Recently, a new documentary was screened across Australia about the late Taiwanese Australian professor Chwei-Liang Chiou, who dedicated his life to improving relations between Taiwan and Australia.

At the Brisbane premiere, former federal MP Graham Perrett opened with a line often attributed to the Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “We know they are lying […] they know we know they are lying […] but they still lie.”

He said the line captured Chiou’s life work. In his classes and writings, Chiou spent considerable time countering false claims about Taiwan’s past and exposing Beijing’s denials of Taiwan’s democratic identity.

Truth and understanding sit at the heart of today’s debate about Taiwan.

And as a new report, which I co-authored for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute makes clear, many Australians do not fully understand what’s at stake if Taiwan’s democracy is someday threatened by China. Indeed, many Australians don’t actually understand Taiwan at all.

As part of our study, we interviewed hundreds of Australians in business, government, universities and community groups to understand how they perceive Taiwan, how they think a Taiwan Strait crisis might affect Australia, and why public understanding of Taiwan remains limited.

We also analysed more than 100 media and public policy documents to see how Taiwan is framed in Australian public life.

The vast majority of our participants agreed on one point: Taiwan........

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