This article tries to adapt the anthropological concept of ‘liminality’ to three fields of research: China–Taiwan relations; the ontology of Taiwan Studies; and the conceptual development of geopolitics. Liminality, as translated into these fields, refers here to a spatial/temporal position of 'geopolitical threshold', rather than to an in-between, transitional period of time. The concept is used here as a substitute for, or nuanced alternative to, ‘marginality’, with reference to the growing debate over the significance of Taiwan as a geopolitical entity in the face of a China experiencing global renaissance. Beyond this, the paper is also an attempt to reflect upon the historical significance of the emergence of Taiwan since the early seventeenth century, first as a geopolitical object of appropriation or control, and later on as a geopolitical subject of its own, to help reassess Taiwan’s global significance. Finally, this is a contribution to the better understanding of the geopolitics of asymmetrical interdependence between a major state and a minor, neighbouring one, within the wider frame of a geopolitics of values.