Taiwan: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

[Music] our main story tonight concerns taiwan and it's honestly remarkable that we haven't talked about taiwan before in this show given it's the birthplace of bubble tea which is delicious even though tapioca ball sounds like a sex move for people over 70. and especially since taiwan shares our unhealthy obsession with mascots cities there make tons of them there is this one the milkfish kids celebrating one area's milkfish production and there is this one from a region that produces bananas which i do not want to talk about right now in fact taiwan makes so many mascots that in some cities the very act of storing them has become a problem we went with the city councillor to a taipei public school following her into the depths of a basement parking lot here behind a door we discovered a mountain of abandoned mascots this is sacred fire baby from 2013 national games held in taipei the city government should really think about whether it's necessary to keep creating one off mascots oh come on taiwan you can't just keep making mascots and throwing them away thankfully at the end of our seasons our mascots go to live on a beautiful farm a fantastic green farm where jeff the diseased lung can breathe fresh air and the polar bear with a broken penis can get the care he so badly needs i keep asking my producer where this farm is she keeps telling me i'll tell you when you're older i can't wait but obviously the major reason that taiwan ends up in the news these days is because of its relationship with china which to put it mildly is fraught and recently it's getting even fraughter china has long viewed taiwan as its own national territory china's president xi jinping on saturday all but declaring it policy the complete reunification of our country must be and will be realized he said military tensions between the two sides are soaring china's air force sent nearly 150 planes into taiwan's air defense zone since the start of this month yeah they did not exactly like that i presume in a big stack i'm guessing they flew the planes out one at a time not heaped on top of each other like an air traffic controller's nightmare the point is china insists that taiwan an independently operating entity with its own democratically elected leaders armed forces and constitution is actually part of china and in no way a separate country here's an understatement the chinese government feels strongly about this so strongly in fact that when john cena went on a press stall for the most recent fast and furious movie and said taiwan is the first country that can watch f9 this is what happened next actor john cena has apologized to china after [Music] uh every part of that is so weird it's weird john cena apologized to china it's where he did it for calling taiwan a country and it's weird to see him do it in pretty decent mandarin that's just too many weird things a half expected that shot to pan out to reveal he's also doing a needlepoint of liam neeson kissing an ostrich honestly it would only make it slightly stranger but john cena is not alone here taiwan is such a third rail for china that it may be why paramount pictures removed the taiwanese flag from tom cruise's jacket for the top gun sequel and it is definitely why the gap apologized for releasing this t-shirt featuring a map of china without taiwan attached that shirt caused a storm and it led to the gap makers of the bland t-shirts that dads wear were when they're on the elliptical for 30 minutes to apologize to 1.4 billion people so if china is getting t-shirt retractions from the gap loudly vowing to reunify with taiwan and sending stacks of warplanes towards it in record-breaking numbers it feels like tonight it'd be worth taking a look at taiwan how it got to be in the unique position that it's in what the world wants from it and most importantly what it wants for itself and let's start with how we got here historically taiwan has been like the stanley cup of asian history and that different people keep passing it around and carving their names on it here is a ludicrously brief history of the last four hundred years there taiwan or is it sometimes been called formosa it was first home to indigenous people then colonized by the dutch and briefly the spanish before china's qing dynasty held it for about 200 years then in 1895 china lost taiwan to japan which turned it was so-called model colony imposing japanese cultural values and generally ruling it with an iron fist then after world war ii two major things happened first the allies put taiwan back under chinese control and second the civil war that was taking place in china between the nationalist government led by chiang kai-shek and the communists led by mao zedong ended now spoiler alert the communists won congratulations to mao and in the wake of that defeat chiang kai-shek fled to taiwan along with two million nationalist soldiers and refugees basically setting up a chinese government in exile meaning that china technically had two governments at the time one in china and one in taiwan and western countries were very invested in the success of the second one even calling taiwan free china because they saw it as a necessary bulwark against communism against all prophecies formosa still keeps the anti-communist flag flying only 100 miles or so off the mainland of china it's a prosperous island where the new generations grow up in freedom a complete contrast to conditions under the rule of mao tatum you know i do kind of miss that period of human history where the only way to learn about other cultures was to have a british man on amphetamine to tell you which were the good ones and which were the baddies here we see formosans living in freedom well not freedom per se but the point is they're not commies and that's where my curiosity terminates but well jan kaishek might have been a staunchly anti-communist u.s ally historically we've had a lot of those and they often haven't been great people and chang ruled taiwan as a brutal authoritarian thousands were swept up in a period that came to be known as the white terror suffering imprisonment torture and even execution doing anything that could be remotely construed as criticism of the government was extremely risky as one writer discovered when he merely translated a popeye popeye and his son were in exile on an island and they were campaigning for election there yet popeye gave a speech and he used an english word fellows there could be hundreds of translations for fellows but i chose one which was all my fellow countrymen this was terrible the bureau of investigation arrested me saying why didn't you translate it into something else this is exactly the way our president john speaks you are making fun of him it deserves the death penalty no doubt the death penalty it's true that guy was interrogated for months on suspicion of being a communist collaborator and ultimately spent nine years in prison all because zhang's government thought a popeye comic had a hidden political message which is a bit of a reach there is clearly no deeper meaning to popeye comics other than women are inherently prizes to be fought over performance-enhancing drugs are cool and pluto doesn't deserve love all of which is to say in the middle of the last century taiwan was a grim place but after chung died in 1975 under pressure both internationally and from political movements at home the nationalists began to loosen their grip ending martial law in the late 80s and opening the door to full democratization so against the odds taiwan shifted from a dictatorship to a functioning vibrant democracy and i do mean vibrant a debate over how billions of euros will be allocated for an infrastructure development plan descended into a brawl in taiwan's parliament on tuesday members of the ruling democratic progressive party and the opposition nationalist party threw water and shoved each other to the floor taiwan's mps are known for brawling and even throwing objects at each other and fights in parliament are even seen as one way for the opposition to show voters that it stands tough on issues yeah fighting is not uncommon in taiwan's parliament here they are throwing water balloons at each other and here they are hurling pig guts during a debate on pork imports and that is not all one time in 2006 a member snatched a written proposal of a bill and shoved it into her own mouth which is fantastic and definitely something that we should steal you want to kill a clean energy bill pull up a chair and eat all 900 pages of it but taiwan is not just a functioning democracy it's a major player in the global supply chain taiwan was the fastest growing economy in asia last year and it's the world's key manufacturer of semiconductors which are used absolutely everywhere in products from cars to sex toys so the next time that you fire up a butt plug that has a hundred thousand times more computing power than the apollo moon mission make sure you say thanks taiwan so all of this brings us to where we are right now with taiwan established as a highly developed and wealthy country and yet no one is allowed to call it one and that brings us back to the huge unresolved issue of taiwanese sovereignty because china now sees claiming taiwan as a key point of national pride with xi jinping calling reunification part of his vision for the great rejuvenation of the chinese nation and anyone wanting to do business in china knows that calling taiwan a country is a massive faux pas and it's not just the gap and john cena who have found this out all of these companies have either had to apologize for or walk back even the smallest implication that taiwan is a separate country and you can see this caution everywhere at this year's olympics you probably saw taiwanese athletes competing not under the taiwanese flag but under the fake pseudo flag of chinese taipei something they've been forced to use at every olympic since the 1980s when they reached a compromise with the ioc that allowed them to participate without angering china but this arrangement isn't something that all taiwanese people appreciate in fact during the 2012 games the lead singer of taiwanese heavy metal band bandhonic pointed out just how ludicrous it is our team our national team being called chinese taipei right oh we can't call you taiwan sorry we have to call you chinese taipei look i know i say this every week but that death metal singer complaining about olympic nomenclature has a real point there although although to be fair if their official olympics name really was chinese taipei that would at least be a little more accurate vis-a-vis who is whom and even huge international organizations like the who are forced to play this ridiculous game freezing out taiwan from full participation last year when one who official was pressed on this point by a hong kong newscaster it led to this very awkward interaction would the who consider taiwan's membership [Laughter] hello i couldn't hear your question okay yeah let me let me let me repeat the question no that's okay let's move to another one then right because because i'm actually curious on talking about taiwan as well on taiwan's case we decided to give dr alward another call to follow up and i just want to see if you can comment a bit on how taiwan has done so far in terms of containing the virus well we've already talked about china oh we did did we are you sure about that because it sure seems like first you pretended not to hear the question then fakes getting disconnected after committing the world's most telegraphed log off that man couldn't be more clearly avoiding the question if he came back online pretending to be a lamp uh you can't ask a lamp about taiwan especially me i only speak french so that's actually two reasons i shouldn't have to answer this question i'm a lamp and i only speak french except for this brief paragraph in english explaining my situation au revoir but it is not just companies and international organizations the vast majority of world governments have no official diplomatic relations with taiwan because china won't have diplomatic relations with anyone who does and for all the initial cheerleading from western countries about taiwan's pluck and verve in keeping the anti-communist fleet flying things have shifted by the end of the 1970s most countries had switched their recognition of china's official government from the one on taiwan known as the republic of china to the communist one on the mainland the people's republic of china in fact today the number of governments still willing to diplomatically recognize taiwan has joined us to only 14 countries and the holy see although that last one really shouldn't be that surprising to you you know the pope he loves to stir up drinks wine in the morning he's a messy who lives for drama now as for america we've spent the past half century walking a diplomatic tightrope with a policy known as strategic ambiguity it's something that lets us maintain functional relations with taiwan and still have a full formal relationship with china it's an approach that began in the 1970s and it was built upon a series of incredibly carefully worded statements the united states in one of our communiques with the people's republic of china acknowledged the prc position that taiwan was part of china but the united states also did not accept the prc claim to taiwan that has been our position ever since and so in effect the us views taiwan's status as undetermined right we acknowledged china's claim but didn't agree with it leaving taiwan's status as undetermined you know like schrodinger's cat or the scientology version miscavige his wife there could be one thing or the other thing and no one knows for sure do they david hey david david where's shelley but that confusion is emblematic of the strategic ambiguity policy for instance the us operates out of this building in taiwan often referred to as its de facto embassy but not crucially as an actual embassy taiwan meanwhile has this building in dc which does pretty much everything that an embassy would do just without actually being called one and i know that this policy can occasionally seem ridiculous but the uncertainty is kind of the point especially when it comes to defence in 1979 congress passed the taiwan relations act in which the u.s committed to assist taiwan in maintaining its self-defense capability but that commitment very much stopped short of the u.s promising to defend taiwan from a chinese invasion instead it says any effort to determine the future of taiwan by other than peaceful means would be of grave concern to the united states and what does that even mean does it mean the us would deploy military assets or just that the us general would slightly raise an eyebrow no one really knows it is a willfully confusing will they or won't they dance that for 40 years has been the backbone of u.s taiwan policy and look so far we've been talking about taiwan almost exclusively in terms of what other countries want from it but the key question is clearly what does it want for itself but even that is not easy to answer taiwan is made up of a mix of different cultures languages and political viewpoints remember that lawmakers sometimes throw pig intestines at each other in parliament everyone is not on the same page there but to the extent taranis people have spoken through the ballot box they've chosen a government that wants to keep china at arm's length that singer that you saw earlier talking about chinese taipei he's actually in taiwan's parliament now and he is openly pro-independence as for taiwan's current leader cy ing wen she was elected on a platform of defending taiwan but crucially preserving the status quo just watch how cautiously she discusses the question of taiwanese independence are you in principle at least in favor of the idea of formal taiwanese independence the reality and what it is now is that we are already a functionally independent country and we have our own government and we have our own election will there come a day when that reality needs to be spelled out by a formal declaration of independence the idea is we don't have a need to declare ourselves an independent statement we are an independent country right she's clearly declaring that they're independent there but also very much drawing the line at a declaration of independence because she knows that taiwan explicitly formalizing the way things are could cause a lot of trouble it's like meeting your partner's parents for the first time and saying hello i regularly your offspring yeah everyone was aware of that but now that you've officially declared it things are going to get much more difficult for everyone involved here and the truth is that intense pragmatism is in line with how many taiwanese people feel polls have consistently shown that when they are asked about independence from or unification with china something like one and a half percent want unification with china as soon as possible and about six percent want independence as soon as possible but the vast majority favor some version of sticking with the status quo at least four now which does make sense because as things stand as volatile as this situation can appear day-to-day life in taiwan can go on as normal as this taiwanese man shows up [Music] wow that is a pretty relaxed attitude given the circumstances here he's talking about the nuclear-armed saber-rattling superpower taunting his country with warplanes like it's season two of emily in paris you know i don't love that it's happening but honestly i just tried to carry on with my life but the question is can the currently safe status quo hold forever xi xingping has stated that the question of taiwan cannot simply be passed on from generation to generation and those military drills do seem to be sending a message and while experts say war is not imminent taiwan is understandably thinking about its own defense capabilities something by the way that the us has been happy to assist them in thinking about by selling them billions of dollars in weapons showing that even strategic ambiguity has its price but despite u.s assistance the taiwan military is obviously a fraction of china's and its recent attempts to atta attract recruits have left something to be desired the armed forces have been producing videos like this to try to drum up enthusiasm among potential young soldiers but they've been struggling to make up for a shortfall left by a phasing out of conscription okay i am really not sure that that is helping that does not look like a group of people who are excited to be in the military it looks like a bunch of background dancers who were cut from in the heights because they were too boring to be on camera so what exactly can or should be done here well that is something that the entire world has been dissecting for half a century now and so far the answer we seem to have settled on is some version of uh next question please which is clearly not very satisfying and i know ambiguity is inherently frustrating especially for americans who might look at a place like taiwan which looks and acts like a country and feel that it is weird and farcical to not acknowledge it as one but from a practical standpoint would that be better and is that even what the people of taiwan want could it be that maintaining the current deeply weird ambiguous status quo is actually the best option here i don't know i'm not taiwanese and frankly people who aren't taiwanese making decisions for taiwan is a bit played out historically so maybe the best thing that we can do is move past talking about taiwan like it's some kind of poker chip in a never-ending game of us versus them because the fact is taiwan is not a plucky bulwark against the red menace nor is it some sort of island-sized viagra to rejuvenate the chinese nation taiwan is 23 million people who in the face of considerable odds have built a free democratic society and very much deserve the right to decide their own future in any way that they deem fit even if that means sporadically beating the absolute out of each other you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 6,865,790

Keywords:

Id: 9Y18-07g39g

Length: 22min 18sec (1338 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Unbelievable, he actually nailed it down in 22 minutes.

They sure as hell hired some top notch researcher to write this episode.

Really appreciate him ending on the note of letting Taiwanese people choose their own destiny, rather than treating it like some poker chips in geopolitical game.

[u/Cahootie]

Half-way through the episode I was confused, because there's no way he mentions Freddy Lim without mentioning that he is also a legislator. It's just exactly the kind odd little story he loves to mention. Thankfully he didn't let me down.

[u/StephMujan]

Every country has a brutal past (well, most), but the difference between true authoritarianism and democracy is you can actually talk about it decades later without getting arrested, heck you can even make a movie about it. Progress of the mind is key in democracy.

[u/DarkLiberator]

"Maybe the best thing we can do is move past talking about Taiwan like it's some kind of poker chip. Taiwan is 23 million people who in the face of considerable odds, have built a free democratic society, and very much deserve the right to decide their own future in any way that they deem fit." Well said. Pretty good episode from a mainstream voice despite a few minor issues.

Though not a huge fan of the focus on legislature fights. I guess a lot of foreign observers still don't realize the fights are mostly staged grandstanding for legislators to show that they care about their constituents. My favorite was a recent one time the KMT legislators brought water balloons and the DPP legislators had raincoats already on.

[u/[deleted]]

"Could it be, that maintaining the current deeply ambiguous status quo is actually the best option here? I don't know, I'm not Taiwanese, and frankly, people who aren't Taiwanese making decisions for Taiwan is a bit fucking played out historically."

John gets the vibe. He really gets it.

[u/Monkeyfeng]

Chinese Fucking Taipei

[u/Notbythehairofmychyn]

That was a well-done segment, especially as an introduction for the majority of the show's audience (many are already fairly informed and presumably curious), considering the complexity of the issue. Props for also citing Shelley Rigger. The analogies were on point, too. I'm glad they showed that trainwreck of a call with the WHO, really underscoring the preposterous tiptoeing around Taiwan's international status.

[u/asoksevil]

For those who can’t watch it due to region lock: https://youtu.be/VFlJr2UvMyw

[u/Def_Surrounds_Us]

I was wondering when there'd be a Taiwan episode. It's a suitable topic for their show.