ABSTRACT
As China rose, rivaling Taiwan lost its economic and strategic advantages once enjoyed during the Cold War. Its advanced status vis-à-vis China used to be defined against an Anglophone standard implanted in capitalism, democracy, and (Western) alliance. Increasingly, such a sense of superiority suffers as China rises and has received compensation from an intellectual indebtedness that owes to Taiwan’s highly Americanized IR. In Chapter 11, the denial of any plausible Chinese IR and downplay of its relevance from the Western IR perspective is in Taiwan’s quest for a binary of China and Taiwan qua the West. It sets up the correct relationship between Taiwan and China to be one of civilizational hierarchy with Taiwan on top. By contrast, Chinese IR is intellectually threatening because it may expose Taiwan’s unwanted (by some, not all) Chinese identity that would ruin Taiwan’s current strategy of distancing itself from China. Balance of relationships, if ever applied in Taiwan, primarily proceeds in the improvisation of ways to abort prior resemblance, including a shared theoretical approach, as much as possible. It is not a politically correct direction of theorization.
