China’s pressure campaign aims to bend Taiwan toward eventual annexation. But sustained coercion could weaken the liberal nature of its democracy even without a loss of sovereignty.

The danger is that countering coercion can gradually narrow the space for liberal decision-making, forcing hard trade-offs between security and openness. A central question for Taiwan going into 2026—and for other liberal democracies watching—is whether a democracy under prolonged foreign coercion can strengthen its resilience without eroding the liberal values it seeks to defend.

The purpose of China’s coercion strategy is twofold: to weaken Taiwan’s will to resist annexation and to normalise the inevitability of unification. Under such conditions, a democratic government is pressed to act swiftly and visibly, lest inaction be read as weakness or surrender. The irony is a grim paradox: to resist authoritarian coercion, a democracy can be nudged into illiberal reactions of its own.

Taiwan’s long-governing Democratic Progressive Party has already broadened the policy architecture seeking to deter infiltration and harden society against cognitive warfare. Some of these measures are essential statecraft. Former President Tsai Ing-wen’s Anti-Infiltration Act (2019) gave prosecutors clearer tools against foreign-directed funding and political manipulation.

But Lai Ching-te, president since 2024, has pushed further. In March 2025, Lai announced 17 measures, spanning criminal law and courts, immigration, mandatory disclosure of officials’ China contacts, and information-space enforcement, to better counter infiltration by China. Taipei’s strategic intent is straightforward: close loopholes that Beijing exploits. But proposals to revive military justice in peacetime and to deepen executive discretion over speech carries obvious risks to civil liberties if safeguards are not watertight. Taiwanese civil society and legal-reform groups urged extreme caution over reviving military tribunals, warning of past human-rights abuses and calling for any move to be narrowly scoped, transparently administered and subject to independent oversight and robust legislative and appellate review.

Two other areas of controversy in 2025 illustrate the tension between the freedoms of liberal democracy and the imperatives of national security.

First, the household de-registration drive for China-born spouses living in Taiwan corrodes social trust by policing a supposed ‘enemy within’. In brief: authorities have required spouses born in China to show proof they have cancelled their mainland household registration (citizenship of localities) or risk losing legal status and related rights in Taiwan. The legal requirement itself isn’t new: Taiwan’s cross-strait framework has long barred dual household registration for those acquiring legal status in Taiwan. What changed this year was enforcement. Suddenly, thousands of long-settled spouses and parents were given only a couple of months to prove they had cancelled their old Chinese household registration. For many, that meant chasing defunct offices or travelling back to places they left decades ago, under threat of losing Taiwan status and splitting their families.

Second, in the information sphere, influencer cases are a test of freedom of speech under pressure. In March and April, Taiwan revoked the residency of several China-born online personalities who posted content celebrating the prospect of a takeover of Taiwan by China. One, for example, had gushed that ‘when I wake up tomorrow morning, the island will be full of five-star red flags.’ Taipei’s case that advocacy of violent annexation is qualitatively different from normal political speech is not absurd: liberal orders have always limited incitement to violence. But the standard should always be a set of clear, consistent, narrowly targeted rules applied transparently, not headline-grabbing improvisation.

In December 2025, authorities also confirmed that a small number of Taiwanese had lost their citizenship rights after using single-use Chinese passports—temporary travel documents issued by Beijing for one-off international trips—to travel from China to Russia. Trips using such passports are banned under cross-Strait law, and officials have warned that such cases can cost voting rights and other civic entitlements.

Given the coercive environment that Taiwan faces, any elected leader would be tempted to reach for blunter instruments: faster bans, wider blacklists, broader definitions of ‘subversion’. That’s the trap. A democracy under permanent siege risks internalising emergency thinking. Taiwan’s leaders deserve credit for refusing to be paralysed. They also deserve candid scrutiny.

President Lai is right about the need to rally diverse constituencies around resisting Chinese Communist Party pressure and protecting Taiwan’s democracy, but any unity forged by fear will not endure. Taiwan’s greatest asymmetric advantage is its culture of the rule of law and pluralism, precisely what the CCP does not want to emulate. Every policy that keeps that culture intact, even when it’s slower, messier, or politically costly, makes Taiwan stronger.

All liberal democracies targeted by authoritarian coercion campaigns face the same dilemma. They all need sharper legal tools against covert foreign direction; they also need to keep the spirit of free societies alive in their use of such tools. That means resourcing independent regulators, funding civic education on disinformation, and protecting investigative journalism that traces influence networks. It means exchanging with like-minded partners best practice on due process in national-security immigration actions. The DPP’s current course is approaching the limits of what a liberal democracy can defend; crossing that line would hand Beijing an easy victory.

There is a final, uncomfortable truth: authoritarian pressure is designed to be unendurable. That’s its strategic purpose. The task for democracies is not to make that external pressure feel bearable; it is to make it futile. That is what narrowly drawn laws, transparent processes and confident free speech do. They signal that Taiwan will defend itself as a democracy without abandoning its democracy. If Beijing’s plan is to bend the Taiwanese institutions until they resemble its own, the surest counter is to show, every day, that they will not bend at all.

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