Amid the coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak, how do the Taiwanese public evaluate the performance of the United States’ and Chinese governments in handling the pandemic? How should people make judgments when the international situation and information about the coronavirus disease keep changing? Using “image theory as its research framework, this study explores whether the Taiwanese public’s impressions of U.S. and Chinese leaders and China’s military threat toward Taiwan affect their perceptions of the U.S. and China governments’ responses to Covid-19.

The phenomenon of divided government－that is, the executive and legislative branches are controlled by different political parties－has become daily reality in Taiwan’s notional and local politics. Yet it receives relatively little attention from a comparative perspective. In the literature, scholars tend to disagree with each other concerning whether divided government leads to policy gridlock, stalemate and inefficiency.