Shelley Rigger

I think what I am learning as I get older is that nothing is permanent.

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 policy.

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.

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 Chiang Kai-shek's idea, and they have inculcated this idea in the minds of many people in mainland China.

Their 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 in 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 governed.

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 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.