Sea Control - Sea Control 571: Revolutionary Taiwan with Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Links1. Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order, by Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison, Cambria, 2024.2. Taiwan's 400 Year History: Anniversary Edition, by Su Beng, 施朝暉, 2017.3. Catherine Lila Cho Twitter account.4. Mark Harrison Twitter account.

So help me, Bob, I'm bullying the alley. You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Help me, Bob, I'm bullying the alley. Bullying the alley, ship, oh no. Ahoy, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. I'm your co-host, Brian Kerr, and my guests today are Catherine Cho and Mark Harrison. We'll be discussing their book, Revolutionary Taiwan, Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order. As a reminder, all views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Defense or any other organization with which we are affiliated.

Catherine, Mark, welcome aboard. Can you tell us a little bit about yourselves and your professional backgrounds? Thanks so much, Brian, for having us on, and thank you to the listeners. My name is Catherine Cho. I'm currently an assistant professor of world history at National Zenzi University in Taipei, Taiwan. Prior to that, I was an assistant and associate professor of history at Grinnell College in Iowa. I'm a Taiwanese-American, and I grew up in a pretty politically active Taiwanese household, Taiwanese-American household. And so I kind of came by my interest and passion for Taiwan from a young age. my academic background, my academic training is actually in pre-modern European studies and Reformation history. And then I took a kind of big detour in my career in order to co-write this

book, which was really like a dream to try to write a book about Taiwan history and politics that could be accessible to a wider audience. So now I say that I kind of study political experimentation and understandings of legitimate and illegitimate authority into very different contexts. So post-reformation Europe, 16th century Europe, and then also today, democratic Taiwan. And my name is Mark Harrison. I'm a senior lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of Tasmania in Australia in the politics and international relations program. i have been involved and interested in taiwan for a long time so i studied chinese at university and then which is back in the late 80s and early 90s and then went to taiwan and spent quite a lot

of time there through the 1990s and began phd research at the end of the 90s in melbourne and then prior to being at the university of tasmania i was at the university of westminster at the Center for the Study of Democracy there for some years. And my background is social theory as well as political science. And so I am interested in Taiwan, but also interested in how important it is in the world today in terms of the international system, but also what it tells us about how societies change,

about the kind of questions we have in understanding societies changing and our place to respond to those changes and so on. So it's a really rich and complex area and incredibly important, obviously, in the current moment because of the changing and changeable international situation. Well, you both have incredible resumes and we are really honoured and appreciative that you decided to join us here on Sea Control today.

So let's turn our attention to your book, Revolutionary Taiwan. Your book, it opens up with this line, Quote, this book is about the making of a Taiwanese nation, one that sees itself as a state and a homeland in its own right, but has not achieved formal international recognition, end quote. That is quite a powerful opening for the subject at hand. Can you expand on that a bit and talk about the purpose of the book and its main thesis? Yeah, absolutely. So our main argument is that the process of democratization in Taiwan, which began with the ending of martial law in the late 1980s and continued on with the first democratic elections, multi-party elections for the legislature and the presidency in 1994 and 1996,

that this process of democratization created a new nation on the island of Taiwan and that the government, it's not just that the form of government changed, but also the Taiwanese people's understanding of who they were and what country, what state they lived in. So post-democratization, we argue,

the idea of nationhood became centered on the island of Taiwan, rather than thinking of Taiwan as on the margins of a kind of sprawling greater China. And I'd follow on from that and say the impetus of the book is really to place the Taiwan story at the center of how we talk about Taiwan. There's a tendency to treat Taiwan as an issue in relations with China or relations with the United States, to sort of talk about it as a metaphor for other things. So the book is really placing the Taiwanese version of that story at its center. And then from that, it expands on to discuss how that story matters for everybody else, not just for Taiwan. But it's really By placing the Taiwan story at the center of its own story,

I think it really helps people understand that Taiwan's past and its future will be made by the people of Taiwan one way or another. And that has really significant implications for how we're dealing with Taiwan and the place that Taiwan will find in the world going forward. I definitely appreciate that perspective. And a card from the table, as we were discussing before the show, I believe myself as an active duty military person and other members of the audience who are probably also active duty military, whether U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, international navalists of some stripe, probably approach the Taiwan story from a different perspective as a security issue, as a dilemma.

and very rarely understand Taiwan as the center of the story and understanding it on its own terms. So I think there's some incredible value in the book, not just from a, I guess, a pure purpose, but also I would say even pragmatically, it would make us more equipped to approach the situation more holistically if we understand that Taiwanese perspective. So thank you so much for that. So your book, Chapter by Chapter, it provides a framework for explaining the status of Taiwan, It's democratization and how Taiwanese people conceptualize the land in which they live and as a nation unto itself. And your first chapter hits that theme hard, arguing that Taiwan was not created through just one struggle against a single Chinese party state, but against two Chinese party states, against both the People's Republic of China, or the PRC, as ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, and against the once authoritarian Republic of China, which was used to rule exclusively by the KMT, the Chinese Nationalist Party. So could you discuss this in more depth, as well as the

struggles against both states as Taiwan pursued its democratization? So I think another way to frame that is to say that Taiwan has thus far defeated two imperial projects that were launched by two different Chinese party states. So first, the Republic of China government that lost the Chinese Civil War in 1949, fled to Taiwan to reestablish its government, bringing its kind of institutions and its organs of government to Taipei. And they intended to use Taiwan as a base for what they called reconquering the mainland and recreating and kind of cross-strait one China nation in that way. So they sort of extracted natural resources, human resources, military resources from Taiwan in the pursuit

of that goal. And the process of democratization in Taiwan, which again, sort of really accelerated in the late 80s and early 90s, actually put an end to that project. So even the KMT had to switch its kind of political agenda and its party platform away from this kind of goal towards militarized reconquest of the mainland and into, in a way, serving the Republic of China government today because it's a multi-party democracy, serves the needs of the people of Taiwan. And it defends the needs of the people of Taiwan in a way that it didn't do so prior to democratization. I think if I can take a slight tangent here, one interesting historical fact, I think it's like the fact that Taiwan has an army. And where did this army come from?

Initially, it was an occupying force. So the KMT occupied Taiwan beginning in 1945 on behalf of the Allied powers at the end of World War II. And with their loss in the Chinese Civil War, 1947 to 1949, you had half a million soldiers and even more refugees, the same kind of half a million soldiers, half a million refugees coming to Taiwan from China. And that army initially was an occupying force. It was an agent of martial law in Taiwan. Most of its energies were either directed towards this kind of very unrealistic plan for, quote, retaking the mainland or also or towards the kind of domestic suppression of dissidents and other people in Taiwan. And today, as a result of democratization, what that army is supposed to do and who the army is supposed to defend is completely different. And that army is now tasked with the defense of people who largely think of themselves, the vast majority of them think of themselves as Taiwanese and their homeland as Taiwanese and their goal not as, quote, retaking the mainland, but ensuring that they can kind of live in a society that's based on their own self-determination. So that's the first kind of imperial, modern imperial Chinese imperial project that I think Taiwan and the people of Taiwan defeated. The second one is a kind of ongoing resistance that takes place in many different ways. The military and security dimension is only one of them.

There's diplomatic and cultural and soft power components to this as well. But resistance against takeover by the People's Republic of China. So we've really in our book emphasized that it would be a takeover. It would not be peaceful unification, which is a term you hear used a lot, but rather it would be annexation and there would be strong resistance. And so, you know, the PRC is trying many different kind of great tactics and sort of soft coercion in order to try to get Taiwan to agree to political union. But really, those tactics thus far have failed. And so Taiwan thus far has kind of defeated the efforts of the PRC to unify it, to annex it. Yeah. I'd follow on from Catherine's tangent about the status of the Taiwanese military, which is appropriate for this discussion. It's one of the challenges that the military has identified is how they tell their own story, how they teach it to their own incoming officers. So it's a very difficult where the Republic of China Army arrived in 1945.

then we have 1947-49. So it's a very challenging, very difficult history. And this whole question of what is actually being defended? Is it Taiwan? Is it the Republic of China? Is contentious and the military wrestles with that. In terms of sort of broadly, yeah, the idea that there are two forces that are being resisted by the Taiwanese. One of the things that the book work through in a lot of detail is that resistance begins long before even the Chinese nationalists arrived in 1945. There's the history of the Dutch period in the 17th century, the Qing period, and then in particular, the Japanese colonial period, where you see an effort emerging at many, many different levels of society in Taiwan to think about

being Taiwanese to resist Japan. You get indigenous politics, a whole range of forces kind of marshaled at the beginning of the 20th century. And then those have continued right up to the present. And so the book tries to bring that very complex and contentious history of the entire 20th century to bear upon what the Taiwanese are doing now with respect to both the ROC and the PRC and how immensely, immensely complex that is for them. Is it okay to add something else? Please, of course. Okay. I'm just thinking how in Taiwan, the process of democratization was really connected to demilitarization initially. And so because people of my parents' generation, my grandparents' generation, they lived under this one party system that had imposed

what was up until that point before the Syrian, before kind of Syrian experience, the longest period of martial law, like in modern history and 37 years end to end. And so, so much of the society was militarized. You had two-year conscriptions for young men. You had kind of military police that set up shop in schools in order to kind of surveil student populations. You had bases scattered across the island. You had military villages where soldiers who had come over with the KMT were given land. I mean, often poor land, but land to settle on. And the process of democratization really involved dismantling the military police, like their kind of embeddedness within society involved reducing conscription. So for a period, it went as low as four months

for young men and shutting down Air Force bases, military bases, and converting them to cultural sites and sites for families to gather on the weekends. And what's happening now, though, because of the threat from the PRC is a kind of tricky dance that elected officials have to do, where they have to sort of motivate the population in a way to accept longer conscription. So conscription now has gone up to one year to accept that some portion of the GDP will go towards purchasing military weapons, and that in a way, now this society that is now democratic has to learn to remilitarize it to a greater degree for its own protection. So there's a bit of an irony in that process, I think. Yeah, a lot of great meat there. So thank you very much for those

responses. With respect to the resistance on Taiwan beginning prior to 1949, I find that very interesting. So I brought to mind, and I'll put this in the show notes, this other tome, Taiwan's 400-Year History by Sugei. That's a deep cut. We go on a whole other rabbit hole because I'm sure this is a controversial figure, but to your point, again, that the

history of Taiwan, you know, proceeds, of course, 1949, and the relationship with the people of Taiwan and the Chinese mainland is very, very complex. So many periods of resistance against multiple powers, well outside of China, of course, with respect to the changing relationship of Taiwan and its military. I'll just share this brief anecdote. I was in Taipei about a year ago in visiting uh from for my first visit there the cheng kai shek memorial hall and what was compelling to me was fascinating to me was in this you know basically this very huge shrine to uh presumably the founder of the republic of china or rather of you know bringing it to taiwan i should say um there are diagrams and uh storyboards everywhere about the white terror and the

martial law and all these other elements of it that many of the people who, you know, were there when the nationalists arrived, they saw things very, very differently than the story that the KMT told many of us to include the United States as a formal mutual defense treaty ally for the longest time. And that brings me to another point. What's interesting, perhaps, to many members of this audience is the changing relationship between Taiwan and its military, and of course, with the rest of the world. Notably, they're used to be a mutual defense treaty alliance between the United States and the Republic of China.

Of course, the One China policy brought an end to that, but the Taiwan Relations Act still permits and allows defense services to be provisioned. So this interesting dance, as you described it, as Taiwan seeing itself in its military, as well as the rest of the world's relationship with Taiwan and its military is a very fascinating and complex web. So forgive me, I'll stop talking. I'll turn the attention back to yourselves. So let's go on to chapter two. Chapter two of your book, it provides what you described as four alternative histories that explain how Taiwan became a de facto independent state with an identity and a way of life that differs markedly from that of modern China. Can you briefly describe these four alternative

histories? Yeah, absolutely. Do you want to do Indigenous history and then also the Japanese? Yeah, sure. Yeah. So one of the histories we talk about is Indigenous history. So Taiwan has Indigenous peoples who've lived on Taiwan for many thousands of years and have built societies and cultures over that period of time. And they have been subject to a series of colonizations by a range of external forces, Portuguese, the Dutch, Chen Chenggong, who was a Ming loyalist naval commander in the 17th century, and then the Qing Empire, and then ultimately Japan. And then you could argue the Chinese nationalists after 1945. And that's a history that, certainly writing as an Australian, as I do, is one that resonates because of Australian

Indigenous peoples, and lots of settler societies have Indigenous peoples who've experienced degrees of dispossession and marginalization in their own societies. And that generates really, really complicated contemporary politics in lots of societies, including Taiwan. But it's a very different version of the story that certainly Beijing tells. It's also a different version to the story that the Chinese nationalists told. It's also not unchallenging for the Democratic Progressive Party, who are the nominally sort of pro-sovereignty party in Taiwan, where they have to accommodate Indigenous histories, and they do so reasonably well. But it's a really distinctive and complex history. And it's also one of accommodation at various points and very

strong resistance at other points, particularly during the Japanese period. So an event like the Wushu incident of 1930, where the Siddique people organized an armed resistance against Japan and the Japanese Empire, really threw the entire might of the Japanese Empire to stop them. It was a very dramatic and very challenging military campaign, waged as a guerrilla war by the Siddique and then the Japanese responded with their huge military machinery. So there are all of these different versions which run against and run parallel to the more received versions that we know. And we talk about the Katagalan people in Taipei, who were the original indigenous inhabitants of Taipei in the capital, but don't really exist anymore. Their legacy is

sort of there. The archaeological legacy is there. But unlike other indigenous nations in Taiwan, they don't have that sort of status. And it speaks to the way indigeneity can disappear under certain circumstances and also be revived like the Sariah people. And it's a really compelling part of the Taiwan story. So that's the first alternative history. The second And one involves moving the clock back to the 1920s during Japanese colonial rule.

And so the struggle for self-rule in Taiwan, some form of self-determination can be dated back, I think, a century or more. So there were big movements for self-rule within the larger Japanese empire for a Taiwanese parliament, for example, to be based in Taipei that would have some kind of budgeting and local authority vis-a-vis the Japanese diet during the colonial period. period. And so thinking about aspirations towards democracy and self-rule as not really being that new in Taiwan, but actually predating the arrival of the ROC and then continuing on through to the 1980s and then also the 1990s. So just again, decentering that 1949 movement, shifting the perspective. And then the third alternative history we offer is what we call the first failed attempt at unification in modern Taiwanese history. So 1945, the KMT armies arrive, and a sort of kind of skeleton government is set up in Taiwan. And

the KMT are also in the process of losing the Chinese civil war. So they're also trying to kind of leverage resources and material from Taiwan to ship off to China to try to aid the war effort there. And so prices go up, inflation goes up, and kind of the KMT take over a lot of the state machinery that the Japanese had left behind. So there's a monopolization of resources there. So a lot of discontent among the population in Taiwan that already is living on the island. And so that's 6 million people in 1945, approximately, both indigenous Taiwanese and also the descendants of Ming and Qing era Chinese settlers. And so a lot of discontent bubbles up into something called the 228 incident or the 228 uprisings nation uh island-wide revolts

i should say island-wide revolts against uh the corruption of the newly arrived kmt government and these uprisings are brutally suppressed um estimates kind of range from any uh anywhere from 18,000 to 20,000 Taiwanese are killed by KMT soldiers. There's reinforcements sent over from China to suppress the uprisings, suppress calls for self-rule, for greater participation of the Taiwanese in local governance. And so we argue that that is actually an example of a failed unification with China. So we actually kind of think we know how forced unification with the PRC might play out, that there would be resistance, that there would be imprisonment, death, torture, that it wouldn't be a process of peaceful unification, which again is that idea that I would

argue a kind of fantasy. If that was ever possible, I don't think it's possible today, um given who the Taiwanese people are as a whole and um how again the kind of majority what the majority of opinions are in Taiwan um so we argue that the 1945 to 1947 moment really is is um uh something that can tell us what any attempt at uh kind of annexation might look like if the PRC were to attempt that. And then the fourth alternative history... I'll just jump in with a couple of them. Yeah, of course. Yeah, please.

To speak about first the Japanese period and democratization, there's some really interesting parallels between self-determination movements in other sort of colonial societies, including British colonial societies at the beginning of the 20th century. so the Taiwanese didn't make it as it were

they aspired to it they campaigned with the Japanese empire but they were not granted self-determination and once Japan annexed Manchuria in 1931 and then invaded China in 1937 all of that became impossible in Taiwan

but there are these the Taiwan story in many ways parallels other sort of colonial societies as well including Australia, New Zealand, Canada went through similar sort of early 19th, early 20th century sorts of experiences. I'd also say on 45 to 47, and particularly the 228 incident in 1947, it was global news. It was an incredibly shocking event and well reported internationally. And I've certainly seen, heard it claimed that it

was one of the key events that led the United States, in fact, to weaken its commitment to the Chinese nationalists and indirectly give the Chinese communists a bit of an advantage in fighting against the nationalists because U.S. resolve became, the disgust was so deep, it became weaker. It was only once the Korean War began in the middle of 1950 that the United States really switched back to full support for the Chinese nationalists. So this idea that events in taiwan play out internationally in really complicated ways with extremely long long-term implications i think is really in that 45 to 47 period so the last narrative yeah yeah um the last narrative we talk about is that taiwan that's kind of suspended in time

between these two possible futures so one future is um again kind of forced unification with the And then it's the erasure of a kind of separate Taiwanese or unique Taiwanese identity as a result, or potentially a kind of continuation of Taiwan's democratic society and system of self-rule. So it's hard to say what pathway will unfold. And it's a key theme of the book, that Taiwan exists in this sort of state of suspension. Its future could be the beginning of a terrible international conflict, or it could be a pathway to self-determination for change in China. And to be Taiwanese is to live permanently in this state of very consequential futures, but to be not quite able to realize them. And so everything that happens there is incredibly significant. If there is conflict across the Taiwan Strait, that'll shape the entire future of the 21st century. That'll define the 21st century.

If Taiwan becomes a self-determining nation in the international system, that will do that as well in a different way. So being Taiwanese means to be permanently in this state of anticipation for these potential futures, which is the last narrative we have in that chapter. I really feel that that chapter was one of the hallmarks of the book. And it opened my eyes up to so many things you just described and those layers of different understandings and that tension. And as far as not seeing it through this very myopic lens, as far as, again, CCP, KMT, full stop, understanding all these different permutations of Taiwanese history and identity and how power structures change. And as the status of the island nation changed, depending on who may have been occupying or trying to occupy the island. I think one thing that stood out, and forgive me, I can't recall if it went into detail in this book or another, but at least referenced the phenomenon, for example, of indigenous Taiwanese during the time of Japanese occupation joining the Imperial Japanese Army and then going to fight off of the island, becoming very notable for their warrior virtues and their ferocity and their skill. And then after the war coming back and so much of that going out the window in terms of, hey, you fought for the wrong side.

And so many other players, whether they're indigenous or not, so many who had invested heavily in Japanese, whether it's business, just learning the language, going to school there, being educated, suddenly that being a mark against you, perhaps, depending on where you fell out in society. So just one little anecdote there, again, and you see the layering and the tension was really brought to the fore in this chapter. So thank you very much for that discussion. Just another anecdote. There were Japanese holdouts, the soldiers who were in Southeast Asia who believed that the war was still going and held out for decades. There was one discovered in the Philippines, I think, in 1970, who was Japanese. The last so-called holdout ever discovered in Indonesia in 1972, I think it was. was actually a Taiwanese, indigenous Taiwanese.

So when he was repatriated, he went back to Taiwan. He didn't go to Japan. And the last Japanese soldier was very celebrated when he returned and he became a sort of a minor celebrity. The Taiwanese who went back to Taiwan, no one really understood how to deal with him. And his story was a very, very difficult one. He had alcohol abuse and just didn't prosper at all upon his return to Taiwan.

So really painful and very complex engagement with that incredibly complex history. That's just riveting, absolutely riveting. Thank you for that, Anto. Moving on to the next chapter, chapter four. It argues that Taiwan's existence exposes contradictions in the post-World War II international system, in which the promise of self-determination by sovereign nations is limited by the interests of other powerful states. In the chapter, it also notes how other governments and NGOs are culpable in the erasure of Taiwanese sovereignty. Can you put this in a little bit more context for the listeners? What were you driving at?

Yeah, so that's the idea that after World War II, an international system was created with organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank and then what we think of as being the international system. And there was an ideal that was in that system, which was that we wouldn't have war anymore. We would have a mechanism globally for solving problems based on nation states. And the Republic of China, that entity, was absolutely at the center of the creation of that system. And its artifacts are scattered throughout it. So the Republic of China is still in the UN Charter as one of the five founding signatories to the United Nations, even though the Republic of China hasn't sat in the UN since 1971. so that system was created as that ideal but the reality was that the international system still has great powers exercising their interests through the power that they can muster as states and that includes the United States but it also includes obviously China and Russia as well of the Soviet Union and in many ways Taiwan's status expresses that exact contradiction where

in an ideal international system, the Taiwanese would have self-determination and they would become a nation state in the world. But great powers have prevented that outcome. So we have China that prevents the Taiwanese from realizing that aspiration. And we also have the United States that prevents China from acting upon its goal of forcing unification. right so uh it's a uh you can see great you can see state power and also the ideals that the international system aspires to and the taiwanese express that um the chapter also talks about the way you know these big forces are in play but often the way we experience them is not through big debates around how the international system works but through these really sort of minor

issues that crop up all the time the very strange language that has to be used to talk about taiwan So they don't have embassies. They have economic and cultural offices. There isn't a Taiwanese ambassador. He's a representative or a director of the office. Very arcane and very fraught often and very frustrating restrictions that the Taiwanese have to endure because they aren't recognized as a state in the system that has been created. um and uh those uh those rules are imposed uh through state power not because because people are anxious really about how beijing might react they're not uh it's not because there's any um sort of real logic to to the application of those rules so it's this idea that we that um taiwan has this extremely difficult place in the world it's both inside and outside the international system. In some ways, it's at its very core. In some ways, it's completely excluded. And the way we experience that in day-to-day diplomacy and managing the relationship is

through this very strange and arcane use of language, which triggers often absurd responses from organizations, from Beijing certainly, but also from organizations that are trying to deal with Taiwan. And we give some examples of that sort of thing, like the International Birding Association, that they wouldn't allow the Taiwanese to call themselves the Taiwan Bird Association. They've got to be the Republic of China Bird Association. Just this really obsessive use of language and flags and national symbols and so on. So it's really about that story. And then it's about what these futures look like, why China is so obsessed, and what unification, if it was to be achieved which is china's goal uh would would it actually mean which would actually

mean the erasure of an entire people the kind of forced forgetting of that identity and which is a fantastically disruptive thing to try and actually implement um and so it really speaks to this idea of what's actually at stake um what's actually at stake is the integrity of the international system itself. And if you try and disrupt that, then that has very far reaching and potentially devastating consequences for all of us. It also has an Australian angle. So I did try and bring a bit of the Australian perspective on this, on the whole Taiwan story. And Catherine is very patient in taking on some of those sort of questions. So the chapter begins with a notorious press conference in Canberra, the Australian capital, with the Chinese ambassador. And he

was asked by an Australian journalist, the Australian journalist said, what about the people of Taiwan? Don't they get a say in their own future? And the ambassador basically said, no, they don't. And it was interesting, it was such a febrile and intense moment. It was where a journalist who didn't really know much about Taiwan was just sort of pushing the people of Taiwan into the discourse. And it was very intense because of what he was actually doing, which is actually making a people who are rendered invisible so often actually visible. And that's a very significant way of trying to deal with Taiwan, to actually remember that there are 23.5 million people who actually live there

and have a say in their own future and will make their own future one way or another. And so the chapter sort of tries to wrestle with all of those questions. It's very fascinating what you describe as absurd. about the absurdity yet the deadliness of this game languages from the outside it might seem like a shell game when i first walked into you know learning about all the things you just discussed my thought was like so for example ait like so that sounds embassy to me why don't we just call it an embassy right uh by any other name what's in a name really and truly but realizing as you dig deeper uh this you know potentially being like a very real red line uh that if you are

Let's put Taiwan back at the center of it. If you are Taiwanese, this absurd game of languages is truly you walking along a nice edge. And consequences can be you're an Olympic champion, but you have to perform under the Chinese Taipei title. And if you are cheering on your nation's team, you have to root for a team that's not called, let's say Taiwan or is under your flag, it's Chinese Taipei. But there's very, very important reasons why this tension, this absurd game is in play. So let me move forward to the epilogue of the book. I really loved it. The epilogue, it's powerful and it's hopeful in that it explores what it means to flourish in the face of an existential threat, as you put it in the book.

That is how Taiwan has become something of a miracle of democracy and capitalism in post-war East Asia, despite the constant threat of an unlawful invasion from an autocratic and aggressive PRC. So what are some of the key points from this chapter that you can share with us? Yeah, so I think the first key point is that the threat of invasion, from a Taiwanese perspective, doesn't just carry with it, of course, the threat of kind of military annihilation, but it's also used to keep Taiwan in line. And it's also, therefore, something that the Taiwanese have to try to deal with, even though they don't know exactly where the bright red lines are. They don't know whether invasion really will or will not come, but they have to try to manage this threat. And in trying to manage this threat, Taiwanese human, natural, economic resources are siphoned away from quality of life issues, long-term planning, a kind of vision for Taiwan. And instead, all these resources are devoted to trying to stay safe from China. And so I think that's really the difficulty that the Chinese military threat poses for Taiwan every day, whether invasion will or will not happen.

um so um young men are conscripted into the army um tax dollars are spent on military weapons and um people you know kind of have to deal with this sense of kind of existential worry or malaise in a way and um so the political debate ends up in many cases kind of revolving around what to do about this China threat, how seriously to take it, whether the worst will come and when it will come. And so ordinary kind of social issues, housing, environmental regulation, sort of judicial reform, immigration, labor rights, all of that, in a way, there just isn't as much energy that people in Taiwan get to devote to this. So that's a way of weakening Taiwanese society

without necessarily even kind of firing a single bullet or missile over the Taiwan Strait. I like that you said it was an optimistic chapter though, because I think that in many ways, like Taiwan does have the ability and the potential to be able to make changes for the better through this kind of democratic process, through this process of negotiation and discussion and consensus within society. For example, through welcoming more immigrants and liberalizing its immigration laws, which

are really, compared to the U.S., quite restrictive. Dual citizenship is very restricted. And who can kind of claim ROC citizenship? that's historically been based on ethnicity and kind of descent and blood and we sort of argue that we argue that if Taiwan can kind of conceive of itself as a more open more diverse society that welcomes more outsiders regardless of their heritage to kind of join and be able to gain status and citizenship within the society that taiwan will have a brighter future um and so the problems that it kind of faces today many of them can be decided um and improved by the

taiwanese people alone that that that this is kind of within their control to do if only they're willing. I'd follow up with those great comments that Catherine's just offered. It's one of the challenges in how we think about Taiwan, where there's a certain urgency to Taiwan's status. You know, there's a threat. There are really big decisions that have to be made. But Taiwan is also a kind of normal place. And what Taiwanese people want is sort of normality. They just want to live of secure society that wrestles. It has many problems as a society, as Catherine has outlined, and they want the space to be able to deal with that

through their democratic mechanisms as all democratic countries want to do. So one of the challenges in writing about Taiwan is there's an urgency to the task. There's a story that needs to be told because if people don't know the story, they'll make bad decisions if they're outside of Taiwan. But you don't want to be sort of constantly telling the story as one of urgency and anxiety and worry. Also doesn't allow space to talk about the normality of Taiwan

and the actual aspirations of the people of Taiwan, which is this sort of normality. So there's a sort of tension between wanting to recognize what is a quotidian and very pleasant place, but also recognizing that even that is a form of resistance against the idea that we must only think about it as a place that's always under threat which it is and so these this this tension goes backwards and forwards between how do we actually make sense of a place that is dealing with such unique circumstances so yeah i think the the epilogue tries to think about those sorts

of questions and remind the reader that it is a society like any other with lots of problems lots of policy issues that need to be addressed, but the threat takes the Taiwanese away from being able to do that effectively. I appreciate those very generous comments. Catherine, at first I thought you were trying to very tactfully tell me I completely missed the point of the chapter. No, no, I actually, I do think it is, we called it a kind of melancholy optimism in the book, which actually one of our peer reviewers really disliked that phrase. But I think, you know, there's a sadness to thinking about Taiwan, but there's also an element of hope, too, because, again, it's like overcome great odds to be where it is today. And so the hope is that, you know, it can sort of continue that street.

You never bet against the Taiwanese. If you look at the course of the 20th century and 21st century, you wouldn't bet against them. And I think this is something that Beijing struggles with. I don't think Beijing really understands Taiwan very well, certainly at the more senior levels. And I think the international community as well should be mindful that the people of Taiwan have built a society over the course of the 20th and 21st century that is a very successful one in many, many ways, despite its challenges. And you wouldn't assume that the you should one should never assume that that society is going to go down without some really, really tough fight, which will happen in very complex ways, both within Taiwan and around the world. And I think bringing that story to the center of our thinking is a really valuable exercise in thinking about the decisions that we all have to make about the future of Taiwan. Yeah, and that's a great segue to my final question here. I'll put my cards on the table. Again, I was drawn to the book because of both personal and professional interests in Taiwan. And on the professional side, many of our listeners may be approaching the subject from a security perspective, especially vis-a-vis cross-strait relations between Taiwan and China and considerations for deterrence and warfighting in a Taiwan defense scenario.

And the book resonated with me in that I discovered many of the proposals made from those working in the national security space, they can appear somewhat ham-fisted, especially without an understanding of Taiwanese nationhood, politics, and identity. So my final question to you all is, what would you offer as the most important ideas from your book that national security scholars or practitioners should carry with them regarding Taiwan? i'd come back to katherine's comment about unification having been tried before and we saw very clearly the outcome of that which is the 228 uprising the the slaughter of tens of thousands of taiwanese people and incredibly consequential geopolitical effects of that event And I think anyone who imagines that the Taiwan issue will sort of go away somehow, that some sort of bargain could be struck, some sort of deal made where one way or another, that China and Taiwan will be unified in whatever form, I think needs to be mindful of a bargain being struck during World War II, that the Republic of China would take control of Japanese territories, including Taiwan, and it would be fine.

And it really wasn't. So I think understanding the consequences, the decades-long consequences of making ill-considered decisions around the future of Taiwan is a message that the book has within it, I think. Catherine? Yeah, just to follow up on that and to reiterate that I think peaceful unification, that's the phrase that the PRC has coined for its vision for what it thinks should happen to Taiwan. But I really think it's a mirage. I think that understanding that the vast majority of people in Taiwan today don't think of themselves as the real China or think of themselves as belonging to the PRC. I think that's so critical to understanding Taiwan today, rather than through a kind of

Cold War framework of two Chinas kind of competing to be the legitimate right and true China. In a way, I think Taiwan wants to be excluded from that narrative. And that as a result, if unification were to take place, it would be under circumstances that are forced, circumstances that would involve resistance. What that means from an American policy standpoint, you know, I think we don't prescribe anything in the book, but we just try to help people understand that the typical PRC frameworks that are used for comprehending Taiwan actually don't comprehend modern Taiwan in any way at all. And instead, they sort of lead the listener, the reader astray. Thank you very much for those last comments. Phenomenal stuff.

Finally, where can listeners find you online and what else are you working on? So I currently have a project that is being funded by the Australian Department of Defense, which is a bit of a swerve for me, sort of getting really into that sort of space. And that is looking at stakeholder responses across Australia to a Taiwan crisis. so we're talking to different groups industry government academia communities just to get a read on exactly what people understand about taiwan itself about the the status of taiwan and about what a potential crisis would mean for these different these different stakeholder groups it's been a very illuminating project so far there's been quite a number of surprises in terms of the information that we've been able to gather so that's what i'm working on

You can find me at the University of Tasmania website. So I do have a presence there. I probably should update it. But, yeah, and I have a certain social media presence. Catherine is the social media queen compared to me, but I do crop up on social media from time to time as well. So, yeah, I'm sort of out and about. But I did have a – I wrote a lot for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's The Strategist, although I haven't written for them since earlier last year around the election.

But there's a lot of my material there, which just in a kind of op-ed style, sort of 800 to 1,000-word style piece, sections that talks about events in Taiwan, the things that were happening at that moment. and capturing some of the broader themes that the book is also talking about. So if you want some bite-sized versions of me, you can grab it from the Strategist website. Great, thanks. Yeah, Mark and I actually met on Twitter and that's how I approached him

with this idea for a book project. So he's M-H-A-R-4? Yeah, I have a very strange Twitter handle, which is just at M-H-A-R-4. there's a reason why it is that um but it's not really a very consequential story but yeah so that's where it is i'm also on blue sky these days using my actual name so you can so i'm katie at katie lila c-a-t-i-e-l-i-l-a on twitter and also now blue sky um yeah now that now that twitter is less usable than it used to be um and we're but we're still getting the hang

blue sky and actually like how to use it. So I think I moved to Taiwan to take up this new job at National Zenzi University. I'm now like a Taiwanese taxpayer. And so my perspectives have, my experiences and perspectives have shifted as well. And so I just want to shout out an organization that I really admire called Forward Taiwan that is working on trying to liberalize immigration policy in Taiwan. Taiwan has a really low birth rate, as do many East Asian countries, for a host of complicated social and cultural reasons. But of course, one reason in Taiwan is, again, this kind of difficulty in having optimism and hope for the future, um in part because of this china threat and so forward taiwan is trying very hard to even open

up the conversation in taiwan about um allowing dual citizenship for long-term non-prc foreigners who come and live in taiwan make a living there contribute there um and whose like labor participation is absolutely essential to maintaining the strength of the Taiwan economy. Excellent. I will include all that in the show notes to include your Twitter and Blue Sky accounts so that folks can follow you if desired. Listeners, the book is Revolutionary Taiwan, Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order. Get it, read it, know it, love it. Catherine, Mark, I had a wonderful time. Thank you again so much for joining us. thank you for the invitation yeah it's great fair winds and following seas

and to listen bravo zulu for tuning in we'll see you next time Thank you. Oh, no.