#209 Erik Prince & Erik Bethel - The China / Taiwan Conflict
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Eric Prince, Eric Bethel. I was hoping you guys would meet someday. Glad to make that happen.
Eric's with a K. Yeah.
Truly an anomaly. Three of them in the building right now. But just thank you guys for coming, both of your repeat guests. former ambassador to World Bank, Eric Prince, former CEO of Blackwater, Navy SEAL. So I wanted to get you- Ambassador of happiness. Ambassador of happiness. I wanted to get you guys in here about this Taiwan stuff that's going on. So the timing couldn't really be better for me. I got the vice president of Taiwan coming on here pretty soon. And so everything just lined up perfectly. And I want to use this interview to kind of educate the audience and not only the audience, but myself on why Taiwan is such a strategic location and why it's so important in the world. And when it comes to chip manufacturing, all this stuff.
But I did not realize how delicate that situation was due to its history with China until I started prepping for this interview. And I mean, I knew the semiconductors and it's been terrifying to me to think that China might take them and they say they will by 2027. But when you look at the history, it's pretty dicey. And so Eric Bethel, if you don't mind giving us a brief history on Taiwan and China and how delicate the situation actually is.
I'm not a historian, but I'll give you a rough outline. We gotta go back way, way, way early. So the Dutch arrived, well, the Portuguese discovered Taiwan. They called it Ilha Formosa, which means beautiful island. The Dutch arrived in the 1620s or so and formed little villages of sorts. The people that were living in Taiwan were Austronesian tribes. There were no ethnic Han Chinese living there at the time. And the Dutch were at the time competing with the Spaniards. The Spaniards had a settlement in one part of the island. The Dutch had a settlement in the other. And it was ironically the Dutch that began bringing in folks from mainland China into Taiwan. They were typically from Fujian province, but some came from the south.
And over time, Taiwan was essentially a backwater. Neither the Ming Dynasty nor the Qing Dynasty gave a rip about Taiwan. And in, I want to say 1895, somebody will correct me on this, I'm sure, the Japanese took it over and it was a part of Japan until after World War II. never in Taiwan's history was it a part of the Chinese Communist Party. And so after the Chinese Revolution, as Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists were losing, they fled and they started the Republic of China in Taiwan. So there were two Chinas. There was the Communist China and then there was the Nationalist China. But there has never been any Chinese
communist party presence or any history linking it to uh to the chinese current chinese government is that that pretty much sums it up so but it's gone back and forth and back and forth a couple times since 1949 correct
Nope. Never been ruled by Beijing.
Nope. Never been ruled by Beijing.
Not since 49, like you said, Chiang Kai-shek fled there with the nationalist leadership. And there's been serious fighting, artillery duels. I mean, there's islands that belong to Taiwan that are within five kilometers of the Chinese mainland. Yeah. Puyemoy, Matsu, I think it's called Kinmen now. Yeah, Kinmen. Right up, like I said, a hour and a half swim from the Chinese mainland.
Wow. And so how does the rest of the world view Taiwan? Do they view it as part of China, part of the communist China?
As the Chinese communist economy has grown, Beijing has used that economic leverage to twist countries into not recognizing Taiwan and to only recognizing Beijing.
In the 70s, Taiwan was China, and we did the switcheroo, and we gave PRC China the seat that Taiwan used to have in the United Nations. But as Eric mentioned... Nixon did that. Yeah. It was in the 70s. Every country has, with the exception of a handful, have switched diplomatic recognition. from Taiwan to mainland China. And this is a function of the fact that China's economy is so important that it uses it as a leverage point.
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