REPORT: Whither Ambiguity? Next-Generation Perspectives on Cross-Taiwan Strait Relations

Whither Ambiguity? Next-Generation Perspectives on Cross-Taiwan Strait Relations

By Juliet Lee and Nia Williams
January 2025

In the second half of 2024, the National Committee on American Foreign Policy (NCAFP) convened a second cross-Strait next-generation working group with young scholars and experts from the United States, Mainland China, and Taiwan to highlight new voices on the longstanding and sensitive issue of cross-Taiwan Strait relations. Throughout this series of dialogues, participants shared their assessments of the current situation and their recommendations to manage relations.

A few takeaways and recommendations from the dialogues include:

• Each side’s priority is to maintain peace and stability and to prevent the current situation in the Taiwan Strait from deteriorating into a military conflict. However, each side is balancing their own domestic issues and priorities can change. Careful management is needed to ensure that maintaining peace and stability is a priority.
• It is important to keep direct channels of communication open to discuss signals and interpretations of actions and to avoid misjudgments. To that end, Beijing and Taipei can begin to normalize scholarly exchanges and ensure the safe movement of people.
• The excessive securitization of exchanges render exchanges difficult to execute and lower the confidence of individuals on both sides to engage with each other. People-to-people exchanges should not be treated as a national security threat.

To read more about our Next-Generation Cross-Taiwan Strait Specialists Program, please click here. For more on our Emerging Leaders Programs, please click here.