U.S.-Asia Law Institute

The deep partisan divisions rending Taiwan's government are no secret. Legislative push-back to President Lai Ching-te’s budgets has received international attention. Yinn-Ching Lu writes that much less attention has been paid both abroad and within Taiwan to a different manifestation of the power struggle between the branches: near-paralysis of the government appointment process. Critical institutions’ leadership ranks are being decapitated by the legislature’s refusal to approve presidential nominees, a phenomenon that Lu says may ultimately be more damaging to Taiwan’s democracy.

The chairwoman of Taiwan’s Nationalist (Kuomintang) Party, Cheng Li-wun, has a message for Americans: Taiwan should not be the next Ukraine. Rather, Taiwan should reconcile with China and seek to carve out some kind of autonomy within “the great Chinese nation.” Katherine Wilhelm writes that most of Taiwan’s 23 million people do not identify as Chinese, but they are deeply divided over whether the best way to preserve their way of life is befriending China or arming against China.

Few people outside of China’s legal elites have heard of the “foreign-related rule of law” policy. Yet this awkwardly named policy was a big reason that Chinese President Xi Jinping was able to stage his recent summit with US President Donald Trump in a posture of apparent parity. Katherine Wilhelm writes that “foreign-related rule of law” produced the critical minerals export control regime that enabled Xi to force Trump into a tariff truce.

China’s National People’s Congress has just approved an ambitious new Ecological and Environmental Code (生态环境法典) to unify and update the country’s previously fragmented ecological and environmental governance framework. USALI visiting scholar Feng Ge assesses the achievements of codification, but notes that the Code weakens the ability of civil society organizations to help enforce the law through environmental public interest litigation.

Japan’s overseas generosity in the form of aid has been a big part of its positive global image. It led the world in ODA for the entire 1990s in terms of total amount. But Hiroaki Shiga warns that Japan is increasingly using its aid program to counter China’s growing geopolitical influence, and in the process is adopting some negative features of Beijing’s approach.