Taiwan’s Aging Society Poses a National Security Threat
Next year Taiwan is projected to enter a rare club: that of the super-aged societies. The island nation, along with Japan, Germany, Portugal, Greece, France, and Italy, will have people over 65 years of age comprise more than 20 percent of its population. This is compounded by the fact that Taiwan has seen three straight years of net population decline. While this will force Taiwan to confront many of the same economic challenges that many – if not most – high income countries are beginning to face today, it also has a special meaning for Taiwan, a nation which has spent the entirety of its existence with the constant threat of invasion looming. Put simply, old people do not make great soldiers.
Taiwan faces two simultaneous demographic crises: a declining birth rate and a continually low, and now declining, immigration rate. However, while no high-income nation seems to have solved the birth rate problem, boosting immigration is something that the Taiwanese government could implement immediately. A rise in immigration would help slow – or even reverse – the declining Taiwanese population, while also giving a much needed stimulus to an increasingly stagnant Taiwanese economy.
By 2050, Taiwan is projected to have the third-oldest population on the planet, with 35 percent of its citizens being 65 or older. An aging population has been a longstanding trend in Taiwan, with the nation’s total fertility rate, an index used to measure the number of births for an average woman, declining from 7 in 1951 to 0.975 in 2021. The crisis not only has major economic implications, but has been recognized as a major national security issue by the island’s leaders as far back as 2006.
Taiwan’s declining population has significant ramifications for its ability to recruit and sustain an adequate fighting force. Research published by Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research predicts that by 2025, Taiwan’s available pool of military-aged men will decline to 74,000, compared to 111,000 in 2016. To put this number into context, this means that Sri Lanka, which plans to cut its number of military personnel to 100,000 by 2030, will field a larger fighting force than Taiwan in coming years, despite possessing a smaller population.
According to figures presented by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, key units such as the army’s rocket forces and the air force’s air defense and missile forces have less than 80 percent of positions filled. Crucially, only around 80 percent of non-commissioned officer positions in Taiwan’s military are staffed as well. Taiwan’s 211th Military Police Battalion, an elite unit tasked with protecting the Presidential Office Building, has only 67.8 percent of positions filled. Factoring in the number of officers and soldiers on leave, the 211th Military Police Battalion, which would play an integral role in deterring and preventing a decapitation strike scenario, may be operating at only 50 percent capacity at any given time.
An increase in the number of new military bases, such as planned ones in southern Taiwan, which will host anti-ship missile squadrons, means nothing if there is nobody to man them.
Politicians and analysts point to myriad causes for the low fertility rate, but chief among them is housing costs, which discourage Taiwanese from having kids. Earlier this year, Taiwan’s house-price to income ratio reached a new all-time high of 9.82, meaning that the average house costs nearly 10 years of the average household income. This issue is compounded for younger Taiwanese, who are increasingly forced to move to high-cost cities such as Taipei to find work, while also not seeing any meaningful increases in wages.
A 2023 survey found that 75 percent of Taiwanese workers reported not receiving a raise in 2023, with 25 percent of those surveyed saying they had not received a raise in the past five years. In a pre-election poll of 15,000 people conducted by Commonwealth Magazine, respondents aged 20-39 said economic development should be the nation’s most important issue, even over cross-strait relations and national security.
Others blame Taiwan’s work culture, which emphasizes long hours. A Ministry of Labor report from 2022 placed Taiwan sixth out of 39 in a ranking of countries’ average working hours, with the average person working 2,008 hours in a year. (By contrast, the average American worked 1,822 hours in 2022.)
Another contributing factor is a declining marriage rate. For Taiwanese couples who do get married, the fertility rate is relatively high, with two children being standard. However, Taiwan has an exceptionally low extramarital birth rate of less than 4 percent, so as marriage rates fall the birth rate falls concurrently. Births outside of marriage are exceptionally low in socially conservative East Asian countries with relatively easy access to abortion like Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, which all see rates below 4 percent. By contrast the OECD – an organization composed of 38 high-income, democratic nations – has an average of 42 percent of births occurring outside of marriage.
The most immediate solution to a demographic crisis is immigration, which Taiwan has historically opposed. Compared with OECD countries, Taiwan’s immigration rate is not only low, but also moving in the opposite direction. (Although Taiwan is not a member state, its economy, governmental structure, and other relevant factors all make the OECD a useful comparison for Taiwan.) In 2023, the OECD published a report announcing that, after the decline precipitated by COVID-19, permanent migration to OECD member countries had reached an all-time high and would continue to increase for the foreseeable future. By comparison, Taiwan saw a 5 percent decline at the same time, continuing a year-over-year trend of declining immigration rates that began in 2008.
Since recognizing its demographic issues, Taiwan has yet to enact meaningful immigration reform. Previously, the island implemented policies allowing temporary foreign workers, which offer some of the economic benefits of immigration without having to address the social obstacles to a larger permanent population of foreign-born residents. However, in 2022 Taiwan showed some signs of change with its new intermediate skilled workers program, which allows workers in industries such as manufacturing, nursing, agriculture, or fishing who have worked in Taiwan for six years or more a path to permanent residency.
As of 2024, approximately 20,000 workers have been redesignated as “intermediate skilled” under the policy shift; however, many of these workers have complained that the promised benefits of redesignation – namely a path to permanent residency and a pension – remain near-impossible to attain. Additionally, this new law has not seemed to do much to promote increased immigration, with rates still declining.
With the inauguration of President Lai Ching-te, many foreign workers in Taiwan hoped that the new administration would address many of the issues they had, most of which stem from the predatory immigration agencies whose fees and processes make immigration costly and time consuming – even for relatively low income positions. While it is still early days for Lai, his inauguration speech and early comments have given no indication that immigration is a priority issue for his administration.
So how can boosting immigration help assuage Taiwan’s military issues? Most directly, Taiwan could implement a foreign legion or some similar foreign recruitment program for its military. While this model is most frequently associated with the French Foreign Legion, some countries in the East/Southeast Asia region also have various policies about recruiting foreigners. Singapore, for example, mainly recruits Gurkhas to its National Police Force. Australia allows both permanent residents with no military experience and foreigners with no immigration status but who have relevant military experience to apply for military roles, provided they are committed to obtaining Australian citizenship. India recruits from Nepal and Bhutan, while New Zealand allows citizens or military personnel from the anglosphere and people having lived in New Zealand for five years to apply for its armed forces. Outside of Asia, but perhaps most relevant, Ukraine founded its own foreign legion following the Russian invasion, allowing virtually anyone without a criminal record to enlist.
These models all show how various countries have taken differing approaches to foreign recruitment to bolster their own military. Taiwan could employ a variation of these strategies in order to supplement its own flagging military with foreign recruits. In the most straightforward approach, Taiwan could allow for foreigners from the nations in Southeast Asia, where the majority of its immigrant population already comes from, to join its military in exchange for an easier path to citizenship.
Taiwan must also undergo military recruitment reforms related to personnel retention, training, and overly stringent physical standards for military service. Currently, a large number of Taiwanese troops are deemed incompetent and are discharged early. In 2022, more than 7,600 volunteer personnel were discharged before their two-year training period concluded. With a rapidly declining population, Taiwan needs all the manpower it can get. It must improve retention at all costs, including by bolstering pay and enhancing living conditions in bases and camps.
Taiwan can also further relax physical standards for recruits. Despite an easing of requirements in 2023, Taiwan’s military recruiters continued to turn away those whose body mass index (BMI) falls outside of the 16.5-32 range. In a country where half of the population and one-third of teenagers are obese, this means rejecting a significant number of recruits that could otherwise make contributions to Taiwan’s defense.
Perhaps most pressing is for Taiwan to continue investments in non-traditional weapons and platforms such as suicide drones, which have been shown to be incredibly effective by the Ukrainian armed forces and require less manpower compared to, for example, the Abrams Tanks that Taiwan continues to spend its limited military budget on.
Taiwan’s military recruitment issues largely stem from its shrinking youth population. While in the long run Taiwan may be able to find its way out of the demographic crisis, any solution or policy addressing that issue implemented today is at least two decades away from having an impact on Taiwan’s military. Immigration reform and a military that allows non-citizens to join are the only viable short term solutions to Taiwan’s demographic and military recruitment issues.
While there are many social obstacles to immigration reform in Taiwan, the Lai administration must decide whether it is willing to enact the bold reforms necessary to maintain the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. The alternative is for Taiwan to render itself increasingly defenseless against a revisionist and assertive China.
