Full Comment - Will Canada sacrifice democratic Taiwan to China’s communists？

00:00:00.000 Your Uncle Dale is the undisputed king of hot takes.

00:00:02.980 Buffalo, they're a lock because his barber said so.

00:00:05.840 Don't listen to Dale.

00:00:06.880 Go with the score bet.

00:00:08.120 Breaking news, live odds, and real-time stats right at your fingertips.

00:00:11.820 Everything you need for game day is one tap away.

00:00:14.320 Don't go with hot takes.

00:00:15.360 Go with the score bet.

00:00:16.820 19 years or older.

00:00:17.820 Ontario only.

00:00:19.400 If you or somebody you know has gambling concerns,

00:00:21.220 call ConnexOntario 24-7 at 1-866-531-2600.

00:00:24.760 Text us at 247-247 or chat with us at www.ConnexOntario.ca.

00:00:28.600 Standard messaging data rates may apply.

00:00:30.000 The future of Taiwan.

00:00:35.020 It is one of the most important geopolitical questions of our day,

00:00:38.500 but it doesn't really get the same amount of headlines as, say, the war in Ukraine,

00:00:42.520 the Middle East, the fighting with Iran, the terrorists that are constantly attacking Israel.

00:00:48.760 But it is a ticking time bomb in the Far East.

00:00:52.520 China has its eyes on Taiwan, and Taiwan is hanging on by a thread,

00:00:57.640 a democracy that doesn't have as many friends as it would like, at least not those who would

00:01:02.040 recognize it and talk openly about their support. Hello, I'm Brian Lilly, and this is the Full

00:01:07.160 Comment Podcast. And today we talk to author George S. Takash. He is behind the new book

00:01:12.440 Inspired by Taiwan, Why Supporting Taiwan Matters for Global Democracy. George,

00:01:18.220 thanks for the time today. Hey, great to be here. Thanks.

00:01:21.620 So, a lot of people don't think about Taiwan. It fades into the background. China is high up in people's minds as they ponder important geopolitical questions. What made you say, we need to talk more about Taiwan? Or what we used to call, even if it was incorrect, free China.

00:01:43.360 well yeah it's as you said in the intro it is in my view one of the top three geopolitical places

00:01:54.080 in the world right now this small island i mean taiwan literally when i was there researching the

00:02:00.300 book i rented a car i mean you can drive from the top of the island to the bottom of the island in

00:02:05.640 three and a half hours i can't get to ottawa in three and a half hours and i live in the same

00:02:10.820 province. Exactly. I mean, it's a very small place and most of it, like three quarters is

00:02:17.720 mountainous forest. So it's effectively, if you're Southern Ontario oriented, it's Kitchener,

00:02:24.720 Waterloo to Kingston, Peterborough to the 401. But in that space, that small geographic effective

00:02:32.700 space, 23 million people, 160 universities and technical colleges, and they produce,

00:02:41.760 and this is what Taiwan is best known for, they produce 96% of the world's highest performing

00:02:50.100 semiconductor chips, the logic chips. So without Taiwan, there's no smartphone revolution.

00:02:57.080 there's no laptops this podcast wouldn't be happening your cars increasingly use their chips

00:03:04.760 and so on but at the same time just to your point earlier about why china is upset with taiwan

00:03:12.160 taiwan has created in the last 30 years a very high performance democracy i mean it's ranked

00:03:19.880 right up there with Canada on the economist ranking scales. It's created a civil society.

00:03:27.140 It's got gender equality, sexual diversity. It's got the rule of law as a recovering lawyer. I

00:03:33.260 got to tell you, uh, it's rule of law is very impressive. So this story has not been adequately

00:03:42.460 told. And what I do in the book is not just talk about, you know, the China-U.S. conflict and how

00:03:50.120 it might impact Taiwan, but the first five, six chapters are about Taiwan itself, because you've

00:03:56.960 got to get compelled by the story first before you start to understand the geopolitics.

00:04:03.500 Well, let's talk a little bit about the history first, because the official government policy

00:04:09.520 of Canada, of the United States, of most of the Western world, is that there is only one China.

00:04:17.060 And yet, while we don't recognize Taiwan's independence, we don't necessarily recognize

00:04:24.440 that China has control over it. So Taiwan's been part of China for hundreds and hundreds of years,

00:04:31.800 ruled by the Japanese for a bit. But when Mao Zedong took over, this was where the people that 0.98

00:04:37.960 didn't support the communist revolution fled to, but it wasn't a democracy at first, was it?

00:04:44.200 Brian, I'm going to have to take issue with what you just said when you said China's ruled it for

00:04:49.960 hundreds and hundreds of years. Let's just go back to the beginning a little bit.

00:04:55.180 Okay.

00:04:56.000 The indigenous people of Taiwan are not Han Chinese ethnic people. Think instead Austronesian,

00:05:05.000 think Polynesian, think, you know, Papua New Guinea, Bora Bora, Fiji. That's the original 1.00

00:05:12.800 people of Taiwan. And they basically run the place till 1624. And the first non-Micronesians

00:05:24.340 who show up on the island are actually Dutch and Spanish. So the Chinese don't really show up 0.97

00:05:30.240 to the late 1600s. They don't take much interest in the island for about 100 years.

00:05:36.760 The Qing dynasty in the 1800s takes a little more interest. But to your point, a minute ago,

00:05:42.640 when China loses a war to Japan in 1894, they say, oh, by the way, as part of the peace deal,

00:05:50.500 here, take what was then called Formosa. Here, take Taiwan. So you're absolutely right. For 50

00:05:56.840 years, 1894 to 1945, it's actually ruled and governed by the Japanese. So again, no Chinese 1.00

00:06:05.100 connection during that half century. And then when the Chinese lose the Second World War,

00:06:12.620 the KMT, the nationalist government from mainland China, they send in a governor,

00:06:19.460 they end up massacring 30,000 Taiwanese society leaders, the physicians, engineers, doctors,

00:06:29.360 lawyers, and so on. So the idea of Taiwanese independence is crushed again. To make a long

00:06:37.740 story very short, there's a whole chapter on this in the book. When Chiang Kai-shek loses the civil

00:06:43.920 war to the Chinese communists in 49, he flees to Taiwan, takes two million people, a million

00:06:50.720 soldiers, a million family members, and they set up the Republic of China. And Mao sets up the 0.60

00:06:59.040 People's Republic of China, the communist version of China on the mainland. Now, Chiang Kai-shek 0.88

00:07:06.520 doesn't want the communists to take over Taiwan, so he imposes martial law. The longest martial

00:07:13.760 law ever in world history, 45 years. So there's no democracy going on in the 50s, 60s, 70s,

00:07:22.180 and most of the 80s. And so to make a long story very, very short, finally in the year 2000,

00:07:29.460 you get a change of government through democracy to the so-called DPP party. And they've been

00:07:36.820 alternating in effective and fair elections with the kmt but that was part of my point is that it

00:07:44.780 didn't start after the chinese civil war it didn't start out as a democracy correct uh and that is

00:07:52.780 that's part of what makes this fascinating is that as you mentioned earlier they've quickly

00:07:59.040 gone from an authoritarian rule, dictatorial-type rule, to a democracy on par with Canada in very

00:08:06.920 short order. That in itself is impressive. And what it means today is that they are everything

00:08:15.240 that China is not. So 100 miles across the Taiwan Strait sits the behemoth China. Dictatorial, 0.98

00:08:24.040 single-party communist state no human rights oppressive regime really the autocrat of all

00:08:33.440 the autocracies in the world and then as you say across this hundred miles of water you have a

00:08:40.620 model democracy civil society you have religious diversity when i was there i was blown away you

00:08:46.960 see a confucian temple and then down the street the next block you see a catholic church then you

00:08:53.140 see a Buddhist temple, and then you see a Presbyterian church. Now, personally, I'm not

00:08:58.600 religious, but as a quasi-sociologist, I look for religious diversity to tell me how human rights

00:09:06.020 are doing in a society. And I've never seen such religious diversity as I've seen in Taiwan.

00:09:13.160 The official line out of the People's Republic of China would be that they do have religious

00:09:18.480 diversity uh they have catholic churches they have other churches now the difference is the

00:09:25.180 communist party has to pick all their leaders and in the official catholic church in china

00:09:30.220 they have to pick the bishops not the vatican um they will crack down on what are described as

00:09:37.060 house churches because they might teach something that the communist party doesn't like so you know

00:09:42.720 China will claim these things and say, oh, no, we're just like that.

00:09:46.380 And they're clearly not.

00:09:49.080 Yeah, no, they're clearly not.

00:09:51.220 If you follow Mr. Jin, the latest dissident, as it were, who finally got released from prison in China, he's now out of China, and listen to his story.

00:10:05.360 The bottom line is, and you hit the nail on the head, the Chinese Communist Party in China cannot countenance any other center of power or thought other than its own party.

00:10:20.240 And listen, if that's how they run themselves, that's one thing. But to impose that on another country, particularly Taiwan, which is way on the other side of the political spectrum, that's where we should take as Canadians, we should take issue with that.

00:10:38.400 so why are we so tepid in wanting to support taiwan you you went there you did a that that

00:10:47.780 wonderful driving trip with your wife barb that you describe in the book um makes me want to go

00:10:53.560 to taiwan but why are western politicians be it canadian or american or british european

00:11:02.020 Why are they so reluctant to give a full defense of Taiwan? They will, you know, make statements about, you know, China not invading or intimidating Taiwan, but we don't even recognize it as an independent country.

00:11:20.900 So there's a very interesting solution in place to what was a very difficult problem in the 1970s when communist China, still under Mao, decided that it wanted to re-engage with the world.

00:11:43.020 Because through the 50s and 60s, Canada, the U.S., Europe, nobody recognized communist China.

00:11:51.600 And everybody recognized effectively Taiwan, then more commonly known as the Republic of China.

00:11:58.480 And the Republic of China in the 50s, 60s, they had the seat.

00:12:02.840 They had the China seat, for instance, on the Security Council with the veto and so on.

00:12:08.320 But when Mao said to the world, look, I want to re-engage, but here's the deal. If you engage with China, you have to downgrade your recognition of Taiwan.

00:12:24.780 And that's when Canada and the U.S. and virtually all the other countries in the world said, look, the commercial opportunities are so great in China, we're going to recognize China, but we will not recognize China's control over Taiwan or its purported objective of achieving that control.

00:12:52.200 And we came up with what we call our one China policy, which was we understand that China claims Taiwan, but we don't agree with that. We're neutral on that.

00:13:05.580 So yes, our official embassy is in Beijing in terms of China, but we have an office in Taipei. It's not called an embassy, but we have a lot of economic exchange between the two countries. We have people-to-people exchanges.

00:13:23.180 you won't see a canadian prime minister go to taiwan you won't even see cabinet ministers go

00:13:31.400 to taiwan but you will see members of parliament michael chong for instance uh made an emphatic

00:13:38.260 statement when he went to taipei recently these were supposed to be on a trip what six seven

00:13:46.440 months ago and they were pulled because it angered Beijing. Yes. And that was a mistake

00:13:52.260 of the first order. And I think Carney's learned from that. So you're absolutely right. He was

00:13:58.180 going, this was coterminous when he went to Beijing to try to reset the relationship with

00:14:04.040 China. There just happened to be four Canadian MPs in Taipei. Two of them were liberal, as you say,

00:14:11.940 And they were recalled and packed their bags and returned to Ottawa because Carney said, oh, that would be confusing to the Chinese.

00:14:21.700 But to his credit, to Carney's credit, later, a few months later, in sort of late April, early May, the Canadian naval vessel, the Charlottetown, after participating in military exercises in northern Philippines, which is really an exercise to think about the defense of Taiwan, were China to attack it.

00:14:48.580 The Canadian naval vessel, the Charlottetown, did a passage through the Taiwan Strait on its own.

00:14:55.320 We'd never done it alone.

00:14:56.900 And that was to send the signal to China that we very much still support free navigation through the Strait.

00:15:04.820 And indirectly, we support peace across the Taiwan Strait.

00:15:09.400 So I think Carney's learned from that first faux pas.

00:15:12.800 And then more recently, when the Chinese foreign minister was in Ottawa with meetings with our foreign minister, Mizanand, I wasn't in the room, so I don't know the exact words, but I'm pretty sure he gave a strong statement to our foreign minister, who then pushed back and said, look, we can have commercial relations with you, China, but we absolutely are going to continue our relationship with Taiwan as well.

00:15:42.280 And that's where hopefully we've got a sort of a an all party consensus in parliament that that's absolutely the right track to take.

00:15:54.680 It's more than 90 percent of the advanced semiconductors in the world come out of Taiwan.

00:16:01.760 You mentioned earlier that everyone thinks about computers when they hear about semiconductors or chips.

00:16:08.600 But if you recall, during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was, for a while, there was a slowdown in supply chains and getting vehicles became difficult.

00:16:23.000 You were having to wait months for getting certain types of vehicles because the manufacturers couldn't get the chips.

00:16:29.620 correct if production of those chips was interrupted in any sort of way through an

00:16:39.200 invasion or some sort of uh instigation by china against taiwan our economy would be in great

00:16:47.940 difficulty so earlier you mentioned that it was the economic opportunity with mainland china that

00:16:54.300 made people say oh okay we'll switch the economic opportunity is too great shouldn't the fact that

00:16:59.600 that we are economically dependent on Taiwan now blow away the idea that we should be neutral?

00:17:05.960 Shouldn't we be full-throated in our defense of Taiwan? We effectively need them.

00:17:13.160 Yeah, and actually the example you point to, which is a good one, the limited supply chain

00:17:21.340 interruption of chips for cars and what that produced in the auto sector, that would be

00:17:28.480 magnified many times over. Bloomberg has estimated that if there's an interruption

00:17:35.520 of chip production and supply from Taiwan to the rest of the world, it would result in a 10%

00:17:44.400 hit to GDP globally and 10%, that's depression level impact. So not just a recession. Now in

00:17:54.760 the U S it would only be 6.7%, but still, but still. So to your point, depression level,

00:18:02.920 not super bad depression level, but depression level. Yes. So, so Brian, you're, you're bang on

00:18:08.420 And look, a bunch of countries like the U.S. are quickly trying to recreate capability and manufacturing supply in their own country.

00:18:20.180 But I can tell you again from my trip to Taiwan and what I saw, and there's a whole chapter in the book just on the economics of Taiwan. They have 16 campuses, not just individual buildings, but campuses of TSMC set that against Arizona with three buildings, just three buildings, not campuses.

00:18:45.360 So the critical mass is going to remain in Taiwan. So to your point, my response would be, we've got to do both. We've got to send a message to Xi Jinping, along with the other democracies, that taking over Taiwan is not on, and we've got to help in the deterrence effort, right?

00:19:08.800 If you want peace, prepare for war through deterrence, so hopefully we never have a war.

00:19:14.760 But at the same time, we should be able to sell particularly low-tech commodities to China, our canola, our LNG, and so forth.

00:19:26.480 But for instance, on China, we should not be buying their EVs, which is part of the Carney deal.

00:19:33.840 That was a mistake. And we shouldn't be buying high tech products from any of the big autocrats because there's a data trail going back to those countries and so on. So you can do both. You can support Taiwan and have limited types of trade with the autocracies.

00:19:55.080 i i think the the ship has sailed on buying um tech from china all of our phones all of our

00:20:02.160 laptops so much of what we uh use to you know live the high-tech life all come out of china

00:20:11.000 perhaps powered by taiwanese um parts and tech but built in china i just looked up you mentioned

00:20:19.540 the three buildings in Arizona, they're going to be building more, but that's not coming online

00:20:26.340 until 2029. Then they're doing some work in Washington state, some work in San Jose and

00:20:34.140 Austin, Texas. But I mean, you're right. We're still going to be super dependent on this Taiwanese

00:20:41.540 tech plus the best chips the most advanced chips are still exclusively coming out of taiwan the

00:20:50.380 i don't want to get that advantage so but just to finish it so i don't want to get too too technical

00:20:57.080 but the building in arizona that's come on stream is at what's called the four nanometer process

00:21:04.160 level the chips made in taiwan are two nanometer which doesn't sound like a big difference but

00:21:10.700 It's about a 40% difference in performance capacity capability.

00:21:16.560 So the critical mass of TSMC is still very much in Taiwan.

00:21:22.440 Now, how did they get there? 0.67

00:21:25.500 If you go to Taiwan, you must go to Sinshu, their science city.

00:21:30.900 It's about an hour from Taipei.

00:21:33.180 It's kind of like Palo Alto is the San Francisco, Sinshu is the Taipei.

00:21:38.120 And when you go to Sinchu, where TSMC has its core factories and offices, there's actually a museum devoted to their innovation, and they highlight Morris Chang, who founded the company in the late 80s.

00:21:54.860 And he had this idea.

00:21:56.500 He said, look, I'm not going to design chips.

00:21:59.200 And so, just to be clear for all your listeners, the NVIDIA chip is designed in California.

00:22:06.340 But then that chip design goes to Taiwan, and then TSMC makes the chip based on that NVIDIA California design.

00:22:20.220 And then to finish the picture, the machines in the TSMC factories in Taiwan, and these are the most important machines in the world right now, $450 million U.S. for one of these machines, they're actually made, believe it or not, in the Netherlands, right?

00:22:43.080 The country that gave us Gouda cheese, wooden clogs, and tulips actually produces the most important chip-making machine in the world.

00:22:52.900 What I'm getting at, by the way, is how global the supply chain is.

00:22:57.980 So it's not just Taiwan.

00:22:59.480 We also have to defend Europe through NATO.

00:23:02.500 But to your narrow question, what has TSMC got that no one else has got?

00:23:08.100 They have focused only on manufacturing.

00:23:11.400 they figured out how to do it and how to do it with economics that blows away everybody else

00:23:18.900 so in a nutshell they produce yields from a single silicon wafer where they actually then

00:23:26.360 make the individual chips they produce yields of 85 90 percent when the rest of the industry is at

00:23:33.560 45 to 50%. So they have 75,000 engineers and they've created a critical mass where they know

00:23:42.740 how to get this done in a way that nobody else can. And the Chinese are desperately trying to 1.00

00:23:48.640 catch up. I would put them at least 10 years behind. You're going to hear all these stories 1.00

00:23:54.840 coming out about their advances and including, you know, Kim K3 and DeepSeek and all that on

00:24:02.840 the AI side, they're still well behind. All right. I want to talk to you more about what

00:24:09.260 would happen if China did act against Taiwan, but we do need to take a quick break. Before the break

00:24:14.620 though, I want to remind the listeners, merch, yep, you're hearing me talk about it a lot. You

00:24:19.440 want a hoodie, a hat, a tote bag to show that you support PostMedia, National Post, Toronto Sun. You

00:24:25.040 can get all of that. You can get your local PostMedia paper. Support fearless journalism by

00:24:30.740 going to the PostMedia merch store.

00:24:33.800 PostMedia.store.

00:24:35.180 Get your dad ball cap with the Toronto Sun logo on it.

00:24:38.200 Get your National Post tote bag.

00:24:40.440 Show your support.

00:24:42.060 PostMedia.store.

00:24:44.080 Shop the collection today.

00:24:45.620 The sports calendar is on fire

00:24:47.040 and the ScoreBet has you covered

00:24:48.360 with breaking news and betting seamlessly connected.

00:24:50.960 Every play, every stat, every score.

00:24:53.220 Giving you the tools you need to bet confidently.

00:24:56.020 Born in the North, built for you.

00:24:57.640 The ScoreBet, Canada's sports book.

00:24:59.340 19 years or older, Ontario only.

00:25:01.700 If you or someone you know has gambling concerns,

00:25:03.540 call ConnexOntario 24-7 at 1-866-531-2600,

00:25:08.160 text us at 247-247,

00:25:10.140 or chat with us at www.connexontario.ca.

00:25:13.740 Standard message and data rates may apply.

00:25:16.080 You're a political junkie, right?

00:25:17.720 I mean, that's why you're listening to this podcast.

00:25:20.480 But if you're not in the loop with PostMedia's VIP political hack,

00:25:25.240 then you're not getting even close to the whole politics story.

00:25:29.800 I'm Stuart Thompson, Parliamentary Bureau Chief.

00:25:32.400 And I'm political analyst Tasha Carradine.

00:25:35.220 We head up the team that brings political hack members the exclusive political intel that goes so much deeper than the news.

00:25:41.560 With inside stories, sharp analysis, and behind-the-scenes scoops from Parliament Hill and beyond.

00:25:47.180 With our twice-weekly newsletters, exclusive reports from Washington, D.C., early access to John Iveson columns,

00:25:55.240 and subscriber-only videos and events,

00:25:58.580 HAC members get insider insight

00:26:00.620 into the minds of the strategists,

00:26:02.900 policy gurus, and power brokers

00:26:04.680 shaping Canada's political future.

00:26:07.280 You don't want to miss all that, do you?

00:26:08.680 I sure don't.

00:26:10.080 And you can get all now

00:26:12.080 for less than a dollar a week.

00:26:15.000 Just go to nationalpost.com

00:26:17.300 slash newsletters to sign up.

00:26:20.280 That's nationalpost.com

00:26:22.040 slash newsletters.

00:26:23.780 So much is happening in politics right now.

00:26:27.140 Rising tensions with the U.S. on trade and defense.

00:26:30.420 Not one, but two provincial separatist movements gaining real ground.

00:26:34.480 The liberals trying to hang on to a razor-thin majority

00:26:38.020 as the economy stumbles and with the cost of living still rising.

00:26:42.220 It's exciting.

00:26:43.220 Extremely exciting.

00:26:44.480 But the only way to get behind the scenes

00:26:46.320 and right into the source code of what politicians

00:26:48.600 and the people around them are really thinking

00:26:50.460 is to get political hack.

00:26:52.260 Go to nationalpost.com slash newsletters.

00:26:56.020 And join us.

00:26:57.380 This is Tristan Hopper, the host of Canada Did What?

00:27:00.780 where we unpack the biggest, weirdest, and wildest political moments in Canadian history you thought you knew

00:27:06.080 and tell you what really happened.

00:27:08.540 Stick around at the end of the episode to hear a sample of one of our favourite episodes from Season 2.

00:27:13.660 And if you missed it, there are even more episodes from last season.

00:27:16.860 So make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What? everywhere you get podcasts.

00:27:22.260 George, I want to ask you in a bit about what really fascinated you about Taiwan, because, you know, as you told me before we started, that the book wasn't originally called Inspired by Taiwan, but it became that due to your trip.

00:27:36.100 But I think we've got to focus a little bit first on that question of what happens if China invades. How long do you see before China does act? Most people believe that President Xi and China will at some point try to take over Taiwan by force or intimidation, some sort of leverage.

00:28:02.540 What do you see coming out of that after your trip there and all your research on Taiwan?

00:28:09.520 So the first thing to really understand is that China's already applying immense pressure on Taiwan.

00:28:20.580 There's a whole chapter in the book towards the end of the book called China's Incessant Pressure on Taiwan.

00:28:27.540 So, you know, cyber attacks. China launches 2.6 million cyber attacks against Taiwan each day. Not week, not month, each day. There's economic coercion. There was a wonderful story, but with a good ending, where they quickly, during the height of the pineapple harvest, particularly in the south of Taiwan, China says, oh, we're not buying any more pineapples.

00:28:56.200 And all of these pineapples are sitting there and, you know, like all fruit, they're going

00:29:00.800 to go bad if they're not eating.

00:29:02.160 I think a few of our canola farmers could relate to this.

00:29:05.780 Well, so what Taiwan did is they checked out Japan and said, by the way, do you guys like

00:29:12.100 pineapple?

00:29:12.700 To make a long story short, they love pineapple.

00:29:16.220 And today, 95% of Taiwanese pineapples go to Japan because something that we haven't

00:29:22.440 explored and happy to talk more about is that the book is now being read by a lot of canadians

00:29:29.840 not just for the taiwanese story but to learn some lessons for what we're now starting to face

00:29:37.980 with the donald trump presidency and we're desperately looking for third markets and so

00:29:44.620 on we we need our own pineapple diversion story and as you say whether it's canola or or other

00:29:51.380 products. Pork, seafood, you name it. That's how China applies pressure. Right. So all of this

00:29:59.900 pressure is being exerted, including what are called gray zone tactics. So these are military

00:30:05.040 tactics where they fly all around the island. These are Chinese warplanes. They sail warships

00:30:15.320 all around the island, and they participate in live fire exercises. So I increasingly call them 0.98

00:30:21.720 rehearsals for the invasion. And obviously what China is trying to do with all of these pressure

00:30:28.000 tactics is to wear down the people of Taiwan and get them to, you know, just throw in the towel.

00:30:35.500 And what, to your other question, what I found so impressive about the Taiwanese 0.59

00:30:41.000 is they're pushing back they they have civil defense courses that families take and they do

00:30:49.540 it collectively and they have all sorts of training not just on first aid but

00:30:56.980 in August when they do their annual big military exercise the country's going to turn down its

00:31:04.540 internet volume as it were so a much slower internet so how do you survive when you don't 0.94

00:31:11.840 have full-on internet so basically they're taking all the lessons from ukraine and how ukraine has

00:31:17.960 survived against all odds against a much bigger foe russia and they're starting to apply them and

00:31:25.700 i gotta tell you brian i was brought to tears you know multiple times during my interviews and my

00:31:33.840 and what I saw in Taiwan. And part of it was also now, if they can do it, you know, we can do it

00:31:42.740 against Trump because, you know, they've been at it for 75 years. We've only been at it for,

00:31:51.180 you know, a year and a half. You mentioned those civil defense courses and I suddenly had,

00:31:56.560 you know, memories of the stories I had of my grandfather being in the home guard in Britain

00:32:01.800 during the second world war here's a helmet and a flashlight go uh go get ready for the german

00:32:07.400 invasion no that it's it's impressive exactly it they're willing to do it though um i have to ask

00:32:15.820 though you know you write about how the people of taiwan see themselves as chinese that's the

00:32:26.760 polling shows that, you know, how do you identify? Well, I'm Chinese. Couldn't Xi be trying to get

00:32:34.980 Taiwan with a carrot rather than a stick? Couldn't he be courting them, trying to make love to them 0.88

00:32:42.140 instead of making war? So this is a really, really central point. Xi Jinping makes this argument

00:32:52.380 that if you're ethnically Han Chinese, H-A-N, Han Chinese,

00:33:00.160 then you are... 0.91

00:33:02.380 And Taiwan is primarily Han and Hakka Chinese

00:33:06.000 plus the indigenous groups, correct? 1.00

00:33:08.740 The indigenous is very small,

00:33:11.740 you know, 3%, 4%, 6% in that range, very small. 1.00

00:33:15.780 And the rest is very much Han Chinese.

00:33:19.840 But there's a difference between—oh, but sorry, to my point earlier, so Xi Jinping would like the world to think that everybody who's Han Chinese ethnically, in terms of origin and ancestors, owes allegiance to Beijing.

00:33:35.840 But that's like saying to the Americans, oh, you're English. You should owe your allegiance to London, England, and King Charles, and the new prime minister, Burnham, etc. And the Americans would laugh at that and say, well, just because we speak English, we're not going to give our allegiance to England.

00:33:58.080 And it's very similar in Taiwan. And in fact, even the language, yes, they speak Mandarin Chinese, but they also speak a Taiwanese version of Chinese that when spoken fully and well, a Mandarin speaker from the mainland can't understand.

00:34:18.980 But most importantly, they speak democracy. They speak religious diversity. They speak sexual diversity. They speak rule of law. And those values trump this allegiance to a Han Chinese political idea.

00:34:41.140 So they're still ethnically Han Chinese, so they have great reverence for their ancestors. A lot of the cuisine is very traditional Asian Chinese. But when you go to Taiwan, you start to see how their architecture, part Asian, part Western. Their music, part Asian, part Western.

00:35:07.080 They speak English in many, many circles.

00:35:11.320 When you listen to a podcast like this in some Taiwanese circles, it's half Taiwanese and half English, and they just seamlessly go from one to the other.

00:35:23.880 I mentioned one of those podcasts in the book.

00:35:26.000 So they have moved beyond a narrow sense of Chinese allegiance.

00:35:33.120 And the latest polls, and including the voting, it's maybe 7% want to unify with China and 87% absolutely do not.

00:35:45.000 But if the leadership in Beijing were less autocratic, could those numbers change?

00:35:56.260 Could people say, well, they're going to let us continue to have diversity.

00:36:00.840 They're going to continue to let us have our civil society, to, you know, have the rule of law.

00:36:07.080 Essentially what they promised Hong Kong and then took away.

00:36:10.980 I mean, Hong Kong was once a glorious place on the face of the earth.

00:36:18.100 I wouldn't put it there now.

00:36:20.560 So, you know, if they had let Hong Kong flourish, they might have gotten Taiwan without a fight, no?

00:36:28.560 And, well, absolutely, in the sense that the deal that they made with Hong Kong, you remember the phrase, one country, two systems.

00:36:39.020 Yeah.

00:36:39.340 is precisely the deal they've been offering Taiwan.

00:36:43.660 Don't worry. 0.78

00:36:45.380 Even though you'll be part of China, 1.00

00:36:47.240 you can keep all of your, you know,

00:36:49.680 domestic institutions and ways of life and so on.

00:36:54.440 But in Hong Kong, Xi Jinping has cracked down. 0.99

00:36:57.820 So in fact, it's not like the Taiwanese

00:37:02.120 have to imagine a world where that promise is broken.

00:37:06.460 They see it with their own eyes in the last decade being broken in Hong Kong. So to your point, no, there's no hope of that happening.

00:37:19.720 And what I say in the book and my earlier book, Cold War 2.0, is that Xi Jinping is actually more autocratic than even his three or four predecessors. And if anything, he's, you know, he's going the other way.

00:37:38.540 And so the chances of all those particularly leaders of Taiwan, because think about this, the current president, William Lai, he's in his late 60s. He was in his early 30s when that struggle for democracy finally came to fruition.

00:37:59.280 So you have a leadership generation right now that remembers the autocracy personally, not just, you know, reading about it from dusty history books, but they lived through it.

00:38:11.400 So for them to go back to the old system that they worked so hard to give up, we visited two prisons, they're now museums, where the autocrat in Taiwan put people in prison and did the re-education camp thing for 330,000 dissidents and another 3,500 were executed.

00:38:36.220 So the current, as I say, leaders and civil society in general, they understand that it would not be at all conducive to what they've got.

00:38:48.220 I wonder how long that survives because, you know, I've known many people who fled from behind the Iron Curtain and I'm old enough to remember the Iron Curtain being up and people fleeing those countries and you hear their stories and then you talk to their children or grandchildren and they start espousing views that would take people back to that.

00:39:12.260 And you think, how how did you go from fleeing communism to embracing either full on communism or a light version of it?

00:39:21.240 It it always just boggles my mind.

00:39:24.300 George, I want to ask you about the comparison with with Ukraine.

00:39:28.120 You've mentioned that a couple of times.

00:39:32.040 We hear Western leaders say that they will defend Taiwan.

00:39:37.240 You mentioned HMCS Charlottetown going through the Strait of Taiwan.

00:39:45.100 The Americans constantly say that they will defend Taiwan.

00:39:50.700 But will Western countries actually defend Taiwan if China decides to invade?

00:39:57.860 Because what we've done with Ukraine, in my view, is give them enough to keep going, 0.59

00:40:04.600 but not give them enough to win. 0.83

00:40:07.240 Well, one of the mistakes with the Ukraine situation, and one of the lessons that I think we've learned as a community of democracies, is that prior even to 2014, let alone 2022 in the full-scale invasion,

00:40:27.300 We did not give Ukraine sufficient military resources, particularly equipment, for them to be able to create such a self-defense regime that Putin would wake up every morning and say, maybe not today, maybe not today.

00:40:48.720 So thankfully with Taiwan, up until a recent Trump decision in the spring, the Americans have been selling sufficient weapons, but also Taiwan has been making.

00:41:07.320 They have their own fighter jet.

00:41:10.180 Now, it's old, but just to get, they've built their own submarine.

00:41:14.720 You know, this is fascinating when you think about, you know, Canada, just announcing, you know, the German submarine is our new submarine. The Taiwanese went out and they built their own diesel electric submarine. Now, a lot of the software and the guts of it came from England, granted. They have their own missile system and so on and so forth.

00:41:36.120 So they are learning the lessons of Ukraine in that sense. They've increased their military budget sufficiently. They've increased from one week to two weeks, the major war games exercise that takes place every August. And they've included, you know, thousands more people, including civilians into it.

00:41:59.880 so they're actually really really muscling up but to your point they need friends

00:42:06.100 to your narrow question i think japan will absolutely be there for them and their new

00:42:12.040 prime minister who i'm a big fan of has said so i think the philippines will be drawn in because

00:42:17.580 they're so interconnected i don't think south korea will they're sort of like the poland of

00:42:23.260 Eastern Europe, they've got their own problems with North Korea. But the big question is, well,

00:42:30.300 what about the United States? Because, yeah, HMCS Charlottetown is not going to do it.

00:42:36.980 Right. So you mentioned Trump made a change in the spring. Explain that.

00:42:42.860 So when in the 1970s, as I talked before the break, when the U.S. and other countries said,

00:42:50.460 okay, look, we're going to recognize China, but we're going to keep things going on an economic

00:42:55.260 and people-to-people level with Taiwan. One of the things that the U.S. Congress did was pass

00:43:01.020 the Taiwan Relations Act, the TRA. And under the TRA, the executive must sell weapons to Taiwan.

00:43:10.500 And then Reagan, you know, no shy wallflower Reagan, he said, I'm not even going to discuss

00:43:19.120 these weapons sales with Beijing. This is between us and Taiwan. And so a lot of military equipment

00:43:27.640 has been purchased by Taiwan over the last few decades. And for the first time after the recent

00:43:35.000 Trump-Xi Jinping summit in May in Beijing, Trump, you may recall, on the plane ride back to the US

00:43:44.800 When asked about, well, are you going to sell these $14 billion worth of arms that Taiwan is ready to buy? He says, well, I'm thinking about it. I'm going to use it as a negotiating chip with China.

00:44:02.780 And this was a horrible position to take. This is precisely what detracts from deterrence, because if the Chinese start to see that the U.S. is not as fulsomely supportive, that might precisely be the kind of thing that a Xi Jinping says, oh, well, maybe if I do attack, the U.S. will be, you know, sitting on the wall kind of thing.

00:44:29.840 So hopefully, I'm hoping that coming out of the next meeting in September that's coming up, Trump will say, yeah, no, I'm going to approve that sale. And particularly if there's a change in the midterms in November, I think a Democratic-controlled House will force him to do that.

00:44:49.900 So it's not beyond correction, but it's not helpful. But at the military level, I can tell you the U.S. military is still doing all the right things. But let me end on the Iran war.

00:45:05.240 the use of the precision strike weapons particularly the tomahawk and then the

00:45:12.500 interceptors the pack three you know patriot missile interceptors those are dwindling in

00:45:20.680 supply and they're even pulling some of that out of asia this is the american military yeah so

00:45:27.560 i'm hoping that trump can come to some conclusion on iran without spending any more of those very

00:45:34.520 precious munitions, because again, I'm not a warmonger. I'm really not. It pains me that so

00:45:42.780 much of this money is being spent on the military, but that's what you have to do to preserve the

00:45:50.420 peace. So let's not squander it in the Middle East when what we really need is to make a proper

00:45:58.020 deterrence posture around Taiwan. 0.95

00:46:03.020 Give me an argument.

00:46:06.400 Talk to the audience about what you experienced in Taiwanese culture during your time there

00:46:13.580 that would lead them to say, you know what, George is right.

00:46:18.640 We need to defend this country.

00:46:21.080 We need to defend these people.

00:46:22.880 We need to support their democracy.

00:46:26.100 Give me the elevator pitch that you would use if you were stuck in an elevator with Donald Trump, Andy Burnham, Mark Carney, and Emmanuel Macron.

00:46:38.200 What would you say to them?

00:46:41.180 So the last chapter in the book is devoted exactly to that question.

00:46:46.580 And I have about a dozen good reasons.

00:46:48.840 And I address both those people who only care about the national interest, you know, hard power.

00:46:56.200 And then I address the people who care about values.

00:47:00.200 Because to me, Taiwan resonates on both.

00:47:04.360 In terms of the national interest, I'll be really, really bare bones and bare knuckles with you. 1.00

00:47:10.840 I don't want 23 million Taiwanese people to be working for the other side.

00:47:17.020 I want them working with the democracies. I want them on my team democracy. And by the way,

00:47:23.700 it's the same with Ukraine. They are now the most powerful military in Europe. If Russia succeeds in

00:47:30.520 taking over Ukraine, they're going to have the most powerful military in Europe aimed at the

00:47:37.520 rest of Europe. So the national interest is we don't want all that tech savviness working for

00:47:46.020 Xi Jinping. But when it comes to values, I won't go into the full storyline, but in the book,

00:47:54.680 I talk about three instances where Barb and I were shown incredible kindness and generosity.

00:48:03.620 And when it happened the first time, I thought, okay, well, you know, that could happen anywhere.

00:48:07.560 When it happened the second time, I thought, huh, this is interesting. And when it happened

00:48:11.320 And the third time I said, okay, you know, something's going on here.

00:48:14.860 And when I went, got back to Taipei, I asked a senior diplomat and I said, is this unusual?

00:48:22.720 And he says, no, no, no.

00:48:23.800 What you just described is Taiwan through and through.

00:48:28.160 And then he said, and you don't get this in China.

00:48:30.960 This is a product of 30 years of democracy and how they deal with other people.

00:48:37.260 And, you know, only 6% of the world's population lives under a full democracy nowadays

00:48:44.320 We can't afford to lose Taiwan

00:48:47.520 We want them in our democracy community 1.00

00:48:51.280 And one day, frankly, like Ukraine is now helping even the Americans

00:48:56.800 If we help Taiwan now, they'll be helping us

00:49:01.740 So we've got to support them both for national interest reasons and value reasons.

00:49:08.840 The book is called Inspired by Taiwan, and George, you've inspired me to consider going

00:49:13.800 to Taiwan, taking up one of those offers that people keep approaching me with.

00:49:19.220 You've also inspired me to go and read your previous book, which I did not know about

00:49:23.280 previously, Cold War 2.0, The Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle Between China,

00:49:29.060 Russia, and America. Both of those are from Sutherland House, correct?

00:49:34.240 The first book is actually Pegasus Books out of New York, but the second one is absolutely

00:49:40.840 Sutherland House, the finest editor of nonfiction in Canada. Let me just put in a plug for Ken White

00:49:49.400 and his fantastic team. Okay, sounds great. And of course, you can pick that up wherever you get

00:49:54.640 your books uh george thanks so much for the time happy to be here cheers full comment is a post

00:50:02.180 media podcast my name is brian lily your host this episode was produced by andre prue theme music by

00:50:07.560 bryce hall kevin liban is the executive producer make sure that you hit subscribe share this on

00:50:13.160 social media and tell your friends about it thanks for listening until next time i'm brian lily

00:50:18.620 here's that clip from canada did what season two that we promised for you

00:50:25.840 and i will tell you that there was the vast majority of the people

00:50:33.360 that we went to look for that we went to locate uh we had no problem finding them

00:50:40.780 approximately a third of them we found literally in the phone book these were these these people

00:50:48.580 were not afraid. They knew that nobody was effectively hunting them. They knew they had

00:50:53.680 escaped justice, that they were going to die in their beds, and they felt comfortable.

00:50:59.100 The usually cited figure is that several hundred Nazi war criminals settled in Canada after 1945.

00:51:06.120 After the war, you have massive streams of refugees moving into countries in the Western

00:51:10.680 Hemisphere. The term at the time was displaced persons or DPs. We'll get into this, but a lot

00:51:17.860 of these war criminals weren't German. The Holocaust was disproportionately committed by

00:51:22.420 non-Germans acting under German orders. The Nazis show up, they enlist whatever police force or

00:51:28.380 militia groups are around into helping the occupation, and it's those groups that are 0.98

00:51:32.920 ordered to round up and murder Jews. After the war, Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, is

00:51:38.860 completely in ruins. If you were a Nazi collaborator, it was a very easy place to take 0.63

00:51:43.880 off your uniform, rip up your identity cards, and pretend to be someone else. As refugee streams 1.00

00:51:50.300 moved into places like Canada, there were groups at the time warning that it was a perfect conduit

00:51:56.080 for war criminals looking to escape justice. The Canadian Jewish Congress specifically told Ottawa

00:52:01.900 that even though Canada was barring immigration to veterans of the German military, any number of

00:52:07.640 these foreign collaborators could be slipping in. But as will be a theme of this podcast,

00:52:13.280 Ottawa didn't listen to them.

00:52:15.220 If you want to hear the rest of the story,

00:52:17.640 make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What?

00:52:20.640 Everywhere you get your podcasts.

Full Comment - October 19, 2026

Will Canada sacrifice democratic Taiwan to China’s communists？

Episode Stats

Transcript