October 10, 2023

Ramapo College of New Jersey is proud to host the 2023 Taiwan and Asia Program Conference  on November 4-5, 2023. The conference is sponsored by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) in Washington, D.C. Ramapo is the first college in the New York metropolitan region to host this non-partisan academic conference. Since the program’s inception in 2013, the conference has been held at various U.S. colleges and universities including Duke University, the College of William and Mary, Wake Forest University, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of South Carolina.

The theme of this year’s conference is Washington-Taipei-Beijing Relations at a Crossroads: The 2024 Elections and Geostrategic Implications from the Individual, Domestic, and International Levels of Analysis. The conference program will examine the potential impact of the U.S. and Taiwan’s respective presidential elections in 2024 on the policy approaches of Washington, Taipei, and Beijing from the individual, domestic, and international levels of analysis. Dr. Dean Chen, professor of political science at Ramapo College, serves as the conference coordinator, and looks forward to this year’s conference. “The conference seeks to convene a group of prominent scholars and experts to explore the strategic and technological ramifications of the increasingly tense relationships amongst Taipei, Washington, and Beijing and also examine how political and socioeconomic changes in Taiwan and China may impact US interest and the international as well as regional balance of power,” he shared.

The two-day conference features an impressive array of policy roundtables and scholars panels, including Dr. Susan M. Elliott, former U.S. Ambassador to Tajikistan and current president and CEO of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, who is part of the opening roundtable titled “The State of U.S.-China-Taiwan Relations on the Eve of 2024 Elections.” There is no cost to attend the conference. Attendees must register for one or both dates by completing the online registration form.

Two powerful keynote addresses will be delivered during the luncheon and dinner segments of the conference schedule. Dr. Larry Diamond, senior fellow and chair of the Hoover Institution Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific region, will discuss via livestream “The Global Democratic Recession and How to Reverse It” during lunch. Diamond is also a Mosbacher senior fellow of global democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. The dinner joint keynote address “U.S. Taiwan Policy at an Inflection Point? Perspectives from Washington and Beijing” will be delivered in-person by Dr. Andrew J. Nathan, Class of 1919 professor of political science at Columbia University, and Dr. Robert Sutter, professor of practice of international affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

Ramapo College previously held a U.S.-Taiwan relations program in October 2022 with guest speaker David Sacks, research fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, who discussed the Taiwan Strait crisis in the shadow of the Ukraine war and rising tensions between the U.S. and China. The event was funded by the College’s Platinum Fund and the University of St. Thomas-Houston’s Taiwan and Asian Program grant from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China on Taiwan.

For more information about the conference schedule or to register, visit the 2023 TAP Conference website. Questions about the conference can be emailed toTAP Conference Coordinator Dr. Dean Chen: dchen@ramapo.edu.