A Review of China Studies in Taiwan: History, Development and Main Contributions

Taiwan has been a significant window for watching and understanding China. Several factors have contributed to Taiwan’s unique role, including geographical proximity and cultural understanding of China, its wide connections with China’s greater society, and its openness to the international community for exploring various qualitative and quantitative methods, including the adoption of artificial intelligence. This article examines the impact of political and educational environments as well as generational changes on research niches of Chinese studies in Taiwan in the past decades. The first stage, from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, was identified as studies of the Communist rebels, which aimed mainly at intelligence analysis and justification of the ruling Kuomintang government’s anti-Communist stance. From the late-1970s to the mid-1990s, the field underwent substantial reforms in methodologies and international exchanges. When Taiwan became more democratic and open, and its relations with China reconciled in the 1990s, China studies also became more diversified and eventually developed into a mature discipline in social sciences. Throughout these stages, China studies in Taiwan have shifted from being politically driven to being a scholarly driven field for diverse academic purposes.