Search Engine - The many lives of Taiwan

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

We go deep into the story of Taiwan. How a tiny island escaped demise, chartered a course from colonial subjugation through mass Barbie production and into the technological powerhouse it is today.  The Tiger Leading the Dragon: How Taiwan Propelled China's Economic Rise by Shelley Rigger Get tickets to hear PJ read live! Friends With Words at Roulette

Hello. Before we start this week, a quick announcement. Next month, June 16th in Brooklyn, I'm going to be part of a night of readings. It's part of this reading series called Friends with Words, hosted by writer and director Susanna Fogel. The theme of the night is writers reading, risky work that they feel scared to read on stage. I will be there. Alongside This American Life's Ira Glass, Amelia Clark from Game of Thrones, fiction writer Kristen Rupennian. It is a stacked lineup. There's even more people. I think it's going to be a special night. The venue is Roulette in Brooklyn, June 16th. Tickets are 25 bucks. There will be a link in our show notes. One night only. Okay, here's this week's episode after these ads.

Welcome to Surgeon. I'm PJ Vote. No question too big, no question too small. President Trump met last week in China with President Xi Jinping. They talked only a bit about one of the biggest points of contention between our two superpowers, the one I was listening for, Taiwan. Taiwan is an independent democracy 100 miles southeast of China's coast. China wants to take Taiwan for itself, but the U.S. for decades has stood in the way. Taiwan also happens to be where almost all of the high-quality graphics chips driving the AI race are made. If either country controlled Taiwan, the AI race would be fundamentally over.

That is most of what I knew about Taiwan before this week's episode. I knew about it as an object in two other country's designs. I didn't know much more about the place itself. How did Taiwan become a democracy? How did Taiwan end up manufacturing all those high-tech chips? How did an island this tiny become one of the most important places in the world? So I did what I do these days when I'm curious. I asked Garrett Graham, our show's senior producer,

to find me one of America's foremost experts on Taiwan, and also to select someone who's a really good storyteller. It took them all of two days. So now I'm going to recreate for you the journey we took from Search Engine Studios, a guided tour through modern Taiwan's history. Do you mind just saying your name and what you do professionally? Sure. My name is Shelley Rigger. I am the Brown Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College in North Carolina.

And right now I'm also the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty here at Davidson. And how did you find yourself curious about Taiwan in the first place many years ago? When I was a college student in the early 80s, the U.S. had just normalized relations with mainland China, with the People's Republic of China, and broken formal diplomatic relations and, in fact, ended recognition of this country that exists on Taiwan, which its formal title is the Republic of China. We always call it Taiwan, but it has another name. And so I took a class where we were going to figure out, you know, what's going to happen to Taiwan going forward.

And so that's when I first became interested in Taiwan. In particular, I was interested in the indigenous Taiwanese people who are about 2% of the population today and have been in Taiwan for millennia and did not originate on the Chinese mainland. You know, they sort of predate the idea of China. So I spent the summer of 1983 in Taiwan learning about whatever happened to Taiwan's indigenous people,

and then I was hooked. Interesting. So, and help me understand, like, you come into Taiwan studies, curious about the indigenous people of Taiwan. There's also overlaid on this very tiny country a vast history of colonization. What other powers show up?

What do they do? And how does it shape the place? So I love a good analogy. Me too. So I'm going to talk about this super famous object. I guess it's an artwork that is in the National Palace Museum, which is in Taiwan. It's a rock that looks like a...

punk of pork. But it's a special kind of pork that Chinese really love. It's called Dong Poro. And it is like layers of fat and meat. And then on the top is a sort of skin layer that looks delicious because it looks like it has all kinds of wonderful flavors soaked into it. But it's actually a rock. And everybody in Taiwan wants to see it. And lots of people in mainland China want to see it too. When Chinese tourists come to Taiwan, they flock to the National Palace Museum. And they want to Let's see the meat rock. Yeah. And Taiwan's human history is a little bit like the meat rock, right?

There are all these layers that accumulated on top of one another of human communities. And they've now all kind of melded together to form one thing. The first layer, of course, are the indigenous Taiwanese who have been there as long as anyone can imagine, remember. Taiwan's indigenous people are Austronesian, meaning of the same kind of back in, you know, deepest ancient history origins as other South Pacific Islanders. And they may have been the sort of original South Pacific Islanders. The linguistic and DNA research suggests that many of the other South Pacific islands, people came there from Thai. Like in Moana with the boats, you know? The weather going from what island to another, that really happened.

But it seems as if the original island where all that started may have been Taiwan. Fascinating. So they speak a different language. Their cultures are very specific to Taiwan, the island where their cultures developed over thousands of years. And they were there already when Chinese started coming from the Chinese mainland, about 100 miles. away in the 1500s and especially in the 1600s and later. But the second layer, and in some ways the thickest layer, are people that came to Taiwan after the mid-1500s for the most part and before about 1900. And these are the folks that we often call native Taiwanese or local Taiwanese.

The reason people came from mainland China to Taiwan was because it was very crowded in the mainland, and there were opportunities for economic benefit in Taiwan. It was rugged. It was far away from any source of comfort or order. There was a lot of competition for land and resources. The indigenous people were already there, so they're going to fight back to hold on to their stuff. Newer migrants coming from the mainland competed with older migrants from the mainland and different communities from the mainland competed with one another. None of those groups got

along with each other. So it was a pretty violent place. It was not the kind of place where you go because you're thinking about staying and setting your clan for all eternity. But over decades, some people did stay and they started to bring families over from the mainland, and Taiwan began to be a bit more of a kind of settled Chinese community. It's funny. The way you describe it, sounds a little bit like the American frontier west, like all these people going out to this rugged place to make a new life for themselves. There's already people there. The people who are settling don't totally get along with each other, but it sounds like Deadwood or something like that. Yeah, it is a lot like that, actually.

You know, and I'm suddenly thinking about the gold rush, which was all men. you know, initially, almost all men. And then people said, well, actually, you know, I'm not panning for gold anymore. I'm doing something else. But this is pretty good. So let me get me a wife from back east and settle down here. So over those centuries from about mid-1600s, when Taiwan really starts to kind of gel as a place for Chinese settlement, the population of Taiwan, the Chinese origin population increased very rapidly, and the place became a pretty important agricultural source, even for people back in the mainland. And as those kinds of things developed, the Chinese government started paying more attention, sending administrators over to Taiwan to try to kind of calm the chaos,

take a little sheriff to Deadwood, turn it into more of a part of the empire. So by the 1800s, Taiwan was pretty much governed more or less and some days more and some days less by the Qing Empire. But in 1895, the Qing court ceded Taiwan to the empire of Japan. So in 1894, China and Japan started fighting, and they were mostly fighting in the Korean Peninsula, fighting in Korea over Korea, but then the Japanese started moving in on actual Qing territory, and the Qing to settle that war

surrendered a lot of territory, including Korea. They accepted Japanese control over Korea, what we know is Korea today, and they also ceded Taiwan to the empire of Japan. And so they're saying to Japan, like, as a peace offering, we're giving you territory.

It's not within the mainland, but it's very close. So it's like a big give. Once Japan colonizes Taiwan, what does Japanese colonization look like for Taiwan in Taiwan? One of the motivations for Japan to ask for territory was that the Japanese also saw the Western powers leaning in in Asia. You know, they'd watched the colonization of Latin America,

of Africa, of South Asia, of Southeast Asia. So they're coming for us next, right? That's the message. And starting in the 1860s, the Japanese government did this huge campaign of modernization and really emulating features of Western societies and especially Western militaries and economies that they believed had enabled the West to become so successful in colonization. And they were like, all right, we're going to show that you can't colonize us because we're going to be just as good at colonizing other people as you are.

Interesting. But in Taiwan, in particular, their concept was this is going to be a model colony, and we're going to show how modern Japan is, because we're going to build roads. We're going to build reservoirs. We're going to build railroads and industry and telegraph lines in Taiwan to show that Japan is a modern country and can do all of these modernizing things. So, One of the features of colonization in Taiwan was it was actually quite developmental. The Taiwanese population at the end of the Japanese colonial period was more educated than pretty much any other population in Asia. So, you know, it was kind of a mixed bag. It was definitely colonization, and there was a certain kind of assimilationist spirit there.

So Taiwanese were educated in the Japanese language. and they were encouraged to take Japanese names. They were drafted into the Japanese army during the invasion of China, which started in the 1930s. But at the same time, looking back on it, a lot of Taiwanese recognized that it was also a period of order

and development for Taiwan. So how does Japanese colonization end? Taiwan's Japanese era ended in 1945 with the surrender of the emperor. Right, the emperor. Right, the emperor surrendered and all of his subjects heard him on the radio, surrendering, including his subjects in Taiwan. So for Taiwanese, this was a really weird moment, because on the one hand, they had been Japanese subjects. for 50 years, which if you think about it, you know, in the early 20th century, that's much of a

lifetime for most people. Yeah. They'd been Japanese subjects, but they knew themselves to be ancestrally, culturally, culturally, linguistically Chinese. So for many people in Taiwan, what they realized was that what was coming next, which was going to be a Chinese government, was something like a return, but also. something new, because they were not being returned to the China that they had left, which was the Qing Empire, which was gone.

They were being returned to this new Chinese state, the Republic of China, established in 1912, by the Chinese nationalists, whose leader by the end of World War II was Zhang Kai Shack. General John Qaishak, He's in full military uniform on an outdoor podium, declaring victory in 1945 after the defeat of the Japanese. After the Qing Dynasty had fallen, China had fractured into territories, mostly ruled by regional warlords. At the end of that fighting, Zhang Kishak's group, the nationalists, had come out nearly on top. with just one rival remaining, the communists.

The nationalists had also done something very smart during World War II. They'd sided with the Allies and gotten something in return, international recognition as China's legitimate rulers, and a promise that they would be handed all the territories Japan had seized from China at the war's end, including Manchuria, including Taiwan. During World War II, the U.S., Canada, Australia, and some of the U.S., the other allies are fighting in Asia. And a critical part of that action is happening in China.

And it's mainly the Chinese that are keeping that going. So from the perspective of the allied leaders, it's extremely important to keep Zhang Kai Sheck and his nationalist army in the war. They're thinking about, you know, what can we offer him to make sure that he stays motivated. It is no exaggeration to say that to see General Chiang Kajek and his wife in this Allied assembly was a very real pleasure to everyone. And one of the things they decided to offer him at the Cairo Conference was anything

that's a Japanese-held territory that used to be Chinese will go back to the Republic of China. Britain, America, and China expressed their resolve to exert unrelenting pressure on Japan, compelling her to disgorge the territory she has seized and occupied even before the First World War in 1914. We won't have some kind of decision-making process to see who should get it. We're just going to send it back to China.

General Isomachang arrives in Shanghai and is greeted by General Weidemeyer, American commander in China. A huge crowd welcomes the Chinese leader. He was absent for nine years because of the war and Japanese occupation. So 1945 rolls around. The Japanese decamp back to Japan,

and the nationalist government, the nationalist army, comes to occupy Taiwan because they've been promised that Taiwan will be Chinese territory after the war. But the Japanese did not turn back the same island they had taken 50 years before. They turned back a bomb-blasted citadel, richer in terms of industrial development, but poorer in terms of Chinese fielding.

So for a lot of Taiwanese, the feeling was, okay, we don't exactly know these people, but they have the same heritage that we do. So we're sort of cautiously optimistic that this is going to be fine. And they were really shocked by what happened. After 50 years out of the Japanese, the transition to the rule of the Chinese was painful, both for the people of Formosa and for the government of China. Because the nationalists, they had just finished a war with Japan, and they were preparing actively for a civil war against the communists.

So the communists and the nationalists had made a temporary alliance to fight Japan. But as soon as the Japanese were defeated, boom, the civil war is just inevitable. So the nationalist did not send the best of their forces. over to Taiwan because they were getting ready for the next step. Who they sent to Taiwan were a lot of kind of conscripted soldiers, many of them not even equipped for battle. Taiwanese wrote about watching people come down off of the ships with like umbrellas and poking gods.

Why umbrellas? Well, I guess because that's what, that was their personal property that they had managed to hang on to because they were sketched. out of the rice fields in southern China to go be in the army. So the Taiwanese were like, whoa, you know, the Japanese were all spit and polish, you know? They knew about army. What is this? So it was kind of like a bad start to begin with. And then from the nationalist perspective, okay, one, these people have been working for the enemy for 50 years. And a lot of them were in the Japanese army. So, you know, from the nationalist point of view, we are taking.

over kind of enemy territory. So we want to tell the folks that live there, hey, we're all Chinese, but also we're quite suspicious. And from the Taiwanese perspective, who are these clowns with their cooking pots and umbrellas? Yes, exactly, exactly. And the next thing the nationals decide to do is kind of pillage Taiwan for stuff they can use on the mainland. So they start taking apart factories and moving equipment to the mainland. because again, as far as they're concerned, this Taiwan thing, you know, that is like a side show that we can deal with later. But right now, we've got to save the Republic of China from a communist takeover.

So stuff goes from bad to worse in Taiwan with this kind of tensions rising between these two populations. And then February, 1947, a Taiwanese woman was selling cigarettes. she was selling single cigarettes, just like some of the people who have gotten in trouble in the U.S., and the cops came and somebody hit her. And there were other Taiwanese bystanders,

and they were just infuriated. You know, here's this woman just trying to get by, and you have this stupid tax that doesn't allow you to sell single cigarettes. And now you are abusing this woman, and they rioted. And that riot just kind of spread everywhere, and there was a whole island uprising against the nationalists. And the

nationalists were like, not ready for that. A lot of police and soldiers went back to barracks or even left the island altogether. And for a couple of weeks, it was like not clear who was in charge. Reigning local nationalist, Governor General Ken Yi, on the the radio, telling the people he's declaring martial law, in his words, entirely to protect them. This clip is a recreation, but those were his words. What happened next is that on March 8th, nationalist troops landed on the island. They began an indiscriminate campaign of violence against citizens. Soldiers fired into crowds, their street executions.

People were pulled from their homes, tied together by wire to others, and thrown into Kee Long Harbor to drown. We'll never know the actual death toll. According to scholars, it's somewhere between 10,000 and 28,000 people. They killed a lot of the leaders. They killed a lot of kind of socially important people. Landlords, professors, a lot of intellectuals were taken in, either imprisoned or executed. And they kind of decapitated the society.

and those who were not personally affected were very well warned that you do not challenge this government. So that is called the February 28th or 228 incident, and that's really the defining moment for Taiwan politics ever after where Taiwanese learned that the nationalists were not going to cut them any slack just because they were Chinese too, but we're going to impose their rule with an iron fist

and that Taiwanese were going to have to figure out how to live under that regime. Because it's just like an intensely, intensely, sort of nationally, socially traumatic event. After that, everything is just different. Everything is different after the 228 incident, but it gets really different in 1949 when the Communist Party and its Red Army

are successful in defeating the Nationalists in the Civil War. This is the part of the story where it goes from something tragic, colonial violence to something very, very absurd. A plot twist transpires that does not resemble the history of any other country I've learned about. So the nationalists who'd been ruling Taiwan from mainland China, The first thing that happens is that in 1949, the nationalists suffer a huge defeat at the hands of the communist army.

October 1st, 1949, Mausadong declares the founding of the People's Republic of China. A monster rally in Shanghai celebrates communism's greatest victory since the coup in Czechoslovakia. Five months ago, the troops of Mao Tse-Tung marched into Shanghai unopposed. That victory was celebrated in July at a gigantic parade in what is today the largest, And anybody from the nationalist movement, the nationalist government army who can get out of mainland China is out. The whole nationalist government gets transported to Taiwan. Oh, because this is where they have to go because they're being forced off the mainland. Exactly. They're defeated on the mainland. The only place left that they control is Taiwan.

And that's where they go. They set up the government there. They take the legislators who are elected from all over China in 1947, they become the legislature of the Republic of China. But their chamber and their offices are in Taiwan, and they cannot go back to China. This is John Kajek talking just a few years after decamping to Taiwan. No longer the country. No longer the country. conquering young military leader. Now a more tragic figure, the so-called leader of the Republic of China,

exiled to a nearby island, claiming that any day now, his nationalist armies will return to the mainland, sweep through, vanquish the communists. He's talking shit. They're going to go back to China. They're convinced that they will because the mission the nationalist government sets for itself

and for the people of Taiwan is we're going to fight back to the mainland we're going to drive out communism and reestablish a real legitimate Chinese state over all of China, including Taiwan. I had never known this. It's one of the things I learned from Dr. Rigger. While I had actually known that Taiwan had often been ruled by a party called the Nationalists, what I'd assumed, of course, was that the nation in nationalists meant Taiwan. It didn't. the nation the rulers of Taiwan were obsessed with was China. They saw themselves as Chinese, deeply Chinese, as the true Chinese government,

not the imposter one run by Mao and the people after him. The tragedy they were experiencing, the feeling that something else should have happened, that it was all going to get fixed next year or the year after, it's the kind of agony you only normally encounter in sports fans. And what would happen next was even more interesting. As the decades passed, the nationalists running Taiwan would live among the Taiwanese people, people who had been their colonial subjects, people they had treated with violence and subjugation.

That proximity would change both sides, would change the shape of the government, the economy. The nationalists would not get what they wanted. They'd get something that was maybe better. That story after these ads. Welcome back to the show. The story of how Taiwan became a democracy is long and gradual. We're going to watch it in fast forward. Essentially, at the beginning of our montage, you have nationalists from China running Taiwan.

But as the decades pass and they fail to take back their mainland, what will happen is they will get old, and they will die, and they will have to be replaced. And the nationalists can't go to mainland China and go get more colonial rulers. That's the country they're in exile from. So over time, the nationalists start letting them. the Taiwanese people run for office. Low-level office at first, but the democracy just keeps going

with help from activists, with help from time, from the bottom up. And by the 1990s, Taiwan has a very different government from mainland China. Two states, siblings, separated by a schism, growing more and more different as the years pass. Sometimes you could watch the same idea

take hold in China and Taiwan, but expressed in crucially different ways. For instance, in China in the 1950, Mao enacts land reform. He decides that landlords are evil, has one to two million of them killed, and gives their land to poor farmers. It's an atrocity,

that poor farmers in the end also don't actually get to keep the land. Taiwan also does land reform, but a gentler, more interesting kind. Taiwan confiscated land from landlords who owned above a certain amount, but the process was much less insane. The landlords, compensated by the government,

were also given shares in some big state-owned company. rather than shooting them, Mao's version. In Taiwan, the idea was to absorb these landlords into the state industrial class, which kind of worked. Land reform in Taiwan had a little bit of a capitalist flair to it because you had to pay for it and the price was very low. And the government gave farmers a lot of support to be successful in agriculture. And then the people whose land was appropriated were also paid. again, not as much as they would have liked to have been,

but enough that it wasn't like the same vibe as in the mainland where it was a violent appropriation of land. It's not somebody shows up at your house and says, like, you capitalist pig. It's a little closer to like eminent domain. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And one of the things they did was they paid some of the landlords, not only in cash, but also in shares in companies. So they're already thinking ahead to industrialization.

right? So that unleashed a huge explosion of agricultural productivity. And a lot of rural families very quickly began to accumulate money. And what are they going to spend their money on? They're going to spend their money on making a little workshop or a little factory. And the government also made sure that as little manufacturing industries appeared, they would have what they needed. So the state took over the upstream industrial sector. So petrochemicals so that you have plenty of plastic. And if you think about Taiwan's exports in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, plastic is at the core. Cement, steel, shipbuilding, logistics, transportation, energy, all the things you need to be sure that if you can make a Barbie, you can get her to the U.S. for sale, right?

So all over Taiwan, people start in their backyards, in their garages, in little factory buildings that they built in the middle of a village. They start making every kind of consumer doodad, you can imagine. And is this, are a lot of these consumer doodads? I'm curious about America's relationship to Taiwan during this period. Is it like we are the buyers of these consumer doodads? Like, how are we positioned? We are 100% the buyers of these consumer doodads, right? And what are the consumer doodads?

What are we buying? What are they sending out? Yeah. Right after World War II, your listeners may not remember, but for your grandparents, everything was made in Japan, made in Japan, made in Japan. For my generation, 1970s, everything was made in Taiwan. And there's a funny moment in Toy Story where Buzz Light Year, who remember, thinks he is a real guy. Yeah. You know, they're all telling him, dude, you're just a toy. He pops open the cuff of his...

glove and it says it right there made in Taiwan. That's when he knows, I'm not a real person. I'm actually a toy like everybody else in this box. So it was toys, it was apparel, it was our bicycles, it was, you know, our writing implements, the pens and pencils, the little stationary objects, but also all kinds of things that go into like electronics, you know, a transistor radio. And actually, the whole transistor radio could be made in Taiwan by 1980, maybe even before. But lots of little connectors and wire specialized components for electronic devices, things like Christmas decorations, you know, all of those kind of high volume, low-tech consumer goods, production shifted from Japan to Taiwan and Korea,

especially in the 70s and 80s as Japan is upgrading into auto manufacturing and a lot more heavy industry and high value equipment. So the U.S. for its part, is happy to get all this stuff because after World War II,

the U.S. wanted industrial upgrading. We don't want to be making like cheap junk in the U.S. We want to be making expensive things that have a high profit margin. So we threw open our market to these Northeast Asian manufacturing partners so that they would do the low end and our consumers would benefit from low prices and our manufacturers would be sort of driven

up the value chain. So that's what Taiwan was doing. And that was a very sort of democratic, economic pattern because they weren't forming huge companies. Most of Taiwan's export oriented manufacturers were and continue to be quite small by global standards and very nimble and flexible. So, you know, if we're no longer making Skipper, we're making Ken this year, all those Barbie villages where they literally made all the Barbies and all their clothes and they put it all in packages and all their shoes and pocketbooks and everything. You know, we just get new molds from Mattel and we immediately shift production from one thing to another. Got it. So that enriched most Taiwanese. So if you think about Taiwan in the post-war period,

what people saw was their standard of living steadily rising. And the quality of life going from being a pretty rugged agricultural society to by the 1990s, they're beginning to be post-industrial. So then you have a democracy that is also a really serious economy. What I understand also is like, how does Taiwan then go from there to now? Because now it's not like, oh, the place that makes all the Barbies. It's like the industrial powerhouse that is producing the thing that the entire world economy is obsessed with. Like, how does that happen? Right.

1987 was a big year in Taiwan. The president was Jean-Kaisek's son. Jiang Jing Jing Guo, and he made a couple of super-consequential decisions. In Taiwan today, the Parliament passed a new national security law that paves the way for ending martial law next month. Marshall law has been in effect on Taiwan for 39 years now, and the new law will permit civilian trials and greater freedom of the press. On the political side, he decided to lift martial law, which was a major obstacle to democratization. But the other thing he did was he said, we need to let people travel to the mainland because we've got all these former soldiers and administrators, you know, all these people who came here between 45 and 49. And they have not seen their parents' graves.

They have not seen their wives and children that they left because they thought they were coming back. We need to let them go back before it's too late. So they opened travel to mainland China. So, you know, a lot of old men get on airplanes. They fly to Hong Kong. Then they fly into mainland China. Well, they've got their sons and sons and law with them carrying the luggage. That's how I imagine it.

And they're not there to see people's graves. What they see is a spectacular economic opportunity. This is China 10 years into reform and opening. So Deng Xiaoping has told every local official, you got to make GDP happen in your locality, right? Find ways to grow. Find ways to bring industry into your village. And here are these Taiwanese guys. They own manufacturing businesses back in Taiwan, and they're being approached at the airport by local officials from Chinese villages who say, I can give you land, I can give you a building, I can give you a workforce that will be well-behaved and very low-paid.

I will not make you pay taxes for the first many years that you're here. I will sit everything up for you if you will open a factory here. So between 1987 and about 1992, Taiwan's traditional manufacturing, so all those Barbies just decamp to the mainland. And they set up factories. A lot of them using the same equipment, you know, they send the machinery and they send the managers all over to the mainland. and they start making the same thing at a tiny fraction of the cost. We talk about Walmart and the Walmartization of the U.S. economy a lot.

Yeah. And we think about, you know, when China became the factory to the world and, you know, all of a sudden Walmart can sell you all this stuff, so super cheap. These are Taiwanese companies in very large part. Taiwanese companies, they were selling you the same thing yesterday, and it was made in Taiwan, and their cost of production was, you know, 10. now they're making it in mainland China. It's the same thing, made on the same machine with all the same techniques,

but now it's made in China and the cost is two. And, you know, something that really scared people in the 1990s was what do we do now, right? Because if you outsource all of your manufacturing, what's left for your domestic economy? Where are people going to find jobs? Oh. And the most incredible part of Taiwan's story is that after the low value, low-tech manufacturing shifted off to China, there's this kind of empty bucket. And the state, partnering again with private entrepreneurs and scientists filled the bucket. And what they filled it with was high-tech manufacturers.

So they basically say, look, we were in the business of Barbies for America, Barbies for the world. That's going to happen in China now. What does it look like for the state to decide we're going to make, I guess, what ends up being chips? Like, how do they do it? One of the really important components of Taiwan's economic policy has always been a certain amount of state direction, but also a lot of state support for research and development. So they founded this thing called the Industrial Technology Research Institute, Ittri. And that's a huge incubator for technology companies to help Taiwanese scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs figure out how they could identify good concepts in the tech space and bring them to market.

So there's a lot of government money in that sector. And the goal is to spin off private companies. So TSM, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, is the most famous of these. And TSM was basically the brainchild of Morris Chang. I was born in 1931 into a middle-class family in China. and I lived in China until I was 18 years old when I moved to the United States. A Taiwanese American, right? He had been educated as a youth in Taiwan, moved to the U.S. for higher education and then worked for Texas instruments.

But then Taiwan beckoned and the offer was to be the president of the Industrial Technology Research Institute. Italy in Taiwan. He was enticed to come back to Taiwan by the opportunity to do something unprecedented, which was to make a foundry for semiconductor chips that would not be doing the design, that would not be involved in marketing, sales, but would just be manufacturing the chips, specialized in that part of the process for other companies, like, Intel that provided the design. We had no strength in research and development,

or very little anyway. We had no strength in circuit design, product design. We had little strength in sales and marketing, and we had almost no strength in intellectual property. The only possible strength that Taiwan had And even that was a potential one, not an obvious one, was a semiconductor manufacturing. Now, of course, TSM has become incredibly innovative. It's not waiting on anybody to tell it how to advance the technology in that business.

But the idea of what they call a pure play foundry. So the goal is just making the chips. That was Morris Chang's idea. And he was able to partner with the Taiwanese government. to turn that into a business, to actually build foundries, to get orders, and to become the favored source, not just for one company, but for all companies that wanted to design chips

and have them built somewhere. And it's also a very Taiwanese thing to do, right, to say, I don't need a brand, I don't need my company to be famous. I don't need for anybody to say, ooh, that's a TSM chip in there. I just need to get really, really good at doing something and selling a lot of it to customers

who they can worry about the marketing and the branding. And, you know, like if your CEO gets in trouble, then suddenly nobody wants to buy your stuff. Like, I don't want to worry about any of that. I just want to make chips that are going to be great and everybody's going to want them. And that's actually a really Taiwanese kind of way to look at it. Because why?

Like, what is the cultural belief underneath it? Just like, like a culture that like less celebrates marketing and image and more celebrates quality? I don't think it's a sort of deep cultural trait. I think it's what Taiwanese manufacturers learned from being contract manufacturers for international brands in the early years of their export-oriented manufacturing boom. So, like I said, you heard the brands I listed. Adidas, Schwinn, Mattel. None of these are Taiwanese, right? Right.

We never heard of a Taiwanese brand until Acer, Asus, and Giant Bicycles. So it wasn't something that Taiwanese manufacturers thought they could do or even felt was necessary because they were doing really well doing contract manufacturing, meaning selling to someone else. And so I think maybe Maris Chang's mind was available for, that concept in a way that someone who came up at Texas Instruments or IBM, their mind was not available for that. It's like there was a different model of what a kind of industrial success could look like because that model had been proven out. Yes, exactly. And so like today, 2026, like I'm sitting in a room right now with like a laptop which has inside of it a chip by

DSMC. I have my iPhone, which has a chip by TSMC. The chips powering quad, a ChesaVT and Gemini. Like, all these things are made by TSM. It is still the thing that kind of, like, I think other people understood before me, I still feel boggled by it, that, like, so much of the technological progress is all coming from chips made in this one tiny island. Like, it's a very strange thing. Well, I'm going to make it worse for you because it's not just the chips that are made on this tiny island, right?

Those chips are part of an industrial ecosystem that they don't just make semiconductors. They make everything that you need, maybe not quite everything, but they make mostly everything you need to make these chips. And they make a lot of things from the chips. And they make a lot of things that support the deployment of the chips. For example, another company that I've visited, they, started out making those metal slides that you put in kitchen drawers, you know, to make your drawers smooth. Yeah.

And then they got really good at that. So they started making slides for chemistry labs and NASA kinds of places, you know, places where the drawers need to slide really smooth. Yeah. And then they looked around and they were like, all right, what else can we do? And they saw that data centers, the huge arrays of chips, that is, they're all interconnected and they're all interconnected. and they're all talking to each other in a GPU, that they've got to be able to come in and out because they have to be replaced and serviced.

They have to be cooled because that's another whole problem with data centers, you know, it's just the heat that that stuff creates. So I said, well, we can make the slides. So every single board in every single array, in every single data center, in the whole world, to be one of these sliding, you know, thingies. And, you know, like all the stuff is being made in Taiwan.

And none of these businesses are going to be easily transferred or replicated someplace else because they're super integrated with one another. They're all right next to each other. They talk to each other every day. And they operate at an incredibly high level of efficiency and quality. And I mean, what I wanted to ask you is like, why can't someone else, presumably someone in the United States? States or in China do what Taiwan does. What you're talking about is it's a story about people. It's like you have all this expertise, all these people who have been getting better and better

and better at doing things alongside each other and the things they know how to do. The sort of process knowledge they have is integrated with process knowledge that other people around them have. Correct. Yeah. And if you really want it to prepare an American community to take over one of these ecosystems or to create an ecosystem that could mirror what happens in Taiwan, you would need to start with pre-K, right? Why? Because the society is being educated from early childhood to be able to fit into that industrial structure. Recently, I was in Taiwan and we were on a bus going between two places,

and I saw a huge industrial park under construction. So it's a huge building. And I thought, I bet you that's a TSM fab, but I couldn't see the sign on it. Later, one of the other people on the bus said, yeah, that was a TSM fab under construction. But what I could see was the sign on the building under construction right next to it. And what it is is a technical high school.

Wait, because why? Because high school and industry, are joined at the hip. The kids who go to that technical high school, so it's like a vocational school. Yeah. They will finish high school basically with the training of a, you know,

a BS degree engineer at a lot of American universities. Wow. And they will walk straight into TSMC and go to work. And they will have been trained and educated not only to do what TSM needs them to do today, but to be able to be able, to grow with the company over time. So they may be technicians, but they are really smart and they are

really good at way more than just, you know, like, soldering two things together. So, like, what is cool about the American education system is that we treat our students often, for the most part, as people who get a lot of time to ultimately figure out what they're going to do as adults. But then you have, like people like me who graduate college at a degree in semiotics or whatever, or drive out of college with the degree in semiotics. What you're saying is that the Taiwanese education system is like, for a lot of people, we know what this country is doing really, really well right now, and we're going to start pointing you at that and specializing you at that at a way earlier time rising because in the United States vocational school exists, but it's not aimed at highly,

highly lucrative jobs necessarily, but I'm imagining that chip manufacturing in Taiwan is a highly lucrative job. And so you have people specializing earlier, and there's sort of like social upside to that. Right. And they learned a lot of math in elementary school. That's how they can be in a position to move through this technical high school. So yeah. And not everybody wants to work at TSM. But I think what I see in Taiwan, although my friends there complain all the time in the same way that my friends here complain all the time. But what I see in Taiwan is that this kind of foundational industrial strength has provided sufficient prosperity for people who would like to have a graduate degree in semiotics or political science for that matter can do that and can make a living. Whereas in a country without that kind of powerful industrial foundation, it is very hard to sustain a lifestyle that gives people choice and freedom. So that's the story of how Taiwan became an indispensable manufacturer of the chips powering the AI race.

We're going to take a short break. When we come back, what the world might look like if war breaks out. It's after these ads. Welcome back to the show. So I asked Shelley just to help me picture the future that right now everyone's trying to avoid. The world where some kind of conflict shuts down Taiwan and TSM, its big chip manufacturer, stops producing, where suddenly the rest of the world cannot source the chips that drive so much of our technology. What she painted was less an apocalypse, more of a prolonged global interruption, which reminded me

slightly of the pandemic, actually. Removing the option of having TSM make specialized chips for your business means that either you got to change the product, which you could do, right? You know, right now, Chinese companies that could, they would do a lot better if they only had access to TSM's most advanced chips or managing without it. They're doing things in a different way. It might be a little bit more cumbersome, take longer, not have the same high efficiency, but you can do it.

Or you have to just charge more because you've got to find another supplier who is not going to have that high efficiency. So I don't think it's that Taiwan's chips are irreplaceable in the sense that there's some kind of value or utility that they provide that cannot be achieved other ways. but they are irreplaceable at a certain price point, and they are at least temporarily irreplaceable in the sense that no one else is making what they're making. But no one else is making it because no one else could make it as inexpensively and with the same quality level.

So it's not like forever and that it's irreplaceable. It's just that we would all change a lot. and the pace of AI development would probably slow down a lot. And, you know, not everybody would think that was a bad thing. No, no. Those are the changes that I think would ensue if we lost access. So if, like, the factories went dark tomorrow, a month later or six months later,

you would have the world as a recognizable thing. It's just the pace of technology would greatly slow. And the technology that we had access to would probably be much more. expensive. Right. And I think what really scares people about the kind of conflict or events that would cause those factories to go dark is not just the loss of their output, but the secondary effects on the global economy. So, you know, where is the growth in the global economy? It's in tech. It's in specifically the whole network of products and services surrounding artificial intelligence. So if we pull the rug out from under artificial intelligence, what's the growth

engine? Right. Right. Like people talk about how the U.S. economy is basically like a recession tied to the balloon of AI. And that's also in many ways true globally. And so you have this this like small place with an even smaller group of people with this very particular expertise and they're just important in a way that would have been almost unfathomable years ago. Like it's just the degree to which both the global economy is very connected but also that the technology story is one technology story and the financial markets are that technology story. It's just like you have a kind of like concentrated vulnerability that is just kind of unprecedented. Right, right. And you know, it's at the moment,

converging with another huge kind of underappreciated vulnerability, which is the straight of Hormuz. Why are those things converging? Well, I think it's, I truly believe that the sort of immediate convergence is coincidental, right? Taiwan was going to be where it was. And then the U.S. decided to go to war with Iran, not really anticipating that Iran had the power to close. the Strait of Hormuz and plunge the world into an energy-related recession.

But, you know, I think we always talk about interdependence and people argue, scholars argue, does globalization interdependence, do these forces promote peace or not? Because the theory goes that they do. And I think what we see is if we ignore peace, we will feel the effects of, you know, having allowed ourselves to become so interdependent. So they don't prevent conflict. The fact that everybody depends on the straight of hormones for their energy didn't stop Trump from going to war,

but we are all paying a much higher price than we would be paying for this war if this dimension were not there. And I think it's similar with respect to Taiwan. I do think that Taiwan's importance in the global economy is a factor in China's restraint so far in taking military action against Taiwan, but that doesn't mean it's going to work forever. But when and if something happens in the Taiwan strait, we will all feel the effects of that interdependence much more strongly than we would

if we had not created these tech supply chains that chase, quality and price across every global boundary. And so for Taiwan right now, the fact of interdependence, it's like temporarily the best way to understand it is that in the short term, it is making Taiwan safer. It is not a kind of like permanent shield, especially in a world where America is run by someone who seems to kind of bulldoze through what was the status quo in some part based on people's understanding of the

consequences of breaking some of these agreements? I think what I am learning as I get older is that nothing is permanent. God. And that what we are trying to do in international relations is to maintain a kind of dynamic stability as long as possible, while larger forces are moving the ground underneath us. So I've always tried to impress upon my students in my international relations classes. The bias of a policymaker in the international realm is always to do nothing, to do as little as possible to just prevent things from getting worse. That's so unsatisfying and frustrating, but it is the wisdom of the international policymaker to understand that almost anything you do,

will have unintended consequences that will make the situation worse. So you just want to do as little as you can to hold things in that kind of dynamic tension. So I think the last thing I'm hoping to get is a picture of that dynamic tension as it exists right now, like this not quite frozen status quo. Like what is like what's the temperature in Taiwan right now towards China? I think the essence of the disagreement, between Taiwan and especially the Taiwanese people and the PRC government, so the Chinese government,

at the heart of that failure to find a shared ground, is that for the Chinese Communist Party leadership, and this is certainly an idea that predates them, you know, this was also John Kaishek's idea, and they have inculcated this idea in the minds of many people in mainland China. There are concept of what constitutes a nation is rooted in history,

the actual history of states evolving over generations, and also the kind of human history of, we are a civilization, and our civilization has certain attributes that exist within people who are alive at any given moment. And so being attached to that thing historically, ancestrally, culturally, that thing being China, means that you are and should be, and in the future must be more fully a part of China. So in mainland China, the idea is Taiwan used to be

part of the Qing Dynasty. We are the current embodiment of what Qing Dynasty was embodying back then. So I need, we and the PRC need for Taiwan to come under our flag one way or another sooner or later. In Taiwan, the concept of the state, right, is consent to the govern. They bought into classical liberalism sometime in between about 1920 and 1990, and they just don't see why. Just because our ancestors lived in China, we've got to be part of the PRC. It's not a meaningful understanding of political identity in Taiwan. So that disagreement leaves them with very little common ground for some kind of compromise that satisfies both sides. Right, because it's not about a narrow who's in charge.

It's about this much broader question of how do you decide where you belong? What is the citizen's relationship to the state? Like, it's not different politics, it's different political worldviews. Yes, exactly. So that's the story in miniature of how we got to where we are today. To Taiwan in 26. An island just a little bigger than Maryland that's evolved from a frontier, through multiple colonizers, through violence, to a democracy.

a tiny powerhouse country, vulnerable, but also by dint of its own genius, very powerful. Thank you for talking to us about this. Thank you for sharing your vast expertise here. You're very welcome. My pleasure. Dr. Shelley Rigger, she's the Brown Professor of Asian Studies at Davidson College. We'll have a link to her most recent book about Taiwan in our show notes. Obviously, there is more here to learn than we were able to cover in an hour.

I actually found myself still curious when we were done talking. I wanted to know what conflict would actually look like between America and China over Taiwan if it broke out. I wanted to know if anyone is doing anything to make that conflict not happen. If you're curious about that too, we have a bonus episode for you that is all about it. It'll be in our incognito mode feed

with historian Ike Freiman. He told us about what options the U.S. might have in the near term. One thing we can do is we can increase our military-to-military relationship with Taiwan, which is not formal, but informally, there's a lot of what I like to call burly English teachers hanging out in Taiwan. Let me put it that way. Right now. Right now. Everyone knows it's true.

Ike does some wargaming. He walks us through the scenarios. Experts on both sides are planning for if things get crazy. Incognito mode subscribers only. You can subscribe, as always at search engine. That will be in your feeds next week. Surge Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruthy Pinnaminani.

Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armand Bizarrian. Fact-checking this week by Piper Dumont. Special thanks this week to Yebu J. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thank you to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor,

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