This is my last show for Rti, but I am keeping the show going on a new feed! If you want to keep listening to the show, you can find it at https://shows.acast.com/the-strait-up-podcast

Today on the show I have a very special guest, Mike Chinoy. Mike was the first head of CNN's Beijing Bureau which opened in 1987, and led the coverage of important events such as the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. He is now a non-resident senior fellow at the University of Southern California's U.S.-China Institute. Mike is also the author of the recent book Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People's Republic. The book offers first-hand accounts from American journalists of what it has been like to report from inside China over the decades, from the post-WWII period through to today. Mike also produced a multi-part documentary series of the same name, which includes footage and interviews with these journalists. A Chinese translation of the book has also just been released. 

In this interview, we cover a number of topics and historical events described in the book, including reporting on the cultural revolution, President Richard Nixon's visit to China, the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the outbreak of COVID-19, and other topics.

If you'd like to keep following me, you can see the new podcast website above, or follow me on Twitter, @chris_gorin 

A YouTube version of this episode can be found here. 

Most people are probably aware that Taiwan has an aging population. In fact, Taiwan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. According to the National Development Council, Taiwan’s fertility rate in 2022 was 0.87. That makes it either the lowest or nearly lowest in the entire world, with similar rates to South Korea, Hong Kong, and Puerto Rico. Thus, one can see how government policies that support working children are also tied to Taiwan’s fertility rates. 

Today I have on the show Grace Huang. Grace is a professor at St. Lawrence University in New York. She is currently a Fullbright Scholar conducting research for a book project that will compare the policies for working mothers in three countries: the United States, Taiwan, and Spain. Her research includes conducting interviews with 25 working mothers in each country, and her work in Taiwan is the main focus of our conversation. 

Grace is also the author of the book “Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame” published in 2021. And you can check out her blog discussing her research, "Field Notes of a Working Mother". 

In this interview, we cover a large number of topics related to working mothers in Taiwan, including Taiwan’s current policies and those being proposed by Taiwan’s presidential candidates, the impact of Taiwanese culture on raising children and working, and many other topics. Just a quick note, this episode was recorded before Taiwan’s presidential election on January 13th.

Today we tackle an issue that is unavoidable if one lives in Taiwan, which is road safety. And I don’t just mean road safety for drivers on the road, but also for pedestrians on the sidewalk. However as you will discover in this episode, Taiwan often lacks sidewalks on many roads. Roads in Taiwan thus must share their narrow spaces among pedestrians, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, and everything else that needs to move. Taiwan’s chaotic streets are well known to residents, but most international audiences will likely only have heard about this issue after CNN published an article that referred to Taiwan as a “living hell" for pedestrians in December 2022. Since then, it has become a hot topic both in international and Taiwanese media. 

So, to discuss this issue I have on the show today Dr. Tsu-jui Cheng (鄭祖睿), Assistant Professor in Transport Studies at National Cheng Kung University. Dr. Zheng’s research focuses on sustainable mobility governance and transport equity, but brings a wide international perspective and valuable insights related to traffic safety and governance. (See his recent contribution to SLOCAT Transport Report here)

This was a great conversation, and I should be having a sort of companion episode coming out soon about motorcycle ownership in Taiwan, which is closely related to many issues discussed in this episode. 

This episode will also be available on YouTube podcasts, so if you prefer a video version, please go check that out. 

In this conversation, we talk about data on the number of road deaths in Taiwan compared to other countries, the factors that may be causing so many accidents, the surprisingly important issue of parking, the lack of sidewalks in Taiwan, roads, streets, and "stroads", the lack of enforcement, building regulations, traffic safety as a political issue, and much more. 

Today, I am very honored to have on the show Alicia Kearns, Chairperson of the U.K. House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. Alicia’s committee released a report a few weeks back which contained some very strong language regarding Taiwan’s sovereignty and how the U.K. government should handle the Taiwan issue moving forward. We talk about that along with a few other issues such as the government’s still-classified China policy, the expansion of Indo-Pacific defense arrangements, and the conflict in Gaza. 

This episode is shorter than most as our time was limited. There’s also no video component to this episode, but I’ll still be releasing the audio version on YouTube podcasts. It was great speaking with Alicia, so let’s get right to it. 

YouTube episode

Today I bring you another episode focusing on what is, on its face at least,  a domestic issue in Taiwan, but I bring it to you with a comparative international perspective. That issue is Taiwan’s minimum wage, and why is it so low compared to other developed countries? 

My guest today is Roy Ngerng, a researcher and writer who has worked on issues such as the minimum wage for many years. Roy is from Singapore and currently resides in Taiwan where he writes for The New Lens. Roy’s work as an activist and writer in Singapore actually got him into a bit of hot water over there, which you will hear about in the interview. But the focus of the interview is on wages in Taiwan, especially the minimum wage. 

This is the first episode which will be released along with video on YouTube podcasts. So hello to any new viewers and listeners who are looking at this in the new format, and hello to my old-time audio-only listeners as well. For those of you who are interested in watching on video, I have included the link here. Feel free to reach out to me with any comments or suggestions as I try to move into the world of YouTube. 

My goal in my conversation with Roy was to try and answer a question that many people in Taiwan have, which is, why are the wages in Taiwan so low? Most people in Taiwan have a pretty good quality of life, but the anomaly of why its wages have stagnated compared to its economic growth, especially when compared to its other East Asian neighbors with similar economic and social factors, is a question worth digging into. The issue of the minimum wage has also made its way into the debate among the candidates for Taiwan’s 2024 presidential election, which is only a few months away now. As you’ll hear in the interview, I was hoping to try and get at the specific factors about Taiwan’s economy that make its low wages so unique among highly developed countries. Roy certainly provides a lot of insight, data, and perspectives on what factors may be playing a role in this issue. 

In this interview, we discuss Roy’s troubles as an activist in Singapore, how Taiwan’s minimum wage compares to that of other developed countries, how the cost of housing and food in Taiwan has far outpaced wages, how wages and migrant labor play into Taiwan’s domestic politics, and many other topics. 

For those of you watching on YouTube, just a quick note, all the graphs and charts you see in this video come from Roy’s articles for the News Lens, and I’ve provided a link to his work there in the comments if you are interested. 

Hello and welcome to the Strait Up Podcast, a show about international affairs with a focus on East Asia and of course Taiwan. That focus on Taiwan will be much tighter in the next several episodes including today, as I take a look at several issues that affect Taiwan, but which have an international component. And today, that topic is Taiwan’s upcoming 2024 presidential election. 

The election will see current president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) reach her term limit which means there will be new blood in the Presidential Office one way or the other. Tsai’s vice president Lai Ching-te (賴清德) appears to be the front runner looking to carry on the legacy of Tsai’s presidency and keep her Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, in power. But there are a few others in the running splitting the opposition vote, including a sitting mayor, a former mayor, and the founder of one of Taiwan’s largest companies. 

To discuss the candidates, I’ll be speaking with the Senior Editor at the online news outlet The News Lens, TJ Ting. TJ writes in both English and Chinese about Taiwanese politics and has some interesting insights into the election. As I mention during the interview, my original plan for this episode was to serve as an introduction to the candidates for an international audience, who might otherwise not be that familiar with a lot of these characters. However, in the end this became a slightly more casual conversation with TJ providing plenty of interesting takes on the election. 

[Note: This episode was recorded on September 21, 2023. Some events related to the election may have changed by the time of release] 

Today I bring you a conversation with Ian Chong, associate professor at the National University of Singapore and Nonresident Scholar at Carnegie China, which is part of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC. Ian’s research has focused on topics such as the international relations of Northeast and Southeast Asia, and important for our discussion, Taiwan politics and cross-strait relations. 

Ian has done quite a bit of fascinating research which covers a lot of ground. Likewise, my conversation with him also covers quite a bit of ground, with a few too many topics to list upfront. In essence, the conversation can be broken into two main sections. 

The first half of our conversation focuses on an article titled “‘Stand up like a Taiwanese!’: PRC coercion and public preferences for resistance,” written by Ian and co-authors David W. F. Huang and Wen-Chin Wu at Academica Sinica. The article utilizes public opinion data to examine China’s economic coercion and military threats toward Taiwan and their effects on Taiwanese public opinion about how to deal with China. In other words, is the coercion having the effect that China presumably intends it to have?

In the second half of the conversation, we discussed several topics related to Singapore and its relationship with both Taiwan and China. This includes the ethnic, cultural, and historical connections between Taiwan and Singapore, Taiwan-Singapore military cooperation, whether Taiwan can become a financial hub in Asia, and how ethnically Chinese people in Singapore view modern-day China. 

As you can probably tell, this was a very wide-ranging conversation, so I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did. One production note, Ian was recording from abroad and there were some technical issues with the recording, so the audio quality is certainly less than ideal. I’ve done my best to clean it up a bit, but I hope that you won’t find it too distracting. 

In the 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy, the U.S. refers to China as “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge.” Certainly, the confrontation between the two sides has played out on numerous fronts, most notably regarding Taiwan. But is America taking its diplomatic rhetoric and policy changes too far in attempting to address the challenge of China? Is it missing opportunities to improve its relationship with China that could lead to more long-term stability? Is it overstating the risks of a war in the Taiwan Strait? These are all questions researchers and diplomats have been asking themselves for the past several years, and I have one such expert on the show today.

Today, I’ll be speaking with Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow and director of research in Foreign Policy and Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. O’Hanlon has recently published the book “Military History for the Modern Strategist: America's Major Wars Since 1861”, which addresses what prior U.S. wars can teach us about modern warfare. O’Hanlon is also the author of two reports for Brookings which are at the center of our conversation today. One is “Getting China right: Resoluteness without overreaction”, and the other is “Can China take Taiwan? Why no one really knows.” These two reports cover different aspects of how the U.S. should think about China as it moves forward with its defense and overall grand strategy. I’ll include links to all three of the pieces in the show notes. 

In this conversation, we cover several topics, including what the U.S. is getting right and wrong in its China policy, whether the U.S. should consider Taiwan a top defense priority, Mike’s modeling of a cross-strait conflict, the differences between war games and military modeling, how AI might affect military planning in the future, and how the U.S. should modify its military budget. It was a fascinating conversation to which Mike brings an incredible amount of expertise. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with  Michael O'Hanlon. 

Hello, welcome to the Strait Up Podcast, the show where we talk about international affairs with a focus on East Asia and of course Taiwan. I’m your host Chris Gorin, coming to you from Taipei, Taiwan. 

Obviously, there are now and always have been significant political tensions between China and Taiwan. But what about people-to-people relations and contacts? For example, how do tourists on either side of the strait view the people and land on the other side? Well, like all things about cross-strait relations, it’s complicated. Luckily, I had the chance to interview an expert on this topic, Ian Rowen (Twitter: @iirowen) who has a new book out titled “One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-strait Tourism.” Ian is an Associate Professor in the Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages, and Literature at National Taiwan Normal University. He previously served as an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder and has been a visiting scholar at universities in China, Taiwan, and Germany. Importantly, Ian also served as a tour guide in China in the past, which is one of the experiences that led him to begin his research into cross-strait tourism. 

In this interview, we cover several topics related to cross-strait tourism, including Ian’s experience joining a Chinese group tour leaving from Shanghai to visit Taiwan. In this way, Ian was able to see firsthand how both Chinese tourists and their Taiwanese hosts experience, and as Ian puts it, “perform” for each other in the context of tourism. Ian’s trip which he writes about in the book took place in 2014, and as I was reading it I was struck by how much different Taiwan feels now without almost any tourists for several years in a row. 

This interview was recorded here in our Taipei studios back in early May. Topics we discuss in this interview include Ian’s framing of tourism as a “performance”, the peculiar language used in cross-strait tourism, how commission-based shopping creates most of the profits for Chinese tour groups, the difference in experience between Chinese group tourists and independent tourists, how the Falun Gong interact with Chinese tourists, and many other topics. It was a great conversation about an important issue. So, it’s a pleasure to bring you, Ian Rowen. 

Well, today we have a very special guest indeed. My guest is none other than Richard Bush. Bush has had a long and storied career. Bush served as the chairman and managing director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), the unofficial US embassy in Taiwan, from 1997-2002. He is currently a nonresident senior fellow in the Center for East Asia Policy Studies (CEAP) and the John L. Thornton China Center, both at Brookings Institution. Prior to his stint at AIT, he served as an advisor to a number of U.S. legislative and governmental bodies. Close followers of Taiwan-focused research are likely quite familiar with Mr. Bush. 

He has just co-authored a new book along with Ryan Hass and Bonnie Glaser titled, “U.S.-Taiwan Relations: Will China's Challenge Lead to a Crisis?” Richard was nice enough to come on my show to discuss the new book. We tackle many topics related to U.S.-Taiwan relations. It's my great pleasure to you this episode.