Dan Snow's History Hit - Taiwan: China's Ukraine?

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

Located just 100 miles off the coast of mainland China, the nation of Taiwan sits in the so-called 'first island chain' - a group of US-friendly territories deemed crucial to American foreign policy.Yet China's president Xi Jinping maintains that Chinese reunification with Taiwan must be fulfilled. He's not ruled out the possible use of military force - and neither has US president Joe Biden. Tensions have grown even in the last few weeks, so to what extent can tensions over Taiwan be compared to those between Russia and Ukraine?In this episode, James Rogers from History Hit's Warfare podcast is joined by Samir Puri, Senior Fellow in Urban Security and Hybrid Warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies based in Singapore, to take a deep dive into the history between China & Taiwan and answer the question: could Taiwan really become China's Ukraine?Produced by Sophie Gee and Aidan Lonergan. Edited by Aidan Lonergan.

Hey everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got an episode of Warfare for you today. It's our special military history podcast, go and subscribe wherever you get your pods, presented by Dr James Rogers. It covers, well, warfare from the early modern period, but particularly First and Second World War. So recently we've been doing a lot on Ukraine as well. It's fascinating stuff, it gets great guests. Enjoy this episode, it's an eye-opener. So if he gets great guests, enjoy this episode. It's an eye-opener. Located just 100 miles off the coast of mainland China,

the nation of Taiwan sits in the so-called First Island Chain, which includes a list of US-friendly territories deemed crucial to US foreign policy. Yet China's President Xi Jinping has said that Chinese reunification with Taiwan must be fulfilled, and he's not ruled out the possible use of force to achieve this. In fact, tensions have grown over the last few weeks between the US and China, with the shadows of the Ukraine crisis spreading far and wide over global affairs. US President Joe Biden has also come out and said that he would be willing to use force to defend Taiwan, a statement which has triggered two hours of what the White House called direct and honest talks between the two leaders. So with all this in mind, how did we get to the point in history where the US and China both state they're willing to risk war over Taiwan?

Well, I'm your host, James Rogers, and here on the Warfare Podcast, I'm joined by renowned international security expert, Dr. Samir Puri. Samir is a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Affairs in Singapore, and so he has those regional and historical expertise that we need to help us place these current tensions in their proper historical context. Now, of course, if you're a regular listener to the Warfare podcast, or if this is your first episode, well, first of all, thanks for listening. And second, if you're enjoying this episode, or if you enjoy it, then please take a quick second to drop us a five-star review

on wherever you're listening to your podcast right now, or simply share us with your friends and family. It really helps us to get out there to everyone who loves history. But now, here is Dr. Samir Puri on tensions over Taiwan. Hi Samir, welcome to the Warfare Podcast. How are you doing? Very well, thanks. Thank you so much for having me. Delighted to be here. Not a problem at all. I think it is the perfect time to be talking about this controversial history between china and taiwan at this moment where an aggressive expansionist russia most specifically putin is trying to to redefine the ways in which we we define sovereign states and borders within the general locality

around Russia, we're starting to see other nation states pushing these existing lines of Western control. And no more is this true than when it comes to Taiwan. So maybe you could give us a little bit of an overview of what is going on between China and Taiwan at this moment in time. Yeah, and I couldn't agree with you more. Not only Ukraine, but also, and we'll talk about this a bit later, things that have happened recently in Hong Kong have really brought the Taiwanese issue to the forefront of people's concerns, more so than it's been for many decades. But this issue's been with us for decades, and I think that's really the best place to start before we get right up to contemporary events,

And I think that's really the best place to start before we get right up to contemporary events, is where the Taiwan dispute comes from. And it really comes from the end of the Chinese Civil War. So we're talking 1949. And the Chinese Civil War lasted a number the Chinese nationalists, fled to Taiwan. And you just need to take a look at the map. And it's pretty clear that if I can make a slightly cheesy analogy, Taiwan is geographically to mainland China. What maybe the Isle of Wight is, the United Kingdom. If you're, God forbid, running an insurgency or fighting a civil war in the mainland of England, and you wanted to get away but not too far away, and you were living in a world before mass transit by airplane, or you're not going to get on a ship and sail the other side of the world, maybe because you want to reinvade at

some point, maybe you want to drop back to this island geography, consolidate your position, lick your wounds, because those nationalists were defeated by the communists in the Chinese Civil War, and maybe foster dreams of reinvading the mainland. Maybe not next year, maybe not next decade, but at some point in the future. So you can imagine what sort of situation that's left the people living in Taiwan in relation to the people living on mainland China. Very specifically, it's meant that mainland China, run from Beijing, has been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party ever since 1949, whereas Taiwan has been ruled actually for a very

long time by one man, a man called Chiang Kai-shek. And Chiang Kai-shek was the leader of the Nationalist forces in this aforementioned Chinese Civil War. He actually lived a very, very long time. And he fostered this great dream of rebuilding his forces one day, going and giving Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party a real kicking, revenge for defeating the Chinese Civil War. He actually died in 1975, which is well within living memory, not too long ago. But just going back to the Chinese Civil War itself, which I think is an episode that's really worth reflecting on just for a moment to really get a sense of what that retreat was like at the end of it. So the Chinese Civil War, as I mentioned, it lasted for a long time, since the 1920s. And it really was an outcome of the fact that the older Chinese empire

of the Ming Dynasty, the Qing Dynasty, all these famous historical dynasties had come to a crumbling to an end finally after many centuries in 1912. And from the ashes, from some chaos that took over China in those decades, from an era of warlordism and just mayhem and butchery and brigands and local fiefs, a Chinese republic emerged in the 20s, headed by a man called Sun Yat-sen, who incidentally, actually, just to give you a real insight into what it takes to take back control of China if you're a small faction, Sun Yat-sen planned some of his recapture, or capture, should I say, of China from Singapore, which is where I live. And there's a fantastic memorial to Sun Yat-sen in Singapore, Sun Yat-sen's house,

which documents the fact that, okay, this is really far offshore. Singapore doesn't have a border with China, clearly. He actually started to send activists in to destabilize this older Chinese dynastic empire from places like Singapore, because that way you're very far away from the hand of retribution. Going back to this Chinese Civil War, started in the 1920s, and it had this immense interruption, also known as World War II. And that immense interruption begins not in 1939, which is that starting year that Europeans are very familiar with. It's 1937. And it's 1937 because the Japanese really went to town in China from 1937, and they actually colonized the northern part of China, Manchuria, which they turned into

a puppet state called Manchukuo. This World War II interruption meant that these two Chinese Civil War factions, the Nationalists and the Communists, actually stopped fighting each other. They're all busy fighting the Japanese to kick the Japanese out. We all know what happened in 1945 when the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese war effort collapsed across the board. And then at that point, the Chinese communists and the Chinese nationalists went back to fighting each other. And this is going to bring us right up to 1949.

Mao Zedong, who headed the communists, did something very cunning. He actually let his archenemy Chiang Kai-shek take most of the strain fighting the Japanese during those bitter years, 1937 onwards. Yes, the Chinese communists helped out, but actually the Chinese nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek were really tired out, their forces were tired out. So when the communists and the nationalists joined battle once more after the Japanese had been evicted. It wasn't too long, exactly four years, as we can see between 1945 and 1949, that Chiang Kai-shek was defeated. And he flees with not only his retinue and his fellow governing council, but also his army and everyone who

basically subscribed to the Chinese nationalist cause to Taiwan. And that's the start of it. When they've not been trading barbs and blowing raspberries at each other over the Taiwan Strait, the Nationalists and the Communists, they've been threatening war. And in particular, it's been the Chinese Communists threatening war on Taiwan. But that really brings us to that point of 1949 and the start of the modern incarnation of the Taiwan problem. Well, take us back just a couple of steps, because I've got a few questions about that turbulent period prior to the Second World War,

leading us into the Second World War itself. How were the great powers involved in this? What were their divisions of loyalty? Because, of course, communist China, Mao, is an ally during the Second World War. But what does this mean for the Republic of China? And if the Republic of China's forces are launching out of Singapore and these disruptive missions into communist China, then surely the British are approving this in some way. I can't imagine at this point in time that anyone could

operate in Singapore without the British approval. So is there a duplicitous double-edged game going on here between the Western allies and what's going on in this ongoing civil war and this dispute? Yeah, completely. I think the best way to think of it is this is still the era of colonial empire, where you're thinking about the great powers around the world, in particular the Europeans, like the British, the French, but also the Americans who are increasingly a global player since the early 1900s of the Spanish-American War. The Americans are emerging as a major Pacific power as well.

They've taken over the Philippines. So they're not actually that far away from where this is all unfolding. But what this comes down to is the perception of China as fair game. And think about this, 1912, when Sun Yat-sen and other people's efforts to collapse this old centuries-long, millennia-long Chinese imperial dynasty works, and it crumbles under the weight of its own anachronisms, its own contradictions, its own rot. And then you can imagine the colonial powers all around the world rubbing their hands together and thinking, well, we wouldn't mind a piece of that. And there have been a fair few incursions in the early 20th century already. Incursions, interestingly, that the modern Chinese Communist

Party likes to point out historical indicators of the nefarious and predatory view that Western powers used to have and may still indeed have of China. I'll just give you one quick example, the eight-power intervention in 1900, a bit before what we're talking about here. Those eight powers are France, Britain, Japan, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, the US, and Germany, I believe. And they intervened in one of these many episodes of internal Chinese infighting, civil wars, the Boxer Rebellion in particular. And it's pretty devastating as an intervention because it's coming off the back of, we're going a little bit further back in time here, the 19th century and the Opium Wars, which were an even more sort of humiliating

and devastating experience for the Chinese, the foreigners coming in with superior weapons, superior technology, and a kind of colonial swagger and a colonial arrogance. Now, China was never colonized. That's a really important point. So we all know the story of the Raj in India, and we know the story of parts of Africa bisected by France and Portugal and Spain and Britain. But China was sort of nibbled away at the coastlines, and it was robbed, and it was hooked on opium in the 19th century. But it wasn't reduced to the status of a mere colony. And so there was always a degree, I think, of pride undiminished by the Chinese elite

carrying on. And this is a real point here, I think, to answer your question. Carrying on, no matter who ran China. So even after the Qing dynasty and the end of the imperial Chinese system in 1912, when you see the Chinese nationalists and you see the Chinese communists coming in succession after this period of warlordism, there's always this question of how do we secure mainland China's borders? Because if we don't, and if it's not the British, it might be the Americans, it might be the Japanese, we cannot take our borders for granted because look at what's happened to us in recent history. So I've somewhat strayed a little bit away from your question there,

I think. But I think that's the sort of situation that you're in. And when it comes to 1949, what did outside powers think about this split where the nationalists fleeted Taiwan and the communists stay in the mainland? Well, I think by now we've got the Cold War. That's the new overarching framework around global politics, rivalries, kind of the Game of Thrones that's always been the game of states. And let's face it, if the nationalists have lost and the communists have won, it's all in the name, isn't it? Your fear, if you're in London, if you're in Washington, if you're in Paris, is that those communists now in charge in China under Mao Zedong are going to

find more than just a name in common with Joseph Stalin and the communists who are the arch enemy number one, just in Moscow. Now, we know it didn't quite work out that way, because if there's one law in history, if you put two egomaniac, megalomaniac dictators in the room together, they don't necessarily get on famously. You've actually got a better chance of putting two historians in the same room together, and they're getting on famously, even if they're writing on the same subject matter and same era. And it didn't work out in the medium term between Stalin and Mao, but Mao and the communists, and actually, to be fair, I think the Russians, the USSR tried to play both sides in the Civil War. I don't think they really put much stock on Mao being a communist. But just that moment in 1949,

when the communists now have, they rule the roost in mainland China, they've isolated their opponents, their domestic opponents onto this island of Taiwan. The real fear there is of a global communist union between China and Russia, which you would struggle to confront because even though China doesn't have nuclear weapons, right in 1949, they're going to accelerate their quest to get them. And will get them in the 50s i believe and the russians will probably help them and that is indeed what happened so that that i think is a principal concern at the time and we get glimpses of this this union this cooperation between stalin and mao when it comes to the korean war and you know a powerful force that can come together to really put pressure on the West and

its allies. Indeed, an entire UN-mandated force that are fighting there for years in a brutal, costly battle. More civilian casualties than the entirety of the Second World War, I believe. Is it wars like this that start to influence the West's opinion of the importance of Taiwan? Is there, I guess you could say, a line drawn in the sand, or indeed the sea, between Taiwan and China, that Taiwan Strait, that really is the line that China should not and cannot cross according to the US and the West? Yeah, that's a great point. And it's always worth remembering that the Korean War began, I think, less than five years after the end of World War II. It's no time at all, really. Just when you thought you could relax, you then have another devastating conflict and one that really threatened to

escalate. But what the Korean War did, I think more so than anything else in relation to Taiwan, is it moved the strategic compass and spotlight to face and to shine over East Asia in a way that it perhaps wouldn't have done otherwise, because you otherwise would have had the Berlin crisis, you'd have had the various European Cold War standoffs. But there's an interesting sort of slippery slope between the Korean War, French and then American involvement in Vietnam, and the fact that East Asia and Southeast Asia started to adopt a much greater prominence in this global standoff between the West and its allies and NATO and the communist bloc. But I think really, from Taiwan's perspective, the Taiwan problem has never gone away since 1949. What you've got are moments when it sort of rises in importance and moments when it slightly fades in importance.

And there are quite a few Taiwan Straits crises during the Cold War. I'm not going to list all of them, but it's worth just Googling Taiwan Straits Cold War crisis. You see them listed in the 50s and onwards, where the Chinese and the Taiwanese almost come to blows. And I should also point out here that another important Cold War marker was the fact that who gets to call themselves China? So because of this schism in the Chinese body of politics and elite arising from the Civil War, you have this curious moment where the Republic of China, ROC, which is the official name of Taiwan, still is, still holds the UN seat for China. And it's recognised

by the US and others as being China, which is absurd when you think about the size of Taiwan. But there's a political statement against the legitimacy of the Communist Party of China's rule. So you've got the CCP running the People's Republic of China, the PRC. You've got your two acronyms in the mainland.

You've got the ROC down in Taiwan. it wasn't until the 70s actually that after Mao died I believe that there was actually some thawing of relations between western countries and Beijing and then I think the absurdity was reversed and as much as some western capitals may have felt they still owed and wanted from the Republic of China in Taiwan, they had to give the UN seat to mainland China. And that was sort of reversed there. And so does this thawing of relations in the 70s, the death of Mao, the rise of Deng Xiaoping, does this start to allow a bit of a calming of relations between China and Taiwan as well?

So it's gone in ways, and I think it's a great question because we're now getting to the heart of what makes Taiwan tick. So Mao died in 76, again, not really too much time has passed since then anyway. And that's the moment when I think the objectionability of that first generation of Chinese communists fades slightly because Mao was so associated with the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward and some of those initial, frankly, atrocities that were committed against the Chinese people. And by now as well, by the 70s and 80s, China is starting to emerge. It's not an agrarian, poverty-stricken, and by its own productivity, overpopulated country. It's starting to show those initial signs that are now going to take it

in the next few years to being the top GDP producing country in the planet. It's really Deng Xiaoping in the 70s and going into the 80s that that liftoff starts to become more tangible. Taiwan, I mentioned, was ruled under the iron grip of Chiang Kai-shek. And Chiang Kai-shek is actually pretty authoritarian as a general. So I suppose there's something there. And just as a quick historical pointer, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong have been enemies for decades. I mean, you can imagine that they probably had dartboards of each other's faces and cursed each other's names before various important events and whatever else it might be. They died within a year of each other. And I suppose in a sort of final marker as to the fact that Mao had bested Chiang Kai-shek

in the Chinese Civil War, Chiang dies in April 1975 and Mao dies in September 76. So he just about outlived him as well by a year and a bit to a sort of final insult. But Taiwan, after Chiang Kai-shek dies, also, I think, has a little bit more political oxygen because that first generation that fought in the Chinese Civil War is now sort of passing the torch on to a later generation of Taiwanese politicians. As well, Taiwan, as the island, was initially populated by indigenous people. and they had been numerically, as a percentage of the population, they'd really reduced in relation to the Chinese who'd come over with Chiang Kai-shek. And you've basically got this massive exodus after the Chinese Civil War

that now runs Taiwan. And they were really still tied to that Civil War ideal. And KMT is the Taiwanese political party that Chiang Kai-shek ran, the Kuomintang. And the KMT still ran Taiwan under a fairly sort of iron grip, really, until quite recently, in fact. I'll pause on that till we get to more recent years. But in terms of Taiwan, you also have an emergence of a burgeoning Taiwanese economy. And I really like this phase in the story, which is a difficult story of China and Taiwan, because they're both lifting off economically. And I think that doesn't solve any problems between them, but it does change the terms of the debate, because you also see the start of Taiwan becoming what it is today, which is this high-tech hub of production, unrivaled in semiconductor

production and sophisticated high-end semiconductor production, I think only by South Korea and Samsung. If you look at the market share, there's a Taiwanese chip manufacturer, the TSMC, the Chinese semiconductor producer, is one of the global leaders. And just think about how much stuff you've got semiconductors sort of buzzing away in your home, even in your fridges and your everyday sort of Alexa devices, everything else like this. There are semiconductors in almost everything. So Taiwan has caught this wave in more recent years of being a producer of something we all need, of these chips. And that's really the sort of the 70s and the 80s, you start to again,

see a little bit more of Taiwan's own economic modernization. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings,

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So does that mean that China and Taiwan start to become reliant on each other economically? Or is there a trade embargo remaining between China and Taiwan and the purchase of semiconductors? And is it more the fact that because Taiwan is such a producer of semiconductors, the West must protect it as well because it's a vital resource to ensure that industry can continue to thrive within Western countries? Yeah, and there's a few really interesting points there, one of which is to China and the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China, do they trade with each other? And the answer is yes, they do. They do now. And despite all of the alarmist headlines that you see, this is something being based on Singapore that you really start to see, I think, beyond the headlines and some of the regional realities, is that China's economy is so large that regionally speaking,

it's pretty hard to turn your back on it. And you think that there's no love lost between the Taiwanese and the Chinese, and actually in some respects there isn't. But in terms of mutual trade, it's actually in some metrics been on the increase, not entirely. I think there's other metrics like Taiwanese investment in the mainland China that I think has not been increasing. But there's been a lot of trade, and specifically on semiconductors, there's an interesting rivalry at play here, which it doesn't really extend to quite as much as it does from other goods and commodities, in which Taiwan exceeds the mainland China's competency in the highest of the high-end semiconductors. Now, I'm actually not a semiconductor expert, but believe me, I actually do know somebody who is.

A young lady who went out of Singapore who actually did a PhD in Cambridge on semiconductors. She's an engineer, and she's tried to talk me through some of what the difference is between a sophisticated chip and a non-sophisticated chip. But as a humble historian slash analyst of contemporary security affairs, I slightly struggle with this, other than the principle that, as you say, the protection of the Taiwanese semiconductor production capability is a really important part of the world's economy, unquestionably so, yeah. So we're reaching this point now where we're starting to discuss these accusations that we've had in the global press that China is poised, ready to do a new Ukraine. Is it going to be the next Ukraine?

Is China going to violate the sovereignty of Taiwan? Is it going to incorporate Taiwan into mainland China? We know that this, of course, is the long-held policy of the government. They do want to have a united China. You may have a continuation of one country, two systems, like you have in Macau and Hong Kong, although that in itself is completely and utterly eroding before our eyes, despite international legal certainties and promises between nation states. So there is some mistrust of China.

There's worries that there is a pact, an alliance between Russia and China, worries that there is a pact, an alliance between Russia and China, and that this could all be part of really trying to challenge the global liberal Western order that's been constructed since 1945, and we could be seeing it collapse at any moment. But from what you're saying, that might be a little bit of hyperbole. Are we being a little over the top here, Samir? Samir Amgadie- The worry around the Taiwan situation periodically spikes and then dissipates over the last seven or so decades. It's on a spike right now, unquestionably so, and concern around Taiwan's independence and the fact that, as you mentioned, Russia's invasion of Ukraine far away has shifted the norm slightly. Because if

you look at the basic ingredients, historically speaking, there are grievances, there are imperial claims to control that have been maybe diminished or pushed away by the flow of events since the high age of empires. And there are sort of authoritarians in charge, both in Moscow and Beijing, who not only see common cause with each other, by the way, they almost share birth years, they're both sort of pushing 70s, they also are, as a colleague of mine once said, old men perhaps in a hurry, which is one of the biggest things we should be worrying about in the world. If you want to leave what is basically a sort of a neo-imperial legacy to your successors within the authoritarian system, maybe you want a signature accomplishment. And I still can't believe we're talking about this, by the way, because the idea of conquest

and annexation, which was always in my mind quite a sort of 19th century concept, has suddenly risen to the fore as this big worry. It's a real concern. There's a few other observations I have on the specifics of the risk that Taiwan currently faces to really get to the meat of this issue. And it is absolutely true that the authorities in Beijing have, probably ever since the birth of the Communist Party and their hold over China in 1949, coveted reacquiring control of Taiwan. And they also have, I think, a legacy of looking back at the fact that there were former occupiers like Japan and European colonizers also in Taiwan. So there's also, I think, a longer historical legacy of the fact that Taiwan slipped outside of Chinese power and grasp

over the centuries, not just the current incarnation of the Chinese from the civil war who fled there. But the policy, and there's a sort of a 1992 marker for this in the Chinese sort of system, is peaceful reunification. And there's a strong emphasis on peaceful because there is a perception that there are cultural commonalities between people who live in mainland China and the people who live in Taiwan that, I guess, expand the issue far beyond this dispute in 1949. And there's also a confidence and a swagger and, dare I say, an arrogance of the Chinese Communist Party. They are leading China to become the world's biggest economy. They know how important they are regionally and globally. And there's an interesting moment back in October last year where Vladimir Putin, of all people, is asked by an American reporter, do you think China will invade Taiwan? Now,

obviously, in the back of his mind, he's thinking, well, I don't know, but I'm certainly about to invade Ukraine. But his answer sort of shrugged his shoulders, slumped to his seat in his normal sort of pose. And he said, well, I don't think they need to, he said. I don't think the Chinese need to invade. I think their economy is so large that they probably have other options. And he almost got a sense there might have been a bit of jealousy in the back of his mind,

thinking, God, if my economy was that indigenously large, I probably wouldn't even need to invade Ukraine myself. I could gobble them up through trade into dependencies. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder.

Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So the specific risk assessment that certainly my colleagues at the IISS, the think tank I work at, and we talk to the people who work for the military and other entities around the region, you get a sense that China has not made an irrevocable decision to invade Taiwan, but the risks of it doing so are rising because its confidence in peaceful

unification is dropping. And there's no scientific formula to work out when that confidence drops below a certain point. Because the other thing we need to remember, and this goes into the heart of what makes modern Taiwan tick, is that Taiwan, long since ruled by the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek's old party, has lost power in 2016 to the DPP party. Tsai Ing-wen is a female leader of Taiwan, and she has a much more strident attitude against mainland China. The Kuomintang, the KMT, learned to live with China's kind of frenemy relationship. They didn't really do anything to provoke Beijing's ire. But the DPP represent the hopes of,

I guess, a different generation. And there really is a new generation of politicians in Taiwan. But there's a Taiwanese parliamentarian, a guy who's probably not much older than me, who used to be a singer in a Taiwanese death metal band. So there's a kind of a pop culture side. And again, like you see in countries that are a bit more connected up to the West, some of the pop culture tropes that we might see from other countries are there. And of course, there's freedom of expression. And that freedom of expression has amounted to a latent sense that Taiwan wants to be seen as an independent state, not just as an appendage of China's rogue province.

And the big fear, and this is, I guess, the punchline around the risk of invasion, is that the Taiwanese always have it within them to suddenly declare independence. Now, to do that would trigger every red light inside the Chinese Communist Party over in Beijing. Red lights would start flashing. That is the scramble-invade order because China wants to retain the military ability to forcibly punish and stop Taiwan from declaring independence. Taiwan hasn't declared independence. Some of its people feel independent. They may talk about being independent, but that would be the possible trigger for an invasion, aside from this future moment where China realizes that it more or less has to invade to achieve its mission. When would it want to do that? When would it see a deadline? We don't know.

That's one of the biggest uncertainties in global politics today. But I'll sort of close my answer on this. One really important date, you know, sort of within my lifespan, so I'll get to see whether we were right or wrong about this, is 2049, the 100th anniversary of the end of the Chinese Civil War. The 100th anniversary not only of the start of Chinese Communist Party rule in Beijing, but also the 100th anniversary of the start of this unresolvable dispute between mainland China and Taiwan. And Xi Jinping, who's currently in charge in China, and those around him, I think they kind of feel they have an unofficial deadline to get this sorted before the centenary is up. That's really interesting. We know that China works on much

longer deadlines than our Western four-year democratic cycles. We know that China also looks longer in history. It talks about its century of humiliation, and it looks to the next hundred years in its planning and where China wants to be in the world. But let's look at the realities of such a move, because the United States has it enshrined within law that it will defend the island of Taiwan. And there is the US 7th Fleet deployed specifically for that purpose. Not only that, you have a mass amount of military reinforcements on that borderline there, pointing over between both sides, between China and Taiwan. And latest military technologies are

supplied to Taiwan. The US is selling drones to them at the moment, which, I mean, is good for surveillance, but it's more of a posturing. It's showing that, you know, the US will supply these incredibly high-tech systems to its really close ally. So, put simply, this would trigger a world war, or at least an incredibly intense regional conflict tantamount to something like the Korean War, or perhaps what we're seeing in Ukraine. Is that not the case? Yeah, absolutely. And there's enormous fear, not only about the ability to defend Taiwan, but also the

possibilities of escalation outside of Taiwan. Because the US and China are engaged in a totally separate geoeconomic rivalry about who's top dog, who's going to be the number one economy, who's going to get to write the rules of the world, whose systems, politically speaking, will influence the rest of the world, authoritarianism, democracy.

And of all the problems that China and the USA have with each other, Taiwan is the one that is the biggest. Not only is it a firecracker, it's likely to be several landmines and several munition dumps worth of explosions all in one. Because the US has walked this fine line, which is they don't want to encourage Taiwan to become independent, nor can they make it a formal ally as such. Because it's not a sovereign state with the status of Ukraine or the UK or France. It is in this sort of twilight zone. But what the US has done this year, especially after the Ukraine invasion, and Biden's been pretty unambiguous in this and so has his officials, is to say that the US would help Taiwan in the event of a military confrontation.

Then you've got the question of how. And as a quick aside, I, in a previous career, actually used to live in the Donbas in East Ukraine. I know Ukraine very well as a country. This was the first Ukraine conflict in 2014-15. And you get a sense of the geography. You get a sense we're talking about land borders here. The naval dimension is important in the Black Sea, but ultimately reinforcements, if you're helping Ukraine, as is now the case. From NATO, they're coming across

the border with Poland. They're coming across the border with Romania, other countries like this. And of course, Russia invaded from Belarus. And the distances are vast as well. And I can tell you, because I've done this on a few occasions, you take either a flight from Lviv to Kiev to Donetsk, or you take overnight trains, and you might end up on two overnight trains from Lviv to Kiev to Donetsk, or you take overnight trains and you might end up on two overnight trains from Lviv to Kiev to Donetsk, spanning west to the east. Taiwan has got none of these geographic properties. It is neither large, nor is it surrounded by any land borders, nor does it have any US treaty allies immediately there from which you could mount a defense of Taiwan. Now, some might sort of debate what the treaty ally is and isn't,

because you do have countries like Singapore and others who are part of this so-called Five Power Defense Act, which actually ties into the British and others. So it's not like it's the Wild West here with no other friendly countries. But just to bring this really into focus, you mentioned the US 7th Fleet. countries. But just to bring this really into focus, you mentioned the US 7th Fleet. I actually had the great pleasure in Singapore of meeting the head of the US 7th Fleet, Carl Thomas, the Vice Admiral. And you very much get the impression from the US 7th Fleet that they are the first responders to a possible militarized Taiwan contingency. And it's not about where they physically are, but we know where the US physically is as a military presence in the Pacific. It's in Okinawa and it's in Guam.

And you can just look up the map. I actually got one of my colleagues who was doing a piece of work on Taiwan. We just sort of measured the nautical miles and the amount of time it takes to travel from either Okinawa or Guam to Taiwan. I don't have, unfortunately, those distances to hand. I'd love to read them out to you, but you can look them up. They're not that close. And despite the fact you can fly a B-1 bomber, and of course you have your US carrier battle groups in the Pacific as well, in the Western Pacific, this is not an open-shut case. And without going into too much detail, my colleagues and friends who are real military technology aficionados, which I'm not, tell me that A2AD, friends who are real military technology aficionados, which I'm not, tell me that A2AD,

anti-area access denial, which is a sort of a military piece of terminology for the ability, I think really boils down to can Chinese sink the American ships and the carriers and their support ships as they come into proximity in the South China Sea, the kind of the technological to and fro between fleet defense and the ability to mount this sort of defense in sort of Taiwan. That's a really hotly contended issue now. And I wouldn't call it an arms race, but put it in this way, the Chinese are either getting to the end of or about to launch their third aircraft carrier. Their first, incidentally, was bought from Ukraine, an old Soviet hull, which is pretty old, but they've sort of indigenously manufactured a second as a third that's coming up. And their sort of naval procurement is picking up speed. And those who are in and around the US

naval community and the US Navy itself, this is very freely available on the internet, are talking very much in terms of fleet sizes and response times. And they're also pointing out to the fact that the US, being a globally committed superpower, has got fleet ships all over the world in these different combat commands that it has. But the Chinese are almost certainly focusing their naval and littoral combat capabilities on their southern and eastern shoreline because they are still making themselves into the predominant regional power. Their global pretensions to power are principally economic through the Belt and Road Initiative and other initiatives that are not as militarised. But the military capacity of the Chinese, I don't know for sure, but I'd hazard a guess, is very much

focused on a future Taiwan contingency. Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to explain all this. I agree with you. I think we've reached a point at the moment where there are red lines being drawn all around the world to show exactly where the West's interests lie and the rest of those against the West's interests lie. You saw Biden announcing recently that he would respond to Iran getting nuclear weapons by launching force. You've seen similar things when it comes to reinforcing the US position with Taiwan. And of course, there are those arguing that a new iron curtain is being raised in Europe, with Sweden and Finland potentially joining NATO. So the lines of global politics are being redrawn. And hopefully we'll get you on again before 2049, so that you can keep us updated about all of this.

Samir, thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much for having me. A real pleasure. All the best. Thanks for listening. But before you go, a reminder that you can now follow along online on Twitter at HistoryHitWW2, on Instagram at JamesRogersHistory, and on TikTok, also at JamesRogersHistory. You can also subscribe to our free Warfare Wednesdays newsletter via the link in the show notes. you