By Sarah Cao
On Monday 23 February, the Oxford Taiwan Studies Programme hosted a screening of Taiwan Undaunted: In Search of the Nation That Cannot Call Itself a Nation at the Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre, followed by a discussion with the film’s director, Neal E. Robbins. The event brought together questions of history, identity, media, and geopolitics through a documentary that seeks to explain Taiwan not simply as a policy problem or strategic flashpoint, but as a lived political community.
An award-winning four-part documentary series produced by TaiwanPlus, Taiwan Undaunted explores the emergence of Taiwanese nationhood. Drawing on more than eighty in-depth interviews with ordinary people, experts, and politicians, Robbins captures not only Taiwan’s political dilemmas but also its aspirations, anxieties, and social complexity. At the center of the film lies a set of tensions that remain unresolved but deeply generative: between indigenous heritage and immigrant roots, between shared history with China and political divergence from it, and between Taiwan’s democratic self-understanding and its constrained international status.
What made the screening especially compelling was the documentary’s refusal to simplify Taiwan. Rather than offering a narrowed account, Taiwan Undaunted assembles a layered portrait of nationhood that is at complex, compelling, and personal. Robbins explained during the discussion that the film was intentionally built through “smaller vignettes” and the depiction of “rich lives being led,” with the aim of giving audiences “a taste” of the many lives being lived in Taiwan. The result is a well-rounded and holistic snapshot of Taiwan, one that resists the flattening tendencies of much contemporary geopolitical commentary.
That breadth was one of the viewing’s central themes. Discussion highlighted the documentary’s wide interview base, including academics, Kuomintang and Democratic Progressive Party figures, multi-party officials, activists, military officials, and artists. This wide range of perspectives matters. Taiwan’s identity debate is too often collapsed into a binary of “pro-independence” and “pro-China,” but the documentary’s method seems deliberately designed to resist such simplification. While Taiwan and China share elements of historical and cultural inheritance, Robbins’s account reportedly foregrounds the distinctiveness of Taiwanese society without denying those points of overlap. Taiwan Undaunted displays this distinct account through memory, democratic practice, cultural sensitivity, and a keen awareness of shared yet contested histories.
The title itself points to the paradox at the heart of the event. “In Search of the Nation That Cannot Call Itself a Nation” captures Taiwan’s peculiar international condition: a polity with democratic institutions, a distinct political identity, and a deeply rooted civic life, yet one that remains constrained by the language and structure of diplomatic recognition. Robbins’s choice of title highlights the gap between political reality and international form, and in doing so raises a broader question of who gets to count as a nation, and on what terms. The phrase “undaunted” also feels carefully chosen. It gestures not toward triumphalism, but toward endurance. The idea that there is ongoing insistence on living a vibrant life under conditions of exclusion and pressure.
The post-screening discussion also revealed how consciously the documentary was shaped as a medium. On the event page, Robbins notes that documentary enabled viewers to “fly like a bird over the land.” However, this resulted in deep considerations regarding breadth versus depth of documentary content. During the director Q/A, Robbins reflected on the challenge of maintaining a coherent theme, deciding what to include and leave out, and using B-roll and visual pacing to hold together a politically and historically dense subject. He also discussed the relationship between the film and his forthcoming book of the same name, suggesting that while the documentary offers a cohesive overview, the book allows for greater nuance, interconnection, and analytical depth.
During the Q/A, several of the most interesting points raised in discussion connected Taiwan’s present to broader comparative cases. Robbins reportedly drew on Hong Kong as an important reference point, including his own research travel there and reflections on the 2014 protest movements and their aftermath. The documentary also engages the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, particularly in relation to civil-military initiatives, asymmetric warfare, and the “will to fight.” These comparisons did not seem to function as easy analogies. Rather, they situated Taiwan within a wider landscape of democratic vulnerability, coercive pressure, and public resilience. The effect was to show Taiwan not as an isolated anomaly, but as part of a broader set of contemporary questions about sovereignty and political resolve.
There was also a productive tension in the conversation around geopolitics. Taiwan, as one audience member put it, finds itself “in between two super powers,” forced into a perpetual balancing act in which its room for maneuver is heavily affected by the state of U.S.-China relations. Yet the documentary seems to push beyond that familiar great-power frame. It asks how geopolitical exposure is experienced socially and culturally, and how ordinary people continue to imagine themselves politically under those conditions. In that sense, Taiwan Undaunted succeeds less by offering a definitive answer than by widening the frame of inquiry. It brings culture into dialogue with security, democratic aspiration into dialogue with diplomatic exclusion, and historical memory into dialogue with present risks. At a time when Taiwan is often discussed in the language of deterrence and strategic competition, Robbins’s documentary offers something more nuanced. Taiwan is not merely a flashpoint in international politics. It is also a contested site of belonging, narration, and political self-understanding.
The seminar was hosted by Dr Bo-jiun Jing, Senior Research Fellow and Programme Manager in Taiwan Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. It forms part of the Oxford Taiwan Studies Seminar Series, and this recap was produced in partnership between the Oxford Taiwan Studies Programme and St Antony’s International Review (STAIR).
