Changes in the international community are barely visible tremors, but from time to time, they take the form of major earthquakes. In the last 50 years, Taiwan has experienced at least three of them. The first one occurred in the 1970s. The second one happened with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 1970s led to the forced exit of Taiwan from the international arena. The Cold War ended with the collapse of a superpower. In the dawning of a new era, it was hoped that the great power rivalry would be replaced by global governance (Rosenau, 1992). That would benefit Taiwan because it favoured cooperation over confrontation. But the liberal international order and the spread of democracy are under threat. Multilateralism seems to be giving way to a new rebalancing of power as the PRC has replaced the Soviet Union in the race with the US for global domination. The third earthquake is coming; it represents the biggest challenge for Taiwan since 1949 because the PRC aims to be a superpower, determined to implement the One China principle.

Taiwan has never accepted the role of a passive observer; it wanted to influence the course of those changes and survive earthquakes unbruised. During the Cold War, Taiwan was employing various types of diplomacies to limit the damage the PRC was inflicting on it by isolating it from the international community. In the 1990s Taiwan started to transform itself by introducing the democratic political system. The process could not have had better timing for Taiwan. The democratization on the island was taking place at the time when the PRC was strengthening its communist regime which also led to the crushing of protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989. In the space of just a few years, two politically completely different Chinas emerged from the Cold War. Democratization processes have not changed much for Taiwan internationally, for the PRC was preventing Taiwan's access to the international community wherever it could. But thanks to democratization, Taiwanese authorities could employ democratically elected parliamentarians as new actors to defend and promote Taiwan's interests. Indeed, the intensified interactions among parliamentarians worldwide which took place after the Cold War encouraged Taiwan to try to connect with the international community at the inter-parliamentary level of international relations. President Lee Teng-hui's administration instructed the MOFA to set up a parliamentary liaison group in 1993 to assist parliamentarians in their international activities.