What Global Rankings Get (and Miss) About Taiwan

The World Happiness Report’s 2025 edition – released by public opinion pollster Gallup, the University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Center, and the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network – found Taiwan to be the happiest place in East Asia, and the third happiest (behind Australia and New Zealand) in the entire Indo-Pacific region. Overall, Taiwan ranked 27th, placing ahead of South Korea at 58th, Japan at 59th, China at 68th, Mongolia at 77th, and Hong Kong at 88th.

The World Happiness Report, a self-assessed evaluation of happiness, has been conducted since 2022. Participants in 140 countries are asked to rate their quality of life on a scale of one to ten.

That Taiwan compares favorably to other Asian countries – particularly those ruled by authoritarian governments – may not be surprising. Yet the poll results left some scratching their heads as to why Taiwanese rated their quality of life so highly despite China’s frequent military threats.

“Taiwan No. 1”

Ironically, news of Taiwan’s strong performance on the World Happiness Report 2025 did not make much of a splash domestically. This in itself is somewhat unusual. Whenever Taiwan places highly in any international ranking, it’s typically trumpeted in the news, with headlines crowing “Taiwan No. 1” – a viral quip originating from streaming videos by American gamer “Angrypug” in 2015, who took to trolling Chinese players on popular online game “H1Z1” by shouting “Taiwan No. 1” at them.

Indeed, it would not be out of character for Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te to highlight the finding in a national address. During his last new year address, Lai touted everything from translator Lin King and author Yang Shuang-zi winning the U.S. National Book Award for Best Translated Work to Taiwan’s historic win at the Premier12 baseball championship. For an island polity that is unrecognized as a nation-state by the majority of the world’s countries, and which is overshadowed by its much larger neighbor across the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan has long craved international recognition.

A significant inflection point in Taiwan’s understanding of its place in the world, in spite of marginalization, was the COVID-19 pandemic. Taiwan remained COVID-free for more than a year. When the virus eventually made its way into Taiwan, clusters were relatively quickly contained. This led The Telegraph to conclude that Taiwan was the “gold standard” when it came to pandemic responses.

Also during the COVID-19 pandemic, there came to be greater awareness – not only globally but locally – of the role that Taiwan plays in global semiconductor manufacturing. Taiwan produces over 60 percent of global supply and close to 90 percent of advanced semiconductors. Industry experts and policymakers have long known of Taiwan’s preeminent role in semiconductor manufacturing. Yet with supply shortages because of the pandemic affecting everything that uses Taiwanese semiconductors, from PlayStations to electric vehicles, the fact that Taiwan plays an integral part in semiconductor supply chains became general public knowledge around the world.

The term “Silicon Shield” was coined to describe the fact that the world is invested in Taiwan’s defense against a possible Chinese invasion because of the island’s importance in global semiconductor supply chains. Here, as in most subjects, discourse around Taiwan focuses on the prospect of a military attack from China.

“The Most Dangerous Place on Earth”

Seeing as Taiwan faces military threats on a daily basis from China, it may surprise international observers that Taiwan rates itself highly in terms of quality of life.

It’s true that threats from China have been on the uptick since the 2022 visit to Taiwan by then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which Beijing used as a pretext to step up military activity directed at Taiwan. Since then, China has regularized large-scale military drills that deploy both the Chinese navy and air force to simulate scenarios for a blockade or other assault. These massive exercises now take place at least once a year, often twice, while incursions into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) have become a daily occasion.

Yet when it comes to such actions, there is a clear perception gap between those inside Taiwan and those outside of it. This was most clearly visible during the Pelosi visit. As international headlines crowed about the possibility of an imminent world war, life in Taiwan simply carried on as usual. And while Chinese military threats directed at Taiwan in the 1990s and 2000s led to an exodus of Taiwanese who moved elsewhere – with China, the United States, and Japan being common destinations – there has been no visible outflow of Taiwanese in the past few years.

Given that Taiwan has long been a potential geopolitical flashpoint, a now-infamous 2021 cover story in The Economist termed Taiwan “the most dangerous place on Earth.” The article met with angry reactions in Taiwan, since this did not seem to correspond to the reality of everyday life.

Taiwan is, after all, a place where if you lose your wallet on the metro, the chances of getting it back are relatively high. Taiwan has cheap and affordable universal health insurance that the public continues to be highly satisfied with, leading both major political parties in Taiwan to be committed to maintaining the National Health Insurance system, when they rarely agree on any other issue.

These are the sorts of factors captured in the World Happiness Report. Taiwan ranked highly thanks to its strong social support (referring to support from relatives and friends), political freedoms, and low levels of corruption.

This is not to say life in Taiwan is perfect. Because of the scooter accidents that occur on a daily basis in urban areas, Taiwan has been dubbed a “pedestrian hell” – a term embraced by advocates of traffic safety as part of efforts to call for reform. But while Taiwanese are happy to describe the traffic situation in Taiwan as “hell” and readily acknowledge the existential threat that China has long posed to Taiwan, The Economist’s framing of Taiwan irked Taiwanese because of its perceived disconnect from on-the-ground realities.

There are a number of reasons as to why Taiwan may place highly on the World Happiness Report in spite of Chinese threats. For one, Taiwan has had Chinese missiles pointed at it for decades. Consequently, Taiwanese have become inured to the Chinese threat – a criticism sometimes leveled by U.S. policymakers that would like to see Taiwan do more for its own defense.

For those in Taiwan, Chinese threats have become background noise more than anything else – coming off as repetitive rather than conveying any sense of escalating, progressively developing threat. The general public does not pay attention to whether China deploys one plane into Taiwan’s ADIZ, five planes the next day, and ten planes the day after that – Taiwanese just have a vague sense that China is sending planes. Beijing may not have done sufficiently well in conveying a sense of threat directed at Taiwan, or connecting escalations to concrete political events that it aims to signal displeasure over.

This is not to say that Taiwan does not perceive Chinese threats. Rather, as research by political scientist Lev Nachman has demonstrated, Taiwanese usually take note of threats from China when the events are mediated through domestic institutions – such as Taiwan’s political parties or elections. Social uprisings such as the 2014 Sunflower Movement or last year’s Bluebird Movement prove that the public takes to the streets in the tens or even hundreds of thousands in a relatively quick timespan when it feels a sense of threat from China – but this is usually triggered by actions by the pan-Blue camp in the legislature, not by Beijing’s own moves.

Election outcomes in the past decade show that voting is the means by which Taiwanese demonstrate their awareness of – and reaction against – the threat posed by China. At the same time, even as the World Happiness Report 2025 seems to indicate strong social cohesion, in the face of rising threats from China, it remains an open question as to whether this will translate to civic mobilizations for defense. Many civil defense groups have sprouted up across Taiwan, mostly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine led to growing concerns in society that Taiwan could potentially experience a similar fate.

“Ghost Island”?

Certainly, there was no reaction against the World Happiness Report, as there was against The Economist’s “most dangerous place on Earth” cover story. But if the findings of the World Happiness Report 2025 were not widely discussed in Taiwan, it is probably because they also do not seem to correspond to lived reality.

For example, another reason for Taiwan’s high ranking is because of mitigated socioeconomic inequality – but Taiwanese are well aware that both major political parties have been unable to solve major social issues such as low salaries, long working hours, and an unaffordable housing market. This has led Taiwan to experience a declining birthrate and rising elderly population, to the extent that Taiwan is projected to become a super-aged society (referring to when over 20 percent of the population is age 65 or older) by this year.

The dire outlook for youth in Taiwan has led young people to refer to their home disparagingly as a “ghost island” (鬼島), lacking in opportunities.

The lack of reaction to the World Happiness Report also gestures toward another characteristic of Taiwanese politics and society – that after so many years out in the wilderness of international marginalization, Taiwan sometimes does not believe it when it is, in fact, “No. 1” This has particularly been weaponized against the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has been in power now since 2016, by the opposition Kuomintang (KMT).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the KMT insisted that Taiwan had one of the world’s worst pandemic responses – taking advantage of lack of awareness domestically of the international handling of the coronavirus by other countries and drawing on a long-standing lack of cultural self-confidence. More recently, tariffs directed against Taiwan by the Trump administration are being framed as the special fault of the Lai administration in dropping the ball on the Taiwan-U.S. relationship, when in fact nearly every U.S. trading partner was hit with the same tariff hikes.

Such issues are compounded by highly polarized and partisan political discourse. Taiwan was ranked the second most free country in Asia this year by Freedom House – only behind Japan – and ranked fourth highest in Asia by Reporters Without Borders in 2024. This has not prevented rhetoric from KMT politicians such as party chair Eric Chu calling contemporary Taiwan “fascist” and “communist” under the Lai presidency.

Still, for better or worse, Taiwan has been increasingly on the international stage in the years since the pandemic – particularly as a result of rising tensions between the United States and China. And while it may not be surprising to see why Taiwan rated highly in life satisfaction in East Asia on the basis of its contemporary democracy, the voting record of the public also shows that they are, in fact, concerned about Chinese threats. It’s just that such threats have been ongoing for the last 70-odd years, and so they do not affect perceived quality of life.

A Chinese invasion would, of course, change that but for now, life in Taiwan carries on.