Wen-Chin Wu

Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica and 2025–26 Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His work focuses on political economy, comparative authoritarianism, Chinese politics, cross-Strait relations, and Taiwanese public opinion on national security and self-defense.

Taiwanese Support for Self-Defense Is High but Conditional

Wen-Chin Wu, in a Hoover Institution talk drawing on multiple public-opinion surveys, argues that Taiwanese support for self-defense is high but conditional. He separates backing for national defense measures, including U.S. arms purchases, from personal willingness to fight or resist, and finds that both depend heavily on perceived threat from China, expectations of U.S. intervention, party identity, costs, and question wording. The result, in Wu’s account, is not a Taiwan that is either complacent or uniformly resolved, but a public that is “worried but cool” amid coercion and strategic ambiguity.

Hoover InstitutionMay 27, 202618 min read