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Global governance is at a crossroads. This conversation will imagine what a more representative international order could look like — one that includes Taiwan and other marginalized countries. Experts will debate pathways for reform.
This is the fourth installment in our six-part Protecting Democracy series with Together Films, featuring Invisible Nation, available for several days each month alongside special vHopeful Conversations—now on Hope for Film and Substack TV. We hope you enjoy, and thank you for watching, reading, and sharing.
In this January conversation, I speak with journalist–author Chris Horton and scholar–activist Wen Liu about Taiwan as a frontline case study in global information warfare and democratic resilience. They discuss how China’s unprecedented propaganda campaign seeks to convince the world that Taiwan is not a country, shapes international media language, and fuels both external dehumanization and internal defeatism. They explore Taiwan’s complex identity beyond simplistic “chip superpower” or “weak victim” narratives, tracing its hard‑won democratization, the U.S.’s contradictory role, and the ways Chinese disinformation exploits Cold War habits on both the right and the left. Together, they argue that defending truth, democracy, and Taiwan’s sovereignty requires everyday global solidarity, critical unlearning, and an ongoing willingness to confront propaganda rather than cede the field to it.
transcript lightly edited for clarity and brevity
Vanessa Hope: Hello, I’m Vanessa Hope, director of Invisible Nation, and I’m very excited to be joined tonight by two incredibly bright authors and journalists who appear in the film. I was fortunate to meet and interview them in Taiwan, where they’re joining us from. Together we’re going to discuss promoting facts and truths, which could not be more important in this age of information warfare that threatens democracy worldwide.
First, Chris Horton is a longtime foreign correspondent who has reported from China and Taiwan for decades for just about every leading news publication you can think of. Most recently, he’s the author of the brand‑new must‑read (or listen‑to) book Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival. Hi, Chris, thanks for being here.
Chris Horton: Hi, Vanessa, thanks for having us.
Vanessa: While we’re on your book, it comes out in the United States on February 10th, but I’ve already listened to the entire audiobook—which is awesome. The audiobook is available, and the book is already out in some countries. Can you say where it’s available now?
Chris: It’s available worldwide outside of the U.S. It’ll be released in the U.S. on February 10th, but the audio, Kindle, and ebook versions are already on Amazon and other platforms.
Vanessa: And Wen Liu is a prolific Taiwanese scholar, writer, and activist who most recently authored the must‑read Feeling Asian American: Racial Flexibility Between Assimilation and Oppression. She is also the chairperson of Kuma Academy on Civil Defense Education. Wen, thank you so much for joining us.
Wen Liu: Good to see you, Vanessa.
Vanessa: It’s great to see you. I feel like you’re traveling all the time—book tour, lectures, what have you been doing?
Wen: Yes, I’ve been to the U.S. a couple of times for the book and for civil defense–related work.
Vanessa: Kuma Academy appears in Invisible Nation—we filmed there. Do you want to explain what Kuma Academy is?
Wen: Sure. We are a grassroots‑funded civil defense education school. We provide workshops to teach regular civilians in Taiwan what information warfare is, how to counter China’s narratives, and how to better understand international relations. We also teach civilians basic medical first response and how to react to different crisis situations, particularly war.
Vanessa: I don’t want to make you sound too young, but you have a wonderful comment in Invisible Nation: President Tsai Ing‑wen was the first president you voted for. So all you’ve known is this incredible first female president. Is that right?
Wen: Yes.
Vanessa: Lucky you. We’re never getting a female president in the United States—at least not in my lifetime, I don’t think.
We’re living through an awful era of information warfare. It shapes elections and wars and public perception—from Taiwan to Venezuela to the United States. Truth feels increasingly fragile, especially when a president names his social media app “Truth Social” and it’s full of lies.
Why is Taiwan such a critical case study for understanding how truth is contested globally? This is for both of you; either one can start.
Wen: I think Taiwan is a really important case because we’ve experienced some of the heaviest information attacks from China. It’s not only information warfare—it’s combined with actual military aggression.
During the most recent military drill by China at the end of 2025, our government found almost 20,000 pieces of disinformation tied to that exercise. So it’s both a psychological attack and a misrepresentation of China’s military capacity and Taiwan’s capacity. China has been trying to instill defeatism or fatalism among the Taiwanese population—the idea that our government is weak, our military is weak, so our only option is to surrender.
That’s a very dangerous narrative that we try to counter. Internationally, it’s also important to challenge simplistic views. People often say, “We need to care about Taiwan because it has chips,” or “We need to care about Taiwan because it’s weak and a victim of China.” Both are too simple.
Taiwan is neither super strong nor super weak. It’s neither colonizer nor simply colonized. We should think about Taiwan in a complex way. For example, Taiwan is now the seventh‑largest exporter to the U.S. We have a big economy, even though people think of us as a small island. We do produce the world’s most advanced chips. But we’ve also experienced severe military aggression. All of those facts coexist.
So producing a complex, humanizing narrative about Taiwan is really important right now.
Vanessa: Thank you. Through your guidance and Chris’s guidance while making Invisible Nation, I tried very hard to avoid those binaries and reductive narratives: that you should only care about Taiwan because of semiconductors, or only because it’s militarily weak. I wanted to say, “Hello, can we please care about human beings and have global solidarity?”
Chris, in addition to your amazing book—which I’ve just finished and love, it’s a must‑read—you also just published a piece in The Observer tackling Taiwan and Venezuela. How do you look at Taiwan’s information environment?
Chris: I think Wen did a great job summarizing the domestic side of information warfare. There’s also the external, global‑facing side, and there’s overlap. China is running one of the biggest propaganda campaigns in human history: convincing the world that a country is not a country.
You have to hand it to them; they’ve done a pretty good job. A lot of people think: “Taiwan? It’s part of China, right? And they want to leave?” Or, “It’s like Hong Kong, right?” It’s just not. There are no PLA boots on the ground here. The People’s Republic of China has never controlled Taiwan for a single second.
One thing often overlooked is how much of the Chinese narrative has been absorbed and internalized by international media. When I moved here from Hong Kong in 2015, the first article I wrote for a major American publication went through their style process. An editor told me, “Our style is a little weird when it comes to Taiwan. We can’t say ‘Taiwanese people.’”
I had naively written “Taiwanese people.” I asked, “Well, what do we call them if not that?” The answer was: “The people of Taiwan” or “the people on Taiwan.” Otherwise we’d be “suggesting it’s a country.” I eventually got that publication to change its style, and now everyone says “Taiwanese people”; it’s fine. But that was only ten years ago.
It reflects a lingering Cold War mentality—a hangover from calling Taiwan “Free China.” Information warfare has always been vital to war: the Marco Polo Bridge incident before Japan’s invasion of China; the Gulf of Tonkin incident before the Vietnam War; Colin Powell at the UN claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Historically, people have felt the need to jump through those hoops.
What’s interesting with Venezuela is that there hasn’t even been much of an information‑warfare campaign; it’s just, “We’re going to do this.” China isn’t taking that approach with Taiwan. They want their public on board—and many Chinese people I’ve met think Taiwan should remain independent—but they also need the foreign audience to believe two things: first, that nothing can stop China; and second, “Why should we stop them? Aren’t people in Taiwan just Chinese?”
The external campaign dehumanizes Taiwan by framing it as “the Taiwan issue” or “the Taiwan question.” It’s designed to make the world treat this not as an attack on 23.5 million people, but as some abstract internal question. That’s part of why this is such an important case study.
Vanessa: After a decade reporting from Taiwan and witnessing cycles of military pressure, disinformation, and diplomatic isolation, what distinguishes China’s information warfare against Taiwan from more familiar forms of propaganda? You’ve addressed much of that.
Chris: I would add that with international media: newsrooms really need to rethink their Taiwan style—the way they talk about Taiwan. Saying “mainland China” in a Hong Kong context is fine; Hong Kong is an island and part of the PRC, so the rest is literally the mainland. But Taiwan is not part of the PRC.
When we say “Taiwan and mainland China,” it feeds the narrative that Taiwan completes China—that there’s “mainland China” and the missing piece is Taiwan. We need to think about the words we use. When we call Taiwan “the island” instead of “the country,” we diminish its sovereignty and democracy.
Most American media have no problem calling North Korea or Iran “countries,” even though they’re adversarial to our government. Yet Taiwan, a friend and democracy, is denied the label. That should change.
Vanessa: That was a critical, essential point in your book, related to the title Ghost Nation: China uses information warfare to isolate and marginalize Taiwan and prevent people from calling it a country—dehumanizing them by not naming them as they are, but that is entirely furthered by liberal democracies and countries worldwide who should stand together and speak truth but instead, parrot that propaganda.
Since our audience may not know Taiwan’s history, I’ll just say: when the U.S. used to call Taiwan “Free China” under Chiang Kai‑shek’s Republic of China government, it was a military dictatorship. It wasn’t free, and it wasn’t China. Taiwan only became democratic through democratization driven by Taiwanese people—after the U.S. left. It wasn’t thanks to U.S. “democracy promotion.” Taiwan became a democracy on its own.
Chris: The U.S.–Taiwan relationship is complicated. In 1947, the U.S. basically supported and gave political cover to Chiang Kai‑shek’s Kuomintang (KMT), which had been in Taiwan for only two years after Japan’s surrender. We supplied arms and political backing while they slaughtered a generation of potential Taiwanese leaders.
But now, we’re also the only country openly supporting Taiwan so it can defend itself. So we’ve been a bad friend and a good friend at different times. There’s a lot more that other democracies, in the West and in Asia, could do to preserve stability in the Taiwan Strait and defend a fellow democracy at a time when democracies everywhere are under threat.
Vanessa: That’s a great segue to a question for Wen about the grassroots civil‑defense work you’re doing, aimed at whole‑of‑society resilience. How does disinformation affect people emotionally and psychologically, not just politically?
Wen: To echo Chris, one of the biggest disinformation narratives internationally is China’s “peaceful rise.” That term comes directly from the CCP. Over the past 30 years, we’ve seen tremendous economic and military growth and a bigger global footprint for China. The party keeps saying this is not about changing the international order—that China will remain a partner to liberal democracies and just wants trade.
But in reality, it’s not just economic. China has dramatically expanded its military, with much of the budget aimed at Taiwan and other neighboring countries. It wants to be a regional hegemony in the Asia‑Pacific.
The idea of a “peaceful rise” has influenced generations of Taiwanese to think of China as a negotiable partner. My generation grew up in the 1990s, seeing the world as globalized, peaceful, with multipolar cultural exchange. That shifted dramatically after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. He cracked down internally, then embraced “wolf warrior” diplomacy externally. Human‑rights abuses in China got much worse, then we saw the crackdown in Hong Kong—democracy protesters jailed or exiled.
So China’s rise has fundamentally changed cross‑strait relations and its posture towards the world. Taiwanese people feel that pressure first.
Research in Taiwan shows that about 60% of Taiwanese are consistently willing to defend Taiwan if China attacks militarily. That number has been quite stable. But there’s also a consistent 20–30% who are more likely to favor surrender under military pressure.
That undecided 20–30% is influenced by multiple factors: whether international allies are willing to help, whether the U.S. is willing to assist, whether other democracies stand with us. That support significantly boosts morale.
But within that group, psychological defeatism plays a big role. Kuma Academy’s work explains modern warfare: it’s not only about counting tanks and ships. It’s also about what we call “whole‑of‑society resilience”—how resilient our critical infrastructure is (energy, food, medical supplies) and how resilient our cultural identity is.
In my research, I’ve found that information warfare isn’t just about individual true or false stories; it’s about the narrative built over time. If information keeps reinforcing the ideas that Taiwanese are not a people, Taiwan is not a country, and China is undefeatable, then you can’t counter decades of propaganda with a few fact‑checks.
Finally, there’s the Cold War dynamic. I spent about 20 years in U.S. academia. In progressive circles there, there’s a tendency to side with the Chinese narrative: Taiwan is seen as a sub‑colony of U.S. empire, so people feel they shouldn’t support it. They argue that human rights and democracy in Taiwan are just Western myths.
So they delegitimize Taiwanese histories of democratization and identity formation, while romanticizing China as a socialist alternative to U.S. hegemony. That Cold War mentality and fantasy about Maoism are still very prevalent in some progressive spaces.
Vanessa: Absolutely. And just to underscore: when the U.S. called Taiwan “Free China,” it wasn’t free. It only became free after the U.S. left and Taiwanese people themselves pushed democratization.
Right now in the U.S., there’s a lot of disillusionment and danger of losing any sense of hope or resilience. We could not need Taiwan’s example more: we have a lot of democracy work to do here. But the progressive left often sees the U.S. as the big villain—worse than China—and sometimes doesn’t even recognize China’s authoritarianism, treating it as just an economic force. That makes them fail to see Taiwan and hear Taiwanese voices.
Chris: Taiwan is “inconvenient.” It clashes with a lot of preconceived notions, especially on the left. Taiwan is actually pretty conservative in some ways, but in an Asian context it’s one of the most progressive countries around. It was first in Asia to legalize same‑sex marriage in 2019, and the first to elect a woman leader who isn’t connected to power by blood or marriage.
It still has the death penalty and harsh drug laws—there’s room for improvement—but overall it’s as progressive as Asia gets. It should be a darling of progressives elsewhere. But because of China’s narrative about the “century of humiliation,” Taiwan is framed not as a progressive success, but as an unresolved shameful fragment of Chinese history, unredeemed territory. That’s how many on the left see it, often unconsciously—and it’s just not accurate.
Vanessa: Yes! And now a question or sequence of questions that come up constantly in casual conversation, especially after Venezuela and the visible closeness between Putin and Xi: “China is going to invade Taiwan, right? It’s going to happen soon, right? And there’s nothing anyone can do about it, right?”
How do you answer that when people throw it at you? Maybe your answers can help others.
Chris: The effectiveness of Chinese disinformation is impressive. People take it as gospel that Xi Jinping can just take Taiwan whenever he wants. But why hasn’t he? Why is he still building up the PLA Navy? Why all the drills?
What was the last successful major military operation the PLA carried out? Tiananmen Square—an operation in their own capital in 1989. Before that, China invaded Vietnam in the late 1970s, got their nose bloodied, and retreated.
They bang drums and thump their chests about being ready to take Taiwan. But if they actually did it, it would be bigger than the Normandy landings in World War II. Taiwan is not small; it’s a large, mountainous island of 23.5 million people, most of whom would be furious at an invasion. To take it, you’d need the largest amphibious invasion in human history.
The idea that China can just flip a switch and do this is a fantasy. But for many people it’s psychologically easier to believe “there’s nothing we can do.” That defeatism is exactly what Chinese propaganda seeks to create.
Wen: I agree. It’s also basically impossible to “kidnap” Taiwan’s president as a shortcut. Our military capacity is quite strong, and we’re a democracy. If you remove the president, you still have the vice president, the premier, other executive leaders. It’s not a way to defeat Taiwan’s democracy.
Vanessa: Is there any kind of deal you can imagine Xi Jinping might accept that would get him to back off Taiwan? Obviously, the facts, truths, and will of the Taiwanese people don’t seem to move him. Is there any pressure or arrangement that might persuade him he can have all the trade he wants, maybe some international prestige for doing the right thing, and no need to aim missiles at Taiwan?
Wen: I think the real pressure on Xi would come from inside China. International partners can help by making clear that attacking Taiwan is not the best option. If he attacks and Taiwan defends itself, we would likely declare independence immediately. In that scenario, seven decades of disinformation about Taiwan could collapse, and Taiwan would be formally free—that’s a huge cost for him.
Xi’s main concern is regime legitimacy. He’s already on his third term, heading toward a fourth, and he needs some kind of historical legacy to silence opposition inside the party and society. It’s similar to Putin: he can’t just stop the war in Ukraine because he needs to sustain the narrative that the West is Russia’s enemy and democracy doesn’t work for Russians.
Chris: Xi and the CCP’s legitimacy rests on two main things since Tiananmen: economic growth and “national rejuvenation”—becoming a respected, even feared power. When Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi recently said that a conflict in Taiwan would likely require mobilization of Japan’s military, China freaked out, though she was stating the obvious. Taiwan is as close to Japan as it is to China or the Philippines.
The party also recently rolled out a new narrative that the CCP—not the KMT and the U.S.—played a decisive role in defeating Japan in World War II. That’s simply not true. The ROC and U.S. armies did the bulk of the fighting.
When people start learning facts like that, they can’t unlearn them. Constructing a fake reality is a lot of work; a single unstoppable fact can crack it. The CCP knows that, which is why they react so ferociously to any hint of Taiwanese sovereignty anywhere in the world, no matter how small.
Vanessa: Both of you remind me of what Xi did with foreign correspondents. There used to be many Beijing‑based reporters for major outlets. In one of his crackdowns, he essentially forced a lot of them out. Many relocated to Taiwan, which is number one in press freedom in Asia. That echoes what Putin did before invading Ukraine—kick out independent journalists so there’s no more truth.
Chris, can you remind us what was going on when Xi reduced foreign media presence?
Chris: He didn’t kick everyone out completely—that’s the clever part. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and others were allowed to keep maybe one reporter each in Beijing, where they previously had several. So China can say, “We didn’t expel everyone, look, they’re still here,” while drastically shrinking coverage.
This really escalated at the beginning of COVID, when China was on the defensive. It started when the Wall Street Journal opinion section ran a column calling China the “sick man of Asia,” a phrase with ugly historical connotations. I can understand why people found it offensive. But there’s a firewall between opinion and reporting. Punishing news reporters for an op‑ed they had nothing to do with was the mechanism.
Vanessa: There’s that Chinese saying: “Kill the chicken to scare the monkeys.”
Wen: Sha ji jing hou. (杀鸡儆猴 (simplified) / 殺雞儆猴 (traditional))
Vanessa: Exactly.
Wen, earlier you mentioned internal pressure on Xi coming from the Chinese people. Could you say more about that and what international actors could do pre‑war, instead of only reacting afterward?
Wen: Talking to diasporic Chinese intellectuals, many feel that sanctions on Chinese elites before a war—like what wasn’t done in Russia—could be much more effective than sanctions imposed afterward. These elites form a tight circle that could, in theory, influence Xi’s decisions.
If war does break out, the most important internal pressure would come from the Chinese people themselves. We already saw spontaneous protests during COVID—the “white paper” protest movement against harsh lockdowns. Movements like that will keep emerging and can help delegitimize Xi’s rule.
International allies should do everything possible before Xi decides to use force—make it clear that an attack on Taiwan would carry enormous political and economic costs, and that there are alternatives to war.
Vanessa: You’re making me think about the power of facts and truth to override the system you’re born into. I spoke with the stand‑up comedian Vickie Wang 王宇平, (who just published this helpful, timely piece: Keeping Up with Taiwan — English-Language Sources and Legit Experts to Follow to Learn about Taiwan) who’s Taiwanese, and she had a cross‑strait act with a Chinese comedian, Jamie Wong. Jamie jokes about how people outside China assume Chinese‑born people have been brainwashed and “won’t understand democracy,” which is wrong.
One of the beautiful things about factual information and journalism is that people everywhere have a desire to speak freely and live truthfully. That’s not confined to any country.
Chris, you also point out in your book, that in a system like China’s, people self‑censor and avoid answering polls which can’t be anything but tools of the state, but that doesn’t mean they don’t think freely. And honestly, there are degrees of self‑censorship and soft authoritarianism in every democracy, including the U.S. right now.
Chris: There are all kinds of Chinese views on Taiwan. I’ve met people who say, “We should go to war, it’s ours, it was taken by Japan and the West.” Others say, “Taiwanese are basically Chinese, but we shouldn’t go to war.” Others come here as tourists, cycle around the south, eat street food in Tainan, get lost and helped by locals, and leave thinking: China’s big enough, Taiwan’s doing fine, it should be left alone.
I have Chinese friends who used to say, “It should be ours,” and later, after visiting Taiwan, told me, “This should not be ours; it’s good the way it is.”
We all grow up in information environments and have to unlearn things. As an American, I had to unlearn a lot of things I absorbed about my own country and about Taiwan—from the Communist Party, from the KMT, from the State Department.
The key is to keep an open mind to the possibility that you’ve been duped or misled on something. You may disagree with someone on almost everything, but maybe there’s one issue where you see they have a point. That can be a bridge.
In Taiwan, there are people who deeply believe in the Republic of China and want nothing to do with the PRC, even if they’re not very “Taiwanese” in identity terms. There are others who are strongly Taiwanese. The question is: how do you connect with people who don’t see things exactly the way you do? How do you make that a bond rather than a divide?
Vanessa: That’s so important. I also like your point about unlearning and humility: recognizing where you’re coming from, what you’ve been taught, and staying open to other people’s experiences—especially across languages and borders. You both bridge cultures beautifully—in your writing, in your activism.
Maybe we can do a bit of “lightning round” questions for another 10 minutes?
Chris: I’m fine. Let’s do it.
Wen: Sure.
Vanessa: Wen, Taiwan is often cited as a global leader in countering disinformation. What roles do humor, civic tech, and education play?
Wen: A lot of the education we do doesn’t come from the state, but from civil society, precisely because Taiwan went through 37 years of martial law under KMT rule—the longest martial law period in the world (until Syria earned that dubious title). That kind of top‑down patriotic education no longer works for Taiwanese people, especially younger generations.
From civil society, we’re creating hands‑on curricula and activities that build mutual trust and self‑efficacy. People learn they can help themselves and each other in crises, instead of passively waiting for the state.
As Chris said, Taiwan is a contested democracy; people differ on the ROC flag, for instance. Grassroots education helps us create our own sense of belonging. Kuma Academy’s symbol is an indigenous Formosan black bear. It represents belonging to the land and the diverse ethnicities of Taiwan, rather than a top‑down nationalism.
Vanessa: In Minneapolis recently, a woman was shot in the face by an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agent. So I think Americans now have to think about civil defense in a whole new way. We could learn a lot from Kuma Academy: local civic education, citizen journalism, activism, community. We need all of that here.
Chris: Community—caring about your neighbors and them caring about you—is the bedrock of any society. China and Russia understand that. Dividing a society and pitting neighbors against each other is a major goal of disinformation.
In my ten years in Taiwan, I’ve watched society become more fractured. You still have the blue–green divide (KMT vs DPP), but now there’s the TPP claiming they’re neither. They say they’re not Taiwanese‑identifying or Chinese‑identifying—so what are they? In practice, TPP legislators mostly vote in lockstep with the KMT: blocking the defense budget, cutting diplomatic and international‑outreach budgets, and so on.
They don’t say, “We’re doing this to help China.” They call it waste, or accuse the DPP of acting like dictators, which is rich coming from a place where the KMT party’s military dictatorship actually existed. It’s similar to MAGA in the U.S., where people can’t talk politics with family anymore.
When people stop talking about politics, things really start to fall apart. Instead of dialogue, you build flat, two‑dimensional caricatures of others in your head.
Vanessa: Here’s a good follow‑up for both of you: what proactive approaches to fighting disinformation could genuinely change public behavior or media literacy? If there’s anything you’d add—especially thinking about America, where media literacy is collapsing.
Chris: It’s a very hard question. We’re entering an era where truly fake news—AI‑generated video and audio—is a real problem. AI can create extremely convincing content, especially for children and older people who may not distinguish real from fake. That will only get more realistic.
We’re heading into uncharted territory. I wish I had a great answer for how to combat that, but I honestly don’t yet.
Wen: I don’t have a perfect answer either. But in my education, we were trained in critique and suspicion—critical theory encourages that. Yet in this era, constant suspicion can lead to political apathy. That’s what disinformation wants: for us to feel nothing is true anymore, that human rights are fake, that democracy doesn’t work better than authoritarianism.
That’s dangerous, not just for regular people but also for well‑educated progressives. I’m learning too. I still think there are values we need to preserve. Democracy has many flaws, but I believe it’s still better than authoritarianism.
So we need core values we’re willing to fight for—and we need to teach people that some things are worth defending, even in a landscape filled with lies.
Chris: Memory matters as well. Younger Taiwanese voters have grown up in a peaceful, democratic, free Taiwan, unlike their parents and grandparents. That can dull a sense of how fragile democracy is.
In the U.S., I’d argue we only became a full democracy when Black Americans gained the right to vote; we’re a young democracy and we’re still in growing pains. There were times, like the 1970s, when the U.S. was becoming more multicultural and open; the conservative turn of the 1980s and the MAGA movement now are very much about putting that genie back in the bottle.
In Taiwan, there are forces who would love to roll back Taiwanese‑focused education, same‑sex marriage, indigenous and Hakka broadcasting—all the things that underscore Taiwan’s diverse, multicultural reality. They prefer a narrative that “we’re all basically Chinese.”
The information battle never ends. Since the end of the Cold War, many assumed the work was done. It isn’t. As soon as you let your guard down, there will be someone pushing lies and division, often backed by hostile foreign powers. While you’re alive, the fight never ends.
Vanessa: That’s a powerful closing remark. I’d add that everyone who cares about Taiwan should read both of your books. And it’s an everyday practice: if we care about strengthening democracy and keeping facts and truth alive, we have to work at it daily.
Chris: Exactly. The people pushing disinformation show up every day. If we decide not to push back, we’re just ceding ground to them—and we can’t afford to do that.
Vanessa: My contribution was making Invisible Nation, which I’m still promoting, and it’ll be on PBS in May. Wen, I’d love for you to close us out.
Wen: I think both of your works are really important, especially for American audiences who don’t know much about Taiwan. For progressives in the U.S., there’s a strong guilt about U.S. interventions abroad—and rightly so, in many cases. But Taiwan is different.
Taiwan is an independent, sovereign nation with its own democracy. We’re not asking the U.S. to install a puppet government or make us a sub‑colony. We’re asking for genuine solidarity, understanding, and truth.
In this crazy age of disinformation, if you don’t know where to look for truth, look at how ordinary people in a place are reacting: look at Venezuela, look at Taiwanese people and how they think about their future. That’s where we should stand.
Vanessa: That’s a beautiful place to end. Thank you both so much for your time.
Wen Liu is a Taiwanese scholar, writer, and activist based in Taipei. She is an Associate Research Professor at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, and is also affiliated with the Department of Sociology at National Taiwan University. Trained in critical social psychology (Ph.D., CUNY Graduate Center, 2017), her work develops a critical psychological and affective analysis of transpacific geopolitics, examining queer mobilization, sovereignty, security, and militarism in Sinophone and diasporic Asian communities. Her first book, Feeling Asian American: Racial Flexibility between Assimilation and Oppression (University of Illinois Press, 2024; winner of the 2018 National Women’s Studies Association First Book Prize), investigates diasporic Asian American subjectivities and affective geopolitical alignments amid U.S.–China inter‑imperial rivalry through ethnography, narrative, archival, and discourse analysis. She has explored how affects such as paranoia, melancholia, and shame shape Sinophone Asian identities (including Taiwanese Americans, Hongkongers, and diasporic Asian Americans) beyond simple East/West or democracy/authoritarian binaries, and she co‑edited Reorienting Hong Kong’s Struggle: Leftism, Decoloniality, and Internationalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Currently, she is conducting fieldwork on grassroots civil‑defense mobilization in Taiwan and how civil society responds to escalating war threats from China, and she serves on the Presidential Office’s Whole‑of‑Society Defense Resilience Committee.
Chris Horton is a Taipei‑based journalist and author who has reported on cross‑strait relations, domestic politics, the economy, and culture in Taiwan for the past decade. Over his career he has written for outlets including The New York Times, Bloomberg News, The Atlantic, Nikkei Asia, and others, bringing long‑form, on‑the‑ground coverage of Taiwan’s democracy and its contested international status. He has lived in Taiwan since 2015, after spending roughly 15 years working in China and Hong Kong, experience that informs his comparative perspective on information warfare, propaganda, and East Asian geopolitics. His new book, Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival (Macmillan), to be published in the U.S. on February 10, traces Taiwan’s modern history, Beijing’s efforts to erase its sovereignty, and the island’s fight to preserve its democracy and global voice.
Vanessa Hope is an award‑winning producer and director. Invisible Nation was Taiwan’s number 1 documentary on release in 2025 and became their 3rd highest grossing, most popular documentary ever. Her work often centers on China, U.S.–China relations, and social justice. She has produced multiple acclaimed films in China, including Wang Quanan’s The Story of Ermei, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, and Chantal Akerman’s Tombee de Nuit sur Shanghai, part of the Cannes‑selected omnibus The State of the World. She has also directed and produced several documentary shorts, such as China in Three Words, an official selection of DOC NYC, and made her feature‑directing debut with All Eyes and Ears, an exploration of the complex links between the U.S. and China that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Her additional producing credits include Sundance selections Zeina Durra’s The Imperialists Are Still Alive! and Sarah and Emily Kunstler’s Academy Award–shortlisted William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, as well as their award‑winning SXSW documentary Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America; she also served as executive producer of Paula James‑Martinez’s Born Free. With her husband, producer Ted Hope, she runs Double Hope Films. Before her film career, Vanessa worked on foreign‑policy issues at the Council on Foreign Relations with Senior Fellow and Director of Asia Studies Elizabeth Economy. She received her B.A. in Anthropology and East Asian Studies from the University of Chicago and completed coursework toward a Ph.D. at Columbia University before transitioning into film.
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