Chapter 1: What is the historical significance of Taiwan in global politics?
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, Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones, fiction writer Kristen Rupenian. 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 Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. 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 countries' 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 him 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 We always call it Taiwan, but it has another name.
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Chapter 2: How did Taiwan transition from colonial rule to democracy?
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 had 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, they're...
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. Hmm. 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 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, linguistically Chinese. So...
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Chapter 3: What were the impacts of Japanese colonization on Taiwan's development?
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