed quite a few jewelry stores, which seems odd in a country where everyone seems to dress down.
One innovation of Taipei street design is that there are covered sidewalks everywhere, presumably to protect from the sort of constant light drizzle that has suffused the city every day I’ve been here so far. Walking along shop-lined streets thus feels a bit like being in a covered shopping arcade.
Getting around Taipei is very easy. The central city is very dense and compact, comparable to San Francisco (though the municipality includes some outlying areas); many places can be reached on foot. The subway is convenient, though for some reason Google Maps keeps telling me to take the bus instead.
But the main way that people seem to get around in Taipei is on the roads. The city is a grid plan of huge thoroughfares with smaller, less regular streets filling in the gaps between:
This is a much different experience than walking through NYC or Tokyo. NYC is a dense grid of small-to-medium streets, while Tokyo is pretty much a mess of winding paths with only a few giant roads. Here’s a map of Ikebukuro, one of Tokyo’s downtown districts, on the same scale as the map above. You can really see the difference.
These different road layouts are probably one reason why Taipei feels a little more car-friendly and a little less pedestrian-friendly than Tokyo; in Taipei you’re never very far from a giant river of fast-moving cars.
The real kings of the Taipei streets, however, are the scooters. It seems like everyone in Taiwan has a scooter, and they move down the roads in giant floods:
Scooters also zoom down the side streets, which makes walking down these streets less comfortable than in Tokyo. In Japan, cars share the narrow side streets with pedestrians, but drivers move very slowly and defer to people on foot. In Taipei, scooters zoom down the side streets at pretty high speed, attempting to circumvent pedestrians without slowing down too much. This makes walking down Taipei side streets a little less comfortable than in Japan — you’ve got to stay a little more alert.
Scooters overall are not the safest mode of transport; Taiwan’s rate of traffic injuries exceeds that of the (unusually dangerous) U.S., and its death rate is about the same. You might think Taipei should switch to bicycles, but the high density of gigantic roads makes this difficult. Scooters also contribute to air pollution (though industry and electricity are bigger sources). The Taiwanese government should make a concerted effort to switch to electric scooters and cars, which would make Taipei’s air a bit nicer and reduce the sound from the big roads (though they’ll probably have to add some sound back in for scooters to make sure pedestrians can hear them coming). In the long term, though, I think Taiwan should try to shift from scooters to bicycles (including e-bikes), by providing protected bike lanes along big roads. They should also build out more trains, taking a cue from Tokyo.
Although I haven’t had a chance to gather a large sample yet, another difference between Taipei and Tokyo seems to be the size of the interiors; Taiwanese apartments are more spacious. Good data is hard to find, but most sources seem to confirm this. Overall, Taiwan seems to have done a decent job of ensuring affordable, abundant housing near the city center.
In any case, if you’re interested in Taipei’s urban layout and policies, I recommend this Twitter thread by the ever-excellent Alfred Twu:
Eleven days in Taiwan
The first thing I noticed about Taiwan was how laid-back everybody seemed. Megacities like New York, Tokyo, and Shanghai are suffused with a frenetic energy; in Taipei everyone just kind of seems to saunter along. People are not in a hurry, they are not obsessed with details and busy-work. In eleven days in the country, I didn’t once hear raised voices, or witness a disagreement of any kind, or see two people get in each other’s way. In Japan people dress up to go to the convenience store; in Taiwan people in trendy neighborhoods look like they shop at Target. When I asked Audrey Tang, the Minister of Digital Affairs, why Taipei doesn’t renovate more of its dilapidated old buildings, she replied “There’s no social pressure for that.”
Oh and by the way…I met Audrey Tang! Thanks to her ideal of radical transparency, a public transcript of our discussion will be published in a few days. The way we met was extremely in keeping with my impression of a laid-back Taiwan — I randomly met a friend of hers at a networking event, and he just shot her a quick email. Tang is a bit of a personal hero of mine, and the conversation lived up to or exceeded my high expectations in every way. (If you really want to see her expound at length, check out her interview with Tyler Cowen.)
That’s just the way Taipei is — the feel of a small town with the amenities of a big city. It’s interesting that I came to Taipei directly from Amsterdam, because the two cultures remind me a bit of each other — the quiet laid-back attitude, the social tolerance, the (often annoying) scooters. The gender equality and gay rights as well, and the extremely low crime. Branding Taiwan the “Netherlands of Asia” might be a bridge too far, but it’s probably a future many in Taiwan would aspire to.
The Netherlands was a small country that for a long time resisted domination by bigger, more aggressive neighbors, though it eventually established its own empire — which, interestingly, included Taiwan for a while. Taiwan has spent most of the last 500 years as someone’s colony — first the Dutch, then a gang of Ming Dynasty loyalists and pirates, then the Qing Dynasty, then the Japanese. The final episode of colonization was when China’s defeated Nationalist government fled to the island with 2 million of their supporters, brutally dominating and suppressing the 6 million locals. Though Taiwan is a liberal democracy today, and the distinctions between the descendants of the Nationalists and the descendants of earlier settlers have faded quite a bit, this historical episode does lurk a bit beneath the surface of Taiwan’s modern-day political divides.
Culturally, Taiwan is very much not China, and this becomes apparent as soon as you leave the airport. The food — and food is Taiwan’s national pastime — is obviously Chinese-derived, but is really its own thing. It blends all the regional cuisines of China into a mishmash, because the Nationalists came from everywhere, and it adds touches from Japan, but it also has plenty of the purely original flourishes that emerge from any rich consumerist society. Milk tea is everywhere, as you might expect, though tastes have moved beyond the classic boba formula. The urban layout of Taipei, the signage and architecture and design, are definitely not Chinese, nor are they Japanese; they’re something new and recently made. Almost two years ago I wrote that “Taiwan is a civilization”, and I stand by that formulation.
What can you say about a whole civilization after just eleven days? I’ve lived more than three decades in America, and my own society constantly finds new ways to astonish and confuse me. Maybe nobody ever really knows what any place is like. All you really get are hints and feelings.
Taiwan feels like a highly individualistic place. Twice I found myself in a bar where there was just one person dressed in full punk rock regalia. Sometimes it seemed like everyone has their own small business. The locks on my Airbnb door were ad-hoc, hacked-together electronic gizmos. Lots of people make up Anglophone names for themselves, and some change it on a whim; I’ve met Taiwanese people who went by “Annester” (a portmanteau of “Anne” and “Chester”) and “Uniko” (from “unique”). There are little touches of cuteness everywhere — not the Japan kind of cute, or the French kind, but something unique to Taiwan.
Individualism seems to infuse the country’s politics as well, at least among the younger generations. The 2014 Sunflower Movement — which opposed a deepening of entanglement with China — featured various experiments in radical democracy and digital activism, in which Audrey Tang herself played a role. It gave rise to various follow-on waves of activism, provided inspiration for Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, and spawned a generation of idealistic and often highly original politicians. Some of the Taiwanese people I talked to brought up this movement in casual conversation, speaking of it with great pride.
My sense is that this individualism goes hand-in-hand with Taiwan’s general laid-back-ness, and its tolerance — when nobody is snapping at you to fall in line, you learn to pretty much do what you like. At times, Taiwanese self-expression can border on the goofy. Coming from me, that’s a compliment.
Why shouldn’t people be able to live this way? Why should a society be consumed with dreams of empire? Unlike the Netherlands, Taiwan is never going to conquer anybody — they’re just going to keep living their lives, strolling to the tea shop in loose-fit jeans, running their businesses in the day and raising a glass in the bars at night.
Unless, of course, someone else’s dreams of empire intrude. Taiwan exists under a sword of Damocles — an ever-present threat of invasion, conquest, and destruction by the People’s Republic of China. In the 2000s those threats eased up, but they have intensified alarmingly since the pandemic. I asked a number of Taiwanese people about the threat of war, and they were surprisingly nonchalant. The threat of Chinese invasion has always been present, they tell me; this is nothing new. It’s “the same as earthquakes,” Audrey Tang told me with a shrug. Sometimes disasters happen. If their country is invaded, Taiwanese people say they’ll fight, just as the Ukrainians fought. But until then, why worry?
That insouciance belies the urgency of the need for preparation. Taiwan’s military strategy and culture need deep reforms (which, thanks to the Ukraine war, they may finally be getting). On top of that, the country could probably stand to build a network of bomb shelters linked by deep tunnels, in case of saturation strikes by Chinese missiles. No matter what preparations Taiwan makes, of course, it won’t be able to indefinitely resist a country 60 times its size without external help. I predict that it would get that help, since China probably wouldn’t risk an invasion without first attacking U.S. bases in the area, touching off a wider war. But I digress.
Why should a peaceful, prosperous, gentle country like Taiwan be forced to prepare for the threat of invasion and bloodshed? There is no principle of human morality or justice that says they should have to. Instead, it’s purely the law of the jungle; there are predators in this world, and they will conquer what they can until they are stopped. China’s leaders want to conquer Taiwan not just because they want to rival the old Qing dynasty in territorial extent, but because Taiwan represents something to them that they can’t abide — an alternative blueprint for Asia. Perhaps even more than Japan or South Korea, Taiwan shows people in China and its satellite states what they’re missing — a way of life where people can just be themselves, instead of living in service to a grand empire.
In some ways, Taiwan shows Americans what we’re missing, too. I found Taipei to be something of a haven for Asian American expats, partly because of linguistic and family ties, but partly because it offers America-like consumerism and opportunity with Netherlands-like safety and tolerance. Taiwan hasn’t yet caught on as a travel destination among the broader American populace, partly because it hasn’t yet managed to replicate the pop-cultural appeal of Korea and Japan. But if you’re thinking of taking an overseas trip to see a cool new place, Taiwan would be at the top of my recommendation list. I liked it a lot. It was cool. Long may it stand.
Note: This was written in early 2021.
I love your Taiwan posts! I think I first signed up for Noahpinion because of your "Taiwan is a Civilization" post. Thanks for writing about Taiwan and keep coming back for New Year's =)
Idea, Noah: Offer Substack subscribers an opportunity to travel with your group (to some limited number), organized through a travel agency, some kind of group rate etc. See how it goes.