Why Soft Power Deserves Some Credit

Anushka Saxena

Taiwan’s Kuomintang (KMT) party caucus convened in April 2026 to demand accountability from Premier Cho Jung-tai over the reported operationalisation of a labour migration agreement with India. Now, one can easily read the move as routine opposition theatrics. The most prominent political opposition to any democratic executive will always find ways to go the extra mile in critiquing all policies, including diplomatic ones. But to dismiss the KMT’s pushback as simply posturing would miss what it reveals about both the Taiwanese society’s relationship with immigration and the tensions in India-Taiwan ties.

The India-Taiwan labour MoU, signed in February 2024, was designed to open pathways for Indian workers to address gaps in Taiwan’s labour market. This is particularly in industries the Japanese call the 3K – kiken, kitanai, kitsui – dirty, dangerous, and demanding. Taiwan, with an immigrant population of just 3.5%, has limited experience managing large-scale labour migration. Some Taiwanese media outlets have questioned whether a genuine labour shortage exists at all, arguing that Indian workers are simply being recruited for jobs that Taiwanese citizens do not want. A petition on the civil society-led Public Policy Online Participation Platform, now carrying over 40,000 signatures, calls on the Labour Ministry to “prioritise social security and gender equality,” acting as a rather politely coded but vocal expression of public anxiety.

The KMT is capitalising on this sentiment in certain sections of the population to achieve policy-blocking outcomes. In fact, its lawmakers have cited data from India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) to raise security concerns, and the party has played to a widespread, if uncomfortable, feeling that the free movement of Indian labour may not sit easily with Taiwan’s social fabric.

Legislator of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Rosalia Wu, has spent two years calling out the stereotypical and sometimes plainly racist underpinnings of such arguments, and she is right to do so. But it is also true that for a society with so little experience of immigration, immediate acceptance of such a policy was never realistic. Even at the time of signing, then-Labour Minister Hsu Ming-Chun suggested Taiwan should first recruit Indians from the northeast because they have “similar looks and eating habits” – a remark that revealed how deep the discomfort runs, even among the MoU’s proponents and executors in the DPP.

The noteworthy takeaway for Delhi should, hence, be that the MoU alone is insufficient and that a large-scale public diplomacy campaign targeting both Taiwanese citizens and policymakers may be in order.

If Indian workers are to travel to Taiwan and feel accommodated rather than merely tolerated, public diplomacy efforts on both sides will need to step up considerably, even if they cannot mitigate the Taiwanese society’s systemically low confidence in open immigration.

At the invitation of the Taiwanese foreign ministry (MoFA), an Indian Cross-Party Delegation recently concluded its visit to Taipei, and met with universities, lawmakers, think tanks, and goverment agencies. There has yet to be a public release of conclusions from these diverse yet important polico-diplomatic interactions, and the fact that this is the first visit by members of Indian political parties to Taiwan since October 2022, at the time of the MoFA-led Yushan forum, is meaningful in and of itself. A continued cross-party dialogue will help shape even paradiplomacy with Taiwan, ensure states can leverage investments, and enable contributions to the Labour MoU.

More broadly, does the KMT’s opposition to the MoU signal something deeper – a broader hostility toward India within the party, and an actual faultline that prevents the advancement of the bilateral relationship?

The evidence suggests, probably not. India’s relations with the KMT have simply not been entrenched enough over recent decades to warrant reading the labour MoU controversy as anything more than a policy-specific disagreement. In fact, India does not figure as a particularly important foreign-policy entity in the KMT’s worldview. There are historical arcs – Chiang Kai-shek’s visit to British-ruled India in February 1942, territorial disputes dating to the KMT’s takeover of Taiwan in 1947, and the fact that Taipei has technically never dropped its claims to Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin. But since the establishment of a Taiwanese representative office in Delhi in 1995, the relationship has seen some cooperation wherever possible, even as legacy issues have remained unresolved.

The real momentum in India-Taiwan ties has come under the DPP, particularly during Tsai Ing-wen’s presidency and her New Southbound Policy. By 2025, over 260 Taiwanese companies will operate in India, including heavyweights like Foxconn and Powerhouse Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (PSMC), which run semiconductor assembly and fabrication facilities in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, respectively. Taiwan-based footwear manufacturers such as Hong Fu and Pou Chen have established large production facilities across Tamil Nadu. The institutional scaffolding for this catalysis of investments was laid by the Bilateral Investment Agreement signed in 2018, while technical MoUs on aquaculture and post-harvest cooperation to strengthen maritime ties create opportunities for further cooperation.

What is important for Delhi to consider going forward, is KMT’s positioning in Taipei, and its willingness to block further diplomatic efforts between itself and India. Discomfort with immigration aside, the KMT’s dialogue-over-deterrence posture vis-à-vis China may also mean reduced willingness to cooperate with India, and hurt both investments and labour mobility. As Taiwan’s mid-term elections near in November 2026, the KMT’s ability to sweep seats in county elections must be watched closely, as Delhi may be dealing with a rather apathetic actor in 2028. If ties with the current dispensation in Taipei’s executive can produce institutional interlinkages that are difficult to overturn with election cycles, well and good. But if not, India may have more than just the DPP to deal with today.

Eye on China is a weekly newsletter curated by the Indo-Pacific Studies Programme at The Takshashila Institution, a public policy think-tank based out of Bengaluru, India.

Declaration on the use of AI/ML: Translation from Mandarin to English via the use of LLMs.