 Good afternoon, I'm Ralph Winnie, Vice President of the Eurasia Center and it's Eurasian Business Coalition. We are fortunate today to have Art Harmon, the Executive Director of the Conservative Caucus who has just recently returned to the United States from a very productive trip to Taiwan. And Mr. Harmon is gonna discuss with us his observations from a cultural, social, economic and political standpoint of his trip to Taiwan and what it means for engagements between mainland China and the United States vis-a-vis Taiwan. So Art, could you talk about what it was like when you first arrived in Taiwan and sort of the backdrop of your trip and what you were hoping to accomplish? Sure, and thanks so much Ralph, glad to be on with you. You know, I went to Taiwan for two reasons. One was explore the island, bit of a vacation, but then also strategically mind it. You know, what can I impart to Taiwan officials? What can I learn from them? What do they need from America to better deter China from an attack? So, you know, I was in Taiwan in 2014. That was with Congressman Stockman. I was his legislative director. And between the two of us, we managed to do things that helped Taiwan at the time and- What kind of things? Working for selling Taiwan technology to build their indigenous submarines, upgrades for F-16 fighters and sales of new fighters. We were trying to get them observer status in the RIMPAC naval exercises. At that time under Obama, Obama was having China, Communist China participate in the RIMPAC exercises, giving them the advantage of watching our naval tactics, which is just absolutely unbelievable. And we're just kind of paying the price for that now. Do you know how that impacted Hawaii at the time? Or was there any engagement with the Hawaii delegation when you went to Taiwan back then? Or what perspective was from people in Hawaii? Were you able to engage at that time? At that time, no, I don't know at all that. That didn't come up. We were meeting with Vice President and Defense Minister, things like that and talking on the more national levels. But, you know, Hawaii is the third island chain. This is China's aim is to drive the U.S. back to the shores of Hawaii. And then if they were to get their way with propaganda and so forth, they would probably try to get Hawaii to secede from the U.S., become independent and then become essentially a vassal of China. This is what they do. This is what they're doing around the world. And then they ensnare them in debt and they can control them like puppets. So, Hawaii is definitely on China's radar, but not in a good way. When you were in Taiwan, what kind of perspective were you able to engage from your daily interactions with the people in terms of their business connection with China and or their engagement with the United States? What would they like to see more from the U.S. or what would they like to see from China in terms of their engagement? Because there's over a million Taiwanese doing some form of business in mainland China, so that creates a very unique economic and strategic relationship between Taiwan and mainland China. Yet, Taiwan is very closely tied and aligned politically with the United States. Well, this is sort of in a way a complicating affair and it's also a perhaps slightly deterrent way. Because if China goes to war, then there's a lot of business contacts that will be destroyed, a lot of customers abroad that will be lost and so forth. Not to mention things like the semiconductor industry, which would be the grand prize of China seizing Taiwan. If they seize those plants intact, then they rule 93% of the semiconductor market. They can put in back doors. They can also use it as blackmail that if you want ships, you're going to get out of the Western Pacific. You're going to do this. You're going to do that. You're going to start using the reserve currency that China is starting to build along with the BRICS. And is that what the Taiwanese people believe? The people that you talk to there on the ground? Among civilians, regular citizens, I had lots of talks. Everything from just people that I got in chatting with, Uber drivers, everything. And there's sort of a dividing line between those that see China as a serious threat and those that dismiss it. And I found that also with officials, with some who believe that war is not inevitable and that it can be deterred. And some that believe it won't happen for years. What's the basis for that rationale? Is it the economic and strategic alliances that exist? The fact that everyone there is Chinese? Or what is their rationale for thinking there's going to be? Well, not everyone's Chinese because Taiwanese have their own identity and more and more, except for the older citizens who still remember the early Taiwan government, the Kuomintang and Pankai Shek. The Taiwanese today feel themselves as Taiwanese, that they don't consider themselves Chinese. And so China knows that they're losing Taiwan. Getting a Hong Kong-like agreement is now impossible, particularly since China abrogated that international agreement. And that's the West perception that they abrogated that agreement. And so when people look at that. Not just the West perception, it's the reality because they're now cracking down. You can't talk about things they used to be able to talk about. They shipped a lot of demonstrators and human rights activists to God knows where, probably concentration camps in the area of the Uyghurs and so forth. So it's becoming China and they will kill the goose at Lady the Golden Egg over time. And that's what these people feel the younger generation in Taiwan feels, that any kind of reprishe model of China could lead to that sort of situation. Is that what you're finding when you're down there? Yeah, yeah, yeah, and, you know, the majority party, the Democratic Progressive Party, is, you know, they, people in that understand that, this would be a deal with the devil and after maybe a couple of years of pretending to be nice, then it would be all over, you know, concentration camps and reeducation. It would be very difficult for them to crush the independent spirit in Taiwan. It would have to be done with brutal force. But I don't think too many really look at that and think that they can fight a war and win a war. If China starts a war, they're going to finish the war one way or another and it won't be ready. And how confident are you in the younger millennial generation, whether it's in Taiwan or in mainland China, that is Western trained and educated? They have only known economic peace and prosperity. And if you ask them what they want in life, they want to be entrepreneurs. They want to trade and they want to invest. And apparently the government, the People's Republic, has been able to co-op many of them into the system by offering them a business development network where they can actually make money and spend their money. Now we saw a crack during the COVID period because many of these young people were locked out and they could not engage in any kind of commerce. They couldn't leave their homes. They couldn't travel. And then they watched the World Cup of Soccer and they realized all the state, they see the stadiums build and they don't understand why their government is cracking down on them. So they go out in the streets and protests. And then the government backs up and they relax these restrictions. Are you confident that something like that could happen in both China and Taiwan if the government's become very oppressive and or trying to force a regime down the other side's back, per se, rather than allowing trade and commerce to flourish and develop? Well, there's tons of commerce now and that shows no sign of lessening. But if there's a war, then all bets are off. And there's only a few options. One is China just keeps bullying Taiwan, hoping to get some sort of accommodation. But I don't think that'll happen. Or they do a war and they take it over. They'll take over a broken nest from the article of one researcher because a lot of infrastructure will be destroyed. It's even possible that Taiwanese would destroy their semiconductor plants on the way out, so to speak, to prevent them from falling in enemy hands. And we would actually be better off if they didn't do that. And if China took the island, we would be better off bombing those plants to smithereens to prevent that blackmail that would happen, to prevent backdoors being put in electronics, including those that are used in our military. So there just aren't very many choices. They, China knows that an accommodation a la Hong Kong really will never happen. Now, if they keep up the bullying in circling the island, firing missiles over threatening war, over five or 10 years, could the population become weary of that and want something like that? I don't know, you know, the Hong Kong kind of spoiled that for Xi Jinping because people, even those that kind of think in some sort of accommodation would be nice. They know what happens when they go the Hong Kong route. And within China, as we know, the growth has slowed and there's sort of a real estate bubble and there's unemployment, especially among younger people. So that may for some sort of change in the leadership perhaps within China down the line. Do you see any that may be impacting some sort of engagement with Taiwan? Well, I don't see Xi Jinping relinquishing power or being overthrown. He has done everything he can to consolidate power in a similar vein as Putin has. You know, anyone with opposing ideas gets purged. We saw, was it Hu Jintao in the last party congress in October, he was literally carried away in a very staged thing. He was reportedly going to say, yeah, I'm with you on COVID. I'm with you on censorship and stuff like that, but don't invade Taiwan. And they literally picked the guy up and hauled him out. Again, it was state. He probably knew it was coming, but he probably is sort of like somebody knowing Liddy who has no choice but to walk into their death. And I have no idea what happened to him. So I'm not expecting anything, any regime change, except that, and this is where you pointed out something. You know, their economy is gradually, slowly imploding. The people are restless to a degree. The only thing that keeps them from a revolution, I think, another Tiananmen Square is this one thing, and that's the great firewall that prevents communication. But they have a good sense of what happens outside of China and what the world is like. And so here's the thing. What group of people are most likely to stage a revolution? So as the economy in China deteriorates, you have more and more unemployed, they won't be able to afford to keep building ghost cities and other make work projects, and so unemployment will increase. Now, if they invade Taiwan, then it gets 10 times worse, maybe 100 times worse, because you may have two, three hundred million unemployed people. And guess what? There's like, I don't know, 90 million Communist Party members and most of those aren't hardcore. It's like you join the party to advance in your career. Right, especially on the economic side to make money. Yeah, exactly. So, but this is not necessarily too much of a deterrence because throughout history, in World War II, as a good example, you had two dictators, Hitler and Tojo and so forth in Japan. They both had strong economies. They had good high tech. They could have ruled the world and even supplanted the U.S. as the leader in the technology and so forth, but they chose war and they paid the price. And both were absolutely ruined after World War II. They built back and now they're very peace-minded, but this is what could face Xi Jinping. And it's in the U.S. interest to talk about democracy, to talk about human rights and the NA human rights everybody in China has. So that because that is how you can increase dissatisfaction with Xi Jinping, undermining his rule in a way that could force him to retrench from his goals of worldwide conquest and even in one of the areas that I deal with space trying to rule space as well. And I think some of the first human rights lawyers that have come out of China have really focused on environmental issues, bad air, bad water, as a way to sort of challenge the competency of various party officials. And after Tiananmen Square, we saw that the Chinese were, they weren't allowed to challenge the legitimacy of the CCP, but they could challenge the competency if there was a graft in corruption or if there were issues involving environmental degradation. And that's where you saw some of the pushback because it also impacted their ability to engage in international commerce and how it impacted them from a PR standpoint. If there's graft in corruption, people aren't going to want to come and invest in your country. Do you see any issues with corruption as far as from the Taiwanese side, in terms of their engagement with the Chinese, how do they see the Chinese people in terms of their ability to interact with them? Well, I think they know. Taiwan is a remarkably vibrant democracy. It is remarkably uncorrupt. It is free enterprises. So it's better than here in the US. I was talking to an official with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I said, you know, there's so much street commerce, small industry. You walk along the night markets, the arcades and so forth, and it's just teeny small businesses. Oh, they're not necessarily wealthy, but you'll find the kids working there and anything, whether they're fixing scooters or selling food or housewares. And so, you know, it is the antithesis of the Chinese way of doing business, which is you've got to grease the palms of folks like Kissinger if you want to do big business there. That's how he makes his money off of Xi Jinping's back pocket. So I think, you know, big companies that do do business there, you know, like, you know, Foxconn. Well, they've paid undoubtedly handsomely to get access to do their factories there and so forth. They either turn their blind eye or whatever to the labor practices because, you know, the child labor is common, slave labor is the watchword. You go to work in one of those factories and you're probably not just commuting from home like we do. You're probably living in a dormitorium and you're allowed out for X hours a day and maybe you'll get Sunday off, that sort of thing. So it's a very different paradigm. And so those Chinese, those Taiwanese to think about it, well, if you're doing business, you just do business just like the Americans and you close your eyes and you pretend not to see and hear the screams of the slave labor and this is what, you know, destroyed U.S. manufacturing. They all went there. They exported it. How do we, how does the United States stay engaged with China on a proactive level to keep, say, Russia or Iran from gaining a stronger foothold? So we're, so the U.S. is managing the relationship at a much higher level and we're keeping our enemies away from engaging with the Chinese to create a stronger alliance against us. Yeah, this is what, it makes absolute sense, but it is the opposite of what's happening. Instead, this administration, Biden administration has been pulling together China, you know, Russia, China, Iran and others into a naval axis working against us. Now, here's where it started and where it could have turned out differently. 2015, President, or then Donald Trump comes down the escalator and immediately the attacks on him were very specific. It was your Russian agent. Of course, he wasn't. He was the opposite. But by doing that and accusing him of that and all these planted things you know, the projection, you know, the criminal accuses others of doing what they're doing themselves. So they were the ones colluding with the Democrats, with Russia, with China and everyone else to create fake crimes against Trump. But if they had not done that, I think it is very possible that Trump could have had the ability to sit down with Putin without all of that rancor that was artificially created by the Democrat Party, the media, the FBI and others. And he could have said, look, we are more alike than we are different. Yeah, you've got a repressive government. But we both do not want China to rule the earth. Let's work together. We can have our differences on all sorts of things. After all, we work together on the space station. But if the two of us work and try to slow the rise of China, that could have turned out very differently. The world today would be very different. So an opposite approach from what Kissinger did? Of course. Going to the Russians instead of the Chinese. Yeah, okay. Yes, yeah. That was the intent. There was a failed intent, but it was the intent of rapprochement with China. Unfortunately, we built them up into a tyranny that's now more powerful militarily than us and has designs on us. But yeah, we had the opportunity in 2015, President Trump could have done that, but it became politically impossible by all the screams of you're a Russian agent. And so I would place at the footsteps of the Democrat National Committee responsibility for everything that's happened in the world up till now. So Hawaii as the center of the Asia Pacific region, I mean, we have Pearl Harbor, our military installations are here. So you indicated that Hawaii's sort of poses somewhat of a strategic importance for China as a way. It is. Back before the terrible deal to let China into the UN and actually what they had leveraged to say Taiwan becomes independent if you want this, Bush could have had the leverage was Bush won WTO and so forth to say you want the American market, okay, fine. You get the American market, but you give up Taiwan. They will be an independent country and you will recognize them and we will continue to arm and support them. When China was starting their economic reforms, that's when this should have happened in Europe. Yeah, exactly. Surprise. You want to participate? Let's diffuse this potential conflict point in the future. Defend it. And it would actually be quite healthy for China even today to do that. But Xi Jinping's imperial ambitions are trumping that so to speak because he wants that conquest to take if only to take people's minds off of the bad economy. That is the typical thing. Why was the Falklands war? Well, because Latinos have a crappy economy. I mean, it's interesting when you have Chinese delegations that come to Hawaii on vacation, they want to go to Pearl Harbor because they want to, in their views, pay respects to the American servicemen that were killed by the Japanese. As you know, the Japanese Imperial Army was very ruthless in their conquest of China. And I say the Japanese Imperial Army, I'm not referring at all to Japanese citizens or Japanese Americans. We're talking about the Japanese military that was in control under Tojo, who you earlier referenced. So the Chinese have very long memories and they remember that the U.S. helped them in the fight against the Japanese. Do you see any of that goodwill keeping that the government from making any sort of incursions into the Asia Pacific region that would be harmful to Hawaii and the United States? You mean China? Yeah. No, no, I mean China. Because there is still a reservoir of goodwill because we helped them fight the Japanese and kept their country from being split up by foreign dominating powers. Yeah, no, it's the exact opposite. When I was working in Congress, we get two papers that I asked for to be put on my desk first. One was Epoch Times because they are very truthful on China. And the other is China Daily, which is a Communist Party propaganda piece. And I would humorously say that you could pick up the front section of that and just flip through the pages and you would always find something attacking Japanese, often in very sort of dingoistic, crude ways. In order to justify their repression and so forth in China, they have to create enemies. And while the U.S. and Germany, we get along in Japan, we get along so many years later, it's been the perceived, but the false best interest of the Communist regime to keep Japan as an enemy. So they portray the Japanese in ways that we would find absolutely revolting, whether in pop culture or in news. And it is the same sort of language as racists would use elsewhere. So they're fanning that flames that they're the government of China for the purpose of keeping the Chinese people thinking they have an enemy there. No, they got a friend and a trading partner, but it suits the Communist dictatorship to educate them from birth that China, that Japan is evil, Korea is evil, and the Americans. And very similar to how in North Korea, they do the same things. It's very similar. Okay. I think we have finished our discussion. Thank you very much, Mr. Harmon. Always happy to be on with you. And another time we might discuss other aspects of Taiwan and their view towards the world and the US. Thank you so much. You're very welcome.