How Will Taiwan's New Leader Govern?
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Welcome to the Asia Chessboard, the podcast that examines geopolitical dynamics in Asia and takes an inside look at the making of grand strategy. I'm Andrew Schwartz at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. This week, Mike and Jude are joined by Catherine Hill, Greater China correspondent at the Financial Times. They discuss Taiwan after the inauguration of Taiwanese President Lai and what it means for the United States.

Welcome to the Asia Chessboard. I'm Jude Blanchett, joined as always by my colleague and friend, Mike Green. We're delighted today to be welcoming to the podcast, Catherine Hill. I think regular readers of the FT and certainly anyone following...

Events in Taiwan will have been reading Catherine over the years. She not only has been covering the developments in military reforms in Taiwan, but she's just been all over stories around the region, as befits her title as Greater China Correspondent. Catherine, prior to landing in Taipei, has been reporting from around the region, including in Beijing, where I first started to follow her work. And before that, she was the bureau chief in Moscow. So she brings just a wealth of experience

knowledge about this really critical topic. And Mike and I were discussing who we should have on to really open the aperture on events in Taiwan, but also thinking about Taiwan's role in the region and could not have thought of a better guest. So Catherine, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Jude, so much for the kind words. I'm really delighted to speak to you. So the first question is the same for all our guests, which is, I want to get a sense of your origin story, but more specifically, how did you

navigate the twists and turns of your career to end up as the greater China correspondent for the Financial Times. How did you get into Asia?

what has led you on this path? Well, I've wanted to work on Asia from Asia since I was a student, really. I studied Chinese when I was in university in Germany. That was, let me think back, late 80s. And went to China the first time in 1987. Then I came to Taiwan for some more language training in 1990 and became a journalist in

I started working as a journalist about five years later. I then joined the Financial Times Group in 2000, first in Germany for a German language venture they had there, and three years as the FT's Taiwan correspondent, actually, in 2003, covering then the Chezobian administration, which was also a very lively time in cross-strait relations, to put it mildly.

From there, a few years later, I was sent to Beijing, and that was still under the then Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao. Maybe times we all think back now, well, not fondly, but the kind of nostalgia. And after five years in Beijing, I moved to Moscow to head up the bureau there. The idea was to get a bit closer to Europe, a bit closer.

less fast-paced news beat, but little did I know that a couple of months after I moved there, Russia would annex Crimea. So it was a lively few years there as well. And five years ago, I moved back again, hoping for a little bit more peace and quiet, but that doesn't seem to have worked out either.

Yeah, you either picked the wrong time or the right time to be in Taiwan covering these stories. You know, Catherine, I wanted to start the questions in sort of a unique place. I think ordinarily, if we were doing a podcast about the Asia Chessboard and Taiwan, we would immediately get into cross-trade issues or we would be thinking about regional security architecture. But I actually want to start with a question about domestic politics. This has been an extraordinary period over the past couple of months,

to watch developments in Taiwan's legislative UN. Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago had the front page image was of one of the brawls in the L.Y. Those are not unique. The L.Y. has had fractious politics before, but the stakes seem to feel higher here. I wonder if you can just give a high level assessment of what is going on in the L.Y., but I think more importantly, why does this matter so much? Sure.

So to answer your second question first, it matters so much because it means that Lai Ching-te, the Taiwan's new president, is from day one embattled on all fronts, really. We have been thinking about him as somebody who will have to navigate a tense cross-strait relationship, but

His more immediate problem really has been facing a parliament in which his Democratic Progressive Party is no longer a majority and which really from day one proceeded to demonstrate to him that their attitude towards this president will be confrontational.

So the situation is that we have a hung parliament. The DPP has a couple of seats less than the KMT, the main opposition party, the KMT. The KMT by itself does not have a majority either. They have to rely on the Taiwan People's Party, which was founded by Keo Ja-de for mayor of Taipei. Now, so far, immediately after the election, the KMT,

were that the TPP could use its crucial minority to, well, switch sides and align with whoever they thought had the best policies and maybe maximize its influence. But so far, they've almost entirely sided with the KMT. And so the first few things they've rammed through, you really have to say, have been bills aimed at severely curtailing

the power of the executive. And so those have triggered protests from the DPP, but also from a broader range of civil society groups and scholars.

that some of this is unconstitutional. We will have to see how far this goes. The president has backed an attempt by his cabinet to ask the parliament to reconsider those bills, but this is probably only going to be a procedural delay, after which there's little the executive can do. So the LY can...

push this legislation through and then the next step would be the government going to the Constitutional Court and seeing if they can get those legislative reforms blocked, changed.

watered down. And the key things here are really that the new legislation or the amendments give the LY the power to call in almost anyone for questioning and demand almost anything in terms of provision of documents, including classified ones and other information that relates to government business, really. And that is not limited to government officials. They can also summon ordinary citizens as long as

They can argue that these people have anything really to say on anything that relates to government policy. Catherine, can I ask, what's your sentiment on how the KMT-TPP efforts to push through these legislative reforms are resonating on the street, so to speak? Is this falling sort of across into predictable partisan camps with KMT?

KMT voters supporting these efforts or something a bit more interesting going on? Most KMT voters would support these efforts. The more interesting bit is in the middle of the political spectrum amongst swing voters, many of whom have been the ones who helped the TPP and Coinger get a sizable chunk of the vote in the January election. So many of these people are young people and many of these people are to a certain extent or

were before and in the election to a certain extent fed up with DPP rule, which is not that surprising after eight years of the party having been in power. So some of these people in the election voted for Cohen because they thought the DPP was getting too ideological. Then a lot of young people were just...

dissatisfied with the government's attempts to address Taiwan's structural, social and economic issues, such as a widening income gap, high property prices, stubbornly low wages in the service sector and so on. So some of these people, when the LY proceeded to vote through these amendments, some of these people were on the streets with the protesters as well.

And that raises the question, of course, can the DPP win these disaffected young people back? Or might this, at some point we were asking ourselves, might this widen into some kind of popular movement similar to the one we saw 10 years ago in the Sunflower Movement when a student-led movement

protest movement stopped in the tracks, pushed by a KMT government then to adopt a cross-strait services trade agreement which would have opened Taiwan's economy to Chinese companies and also to Chinese individuals a lot more. That hasn't happened. So far, we haven't seen the sustained street movement and nothing of the sort like in 2014 when protesters entered parliament and occupied it for a while. So,

Still remains to be seen how the street reacts to the next sequels in this saga.

Catherine, I wonder if I can ask just a bit about Lai himself, William Lai. His biography is easy enough to understand. Studied medicine, was a doctor working on spinal cord damage, was a local mayor of Tainan, premier, before serving as the vice president for President Tsai up until he won the election in January. I think the harder thing for some of us outside Taiwan to understand and where I'd be keen to get your assessment is,

How do you see Lai, the leader, Lai, the politician? How do you sense he's going to navigate already these early challenges? We've had PLA exercises. We've got, as you say, the efforts in the legislative UN. What do you think are the strengths he brings to this? How do you think he will handle this? I think just any assessment you have of sort of Lai, the leader, Lai, the strategist would be helpful.

So Lai Qingde, the most important thing at this point to say about him is that he is so, so different from his predecessor, Cai Yingwen. So President Cai was someone whose career was built as a scholar and then as...

a government official. And I think Tsai herself would not disagree if you called her a nerd. She is someone who buries herself in files, who reads an immense amount of stuff herself to be sure she understands what the issue is and also to be able to challenge the people who work for her. Lai is also a very, someone who pays a lot of attention to detail, but he is very,

well, I would say less prudent than Tsai. And he is also much more of a believer in taking a stand on, a principled stand on an issue. And if you do that, really spelling things out. And if you look at the way, the things he has said, not just in the inaugural address, but also throughout his election campaign, you can see few instances of that. And that in almost every,

Every of these events, I can see why he would say these things, but you can also see that this kind of habit is a bit riskier than Tsai's. So, for example, during the election campaign, there was a televised debate. Someone from a very anti-DPP media organization asked him or challenged him to clearly commit to the constitution of the Republic of China, which Taiwan follows.

which is not very much loved among those Taiwanese whose families came here hundreds of years ago and who are defenders, staunch defenders of sovereignty who don't embrace the Chinese identity. I don't know.

Lai is one of them. So he proceeded to try and explain what he thinks about the constitution, try to contrast the original version of the constitution that was adopted in China with those parts of it that were added in the 1990s after democratization to adapt the constitution to the reality that the Republic of China only encompasses Taiwan now.

And then he replied to the journalist who had asked him the question, saying, be careful what you wish for. ROC constitution might not be very useful or very helpful in tackling cross-strait relations. It might be a disaster instead. And that has stuck with him, of course, domestically among the people or the

everyone who aligns more closely with the KMT among those patriots who are Republic of China patriots rather than Taiwan patriots, they

remember only the ROC constitution is a disaster. He has had many such moments. And in the inaugural address too, he tried to spell out what his position is, including to China. And his aide's explanation is that he believes he can only engage with China in a self-confident manner if China

he spells out the truth and he spells out his position that will give him a good basis from which to move forward. But

With the China we have today, it's questionable whether that really works out. And Tsai Ing-wen would have handled these things slightly differently. Many of the words and phrases they use are almost identical, but the way in which Lai puts them together is ever so slightly different from what his predecessor would have done. Catherine, final question for me. I'll turn it over to Mike, but maybe transitioning from that is...

What do you think Beijing's deep sense of lie is and how Beijing is going to approach his administration? We already saw an early indication of this, which is the PLA Coast Guard, the punishment exercises of lie. Be curious for your assessment of those as well. They're

They're framing that as if his inauguration speech, no mention of the 1992 consensus, his phrasing of ROC Taiwan, ROC Taiwan, whatever we call it, his language on that. But I'm curious if you think there's a deeper significance or at least interpretation of China's exercises. Propaganda framing in Beijing is and has been for years that Lai is an independent sheep in wolf's clothing or whatever the way the metaphor runs.

That's been easy enough to understand because the propaganda has been relentless on this. Beijing has to determine, is it going to continue to freeze out democratically elected leader in Taipei, or is it going to try a new approach? I'd be curious just your sense on how you think Beijing will, what their strategy is here. Okay. If we just look at what they've said and done so far, I think before

inauguration and even before the election, there was never any doubt, at least from this end, that Beijing, if Lai was elected, that Beijing would indeed continue to freeze out the democratically elected government here, that they would not engage with Lai. I mean, there are a few people who think that some of his friends or people he trusts might

somehow provide an opportunity for back-channel communications with Beijing, but I don't think that would have ever been possible on a high enough level in Beijing. We would just be talking about, well, provincial-level Communist Party officials or

scholars or that kind of thing. So that led to a situation where Lai himself was convinced that whatever he would say wouldn't really matter because Beijing had already decided, had already publicly tied itself to this really hardline view on him and on full-scale condemnation and

which is very hard to get out of, I guess. So then the next question becomes, of course, so how hardline and how bad does the Chinese Communist Party think this is, this election result? And then there are a few different signals, really. If you think back to the evening of 13th of January when Taiwan's election results came out on the next day,

I don't remember now. The first statement from the Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing was that they stressed that the DPP had lost its majority in the LY, that Lai himself had not been elected with more than 50% of the vote because this was a three-way race. It

almost as if they were consoling themselves or somehow providing justification that Xi Jinping's policy towards Taiwan had not totally failed or hasn't really reached the end of the road. And then if you look at what they've been doing since Lai took office, yes, we've seen those two days of military exercises, but we've also seen Beijing stacking up United Front tactics and efforts to try and co-opt people's

people in Taiwan, no matter if it be politicians or celebrities, that there's been revelations over these past few days that prominent actors and singers from Taiwan have been offered by the Chinese authorities basically payment for posting certain things on the internet or social media, but also maybe for setting up a party in Taiwan, which is, of course, would make you a foreign agent and is illegal here now. And

From those efforts, I read that can only mean that Beijing still thinks these efforts can lead to something and still stand a chance for success. And as long as that is the case, well, we can still be hopeful that the decision for military action hasn't been made. And as to the exercises themselves, no.

A couple of interesting points. They were, of course, shorter than both the drills they held after Tsai Ing-wen went to the U.S. last April and also much shorter than the ones they held in reaction to Natsumoto Pelosi's visit to Taipei in August 2022. Also, the substance was much different. There was no live fire. There were no missiles being fired over Taiwan's airspace.

The one very interesting point, of course, is that they included the Coast Guard for the first time. And as far as I understand, those Coast Guard ships were accompanied by maritime militia ships, which we haven't really seen that active in waters around Taiwan as they have been, for example, in the South China Sea.

And so those conducted boarding and inspection drills east of Taiwan, basically practicing if China were to impose, well, maybe not a full-scale blockade, but something like a trade quarantine, how to do that and how to start that from the first step. So that's...

That is obviously political signaling, but it's also preparation. So that's something I think the national security officials here are more worried about than the military exercises themselves. Catherine, this has been a great discussion. We move from the domestic

now connecting to the regional and geopolitical. And I think you gave a really nice balanced explanation of what we're seeing in Beijing's response to Lai Jingde, particularly the character of the military exercises. And your description of the leadership within Taiwan was really interesting. If you're in Washington and you're worried about peace and stability in the Western Pacific and the Taiwan Strait,

You pay attention to leadership in Taipei and you pay attention to what China's doing in military exercises. I spent a lot of time with Chen Shui-bian when you were covering him. My sense on the leadership briefly before going back to the geopolitics is Lai Jingduan in his heart of hearts probably shares a very similar sentiment to what Chen Shui-bian shared. But I think Chen Shui-bian saw provoking Beijing as politically useful.

And a lot of what the U.S. was trying to do in Japan was convince him that it was actually a really bad idea because it was isolating Taiwan internationally and from its closest friends and allies, partners like Japan and the U.S. Tsai Ing-wen took that on board as a lawyer, and she delivered her client's brief and looked out for clients' interests in a much more nerdy and calculating way. My sense is that Lai is not...

at all in the Chen-Tri Binh camp in the sense that he sees provoking China's political useful the way Chen did. He's not quite where Tsai Ing-wen is or was as president, as you point out, because it's a little more personal and principled and he has less experience.

But just to tie that one up, are you worried about Lai Jingde doing what Chen Shui-bian did and actually provoking, becoming the fascist bella or the cause of a crisis the way Chen came pretty close to being? No, I'm not. I think the dynamic is a completely different one today. I mean...

We are 20 years down the road. For one, public opinion in Taiwan has, I wouldn't say changed, but consolidated much more in the direction of a clear consensus for the status quo of independence, as I would call it that, and not meaning Taiwan independence as some kind of declaration of independence, but people want to keep what they have now. They're also on top of that

They want recognition for that and they want to be able to say, well, we are this country, we are this nation. And that's exactly where Lai stands in terms of his real policies and the essence of what he's talking about. Also, we have seen under Tsai over the past eight years, we have seen Taiwan's international relations evolve quite strongly. And much of that, I think, has been driven by the way China thinks

has been behaving not just towards Taiwan but in its use of

economic coercion, for example, in Australia, in Europe, in lots of places. So we see, and then of course, the heightened awareness of the People's Liberation Army's greatly enhanced capabilities now, which it puts on display almost every day. So I think it's very clear Taiwan has much more solid and robust

broad relations of all kinds and interactions with democracies around the world. And this has become the mainstay of Taiwan's foreign policy. And Bly is fully on board with that. And he understands that he must not put any of that at risk. And that, well, what would put it at risk would be any kind of attempt by Taiwan to rock the boat. So really, the way he approaches China is, I really think he believes that

it is necessary to get Beijing to truly understand what Taiwan is about, what the Taiwanese feel, what they believe. And he's been trying this before. I mean, if you look at his China visit in 2014, he went to Shanghai and he on camera challenged local officials and university professors telling them, you know, independence is not something DPP invented. It's what Taiwanese want. And as long as you don't understand that,

we're going to get nowhere. That's the way he thinks. And that is not meant to provoke. It is his way of trying to get through to politicians on the other side, which he thinks have a completely warped understanding of Taiwan. But I think it's risky nonetheless. Yeah, his heart tells him that. His head tells him

You got to keep doing what Tsai Ing-wen did, which is building credible relationships with key powers around the world, which I think was a major takeaway for Taipei from the Ukraine war.

They saw that Zelensky survived and fought back because he was not only credible, he was inspirational for Western Europe, North America, much of, well, certainly US allies in Asia. And I think that had a big impact, but his heart is not all in it, as you point out. The international relations bit is quite interesting and important. And as I said, I think Ukraine really drove that logic in a way that I think conveys to lie as well.

But how do you think the public looks at that? You know, for a long time, the public judged the foreign policy performance of the government in Taipei by how way they managed Washington, Beijing, and small states that had diplomatic relations with Taiwan. It really didn't feature Japan, I guess, but Europe or Australia or Korea or India just didn't feature in the debate about whether Taiwan was doing a good job in the international arena.

space. Do you think that's changing? Do you think the public or at least experts and scholars are beginning to realize

maybe because of Ukraine, that Taiwan's survival and well-being depends on a much more, if you will, multipolar vision of where the world sits around Taiwan? I mean, that's certainly the DPP government's narrative. And I think Taiwan's broadening and deepening relations with so many other democracies around the world have done a lot to strengthen public confidence and also strengthen

just a sense of, well, pride and reassurance that finally some people are seeing us for what we are or for who we are. I mean, a huge role actually beyond the US and Australia, the Czech Republic has played a huge role in that with it. Try to remember that was before Ukraine when the, I think, when the Speaker of the Czech Parliament came here and declared, I'm

I'm a Taiwanese, much like Kennedy did in Berlin. Yes, exactly. So that relationship has endured and it's broadened. There's a lot of exchange, cultural people to people, but politicians too, and economic as well. There's been a lot of corporate delegations to Central and Eastern Europe from Taiwan. And that is very much in the public eye and that's played a huge role.

On the U.S., it's a difficult one. I'm sure you may have seen the polling. There's been a number of opinion polls in recent years that show you, yes, of course, Taiwanese are very pro-America, but they're also not quite sure whether they can rely on the U.S. And rightly so, I guess. There are severe doubts, and the doubts seem to be deepening over whether the U.S. is reliable.

That is so striking. And you may have seen, I think a year or so ago, a poll in Taiwan where Taiwanese on balance thought that Japan was more likely to come to their defense than the U.S., which is a complete reversal of the reality. Although I think things have changed so much in the U.S.-Japan alliance that

It's hard to imagine a scenario where the US and Japan are both acting in response to a crisis, but it tells you a lot about the Taiwanese people's, well, for one thing, warmth towards Japan and appreciation of the strategy Abe started, but also anxiety about the US, which raises the question about US reassurance. I'm sure you've seen recent articles by China scholars like my friend Tom Christensen, Bonnie Glaser,

Jessica Chen, Weiss, Jim Steinberg, and others saying the U.S. stance towards Taiwan is basically overdoing deterrence and not doing enough to reassure Beijing. But given what we've just discussed and given how important reassurance of Taiwan is in terms of deterrence and resilience and standing up to Chinese pressure,

Is there a way to thread that needle? Do you think there is more room for the U.S. to reassure Beijing without exacerbating what we've just been describing? I think it all depends on how you do that and when

When it comes to reassuring Taiwan and stepping up, for example, defense assistance to Taiwan and having some candid discussions about what would happen in the event of war and what kind of interoperability there could be in training and all that kind of stuff, a lot of that needs to be done away from the public eye because the fear is that if it were to become public or if there's too much public discussion,

discussion of it, Beijing will use it as a pretext to throw fit or step up the pressure or even worse than that. But I would argue that the same applies to US-China and reassuring China. I think that there's probably a lot of things the US could do to reassure Chinese officials in private rather than publicly. And my understanding is that would probably also be part of what the Biden administration is doing. I'm not sure. I'm not privy to any of the

their discussions. And then if you look at the risk of this flashpoint overall, clearly for any US policymaker, it

Maybe you have to weigh your priorities. If you think that China's having misconceptions and that would heighten the risk of them doing something extreme, then probably the priority is to use some reassurance to lower the temperature there. But reassuring the Taiwan public is maybe something that feels a little bit more

long-term and not as acute. If we look at the state of US-China relations over the past, I don't know, two years or so, it may have been that felt more acute. But I mean, on reassuring the Taiwanese public, part of the challenges can probably also be addressed

Not by changing things radically, but part of the problem with really the public trust or confidence in the U.S. being shaken was this whole global supply chain realignment push. So the CHIPS Act. So for a while we had this never-ending queue of U.S. visitors.

maybe some of them from the corporate world, but also a lot of lawmakers. And every single one of them would have a feature in the public talks. TSMC, the need for diversifying my chains. We want TSMC investment to the average Taiwanese. That basically means we want to move this capacity away from you. We want to reduce our dependence on you.

And what does that tell you about the event of war? Well, the US would probably be less inclined to go all in because in a world where they were less dependent for semiconductors on Taiwan. So the TSMC bit did a lot of damage. And I think that's stabilized to some extent because also the Taiwan government has managed to tell their public, to convince their public actually by saying,

globalizing our tech manufacturing footprint, we are becoming more deeply anchored within this democracy camp and we're building even more solid relationships with these countries and there will be things in return. And they're right because we've seen, for example, the revival of Computex, this trade show, which used to feel like a little bit

old-fashioned and whatever, but with the rise of generative AI, we're seeing unprecedented streams of tech industry visitors. Here, we're seeing new investment in Taiwan. So I think that bit is being worked out. It's really interesting, your point about the CHIPS Act and how a non-defense, or at least not principally defense, move by the U.S. can look like abandonment.

And the obvious tool to counter that is for the U.S. to move forward with something in the trade area. And interestingly, I think you would agree, in a generally pretty close-minded U.S. trade representative's office when it comes to trade agreements, Taiwan does get sort of special treatment. So maybe that's an important admonition for government is think about ways to reassure people in Taiwan of the U.S. economic engagement commitment and

I just think the efforts of the United Front and the efforts of China's disinformation are so targeted on undermining confidence in the U.S.,

That might be the so-called Clausewitzian center of gravity. That might be the most important target of all if Beijing wants to unify without force. And I think the U.S. should be highly attentive to it. And our reassurance strategy has to really, in my view, start with that. And there are things that I'm sure are happening behind closed door. I'd be surprised if President Biden or Jake Sullivan or Tony aren't saying we have a one China policy. We oppose unilateral changes. It's sort of the liturgy policy.

The only problem is it's almost like a liturgy. The Chinese are so used to hearing it, it doesn't have effect. If you go too far, you end up tripping over the so-called six assurances, which were made in the Reagan years to Taiwan that we won't discuss arms sales to Taiwan with China. We won't discuss certain equities that we've said are not Beijing's.

So it's a very narrow lane in there, but I take your point. There is room for more. Hey, one last quick thing for me before we end. We've talked about all the different dimensions of maintaining peace in the Taiwan Strait and a prosperous environment for the people in Taiwan and Japan and the whole region. The one thing we should touch on is the state of Taiwan's military capabilities.

and Attorneys in Defense. What is your overall assessment? I think there's more urgency since Ukraine, is my sense, but sure, there's a long list of things they still need to take seriously. What do you think? Yes, you are completely correct. This has become the most urgent issue of all. You can't accuse Tsai Ing-wen of not having...

done anything on that front. I mean, she oversaw steep rises in defense spending. She also started and continued throughout her eight years in power, very frequent visits to military units. She tried to rebuild the military's self-confidence, the attractiveness of military jobs by constantly trying to improve living conditions like

spending more on food on military bases, renovating accommodation, lots of things like that. Just

highlighting soldiers' and officers' achievements in public constantly. She did all that. She also reinstated a longer prescription period. She started addressing the problems with the mobilization system and with the reserve force. But the problem is, and this is actually going back to really domestic issues once more, there is an unaddressed need

insufficiently addressed heritage from Taiwan's history as well, a quasi-military dictatorship under Chiang Kai-shek. I mean, this place used to live under martial law for 38 years. And the military it had was a military that had been founded in China and that had been defeated in China, that did not identify with the people on this island at all.

and that's been a lingering issue. Even since Taiwan democratized in the early 90s, the military and the Ministry of Defense has remained this kind of separate universe. I mean, there have been successive governments have tried to break through, have tried to force some change, some reform. Of course, things are changing slowly through generational change because

younger officers coming in, but it's not enough. And what I see is that Lai Ching De is much more serious about this or is kind of taking the next step on this. And the best and very encouraging signal on that is that we now have Wellington Goo as defence minister, the first civilian to head the defence ministry in many years,

And also someone who has already, from his previous role as National Security Advisor to Taiwan, ample experience and exposure to the military and its culture and knows all the senior people. I mean, they're holding these regular talks regularly.

among national security and military officials. And so he's had in-depth and close-up exchanges with many of these people. So I think there is a certain goodwill in parts of the military towards him, which gives us hope that he can last longer than the last civilian defense minister, who I think didn't even make it through his first week in the office.

Yeah. And if readers needed just one more reason to subscribe to the FT, I would say that Catherine has a great story out today, I think, or at least I read it today, looking at some of this issue of Lai's efforts to modernize the military through the lens of his speech to the Wampoa Club. Founded 100 years ago in the PRC, but they celebrate it in Taiwan and it's a good lens. And I would also recommend reading Lai's speech

So a really important issue. I did a lot. Lai is doing more. The question is, are we all doing enough fast enough to keep pace with this challenge? But the best place for us to benchmark that, Catherine, is to continue to read your work.

Really fantastic to have you on today. Really appreciate your time. And for those of us who are thousands of miles away from Taiwan, we just couldn't ask for a better guide to walk us through these and other really important dynamics. So really appreciate your work and your time. Thank you so much, Jude. Thanks very much for the exceedingly kind words. And this was great fun. Thank you, Catherine.

For more on strategy and the Asia program's work, visit the CSIS website at csis.org and click on the Asia program page. And for more on the U.S. Studies Center in Sydney, please visit ussc.edu.au.