Thammasat University students interested in Taiwan, Australia, international relations, political science, sociology, gender studies, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 11 April Zoom webinar on Taiwan and Australia in the twenty-first century.

The event, on Thursday, 11 April 2024 at 11am Bangkok time, is presented by the University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of the international relations of Taiwan and Australia.

Students are invited to register at this link.

The speakers will be Honorary Professor Antonia Finnane, who teaches historical and philosophical studies at the University of Melbourne and Associate Professor Lennon Yao-Chung Chang, who teaches cyber risk and policy at the School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia.

The TU Library collection includes published research by Professor Finnane and Associate Professor Chang.

In 2020, on the Monash University website, a blog by Professor Chang was titled Technology and the truth: Novel approaches to combating misinformation:

Since the advent of web-based social media platforms, the creation and dissemination of information is no longer in the hands of a few.

Citizens can now simultaneously be creators, consumers and spreaders of content. The analytics and algorithms of social media mean citizens have a new power not only to create information, but also to disseminate information by posting or reposting, and this has led to a large increase in the volume of information circulated.

Much of this information is authentic, but it’s also opened the door to “questionable content” such as fake news, hate speech, misinformation, disinformation, and other problematic material that might be locally created or represent foreign interference.

When it’s reposted by “super spreaders” such as entertainment or sport celebrities or politicians, it’s perceived to have their endorsement and is more likely to be accepted and reposted by their large number of online followers.

Often, but not always, questionable content is politically or ideologically motivated. It has the potential to cause collective victimisation by changing popular opinions and attitudes, creating scepticism towards government and the electoral process, causing political unrest and communal violence, marginalising certain communities, and damaging the economy.

There are growing calls for greater government regulation and for social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, to take down problematic content.

The big question that governments around the world are grappling with is how to regulate information systems, and specifically questionable content.

Government-imposed regulations can eliminate or restrict the flow of questionable content, but at the same time can act as a legally sanctioned mechanism to gag real news and, ultimately, violate media independence, freedom of information and expression.

Claiming that it’s necessary to stop rumours from spreading and to prevent violence between communities, we’ve seen several governments impose a localised shutdown of the internet. They argue the national security imperative, but it also conveniently prevents people in that jurisdiction and beyond from knowing what’s happening, including the other measures and behaviours the security agencies might be relying on.

Getting the balance right might not be possible. Legislation and regulations, by their very nature, are unlikely to be a satisfactory solution to the problem of questionable content, especially as it’s often difficult to find the originator.

And when it comes to blocking or deleting content, are we to empower public servants to be the verifiers of truth and the arbiters of what’s acceptable? […]

Last December, Professor Finnane posted an article on Domino Theory, a website that covers the shifting geopolitics of East Asia, with an emphasis on relations between China and Taiwan.

Titled Why Taiwan’s Falling Birth Rate Has Become a National Security Issue, it noted:

As Taiwan heads towards its eighth presidential election, it is hitting a new low in births per year

The fertility crisis has long been a matter of concern in Taiwan. In a perfect illustration of “be careful of what you wish for,” early population planning targets set by the then-dominant KMT were met and then exceeded in the 1980s. The fertility rate dropped below replacement level in 1983 and has never recovered.

It was identified as an issue of national security in Taiwan’s first national security report, issued in 2006. Since then the issue has been consistently in the news, local and international. It is associated with several negative economic and social indicators: the gradual increase in the burden of the national debt on each individual; the weakening of domestic demand; the reduced supply of labor; the problem of aged care in a super-aged society.

For all these reasons, politicians take the problem seriously. Nonetheless, the fertility rate is a slow burner in Taiwanese politics — it lacks the immediacy of cross-strait relations, widely held to be the main issue in the current political contest.

But there is a meeting point between the two issues. Already many fewer young men are available for military service in Taiwan than there were a decade ago. The air force in particular is low on trained personnel, and its fighter pilots are exhausted from the constant need to respond to Chinese jets crossing into Taiwanese air space.

This problem is only to some degree balanced by a parallel problem in China, where the fertility rate (1.45 in 2022) is also in precipitate decline.

On neither side of the Taiwan Strait does anyone have good ideas about how to reverse the fall. Candidates for the election in Taiwan all promise potential parents enhanced financial support while no doubt fully aware of the limited effects of such measures on fertility choices.

In China, President Xi Jinping’s advice to women that they should “play their role in carrying forward the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation” seems even less likely to yield results.

So why are so few people having babies?

Young women in Taiwan tend to explain their preference for pets over babies in terms of financial pressures, particularly the cost of housing. Housing is recognized as a serious problem in Taiwan and all contenders for the presidency are promising to help with housing for couples with children.

But in a society where having children is normatively associated with marriage, being married is generally a prerequisite for enjoying even existing benefits. The fertility rate for married couples in Taiwan is reasonably high, two children being standard. The key question appears not to be why don’t women have children? The question is why don’t women get married?

In Taiwan, as in much of East Asia, marriage avoidance has become a marked phenomenon. In 2021, a mere 50% of young Taiwanese between the ages of 25 and 34 were married.

Of the unmarried group, 70% of the men wanted to get married at some future date. A majority of the unmarried women had no such intention. Similarly, many more unmarried men (61.22%) than unmarried women (42.98%) wanted eventually to have children.

Since housing and raising children are costs for men as well as for women, there is presumably something more to the falling birth rate than simply the financial pressure.

Analyzing the uniformly low and falling birth rates across East Asia, Yen-hsin Alice Cheng argues the problem is grounded in the Confucian cultural bedrock of the region. Family and society are rigidly patriarchal. Workplace organization and wider societal structures are unfavorable to women. […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)