For decades Taiwan has lived under the shadow of a far larger neighbour intent both on diminishing its global standing, while also forever threatening invasion and military occupation.

China’s aggressive diplomatic, military and economic manoeuvres have stripped Taipei of formal allies, leaving only a handful of states that still recognise it. Yet while Beijing rattles sabres and lodges protests each time any recognition or praise is attributed to the island nation, Taipei has been mounting a quieter, more supple offensive of its own. Its weapon of choice is not the aircraft carrier – Taiwan doesn’t have any - or missile battery, but the more subtle arsenal of ‘soft power’.

Former President Tsai Ing-wen’s then-New Southbound Policy launched in 2016, was emblematic of this turn. Instead of allowing Taiwan’s fate to be dictated by over-reliance on China, the initiative redirected energy towards Southeast Asia, South Asia and Australasia. The move was not merely about trade figures even if in the years since, ASEAN has become Taiwan’s second-largest trading partner, with exports and imports rising by more than 14 % between 2018 and 2019, the Asia Pacific Pathways to Progress Foundation wrote at the time.

Instead, at its heart lies a “people-centred” vision: scholarships for students, healthcare collaboration, agricultural expertise, and tourism exchanges. By the end of the decade, a quarter of tourists coming to Taiwan were arriving from these target countries, while thousand of students from ASEAN were building long-term links to Taipei, the Global Taiwan Institute wrote this year.

Language has become another battleground. Where Beijing once exported the controversial Confucius Institutes, Taipei now offers a more liberal alternative. Through the Taiwan Centre for Mandarin Learning and the Huayu 2025 initiative, Taiwan is branding Mandarin study as inseparable from democratic freedoms and cultural pluralism.

Where suspicion of China’s Confucius Institutes has deepened, this is Taiwan’s attempt not just to teach a language, but to tie it to the story of Taiwan’s liberalism.

Culture too has become a frontline battleground with The Taiwan Academy supporting research on Sinology and Taiwan studies, while showcasing film icons from Ang Lee to Edward Yang. The Taiwan Creative Content Agency, founded in 2019 by the government in Taipei, goes further, ensuring Taiwanese stories find homes on global platforms like Netflix, the Global Taiwan Institute reports.

Wisely in the eyes of many China, and wider Asia watchers, Taipei is using its cultural distinctiveness as a form of political armour as every film, book or exhibition that emphasises Taiwan’s difference from the mainland chips away at Beijing’s narrative of inevitable ‘unification’ – itself a nonsensical goal when the ruling Chinese Communist Party has never controlled Taiwan or any of Taiwan’s 160+ islands.

Even food has been conscripted into the soft-power playbook by the ruling elite in Taipei.

Gastrodiplomacy as it is sometimes termed – also mockingly called “cuisine wars” - has become surprisingly potent. Campaigns such as All in Good Taste: Savor the Flavours of Taiwan exported the popular bubble tea drink and night-market delicacies to a global audience. Programmes quietly back restaurants overseas with loans and training, ensuring that a Taiwanese meal abroad doubles as cultural outreach of sorts. In neighbouring Japan, which played host to just two out-and-out Taiwanese restaurants in a 2015 search, a simple search of the web today comes up with over 140. While there may be some overlap with food from China skewing the numbers, as any diplomat speaking off the record would admit - a well-time tray of dumplings can do more for goodwill than a dry communique.

Taiwan’s humanitarian instinct meanwhile, was most visible during the COVID pandemic when it switched from importer to global donor. Over 54mn masks were shipped to more than 80 countries worldwide, and respirators and medical expertise were shared across Europe and the United States. It was a gesture that reinforced the idea of Taiwan as a responsible international actor, despite the nation not being recognised by the World Health Organization; at the 78th session of the World Health Assembly in 2025, held in Geneva, Taiwan was largely excluded.

Yet, while COVID spread like wildfire across the globe, WHO member China was accused of hoarding supplies.

Education ties have also become a key focal point for Taiwan to spread its soft power. The Global Taiwan Institute reports that 130,000 international students now study in Taiwan annually. These graduates carry with them the lived experience of free speech, pluralism and democratic institutions in a culture so similar, but different to China. Said students then return home as ambassadors for a country fighting for recognition.

International think-tanks and forums also play a role. The Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation, convenes the Yushan Forum, drawing civil society leaders, NGOs and policymakers from ASEAN and South Asia. Such venues project Taiwan as a regional hub for dialogue rather than conflict, the very opposite of Beijing’s militarised diplomacy.

To this end, analysts writing in Modern Diplomacy earlier this year called this a deliberate strategy of “soft-power deterrence”: projecting values that highlight Taiwan’s difference from China, ensuring that any attempt at coercion carries reputational costs. And in the words of one Wall Street Journal analysis from late 2024, Beijing may have picked off Taiwan’s formal allies, but Taipei is finding fresh ways to fight back, weaving networks of sympathy and support across continents.

These are all deliberate attempts to make Taiwan’s survival a shared international stake. Every cultural exchange, student scholarship, or cargo of masks in recent years has added another strand to a web of relationships that makes aggression costlier for China. Beijing now needs to wake up and smell the bubble tea.