The World’s Most Inconvenient Democracy: What EATS 2026 Taught Me About Taiwan

On banned magazines, maternal grief, and what it means to be a democracy the world pretends not to see

Three days in Portsmouth. Dozens of scholars from across Europe, Taiwan, Japan, the United States and Canada. And one question that kept coming up in every panel, every corridor conversation, and every Q&A: how do you understand a place that functions like a fully sovereign country but is not allowed to say so?

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23rd EATS Annual Conference | 1–3 April 2026, University of Portsmouth 

Personal account by Susmita Das — Reporter, Masters (IR & Politics), Political Strategist & Consultant 

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The official conference poster for EATS 2026 at the Richmond Building, University of Portsmouth. 

The background image shows the Ankang Reception, a clandestine pre-trial detention centre for dissidents under martial law in New Taipei City.

It took me nearly two weeks of intensive research to fully grasp what this conference held and what it was trying to say to the world. But the determination to finish this piece and put it somewhere people might actually read it never wavered. Taiwan’s story is too important to stay inside lecture theatres.

Why would anyone, in the middle of everything else happening in the world right now, stop to think about Taiwan? It is a densely populated island of 23 million people, sitting off the southeastern coast of China, and for most people it is a place that surfaces only when the headlines force it into view. The Economist called it “the most dangerous place on earth” in early 2021. That same year, Bloomberg warned that “the world was dangerously dependent on Taiwan for semiconductors”. Both framings are true as far as they go. But neither tells you what Taiwan actually is, and that is precisely the problem.

Taiwan is one of the most consequential and least understood places on earth. It produces the chips that run your phone, your laptop, your car, and increasingly your hospital. It sits at the intersection of the world’s two largest military powers. It has built, against extraordinary odds, one of Asia’s most robust democracies. And it exists in a legal and political limbo that no one in the international community has been willing, or able, to resolve. The People’s Republic of China insists Taiwan is a renegade province that will eventually return to the fold. Taiwan’s 23 million people, for the most part, disagree rather strongly with that characterisation.

So why EATS? Why does the European Association of Taiwan Studies exist, and why does it matter that its 23rd annual conference landed in Portsmouth this April?

The answer is simpler than you might think. Because someone has to take this seriously. Because the gap between how Taiwan is talked about in diplomatic circles, where careful language is everything and nobody wants to upset Beijing, and how it is actually lived and understood by the people there, is enormous. Academic communities like EATS exist to close that gap. They bring together historians, political scientists, cultural scholars, and legal experts who have spent years studying Taiwan not as a geopolitical problem to be managed, but as a society with its own history, its own traumas, its own democratic achievements, and its own very urgent future.

This year’s conference had a specific focus: the fortieth anniversary of 1986, the year before Taiwan’s martial law was finally lifted on 15 July 1987. The choice of 1986 rather than 1987 was deliberate and important. As Dr Cockel explained to a Central News Agency journalist during the conference, democratisation was not predetermined. Standing in 1986, you did not know it was coming. The conference asked us to sit with that uncertainty, to appreciate the twilight of authoritarianism and the dawning of democratisation as a moment in which several forces were at work simultaneously, with strong aspirations to break the shackle but no guarantee they would succeed. The questions it raised went well beyond anniversaries. They were about what democracy actually costs, how societies process decades of authoritarian rule, and what it means to be a state that the world recognises in practice but refuses to name out loud.

As an International Relations (IR) student who came in thinking Taiwan was a complicated puzzle, I left three days later understanding that it is something more important than that. It is the place where the world’s loudest principles meet their quietest exceptions.

The puzzle I walked in with

I came to the 23rd annual EATS conference with a head full of IR theory and a nagging sense that Taiwan was one of those topics that textbooks tend to skip over. Not because it is unimportant, but because it is genuinely uncomfortable. It sits in a gap in the international system, and nobody seems particularly eager to explain exactly how it got there or what to do about it.

As someone studying international relations, Taiwan had always struck me as confusing in a way that felt deliberate. Here is a place with its own government, its own military, its own passport, its own currency and judiciary, a world-leading technology sector, and a population that overwhelmingly identifies as Taiwanese. By almost any functional measure, it is a state. Yet the majority of the world does not formally recognise it as one, and its official name, the Republic of China, dates back to a government established in 1912 on the mainland, long before the People’s Republic of China (PRC) even existed.

I had assumed this confusion was simply the result of geopolitical complexity. What I learned at EATS is that it is not really confusion at all. It is pressure, systematically applied.

“The people of Taiwan feel like the citizens of an independent and sovereign state. The government functions like an independent and sovereign state. It is a powerful state in terms of its trade, technology and defence. Unfortunately, it is not allowed to claim so because of the PRC.”

— Dr Isabelle Cockel, University of Portsmouth

Those words from my professor, Dr Isabelle Cockel, one of the lead organisers of this conference, stayed with me throughout the three days. They capture something that the academic literature often phrases in such careful, hedged language that the human reality of it gets lost. The People’s Republic of China maintains, as a matter of official policy, that Taiwan is simply a province of China. The international community, for the most part, goes along with this fiction because the cost of challenging it is higher than most governments are willing to pay.

What makes Taiwan’s situation especially unusual is the naming puzzle at its heart. As Dr Cockel explained, very few countries actually recognise the Republic of China as a state. Only twelve do, including the Holy See, and the list makes for striking reading: Belize, Guatemala, Haiti, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Eswatini, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu. Taiwan is the geographical place where that state now operates. So there is a kind of diplomatic fiction being maintained on all sides: not a recognition of Taiwan as a new state, but a faded, often unspoken acknowledgement of an older one, carefully worded to avoid provoking Beijing.

A conference forty years in the making: the Janus moment

The timing of EATS 2026 was significant. The conference theme, Echoes of Authority: Forty Years on from the Eve of the Lifting of Martial Law, centred on the year 1986, the year immediately before Taiwan’s martial law was lifted on 15 July 1987. That was the year Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party was formed in secret, while the 38-year-long martial law was still firmly in place. Nobody at the time knew that it would end the following year, or that Taiwan would one day be celebrated as one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies.

The organisers chose a powerful image to frame all of this: the Janus moment. In Roman mythology, Janus is the god of thresholds, of doorways, of beginnings and endings. He is always depicted with two faces, one looking back into the past, one looking forward into the future. The conference used this image to describe what 1986 actually was for Taiwan. It was not a clean break, not a revolution, not a single dramatic moment of liberation. It was a threshold. Standing on it, you could look backwards and see nearly four decades of authoritarian rule, martial law, political imprisonment, censorship, and the silencing of dissent. But you could also look forward and see, dimly and uncertainly at first, a democratic future beginning to take shape. As the title of Tzu-ming Huang’s photographic exhibition put it so precisely: we need to look to the past if we want to look to the future.

Exhibition boards at the conference atrium showing archival photographs from Taiwan’s democratic transition, including the DPP’s first peaceful transfer of power in 2000 and the protest movements that helped end martial law.

The critical point the conference made about this Janus moment is that it was not obvious at the time. The people living through 1986 did not know they were at a turning point. The DPP was formed clandestinely, because forming a political party was still illegal. The martial law that had governed Taiwan since 1949 showed no obvious signs of crumbling. And yet, just beneath the surface, things were shifting.

Exhibition boards showing a woman collapsed in grief after Chiang Ching-kuo’s death in January 1988, alongside an explanatory panel on the campaign for direct presidential elections and the peaceful transfer of power.

Forty years on, that Janus quality has not disappeared. Taiwan can look back at an extraordinary democratic transition, one that produced Asia’s first legalisation of same-sex marriage, a vibrant free press, and institutions that have withstood sustained pressure from Beijing. But it can also look forward and see a great deal of uncertainty: a cross-strait relationship under growing military tension, a global order that has not found a way to give Taiwan the formal recognition its democratic achievements might seem to warrant, and domestic questions about identity, memory, and justice that are still being worked through. That is what made this conference feel genuinely urgent rather than merely academic. The Janus moment is not finished. Taiwan is still standing on that threshold.

“What they recognise is that the Republic of China is a state, which has existed since 1912. Taiwan is the geographical place where the state exists.”

— Dr Isabelle Cockel

The exhibition: silencing but unsilenced

Before the panels began each morning, delegates passed through an exhibition in the Richmond Building Atrium that had travelled from the National Museum of Taiwan History. Called Silencing but Unsilenced, it brought together 758 copies of opposition publications from the martial law era — what is believed to be the largest collection of its kind outside Taiwan. Under martial law, all forms of publication were subject to censorship: newspapers, books, magazines, journals, television and radio programmes, film, and advertising. Decades before 1987, even owning a radio required a licence. The magazines in this exhibition were among those that received the most intensive surveillance, and some of the banning claimed lives.

The Silencing but Unsilenced exhibition poster, showcasing tangwai magazine covers from Taiwan’s martial law era. They are donated to Dr Cockel from the National Museum of Taiwan History. Source: Tzu-ming Huang.

Some histories are written in archives. Others are written on the body. Huang A-tao’s war scars, from the Janus Moments exhibition by photographer Tzu-ming Huang, on display at EATS 2026, University of Portsmouth. Huang A-tao was one of the publicly identified Taiwanese Comfort Women, forced into sexual slavery under the Japanese military during the Second World War.

The hands of Taiwanese Comfort Women, from the Janus Moments exhibition. These women’s experiences were suppressed for decades and only began to be publicly acknowledged after evidence emerged in 1991.

The magazines were a physical record of the cost of speaking out. Many of the editors and writers behind them were arrested. Some were imprisoned for years. One of them, pro-democracy activist Cheng Nan-jung, paid with their lives. Walking past these publications before heading into academic panels was a grounding reminder that the conversations happening inside the lecture theatres were not abstract exercises. They were about real people and real consequences.

An exhibition board on sexual slavery under the Japanese military, documenting the stories of Taiwanese Comfort Women

. One of several sections of the Janus Moments exhibition confronting the most difficult chapters of Taiwan’s twentieth century.

The second major exhibition, Janus Moments, presented archival photographs by journalist Tzu-ming Huang documenting Taiwan’s democratic awakening. Among the most striking were images of Taiwanese Comfort Women, elderly survivors whose experiences of sexual slavery under the Japanese military had been swept under the carpet for decades, only beginning to be publicly, politically, and academically discussed after a Japanese academic uncovered evidence in 1991. Huang A-tao, whose war scars appear in one quietly devastating photograph, was one of the publicly identified survivors. 

Day one: the view from LT2

I should say something about my role at this conference before going further, because it shaped what I saw and how I saw it. I was the timekeeper for the LT2 sessions across all three days, responsible for making sure each scholar had their fair and equal share of the room. It meant I sat through every presentation in the main lecture theatre from start to finish. What I caught of the parallel sessions in LT3 and Seminar 201 came through breaks and corridor conversations, and I will touch on those briefly. But the heart of this account is LT2, and I want to be honest about that.

The conference opened on the morning of 1st April with the keynote screening of Eyes on Democracy, directed by Yi-chieh Chung, which set a quietly urgent tone for everything that followed. The opening ceremony brought together the University of Portsmouth’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor Chris Chang and Professor Liao Da-chi, President of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, marking the institutional weight behind what EATS represents for Taiwan’s academic visibility in Europe.

Poster for Panana, directed by Hsiung Ju-hsiang, screened on the evening of Day 1. The film follows the life of legendary Taiwanese singer Kao Chu-hua, a story shaped by the upheavals of the twentieth century. Source: Tzu-ming Huang.

The morning’s Cold War Geopolitics panel covered Taiwan’s trade policy under martial law and the tariff reforms that shaped its economic vision of the future, the Taiwan-Indonesia relationship in the 1960s, and a paper rethinking the hub-and-spoke alliance structure and Taiwan’s indispensable role in the Indo-Pacific. These papers collectively built a picture of a state that was being quietly but deliberately integrated into global systems even while its formal recognition was being systematically denied.

After lunch, the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy hosted a comparative panel on martial law and emergency powers across East Asia. Dr Cockel presented her research on the use of women’s voices for psychological warfare, followed by papers on military fingerprints in Thai constitutions, emergency powers under the Marcos, Arroyo, and Duterte presidencies in the Philippines and the short-lived martial law in South Korea. Sitting in LT2 watching the clock, I was struck by how recognisable the pattern was across all three countries. Governments reach for emergency powers and then find it very difficult to let them go. Taiwan’s own long path away from those structures looked less like an exception and more like one of the more successful outcomes in a wider regional struggle.

The afternoon session on Taiwan and China covered diplomacy under constraint and Taiwan’s struggle for international visibility, the militarised simulation culture that has grown up around civil defence, Taiwanese public perceptions and emotions around cross-strait relations, and a paper visualising the contested Taiwan Strait median line through the lens of the 1996 and 2022 conflicts. This was some of the most directly IR-relevant material of the conference for me, and it sat uneasily alongside the morning’s historical perspective. The mechanisms of Taiwan’s marginalisation have not changed much in sixty years. They have just become more sophisticated.

The evening ended with a conference reception at Portsmouth Guildhall, hosted by Vincent Chin-hsiang Yao, the Taipei Representative in the UK, with Deputy Lord Mayor of Portsmouth Cllr Abdul Kadir attending as a guest.

From the right, Professor Liao, Deputy Lord Mayor of Portsmouth Cllr Abdul Kadir, the Taipei Representative in the UK Vincent Chin-hsiang Yao and Dr Cockel. Photo: Tzu-ming Huang.

The fact that Taiwan has a representative rather than an ambassador in London is itself a small illustration of the recognition problem. The office does the work of an embassy in almost every practical sense, but the language has to be carefully managed to avoid offending Beijing. Even at a drinks reception, the political constraints were quietly present.

In LT3 and Seminar 201 that day, sessions ran on legal systems and citizenship, heritage both tangible and intangible, space politics and public infrastructure, Indigenous culture and memory, and democratisation and elections. I caught fragments of several of these in passing. The session on pop soundscape in Seminar 201, exploring how Taiwanese indie music grapples with authoritarian legacies, was one I wish I had been able to follow more fully.

Day two: memory, film, and the family

Poster for Eyes on Democracy, directed by Yi-chieh Chung, screened on Day 1. The film traces Taiwan’s pro-democracy movement through archival footage and personal testimony. Source: Tzu-ming Huanga

Thursday in LT2 opened with Professor Lung-chih Chang’s keynote on the National Museum of Taiwan History, followed by a conversation about the Wufeng Lin Family Trilogy with Professor Fu-san Huang. The combination of these two sessions set up the day’s recurring theme: how institutions and families alike carry and transmit historical memory across generations.

The morning’s main panel on Indigenous Identity Making brought together papers on oceanic connectivity and Indigenous borders in post-martial law Taiwan, the role of cinema in the rise of Indigenous identity, transitional justice initiatives in collaborative museum practices, and education as a path to Indigenous emancipation. These papers, chaired by Professor Lung-chih Chang, addressed something the conference kept circling back to: the question of whose story gets told, by whom, and in what institutional form.

After lunch came a screening of Behind the Scenes, directed by Tzu-ming Huang, with a Q&A featuring both Huang and Yi-chieh Chung. The films shown across the three days were not decorative additions to the programme. They were evidence, a different kind of scholarship that carried emotional weight alongside intellectual argument.

The afternoon session on Family, Marriage and Generational Change was one of the most personally resonant panels of the conference. Papers examined how Taiwan’s social transition around 1987 registered in the most intimate spaces of daily life: in the psychosomatic suffering of mothers, in the legal and emotional complexities of cross-strait same-sex marriage under geopolitical tension, and in the experiences of children of cross-border marriages navigating multiculturalism and identity. The afternoon also ran parallel sessions in LT3 and Seminar 201 on Taiwan and Europe then, and on writing about identity, which I was only able to follow at a distance.

Day three: books, frontlines, and young voices

Delegates browsing the book stalls in the Richmond Building Atrium. Among the most significant items on display were books donated by the Institute of Taiwan History at Academia Sinica — Taiwan’s most prestigious research institution — including personal diaries and letters of political prisoners and their family members, as well as secret service surveillance and interrogation reports. These have been donated to Dr Cockel as conference organiser and will remain at the University of Portsmouth. Photograph by Tzu-ming Huang.

Books on Taiwan’s history on display, including volumes on the White Terror, oral history collections, and materials from the National Human Rights Museum. On the right, comic books about the White Terror testify to the willingness of Taiwanese citizens to engage with this difficult past through popular culture.

Taiwan-related publications lining the display tables. Many titles documented the lived experience of political repression, family separation, and survival under martial law.

The final day opened with parallel sessions I could only catch in parts: Queer Taiwan in LT2, which examined trans identities and lesbian poetry in contemporary Taiwanese literature; and a session from Academia Sinica on Taiwan and the World from a Southern Perspective, covering the sea, aquaculture, and Taiwan’s global position, running in LT3.

Back in LT2, the Frontline Coast and Landscape panel brought some of the most granular historical work of the conference. Papers covered White Terror on the Cold War front line in coastal Zhejiang between 1950 and 1955, geographies of silence in White Terror literature, the struggle against military rule in Kinmen and Matsu from 1987 to 1992, and the politics of preservation and natural monuments in southern Taiwan. These papers recovered experiences that have rarely made it into the mainstream narrative of Taiwan’s democratisation, drawing on local archives and oral histories to put specific places and specific people back into a history that tends to get told in broad strokes.

In LT3, a parallel session on Social Change and Civil Society covered union organising at Taiwan’s airlines, intergenerational class mobility through Taiwan’s rapid social transformation from 1984 to 2022, the continuity and succession of community development policies after martial law, and a comparative study of student movements in Taiwan and Poland. These were sessions I heard about over lunch rather than witnessed directly, but they reflected the same preoccupation running through the whole conference: how change actually happens in a society, and how slowly and incompletely its benefits tend to arrive.

The afternoon brought the Young Scholar Award presentations, one of the most important traditions in the EATS calendar. Early career researchers presented on the secret 1967 Japan-ROC agreement on forcibly repatriating Taiwanese dissidents, Taiwan’s civic-embedded diplomacy and the transformation of authority after martial law, youth confinement in Taiwan and the hidden resilience of cross-strait knowledge flows in the semiconductor industry. The panel in LT3 covered landscape transformations, space industry imaginaries, and indigeneity and heritage. These were research projects in progress, and watching young scholars hold their ground under questioning from established specialists was one of the most quietly encouraging things about the whole three days.

A wide view of the book and magazine stalls filling the atrium, with delegates browsing between sessions. The volume of material on display was itself a statement about the richness of Taiwan Studies as a field.

What I brought home: the weight of what mothers carry

Coming into EATS, I thought I understood the Taiwan issue in broad strokes. I knew about the One China policy, I knew about the Taiwan Strait and the semiconductor supply chain, and I knew that relations with Beijing were tense. What I did not fully appreciate was how much of Taiwan’s story is about the internal work of building and sustaining a democracy under conditions that are extraordinarily hostile to that project.

The recognition problem is real and it matters. As Dr Cockel explained, recognition is one of the traditional criteria for statehood in international law, and Taiwan’s situation is genuinely anomalous. Only twelve states recognise the Republic of China, and the existing world order has not been designed to help Taiwan. International law has not found a way to resolve this, and the weight of that unresolved question falls daily on 23 million people who are living, governing, and building a society that the world officially pretends is something other than what it is.

But the session that stayed with me longest after I left the conference was not about geopolitics or diplomacy. It was about mothers.

The paper on generational differences in the meaning-making of psychosomatic suffering in motherhood, presented within the Family, Marriage and Generational Change panel and focused on Taiwan’s social transition around 1987, did something that the more overtly political sessions could not quite do. It brought the weight of Taiwan’s history down to the smallest possible scale: a woman’s body, her silences, the way she holds pain that she has never been given the language to name.

The research examined how Taiwanese mothers, particularly those who lived through the martial law period and the turbulent social shifts of the late 1980s, experienced and expressed physical suffering that was inseparable from the political and emotional world around them. Under martial law, public grief was dangerous. Open dissent was dangerous. So suffering turned inward. It became somatic, carried in the body rather than spoken aloud. And what the research showed, quietly and with real precision, was that this pattern did not simply end when martial law was lifted. It passed between generations. Daughters inherited not just their mothers’ stories but their silences, their ways of holding pain, their psychosomatic vocabularies of a trauma that was never fully named.

Sitting in LT2 as timekeeper, watching the seconds tick and making sure each scholar had their fair share of the room, I was struck by how much that paper said about Taiwan as a whole. Because in a way, that is exactly what Taiwan has been doing on the international stage for decades: carrying a weight it has never fully been allowed to name, expressing through resilience and industry and democratic achievement what it cannot simply declare out loud. The country, like those mothers, has learned to hold its truth in its institutions rather than in the language of formal recognition.

That connection might sound like a reach. But after three days of scholarship that moved between Cold War geopolitics and maternal grief, between banned magazines and constitutional courts, between horseshoe crabs on the Kinmen shoreline and the quiet politics of a Taiwanese market, I came to believe that everything in this conference was connected. The personal and the political in Taiwan are not separate registers. They never have been.

I will be honest: this piece did not come easily. Nearly two weeks of reading, rewinding, and rethinking went into it. But that is the thing about Taiwan. Once you start paying attention, you cannot stop. And once you understand what is at stake, staying silent feels like a choice you are actively making. Taiwan’s story is too important to stay inside lecture theatres. It belongs in the world. And it deserves better from that world than carefully worded silence.

The 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association of Taiwan Studies was held at the University of Portsmouth, 1–3 April 2026. The Silencing but Unsilenced exhibition was on loan from the National Museum of Taiwan History. The Janus Moments exhibition featured photography by Tzu-ming Huang. Further information at eats-taiwan.eu.