Transcript: The Struggle for Taiwan

Sulmaan Wasif Khan of Tufts University on his new book

Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast recorded on May 1, 2024. Thanks to the great folks at Cadre Scripts for the transcript, and to Lili Shoup at the University of Freiburg for reviewing and formatting it!

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. 

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I am doing with the podcast, please consider lending your support. You can get me at sinicapod@gmail.com.

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Today on Sinica, I am delighted to welcome back Sulmaan Wasif Khan, Denison Chair in International History and Chinese Foreign Relations at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. You may remember our last conversation five years ago this month, can you believe it?

Sulmaan Wasif Khan: It’s a long time.

Kaiser: Yeah, time flies!  …Which was about his excellent book on China’s grand strategy titled Haunted by Chaos. In that book, he argued that China’s foreign policy is motivated primarily by insecurity, and fear is still very much alive in the memory of China’s leaders. His new book, which comes out May 14th, is titled The Struggle for Taiwan: A History of America, China, and the Island Caught Between.

It’s a fascinating, thought-provoking, and highly educational read, even for somebody who’s been thinking about these issues for a very long time. It’s the story of an American China policy that is confusing and confused both within the government, between the executive and legislative branches, for instance, and within the minds of individual American presidents. We see this still with Biden today, just as we’ve seen it with almost every president since Truman. It is, as the title suggests, a history, and it goes all the way back to the Cairo Agreement over 80 years ago, and stretches to the Taiwan elections held in January of this year. I imagine this book is going to be talked about a lot in the coming months, so grab your copy. And meanwhile, enjoy this little preview. Sulmaan, welcome back to Sinica.

Sulmaan: Thank you for having me back, Kaiser. It’s been a while and it’s a pleasure to be back.