Taiwan Studies in Australia: Policy Engagement and Moral Purpose in the Shadow of a China-Taiwan War

2026 ANU TAIWAN UPDATE

Taiwan Studies in Australia: Policy Engagement and Moral Purpose in the Shadow of a China-Taiwan War

Australia's institutionalised understanding of Taiwan exists in the context of an increasingly belligerent PRC escalating its threats against the Taiwanese. Knowledge of Taiwan is therefore a concern of Australian policy-making, yet in national discourse it remains constrained by questions of defence capabilities and alliance politics. Preparedness requires deeper Taiwan knowledge, able to recognise a crisis, define its thresholds, and understand what is at stake and for whom. This gives Taiwan Studies a distinctive contemporary purpose as a form of critical national infrastructure.

The talk assesses these themes through a 2025 study of Australian public and institutional responses to Taiwan Strait crises, conducted with John Fitzgerald, Kuo Mei-fen, Nathan Attrill and Marc Ablong, which found Australian understandings of Taiwan to be fragmented, event-driven and reactive, with Taiwanese-Australian communities distinctively marginalised.

I then move beyond this instrumental purpose to pose a moral problem the field cannot defer. When the threat to Taiwanese society, to friends and colleagues, is material rather than notional, supplying knowledge and practising critique are not the only responsibility of Taiwan scholarship. I examine what it means for Taiwan Studies to take on a moral purpose, as the discipline through which Australia comes to know Taiwan and answers whether it is willing to defend its existence as uniquely Taiwanese.

Speaker
Mark Harrison is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and a Senior Advisor on security at the University of Tasmania. He is also an Expert Associate of the National Security College and a Founding Fellow of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University. He is co-editor of the Taiwan Studies series by Brill and is also active in Taiwan policy at the federal level in Australia.

With Catherine Chou, he is co-author of Revolutionary Taiwan: making nationhood in a changing world order (Cambria, 2024) and co-author with Mei-fen Kuo, John Fitzgerald, Marc Ablong and Nathan Attrill of the research report Australian Public and Institutional Responses to Taiwan Strait Crises, Dept. of Defence SPSG / ASPI (2025).

Afternoon tea will be provided at 3:15pm. 

VIEW THE 2026 ANU TAIWAN UPDATE PROGRAM.

The Taiwan Update is an initiative under the ANU Taiwan Studies Program 2025-28, which is a partnership between the College of Asia and the Pacific at The Australian National University and the Ministry of Education, Republic of China (Taiwan). We especially thank the Political Science and International Relations programme at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington for co-hosting the 2026 Taiwan Update in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.

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