China’s Quest to Peripheralize Taiwan

Project leader: Gunter Schubert, University of Tübingen

This project examines China’s imperial practices toward Taiwan, with a particular focus on processes of peripheralization and policy learning. Taiwan represents a crucial case for understanding how the People’s Republic of China seeks to consolidate the imperial center by combining economic incentives, political influence, and military pressure. Taiwan’s strategic importance in semiconductor and AI-driven industries gives the case global relevance, particularly in the context of geopolitical competition and global supply chain restructuring.

The project analyses China’s attempts to peripheralize Taiwan through three main strategies: control over economic structures, the creation of intermediaries linking Taiwanese and Chinese actors, and divide-and-rule approaches targeting political and business elites. Empirically, the project relies on document analysis, semi-structured interviews with policymakers and entrepreneurs in China and Taiwan, and the evaluation of supply chain developments in high-tech sectors.

The project contributes to the literature on Chinese foreign policy, imperial practices, and political economy by examining how policy learning shapes China’s Taiwan policy and its broader strategy to become a high-tech powerhouse. It provides new insights into cross-strait relations, the geopolitics of semiconductor value chains, and the dynamics of dependence and autonomy in the emerging Chinese empire.