Internarrativity beyond acceptance: strategic narrative reproduction and Taiwan's ‘Taiwan Can Help’ campaign in the U.S.

A political actor's strategic narratives will be accepted if they appeal to the target audience's master narratives, but acceptance is not a singular outcome. By building on the internarrativity framework by examining the audience as a narrator and identifying distortions in meaning between two narrative tellings, this paper analyzes the 'Taiwan Can Help' campaign as a strategic narrative that was overtly accepted by the U.S. while still being distorted and constrained by the same master narratives that enabled acceptance. The U.S. audience's reproductions of Taiwan's narrative only preserved elements that affirmed its exceptionalist self-identity and threat perceptions while overlooking the particulars of Taiwan's pandemic response model that the original narrative emphasised. This research contributes to the understanding that the discursive environment constrains Taiwan's capability to reach its full potential in projecting substantial influence in US-Taiwan relations, addressing Taiwan's unequal predicament, and garnering political support.