Taiwan is a fascinating experiment
in terms of democratization.
You've got a relatively liberal society.
One way that people have seen that globally
is that it's the first place
in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage.
It's an island of less than 24 million people,
and yet its economy is close
to one of the top 20 in the world today.
But this wealthy, democratic island
is not considered an independent country by Beijing.
China has long viewed Taiwan as its lost territory
and threatened to unify with it by force.
Under Beijing's pressure,
only 15 states in the world recognize Taiwan today,
down from 23 in 2016.
And one key country is not on that list:
the United States.
The U.S. is Taiwan's biggest ally.
Although there are no formal diplomatic relations
between the two.
The U.S. is Taiwan's biggest arms supplier,
has close economic ties with the island
and is likely to defend it.
We are going to hold China accountable
to follow the rules.
So how has Taiwan become
the most volatile issue between
the world's two greatest powers?
Up to the late 19th century,
Taiwan, then known as Formosa,
passed through the rule of Dutch and Spanish colonizers,
its aboriginal peoples and Chinese dynasties.
In 1895, the Qing dynasty of China lost Taiwan
to Japan after a humiliating military defeat.
Taiwan was then ruled by the Japanese
for the following 50 years.
Japan wanted to make Taiwan into a model colony,
using it as an example to persuade other Asian nations
to join the Japanese empire.
They raised living standards,
they improved education,
they improved health and built a lot of infrastructure.
So that 50 years later,
Taiwan was actually one
of the more developed parts of the region.
After World War II,
Taiwan was returned to the control
of the Chinese government,
at that point, the Republic of China.
The Republic of China rapidly lost the Chinese Civil War
to the Communist Party of China,
and as a result ended up on Taiwan as a regime in exile
with very few resources, a lot of refugees,
a very poor population struggling to survive.
Taiwan relied heavily on U.S. economic aid,
but by the middle of the 1960s,
most of that aid was phased out as the U.S. wanted Taiwan
to develop its own economy.
So Taiwan changed its strategy,
moving from an import substitution policy,
which replaced foreign imports with homemade goods,
to an export-oriented economy.
And Taiwan moved very, very quickly
towards exporting very cheap,
mostly consumer goods to the United States.
And as a consequence, over the next 20 to 30 years,
Taiwan's economy boomed.
So beginning of the 1980s,
the government in Taiwan started to think
how do we take the next step in our economic development?
And they identified among many areas semiconductors
as a critical technology.
So that really took off in the 1990s with the growth
of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
that eventually, you know,
now today is an absolutely crucial company
for any company that's making technology.
You know, their chips are in smartphones,
they're in tablets, they're in computers,
they're in games consoles and they're in cars as well.
Anything that you need chips for,
largely you're having to come to TSMC.
And so this by extension puts Taiwan
in a fairly strong position that it is a key node
in the tech supply chain globally.
And so it is a really, really valuable partner
for every single country in the world.
Alongside this economic shift,
Taiwan's political landscape also changed dramatically.
Under the rule of the Chinese Nationalist Party, or KMT,
for four decades Taiwan was an authoritarian regime
until the end of martial law in the late 1980s.
Then Taiwan gradually transitioned to democracy.
The first direct presidential elections took place in 1996,
followed by several peaceful transfers of power.
So the Democratic Progressive Party
is the current party that governs Taiwan.
They were a party that came out of this movement
of activists pushing for more democracy
in Taiwan in the 1970s.
And their fundamental stance
is that Taiwan is already an independent country.
But this isn't
the same stance held by Beijing.
So from the People's Republic of China,
the PRC's perspective,
Taiwan remains the last piece of an unfinished civil war.
It's an illegitimate regime.
It's a breakaway territory that needs
to be unified with the motherland.
The Chiang Kai-shek regime
won a reprieve in June 1950 when the Korean War broke out.
The United States then stepped in to prevent
a final Chinese Communist Party,
a CCP-led invasion of the island of Taiwan.
The United States has been there ever since
as the guarantor of Taiwan's security.
Despite this guarantee of security,
in 1979, the U.S. broke ties
with the Republic of China on Taiwan,
and established them with
the People's Republic of China in Beijing.
Here things get complicated.
The United States, in one of our communiques
with the People's Republic of China,
acknowledged the PRC position that Taiwan was part of China.
But the United States also did not accept
the PRC claim to Taiwan.
That has been our position ever since.
And so, in effect,
the U.S. views Taiwan's status as undetermined.
But even after 1979,
they've maintained informal relations with Taiwan
and continue to invest here,
continue to support the economy
and most importantly, continued to sell arms to Taiwan.
With the U.S. in the middle,
China and Taiwan have avoided war for over seven decades,
but tensions between the two sides
have risen in recent years.
Emerging as a superpower on the world stage,
China has become more assertive
in its claims of sovereignty over Taiwan.
While most of the Taiwanese prefer maintaining
the status quo for now,
many young people favor overt independence for Taiwan.
The young people have really been at the heart
of this political transformation we're seeing in Taiwan
over the past eight, nine years,
when they started pushing back against
this economic integration between China and Taiwan
that started under former President Ma Ying-jeou.
One of the best examples was the
Sunflower Movement that broke out in March of 2014.
This movement was led mostly by college students
opposed to negotiations with Beijing
over a free-trade agreement.
The movement occupied the Legislative Yuan,
Taiwan's parliament,
for more than three weeks in order to block that parliament
from considering this trade agreement and voting on it.
So in effect,
the Sunflower Movement protesters blocked
further economic integration with mainland China.
Taiwanese podcasters Kylie Wang
and Ken Young joined some of the rallies and marches,
and started their popular news show during the movement.
We have mixed feelings towards China.
Yeah. Because on one hand,
I know that a lot of young people want to explore
the big market in China.
Because China has just much more opportunity,
and sometimes even better salaries nowadays.
Yeah,
especially for those who just graduated from college.
On the other hand,
China just keeps on bullying us.
We just don't like what they're doing.
We want to have economic growth,
but we do not want to sacrifice our economic growth
with our freedom of speech, with our independence,
with our democracy.
Since the Sunflower Movement,
the China-friendly KMT party has seen
its polling numbers decline steeply
while the DPP leader, Tsai Ing-wen,
won the presidential elections in 2016
and was re-elected in 2020.
So she has,
as her bottom line effectively
that Taiwan is an independent sovereign nation.
Her stance is that we're willing to talk
but only as equals.
And that is obviously a position that Beijing
is unwilling to accept.
China cut official communications
with Taiwan in 2016
and stopped individual travel permits
to the island in 2019.
It's also upped the rhetoric on taking control of Taiwan
and increased military maneuvers,
all of which is a concern for the U.S.
Taiwan is by far the most likely issue to draw
the United States and China into a direct military conflict.
I should say I don't think the likelihood of that
is particularly high still,
but it overshadows all other potential points
of friction in the U.S.-China relationship.
If China and Taiwan did eventually go to war,
there could be a devastating cost
to human life and industry.
Even if China manages,
they could spend years rebuilding Taiwan
and struggle to integrate a hostile population.
So it would be an incredibly dangerous,
messy affair.
The attempt to invade a fortified island
is always going to be an incredibly difficult one.
So there's a very good reason they have not attempted
to take Taiwan by military force.
It's because they're not sure they can do so.
And so it would be a really disastrous event
for everybody involved.
And there's a very good chance that other democracies
in this region, certainly Japan, maybe Australia,
would get drawn in as well.
Put quite simply,
it's in everybody's best interest right now
not to force the issue and to push it off
for another few years or maybe even a few decades.
But the unification would signal to the world
that it's China, not the U.S.,
that's the new dominant power in the region.
Being able to bring Taiwan into the PRC fold
would obviously be a huge achievement
for any Chinese leader.
And it's largely seen as being as one of his ambitions
to achieve before he steps down, whenever that may be.
Taiwan's future really depends on
if our allies would take China seriously.
No, I would say it depends on the attitude
of the western countries towards China.
Yeah.
Because if the Western countries, for example,
the U.S. starts to see Taiwan
as an important geopolitical ally,
then Taiwan could become a beacon of democracy
in the Chinese-speaking world.
If not, the western countries would like
to see China growing over the influence over the world,
then...
They can just let China be.
Yeah,
and we will be in real risk.
Yeah, Taiwan might be in real risk.
The Trump administration showed strong support
for Taiwan by providing more weapons,
sending high-level officials to visit
and changing the law to make interactions
between the two sides much easier.
In June, a U.S. delegation visited Taipei
and announced plans to donate 750,000 doses
of Covid-19 vaccines to help alleviate
its shortage of shots.
Since Biden has taken office,
the people he's put in place so far at least
have repeated the Trump administration's position on Taiwan,
and have actually taken quite strong stands in favor
of that approach to Taiwan,
ignoring or pushing back against Beijing's objections.
But obviously we'll have to see over the next four,
potentially eight years to see how strong that support
for Taiwan actually is.