Does Taiwan Have the Will to Defend Itself?

Visitors to Taiwan are often surprised by how everyday life carries on in the shadow of war. For several years, headlines have warned that the people of Taiwan face an imminent attack from Beijing, but everyone seems calm. There isn’t any panic buying; shelves at the grocery store are fully stocked; construction is booming. Were the headlines all wrong, or are people out of touch with the sheer magnitude of the danger they face? If war broke out tomorrow, would they have the will and determination to defend themselves and their way of life? Or would they simply wait for the United States to fly in and save the day?

Casual observation can be misleading. If you were to stop people in the street and ask, “What will you do if China attacks?” they would probably look at you like you were saying that the end times were coming. But if you look at the survey data, in which respondents are presented with very similar questions, the results are clear: most people in Taiwan are willing to make sacrifices to defend their democracy. In the most recent wave of the American Portrait survey, which was designed by our team at Academia Sinica (Taiwan’s academy of sciences) and administered in January 2026, we asked respondents, “If China uses force against Taiwan, would you be willing to resist at all cost?” Just over 17 percent said they would be moderately willing, and 36.3% said they would be very willing. We also asked what  respondents would do if the United States did not assist Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack. The results were about the same: far from abandoning all hope and giving up (as some analysts have suggested they might), 17.5 percent said they would be moderately willing to resist at all cost, and 41.2 percent said they would be very willing to do so.

Skeptics might say that surveys don’t prove anything, and that answering a telephone survey is nothing like being thrown into the terror and chaos of modern war. It is true that surveys don’t provide absolute proof, but they are certainly better than intuition. Without surveys, there is little else to rely on than gut feeling. A more serious issue is what social scientists call “social desirability bias”: the possibility that the figures might exaggerate Taiwanese respondents’ willingness to fight because they think it sounds better (in this case more patriotic) to say they will fight. There’s no way of fully resolving this issue, though scholars have proposed various ways of mitigating it. Even so, the rest of the survey results present a consistent picture that respondents take self-defense seriously: 75.9 percent said that the threat from China had increased in recent years; 53.5 percent said that Taiwan should increase defense spending to 3 percent of GDP; and 69.5 percent said that Taiwan should purchase arms from the United States.

Some might look at these results and be worried about a different issue: maybe the willingness to fight is so strong that Taiwan will accept the risks of independence and stumble into a war with China. But our results suggest that there is little appetite for risk in Taiwan: most respondents interpret the status quo to mean that Taiwan is not part of China, and most respondents are not interested in changing that status quo. When we asked respondents if Taiwan and China were part of the same country, 78.4 percent said no. 87.7 percent of respondents said they wanted to maintain the status quo at least in the near term, and only 5.8 percent said they wanted to declare independence immediately. It might be puzzling to find both of these results in the survey results (namely that most don’t see Taiwan as part of China but also don’t want to declare independence), so some explanation is warranted. In Taiwanese politics, the phrase “declare independence” usually has to do with formal legal changes, such as changing the Republic of China Constitution to enshrine Taiwan’s independent status or changing the official name of Taiwan from “Republic of China” to “Republic of Taiwan.” It is those formal legal changes that are most likely to involve crisis or conflict with Beijing, but most respondents don’t see the need to take things that far: in their view, Taiwan is already a country (only 9 people in a sample of 1,202 respondents said that Taiwan wasn’t a country), and they want to preserve that status quo.

These results show that Taiwan is neither reckless nor complacent. The “dual deterrence” argument –the view that the United States needs to both deter China from using force and Taiwan from taking actions that would trigger China to do so – does not find support in the data. Over several waves of this survey, we’ve found consistent evidence that Taiwan’s citizens want to preserve the status quo, and there’s little reason to believe that the government would take provocative actions that would be deeply unpopular with voters.

But if China attempts to change the status quo, Taiwan would put up a determined resistance. Taiwan’s citizens see themselves as bearing the primary responsibility for Taiwan’s security. With the United States currently focused on its conflict with Iran, it is especially important to know if U.S. allies and partners are willing and able to defend themselves, and Taiwan is no exception. The public opinion data indicate that Taiwan’s citizens are determined to defend their country, regardless of the cost.

James Lee is an assistant research fellow/professor at the Institute of European and American Studies at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and an affiliated researcher at IGCC.

Thumbnail credit: Taiwan Presidential Office (Flickr)