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Available at your local grocery store or online at athleticbrewing.com near Beer Fit for all times the same tiny island that most people couldn't find on a map is one of the most likely flashpoints for a major global conflict. Fewer than 15 countries on Earth officially recognize it as a real country, and yet it is one of the 20 largest economies in the world. It builds around 90% of the most advanced computer chips on the planet, the ones inside your phone, your car, your laptop, literally the servers running artificial intelligence. Without this one island, the global economy doesn't just slow down, it might stop. And the same government that sat in China's seat at the United nations for over two decades got voted out in 1971 and hasn't been allowed back in since. It has its own military, its own currency, its own democratically elected president, its own passport. But if you call it a country in the wrong room, billion dollar deals collapse. Hollywood stars will post tearful apologies in Mandarin. The entire sports league will get pulled off of Chinese television. Yes, we are talking about Taiwan. Or depending on who you ask, we're talking about the Republic of China. And depending on who else you ask, in Beijing's view, we're talking about a Reneg province that was never supposed to leave in the first place. This is the story of how one unfinished Civil War from 1949 became one of the most dangerous geopolitical standoffs on the planet, and why every major government on Earth is terrified to say the wrong thing. So if you're interested in history of this specific conflict why Taiwan is so important right now in the global stage, and of course, all the details on both sides of the issue. This is the episode for you. So sit back, relax, and welcome to History Camp. Foreign. What's up, people? And welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent, where every single week, we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from all history, from all time, forever. Yes, I want to say thank you so much to every single person that clicked on this video that supports the channel. Every time you engage with the content, you keep the lights on here in the campsite and you keep the fire burning. So appreciate y'. All. I also want to say shout out to the patrons, we have a Patreon that is our inner sanctum. It is the. It is the crypt. It is the place where the most faithful of the campers gather. It is the fire, and you want to be close to the fire so you can check it out. Patreon.com Camp Gagnon and all the proceeds of that go directly to the guy sitting to my right. He's handsome, he's smart, he's tall, he's very wealthy. His name's Crusos Papadopoulos. How are you, pal? We should have. All right, Christos, I'm sorry, we don't have time because we're talking about a very fascinating geopolitical conflict. All right? Jaime said you look like a Make a Wish kid. I thought that was disrespectful. He is right. I know. Don't. Come on, don't sell yourself short. You sound like a Make a Wish kid. Like you're a little desperate, but I don't think you look like one. I don't know if I shaved my beard. It's pretty bad. Yeah, well, any guy with a shaved beard, you know, I mean, it doesn't come across great. Anyway, look, we. We should. We can't, you know, can't get too off the rails here. If people want to hear from Christos, if they want to talk to Christos one on one, they can go to Patreon. Anyway, today we're talking about a small little island known as Taiwan. Now, you've probably seen this in the news. If you are following what's going on right now in the conflict with the United States, Israel, Iran, plus all the proxies, etc, you're going to hear about Taiwan coming up, like, oh, this is just setting up for Taiwan. That's what our friend Chris Cappy said when he came on the show on the Main channel recently, and it seems like Taiwan, perhaps depending on who you ask, is the button, it is the flash pin that will initiate some type of massive global conflict. But what is Taiwan? What is Taiwan's relationship with China? What do the Chinese people say about Taiwan? How does America view Taiwan, etc? And why is this one small little piece of land, one, so economically viable and two, so important to the geopolitical happenings of our world? Well, you came to the right place. Don't worry. We're going to dive into all that and we're going to try to give a fair and, you know, unbiased as well as we can take on what's actually going on. We try to give both perspectives. That way you can understand what the people are thinking. Now, a few things before I start. One, I'm not a political scientist. I'm not a geopolitical expert. I don't know all the things. I'm just a guy with a wi fi connection and myself, plus a team of researchers have put together this episode so that we can try to understand what's going on, so that you can learn, so I can learn, so we can all be a little bit less dumb. So a couple things. One, if I miss anything, if you're Taiwanese, if you're Chinese, if you know, please feel free to correct me. You know, if there's anything in the comments, please drop them in there. I just want to know the truth. Secondly, sorry if I get any of the words wrong. I didn't grow up speaking Mandarin. I don't even. I don't know Cantonese. I know that one video of the pilots that, that crashed and they swapped the names out for those racist Chinese names. You remember that? No. Some Ting Wong we. Too low. You never saw that. It's a terrible clip. It's very extremely insensitive and offensive to the Chinese community. So I don't condone it. I don't even want to watch it because it pisses me off how offensive it is. Me too. Same for the record. Now let's just move on with what's going on in Taiwan. All right? In order to understand Taiwan, you actually have to start with China. And you can't go with China today. You actually got to go back more than 100 years. So for over, like 2,000 years, China was ruled by a series of dynasties. Now it's a dynasty, basically, just like emperors who govern one of the oldest continuous civilizations in human history. Okay? But by the late 1800s, the last dynasty, the Qing dynasty, was basically falling apart. Foreign powers basically carved China into different spheres of influence. The British had humiliated the empire. The Opium wars, which is its own fascinating subset of history that we should do an episode on. The Japanese had seized territory, and internally, the country was plagued by famine and corruption and just a population that was losing faith in imperial rule and in these dynasties that had basically governed the country for hundreds of years. And then came Sun Yat Sen. Now, Sun Yat Sen was one of those rare figures who is revered on both sides of this bitter divide. So to this day, both mainland Chinese and Taiwanese consider him the father, father of the nation, which should tell you something about how complicated the story is about to get. Now, sun was a doctor and a revolutionary and a philosopher in a lot of ways. And he believed that China needed to overthrow the emperor in order to become a modern republic. Now, he spent years in exile, fundraising in the United States, in Japan and Southeast Asia, organizing secret societies and surviving assassination attempts. And in 1911, a revolution finally succeeded. The Qing Dynasty collapsed. And on January 1, 1912, the Republic of China, also called the ROC, was officially established. Sun Yat Sen became its first provisional president. And after 2000 years of emperors, China was, at least on paper, a republic. But here's the thing. The republic was a disaster. He stepped down as president and almost immediately was replaced with a guy named Yuan Shikai, who was a general who promptly tried to declare himself emperor. So you literally go from years of dynastic regime and emperors that basically pass on to their kids, and then you get one, you know, democratically elected president, and then back to a guy that tries to become an emperor. Then when Yuan dies in 1916, China fractured into competing warlord territories. So for the next decade, the country was essentially just a failed state. I mean, imagine a government in the world that's completely dysfunctional. That's what China was at the beginning of the 1900s. You have, like, dozens of regional warlords basically fighting each other in civil war upon civil war, while the central government in Beijing controls basically nothing. And then Sun Yat Sen basically spent the rest of his life trying to reunify China. He founded the Kuomintang, or the kmt. This is like the Chinese Nationalist Party, and ironically sought help from the newly formed Soviet Union to build a modern political party and an actual army. He unfortunately died of cancer in 1925 before he could actually see China become unified. But he left behind two things that would actually shape the future of the country over the next century. The kumontang and a young military officer named Chiang Kai Shek. Now, after Sun Yat Sen passed away. Chiang Kai Shek rose to lead the kmt. He was a military man. He was disciplined and autocratic and extremely suspicious and paranoid. And he had a problem. You see, during Sun's lifetime, the kmt, this Nationalist Party had been cooperating with the Chinese Communist Party, the ccp, you probably heard of that. And this had been founded in 1921. The Soviets had basically encouraged both parties to work together in a united front against the warlords. But Chiang Kai Shek was not a Communist. He was a Nationalist and aligned with China's business elite and, of course, the landowners of China. And in 1927, he made his move. And what became known as the Shanghai Massacre or the White Terror, Chiang turned on the Communists. Thousands of suspected Communists and labor organizers were arrested, organized and executed. And practically overnight, the alliance was over and China's civil war had begun. Now, not between all these different factions, but between the KMT and the ccp. On one side you have the KMT led by Chiang Kai Shek, and these are the Nationalists. This is backed by China's urban elite, supported by the Western powers and controlling the official government. On the other side you have the Chinese Communist Party led by a man from the rural Hunan province named Mao Zedong. And Mao is backed by the peasant farmers and fueled by revolutionary ideology and is basically fighting a guerrilla war from the countryside. And you can see how these two factions are against each other, and you can imagine the types of people that would side on each. Now the civil war broke out and it raged from 1927 to 1949 with one major interruption, the Second Sino Japanese War, which basically merged into World War II. When Japan invaded China in 1937, the Nationalists and the Communists were actually forced into this uneasy truce basically to fight this existential threat and this common enemy. But even during the war against Japan, both sides were maneuvering against each other, saving their best troops and their resources for the fight that they knew was going to come after this conflict. And when Japan surrendered in 1945, the Civil War exploded again, but this time way bigger. And here's where things get interesting. On paper, Chiang Kai Shek should have won. The Nationalists had more troops and more weapons and more international support. I mean, the United States had been bankrolling the KMT throughout World War II, but the Nationalist government was riddled with corruption, which is kind of ironic, right? If you think about the Nationalists as opposed to the Communists, it is the corruption and the greed ultimately that really takes out the kmt. Inflation was catastrophic. And at one Point, prices were doubling every few days. I mean, like, a loaf of bread would be like $2, $4, $8, $16, just going up exponentially. And as a result, morale collapses. Soldiers are deserting by the hundreds of thousands, many of them even switching sides to join the Communists. Mao Zedong, meanwhile, had spent decades building support amongst China's rural population, which was the vast majority of the country. The Communist message was very simple. Land reform and corruption, power to the peasants, which is most people. And it really resonated in a way that the Nationalist government's increasing desperate authoritarianism simply just couldn't match. And so in 1949, it was over. The Communists had won the mainland. And on October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong stood at the gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing and proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China, the prc. But what about this guy, Chiang Kai Shek? He did the only thing that he could. Basically, if you're in that position and you lose a civil war, you either get killed or you run. So he basically gathered what was left of his government and his military and his treasury, including China's gold reserves and an enormous collection of imperial art and artifacts, put it all onto ships, and fled across the Taiwan Strait to an island that most of the world had ever even heard of. I mean, it was like barely an afterthought. And this was the island of. Of Taiwan. Sometimes you just want a good story on TikTok. You'll find short dramas, emotional, fast, and impossible to stop watching. Download TikTok now. Protein is now at Starbucks, and it's never tasted so good. You can add protein, cold foam to your favorite drink or try one of our new protein lattes or matcha. Try it today at Starbucks. Now. Taiwan wasn't some empty rock. It had its own history. And this is a history that, you know, matters to an extent. In order to understand this whole story. Taiwan had been inhabited by indigenous Austronesians. This is basically a people that for thousands of years lived on this island. Before Chinese settlers arrived. The Dutch actually colonized part of the island in the 1620s. The Spanish held the north briefly, and in 1662, a Ming dynasty loyalist named Kosinga drove the Dutch out and established Chinese rule on this small island of Taiwan for the very first time. The Qing Dynasty later absorbed the island, and Chinese settlers gradually became the majority population. But here's the critical part. The Qing court declared Taiwan a full Province in 1887, upgrading it from a prefecture. But that provincial status lasted barely eight years. After the First Sino Japanese War in 1895, China was basically forced to cede Taiwan to Japan. And then Japan held the island for 50 years, 55 decades, basically in modern history. And Japanese colonial rule was a kind of a contradictory legacy. On one hand, the Japanese built roads and infrastructure, schools, public health systems, all that stuff that basically transformed the island. On the other side, they imposed a harsh colonial control, basically of all the people. They suppressed local languages and customs and forced cultural assimilation, requiring Taiwanese people to adopt Japanese names and speak Japanese and worship at Shinto shrines and all that stuff. So when Japan surrendered in 1945, Taiwan was basically handed back to the Republic of China. Now, this is where the story gets painful. The Nationalist government that took over Taiwan in 1945 was viewed by many locals as corrupt and heavy handed. And as a result, tensions exploded on February 28, 1947. This is a date known in Taiwan simply as 2 28. After Nationalist agents beat a widow selling black market cigarettes and then killed a bystander, island wide protests erupted. The Nationalist government responded with a military crackdown. And estimates of the dead range from 10,000 to 30,000 people. The 228 incident became a defining trauma in Taiwanese identity. And it happened two years before Chiang Kai Shek even arrived with his retreating army. So when Chiang showed up in December of 1949 with roughly 2 million nationalist soldiers and government officials and their families and wives and kids, he was arriving on an island that had already had reason to distrust him and already had a slew of interpersonal issues. So as a result, he imposed martial law, which would Then last for 38 years, one of the longest periods of martial law in modern history anywhere in the world. Dissent was crushed. Political opponents were imprisoned or executed in what became known as the White Terror. And the KMT controlled controlled everything from the media to the schools, to the military, to the government. But here's the thing that makes the story so strange. Throughout all of this, Chiang Kai Shek never gave up the claim that his government, the Republic of China, the Nationalist faction, was the legitimate government of all of China, not just Taiwan. But they were basically a government in absentia. And as a result, the mainland, the territories, everything in his mind was his. The plan was basically to, you know, retreat for a period and then eventually retake the mainland when the time was right. But for over two decades, many Western and allied governments just kind of went along with it. Now, this is the part that confused a lot of people. So let's just kind of take it back a little bit. From 1949 to 1971, the Republic of China, the government of Taiwan, held China's seat at the United Nations. Does that make sense? Not the People's Republic of China, which controlled the mainland and its hundreds of millions of people. Taiwan, an island of roughly 10 million, was officially representing China on the world stage, including holding the permanent seat at the UN Security Council with veto power. You can see what's happening here. You have the government that's in control on the mainland with the kmt. They go to the small island known as Taiwan and they're claiming that they're the legit government. You have the CCP claiming that they are the legit government. And the UN is actually recognizing the Taiwanese government as the one that's basically holding all the cards. Now how is this possible? Well, the Cold War, it's that simple. The United States and its allies refused to recognize the Communist government in Beijing. In their view, Ma and his regime was illegitimate. This was a Soviet aligned Communist government that took power by force. And I mean, you know, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, the Communist faction, they were very close allies in the early years. Though that relationship would later fracture in the Sino Soviet split in the 1960s. And the real China was the one in Taiwan run by America's ally, Chiang Kai Shek. Never mind that The PRC controlled 99% of China's territory and population and agriculture and you know, urban areas, all that stuff. Cold War logic doesn't care about math. Even though 99% of the country is on this mainland part and 1% is on the island, that's the part that America recognized. And this arrangement held through two major crises in the Taiwan Strait. The first Taiwan Strait crisis came in 1954-1955. The PRC began shelling islands controlled by the Nationalists just off the mainland coast. Tiny islands called Kimoy and Matsu. The United States responded by signing a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan and openly considering the use of nuclear weapons. President Eisenhower made it very clear America was going to defend Taiwan. And the crisis eventually cooled, but the message was very clear. It's like, hey, you mainlanders can do whatever you want. America's rocking with Taiwan. We recognize this government and we're going to protect this Island. Now the second Taiwan Strait crisis hit in 1958. More shelling of the same islands. Kimoi, Matsu. This time the PRC fired tens of thousands of artillery shells. Again the US backed up Taiwan and again the crisis subsided without a full scale conflict. But at this point, the pattern couldn't be more clear. The Taiwan Strait was one of the most dangerous stretches of water on Earth, and America was riding for Taiwan. But here's where things get interesting. The geopolitical math was shifting. By the late 1960s, the United States was bogged down in Vietnam and looking for leverage against the Soviet Union. So President Richard Nixon saw an opportunity. If the US could build a relationship with the ccp, it could exploit the growing rift between Beijing and Moscow. So if we're battling the Soviets and the Chinese and the Soviets have a little bit of a, you know, a rift, then America could cozy up with the CCP and put more pressure on the Soviets. So in 1971, Nixon's National Security Advisor, this guy Henry Kissinger, who you probably heard of, made a secret trip to Beijing to meet with the Chinese Premier, Zhao Enlai. And then came the vote. On October 25, 1971, the United nations passed Resolution 2758, which basically just recognized the People's Republic of China as the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations. The Republic of China. Taiwan basically was expelled. No more UN seat, no more Security Council veto. All that was gone. And this was all done in 71 under Richard Nixon. In 1972, Nixon made his historic visit to China. And in 79, under President Jimmy Carter, the United States formally switched diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China to the People's Republic of China. From the Taiwanese nationalist faction to the ccp, the Communist faction on the mainland. The US Embassy in Taipei was closed, and official diplomatic relations with Taiwan basically ended. The CCP got what they wanted, recognition on the world stage. But, and this is a very important piece, Congress passed the Taiwan Relationships act in 1979, the very same year. And this law basically committed the United States to providing Taiwan with defensive weapons and maintaining the capacity to resist any use of force that would jeopardize Taiwan's security. It didn't guarantee that the US Would go to war for Taiwan, but it didn't say that it wouldn't either. It's kind of ambiguous. And this deliberate vagueness became known as strategic ambiguity. It seems like America's trying to play both sides. They're recognizing the ccp, but they're also going to defend Taiwan no matter what. So which is it? And this has been the foundation of the American Taiwan policy for basically four decades. 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Under the authoritarian rule of the kmt, Taiwan underwent one of the most dramatic economic transformations in history. In the 1950s, Taiwan was poor and, you know, like, most of China was having a lot of economic issues, and it was an agricultural island dependent on American aid. But by the 1980s, it was one of the four Asian tigers. This is an actual term basically used to describe a booming export economy. It was recognized alongside South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore has a real economy with A growing middle class and one of the highest standards of living in Asia. Though, like all these different places with rapid industrialization, this growth came with its own costs and inequality and labor conditions that really took decades to address. But the miracle was political. Chiang Kai shek died in 1975, and power passed on to his son, Chiang Chingko. And Chiang Chingo did something that his father could have never done. He began opening up the political system in 1987. He lifted this martial law that his dad basically had for decades, and he allowed opposition parties to form. He began a process that would have been just unthinkable under his father's rule. And this was democratization, the actual ability for the citizens and the parliament to vote. After Chiang chingkou died in 1988, he was succeeded by Lee Tung Hui. And this is a huge moment because Lee Tung Kui was the first president of the Republic of China who was actually born in Taiwan. You see, this is not a mainlander who fled in 1949, someone that was, you know, raised in Beijing their whole life and now lives in Taiwan. This was a native Taiwanese. And he pushed democratic reforms even further. And in 1996, Taiwan held its first direct presidential election, the first in the entire history of Chinese civilization, a place with thousands of years of emperors and warlords and authoritarian leaders. They had a free democratic vote, and the people in Beijing were pissed. The third Taiwan Strait crisis happened in 1995-1996 and was the closest the region ever came to war since the 1950s. So in the lead up to Taiwan's first democratic presidential election, Beijing decided to send a message. The People's Liberation army conducted large scale missile tests, firing ballistic missiles into waters just miles from Taiwan's two largest ports, essentially bracketing the island with actual live fire. And the message, I mean, it's obvious if Taiwan moves forward with independence and more democratic elections, there will be consequences. So the United States responded by sending two aircraft carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Strait, the largest American military deployment in the Pacific since the Vietnam War. For several weeks, the world just sat there. I mean, is this going to be World War 3? Are they going to start going after each other? Will nuclear war actually be brought into the fold because of this conflict in Taiwan? And fortunately, the crisis passed. Lee Tong Hui won the election in a landslide, and the missile tests had arguably boosted his popularity by making voters really rally around the flag and the leader of the Taiwanese people. But the crisis reveals something really important. This is not a frozen conflict or a cold war. This is a live wire and over the next two decades, Taiwan's politics kind of seesawed between two different visions. Chen Shui Bian, who served as the president from 2000 to 2008, was the first president from the Democratic Progressive Party. This is the dpp, which leans more towards Taiwanese independence and a distinct Taiwanese identity. And then came Ma Yingzhou, a KMT President from 2008 to 2016, who pursued some more friendly relations with Beijing, including direct flights and trade agreements. Then Tsai Ing Wen from the Democratic Progressive Party from 2016 to 2024, took a firmer stance on Taiwan's sovereignty and strengthened ties with the United States. And through all of this, a generational shift was happening on the island. Polls consistently showed that a growing majority of Taiwan's population, especially younger generations, identified as Taiwanese, not as Chinese. But it's important to understand that Taiwanese isn't this simple, unified category. Taiwan society includes indigenous Austronesian communities who were there long before any Chinese settlers arrived. Then you have the Ben Shengren. These are families whose ancestors came to Taiwan centuries ago, before 1945 or 1949. And then you have the Weishengren, the mainlanders who arrived with Chiang Kai Shek. And these distinctions really do shape Taiwan's politics and identities for decades, even as a broader Taiwanese identity has increasingly bridged those divides. You could probably think of it like America, right? You have people that come from, you know, Plymouth Rock, and they immigrate here in, like, the 1600s. And then you have another wave that comes over in, like, the 90s. And you have people that move here just now, and they're all American, but. But their perspective and their relationship with America and the things that they like and the way they dress kind of is different. So the idea of reunification with the mainland, which had once been the KMT's core mission, was becoming increasingly unpopular. Again, the whole point of the KMT in Chiang Kai Shek going to Taiwan was because he's the legit government and they're going to take back the mainland. But for many people in Taiwan, the question wasn't when do we reunify? It was, why should we reunify? Okay, so here's where the story connects to something that you've almost certainly seen, even if you didn't realize what you were looking at at the time. So in May 2021, the actor and wrestler John Cena was promoting the movie Fast and Furious 9, which, thank goodness, we needed the ninth one. That one really kind of pulled it all together. And basically, in an interview, he referred to Taiwan as A country. Why is that significant? I mean, we were like, yeah, China's a country, Taiwan's a country. Why can't you say it's a country? Within hours, Chinese social media exploded. The backlash is massive. Encina, one of the biggest action stars on the planet, literally posted a video onto Weibo. This is China's biggest social media platform. Basically, like, you know, Facebook in China. And he was speaking in perfect Mandarin and was apologizing to the people of mainland China and the members of the ccp. He never specifically said what he was apologizing for. He never said, Taiwan is not a country. But again, the message is clear. And the video went viral worldwide, not because of what he said, but because it revealed something about the power dynamics in play. Now, here's the thing. John Cena is not the first and he's definitely not going to be the last. And the examples are all over the place. Someone that you know recognizes Taiwan as a country, but that conflicts with their business interests in China. So in 2019, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the NBA's Houston Rockets, tweeted a seven word message. Basically just said, fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong. Now this is a problem. Because he was supporting the pro democracy protests that were happening in Hong Kong at the time, China's response was swift and devastating. Chinese state television pulled NBA games off the air. Chinese sponsors dropped the league. The NBA stood to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in the Chinese market. I mean, this is massive. Again, one of the biggest basketball stars metaphorically and literally ever from China played for the Rockets. The Rockets are in many ways, like, unofficially the Chinese team, but generally people that live in mainland China love the NBA. So to lose that market is so much money. The league's response was widely criticized. They initially called Maurice to tweet regrettable before walking that back under domestic pressure. And then Once again, in 2018, Gap released a T shirt with a map of China that didn't include Taiwan Apology. The product gets pulled. And that same year, Marriott hotels listed Taiwan as a separate country on a consumer survey. Which countries do you want to go? China, Taiwan. But if you're Chinese, you're like, dude, it's the same thing. It'd be like if you were like, hey, what are your, your favorite countries? You know, what are your favorite countries? America or Texas? It'd be like, those are the same as an American. You'd be like, indignant. You'd be like, what are you talking about? That's all the same thing. So the Marriott had to apologize publicly. And you know, an employee that had liked a Tibet related tweet from the company's account was fired. Once again, Mercedes Benz quoted the Dalai Lama on an Instagram page. This, you know, inspirational quote, nothing political, just Mercedes Benz quoting the Dalai Lama. And they had to issue a formal apology to China within days because again, the, you know, Tibet and Chinese relationship is extremely tenuous. And then in 2020, the Korean pop group BTS received an award from a Korean war veterans organization and they thanked Korean war veterans during their acceptance speech. Chinese social media erupted once again because BTS had acknowledged that the Korean War was a thing without mentioning China's sacrifices. And you know, China lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in that conflict. Fighting on the opposite side, Samsung and Hyundai quietly pulled BTS related promotions in China. Now, why, why do massive corporations and global celebrities apologize and kiss up to the ccp? And the answer is obvious. Money. The same reason that you probably would and Christos definitely would, right? Absolutely. I mean, China comes up to. I did a joke about this back in the day where it's like, I wouldn't recognize Taiwan for $100 million. Would you? No, like, I'd be like, what is that? What is that? I've never seen that. This looks like China. They look Chinese to me. I'd remove those letters from the Alphabet. Yeah, get rid of 100 mil. And sure, maybe some people wouldn't and maybe I wouldn't, you know, but I think for most people, they're $100 million. I got it, Mark. I would. Right? You're gonna do it for us. You'll give me a piece. Little piece. I appreciate that. Now, China's consumer market is massive. I don't think this needs to be explained. Right. 1.4 billion people. Access to that market is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to companies like the NBA and Hollywood, movie studios and hotel chains and car manufacturers. And the Chinese government has shown repeatedly that it is willing to use that market access as a weapon. Cross a political red line, acknowledge Taiwan sovereignty, mention Tibet, bring up the Dalai Lama, reference Tiananmen Square, any of that stuff, and the door is shut forever. Now this is what's known as economic leverage. And it's worth noting that the backlash isn't always a top down government directive. In many of these cases, the initial fury comes from ordinary Chinese citizens. Grassroots nationalism on social media. Millions of people who genuinely feel that their country's sovereignty is being disrespected. The Chinese government doesn't always have to orchestrate the outrage or, you know, manufacture consent from the people. Sometimes it just has to not stop it. And sometimes the state actually amplifies what's already there. Either way, the result is the same. Companies face a choice between a public apology, never doing it again, or losing access to the world's second largest economy. And for most corporations, the math is simple, right? A Mandarin apology video is a lot cheaper than losing 1.4 billion customers for your new movie. But there's another reason that the world cares so much about Taiwan. And it has nothing to do with politics or ideology. It has to do with a company most people have never heard of. This is a country called tsmc. If you're into investing or you follow the stock market, this is probably a ticker that you've seen before. This is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. And it is arguably the most important company on earth that, you know, if you're not familiar with, you know, microchip processing, you probably never heard of it. It was founded in 1987 by a guy named Morris Chang. And TSMC basically pioneered the foundry model of chip making. Basically, instead of designing and manufacturing its own chips, it manufactures chips designed by other companies. So Apple and Qualcomm and Nvidia and all these other tech companies all depend on TSMC to produce their most advanced and F processors. And here's the crazy number. TSMC just that company alone produces around 90% of the world's most advanced semiconductors at leading edge nodes. Basically, you know, not 90% of all chips, around 90% of the most cutting edge chips that are needed for all of the most high tech computing, not only for consumer consumption, but for military and national defense and security. And now that kind of power, I mean, goes from everything from smartphones to AI to, you know, weapon systems. It the whole world really. And Taiwan's dominance in semiconductor manufacturing has been called the silicone shield. And the theory here is basically that the world simply cannot allow Taiwan to be disrupted because the economic consequences would be catastrophic. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan wouldn't just be a military conflict. It would shut down the global supply chain for all the chips that modern civilization depends on. Estimates suggest a disruption in TSMC production could cause over a trillion dollars in global economic damage in the first year alone. Just one year. A trillion dollars. And this is why Taiwan matters so much to people who couldn't care less about the Chinese civil war or Chiang Kai Shek or any of this stuff. This is why the United States, Japan, Europe have all began investing billions in domestic chip manufacturing. And, you know, they're basically trying to reduce their dependence on one single island in the western pacific next to a giant adversarial country. But that process will take years, possibly decades. For now, Taiwan is irreplaceable. Some analysts have started calling what happens next in this story the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis. We went through the first three from the 70s to the 90s, though whether it truly rises to the level of the first three is, you know, debated amongst political scientists. But either way, the events were dramatic, and you probably saw the headlines, and maybe you didn't really understand what it meant. So I'll break it down. In August of 2022, U. S. Speaker of the house nancy pelosi visited taiwan, the highest ranking american official to visit the island in 25 years. Beijing had warned publicly and privately through many different channels, that the visit would have severe consequences. But nancy pelosi went anyway. China's response was the largest military mobilization around taiwan in decades. The people's liberation army launched live fire military exercises that effectively surrounded the island. Firing ballistic missiles over taiwan for the first time, Chinese warships crossed the median line of the taiwan strait. This is kind of an unofficial boundary that both sides had respected for decades. Fighter jets flew near taiwan's airspace over and over. The exercises were widely described as a rehearsal for a blockade or potentially an invasion. And unlike the 1995-96 crisis, China's military was vastly more capable. You see, in the 1990s, the PLA was a kind of an outdated force. But by 2022, China had the world's largest navy by number of ships, Advanced ballistic and hypersonic missiles, and a military budget second only to the united states. The crisis eventually de escalated like the other three, but the new normal was established. Chinese military activity around taiwan including fighter jets and naval patrols and surveillance and all that stuff became routine. And what had once been exceptional Became an everyday occurrence. And in May 2024, Lai Ching Te was inaugurated as taiwan's new president. He's from the democratic progressive party, the party that beijing hates the most. In his inaugural address, he called on china to stop its military intimidation and accept the reality that the republic of china, the people in taiwan and the people's republic of china Are not subordinate to each other. Beijing called him a dangerous separatist. So basically, the president of taiwan is like, we're cool. China's a country, We're a country. Everyone's fine, right? Meanwhile, xi jinping, the supreme leader of china, has called the unification of taiwan with the mainland a historic mission and has refused to rule out the use of force In a landmark speech in 2019, Xi explicitly linked reunification to the broader project of China's national rejuvenation. The idea that China's century of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers and the opium wars and warlords and civil war and all that stuff won't truly be over until Taiwan is brought back into the fold. It is an existential issue. So where does that leave us? Well, here is the unfortunate part that nobody in power really ever wants to say. The People's Republic of China, the government in Beijing, also known as the ccp, they say that there is only one China and there will only ever be one China, and it's going to be the mainland of China and some surrounding areas and of course, Taiwan. This is the One China principle, period. Non negotiable. That's what it is. We've been humiliated for a century, maybe even more, and we're not going to stop until we get Taiwan. Any country that wants diplomatic relations with Beijing has to accept this. That's why only around a dozen states, 11 UN members, plus the Holy See as of the mid-2020s currently recognizes the Republic of China. Everyone else recognizes Beijing. But here's an important distinction that gets lost in this whole mess. Not every country's One China means the same thing. Some nations explicitly endorse the PRCs, the People Republic of China's position that Taiwan is a part of China. Others merely acknowledge Beijing's claim without actually endorsing it, basically being like, hey, I get that that's what you guys want to do. Others respect the position without stating agreement. They're like, that's, that's, that's between y'. All. And the wording varies. And those differences matter enormously in diplomacy. I mean, how are you talking about Taiwan to a high ranking, you know, mainland Chinese government official in Beijing? Are you going to say like, oh, I respect that. Are you going to say, oh, I know that's what you guys want, or are you going to say Taiwan is China? It's the same thing. It's one China. Like, of course, and depending on what you say is going to impact the contracts that you get, the money that you make, the relationships that you build. I mean, the United States is a perfect example, right? America had its own version, the One China policy, which is subtle but, you know, critical and different from Beijing's One China principle. The US Acknowledges the Chinese position that Taiwan is a part of China, but it doesn't endorse, maintains, once again, this kind of ambiguous situation, this unofficial relationship with Taiwan through The American Institute in Taiwan. And it sells the island billions of dollars in weapons and keeps open the question of whether it would intervene militarily in a cross strait conflict. Again, strategic ambiguity. Taiwan doesn't necessarily have a guarantee of security from the United States, but it does have kind of this ambiguous confirmation that America would support it and they're giving them weapons. So it's like, all right, it seems like we're on Taiwan side, but also we're doing business with China. Like we're, what is America really doing? And then there's Taiwan itself. The Republic of China's constitution still technically claims sovereignty not only of Taiwan, but of all of mainland China. A holdover from the days when the KMT plan to retake the mainland in a couple years. But in practice, most people in Taiwan today don't care about reclaiming the mainland. They care about what they have and they care about preserving their island. A thriving democracy, one of the highest standards of living in Asia, a GDP in the, you know, high hundreds of billions of dollars that places it around the 20th to, you know, the 22nd largest economy on earth, depending on how you slice it up. And a distinct identity that has been developing over the past 75 years. And the irony here is kind of funny. I mean, both governments were born from the same revolution. Both trace their legitimacy to Sun Yat Sen. Both share a language, a written script, a cuisine. I mean, centuries of cultural heritage, the same stories, the same myths, religion, all that stuff. Both societies Dr. Deeply on Chinese cultural traditions. I mean, Confucius and the writings of Confucian values, lunar New Year celebrations, shared literary and philosophical canons, all that stuff. And yet after 75 years of separation, they've developed fundamentally different political systems and subtle different identities depending on when they came over, when their parents came over. One is an authoritarian state run by a single party. The other is this multi party democracy. One has the largest military in the world, the other has 23 million people and a semiconductor industry that the entire planet needs. And the question that still haunts everyone, policymakers, military planners, economists, ordinary people on both sides of the strait, is whether these two realities can continue to coexist or whether this unfinished civil war will finally demand a resolution. And really, no one has a good answer. And maybe that's the point. Some conflicts don't have like a clean ending where everyone wins and it's happy ever after. Some questions have really uncomfortable answers. The story of China and Taiwan isn't a story with one single hero and one villain. And this side did everything bad. This side did every good. It's a story about identity and legitimacy and secession and what happens when history really leaves a wound open and the world keeps on walking around it, kind of pretending that it's healed up. People on both sides of the strait carry their own historical memories and grievances that shape how they see sovereignty today. For many people in China, the separation of Taiwan is again this really fresh wound from a century of foreign humiliation. For many in Taiwan, the forced unification would mean the end of a hard won democracy. And both of those feelings are legitimate. 75 years later, two flags are still flying. Two governments still claim to be the rightful heirs of a revolution that started in 1911 and 100 miles of water, this tiny little strait of Taiwan remains one of the most consequential boundaries on the face of the planet. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief abridged history of the conflict between China and Taiwan. I mean, wild. It's. It almost it I'm trying to think of like what it reminds me of. It almost seems like the religious conflict amongst like the Abrahamic religions in a way, like kind of. It's like, okay, you have one singular person, Abraham, that all of these religions, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, all kind of trace back to and they all kind of claim him, but yet they all have these massive, you know, fundamental gaps in like how they perceive divinity and God and all that stuff. Stuff. It's kind of the same thing. They all go back to this one guy, they all go back to sun and they're like, that's our guy, he thinks that we should be in charge. They're basically invoking this secession to this one historical figure who in reality, like, I don't even know if he would have a perspective on who's supposed to be in charge, you know what I mean? He just wanted a unified China and he got close. But of course, you know, close only counts in hand grenades as they say. I don't know, it's a really interesting situation to be honest with you. I don't have an answer. Like, I don't know if anyone has an answer. I guess like my only position you could really take is like, I want the people of Taiwan to have the ability to determine their future. And the people of Taiwan are like, hey, we want to be Chinese. We're all ethnically Chinese. We're all culturally pretty Chinese. Let's just go back to China. If they want that, then I'm like, all right, like I want what they want, I guess, you know. But I don't think any you know, Islander, people of millions of actual humans should be subjugated to some other country coming in and basically, you know, knocking their guy out of power and just taking it over. That seems pretty unfair in the modern era, you know, what is this, 1990 in Iraq? You can't do that anymore. You know, we gave that up a while ago. America doesn't do that anymore. You know, we don't go in other countries, tell them what to do, right? Not at all. No, not at all. We'd never. We'd never. Come on, long time. Come on now. We'd never do that. This episode is brought to you by Subaru. Go further in a long range Subaru Hybrid with up to 597 miles per tank in the Crosstrek Hybrid and up to 581 miles per tank in the Forester Hybrid. Subaru love goes the extra mile. Visit subaru.com hybrid to learn more. Range based on EPA estimated combined fuel economy in a full tank of fuel. Actual mileage and range may vary. Unfortunately, we do that a lot. But again, it's wrong when we do it. I don't think we should be going over there. Just, just, you know, I think. I think people and their, you know, ethnic claims have a right to self determination. That would be my hope for the people of Taiwan. Especially the chips, dude, we need the chips. How else are you gonna edit the pod and you know, fleece me for hundreds of millions of dollars? I don't know. You'd have. No way. No. Are you getting paid by the lobby? The CCP lobby? No, but I would make a video in perfect Cantonese or whatever it is, is. I'll allow. Proclaiming what? That Taiwan is not its own country. How would you do it? What would it sound like? Same way John Cena did. Go ahead, spit a little Chinese on him. I'm good. No, come on, do it. You gave Cena 24 hours. I got. All right, Fair. That's fair. I mean, what do you guys think? If you know more about this conflict than I do, which you know, if you're even moderately an expert, I'm sure you do, please let me know. Drop a comment. Is there anything that I missed or anything I got wrong? Again, I have no agenda here. I just am interested in the truth. So please don't hesitate to educate me. Just be nice about it. I read all the comments, YouTube, Spotify, all that. So please be cool. If there's anything that you learned, if you didn't know about this at all, please. I would love to Know what you think. Drop a comment. Let me know what you took away from this. I have great news, by the way, I mentioned the Abrahamic religion thing. If you like more religious deep dives, we have a channel called Religion Camp where we deep dive and all the craziest religious stuff ever. You can check that out. We also have a main channel, almost 500k subs. Let's go, Christos. And it's called Camp Gagnon. It's where I do deep dives and interviews with people way smarter than me. Actual experts that know what they're talking about. And, you know, deep dives on all sorts of crazy, miscellaneous stuff, current events of the day, conspiracy stuff, things that I find interesting. You know, Religion Camp is basically where we're going to go in the future. Camp Gagnon is what's going on right now. And History Camp, of course, that's where we came from. That's what's been going on throughout all of time, forever. This is the place where I try to figure out everything that's been going on. So if you rock with us here at History Camp, great news. We drop these episodes every single week. Just make sure you subscribe. Please drop a comment again. It really helps out the channel. You can also check me out. Mark Yagnon Live. Come see me on the road. I'm doing stand up comedy. I'm going all over, especially in October. I'm hitting like Detroit, Chandler, San Diego, all sorts of dates. Check out the website. Check us out on Patreon again. Patreon.com Camp Gagnon. Come join the campfire. Gather round, share some stories, hang with people just like you. And by joining, I hope you become a little more like yourself. And I mean Camp R D. You get the threads, get the merch, it's fire. Anything else? I think that does it. Hit up Christos on Tinder. Do that. Patreon. On Patreon. That's what I meant. Yes, that's right. Anyway, God bless you all. This has been another episode of History Camp and I will see you all in the future to talk about the past. Peace.