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The COVID-19 pandemic required swift responses from governments at all levels. Government agencies were faced with the immense task of mitigating the health, social, and economic effects of COVID-19. These actions and responses included developing mobile phone location tracking systems and 'electronic fences' alongside the use of big data analytics. Whether intentionally or not, this led to questions about the rise of the 'biosurveillance state'. In this paper, we examine the extent to which digital democracy has emerged as a contested concept in Taiwan. Furthermore, we ask: to what extent is the use of digital surveillance for disease control and prevention justifiable, and to what extent can personal privacy be sacrificed when adopting digital surveillance measures with the aim of securing collective safety? We compare Taiwanese citizens' concerns about personal privacy with those in other democracies, such as the UK, and those in the EU and North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes to repostulate the sovereignty-statehood complex of the Republic of China (ROC/Taiwan)—namely, the dynamism between its full-fledged sovereign capability and its indeterminate statehood—by using a critical-constructivist approach. To counter legal textualism and rigidity, a three-phase approach is developed to address the under-theorisation of this issue by analysing (1) the establishment of a modern nation-state governance system, (2) identifying the national of the nation-state polity, and (3) obtaining democratic authorisation of its sovereign practice. Therefore, a state should not be considered a static edifice but an ongoing process, fraught with re-instantiations of sovereign exercises via consistent practices, through which criteria of statehood can be re-contemplated and refined. The ROC/Taiwan's South China Sea claim thus effectively demonstrates that its re-sovereignisation remains unaccomplished and has produced a stalemate that substantially impacts the ROC/Taiwan's ongoing state-making efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]