The many lives of Taiwan
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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. 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, and help me understand, like, you come into Taiwan studies curious about the indigenous people of Taiwan. There's also overlaid on this, like, very tiny country a vast history of colonization. Like, 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 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. 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.
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