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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal and Gadigal people. On the Chinese island of Dadang, just off the coast of the city of Xiamen, there's an interesting little tourist trap called the Frontier Broadcast History Museum. The centrepiece of the museum is a giant horn, which, according to its plaque, is the world's largest loudspeaker.
Chapter 2: What strategies has Beijing used towards Taiwan?
The volume on the speaker is set to like 1% power these days, but from the 1950s to the 1990s, pro-communist propaganda messages like this were being blasted with 20,000 watts of power through the horn out over the ocean. See, six kilometres over the water is an island that belongs to Taiwan. where there was another set of speakers blasting anti-communist propaganda straight back at them.
The interesting thing is that the speakers were set up on the edge of the islands. But the Chinese speaker isn't on the edge of the island anymore. It hasn't been moved. It's just that a giant international airport has been built in front of it.
The airport has cut the distance between the communist Chinese island of Dadang and the democratic Taiwanese island of Jinmen from six kilometres to three kilometres. Plus, China has built a giant new bridge across the harbour. They're calling it the Xiamen-Jinmen Bridge. And they'd like it to cross the border between the two sides and allow people to drive between them.
Taiwan's government has called the bridge a national security risk and has never agreed to it. Despite that, China has gone ahead with building a portion of the bridge on its side.
The new bridge and airport are meant to open later this year. And if Chinese President Xi Jinping attends the opening ceremony, there's one thing that's likely to really annoy him.
Despite reclaiming land to halve the physical gap between China and Taiwan and building half a bridge that's meant to link the two sides, the unification of Taiwan and China seems just as far away a possibility as it was back in the days when they were blasting propaganda at each other over the ocean.
It's part of Beijing's efforts to integrate China and Taiwan in various ways, with the ultimate goal of bringing Taiwan under its control.
As we've been discussing over the last few episodes of this series, it's a strong ambition of Xi Jinping to bring Taiwan under Beijing's control while he's in office. How does he plan to achieve this? Well, for a long time, he's been using two methods, the stick and the carrot.
The stick is military threats, basically encircling Taiwan with the Chinese Navy, firing missiles into the sea nearby, that kind of thing. While the carrot is soft diplomacy, where Xi tries to convince the people of Taiwan to voluntarily submit to Beijing's control. So today we're going to look at the two methods, the stick and then the carrot, and see whether either of them are working.
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Chapter 3: How has Taiwan's identity shifted over the decades?
The thing is, these WeChat messages weren't particularly effective. In the 2024 election, the DPP won an unprecedented third consecutive presidential term.
Taiwan has elected the ruling party's candidate, William Lai. Beijing had painted the vote as a choice between war and peace, labelling him a dangerous separatist.
The defeat of the China-friendly KMT was a clear sign to Beijing that the possibility of a peaceful unification with Taiwan was slipping away. The problem for Xi Jinping is that the sentiment of the Taiwanese people towards the mainland has changed a lot since the 1990s. Every year, people in Taiwan are polled about whether they primarily identify as Taiwanese, Chinese, or both.
Before President Lee spoke at Cornell University that day in 1995, about a quarter of people in Taiwan saw themselves as Chinese, another quarter said Taiwanese, and half the population said both. The proportion who see themselves as primarily Chinese has since collapsed to around 2 or 3%. About 30% of people see themselves as both Taiwanese and Chinese.
More than 60% of people now say that they are just Taiwanese. None of Xi Jinping's carrots have brought them any closer. It's not like Xi Jinping has completely abandoned the stick method, but that doesn't seem to be working for him either.
China wants Taiwan to know it's getting ready.
Propaganda videos show a fierce fighting force on the move in its bid to take Taiwan back. The people of Taiwan have been living with China's threatening stick waving since the 90s, so they don't take it particularly seriously anymore. people in Taipei have seen it all before.
If nothing happens, then nothing happens.
There's nothing we can do to control it. We just get used to it. Everything Xi Jinping has done in his efforts to bring Taiwan under his control, the Mazu tours, the blockade drills, the half-built bridge between Xiamen and Jinmen Island, have been exactly as effective as the big horn-shaped speaker blasting propaganda across the water.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Xi Jinping's military threats?
Now, Adair is a little bit angry with me and Cara because we cut out her favourite thing from this episode. A story about an ancient Chinese cultural practice that was eradicated from the mainland but maintained on Taiwan. It involves men tying large weights to their genitals.
So instead of squashing it into this episode, we're going to spend a bit of extra time exploring it with an ABC reporter who gave it a try. That's coming up on Tuesday. I'll see you then.