TAIPEI (TVBS News) — As tensions mount over looming trade deadlines, Tunghai University's (THU, 東海大學) Department of Political Science has partnered with TVBS news network to convene a high-profile forum examining Taiwan's precarious position between competing superpowers. The event, titled "A New Geopolitical Order: The U.S.-China-Taiwan Triangle from Chips to Tariffs" (地緣政治新秩序：從晶片到關稅的美中台三角競局), will take place Thursday (June 19) at the prestigious National Taiwan University (NTU, 國立台灣大學) campus in Taipei. Organizers have strategically timed the symposium just weeks before the expiration of the Trump administration's 90-day reciprocal tariff grace period on July 8, a deadline sending ripples through Taiwan's export-dependent economy.
Drawing intellectual framework from two recently published geopolitical analyses — "Silicon Triangle" (晶三角) and "Underground Empire" (地下帝國) — the forum aims to dissect Taiwan's strategic vulnerabilities and potential advantages within an increasingly fractured global order. Organizers have announced that Lin Tzu-Li (林子立), an associate professor of international relations at Tunghai University specializing in trade policy, will present a historical parallel analysis comparing the Reagan administration's 1986 semiconductor agreement with Japan to the current Trump administration's tariff strategies targeting Taiwan. Lin's presentation will explore whether Taiwan's semiconductor industry, which produces roughly 90% of the world's advanced chips, might face similar pressures to those that permanently altered Japan's technological trajectory four decades ago.
The intellectual gathering will be moderated by Chang Chun-Hao (張峻豪), who serves as department chair of political science at Tunghai University and has published extensively on cross-strait economic relations. Featured prominently in the program is Yeh Chun-Hsien (葉俊顯), a senior researcher at Academia Sinica (中央研究院), Taiwan's premier research institution equivalent to a national academy of sciences. Yeh's presentation will advocate for increased supply chain autonomy and local manufacturing resilience as strategic imperatives for Taiwan, proposing a conceptual framework he terms "autonomous resilience" that could potentially reshape how nations approach economic security in an era of intensifying great power competition.
Rounding out the panel of experts are two prominent political scientists from Taiwan's leading universities. Hsueh Chien-Wu (薛健吾), a professor at National Chengchi University (NCCU, 國立政治大學), a top institution known for training many of Taiwan's diplomatic corps, will trace the evolution of American technology containment strategies targeting China since their inception in 2015. The symposium will conclude with analysis from Kuo Yu-Jen (郭育仁), a professor of international relations at National Sun Yat-sen University (NSYSU, 國立中山大學) in southern Taiwan, who will present research suggesting that Trump's unconventional approach to foreign policy has paradoxically reinvigorated American global influence while successfully recasting China as the primary challenger to the international order. ◼
