What Did COVID-19 Teach Us about Us? Understanding Taiwanese Civil Society through its Pandemic Preparedness

While Taiwan’s success at containing COVID-19 is now a familiar story, the pandemic also provides an empirical window for gaining new perspectives on Taiwan’s civil society. This talk will identify the civil society mechanisms in Taiwan that served to demand institutional reforms for enhancing pandemic preparedness and to facilitate discourses of civic inter-dependence among its citizenry. Furthermore, it will discuss the challenges confronting Taiwan’s democracy, such as populism and disinformation, and how these challenges were partially contained during the pandemic. Finally, it explores how Taiwan’s democratic mechanisms for pandemic intervention were compromised by geopolitical power struggles. Taiwan’s COVID experiences highlight new directions for future conversations about the legitimation crisis of democracy.