YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Horton

lines on the record: 50
first: 2025-07-26
most recent: 2025-07-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Sure, I think what the electorate, what they feel. But we're going to get a very good indication of that on the 27th. So by then, I think that will be a really good indicator of kind of the direction of things. But it's going to be. It's going to be a big change one way or another from what we have today.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel a little hesitant to say too much because I think we'll know what direction things are going after this vote. But if the recall movement is successful, you'll have more belligerence from Beijing than before. But if the KMT comes out surviving and the recall movement fails, then I think, yeah, you'll definitely have a different dynamic where there's more It will likely lead to more protests in the street and less social stability. But it's really hard to say. I think this is kind of the next few days are going to be a bit of a cliffhanger for Taiwan, regardless of what side of the political spectrum you're on, I think everybody here is a bit nervous and nobody really knows for sure.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's alliance with its coalition with the TPP. It will become even more emboldened to try to make dramatic changes to how the government is run and kind of the balance of power between the different branches. So it's really, I mean, I feel like”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who are facing recall votes on the 27th? And if a certain number, I believe it's seven, but it might be more. If a certain number of KMT legislators are recalled, and then in the following elections to replace them are replaced by DPP legislators, then the legislature suddenly becomes aligned with the executive branch led by President Lai Chingda. And if that happens, then I think that's a very strong rebuke of what the KMT has been doing and kind of a vote of confidence for the Democratic Progressive Party, for the DPP. If that doesn't happen, then I think you have a situation where it's really hard to say what's going to happen, but I think the KMT will, and it's...”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think there's a lot of different viewpoints here, and there's a lot of nuance. It's not as polarized as a lot of other countries. There are people here who don't want anything to do with becoming part of China, but they look at the KMT, which is a much more China-leaning party and seek some sort of, I mean, there are members, prominent members of the KMT, including former President Ma, but also legislators who are in office right now who they're openly pro-unification. And they look at the DPP and how long it's been in power, at least in the executive branch.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There may be not for so many young people, the DPP, the Democratic Progressive Party, they're the establishment and they haven't seen their wages increase enough. They have no chance of buying a home. They have a lot of gripes and they can't all be blamed on the KMT. Whereas their parents, they grew up under KMT martial law. And so there was much more of a visceral, you know, kind of either anti-KMT or pro-KMT, we are Chinese kind of feeling in that generation. And now it's all being blurred. And social media, like it is everywhere else, is a big part of it.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Vote now, but they weren't voter age during the sunflower movement of 2014 that occupied the legislature. And they don't really see China as much of a threat. And TikTok is actually a pretty big reason. It's like the threat, their grandparents perhaps, they saw the threat from China because, and they grew up during the Cold War. So, you know, there was very much a and there was domestic propaganda about, you know, the evils of communism and all that. But, you know, at that time, the People's Republic of China, Beijing had no chance of really invading, especially with, you know, American soldiers and nuclear weapons on this side of the strait. But the balance of power has really changed. And I think people are, young people are getting tired of politics here.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Levels, but it's getting to the point where with China's military kind of development, especially in the last few years, two, three years, they're building ships faster than anyone in the world can. And they're building ships that are purpose-built for an invasion. Part of this gives them leverage, right? Even if they never use it, they can threaten it. There's a psychological element to it too. Taiwanese people see it and they're like, that's not good. So, you know, they're trying to put pressure on the government, but also on the citizenry here. And, you know, in some ways, it's working. But then you also have another dynamic where you have these, you know, the youngest generation here, you know, people who can”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shifted from preventing so called Taiwanese independence, the dismantling of the Republic of China government in Taiwan and the establishment of some sort of Taiwanese state, it's shifted from that to kind of pushing towards the goal is no longer preventing Taiwanese independence. The goal is unification. And a lot of that is because the DPP under its pie and also LI, they're like, look, we're fine with the Republic of China government. I'm the Republic of China president. But colloquially, we're Taiwan. And, you know, they call it the Republic of China Taiwan with Taiwan in parentheses. But it's a fudge, you know, and as so much of what the government here is doing kind of has to be because they're really constrained on so many levels.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Central government, all direct communications, which is still the case today because the KMT hasn't come back into power basically. If that ever does happen, if Taiwanese do re-elect a KMT president, I think it's quite likely because all the previous since then, all the KMT candidates have endorsed the 1992 consensus, then there will be direct communication again between the governments. But right now you have a situation where The DPP controls the executive branch, but there's a coalition led by the KMT that has control of the legislature and you have a KMT legislators that are going over to China and meeting with top Chinese officials who are in charge of Taiwan policy under Xi Jinping. And it's worth noting that under Xi Jinping, the policy Beijing's policy towards Taiwan has”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a situation where after that, tying one becomes president and the Chenchuibian, the 2000 to 2008 Chunshuibian presidency, it ended on a pretty sour note. And there was a lot of distrust of the DPP, the Democratic Progressive Party, both in Taiwan and also in Washington and other national capitals that are friendly to Taiwan. And so Tsai came in in 2016. She didn't endorse the 1992 consensus. I was at her inaugural speech. She said, look, it's a historical fact that in 1992, we spoke face to face, and we should continue to do so. But China, I think they saw her as weak, maybe a one-term president. And so they rebuffed her. They said, look, that's not enough. And they cut off all communications with Taiwan's.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of mind, Joe being president where he really kind of brought in Chinese money, Chinese politicians, really got close to China and tried. The KMT tried to ram through a trade agreement, a cross-strait services trade agreement that would have basically opened up 60%, it would have been the service sector of Taiwan's economy. It would have opened it up quite widely to Chinese investment. So in a sense, you had a situation where like in 2014 there was this bill that had been signed by the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party in China and then before it could be ratified in Taiwan student protesters stormed the legislature and prevented it from being passed. They were successful unlike the protests just a few months later in Hong Kong. And you have”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Began in the 90s here in Taiwan. Mindjo, he endorsed the 1992 consensus, but kind of with a caveat that look the consensus that Suchi came up with is both sides had agreed that Taiwan and China are part of the same country, but there was this caveat that each side has its own interpretation. So on the China side, they're like, okay, you know, Taiwan is part of the People's Republic of China. And then on the Taiwan side, you had the KMT saying, look, the mainland, so to speak, it's part of the Republic of China. And we'll agree to disagree for now. But the DPP, the Democratic Progressive Party, this Taiwan-centric party, has never subscribed to that. And so after eight years,”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of, he more or less admitted to trying to constrain Chen Shui Bian, the first non KMT president of the ROC government in Taiwan. And so that was, he later admitted in 2006 that he had basically made it up. But this is something that Beijing really liked. And when after eight years of Chan Shi Ben, you had The only the only really true KMT president that's been elected since democracy.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out of a coalition known as the Dongwai movement, the outside of the party, the party being the KMT movement that started in the 70s and really kind of gained momentum in the late 70s. And then in the 80s, it kind of coalesced into a party that is now the majority party, the kind of dominant party in Taiwan. But in 2000, when Chun Shuiam was elected, you had one of the people, one of the participants, Suchi, one of the participants in the meetings in 1992, he just kind of came out of nowhere and said, like, look, there was this, we reached a consensus in 1992. Eight years after the fact, no one had talked about this. And he later said that he was tried to do it to...”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I guess the 1992 consensus, I'll start with that. It's something that there were meetings between basically the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong in 1992. And there were closed-door meetings, and there was no announcement. It was dealing with stuff like how to deal with postal traffic and telephone connections across the street. Just really mundane stuff like that. But there was no announcement of some sort of breakthrough or anything, big breakthrough or anything like that. And the KMT, they had basically a monopoly on political power until 2000 when Chunshubian was the first Democratic Progressive Party president. This was a party that was very Taiwan-centric. It had a Taiwanese identity.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Government relations since 1979 between Taiwan and the US really gets in the way of that. But yeah, you do have a growing mistrust of the United States here. And it's for good reason. But at the same time, the United States is also Taiwan's best friend. So they're kind of in a, you know, when you're in a situation like Taiwan's in, you can't be that picky with your friends. There are a few, there are no other countries that are really willing to just straight up sell weapons to Taiwan. They might help with technical stuff on submarines or this or that. But the democratic world is pretty scared of China. And that has big ramifications for Taiwan.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's much more stable than if you look at its last hundred years of history. Things are pretty good. There's economic issues and stuff like that. But these matter more now because people are used to the stability and the democracy and being able to vote for against politicians as they choose. And that's good. But with the US, the strategic ambiguity thing that people still talk about, it's really outdated. It's kind of a Cold War relic. And basically, we're getting to a point where at some point there's going to have to be a commitment or an abandonment of Taiwan. And it's unclear which way it's going to go. There's definitely people who are in either camp in Washington. And people, politicians here. They're working on that as well. But, you know, the lack of official.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chiang Kai-shek wanted to retake China. And so the US basically told both sides of the Taiwan strait, both the PRC and the ROC, like, look, we're not going to say if we're going to help the Guomindang, if we're going to help the KMT or the Republic of China, if there's a war between the two sides, because they were worried that Washington was worried about getting dragged into a war with China because of its alliance with Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT but nowadays that's not an issue. Nobody here talks about retaking the motherland or anything like that. Taiwanese, they've got their democracy, they've got universal health care. They've got a pretty nice existence and it could be better, of course, but it's”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The average Taiwanese person hasn't been exposed, and you could probably say that about most countries, you know, like you don't really learn your own country's history unless you make an effort. And if you just go by your textbooks, I mean, I remember I didn't really kind of start to understand certain things about American history until I really started delving into it when I was a university student. And I was, you know, things get glossed over or even omitted or twisted. But it's really, you know, the US-Taiwan relationship, it's shifted from being a US ROC relationship to being a US-Taiwan relationship, but the U.S.-Taiwan relationship is very unofficial. And it's really, you know, there's this whole talk of strategic ambiguity, for example. It began during the US, when the U.S. still had a presence in Taiwan.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's gone American support for Taiwan has ebbed and flowed, and it really, you know, in the 40s, it really began with support for not Taiwan, but the Guomindong and the Republic of China government that the Guomindang monopolized. And when the Guomindong, when the KMT was massacring Taiwanese people, the United States more or less looked away while it was providing Weapons and political cover to the KMT. And a lot of people here remember that. And some people, you know, that history is not so clear because textbooks here, they're still kind of recovering from the censorship of the martial lawyer.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, you know, I think a lot of people, especially outside of Taiwan, think that Taiwan is reliant on the US and to a certain extent it's definitely benefited from US protection from China. But you did have an actual alliance between the military government of Chiang Kai-shek and the United States that ended in 1979 when his son was president. And that's when the United States, that's when Jimmy Carter recognized the People's Republic of China. And so prior to that, the U.S. military had a large, a very large presence, thousands of soldiers in Taiwan, and for a certain number of years, the US had nuclear weapons on Taiwan. So it's”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then their parents identified as Japanese. So it's really kind of, like I said, it's difficult to explain in a paragraph or two in a 800 word story.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was the, how would you say it, the passing of the torch from the Japanese educated generation to the people who grew up under the Taiwanese who grew up under KMT martial law? And so that includes Taiang Wan, the previous president, who I managed to, I had the first interview with her after she stepped down as president last year. And there really is this intergenerational thing. I mean, how many countries do you have in Taiwan nowadays, young people, they're just like on Taiwanese, but their parents, you know, they were forced to adopt. And, you know, some of them didn't feel like they were forced. It was just natural because they're an island. They didn't know what was going on elsewhere. And the KMT had a monopoly on information and political power. But you had young people today, Taiwanese, their parents, Chinese.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You had a publishing house in California that after they published this book in Chinese, all these students that were studying, all these Taiwanese students studying in the United States read the book and then they're like, oh wow, that's what happened to my uncle or my father or grandfather. There was this kind of awakening through just a book. The power of media, it's really a thread that goes through any country's history. But especially Taiwan's because you had so much censorship during martial law. And so in the United States, the kind of Taiwanese independence or Taiwanese self-determination movement really gained momentum. And it was a major site for fundraising. But all three of these centenarians who passed away just a few years ago, they kind of, you know, they're passing kind of.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was a Marxist by nature, but he didn't think the communists were Marxist. He thought that they were basically just like anybody that was inconvenient, they killed him. And so he kind of fell out with them. And they were pressuring him to join the party. And he decided he would leave. And he went back to Taiwan. When he left Taiwan earlier in his life, it was still part of the Japanese Empire. But when he arrived the second time, it was under KMT control. And the big massacre of 1947 had happened. And then he vowed to overthrow Chiang Kai-shek's government. He was found out. He ended up fleeing to Japan. And he wrote a book when he was there that was then translated into Chinese. Obviously, couldn't be published during martial law in Taiwan, but because there were so many students, Taiwanese students who were studying abroad in the United States, it was...”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getting back to the three immortals, then there's Su Beng, who ended up, I interviewed him when he was, I think 100. And he passed away just a few years ago, but he was an advisor to the previous president, Tsai Yingwan. And he had worked with the communists in China. He never joined the party, but then he saw that what he told me was.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As well as at that time. But there were times where maybe this whole situation could have been resolved to some degree. I mean, you look at North and South Korea, while that's not resolved. You do have both North and South Korea being represented in the United Nations and things like that. There's no doubt that North Korea is a country and South Korea is a country. But yeah. you know, Taiwan's statehood gets called into question. And for a while, I was a province of the Republic of China, you know, but it was really, you've only had four years in all of human history where a China-based government controlled all of Taiwan. And that was between 1945 and 1949. And even then, it was pretty loosely controlled because the KMT, they were fighting a war with the communists. And so, but getting back to...”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Status quo basically. The status quo is Taiwanese run their own country and China runs itself. But for historical reasons, it was 1943 that both the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party decided that Taiwan needs to become part of China. And ever since then, it's been a very big propaganda war. And it's been very successful. For the US, we were willing to go along with it. We were willing to suppress Taiwanese and the Taiwanese identity and kind of brand Taiwanese who wanted greater self-determination as troublemakers because we needed the KMT, the anti-communist KMT in the Cold War. So it's one of those marriages of convenience that ends up kind of producing something a bit unfortunate down the road.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To Taiwan, which was no longer under Japanese control and was under ROC control, and he tried to make change there and ended up going to prison. But after some pressure from Washington, it ended up being commuted to house arrest. He was smuggled out by amnesty's Swedish branch and then ended up at the University of Michigan. And he was writing op-eds in the New York Times and he wrote a book called A Taste of Freedom kind of explaining the Taiwanese or as they called it back then the Formosan experience and what they wanted. And he said, you know, look, we're our own thing, but we have nothing against China. And that's a common theme with most people here. Nobody wants, no Taiwanese want war with China. They just want what they already have, which”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Initially, Lee Dung Hui was pretty careful. He kept his cards close to his chest. But after a while, after making some moves to kind of get certain people out of key positions, people who might have been able to overthrow him in a coup, then his Taiwanese started to come out more and more.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, moving up the ranks of the KMT. And the KMT, they didn't have enough of their own people to kind of keep power to themselves forever. They had to bring Taiwanese into the fold. And you had educated Taiwanese such as Li Donghui, who were brought in kind of his background was agriculture. And that was a very important part of Taiwan's development under the KMT. He earned the trust of the KMT and Chiang Kai-shek himself. And Chen Kai-shek's son, Zhang Jinggua, he succeeded his father. He promoted Li Deng Hui to be his vice president. And in doing so, after he died, he basically set it up so you had the first Taiwanese born president of the Republic of China. And the Republic of China government in Taiwan. And so...”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, all three of these figures have very long and interesting stories, but basically they're from the generation of Japanese educated Taiwanese who they experienced life under Japanese rule and challenged it. And then they were there for the changeover to Chinese rule. And they responded a different ways. So Li Dong Hui, he was the president, the foreign president, who I mentioned earlier, he embraced an ROC identity after having become a member of the Chinese Communist Party twice and then leaving very quickly. He ended up”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Self determination, any sort of challenge to KMT authority. And that really scarred people, whether their descendants were native Taiwanese or had come over from China. And it's something that still hasn't really been fully resolved or reckoned with today.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the people whose families had been there since before the arrival of the KMT. And then you had the so-called mainlanders who basically show up and it was not ideal for anybody. But then with that in 1949, with the fleeing of the KMT to Taiwan, you had the beginning of what ended up being 38 years of martial law, which was a world record until Syria broke it in 2011, I believe. But during that, there were two, the whole martial law thing, the ROC military was used for two main goals from a KMT, from a Chang Kai-shek perspective. And that was to root out any possible communist infiltrators that had come over with the Chinese from China and to prevent any sort of Taiwanese independence or”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Three weeks, and that was in March of 1947. So after that, you know, things started falling apart with the Chinese Civil War on the other side of the Taiwan Strait. And by 1949, 1950, you had a mass exodus of Chiang Kai-shek, but also the rest of the KMT and people that they pressed into military service and other stuff. A lot of them very young. About 2 million people. So there were 5 million Taiwanese in Taiwan at that time, and then 2 million Chinese came over, most of them heavily traumatized by the war with the Japanese, and then also by civil war. So it was a big mess. And ever since then, you've had this kind of duality where there's this, you know, there's like native Taiwanese, which is a very broad concept. It includes indigenous all”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Taiwanese kind of collected themselves. Political elites kind of calmed everyone down and they tried to negotiate with the Guominda, with the KMT. And the governor general Chuni, he bought time. He said, look, there's a misunderstanding. Yeah, we get why you're upset. Go on, let's talk it out. Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek, he had sent word to Chiang Kai-shek, who then sent reinforcements, which arrived a week later. And then basically all the political elites at the time of these political elites who had been negotiating some sort of arrangement, nobody wanted independence. It was really just about more representation and more say in their local government, which they had been denied under the KMT, just as they had by the Japanese. And once the reinforcements arrived, they went on a rampage and killed around 30,000 people in”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From the Japanese, anyways, this public beating of this woman led to kind of a confrontation with a crowd. And then one of the officers shot into the crowd, killed someone. And then basically that snowballed into big protests the next day. And that day, like towards the end of the protest, This just happened, it's time to rise up. And so you had this kind of, I mean, it was a very savvy use of media, but basically like in all of Taiwan's major cities, there was an uprising. It was a violent uprising and hundreds of Chinese were killed, maybe more.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, at gunpoint to identify as Chinese and to speak Mandarin when they first arrived in Taiwan, everyone spoke Japanese. And Chiang Kai-shek spoke Japanese, and so did his first governor, Chuni, the first governor of the ROC, the Republic of China, in Taiwan. But they basically banned all Japanese media and forced everyone to speak Mandarin. And there was basically an uprising about a year and a half into it where Taiwanese people had enough and it was violent. They killed Chinese people. And in the hundreds and this was after an incident in which customs officers, Chinese customs officers had beaten a woman who was selling cigarettes that had been smuggled in from China. She was circumventing the monopoly, the tobacco monopoly that the Chinese, that the KMT had inherited.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gorman Dang soldiers weren't getting paid well, if at all. And so they were taking whatever they could of value in trying to convert it into money, into some sort of sustenance. And then at the very top of the Gormandang and the Republic of China, which was the Gormendang Party state in China, you had the seizure of monopolies that have been created by the Japanese. Basically, the US had made a deal with Chiang Kai-shek and without consulting the Taiwanese people. And also, it's worth noting that people didn't really speak Mandarin in Taiwan until 1945, until the United States brought the Republic of China over. So, you know, there's this argument that like, oh, you know, both sides of the straits speak the same language. And it's, well, like, it's because you have this refugee government from China that forced everyone.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Build a new China together. China was devastated from the Second World War. Japan had wreaked so much damage on China for so long. There was this kind of like, all right, here's a new start. People didn't like being colonized by Japan. But then when the Gormandang arrived, things really kind of fell apart quickly. You had things like the return of cholera and bubonic plague because the Guomindang didn't really continue with there was no continuity with like the quarantine protocols that the Japanese had put in place. There was also pilfering and theft and looting at the micro and macro level where the Guomindang, they stole and seized personal property, even just the smallest of things like doorknobs on trains.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very bloody. But at the same time, you also have modernization. You have education, you have infrastructure being built. You have industrialization. And the level of safety and education and public hygiene that Taiwanese had in by the time of 1945 among the best in Asia, if not the best. And then you have Japan losing and surrendering at the end of World War II. And the US brought Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist Party, also known as the Guomindang or the KMT. They brought the KMT over to Taiwan. And basically they had told Taiwanese people that, look, you're going back to China. It's going to be great.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, yeah. In 1945, basically, most Taiwanese people, you know, they might have their language at home, whether it's indigenous or hakka or kind of a local evolution of a Fujianese dialect from China. But the lingua franca in Taiwan at that time, because of 50 years of Japanese colonization, was Japanese. So Japan is often really overlooked as in terms of its influence on Taiwan. It was the first colonizers to actually completely control and conquer all of Taiwan. And that required in about two-thirds of Taiwan, the mountainous bits, that required 20 years of so-called pacification where it was basically wars against indigenous people. And it was”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, in the developed world that doesn't have a bit of Taiwan in their pocket or at their home or in their car. And we saw that during the semiconductor shortage early on in COVID. So there's a lot of different things at play. There's global trade, but there's also there's democracy. And right now, authoritarianism, it's on the move. It's making moves through Russia in Ukraine with what's going on over there. And also, you know, China, it's expanded. It's taken over islands in the South China Sea. It's putting pressure on Japan and the Philippines. But the real prize is Taiwan.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A legacy of Chiang Kai-shek not wanting to basically let Taiwan, which he had fled to from China, have its own seat as Taiwan in the United Nations. He had the China seat on the UN Security Council, and he would rather give that up, which he did, than accept a two-state solution where the People's Republic of China with Beijing as its capital is the China seat in the UN and Taiwan gets its own seat. But in terms of what's going on now and why it's important, China is basically hemmed in by what is known as the first island chain. And so that stretches, it's basically a grouping of U.S. allies and partners starting with South Korea down to Japan, then Taiwan, and the Philippines. And kind of like Ukraine. Europe”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The notion of Taiwanese people and Taiwaneseness has evolved from the original indigenous inhabitants of Taiwan to this very multicultural and diverse society that you have today. There's always been this longing for self-determination, for a say in their own governments, in their own destiny. While we tend to view Taiwan through a lens of great power politics, Taiwan and the Taiwanese people do have agency. They're more than just an island. They're a country. They have their own democratic elections. They have their own military. They have their own currency, their own customs regime. They operate in every way like a country. And the only thing that really kind of in many people's eyes disqualifies them from being a country is that they're not in the United Nations. And that's a...”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's, you know, in terms of its history, it's been colonized by different empires, Western and Eastern over the past 400 years. So when the first who arrived were the Dutch, and they arrived in 1624, which was the same year that they arrived in Manhattan. And so there's, ever since then, you've had the Spanish, Chinese, well, I mean, even calling them Chinese, you know, Koshinga, this pirate who his father was a Chinese pirate and his mother was Japanese. So is that a Chinese empire? I don't know. Then also the Japanese themselves, the Qing and also the Chinese nationalists who were brought over by the United States in the 1940s, initially in 1945. It's a very complicated, convoluted history, but it's also very simple. Taiwanese people, while”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Explain Taiwan in 800 or 1,000 words and the little bit of history. Maybe you've got room for like a paragraph or two to explain Taiwan's history. And it's just not enough room. Nobody can do it. It's just too much. So yeah, I just felt it was kind of the time had come. The opportunity presented itself and so I took it.”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like Taiwan's last 20 or 30 years basically democratic Taiwan. I interviewed the last or the first democratically elected president of Taiwan, Li Dungwei. And I also had access to other people who really helped shape the country and where it's headed and what it is today. So I kind of felt a bit of a responsibility to kind of put it all together, everything that I had seen because you read an article and especially because of the complexity of Taiwan's recent history, especially since the 1940s, you really have a situation where you can't summarize or really”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's pretty simple. I had lived in China before and first went there in the late 90s. And at that time, it was very easy to find books that really kind of, at least in terms of bullet points, it would really get you caught up to speed on modern China and where it had come from. And the trajectory it was on. When I moved here in 2015, there just weren't that many books that could do it, especially non-academic books. And so, you know, knowing nothing about Taiwan when I first got here, I was just hoping that eventually someone would write one. And after a while, it kind of became clear that if I wanted to see that happen, I might have to write it myself. And in the course of my reporting, I ended up interviewing a lot of pretty consequential people when you think about”
2025-07-26 · Intelligence Squared · How will Taiwan shape Asia’s future? With Chris Horton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT