Shelley Rigger

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.

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

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 decades.

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 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 hunk of pork, but it's a special kind of pork that Chinese really love.

It's called dong po rou, and it is like layers of fat and meat.