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After discussing major political and economic structural transformations in Taiwan and mainland China over the past ten years, the author explores Peking's reunification strategy, Taipei's attitude toward reunification and drawbacks of Peking's "one country, two systems" model. He believes that hostility between Taiwan and mainland China has clearly been reduced in recent years, although the danger of war still exists. Taipei must be careful not to lapse into a "two Chinas" policy, while Peking should cease trying to isolate it internationally as long as it adheres to "one China". (DÜI-Sen)

Taiwan is diplomatically isolated in international politics and yet it now has a thriving IR community with links the world over. As diplomatic isolation has increased, the government has felt a strong need to reach out in other spheres of the international community, and this has led to a demand for a better understanding of international relations. This can be compared to an 'industrial policy' — the government has supported and guided certain IR research agenda and institutions in accordance with the perceived needs of the territory. At the same time, the political science community was able to respond in kind. Since the early 1970s many of those who had received advanced degrees in American universities began to flow back to Taiwan, reversing a brain drain in political science in the previous decade. Their teachings and publications laid a firm foundation for the study of international relations in Taiwan. After three decades, this sub-field of political science has genuinely come of age. Whilst this has been on the back of US-inspired methodologies and academic role models, it is applied to challenges and problems that are unique to Taiwan and its regional environment.

This study examines the authoritarian conditioning of political expression on social media in three Chinese societiesby analyzing three parallel surveys comprising 6942 respondents from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Results demonstrate that the use of social media to gather political information triggers politically expressive use of social media and indirectly predicts offline non-institutionalized political participation. Individuals' authoritarian orientation, however, moderates such indirect effects. Only people who demonstrate low or moderate adherence to authoritarian value systems exemplify this mediation model. Those with high levels of authoritarian orientation are not exemplary. Furthermore, the extent to which social media use interacts with authoritarian orientation to build a relationship with political participation presents two different patterns across three Chinese societies. The moderated mediating effect described here exists in Hong Kong and Taiwan but not in mainland China. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings.