How Could the U.S. Deter Military Conflict in the Taiwan Strait?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Daniel R. Russel, Shelley Rigger & more on September 28, 2021

Last week, China flew 24 warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. One of the largest incursions in recent years, the People’s Liberation Army flyover came a day after Taipei applied to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Beijing, which applied to the trade pact a week earlier, has opposed Taiwan’s bid. In response, Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement branding China an “arch criminal” bent on increasing hostilities across the strait.

‘China’s Search for a Modern Identity Has Entered a New and Perilous Phase’

By Roger Garside on September 23, 2021

In 1980, writing the last paragraph of the last chapter of Coming Alive: China After Mao, I declared that China was moving “from totalitarian tyranny to a system more humane, part of a struggle by this nation to free itself from a straitjacket woven of feudalism, Marxism-Leninism, and twentieth-century technology.” In 2020, 40 years later, in China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom, I describe a China firmly in the grip of totalitarian tyranny. In the years between, there were periods of loosening. But since Xi Jinping assumed the leadership of the Communist Party in 2012, he has progressively tightened the drawstrings the Party first imposed on China in 1949, cinching them closed with the technology of the 21st century.

Roger Garside

on September 23, 2021

Roger Garside is the author of China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom, published by University of California Press in May 2021, which predicts the end of totalitarian rule in China and shows how this may happen. He is a former diplomat who served in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution and again from 1976 to 1979, when Mao died and Deng launched the Reform Era. He then wrote the highly acclaimed Coming Alive: China After Mao.

Apart from 20 years in diplomacy, he has worked in the World Bank and the London Stock Exchange, was a Professor of China Studies at the U.S. Navy Post-Graduate School, and spent 10 years running his own company advising countries in transition from state socialism to the market economy on the development of their capital markets, including Russia, Hungary, and Vietnam.

His experience on the frontline of radical change in emerging markets and developed economies has equipped to comment on financial and economic as well as political issues. He has broadcast for the BBC World Service, the BBC Chinese Service, Deutsche Welle, Epoch TV, and VOA, and reviewed books on China for The Economist, Spectator, Prospect, and China Rights Forum.

As of September 2021, China Coup has been reviewed in The Economist, The Washington Post, The Australian, The Strategist, and The Tablet.

Shelley Rigger

on September 21, 2021

Shelley Rigger is the Brown Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College. She has a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and a B.A. in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University. She has been a Fulbright scholar at National Taiwan University (2019), a visiting researcher at National Chengchi University in Taiwan (2005), and a visiting professor at Fudan University (2006) and Shanghai Jiaotong University (2013 and 2015). She is a Non-Resident Fellow of the China Policy Institute at Nottingham University and a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). She is also a Director of The Taiwan Fund, a closed-end investment fund specializing in Taiwan-listed companies.

Rigger is the author of two books on Taiwan’s domestic politics, Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy (Routledge, 1999) and From Opposition to Power: Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001). She has published two books for general readers, Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse (2011) and The Tiger Leading the Dragon: How Taiwan Propelled China’s Economic Rise (2021). She has published articles on Taiwan’s domestic politics, the national identity issue in Taiwan-China relations and related topics. In 2019-2020, she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar based in Taipei, where she worked on a study of Taiwan’s contributions to the People’s Republic of China’s economic take-off and a study of Taiwanese youth.

A Farewell to My Students

An Excerpt from ‘Ten Letters from a Plague Year,’ by Xu Zhangrun, Translated and Annotated by Geremie R. Barmé

By Xu Zhangrun & Geremie R. Barmé on September 9, 2021

Xu Zhangrun addresses this letter to the students and young scholars who participated in “The Three Talents Salon” which Xu founded in 2003, a biannual symposium devoted to fostering “three talents” or skills in the participants: in-depth reading, freewheeling discussion and debate, and convivial social drinking. Under Xu’s aegis, members of the salon published numerous edited volumes on topics related to law, history, philosophy, and politics.

How Much Does Beijing Control the Ethnic Makeup of Tibet?

By Andrew M. Fischer on September 2, 2021

The idea of swamping, which the Dalai Lama himself elaborated in 2008, holds that China’s government has been seeking to solve its problems in Tibet and other “ethnic minority” areas such as Xinjiang by turning local indigenous ethnic groups (such as Tibetans or Uyghurs) into minorities in their own land through a coordinated program of Han Chinese in-migration, like settler colonialism in the Americas or Australasia. China’s 2020 National Population Census allows us to assess the concerns about ethnic population shares.