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Like the United States, Japan views its relations with Taiwan through a greater China framework. It uses a similar strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan to navigate its relations with China and Taiwan. However, Japan's recent strong support for Taiwan to counter China's pressure on the island seems to suggest that Japan's Taiwan policy is moving away from its old strategic ambiguity toward a new strategic clarity. Why has Japan started to protect Taiwan proactively and directly in recent years? How to explain the transformation of Japan's policy regarding Taiwan from strategic ambiguity to strategic clarity? Drawing upon various primary materials, this article approached those questions from a social constructivism lens. It argues that Japan's new identity is a critical factor in Japan's strategic transformation of its Taiwan policy. Japan's new identity has first taken shape due to the growing challenge from China, and second been accelerated and hardened by the caprices of the United States. It is this new identity and its associated normative expectations that have caused Japan's foreign behaviour to change fundamentally. This article will detail the process in which how Japan steadily changed its state identity over the years after showing that the existing explanations are unable to properly account for the shift of Japan's policy toward Taiwan. Some policy implications will be offered in the conclusion section.

Abstract
How are we to understand China's decades-long sovereignty claim over Taiwan? One assumption upheld by many international relations scholars is that state behaviour will change according to a variance of polarity in the international system. Yet while China can flexibly manage its territorial issues elsewhere, its goal of unification with Taiwan has not changed despite multiple structural changes in the international system over the decades. This paper argues that historical and nationalist approaches alone do not explain China's unswaying obsession with this island. Geopolitics plays a far more prominent role in the minds of Chinese leaders than scholars have previously acknowledged. Since 1949, China has viewed Taiwan as a geopolitical buffer protecting the security of Chinese coastal areas. China's buffer thinking towards Taiwan was a significant factor in China's decisions to launch military action against Taiwan in 1954, 1958, and 1996.

Few efforts have been made to explore two emerging demographic features, the extra low fertility of the Taiwanese population, and a rapid increase in cross-border marriages. The objective of this research is to provide comparative estimates of fertility outcomes of marriage immigrants from Mainland China, Southeast Asia, and other countries. Through exploring the 2003 Survey of Foreign and Mainland Chinese Spouses' Living Conditions, this study gives us a first glimpse of how prevalent cross-border marriages are in Taiwanese society. While the headlines tend to portray an image that only old veterans and minority rural men are likely to marry an immigrant, the findings indeed show that an increased number of Taiwanese men have adopted cross-border marriage as an alternative. The fertility results reveal a singularly important conclusion: the substantial number of babies born to immigrant mothers has made an important contribution to total fertility rates in recent years. Despite an increasing anxiety concerning the quantity of newborns from foreign and Mainland Chinese mothers, this research shows that the average number of children born to a marriage immigrant is still lower than the replacement level. By examining the sex ratios of recent newborns from cross-border marriages, it is evident that some couples may have a strong preference for a son. This unexpected outcome deserves more observation and research from policymakers and researchers.

While fertility has been drastically declining in East Asia, mechanisms accounting for the current trend vary. One noticeable mechanism documented is that the changing value of children affects couples' fertility decisions which in turn affect their subsequent fertility behaviour. This study will examine the intergenerational transmission of the value of children (VOC) among grandmothers, mothers and teenagers in two Chinese societies: Taiwan and Mainland China. We assume that cultural homogeneity interacts with political and social heterogeneity and may result in different values regarding having or not having children. Data are taken from two corresponding VOC surveys from Taiwan (2005-2007) and from Mainland China (2002-2003). We first compare the value of children for Taiwan and Mainland China with special attention to cultural aspects. Two identified factor solutions are generated for both positive (traditional and emotional) and negative (emotional/psychological and familial/social) VOC. Analyses show that intergenerational transmission of the VOC among three generations is more likely to occur for a positive VOC in the Chinese Mainland sample. We suspect that actual fertility experience results in greater resemblance on the VOC between grandmothers and mothers in both research settings. Among selected structural mechanisms, only rural-urban background has an effect on patterns of intergenerational transmission. The paper ends with a discussion on the importance of culture in explaining the intergenerational transmission of the VOC in Chinese societies. ; Dieser Beitrag liegt nur in englischer Sprache vor.While fertility has been drastically declining in East Asia, mechanisms accounting for the current trend vary. One noticeable mechanism documented is that the changing value of children affects couples' fertility decisions which in turn affect their subsequent fertility behaviour. This study will examine the intergenerational transmission of the value of children (VOC) among grandmothers, mothers and teenagers in two Chinese societies: Taiwan and Mainland China. We assume that cultural homogeneity interacts with political and social heterogeneity and may result in different values regarding having or not having children. Data are taken from two corresponding VOC surveys from Taiwan (2005-2007) and from Mainland China (2002-2003). We first compare the value of children for Taiwan and Mainland China with special attention to cultural aspects. Two identified factor solutions are generated for both positive (traditional and emotional) and negative (emotional/psychological and familial/social) VOC. Analyses show that intergenerational transmission of the VOC among three generations is more likely to occur for a positive VOC in the Chinese Mainland sample. We suspect that actual fertility experience results in greater resemblance on the VOC between grandmothers and mothers in both research settings. Among selected structural mechanisms, only rural-urban background has an effect on patterns of intergenerational transmission. The paper ends with a discussion on the importance of culture in explaining the intergenerational transmission of the VOC in Chinese societies.

"While fertility has been drastically declining in East Asia, mechanisms accounting for the current trend vary. One noticeable mechanism documented is that the changing value of children affects couples' fertility decisions which in turn affect their subsequent fertility behaviour. This study will examine the intergenerational transmission of the value of children (VOC) among grandmothers, mothers and teenagers in two Chinese societies: Taiwan and Mainland China. We assume that cultural homogeneity interacts with political and social heterogeneity and may result in different values regarding having or not having children. Data are taken from two corresponding VOC surveys from Taiwan (2005-2007) and from Mainland China (2002-2003). We first compare the value of children for Taiwan and Mainland China with special attention to cultural aspects. Two identified factor solutions are generated for both positive (traditional and emotional) and negative (emotional/ psychological and familial/ social) VOC. Analyses show that intergenerational transmission of the VOC among three generations is more likely to occur for a positive VOC in the Chinese Mainland sample. We suspect that actual fertility experience results in greater resemblance on the VOC between grandmothers and mothers in both research settings. Among selected structural mechanisms, only rural-urban background has an effect on patterns of intergenerational transmission. The paper ends with a discussion on the importance of culture in explaining the intergenerational transmission of the VOC in Chinese societies." (author's abstract)

This paper examines how adolescents' values may be shaped by the immediate social context with special reference to social class and rural urban background. The locus of study is Taiwan, a society with drastically declining birth rates in recent years. It is hypothesized that the value adolescents place on having children (or the positive value) and not having children (or the negative value) are accounted for by individual, familial and social contextual factors. Data are taken from an island-wide sample of first-year senior high students. A field survey was administered from winter of 2005 to spring of 2006. The analysis shows that three dimensions can be extracted from both positive and negative values toward having children: with emotional value rated the most important, followed by physical and social value. Results indicate that expected effects from different social class and rural-urban background vary and are salient for explaining physical and social value. In addition, social contextual factors and individual factors are shown to contribute to the formation of positive value of children among Taiwanese adolescents. The importance of social context in adolescents' value formation with regard to the value of children is thus supported.