 Welcome everyone to this UK book launch of Taiwan's economic and diplomatic challenges and opportunities. My name is David Fell and I'm one of the three co-editors of the book. I'm just going to stop because we've got someone with a mic on. Okay, that's okay. So I'm one of the three co-editors of the book together with Mariah Thornton and Robert Ash. So what I'm going to do briefly is to introduce the book and the panel and then what we'll do is move on to quite brief 10 minute introductions to each of the chapters that we're covering here today. So the book itself was published in April 2021, but it does have a bit of a history. The book project first originated in a conference that we held at SOAS in May of 2018 that was titled challenges and opportunities of Asian economic integration facing Taiwan under the impact of globalization. And I think nine of the chapters in the eventual book, which we have here were first presented in some kind of draft form in that workshop back in May of 2018. Now simply put what we're trying to do in the book is engage with some of the debates about the state of Taiwan that we previously covered in another book that Bob Ash co-edited called Taiwan's democracy, economic and political challenges that was published in 2011, which was also based on a SOAS conference that I think we held in Atlanta in 2006. But on this occasion, what we've done is to replace the more political focus of that book with a secondary focus on diplomatic issues. So this time it's economic and diplomatic issues that we focus on. And what we try and do in the book is to engage with the debate about whether or not we should be positive or negative about the current state of Taiwan. Looking ahead into the future, should we be optimistic or pessimistic for the future of Taiwan. And that's why in this book, we also included opportunities as well as challenges compared to the 2011 book. And I think one of the things that you'll find once you get into the book, which of course we do, I should say that we do have the e-book in the SOAS library. And I can see the book is gradually getting distributed better in worldwide university libraries. I think one of the things you will find when you get into the book is that there's a lot of variation in the chapters in terms of whether the authors are more positive and optimistic, and those that are more pessimistic and critical of the state of Taiwan. So let me now then turn to say a little bit about the chapter authors in the book and some of the commonalities that we have, particularly for the panel of speakers today. One other thing I forgot to mention is that originally our plan was to hold a Taiwan launch, and we'd got it all planned to hold a launch in Taiwan's parliament. But unfortunately that has been postponed, but we're looking to do something similar in Taiwan in the near future. Okay, back to our speakers. So I think one of the things that is a really wonderful feature of the lineup for this book is that we have so many SOAS alumni in the book. If we just start with our co-editor team, we have Bob Ash, who graduated first in Chinese studies in 1968. And also got his 1966. 66, okay, sorry. And has been at SOAS ever since, also getting his PhD from SOAS. Although a little bit later, I graduated from SOAS in politics in 2003, and Mariah Thornton did our MSc Politics of China 2016 to 2017. We also have other politics graduates, for example, Jan Konorich got his PhD in economics in 2011 and is now a senior lecturer at King's Colleges Law Institute and Department of International Development. Another of our chapter authors, Charles Chen, received his PhD in economics in 2014. And today, he's not with us here, but his chapter will be introduced by his co-author, Lin Quan Qin, who's a university lecturer in politics at the University of Cambridge and Deputy Director of their Centre for Geopolitics. A further SOAS participant we have is Chen Naidia, who's the most recent SOAS graduate who graduated from our MSc International Politics in 2018. And her chapter looks at Taiwan's queer diplomacy. And another thing to mention is both Mariah and Naidia's chapters are based on things that they originally wrote as SOAS essays as students and have gradually turned into book chapters. Another really nice feature about our lineup is that many of our authors actually have practical experience beyond academic circles. Lin Zhu Jia was a Cabinet Minister for Mainland Affairs under the Mainland Joe Administration. Charles Chen has been presidential and KMT spokesperson, is now a legislator in Taiwan's parliament. What Chen Naidia worked for the NGO Taiwan Equality Campaign and also worked for the New Power Party. Another practical element of our lineup is that a number of us have diplomatic experience and are able to bring this into their chapters. For example, Richard Bush and Michael Riley have both served as the de facto ambassadors to Taiwan for the United States and the UK. And they're both extremely productive authors since leaving the diplomatic service. With Richard Bush based in Brookings and Michael Riley at Nottingham's Taiwan program. And we've been able to hold, I think already two book launches for Michael at SOAS on very diverse topics. And we're now looking forward to doing a launch for Richard Bush's book, Difficult Choices, Taiwan's Quest for Security and the Good Life in the Autumn. My co editor Mariah Thornton has also worked in the diplomatic service working in London in the Taipei representative office as a press and communications officer. And a final commonality that I think brings our speakers together is the way that many of us have been involved in the development of the Taiwan studies field. For example, Li Junyi is the director of the Taiwan Studies program at Nottingham University. And through really important initiatives such as the Nottingham annual Taiwan conference and the very influential Taiwan Studies blog, Taiwan Insight. She's also been making very important contributions to our field. Similarly, Richard Bush has played an important role promoting Taiwan studies in the US think tank Brookings Institute. And of course, Bob Ash was the founder and longtime director of the SOAS Center of Taiwan Studies. So in short, I think today we have a really exceptional panel. And what we're going to do next then is to talk briefly about each of our chapters. And we're going to follow the order of the book. So we'll start off with the more economics chapters and then gradually move into the more diplomatic and political economy chapters. So now I'm going to hand over to my Shirdi, who's also a SOAS graduate, Jan Knorrich from Kings College London. Thank you, David, for the excellent introduction. I should add to this that I had the honor to write my PhD on the supervision on a Bob Ash supervision. And I voted actually on Chinese investments. At that time it was on Chinese investments in Europe. And later on I developed an interest in mainland Chinese investments in Taiwan. And this is also what this book chapter is about. First of all, I would like to thank, of course, I would like to thank you, David, Mariah and Bob for all the efforts you have put into publishing this book. And the very solid job you have done in editing it. It really reads well and it looks amazing. And it's great to celebrate the launch today. And I wish we could have done it in person, of course. So to talk a bit about this book chapter. So the chapter was written by Li Chun-Yi, who is also here and will speak later on her own chapter and me. And it looks at an aspect rarely covered in examinations of cross-Taiwan straight relations because it is a relatively recent phenomenon, namely mainland Chinese direct investments in Taiwan. And in 2009, the Taiwanese government actually opened the Taiwanese economy for the first time to direct investments made by mainland Chinese companies. And it supported this by the shortly after by signing a cross-trait bilateral investment agreement as well that applied to such investments. It applied to such investment, but it was primarily actually signed to support Taiwanese investments in the mainland. But it also applied to mainland investments in Taiwan. But despite sort of this opening up, only very limited amounts of such investments have actually entered Taiwan since then. And this is sort of what we are trying to examine in this book chapter. And we say actually there should be reasons in theory that a lot of mainland Chinese investments go to Taiwan. And we set these reasons out in the beginning of the chapter. So we say, for example, that obviously we know mainland Chinese investments go everywhere in the world and it's the third largest source of investment worldwide by now. And Taiwan should be an interesting market. It's close by. It is culturally very similar. And it's quite wealthy market with wealthy consumers. And also we know that there are a lot of direct investments in the opposite direction. So many Taiwanese firms have for a long time invested in the mainland. So for these reasons, we sort of set out and said, well, actually there should be quite a lot of mainland investments in Taiwan. So they should be taking advantage of this opportunity. And the statistics just simply show that they are not. So there's a really limited amount of investments, a few billion, so relatively low. And so we develop three explanations why this sort of influx of mainland Chinese investments has not happened and try to explore which of these explanations are most plausible. So the first explanation is that simply it's a statistical issue, official statistics could be underreporting the true level of investments from the mainland. And what we sort of do is we look at the statistics that are available to determine whether we can find any patterns that support this idea that official statistics are underreported. And of course, this only reporting could happen in particular because investments might have been made by Hong Kong and other tax havens like the British Virgin Islands. And then so when they went to Hong Kong from the mainland and then registers Hong Kong investments in Taiwan. But in short, our investigation of relevant available statistics does not indicate that there has been some major major sort of that's called trans shipping investment via Hong Kong and offshore financial centers. And so we think that while there may be a bit of underreporting, it's not a major factor in explaining limited amount of investments at mainland investments in Taiwan. The second explanation looks at the second possible explanation looks at the companies themselves and better for them. So for mainland Chinese companies, Taiwan is an attractive destination for investments. And we look at, you know, in FDI and foreign direct investment theory, there are four reasons why companies make overseas investments market resources, efficiency and strategic asset seeking. So we look at each of them in turn. And for market seeking, we find that, yes, Taiwan, as I said earlier, has a potential market affluent, relatively affluent, culturally similar and so on. But it is a relatively small market and there are no neighboring markets, which make it maybe less interesting to invest there as a mainland Chinese company. Also, the Taiwanese market could be sort of easily served from the mainland since it's so close. So you could just export goods from the mainland rather than needing to support it with an investment. We also say that in terms of resource seeking, Taiwan as a small island doesn't have many natural resources. It doesn't need so much large scale infrastructure, which we know mainland Chinese investors are very active in. And so Taiwan is not so interesting. In that area, Taiwan is not interesting for efficiency seeking investments because mainland China has still the most more cost efficient location. And if mainland Chinese firms were to save low labor costs, they would not go to Taiwan, but to Southeast Asia, India, Africa. And then finally, there's strategic asset seeking investments, which is, you know, acquiring know how technologies last by making an investment in another economy. And here we found that, yes, some mainland Chinese companies have an interest in investing in Taiwan because they can use these investments to upgrade their firm specific capabilities. So they know how on technologies. But then Taiwan is in many areas technologically still more advanced than the mainland. So this could be interesting for them. Also cultural similarities in Taiwan could facilitate know how transfer make it easier. However, some interviewees also we interviewed for this study have argued that, well, Taiwan is not so much more advanced than mainland China. The learning space is relatively limited. They'd rather go to Silicon Valley, for example, rather than to Taiwan. And so it's, you know, their attractiveness is also limited for strategic asset seeking investments. And, you know, Taiwanese companies on the mainland are already transferring know how. And another reason is that, you know, maybe it's easier for a mainland Chinese company to simply hire new headhunt Taiwanese high skilled individuals in Taiwan and say and offer them high salaries to come to mainland China to work in mainland China, rather than sort of trying to gain technologies and know how by making an expensive investment. Then the third explanation is that why they are so limited investments is that there are. Regular to rehearse in Taiwan that hinder a genuine expansion of mainland investments there. So why it so Taiwan did in fact open 97% of manufacturing sectors and 50% of services sectors to mainland investments so it sounds as if you know the markets are very open. But if you look closely at what's going on, you'll find that there are still enormous restrictions. So restrictions, for example, in terms of the degree a mainland Chinese company can own or so the percentage of ownership it can have in a Taiwanese company and managerial control over that company. So there are restrictions that might be as low as 10% ownership, especially in sensitive sectors. Sometimes investments are very restricted and prohibited in some same sensitive sectors. The Taiwanese government has as we has kept, you know, investment screening and approval procedure put that in place. In particular, in particular targeted at large investments, so large investments from mainland China were really screened and looked at can we really let them in. And you know, sometimes these investments have been blocked or withdrawn. And also, there are tight restrictions on immigration. So if you were to bring mainland Chinese personnel over to Taiwan to support an investment, there are lots of restrictions there. Now these restrictions towards mainland Chinese companies are rather discriminatory. So investors from other countries do not necessarily face these restrictions. And so they are a major disincentive for mainland firms to invest in Taiwan. And what I didn't discuss here, but in the chapter we note in some detail that these restrictions are in line with, you know, the cross straight bilateral investment agreement, which, you know, does not prevent Taiwan from keeping these restricted measures in place. So, so the rules that respond to the complex political relations between mainland China and Taiwan, right? So they're in place because there's concern that mainland investments are government backed made by state and enterprises and there could be various security concerns associated with them. You know, such as increasing Taiwanese dependence on the mainland technology theft could be an issue. Soft power influence via these investments and so on. So, I could give a quick example of how much time I have. I don't know if I have it, but Jinghua Unigroup planned one minute. I think I can do that. Planned approach is 25% in Taiwanese Silicon Web precision industries and chip most technologies in 2015 to enter the Taiwanese semiconductor industry. And they made various assurances to the Taiwanese government, but in the end it found it too difficult and withdrew because it was still seen as a sensitive sector. So briefly to conclude 30 seconds. First, you know, statistical anomalies are not the main issue explanation. More convincing is the argument that there's often no business case for investments in Taiwan and the most serious factor is that the investment environment is simply unfavorable and unpredictable for mainland investors. And we don't expect that to change as long as the DPP is in power, which is much less willing to open to mainland Chinese investments any further. So concluding sentence, I guess, why mainland direct investments do offer opportunities to mainland Chinese companies to bring the theme of opportunities and challenges. So they offer opportunities to mainland Chinese companies and the Taiwanese economy. These are outweighed by the economic and diplomatic challenges. And that would be my summary of the chapter. Fantastic. Thanks, Jan. And now I'm going to hand over to your co-author who's now going to talk, Li Junyi is going to talk about your own single author chapter on the new Southbound policy with a focus on Vietnam. Yeah, thank you, David, and thank you, Jan, to outline so nicely of our joint chapter. So what I will do is to brief the audience about my single author chapter, which is Taiwan's new Southbound policy, but I only focus on the case of Vietnam. But before that, I also wanted to just briefly to address my appreciation to the editorial team. I think you've really done a great job to put everything together. And overall, this is a long, long journey for us to achieve. And I think you're in your very dedicated and also very professional efforts to push us all together as I myself as editor, I can see the efforts. And so I really appreciate this very good book as added by the editorial team morale and the deaf aid and Bob, of course, you are the backbone. So put us together. Okay, so what I would like to just to brief our audience is to see what my own single author chapter to see the new Southbound policy in the case of Vietnam. Well, we do understand that the new Southbound policy under Thai government was a flagship diplomacy, economic diplomacy. One may say so of the Thai government since 2016. So the chapter where I was writing on was the time that I was actually conduct interviews in Vietnam in March 2018. Of the Taiwanese business man in Vietnam and to see how do they feel about the new Southbound policy. And in a sense that in Vietnam and as well in many other Southeast Asian countries, it's not only Taiwanese investments, but also apart from the Taiwanese, very strong Chinese investments. So my contextual thesis in this chapter is to see how exactly the business groups in Vietnam to look into the new Southbound policy and how do they face being a Taiwanese investor but also the. I'm not saying trade but also overwhelming emerging Chinese investment force. So what I actually I started out of the chapter is to see, well, the Taiwanese investment in Southeast Asia coexisted with the Chinese investments, for sure. But Taiwanese investment in Southeast Asia actually arrived lots earlier than the Chinese investment. So when my good colleague in our light of the all the way round of Chinese investment to Taiwan, the Chinese investment to Southeast Asia countries actually also just started in like 1990s. But Taiwanese investments in Southeast Asia country actually started quite earlier in the late 1980s. In Vietnam, actually when Taiwanese investments started to be in Vietnam also they started to started to invest in China. So simultaneously, Taishang Taiwanese businessmen already started their business in Vietnam and in China and other Southeast Asia countries, which has been outlined by Professor Shaoxing Huang and Professor Yang Hao. There are very imminent research already outlined of the Taishang Taiwanese investment in those Southeast Asia countries. The reason I choose the case of Vietnam because from my interviews, even when my interviews in China of those Taishang Taiwanese businessmen in China, they informed me. Vietnam is the most similar or the most possible Southeast Asia countries they could invest on apart from China. For the reason of the actually there are quite a lot of the Vietnamese Chinese and the culturally they are similar. So this is interesting to look into Vietnam in a sense that they're very liberalist sort of the cultural similarity, a cultural similarity. But also in my chapter I identified you know the saucepan policy new saucepan the saucepan policy actually is carried on with the before in the Donghui and also in Chen Shui Bien's period of time. Taiwanese government already set out the investment in the South, not invest in to the West to China. So what are the difference between the new saucepan policy and the pre existing saucepan policy? From what I can see is these new saucepan policy emphasize on people to people's linkage, not just on money, right? It's not just on investment, but more on the people to people's linkage or understanding, let's say people to people's understanding. But I also made a point in the chapter, even it's in the people to people's understanding, which is a new saucepan policy, a more broader, wider approach rather than just focus on the business group. Actually, the majority of the, you know, connection still through the investments. So although the Thai government wants to emphasize that new saucepan policies not just focus on the business group, but in fact, it's still pretty much on the business investments of Taiwanese engage with Vietnam. Another thing is the new saucepan policy also emphasize the bilateral investment, the bilateral connection. So actually, Taiwan also expect that Vietnam would also come to Taiwan to invest, but so far it's not possible because Vietnam hasn't reached to less status could invest in Taiwan. But there were a lot of Vietnamese migrant workers in Taiwan. Okay, so this is a different ways of engagement. Taiwanese are investing in Vietnam and Vietnamese are exporting their labor to Taiwan. Okay, I believe that another colleague is about Chen. If you would be able to know her research, she is doing a lot of the migrants research on that. Back to my chapter, the last note I brought about the China-Taiwan investment sentiments, right? I mentioned that the Taiwanese investment arrived in Vietnam lots earlier than the Chinese. However, Taiwanese investment scale still much smaller than the Chinese. The Chinese investment come with the state-owned enterprises, you know, all that of the BRI, Belt and Road Initiative, all that money-driven or money-spreading process. Taiwanese investments are small and medium enterprises. They are not of the great or bigger, a number of, but not of the majority of the investments are big as the state-owned enterprises. Most of the Taiwanese are small and medium enterprises. So the scale-wise can't really compete with the Chinese. And another note is, in Vietnam particularly, the China card is a bit difficult to play. Although there are a lot of Vietnamese Chinese, of course, culturally, but they actually had quite strong anti-Chinese sentiment. So in a way, that Taiwanese in Vietnam does not really gain the similarity of the Chinese, but actually if our audience would heard about the Vietnamese actually had quite anti-China sentiment, especially in 2015-2018, they burned down most of the factories are not Chinese factories, Taiwanese factories. Okay, so this is what my interview is, Taiwanese interview is actually say to me that they felt the Vietnamese, they are taking advantage, taking the chance of anti-Chinese, but actually burned down the Taiwanese. To what extent the government, Taiwanese government would be able to establish a very good, well-linked bilateral relationship. I'm sure the government is working really hard on that. But from the time of my interview, I need to emphasize the time was 2018, March, April that time. Taiwanese investment in Vietnam didn't gain much of the profits and also suffered. I mentioned the 2015-16, the anti-Chinese route in Vietnam, most of the Taiwanese factory were burned down. The post note of this chapter, which our editor actually very wise to ask me to write down the post, the post script of the chapter changed was the COVID. So the Chinese actually didn't gain much of the favor or support during the COVID. When I was writing down the post script, Taiwan was sending out of all the face masks and everything. So by then, the Taiwan's soft power, if you like, was increased during the time I was writing down this chapter. I should stop now because I think that there's a lot of the changing dynamic to be seen. And note, I would just want you to bring up is economic diplomacy comes not just about money. I agree with the government. It's a people-to-people's connection. But there are a lot of the complicated elements within it and sometimes it's not one government can control. That's so far I can see from the case of Vietnam in terms of responding to Tai government's new sourcebound policy. Fantastic. Thanks, Trini. And just a question, something to mention to the audience. The chat is now open. So you can start raising your questions, which will come to at the end of the chapter presentations. So I'm now going to hand over to Michael Riley. Michael, are you ready? Because we are, we're jumping to you now because Kun Jin hasn't quite got here yet. Good afternoon, Dadith. Yeah, there I go. Sorry, I wasn't quite ready, but hope I am now. Thanks to you for your introduction. And like my previous contributors, thank you to your fellow editors for a splendid job in producing this volume. Good afternoon, everybody. My chapter is based on three underlying assumptions. Firstly, that Taiwan wants to reduce its dependence on China. Secondly, that it wants to broaden the scope of its economy to reduce its dependence on the information and communications technology or ICT sector. And thirdly, that at a political level, at least the EU is prepared to sign an investment agreement with Taiwan. And I argue in the chapter that a well designed agreement with the EU would help Taiwan achieve both of these diversification objectives. I see two main problems. First one is a lack of political will within Taiwan. And secondly, a lack of bureaucratic will, if you like, within the European Commission. And I see them as to some extent interlinked. Now, the book, I think, went to press about a year ago just as COVID was really getting underway. And since then, there have been several significant developments. The UK has finally left the EU. Donald Trump is no longer the US president, but anti-Chinese sentiment has continued to harden in the West, but more broadly, especially since the onset of the pandemic. On the other hand, more positively, perhaps the US and Taiwan are about to hold their first bilateral trade talks in five years. Now, despite these changes, I would argue that my underlying argument not only remains unchanged. If anything, I think these developments reinforce it. Now, I recognize that when I say there's a lack of political will in Taiwan for an agreement with the EU, that might sound surprising, because after all, Taiwan was lobbying the EU pretty hard to agree a free trade agreement for the better part of 10 years at the start of this century. But I explain that the objectives of the EU and Taiwan in considering such an agreement are actually very different. Taiwan's push for a free trade agreement was driven by its desire to enhance its political sovereignty to show in the absence of diplomatic relations that it still had and has substantive relations with other countries. So for Taiwan, the focus was much more on the principle of an agreement rather than on its substance. By contrast, the European Commission was and is only interested in an agreement with Taiwan if that can actually reduce or better to remove market access barriers. And so far, there's not really enough evidence that any Taiwanese government, KMT or DPP, is willing to tackle these. There's an additional issue of the Commission's perceived reluctance to annoy or irritate China. There's a common assumption among Commission bureaucrats that progress with Taiwan can only happen when they first concluded an investment agreement with China. But I see this actually as more of a convenient scapegoat rather than a real barrier. If the political will is there, then it will happen. Not only however do the objectives of the two sides differ, they're superimposed on what I described as a historic background of mistrust and disillusion between the two sides. If we go back 25 years ago, the bilateral trade and investment relationship between Europe and Taiwan was booming. It's hard to realise today, but actually in the late 1990s, most European countries were doing more trade with Taiwan than they were with China. And I give several examples of this in the chapter. But since 2000, the turn of the millennium, the bilateral trade has largely stagnated, while that of both the EU and of Taiwan with China has, as we know, boomed. That's mainly due to China's continued rapid growth and its succession to the World Trade Organization. But if you look at the growth of European trade with Korea, for example, that's been far greater than with Taiwan. And I argue that mutual mistrust is a factor in this relative stagnation of trade. In Taiwan, this is primarily a result of the EU's subsequently aborted plans to lift the arms embargo on China in 2005. In the case of the EU, it reflects a growing disillusion about the business relationship with Taiwan. I give several examples of contracts awarded to European countries overturned for political reasons, or European companies getting embroiled in legal arguments over compulsory licensing, for example. But there was also ill-feeling on the part of European companies and governments as many Taiwanese inward investment projects into Europe quickly went sour. And again, I give examples. All of this has encouraged this mutual sense of mistrust, if you like, at worst, in difference at best. But if you look at the situation today, there were growing concerns in both Europe and Taiwan about the dominance of China in bilateral trade. Taiwan's already seeking to address this through both the new southbound policy and its same accession to the comprehensive program for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the CPTPP. But the biggest problem Taiwan faces, I argue, isn't its dependence on China, but actually its dependence on a single industry. Because Taiwan is now, to a very great extent, a single product economy, heavily dependent on the electronics sector, even more specifically on integrated circuits and, in fact, on semiconductors. And it's achieved very impressive results in this sector. There's no doubt about that. It's got the scale in the production of the most advanced chips that give it a market dominance, but this has come at a price in terms of, to a certain extent, the hollowing out of other industries. If we look at Taiwan's trade with China, it is dominated by this industry. But integrated circuits are a commoditized product that they're like coal or iron ore in that there's no brand premium, the margins on them are tiny and the competition is fierce. But if we compare this with Taiwan's trade with the EU, we see a much more diversified trade. As examples, almost 50% of all the bicycles imported into the EU are of Taiwanese origin. But we're also seeing Taiwanese orchids, tea, whisky, even chain restaurants opening up in the EU. So if there was a bilateral agreement with the EU, it doesn't simply offer more opportunities for future trade, but actually more opportunities in areas where the margins are higher and in what is a larger overall and more prosperous market. Now the obstacles to reaching an agreement aren't over tariffs because bilateral tariffs are actually very modest, but they're essentially over regulatory procedures or non-tariff barriers. And I suspect that amongst Taiwanese officials, there's a reluctance to get into serious negotiations because they worry that the negotiations would be disproportionate. They would have to give up a lot for very little benefit. But I don't believe that has to be the case. On the other side, there's no doubt that European Commission inertia is a big reason for the lack of progress to date. And actually since first drafting the chapter, I feel that this inertia has grown in relative importance, even as European views on China generally are souring. But commission officials quite legitimately argue that European businesses are not pressing for any agreement at present. So Taiwan needs to do more to get European business they're engaged interested in doing business in Taiwan. It's going to in any case have to take some market liberalization measures if it's going to get any progress under bilateral agreement with the USA, or if it's going to be able to join the CPTPP. So taking those measures within themselves send a positive signal. But I do actually feel there is more Taiwan could do focused on Europe. And in the chapter, for example, I suggest one area where I think there is particular scope is in what are called sanitary or phytosanitary measures. We've seen in the case of the UK's row with the EU over Northern Ireland, that this is a sensitive area. This is essentially about the import of agricultural produce food and so on. But in contrast to the case of the US where we've seen enormous pressure over pork and racked up a minute and so on. There's no obvious threat to Taiwan's domestic interests from more agreement with the EU in this area. The EU has a complete blanket ban on the use of racked up a min for example. In this area, EU industry and Taiwanese production are complementary more than they are competing. But even if that wasn't the case, it's very much in Taiwan's own interests to pursue structural reform and liberalisation. If we look at the World Bank's annual doing business ranking, overall Taiwan actually scores very well compared indeed to most European countries. But for what is arguably the most trade dependent nation on earth, its score for the ease of cross-border trade is actually pretty concerning, scary even. Places like Kosovo or the West Bank, countries like Albania, Belarus, all rank above Taiwan for the ease of cross-border trade. And this is what's happening is that the market barriers in Taiwan aren't just hindering trade, but they're actually hurting Taiwanese consumers too. And doing something about these matters not just because of the trade benefits, not because of the benefits they'd bring to Taiwanese consumers, but because the evidence from the 1990s and more recent evidence for Europe in the case of both Korea and China is that growing trade leads almost inexorably to stronger and closer political links, which is what Taiwan is trying to achieve. But time's not on Taiwan's side. We're seeing an increasing assertiveness from Xi Jinping. At the moment there's a lot of sympathy in the EU for Taiwan, but that may not last. So it needs to try to make progress and lock it in soon, which means Taiwan has to take the first steps. I'll stop there. Thanks. Fantastic. Thanks, Michael. I'm delighted to see Lin Quinchin from University of Cambridge has arrived now. So Quinchin, I can now hand over to you for your co-authored chapter with Charles Chen. Thank you very much, David. How are you? Fantastic. Apologies for being a little late. It's this weather and all. Thank you for the opportunity for me to tell you a little bit about the paper I've written with Charles Chen. The paper is called Facing the Pacific, an eastbound strategy for Taiwanese maritime commerce in the 21st century. And I'm sure as many of my colleagues, paper contributors have mentioned, of course, a lot has happened in the past year. And so we've all been reflecting on whether this COVID situation has been has reinforced or created disruptions from prior trends, both in state and market actions. So this is a very interesting question I'd like to open up with my discussion here. Of course, as many of you would have noticed, shipping has been in the news tremendously in the past few months. Not only have we seen the Suez Canal blockage, but we've also seen shipping rates going through the roof, container shipping rates, therefore creating inflationary pressures across many economies and severe disruptions. So many of these things actually come into the paper I've written with Charles in a way that it projects from the arguments we've made. So the main point of the paper is to expose the narrative of sort of Chinese dominance in the maritime realm. So oftentimes you hear people talking about the Pacific Age, right? So that's a more generic sort of prediction. China ruling the waves. And then of course there's a counter narrative of the Indo-Pacific that's emerging from United States, Europe and other countries at this point. So when people talk about these sort of dominance, this hegemony over the sea, oftentimes they're not thinking very clearly as to what is the basis for a country to have influence at sea. And one of the most important things is of course container shipping. As you know that 90% of global trade goes through sea and most of which is packed in these giant boxes, you know, 40 footers which are packed into a ship that are increasing in dimensions. You know, some of them are just tremendously huge. If you go to Felix, though you can see some of these ships, it's just stunning. And then they've been moved around the world, right? They're very predictable, you know, routine rates, which are generally speaking not governed by the, you know, by governments, by their own industry associations. And over time, the past few years, China has obviously increased its presence in maritime shipping, starting from the late 1990s, and then over the 2000s, they built up their main shipping companies, Costco. And then joined the oligopolies of global shipping alliances and have made the impact felt. So what we wanted to talk about is a particular moment which happened in 2016, when the Panama Canal was expanded. So the logs were made bigger, they dredged deeper so that they could accommodate, the canal could now accommodate fairly large sized ships. And this was a moment that strategically changed the flow of container traffic globally. And that had several implications. One of which Charles and I tried to describe is an opportunity for Taiwan to enhance its maritime commerce status by playing a hedging game and opening up new options, which in the past might have seen less attractive due to various factors. So what we did in our chapters, first of all, we talked about the strategic developments both in Taiwan and U.S. and China. We started with President Tsai Ing-wen's New Southbound Policy. I'm sure most of you will know something about that, so I won't go into that detail. It suffices to say that in terms of the simple outcome, the very quantitative surface outcome of the Southbound Policy has been mixed at best. So some of what the government was expecting or hoping in terms of drawing on Southeast Asia in trade has happened, but perhaps not to the extent and certainly not to the extent as to decouple Taiwan, but to move Taiwan away from the growth pull from mainland China. So that was one of the points for us to start suggesting that perhaps we can look at some other policies. We also looked at the American Indo-Pacific Initiative, which by the way, of course, Japan had a big role in that, and then more recent times, Australia and many other countries have participated in. And then we talked about China's Westbound Initiative. So distinction was made between Eastbound traffic and Westbound traffic. Now, if you can sort of imagine the trade going from Asia, sort of from Northeast Asia or down to Southeast Asia, going towards the European market and U.S. East Coast market, which consumes about 80% of the trade in the United States. So then there are two ways to do it, right? So you can ship the goods across the Pacific, past the Panama Canal. Well, you can drop them off at East Coast and then put them on railways, but that takes quite a lot of time. So you can pass the Panama, now go all the way to the ports of East Coast America. Or you can take the other way, which is what's often been talked about, you know, the Malacca Strait through the Indian Ocean, then up towards Europe. As you know, China's Belt and Road Initiative is pretty much on the sort of Westbound road, right? So that's where we discussed the Malacca dilemma. We talked about, you know, East Africa and then the ports of Paris, in Greece and all that. So much of the activities of Chinese expansion has been caught up with going through the Suez Canal, which is a critical part for ships going in that direction. And over the past 15 years or so, the Suez Canal has gained disproportionately from global trade compared to Panama Canal for very simple reasons. It's easier to get bigger boats through the Suez Canal. So ships, you know, are increasing in size. So then going through the Suez Canal reaches the European market, very straightforward. And Southeast Asia has been growing, and that's also a closing route for Southeast Asia. But so what happened in 2016 is that with the expansion of Panama Canal, it now accommodates ships that are as large as the ships that are going through the Suez Canal. And one thing we did mention, but didn't sort of put a lot of emphasis on that, is that it accommodates LNG tankers now. So America, having gone through this again, energy transformation, right, becoming a net energy exporter, especially one wishing to explore natural gas, they could find natural gas to Asian economies can now put their tankers through the Panama Canal to reach Asia. So that creates a whole new world. So we documented the sort of the first few years of that transformation, where most of these major shipping alliances, as I mentioned before, start moving their traffic towards the Pacific again. So away from the Suez towards Panama. So we tried our best to sort of figure out how big that shift was. It was major. So the big companies, you know, Marsk, CGM, and of course Evergreen, so there's a lot of movement of routes away from the Suez Canal towards the Panama Canal. And that created a whole secondary effect. A lot of the East Coast American ports went through double digit growth in the first few years after that. In terms of global shipping, the momentum shifting that way also affected the Chinese. One thing we did not sort of mentioned in this chapter, but it's relevant is that the Chinese then were sort of pulled toward that direction as well. So in the years before the expansion of Panama Canal, they were investing in Nicaragua to trying to get a canal going after they gave up on that. And they started throwing money at the government, the Panamanian government, hoping to gain political capitalism. So it's had a major effect. So then the question is, what does that do for Taiwan? So we know that by having the Panama Canal, it shortens the movement from here to from Asia to American markets. So how can Taiwan take advantage of that? Well, historically we know these things matter a great deal. So when Panama Canal was opened up back in 1914, which for those who were history buffs, now the American took over French concession land and then built a canal. It was deemed to be strategic. So back then America was the rising power, right? It seemed to be strategic for American interests, and that created a whole chain effect, including making Japan more important as a shipping route, a transshipment center than Hong Kong. So in the past, before the Panama Canal, Hong Kong was the big shipping. And then with the Panama Canal, Japan then absorbed Taiwanese shipping through Japan to America and Europe. So there is that potential for this transformation. So Charles and I suggested four policies for the Taiwanese government to consider, which will ideally create a sort of hedging situation which allow the Taiwanese to enhance the competitiveness of ports like Gaoxiong and Taipei. So these are ports that have seen relative decline because of the Chinese ports rising, but it seems that there might be an opportunity to do this. So let me just very quickly mention these options. So the first option is to think strategically about building production bases in Southeast Asia. So this is how the Taiwanese have always been very active and involved in foreign direct investment in the region. We documented two ways of that. And the second way, if we're hoping that with this increase will make more sense for Southeast Asians to transport their goods through Taiwanese ports and then moving on towards. So that can only be done by having a sort of production network in place to incentivize that kind of logistics. So this is something we talked about. The second suggestion was to upgrade Taiwan as a high value added innovative processing center. So again, thinking about the export processing zone in Gaoxiong that started in 1966 and which was at that period of miraculous growth to Taiwan. Then sort of projecting it to today, thinking about how we can do more with these special economic zones and global value chains to promote maybe made in Taiwan brands. And of course with COVID Taiwanese brand has been on the ascent and there's much more interest in sort of production that's really linked to Taiwan also with the Americans are opening up their markets to us. The third recommendation was to make Gaoxiong a port for free and small maker hub. And this goes back to the idea that Gaoxiong has been already in relative decline, but fundamentally, so the fundamentals is that Taiwan could use the Gaoxiong port to access both Chinese mainland and as well Southeast Asia. And this really depends on putting in serious infrastructure investments, including meeting the complying with the standards of IML, the international maritime organizations on things like pollution and ecological regulations. So the fourth recommendation was to try to maybe negotiate for access to American markets, particularly East Coast markets. So this is just being a part of the sort of eastbound zone, eastbound strategy to be able to link more closely with the ports that are rising in this eastbound strategy. And part of that could be a new trade deal. So this will strengthen the partnership between the United States and Taiwan. So that's sort of the fourth recommendation that has much more diplomacy and trade deal that type of negotiation. And the final one is developing a maritime strategy. Of course, this is very contentious, giving South China Sea is now mainly heating up due to great power competition. But fisheries agreements that we have, Taiwanese have had a few, but also industries such as maritime tourism, biotechnology, renewable energy seem to be areas where the Taiwanese could perhaps think about and engage other neighboring countries in. So these are sort of some of the strategies we came up with to try to capture the benefits of the eastbound traffic dynamic. We think that these some of these strategies will help Taiwan in sort of in terms of national security of energy and food security as well. So with energy security, I did mention the LNG. So one of the things that one of the key actions that the second one government did with when Trump came to a power was to sign an LG agreement with the American company. And which is something that obviously the Taiwanese need and will help Taiwan to get out of some of the high cost of natural gas when imported from other places like Qatar. So that's called Asian premium. The food security will might be also be enhanced by the reliance on the east coast ports and Latin America. So these are all sort of conceptual issues that we were hoping to test empirically over time. The interesting thing is of course in the past year with the shipping industry situation, what has happened is that in fact a lot of. Well, because of the container and the vessel shortage, actually what has happened is the Chinese have concentrated a lot of vessels in Chinese ports. So as the result countries like Vietnam and India and maybe others have actually seen a drop in exports due to this concentration of ships in China. And this has been problematic because it essentially reverses the trend of decoupling that was evident in 2018 and 19. So some of the trends of the decoupling action, right? So putting resources elsewhere, starting supply chains beyond mainland China has already been in motion. It's not just due to Trump's policy, but some of that trend has been reversed simply by the actions of the shipping industry. So I think this doesn't bode well in terms of some of the suggestions we propose, but hopefully this is a short term trend. So shipping industry is telling us that it's going to be another year, but once it's over, then perhaps we can get back on the trajectory. So these are the ideas I propose in our paper. Thank you very much. I'd love to hear more from you as to what you think of our suggestions. Thank you. Fantastic. Thanks, Quentin. And now I can move on to our next speaker, Richard Bush, over to you. Thank you very much, David. It's a great pleasure to be part of this conference. Thank you to SOAS Center for Taiwan Studies for organizing it. Congratulations to Mariah, Bob and David for getting this process to a successful conclusion. My topic is Taiwan's international and political and economic role. Simply put, over the last 72 years, Taiwan has had to conduct a rearguard fight against exclusion from the international system. The ROC government has borne the brunt of this marginalization period. Taiwan corporations have had more freedom of action. The Taiwan people who have written a success story of economic and political modernization have been denied the global dignity that they justly deserve. Now, this marginalization was not an accident. It was the result of a relentless campaign by the People's Republic of China to drive Taiwan and the ROC from the international political system. This effort was not an end in itself, but one means of achieving the regime's fundamental goal of national unification. According to Beijing's logic, a Taiwan with little or no international presence was a Taiwan that was more likely to capitulate the Beijing's approach to resolving the cross-trade dispute. That Beijing's campaign has not succeeded is because of Taiwan's own resilience and aid from the United States and other actors. Time doesn't permit me to detail the history of this campaign and Taiwan's defense. Obviously, Beijing's replacement of Taipei in the UN in 1971 and the normalization of U.S.-China relations in the 1970s were key turning points. Then, beginning in the 1980s, the situation changed significantly with the opening and expansion of cross-trade economic relations and Taiwan's democratization. On the one hand, PRC leaders thought that business ties would provide political leverage. On the other hand, with democratization, the Taiwan public began demanding that the island be allowed to return to the international system. Obviously, Taiwan's international presence exists at different levels. International governmental organizations is one, multilateral economic organizations and groupings are another, and economies in which Taiwan companies operate are a third. Now let me jump to my conclusions about Taiwan government's efforts to preserve and expand its international presence, both in governmental and economic organizations. First of all, for those international organizations where China is already a member and Taiwan is not, China has an absolute veto over Taiwan's entry and is prepared to use it. The same is true of multilateral trade groupings, be they existing or proposed. These entities usually operate by consensus, so China can overrule any proposal that Taiwan be included. And even theoretically for group things where PRC might be included, it would try to at least to manipulate a few members to block Taiwan's entry. The same is true of economic arrangements that Taiwan might pursue, such as free trade agreements. Most of the countries that might be Taiwan's targets would weigh the potential value of any such agreement against the potential long term costs to its relationship with the PRC. Now there are four exceptions to these rather unhappy rules. The first is when China decides to relax its blockade of Taiwan for its own reasons. This happened during the Ma Yingzhou administration, Beijing facilitated Taiwan's presence at major meetings of the World Health Assembly and the International Civil Aviation Organization, and it gave the green light to Singapore and New Zealand to conclude FTAs. But this was a special case, and it was a limited case. The second exception occurs in multilateral groupings where neither China nor Taiwan are members, but the United States is a member. In these scenarios, Washington can play a strong leadership role on Taiwan's behalf to circumvent China's indirect pressure on other members. That was true in the ADV, APEC, the WTO, and the Information Technology Agreement. Unhappily for Taiwan, there are not many such organizations where this scenario is possible. The third exception, which is relevant to bilateral FTAs, is where the country concerned is willing to stand up to Chinese pressure. Japan demonstrated this kind of resolve in concluding a bilateral investment treaty with Taiwan in 2001, agreement, not treaty, and the Fisheries Agreement in 2013. These weren't FTAs, obviously, but they were important agreements. The fourth exception, and to date only a theoretical one, concerns groupings where China is not a member, Taiwan is not a member, but membership is open to members of another grouping of which Taiwan is already a part. For example, the Trans-Pacific Partnership was open to all members of APEC, so is CPTPP. But even here, the PRC can try to exploit the consensus principle to get one or more of its members to veto Taiwan's interests. To repeat my basic point, Taiwan is excluded from the international system because Beijing believes it helps advance its unification goal and is quite prepared to use its growing political leverage to that end. Now, you might think that this is a counterproductive way for Beijing to, quote, win hearts and minds of the Taiwan people, unquote, and to get Taiwan public and government to move even gradually towards unification. In my view, it is becoming clear that the PRC regime favors crude leverage to get what it wants rather than friendly persuasion. Beijing, I think, underestimates the desire of Taiwan people to be treated with dignity. Now, this is the situation when it comes to the Taiwan government's policy concerning international governmental organizations and multilateral economic groupings. Despite Taiwan's exclusion from many clubs it would like to join, Taiwan companies are not necessarily constrained by intergovernmental arrangements. Indeed, when Taiwan is excluded from regional trade and investment groupings, Taiwan companies sometimes move their operations behind the walls of the group to gain the relevant preferences. Bilateral FTAs are a different story. The conclusion of the US-Korea FTA stoke fears that Taiwan firms would not be able to compete with their Korean peers in the US market in product lines where they go head to head. The same concern applies to an ROK PRC FTA. One lingering fact is that Taiwan's trade has always focused on a few partners at a time since the 1990s. The most important partner has been the PRC. President Ma Ying-jeou and President Tsai Ing-wen both understood the value of diversifying Taiwan's economic activity externally. This need for diversification makes it all the more important for the Taiwan government to pursue economic relationship with friendly countries like the United States and Japan, either through FTAs or through a collection of sector-specific arrangements like digital trade. I agree completely with Michael Riley that this will require difficult concessions and it involves unilateral liberalization steps that Taiwan should take because they are in its own interest. Now these concessions will be disruptive because they will force structural adjustments of the Taiwan economy. But to remain internationally competitive, structural adjustment is exactly what Taiwan needs. That is all the more reason why I've long regretted the narrow-minded, non-strategic approach of the US government and the US trade representatives to be precise. Economically, Taiwan has many strengths. Its ability to remain competitive in many product lines is impressive. Yet because Beijing continues to try to marginalize Taiwan internationally and use economies' economics to produce political results, this is not a time for complacency. It is a time for creative action both by Taiwan and by friendly countries. Thank you. Fantastic. Thanks, Richard. Now I can hand over to our final chapter speaker and co-editor, Mariah Thornton. Yes, hello everyone. Thank you very much to everyone who has made such kind comments about the book and the co-editing. I really appreciate it. It was a long process, but here we are. So I'm going to kind of take a different turn from everyone else. I'm going to actually have a PowerPoint. I thought this would be kind of useful for our audience in terms of following my talk. So I'm just going to pull that out a few bear with me just for a few seconds. Hold on. Let's see. Okay, can everyone see that? Yeah? Okay, great. So the title of my chapter, as everyone can see from the PowerPoint, was Walking Towards China or Towards the World. My chapter looks at Taiwan's international space under Ma Yingzhou and Tsai Ing-wen. And so basically to kind of start the chapter off, I had to think about what international space meant and how it's been defined. And of course, international space is a direct translation from the Chinese, which is Guoji Kongjian. And this concept has been defined by two scholars I can think of in particular, Jack DeLyle and Kui Bo Huang, who I believe is a Taiwanese scholar. So in any case, and both of them kind of say that international space or Guoji Kongjian is describing Taiwan's level of participation and engagement with the global community. Jack DeLyle laid out particular areas for what international space means in more concrete terms. So Taiwan's participation and membership in international organization, Taiwan's number of formal diplomatic allies, the strength of Taiwan's unofficial relations, as well as levels of international economic engagement. So those are some areas that kind of help us better understand what international space is and how do we measure it. But the concept is abstract and multi-dimensional. And I make the case in this chapter that actually international space is a concept that has evolved with each successive and administration to suit that administration's foreign policy objectives. And I really look at the case of Ma and Tsai to illustrate this point about international space. So to broadly summarize, I thought that Ma and Zhou's strategy could be characterized by an emphasis on cooperative or positive relationship with China. And this is the key to Taiwan's economic and diplomatic success. There are many examples in Ma and Zhou's speeches as well as his publications, which kind of highlight this point of view about international space, particularly his comments on 1992 consensus and agreeing to the 1992 consensus as being like the gateway to expanding Taiwan's international space. And of course, in contrast, Tsai Ing-wen has more or less emphasized the decoupling of Taiwan's international space from China through strengthening relations with other countries. And as some of our chapter contributors have already said in their talks, there's been more of an emphasis on expanding non-economic and cultural ties, especially under the New Southbound policy under Tsai Ing-wen. But of course, there's also a focus on diversifying economic ties with those NSP countries as well. So in any case, that's broadly how I characterize the contrasting approaches between Ma and Zhou and Tsai Ing-wen when it comes to international space. But I have to say that I think that Tsai Ing-wen really summarized it quite well in the 2011 debate on ECFA, when she said the DPP walks towards the world and walks towards China with the world while the KMT walks towards China and walks towards the world with China. Now, I understand that was back in 2011 and that may not really characterize the DPP's kind of approach and view of China nowadays, but nonetheless, I find it a helpful kind of summary and an apt summary of the difference between these two kind of views of international space and how to best expand Taiwan's international space. So moving forward, my chapter really sought to explore which of these two strategies between Ma and Zhou and Tsai Ing-wen best serve Taiwan's interests over the long term and which of these strategies really contributed to international space in the long term. And I looked at six main areas, you know, contrasting these two strategies. One, of course, was international economic engagement. Two was Taiwan's membership and participation in IGOs. Third is Taiwan's formal diplomatic allies. Fourth was the strength of Taiwan's unofficial ties. Six was the international law in the South China Sea and six was the domestic reforms in Taiwan. So was Ma's strategy very effective? That's something I tried to answer in the chapter. I thought that in some ways, yes, there was definitely some effective elements of Ma and Zhou's strategy for international space. One, of course, was that we saw the signing of ACFA. We had free trade agreements with Singapore and New Zealand. We had Taiwan's ascension into the government procurement agreement in the WTO in 2009. And so in terms of international economic engagement, Ma's strategy was quite effective. And in the second way, in the second realm, it was also quite effective in terms of the diplomatic ceasefire and kind of preserving Taiwan's number of formal diplomatic allies, apart from, of course, the loss of Gambia in 2013. However, while we've seen these successes in terms of Taiwan's international space under Ma, I would have to say that actually his strategy has exposed some pretty serious limitations, pre-existing limitations imposed by China on Taiwan's international space, even in the field which arguably he was most successful, which was boosting Taiwan's international economic engagement. And so these pre-existing limitations included Taiwan's basically was not involved in the negotiations and RCEP or TPP and continues to be shut out from those negotiations. Taiwan was also shut out from multilateral free trade negotiations with South Korea and Japan, which are key trading partners in the region. And as for ECFA, which could be kind of seen as Ma Yingzhou's real significant impact in international space, actually ECFA really only had significant gains for Taiwan's international space for the duration of Ma Yingzhou's tenure. So it's not something that carried on really, I would say. I don't think the benefits of it really lasted past Ma Yingzhou's presidency. And we saw this even with the early harvest list from ECFA, where we saw the export items jumped by 35% the year that ECFA was signed, but then they've declined in each successive year since. So my overall assessment for whether Ma Yingzhou's strategy for Taiwan's international space was effective is that this strategy worked under the condition that the next administration was equally China cooperative as the Ma Yingzhou government was. But obviously, since that wasn't the case with the election of President Tsai Ing-wen in 2016, that was quite a big gamble. I think it was quite risky and I think it was not really in Taiwan's best long-term interest so it did not translate into meaningful and enduring success for Taiwan's international space. Now, was Tsai's strategy for expanding international space that much more effective? Well, as you've heard from our other chapter contributors, there are some significant developments under the New Southbound policy, which seem to suggest that international space is expanding in a meaningful way. We saw exports to NSP countries rise significantly. We've seen an incredible number of educational exchanges between students from Asian countries and Taiwanese students. We've also seen the number of Asian tourists traveling to Taiwan increase significantly thanks to the easing of visa restrictions under the New Southbound policy under Tsai Ing-wen. And of course, to address COVID-19, I think one of the major successes under President Tsai Ing-wen for Taiwan's international space has been that the WHO ended up granting Taiwanese experts access to their online forum on COVID-19 in mid-February 2020. I think that was huge success because this result was brought about by the sheer level of international support Taiwan had from other countries. And in any case, and it translated into this result, I think that's pretty big success for Taiwan's international space, although I admit not enduring. And part of this move was brought about by the fact that Taiwan has been highlighting particularly at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic back in the 2020. It's been highlighting the effectiveness of its approach to restricting the spread of coronavirus. And as many of you in the audience and the chapter contributors are well aware, we had kind of a narrative in the international news media of the Taiwan model and pushing the Taiwan model. You may have even seen on Piers Morgan kind of lauding the Taiwan model at one point on Good Morning Britain is just a small example. So also in terms of assessing whether Tsai's strategy was effective, I think although the domestic reforms under Tsai Ing-wen are not necessarily directly linked to her strategy for expanding Taiwan's international space, I think they inadvertently boosted her strategy for international space because domestic reforms like legalizing same sex marriage in 2019 and some of the judicial reforms that the Tsai administration has introduced, such as exploring the possibility of citizen judges, these kind of reforms have helped to position Taiwan as a leading democracy in Asia and put it on par with other like-minded democratic nations elsewhere in the world and in the West and strengthening those partnerships with democratic organization. And then finally, in terms of assessing the effectiveness of Tsai's strategy for international space, I have to say that also this can't be accredited, attributed directly to President Tsai and her government, but the fact that we've seen an increasingly authoritarian stance in China under Xi Jinping has kind of fed into this bigger contrast between Democratic Taiwan and an authoritarian China and this contrast has kind of helped to highlight Taiwan's separate statehood in the international field. So I think that contrast has actually been positive for Taiwan's international space in the long run. So my overall assessment and the argument that I make in my chapter is that the more that Taiwan has strived to improve its democratic systems, the more common ground it has with other like-minded allies to strengthen cooperation and opportunities for cooperation in the future and I think this strategy that Tsai has introduced, which is more soft power focused, may actually help improve the quality of Taiwan's official and unofficial relations for the long term as well as increase awareness of Taiwan's status as a sovereign democratic state that is very much separate to China. So I conclude in this chapter that I think actually President Tsai Ing-wen's strategy for international space may be more effective in terms of expanding Taiwan's global position for the long term and for the future. So thank you very much for making it this far for listening to this book talk and I really do encourage you to, if your library at your institution does not already have a copy of the book, I really encourage you to lobby your library or your institution to purchase it because I think that just a building on what my co-editors have said, it really does kind of showcase the diverse range of opinions and perspectives on Taiwan and yeah, I think even though it was sent to publication in 2010, I still think that a lot of the arguments made in this chapter by our chapter contributors offer a valuable and enduring perspective on Taiwanese international politics for the future. So thank you very much to my co-editors Bob Ash and David Fell and I will hand the floor back over to Dr. Fell. Fantastic, thanks for that Mariah. So what we're going to do now then is move to our Q&A section and I can see that we're already starting to have some discussion on the chat. So maybe the best thing then is me to just summarize some of the questions that have come in so far and our contributors can try and engage with some of these. So we started off with one question that asked about the potential for Taiwan to rejoin the international community, particularly organizations such as United Nations, that was one question. A second question raises the issue of whether or not Taiwan's soft power is as effective as Taiwan's economic power in terms of its diplomatic relations. A third theme that Maiming Ker raises is about Taiwan's industrial policy and to what extent Taiwan can push its industry to move away from a original equipment manufacturing model to one of original design manufacturing. And a fourth question theme that comes up from my colleague Jumbie Yu is about the question of optimism and pessimism and of course the answer to that question is going to vary according to our chapters. I should note that probably the most pessimistic chapter authors aren't here today so hopefully our answers might be a little bit more positive than the opening couple of chapters. So what I suggest then that we do is I'll let my colleagues pick and choose which ones you want to focus on and I can see Richard you've got your camera on so maybe you want to, would you like to come in first? Yes I'll do the UN question it's a fairly simple answer and that is that as long as the People's Republic of China asserts that it is the sole legal representative of China in the international community the practical implication of that is that the People's Republic of China's government will represent China in the UN and all of its affiliated organizations. This is a zero sum question. Now ironically this was also the ROC's position into the 80s. President Zhang Kai-shek was very rigid on this point and in fact the only effort to try and encourage Zhang and the ROC in the direction of a two China policy in UN organizations was the United States. This was back in the 1960s and it was abandoned because Zhang wasn't interested. Okay fantastic thanks Richard. So would others like to come in on any of those questions that we've had so far? Yeah Michael go ahead. Michael could you just unmute yourself? Hopefully that's going to work. I've got problems with my computer. I think it's a Taiwanese computer. Clearly time to buy a new one. Richard addressed the UN question comprehensively. I mean at the risk of nitpicking I could add that actually if you look at the wording of resolution 2758 it makes no mention of the actual status of Taiwan but the reality is as long as China takes the position it does nothing is going to change in the UN or any of the UN associated bodies. What I really wanted to come in on was a question about Taiwanese soft power because I do feel quite strongly that this is an area that Taiwan has actually been very weak at. It is getting much better I think but you know when you compare Taiwan's performance in this with say South Korea's performance there is a big gulf. I have addressed this in some of my writing in the past some of the obstacles I mean from a European perspective the Taiwanese play the wrong type of sport. That's an asset with Japan in the US but they don't play football but it's more fundamental things. How can you project an image of Taiwan when your quote flag carry unquote calls itself China Airlines and everybody thinks that you're actually mainland Chinese carrier. I'll be very blunt. I think that they're largely dying away now but certainly until fairly recently it was not uncommon to meet Taiwanese diplomats who actually seemed to have more interest in mainland China than they did in Taiwan itself and I can recall having fairly vigorous discussions with them shall we say about how to promote Taiwan and that privately they were very critical of Taiwanese filmmakers. They saw themselves Taiwan as part of China and wanted to promote Taiwan in that wider context. So until and this feeds into I think a point Richard has made in reply to me on the chart about Taiwan's future until Taiwanese politicians can actually agree of all the main parties can agree at least a core position as to representing promoting Taiwan's image. It's always going to struggle in this area. But this is something that they really should be working harder at doing. Great, fantastic Michael. Would others like to come in on any of these questions? Yeah, Junie. Yeah, it's just really like Michael said about the Taiwanese computer. No, no, no. Just kidding. But since I'm coming from industrial manufacturer perspective, my take of Taiwan's soft power actually is Taiwan's manufacturing power. I see the audience has a very good question of OEM, ODM and I type my answer on it. It is the situation like Taiwan has been, you know, as a contractor of most of the electronic suppliers. And the reason that Taiwanese are actually being comfortable here because that is the stable, you know, supply and order. But on the other hand, actually, that also means that all of these big brands, they can't do without Taiwan's production. So let's let's a cup one half full, one half empty, if you like. Taiwan hasn't had this kind of wolf spirits, if you like, of the Chinese to I mentioned about innovation has to has a lot of government funding. Taiwanese government is a democratic government. So all the sectors are asking money off the Taiwanese government. They can't really input the capital in one sector. So that is one thing, but Taiwanese production has been reputed, has been sustainable. That's why I mentioned about TSMC, right? So I do think the soft power I agree with Michael and previously Gary Ronsley, Professor Ronsley also made the point that Taiwan really doesn't speak up a lot. I do think that Taiwan's manufacturing has been reputable. It's something not even the Chinese rate supply chain can replace. So this is just from the industrial perspective I wanted to chip in. I also wanted to speak about it, but because I overheard his presentation is talking something about that as well. Yeah, Kun Jin, as you've been, your name's been called out. Did you want to respond to Junyi? In the meantime, let me just kind of jump in kind of briefly on this kind of soft power, economic power, because it's something that the chapter that I do with Chenai Jia does address. Although our contrast is more between civil society-led diplomacy and top-down diplomacy, something that to a certain extent I could see that the Michael was critiquing at least the top-down diplomacy. And one of the things that we try and argue is that through areas such as LGBT rights diplomacy, Taiwan does actually have a story to tell and is able to kind of go to places where the official diplomatic channels don't work. Similarly, in another publication, I also talk about Taiwan's green diplomacy and the ability of Taiwan's green parties to engage internationally. And this kind of overlaps with some of the arguments, again, that Gary Ronsley's made about grassroots bottom-up diplomacy, actually having a lot of potential and the fact that Taiwan potentially could push this in this direction a little bit more. But let me open up to my other colleagues. Did anyone else want to come in on any of those kind of four core questions? Michael, I can see your hand up. Is that an old hand? Sorry, yes, it's an old hand. It's sorry. And in that case, let me also try and push Yan, because one of the things I was curious about Yan in your presentation was, okay, you showed the limitations of Chinese investment. But to what extent do you feel that Taiwan can actually find alternatives? In other words, is it still getting enough investment from, let's say, the US or Japan? Or even, I know that Junyi mentioned the limitations of Vietnamese investment in Taiwan. But if you're going to advise Taiwan, what are the alternatives if Chinese investment just isn't coming in? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I haven't studied exactly the sort of statistics from other places in Taiwan. But as I understand, there's quite a few investment from other places. And I would say that, so I have not looked at whether they're going up and what the situation is and how Taiwan is doing. But mainland Chinese investment is certainly not sort of a competing sort of economic activity that in any way is broadly relevant. The focus needs to squarely be on investments from elsewhere. I think Junyi might be able to come in on this a bit further. I was going to say, can't we just all sort of, all panelists sort of show each other here that might be best? Or is it a problem with bandwidth instead of coming in and out? Yeah, I think it should be fine. I think the volume can be an issue. But I think the cameras is not a problem. Junyi, did you want to come in here? Let me just say something about the non-Chinese investment to Taiwan. So to my understanding, while I was doing the fieldwork on this issue, actually Taiwan has been quite cautious about investments coming into Taiwan. But particularly as Ian's presentation, our chapter presented being particularly picky or cautious on the Chinese investment. But one point I wanted to mention is Taiwan wanted to transform itself into a more of a smart island. Then it also needed to transform into to attract the valuable investors. So the Taiwanese government has been working hard on this part. But I think the overall, when I looked into the data four years before, four years ago, the investment from, for instance, USA, UK to Taiwan wasn't really high, because Taiwan has a really, really conservative attitude to receive investments in that sense. So that was actually my own recommendation to the government that be a bit open minded to open more. I understand with the Chinese have a lot of the security concern and the mistrust, of course. But to have a foreign investment as a stimulation of the countries overall economic industrial group actually is very important for Taiwan for the industrial upgrading in that sense. I don't see Taiwan as very open minded. If I compare this, although I really hate myself to say so, but because I'm comparing Taiwan and China, China was so open. And Taiwan has been quite restrictive in many ways in terms of investment regulations. So that's my not really updated, I have to say, because it was four years ago's fieldwork observation. I see we have a kind of a follow up question again that I think could be open to multiple chapter authors and that's about post Brexit. And to what extent does that actually does the UK leave in the European Union offer greater potential for UK, Taiwan trade? My immediate thought is that's that's a question that Michael might want to respond to. But I think if others would like to respond to to Raymond's question there. Shall I go first? Yeah, go ahead, Michael. I mean, I've already tight short answer. You better stop me because Brexit, I could rant for hours on on that. But essentially the problem on it is that if you're a remainder, you will say, well, it's a disaster. If you're a Brexit, you'll say this is wonderful. Yes, of course, it raised opportunities. The reality is actually Brexit is something of a red herring in this area. As I've said to Raymond, UK and Taiwan have been having bilateral trade talks for several years already. Even while the UK was in the EU was able to negotiate sector agreements on things like pig meat exports. They could do more. And the question is, does the UK have the resources to do more, given it's now trying to go set bilateral trade deals all around the world? And if you look at it from the UK's perspective to just set China to one side for the moment, but Taiwan ranks something like number 17 as a trade partner. That means there's 16 outside the EU, this is. There's about 16 countries ahead of it that logically should be higher priorities for negotiating bilateral trade deals. And that's even before you get into the whole question of China and the rest of it. So I would say overall it's not a priority. But on the other hand, if you've got, forgive me for saying it, but if you've got an energetic enthusiastic team in the British office in Taipei, and they know the right people in Whitehall Ministries, and the Taiwanese are willing to do it this way, there's quite a lot that could be done bilaterally anyway, if they wish to do that. Thanks, Michael. And Jan, you wanted to come back in. Yeah, I mean, I just think as we saw with the two points, the first point is as we saw with the Australia deal recently, I think sort of these trade opportunities, they're often overrated. So there may be an opportunity in one sector, like, you know, there was a lot of talk about beef with Australia and so on. But I wouldn't say there's not as big boom happening because of that, or that there's going to be huge disadvantages and trade. So I wouldn't, you know, I think it's often sort of overrated what Brexit now brings, what change it brings. The one issue I'd probably point out, I mean, it was mentioned earlier that the EU could be willing to sign the discussions about this, you're signing a trade deal with Taiwan. And I think that's easier for the EU actually because of, you know, it's quite a powerful entity, right? And, you know, it will upset mainland China in some way. And the US being a powerful entity will be able to shoulder that more than probably UK on its own would be. And I think that's, you know, that's the thing. UK is just one entity that can more easily sign these agreements. It's more flexible, doesn't have to consult with 26 other countries. But it's less powerful in the process and all that comes with it. Yeah, sorry, thanks, Jan and Michael. Yeah, Michael, do you look like you're muted again? Sorry, just to say quickly, I very much agree with Jan. It's easy to overstate the impact of trade deals, particularly bilateral one, but very much on the EU one. The difficulty there is, as I sort of said briefly, I think there's a strong political will in the European Parliament to do something with China. There is great reluctance within the European Commission bureaucracy. And this is a combination of factors. It's partly just sort of the historic attitude of the bureaucrats that they will decide what they're going to do. They're not going to have the parliament push them around. But it's also a very, it's sort of an insular view of the world that you see in other parts of the commission. But basically, Commission bureaucrats spend a lot of time with their Chinese counterparts. And they get this distorted view as a result of Chinese lobbying that they mustn't do anything that the Chinese won't like. And it's complete nonsense. They just need to get out and about a bit more. And Jan's right. Actually, I mean, before Cecilia Malmstrom in 2015 said that the commission was willing to start talks. She was being lobbied on a daily basis by the Chinese ambassador in Brussels saying you mustn't do this. Well, she went ahead and announced it and that's it. There's no fall in no reaction. This is just a Chinese lobbying stance. And people really do need to give the commission bureaucrats more spine to actually get out there and stop being so reticent and so worried about China. Great. Thanks, Michael. Be you, you've got a question. Did you want to come in and read out your question, which is directed to Mariah and Richard? Okay. Thank you very much. It's fantastic presentations here for Richard and Mariah. Sorry. I'm quite interested in both of your topics and combining the both topics. I want to really see how what your views are really relating to this continuous Chinese pressure. So I have written my question there basically just asking you what can you foresee what kind of future for cross-strait relations and also whether and to what extent that really China's diplomatic pressure will impact Taiwan's international space. Thank you. Mariah, do you want to go first? I'm happy to go first. I'll try to be brief. So basically, I mean, I think this in large part, you know, to what extent doesn't impact Taiwan's international space. Well, I think that depends a lot on how you define international space. So in my chapter, I kind of lean towards the argument that international space is something that can also be not just defined in terms of the number of formal diplomatic allies that Taiwan has, not just in terms of the number of free trade agreements that has with certain countries around the world, but also like in terms of like, I guess like kind of countries perception of Taiwan and how effectively is Taiwan able to communicate its separateness from China. And that's actually kind of links with Gary Ronsley's argument about Chen Shui-bian's democratic diplomacy. So in any case, I would encourage everybody in the audience to think kind of in terms of international space, not just in terms of these like numbers of diplomatic allies and to kind of look at the more abstract elements of it, the more soft power elements of it. And so, you know, look, if we kind of look at international space in that way, then I would think that, you know, this kind of wolf warrior diplomacy that China is exercising this increasing marginalization of Taiwan reflects very poorly on China and the international community. And it has actually in many ways kind of, I think, against China's wishes inadvertently highlighted that contrast between Taiwan as a democratic country and Taiwan as a more authoritarian country. And that's not really something that China is interested in doing because China wants to kind of take advantage of a lot of people's misunderstanding about Taiwan or, you know, ignorance about Taiwan and its situation and its international situation. So I think actually China's tactics kind of inadvertently kind of feed into highlighting the separateness between Taiwan and China. I think more people, more nations are aware than ever before of just how separate Taiwan is and COVID has kind of contributed to that, right? Because Taiwan was donating masks, it had its Taiwan model that it was pushing in international news media outlets that was applauded by, you know, various really notable news outlets. So I think it's not, how do you say, like, I don't think that this wolf warrior diplomacy is actually a very effective strategy. What I find more worrying is that actually China is not really so concerned with its image on the international stage. I really think China is much more motivated by its domestic audience at home. And so of course, you know, for Chinese people and Chinese politicians, they're going to be much less concerned with what other countries think. And I mean, that was obvious in the case of Hong Kong. As everybody in this panel knows, the, you know, the One Country Two Systems model was something that was designed for Taiwan, but effectively, I mean, effectively from the Chinese Communist Party's perspective, implemented in Taiwan. So that's what I find very worrying. It's not actually the wolf warrior diplomacy. I don't find that in a very effective form of diplomacy. If you want to look, assess effectiveness of diplomacy outside of China, I think it's highly effective in China, but not really that effective elsewhere. But given the Chinese Communist Party stated goals, given the, I think we've had the, we're having the run up to the Chinese Communist Party centenary. Like all of these kind of significant dates are worrying to me. And because the Chinese Communist Party has been really clear about reunification and the, or I don't even say reunification, but they've been really keen to bump up, prioritize the unification of Taiwan. So that's something I find worrying. But again, I don't think the wolf warrior diplomacy, I don't think it has much of an effect in terms of achieving this goal. I agree with all that. Let me answer the cross straight part of the question. It's important to understand that there's been a significant shift in China's basic approach towards Taiwan when it comes to cross straight relations. For a long time, and particularly during the Mainzhou administration, the approach was to try and persuade Taiwan leaders and the Taiwan public on the virtues of one country, two systems and moving closer to the mainland, even on a gradual basis. With the election and reelection of Tsai Ing-Wen, there has been a significant shift towards what I call coercion without violence, intimidation, pressure, marginalization, all of that. And wolf warrior diplomacy is only an international manifestation of this same psychology. Now, if we had a KMT president elected in 2024, there's of course the chance we could go back to persuasion. Whether there would be a basis for persuasion, particularly after what happened in Hong Kong, is a big question. If KMT leaders decide that they have to embed the 1992 consensus within the ROC constitution, then I think it's a non-starter for Beijing because they don't think the ROC exists. And they have never accepted the idea, which is universal in Taiwan, that the 1992 consensus is one shine of different interpretations. So perhaps the persuasion, there'll be some persuasion in addition to intimidation, but I think this more pressure-based approach is going to continue. It then becomes very important for Taiwan leaders, Taiwan politicians, and the Taiwan public to be very realistic about their situation and understand that it's really important for Taiwan to strengthen itself in the face of coercion without violence. And there are a lot of ways that they can do that, strengthening cyber defenses is one of them. It's important that they take steps to attract the support of friendly countries, particularly the United States, Japan, and in Europe. When it comes to China to borrow a phrase from American politics, politics really does have to stop at the water's edge. People need to get together and be very serious about the threat that Taiwan faces and the stakes involved. Taiwan cannot afford to get this wrong. Thanks. Thanks for that, Richard. So we've just about run out of time. I'm sure we could carry on talking for many more hours, as I've also got a lot of questions I would like to follow up on. But we do need to bring things to a close and get a bit of dinner here before our next event that starts at 7 o'clock. The 7 o'clock event is writing books about Green Party, Taiwan, Canada, Germany and Japan. So I hope some of you can join that final session. We've had a marathon of Taiwan studies today and there's still a little bit more to come. But before we move to our quick dinner, I'd like to thank my wonderful panel of chapter authors and co-editors and also those of you. Of course, we do have some authors that weren't here, but we will do a follow up book launch for those chapter authors that were based in Taiwan. So for those of you that are still here, could you turn on your mics and give our panel a big round of applause?