Thinking Taiwan Forum: 14 Years from a Post-Election Loss Touchstone to a Cross-Party Democratic Dialogue Container

30-Second Overview: Thinking Taiwan Forum is an online commentary platform founded on August 5, 2012 by the Tsai Ing-wen Education Foundation after Tsai's presidential election defeat, and relaunched with a major redesign on October 3, 2025, five months after Tsai left office. The founding board of six directors spanned multiple fields (former DPP Secretary-General Su Jia-chyuan, former Chunghwa Telecom Chairman Hochen Tan, former Council for Economic Planning and Development Vice Chair Chang Ching-sen, journalist Antonio Chiang, political commentator Yao Li-ming, and CEO Lin Chuan). Tsai set the platform's DNA with a single line on launch day: "While it takes piles of cash to fill up a room, you can light up a room with a match." Over 14 years, the platform has accumulated 1,900–5,800 articles from over 600 authors, published two volumes of Thinking Taiwan Forum Selected Essays, and ran an English edition led by former Taipei Times news editor J. Michael Cole from 2014 to 2016. In May 2026, the flagship series "30 Years, 30 People, 30 Perspectives" launched, inviting figures across party lines, generations, and ethnic groups—including James Soong, Hsu Hsin-liang, Wang Yu-ther, Miao Poya, Chu Ching-yi, Wu Nien-jen, and Gong Jianjia—to publish in batches. The United Daily News fired back with "Relaunching Thinking Taiwan? Think About Yourself First." Tsai wrote in response: "Democracy is a road that everyone must walk together." A platform that explicitly declared from day one that it would remain "free from political ideology and partisanship" is still responding to the same tension 14 years later.

May 2, 2026 — That List

That list simultaneously included former People First Party Chairman James Soong, former DPP Chairman Hsu Hsin-liang, Taiwan Statebuilding Party Chair Wang Yu-ther, Social Democratic Party National Committee member Miao Poya, KMT Youth League Director and Central Standing Committee member Guo Yourui, former Taiwan People's Party at-large legislator Chang Chi-lu, former KMT at-large legislator Hsu Yu-jen, former KMT Mainland Affairs Department Director Tso Cheng-tung, political commentator Huang Weihan, and director Yang Ya-che¹. Also on the list: Academia Sinica Academician Chu Ching-yi, Ju Percussion Group Artistic Director Ju Tzong-ching, Greenray Theatre Artistic Director Wu Nien-jen, Taiwan Environmental Citizen Society Chairman Lee Ken-cheng, Da-Yan-Cheng Cultural and Creative District founder Zhou Yicheng, and large-animal veterinarian and Fresh Milk Farm founder Gong Jianjia². Sixteen names made public; the remaining fourteen are to be revealed in batches through May.

This is Thinking Taiwan Forum's 2026 flagship series, titled "30 Years, 30 People, 30 Perspectives." The introduction page reads: "In March 1996, the people of Taiwan directly elected their president and vice president for the first time with their votes." "For the next 30 years, how do we safeguard our hard-won democracy?"³

Placing James Soong (age 76) alongside Wang Yu-ther (Taiwan Statebuilding Party chair) on the same list, and Ju Tzong-ching (classical music) alongside Gong Jianjia (livestock veterinarian) in the same column—this is the greatest common denominator of Thinking Taiwan Forum's vision, and also the target it has faced accusations about for 14 years. The United Daily News "Heavyweight Commentary" headline on the day of the 2025 relaunch read: "Tsai Ing-wen Relaunches Thinking Taiwan Forum — Is Lai Ching-te Still on the Road?"⁴. A platform that declared itself free from partisan alignment was read as an implicit criticism of the sitting DPP president.

📝 Curator's Note:
The same kind of "cross-party" list—in 2014 Thinking Taiwan chose J. Michael Cole writing about the Sunflower Movement; in 2025 it chose 30 perspectives on democracy. Fourteen years later, this cross-party positioning has shifted from "externally defending the Sunflower narrative" to "internally bridging blue-green-white dialogue." The positional shift is not the platform's failure; it is a fingerprint of where the wind is blowing in society.

August 5, 2012 — That Sunday

Rewind 14 years. In January 2012, Tsai Ing-wen lost the presidential election to Ma Ying-jeou. On July 18 of the same year, the Tsai Ing-wen Education Foundation completed its legal entity registration with the Judicial Yuan⁵. On August 7, Tsai held a press conference announcing the platform's official launch. In that day's Taipei Times report, she said three things:

"While it takes piles of cash to fill up a room, you can light up a room with a match."

"The ultimate goal would be to further the power of thinking, the power of action and the power of society."

"The most beautiful thing about Taiwan is its people. Without these passionate and sincere people, Taiwan would be a hollow place."⁶

The match metaphor is the platform's day-one DNA. The foundation declared it would remain "free from political ideology and partisanship"⁶. The firewall that the United Daily News would still question 14 years later as a factional tool was explicitly written into the founding statement on day one.

The board composition was also a day-one cross-disciplinary design. The Taipei Times report listed six names: former DPP Secretary-General Su Jia-chyuan, former Chunghwa Telecom Chairman Hochen Tan, former CEPD Vice Chair Chang Ching-sen, senior journalist Antonio Chiang, political commentator Yao Li-ming, and CEO Lin Chuan⁶. Six professional types—political, business, governmental, media, commentary, economic—placed on a single board roster. This ethos was repeated at five times the scale 14 years later in the 30-person series.

✦ Does the match light up the room, or does the room light up the match—Thinking Taiwan Forum has been answering this question for 14 years.

The platform website went live that Sunday (August 5, 2012)⁷, 18 days after the foundation's legal registration and two days before Tsai's press conference. The original layout ran on Drupal 7, divided into four categories: "Policy Thinking," "Current Affairs Thinking," "Thinking Supplement," and "Casual Commentary on Current Affairs"⁸. The slogan was also a double-verb construction: "Think Taiwan, Think the Future."

Fourteen Years, Accumulated Across Thousands of Articles

In its first year, the platform accumulated nearly 1,600 articles from 500 authors⁹. By the eve of the 2025 relaunch, the foundation's publicly stated figures were over 1,900 articles from more than 600 authors¹⁰; the old site's archive pages ran to 580 pages, suggesting an actual count of individual articles between 5,200 and 5,800⁷.

The author composition had a particular tilt. Academics formed the majority: university professors (Chengchi University Journalism Associate Professor Lee Yee-chi, National Peking University Economics Associate Professor Chen Yen-chien), think tank researchers (former Financial Research Institute President Huang Chong-cheh), and international media figures (former Taipei Times news editor J. Michael Cole). Next came political staffers and politicians themselves, followed by civil society organizations and reader submissions. Article length conventions ran 3,500 to 5,000 words of academic commentary, citing Jürgen Habermas's public sphere theory, Patchen Markell's deliberative democracy, and Nicholas Eberstadt's demographic dividend analysis¹¹.

2014 was the golden year. On March 18, students occupied the Legislative Yuan. On April 11, J. Michael Cole published "Debunking the Myths Foreign (and Other) Scholars Hold About the 'Sunflower Movement'" on Thinking Taiwan Forum¹²—a piece that opened its second paragraph by writing, "According to the Taiwanese government's account, the Sunflower Movement, which began with the storming of the Legislative Yuan on the evening of March 18, came out of nowhere and for no apparent reason." Another article from the same year, titled "This Is Not a Record of the Sunflower Student Movement, but a Prelude to Deep Reflection in Taiwan's Civil Society"¹³, went further: while other green-camp media wholesale endorsed the Sunflower Movement, Thinking Taiwan chose to approach the movement from a position of "critical reflection." This framing connects directly to the platform's day-one explicit declaration of being "cross-party / non-partisan."

📝 Curator's Note:
Thinking Taiwan's framing of the 318 occupation is a layer Taiwan.md has not seen before. Cole proactively challenged "foreign scholar myths" from the third paragraph; the author himself was an international media figure, but he surfaced internal contradictions within the movement before pushing outward to expose the weakness of the government's accusations. This methodology shares DNA with The Reporter's "narrative investigative journalism," runs counter to the current-affairs commentary style of Storm Media, and does not overlap with the policy discourse of Voice Tank.

On May 6, the foundation held a press conference announcing the launch of the English edition, Thinking Taiwan. Tsai's positioning that day was: "A platform connecting Taiwan with the international community"¹⁴. Cole served as English edition editor-in-chief through 2016¹⁵. CEO Lin Chuan simultaneously introduced the platform's architecture at the press conference—this economist, who would later serve as Tsai's first-term premier from 2016 to 2017¹⁶, was at the time concurrently CEO of the New Frontier Foundation (the DPP's party think tank) and CEO of the Tsai Ing-wen Education Foundation.

Lin Chuan straddling both the "party think tank" and the "personal foundation" think tank—this path later became Tsai's model for using think tanks to train future cabinet members. On May 20, 2016, Tsai Ing-wen was inaugurated as president, and Lin Chuan moved directly from foundation CEO to Premier of the Executive Yuan¹⁷.

Once article volume reached a critical mass, books followed. In January 2014, Fangzhi Publishing, part of the Yuan Shen Publishing Group, released Xiang: Thinking Taiwan Forum Selected Essays, edited by the Thinking Taiwan editorial department; in January 2015, Xiang: Thinking Taiwan Forum Selected Essays II followed¹⁸. The publisher of both volumes was the same person who would take over as chairman the following year—Jian Chih-chung.

Selected English essays were also translated and republished by Canada's The Taiwan Gazette starting in 2015¹⁹, establishing an international syndication pathway for exposure. Readers who did not read Chinese could still access Taiwan's own discursive voice through a third-party English outlet.

June 2014 — Tsai Ing-wen Steps Down as Chairman

On May 28, 2014, Tsai Ing-wen was elected DPP chairperson once again. In June, she stepped down as chair of the Tsai Ing-wen Education Foundation, and the board elected Yuan Shen Publishing Group founder Jian Chih-chung as her replacement, with Chang Chen-ya taking over as the new CEO²⁰.

This move was an explicit "partisan vs. platform" firewall. Tsai's reason for stepping down was not that she was "too busy," but rather "to avoid overlap between the foundation's role and the party's role"²⁰. If the foundation's claimed non-partisan nature shared the same chairman as the sitting DPP party chair, the former would lose its credibility. The act of stepping down itself did more to preserve the platform's ethos than any article content could.

Jian Chih-chung is a singular figure in Taiwan's publishing world. Born in 1955 in Tianzhong Township, Changhua County, he founded the Yuan Shen Publishing Organization in 1985, which grew to encompass six imprints: Yuan Shen, Fangzhi, Xianjue, Jiujing, Ruhe, and Jimo²¹. In 2013, he transformed Yuan Shen into Taiwan's first company to implement a three-day weekend, with employees working four days per week²¹. A publisher taking over a politician's foundation was the key inflection point where Thinking Taiwan shifted from "think tank voice" toward "cultural commentary."

📝 Curator's Note:
A publisher taking over meant the editorial process shifted from "political staffer logic" to "editorial committee" logic. Jian Chih-chung's Yuan Shen produced bestsellers like The Secret, A Complaint Free World, and The Courage to Be Disliked—he excelled at the editorial taste of "translating academic or philosophical content for the general public." This DNA later entered Thinking Taiwan, mixing pure policy discourse with human-interest narratives.

After the CEO transition to Chang Chen-ya, the platform's day-to-day operations were completely severed from Tsai Ing-wen's purview. After Tsai was re-elected president in January 2016 and inaugurated in May, Thinking Taiwan entered a nine-year dormant period: no major structural changes, articles continued but at reduced volume, and after English edition editor-in-chief J. Michael Cole departed in 2016, there was no successor of comparable stature.

Nine Years Without a Major Redesign

From Tsai Ing-wen's presidential inauguration on May 20, 2016, to her departure on May 20, 2024, when Lai Ching-te took office, a full eight years passed. Adding the 17 months before the October 2025 relaunch, the platform maintained essentially the same architecture for approximately nine years²².

These nine years were not a complete standstill. The November 2018 local elections, the January 2020 presidential election, the December 2021 four referendums, the November 2022 local elections, and the January 2024 presidential election—around each of these, Thinking Taiwan continued to publish. But the distance during the administration period was unmistakable: when the sitting president was the platform's founder, the platform could not criticize the government yet could not stay silent either. The easiest solution was "reduce the pace, maintain neutrality, avoid making it an issue."

✦ A forum platform whose founder is the sitting president—the lower its visibility, the better.

A useful comparison is Voice Tank (Voicettank), another commentary platform in the same political camp. Voice Tank was founded in 2018, and its footer shows ownership under the Taiwan Think Tank—a different green-camp think tank from the New Frontier Foundation²³. During the same period that Thinking Taiwan went dormant, Voice Tank published actively. The two commentary platforms belonged to two separate think tank ecosystems, complementary but under different patrons. Taiwan.md has previously flattened all green-camp media as "green media" in its coverage; this layer of institutional structure has never been clearly articulated.

📝 Curator's Note:
Thinking Taiwan ≠ Voice Tank ≠ The Reporter ≠ Up Media. The Reporter is a nonprofit in-depth reporting outlet founded in December 2015; Up Media is a commercial commentary platform founded in 2016; Voice Tank is the commentary arm of the Taiwan Think Tank; Thinking Taiwan belongs to the Tsai Ing-wen Education Foundation. All are "commentary platforms on the green spectrum," but their business models and patrons are entirely different.

October 3, 2025 — Five Months After Leaving Office

Tsai Ing-wen left office on May 20, 2024. On October 3, 2025, less than five months after leaving office, she posted simultaneously on Threads and Facebook announcing the relaunch and redesign of Thinking Taiwan Forum²⁴. Two lines from the relaunch editorial were immediately cited by the Central News Agency, Liberty Times, Newtalk, and ETtoday on the same day:

"The Taiwanese people's aspiration for a good society has not disappeared, and the era of reasoning has not passed."²⁵

"Democracy is a road that everyone must walk together."²⁶

The platform jumped from the old architecture (Drupal 7, four major categories) to Drupal 10 with six major sections: Policy and Thought (with five subcategories: security, energy, finance and economics, industry, and social welfare), Geopolitics and Political Economy, Society and Humanities, International Think Tanks, Diverse Thinking, and Thinking Selected, plus an English Edition²⁷. Article numbering restarted from 100011. Nine years without a major overhaul—this time, it was a complete rebuild.

Technically, there was a silent ideological signal. Most media in Taiwan use WordPress (the lowest-cost, most CC-friendly platform), while a few government websites and institutional media use Drupal. Thinking Taiwan 2.0 chose Drupal 10 + Bootstrap Barrio + NetiCRM (a public-welfare donation plugin)—the entire tech stack leans institutional rather than media outlet. Readers would not notice this stack choice, but architecture-as-data reveals how the platform positions itself: as a "civil society institution," not a "media outlet."

The editorial structure also changed. From the previous single-CEO-plus-editorial-department model, it shifted to an "editorial committee composed of cross-disciplinary experts and scholars"²⁵. The specific membership list has not been made public; at present, it can only be inferred from published articles—Huang Chong-cheh (former Financial Research Institute president) writing on geopolitics and political economy, Lee Yee-chi (Chengchi University journalism associate professor) on society and humanities, and Chen Yen-chien (National Peking University economics associate professor) on China observation.

The flagship column "China Observation Report" is a new hallmark of the 2025 relaunch. It compiles annual scholarly observations across five dimensions of China: economics, finance, fiscal policy, society, and politics²⁸—elevating "China studies" from scattered articles to an institutionalized annual output. The very existence of this column echoes what J. Michael Cole was doing when he wrote about the Sunflower Movement in 2014: building a locally grounded Taiwanese narrative about China that does not depend on translation from the non-Chinese-speaking world.

30 Years, 30 Perspectives: An Echo 14 Years Later

On May 2, 2026, the editorial department published the introduction page under the title "30 Years, 30 People, 30 Perspectives." Thirty articles are scheduled to be published in batches through May³. That day, the Liberty Times broke the story exclusively, revealing that the list spanned "opposition party chairs and KMT Central Standing Committee members"¹; the China Times followed at 11:55 with a report titled "From Political Reconciliation to Unity," adding more names². As of the writing of this article, the sixteen publicly confirmed names are: James Soong, Hsu Hsin-liang, Wang Yu-ther, Miao Poya, Tso Cheng-tung, Guo Yourui, Chang Chi-lu, Hsu Yu-jen, Huang Weihan, Yang Ya-che, Ju Tzong-ching, Chu Ching-yi, Wu Nien-jen, Lee Ken-cheng, Zhou Yicheng, and Gong Jianjia.

Overlay this list with the six founding directors reported by the Taipei Times in 2012 (Su Jia-chyuan, Hochen Tan, Chang Ching-sen, Antonio Chiang, Yao Li-ming, and Lin Chuan), and the 14-year arc becomes clear. The original six were a cross-disciplinary composition within a single DPP spectrum; this year's thirty expand across blue-green-white party lines and across all sectors of society. The same ethos—"cross"—just scaled from single digits to thirty.

📝 Curator's Note:
Going from six cross-disciplinary directors to thirty cross-party perspectives does not require a new ethos; it requires 14 years of accumulated curatorial energy. The "remaining free from political ideology and partisanship" explicitly written into the founding statement on day one became, in May 2026, the concrete act of placing James Soong and Wang Yu-ther on the same list.

But this ambition of "cross" still carries a burden. The United Daily News "Heavyweight Commentary" headline on the day of the relaunch read: "Tsai Ing-wen Relaunches Thinking Taiwan Forum — Is Lai Ching-te Still on the Road?"⁴. The moment the platform moved, it was immediately interpreted as an implicit criticism of the sitting DPP president. Another United Daily News "Black and White Collection" editorial directly countered with the headline "Relaunching Thinking Taiwan? Think About Yourself First"²⁹. During the same period, the Liberty Times commentary site interpreted the inaugural annual China Observation Report as green-camp intellectual mobilization under the umbrella of "China Shock 2.0 Global Alert"²⁸. The same act, two opposing framings.

✦ The more the platform tries to be a cross-party container, the more it is seen as an extension of the Tsai Ing-wen Foundation. This tension has not changed in 14 years; only the scale has grown.

The fact is that in 2026, Tsai still announced the relaunch in her capacity as "founder," without resuming the chairmanship. Jian Chih-chung remains chairman²¹. The platform's governance firewall exists just as it was drawn in 2014; it is only the platform's visibility that has returned to public attention with the founder's departure from office and the relaunch action.

Does the Match Light Up the Room, or Does the Room Light Up the Match

On October 3, 2025, the day the relaunch was announced, the last paragraph Tsai wrote was: "The more turbulent politics becomes, the more consensus is needed to resolve it."³⁰ The United Daily News then asked: With Lai Ching-te's governance direction veering away from dialogue and toward confrontation, is this relaunch of Thinking Taiwan a reminder to Lai or a warning to society⁴?

On May 2, 2026, the day the 30-person list was published, James Soong (former People First Party chair), Wang Yu-ther (Taiwan Statebuilding Party chair), Miao Poya (Social Democratic Party), Guo Yourui (KMT Youth League Central Standing Committee member), and Hsu Yu-jen (former KMT at-large legislator) were all placed on the same list. If this list can sustain 30 articles without the authors attacking one another, the room that Tsai lit with her match 14 years ago is still glowing.

If this list becomes another battlefield for blue-green-white mutual framing, then the match is just a match.

The United Daily News and the Liberty Times giving two different narratives from the same event is the normal state of Taiwan's public discourse in 2026. Thinking Taiwan Forum chooses to continue standing in the middle as a "container" rather than taking sides as a "weapon." This choice has been inscribed since that Sunday, August 5, 2012—in the day-one board composition, in the words "remaining free from political ideology and partisanship." After three iterations (2012 founding, 2014 firewall, 2025 relaunch), the platform is still facing the question that has hung over it since day one.

Whether the next 30 years should walk the same road again—May 2026 is just beginning to ask.

Further Reading:

• Tsai Ing-wen — Founder of Thinking Taiwan Forum, founder of the Tsai Ing-wen Education Foundation, served as the seventh and eighth president of the Republic of China (Taiwan) from 2016 to 2024
• Lai Ching-te — Succeeded Tsai Ing-wen as the ninth president of the Republic of China (Taiwan); the implicit point of comparison in the United Daily News "Heavyweight Commentary" when Thinking Taiwan was relaunched in October 2025
• PanSci — Also a public discourse platform, but PanSci has built science communication into a hybrid of knowledge media, educational products, and creator economy
• Poison Potato Cognitive Warfare — One of the China information warfare topics continuously discussed in Thinking Taiwan's geopolitics and political economy section
• Psychological Warfare — An intersecting topic with Thinking Taiwan's Policy and Thought / security section

References