The Taiwan Research Hub and Asia Research Institute are pleased to present a talk on
A Contested Democracy Under Threat or a Forerunner of Digital Democracy?
by Dr Jonathan Sullivan, Associate Professor, School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham
and Dr Chun-yi Lee, Director of Taiwan Research Hub, School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham
Wednesday 6 December 2023
11am-12 noon, A4 Law and Social Sciences Building, University Park Campus.
This is an in person event, please register.
What is digital democracy? This talk will start from the definition of digital democracy, then we will investigate the extent to which digital democracy has emerged as a contested concept in Taiwan. Furthermore, we ask: to what extent is the use of digital surveillance for disease control and prevention justifiable, and to what extent can personal privacy be sacrificed when adopting digital surveillance measures, with the aim of securing collective safety? We compare Taiwanese citizens’ concerns about personal privacy with those in other democracies, such as the UK, and those in the EU and North America.
About the speakers
Jonathan Sullivan has been studying Taiwan since the mid-1990s when he first visited as a language exchange student at National Chengchi University. He has accumulated more than eight years living in Taiwan and speaks fluent Mandarin. He wrote his PhD thesis [2010] on Taiwanese political party strategies and communications in presidential and local elections, based on an empirical study of several hundred campaign advertisements. His thesis was funded by the ESRC and a Dissertation Fellowship from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for Scholarly Exchange. He has held a visiting position at National Taiwan University under the auspices of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs fellowship and is a Fellow of the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan at the University of Tubingen.
He has participated in numerous Track 2 delegations to Taiwan and regularly briefs UK government on Taiwan related issues. He is the author, with Lev Nachman, of Taiwan: Contested Democracy Under Threat [London: Agenda, November 2023], and many other academic publications on Taiwan, including: 'Time matters in cross-Strait relations: Tsai Ing-wen and Taiwan’s future' [The China Quarterly] ‘Campaign advertising and democracy in Taiwan’ [The China Quarterly]; ‘Chen Shui-bian: On independence’ [The China Quarterly] ‘Is Taiwan Studies in decline?’ [The China Quarterly] ‘Nasty or nice? Explaining positive and negative campaigning in Taiwan’ [The China Journal]; ‘Electronic resources in the study of elite political behavior in Taiwan’ [The China Quarterly].
Dr Chun-Yi Lee is Associate Professor at school of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham. She is also the Director of Taiwan Research Hub at Nottingham. Chun-Yi's first book was published by Routledge in 2011: Taiwanese Business or Chinese Security Asset. The book is under Leiden Series in Modern East Asia History and Politics.
In 2010, Chun-Yi received the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) standard grant with Prof. Andreas Bieler on a three-year project, 'Globalisation, national transformation and workers' rights: An analysis of Chinese labour within the global economy'. In 2014, Chun-yi received a two-year research grant from the Chiang-Ching-kuo (CCK) Foundation in Taiwan in relation to 'Chinese Investment in Taiwan: Challenge or Opportunity for Taiwan's Industrial Development'.
Chun-yi edited numerous books since 2018, most recently In 2023, along with Michael Reilly, Chun-yi edited a book: China, Taiwan, UK and the CPTPP: Global Partnership or Regional Stand-off? published by Palgrave. Currently, Chun-yi is working on her second single authored monograph on the topic of 'Sticky Decoupling: Geopolitics and Semiconductor supply chain'.