Wen-Chin Wu

Mobilizing citizens for defense is crucial in international conflicts, as demonstrated by recent events such as the Russia–Ukraine War in 2022. These conflicts highlight the critical importance of citizens’ willingness to fight. However, existing research, including that using the standard question in the World Values Survey (WVS), often overlooks a significant framing issue in measuring this willingness. This study addresses these gaps through theoretical and methodological perspectives. We argue that the way survey questions are framed can significantly influence responses. In particular, a value frame suggesting patriotism would increase willingness to fight, while a cost frame implying war-related costs would decrease it. Through conducting experimental surveys with varied wording on willingness to fight in Taiwan in 2024, we assess the impact of these different frames embedded in question wordings on responses to willingness to fight between two distinct groups: civilians and military recruits. We also measure the extent of social desirability bias that the value frame may induce. We have two major findings. First, the value frame would induce more willingness to fight while the cost frame dampens it. Second, military recruits display a lower willingness to fight compared to civilians, likely due to their greater awareness of the costs associated with war. This study emphasizes the need for carefully designed surveys and suggests alternative strategies of political communication to enhance the public willingness to fight among various groups, ensuring more accurate assessments of national defense preparedness.

: In light of Hong Kong’s failed attempt to amend the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance in 2019 and China’s enactment of the 2020 National Security Law for Hong Kong, many countries have voiced unease about their extradition agreements with China. Some, out of concern over potential adverse impacts on human rights, have even suspended their extradition agreements with Hong Kong. In this article, we investigate factors affecting the signing of extradition agreements between China and other countries. We hypothesize that third countries are more likely to conclude an extradition agreement with China if they are more economically engaged with China or are already cooperating with China in civil and criminal matters. In contrast, countries more strongly committed to the rule of law, or those which maintain a Common Law system, are less likely to sign an extradition agreement with China. Statistical analyses of the 57 Chinese extradition agreements signed between 1993 and 2019 support our hypotheses.

How does income distribution affect citizens’ willingness to defend their country? In this article, I argue that perceived unfair income distribution reduces citizens’ attachment to their country and inhibits their willingness to fight. Using mediation analysis with data collected by the World Values Survey in Taiwan in 2019, I find that perceived distributive unfairness reduces non-rich citizens’ willingness to fight for their country via dampening their national pride, a key element in psychological attachment to national identity. This finding suggests that distributive unfairness threatens national security and contributes to the literature on the perils of economic inequality.

Since 2016, China has been conducting military flybys around Taiwan, while the US has approved arms sales to Taiwan on several occasions and sent warplanes and battleships through the Taiwan Strait. How does Taiwanese public opinion respond to the Chinese and US military presence in the Strait? Is the public likely to become less supportive of de jure independence for Taiwan on account of China's military deterrence or more supportive owing to a perceived likelihood of US military assistance? In this report, we provide answers to these questions based on evidence from a survey experiment conducted in Taiwan in October–November 2020. We find that Taiwanese are less sensitive to the Chinese military presence in the Taiwan Strait but have become more supportive of de jure independence after seeing the US aircraft in the area. Our findings contribute to studies of cross-Strait relations and US foreign policy on the Taiwan Strait.

Taiwan's opposition to PRC demands such as acceptance of the ‘92 Consensus’ and ‘One Country, Two Systems’ formula since 2016 has invited a series of retaliatory measures from Beijing, designed to coerce Taiwan into compliance. Given the stark asymmetry in economic size, military capability, and diplomatic status, Taiwan provides a case for studying coercive diplomacy that takes the form of threats to punish. Material differences suggest that Taiwan should capitulate, and ‘cheap talk’ theses expect PRC threats to have no discernible effect, while balance of threat arguments expect resolve. In this article, we use the survey data collected in the 2016, 2019, and 2020 rounds of the Taiwan National Security Study to examine how Taiwanese respond to China's intensifying and expanding threats. Our paper identifies four strategies that the public sees as responses to PRC coercion: isolation, bandwagon with China, balance against China by allying with the USA and Japan, and hedge by deepening economic ties with China while aligning with the USA and Japan against China. We show that the popular support for balancing against China rises as PRC coercion grows and Taiwanese citizens increasingly perceive China to be a threat. Our findings imply that citizens in a liberal democracy can develop the will to pushback against pressure from an authoritarian regime despite sharp asymmetries in capabilities and material limitations.

As Taiwan is now recognized as one of the major flashpoints for potential conflict between the US and China, one strategic choice confronting Taiwanese citizens is whether Taiwan should take sides with the US against China. To answer this question, we analyze survey data collected in Taiwan by Duke University in October 2020. We find that Taiwanese support for siding with the US against China has less to do with respondents’ party affiliation and views on unification or independence but more to do with circumstantial factors, such as their attitudes on “distrusting China” and “appeasing China.” Specifically, Taiwanese who believe that a moderate policy would be effective in preventing war in the Taiwan Strait are less likely to support such an alliance. Those who believe that China cannot be trusted to honor its peace commitment, or that it may use economic coercion against Taiwan, are more likely to support taking the US side against China. Our findings have several policy implications: if China wants to reduce the possibility of a US-Taiwan alliance, it should alleviate Taiwanese people’s distrust of its peace commitment toward Taiwan. Intensifying military threats against Taiwan is counterproductive, because it would invite US intervention, which in turn would increase Taiwanese support for a US-Taiwan alliance.

This paper aims to answer a general question: whether an international organization (IO) is able to shape public opinion in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the pandemic took hold in early 2020, countries across the globe have switched gear from prevention to vaccination. Most had to not only secure a sufficient supply of vaccines, but also to curb vaccine hesitancy among their populations. Can endorsement by an international organization like the World Health Organization (WHO) enhance a vaccine’s acceptability? Based on a survey experiment conducted in Taiwan, our study leverages the special relationship between China and Taiwan to show that WHO endorsement can induce acceptance of Chinese vaccines among Taiwanese people. However, the effect is found to be contextual in the sense that it only works when people’s trust in the WHO is higher than their trust in the vaccine’s country of origin. Our study not only contributes to the literature of IO legitimacy by empirically showing IOs’ causal effects on public opinion, but also sheds light on how a vaccine’s credibility can be enhanced to promote vaccination uptake.

Diplomatic protests convey one government's displeasure with the policies of another government. Yet, public support for their own government's policies can be influenced by the actions of others, so diplomatic protests have the potential to increase domestic support for the policy within the target country. A rally-’round-the-flag effect has been found to be associated with wars, crises, and sanctions. Here, we assess the existence of such an effect in relation to diplomatic protests by foreign governments. Using a survey experiment, we assess the impact of foreign government protests—specifically protests by China—against US arms sales to Taiwan on public support for Taiwan's government and its policies. We find that who lodges the protest, whether it is an adversary or a supporter, is more important than the language of the protest itself. We argue that diplomatic protests create a dilemma—lodging complaints about the behavior of other governments can increase public support for those very policies in the target country.

During the outbreak of an epidemic, the success in risk communications to make the public comply with disease preventive measures depends on the public’s trust in the government. In this study, we aim to understand how media audiences update their trust in the government during the COVID-19 outbreak depending on the information they received. We conducted an online survey experiment in February 2020 in Hong Kong (n = 1,016) in which respondents were randomly provided with a government press release and an endorsement either from an official or a non-official source. This study shows that the information from a non-official source enhances the credibility of official government messages. Our findings imply that dictators can actually “borrow credibility” from their citizen journalists and even nondemocratic leaders can make themselves more trustworthy to potential dissenters through citizen journalism. Allowing information flow from non-official sources can be a practical measure for governments to address the problem of a credibility deficit during a pandemic.

This paper evaluates the progress and impact of the literature on comparative authoritarianism, showing not only how its development over the previous two decades can help us understand China’s authoritarian politics better, but also how the latter can move the former forward. We focus on two important topic areas in the literature: authoritarian power-sharing and autocratic politics of information (e.g., partial media freedom and government censorship). For the first topic, we shall review the literature on the authoritarian power-sharing between dictators and their allies and explicate how this conceptual innovation helps us understand the institutional foundation of China’s regime stability and phenomenal economic performance before Xi Jinping. The analysis then provides us a baseline for assessing China’s economic and political future under Xi Jinping given his clear departure from the pre-existing power-sharing framework. Finally, this paper also assesses the relevance of the literature on authoritarian politics of information to the Chinese context. In sum, we not only emphasize the conceptual contributions of the literature of comparative authoritarianism to the field of Chinese politics, but also identify lacunae in the current literature and avenues for future research that post-Xi political developments have made visible to us.