AINEWS
Lai's government has turned the National Security Council, built under Chiang era strongmen, into the central coordinator for Beijing pressure. The 1993 law governing the body has not kept pace.
President Lai Ching-te appeared at the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Taipei in June to lay out the island's China posture, accompanied by his national security chief. The briefing put on public display the Lai government's answer to a basic organizational question: who coordinates China policy across ministries. The answer is the National Security Council, not the foreign ministry, the defense ministry, or the Mainland Affairs Council.
The shift is real: the NSC is "orchestrating" whole-of-government China policy, from defense reform to economic resilience to diplomatic messaging, per a Nikkei Asia profile published Aug. 23. The change is operational, not rhetorical. The NSC-led coordination model replaces the ministry-by-ministry default that has shaped Taiwan's China policy since democratization.
The National Security Council has roots in Taiwan's authoritarian era. It is small and opaque. President Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan's first democratically elected leader, formalized it through a 1993 Organization Act, building on a 1991 constitutional amendment that gave the president a national-security apparatus separate from the Executive Yuan. Amendments in 2003 broadened the mandate again. The institutional design dates to the Chiang Ching-kuo era, when Taiwan's executive concentrated security power away from the legislature. Critics have called the NSC a "superlative Executive Yuan", and the secretary-general has historically refused to face legislative questioning, per the Jamestown Foundation's institutional history of the body.
Chinese policy is increasingly designed to chip away at Taiwan's semiconductor edge as a workaround for the export-control regime built by Washington and its allies, Reuters reported in April 2026. Expert calls for a technology protection law to defend the industry surfaced in Taipei Times a year earlier, in August 2025. The Lai government's answer to both pressures runs through the NSC. Every ministry that touches China policy now takes its cues from one office.
Inside the government, ministries with equities in China policy defer to the NSC on framing and timing. The secretary-general's office sets the talking points; the line ministries carry them out. Parliamentary oversight is harder because the secretary-general does not appear before the legislature, a pattern the Jamestown Foundation traces back through the post-democratization era. The result is faster coordination on defense reform and resilience planning, and no public airing of the disagreements between ministries that the old model would have exposed.
The 1993 Organization Act has not been amended since 2003, and it does not cover the cross-ministry coordination role the NSC now plays. The Lai government has not proposed reforms. The body's accountability, and the secretary-general's, has not been renegotiated to match the work the office is now doing.
Every Taiwan China-policy move that follows will run through the same structure: the NSC as cross-ministry coordinator, the 1993 law unchanged. The next cross-strait crisis will be the first public test of whether the Lai government's whole-of-society framework holds, executed by an office the law was never written to govern.