Jeffrey Wasserstrom: belief

Transcript context

…Maybe you could just elaborate the possible clues we have. So with talking to people in Taiwan and from Taiwan, there are a couple things that are clear. One is that daily life in Taiwan is not people waking up each morning living their life based on the fact that they’re in such a perilous predicament. That it’s life goes on and a lot of people feel very, very fortunate to be in Taiwan. There are many reasons why it seems like a great place to live, in many ways. But at the same time there is an awareness of things that increase precariousness. And there was a lot of concern with the invasion of Ukraine and watching how the response to that was, and there was a sense of it being analogous. There was a sense that Xi Jinping would be watching the response to Putin and seeing what he would do then. And so then there was a sense of relief, I think, when there was as unified a western, NATO, including the United States response. And then there’s a concern about the Trump presidency because of Ukraine. At the same time, there’re mixed signals. So I’m sure there are people there who are both saying, “Trump is going to be tough toward the Chinese Communist Party,” and others are going to say, “But if he’s not as supportive of Ukraine, what does that say for the defensive?” So they’re not the same situations, but all people have, in a sense, sometimes with unknowable situations, is to look at things that have any degree of parallel connections in other places. Do you think Xi Jinping knows what he’s going to do in the next five, 10 years with Taiwan? Or is it really, there’s a loose historical notion that Taiwan should be part of China. Would Xi Jinping and the Communist Party believe that?…

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