hey mate! Just in case you’ve been forwarded this email but would like to subscribe - click the link here.

It’s Taiwan All The Way Down…

Kerry Brown on Curious Worldview - Spotify

Kerry Brown On Curious Worldview - Apple

Kerry Brown On Curious Worldview - Youtube

Taiwan is the greatest geopolitical question of the 21st century says Kerry Brown, Sinologist, and former Diplomat to the British Embassy in Beijing.

He is, I am thrilled to say the guest on todays podcast. A sinologist is a scholar and expert of China, its language, history, politics, and culture - and the theme today is top to bottom the myriad questions looming over one of the largest political issues for China… Taiwan.

Kerry published a book last year called The Taiwan Story: How a Small Island Will Dictate the Global Future. It is marvellous, and my hope was to do as much justice to the various questions which Kerry approaches Taiwan with as possible in a brief podcast.

The big questions being, the economy, given Taiwan’s semi conductor supremacy with its home grown TSMC, the perplexing idea that Xi would view Taiwanese reunification as the most significant achievement to his legacy, how a more fractured, less unified global order creates lots of wiggle room, Taiwan’s history, and that despite having 95% Han ethnicity, what is it about Taiwan which makes them a distinctly different culture to china, Kerry’s feeling for the inevitability of an attempt at reunification and lots more between those cracks.

Kerry Brown on Curious Worldview - Spotify

Kerry Brown On Curious Worldview - Apple

Kerry Brown On Curious Worldview - Youtube

Kerry Brown - The Taiwan Story

Consider sharing this interview with a mate, colleague, brother, sister, whoever you think might be interested in this as well.

Here is a transcript of the opening exchange from the conversation…

Ryan
You said in your speech at the Policy Institute at King's College, I think it was just published yesterday in fact, that everything at the moment looks like a big opportunity for China. What did you mean by that?

Kerry
Well, I think that China didn't expect the United States to attack its own allies. so most people would think when your greatest competitor is attacking not just you, but their allies, you have a little bit of an opportunity. And so I think since the inauguration, Trump turning on Canada and Mexico, and now, you know, kind of having fights with Denmark over Greenland, having fights with Europe, I think China sees this as fracturing a world which was once quite united against it. I in the last four years certainly the pandemic made people pretty united against China. I mean in Australia, in Europe, in America people were quite angry about how the virus had originated and now a lot of that has been forgotten because people are just looking every day at the antics in Washington and thinking wow okay well we we at least know that China is not our friend but wow what is worse than a you know, a problem person who you kind of know is going to be a problem person and can predict and somebody one minute is your friend saying you're great and the next they're saying that you're awful. I think that's really hard to deal with. So that's what the opportunity is for China.

Ryan
But principally for China, it's an opportunity for what?

Kerry
I think it's an opportunity for it to create a kind of different world architecture, know, world governance, which is more transactional. It's not really about shared values and that works for China because it didn't really ever buy into that in the first place. And also it's an opportunity for China to kind of create a separate, you know, kind of set of alliances of its own based really on trade in what we call the global, what we did call the global South or Latin America, Middle East, Africa.

If you look at a map of the world, know, largest trading partners, 120 have China as their largest trading partner. That's mostly in that part of the world. yet, you know, large military installations, it's all America. So I think China sees this as the opportunity to create a world of transactional opportunity and a fracturing of the thing that it wasn't so happy dealing with, which is this sort of values based system where it didn't really have much time for their underlying values.

So I think that's one of the key opportunities.

Ryan
Yeah, I got this map here that shows exactly that. Everything red is China's trading partner. And so...

Kerry
And that you know if you did that 15 years ago, it wouldn't have been like that. I mean, it's it's been happening quickly So it's quite a transformation

Ryan
But as well, principally, an opportunity for Taiwan…

……. continue the conversation with the podcast here.