Taiwan's Overseas Opposition Movement and Grassroots Diplomacy in the United States: the case of the Formosan Association for Public Affairs

Abstract

This article examines the advocacy of overseas Taiwanese, particularly those in the United States, and their influence on US foreign policy and subsequently upon democratization in Taiwan. It concentrates particularly on the work of a Taiwanese non-governmental, non-profit advocacy group in the US—the Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA). This article first composes an organizational history of FAPA by investigating the questions and processes of why and how FAPA was formed at the local level in the US. Further, it analyzes how the organization mobilized its relatively modest local resources in the US through grassroots diplomacy to promote Taiwan's visibility in the US, to influence the US government on Taiwan-related issues, and to attempt to impact upon Taiwan's democratization. Through the presentation of FAPA's organizational history, this article ultimately tries to answer the question of whether a non-governmental organization such as FAPA and its grassroots diplomacy has had an impact on US foreign policy and Taiwan's democratization. Besides adding to the existing scholarly literature on the causes of Taiwan's democratization, this study on the formation and effectiveness of FAPA seeks to contribute to studies on NGOs' or non-state actors' grassroots diplomacy and lobbying efforts on governmental policies. Because FAPA functioned as an important diplomatic channel for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Taiwan's first opposition party in the post-World War II era, before it matured into a fully-developed national opposition party in the 1990s and consequently unseated the Kuomintang (KMT) in 2000, this article is also an examination of an opposition movement's informal diplomacy.