Assessing Taiwan's Societal Resilience Using COVID Governance Experience

Oxford Taiwan Studies Programme

[Oxford Taiwan Studies Seminar Series] Speaker: Dr Wei-ting Yen, Academia Sinica; Host: Dr Bo-jiun Jing, University of Oxford

University of Oxford China Centre

Much international focus on Taiwan’s security centers on its military preparedness and public willingness to resist external threats. Yet, wars are not only fought with weapons—they are also contests of societal resilience. As Taiwan faces mounting geopolitical threats, assessing its societal resilience—beyond military capacity—is vital.This talk draws on Taiwan’s COVID-19 experience to evaluate how civil society might respond under wartime conditions. Three core lessons emerge from the COVID-19 experiences. First, early and decisive virus securitization enabled the government to frame COVID-19 as a national security threat, galvanizing a whole-of-nation response and public compliance. Second, Taiwan’s developmental state legacy and pre-crisis coordination capacity—particularly at the industry level—allowed for rapid mobilization of critical medical resources like masks, though these strengths did not extend to all sectors. Third, the politicization of vaccine procurement undermined trust and governance, opening space for disinformation and social division. Overall, the COVID-19 experiences show Taiwan’s capacity to define crises coherently and coordinate across sectors during a crisis. Yet, they also show that societal unity depends on whether political actors share a common threat perception. Strengthening peacetime manufacturing in strategic sectors and bolstering bottom-up media literacy are essential steps.Dr Wei-Ting Yen is currently an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica (IPSAS). Previously, she was an assistant professor in the Government Department at Franklin and Marshall College and a Mellon High Impact Emerging Scholar. Dr Yen also serves as Associate Editor for Asian Politics &amp; Policy and is a Public Intellectuals Program Fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations.Dr Yen studies democratic governance, comparative political economy, and welfare state development in Asia. Her current research examines the political impacts of economic insecurity, particularly on welfare state development. She also has several projects examining the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic from a comparative perspective. Her work has appeared in Governance, Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of East Asian Studies, Social Science Quarterly, among others. She holds a PhD in Political Science from The Ohio State University.Dr Bo-jiun Jing, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, will be hosting the event.