This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 27th, 2004. I'm Caleb Brown.

Taiwan has a new president, but it's not clear that much has changed in the country's view of

the threat emerging from China.

Cato's Eric Gomez comments. Since the inauguration of Taiwan's new president, what can we say with confidence about how Taiwan, the government of Taiwan

is thinking about a potential Chinese invasion?

Well, there's certainly... potential Chinese invasion?

Well, they're certainly willing to kind of say some things that the Chinese don't like.

Li Ching-Tuh is the name of the new president. In lies inaugural address, he talked a lot about sovereignty

and how China and Taiwan were these sort of de facto separate entities anyway, sort of taking the rhetoric of sovereignty

and independence up a notch while still falling a bit short of fully declaring it, which I don't think China liked very much.

He did talk a lot about strengthening international ties and he's really leaning heavily on the democracy versus autocracy framing which the Biden administration has been very fond of as well.

And I think that's where they're banking, right? They're going to say,

listen, we're a good democracy, we're, you know, freedom-loving people, and

we're going to get the international community on our side as much as we can to respond or preempt the China problem.

Yeah, I was going to say that that sounds almost entirely like a message not for the people of Taiwan before the rest of the world.

Yeah, I would I would agree with that. I mean I think the people of Taiwan are on the same page as their

president, but he was elected on, you know, he wasn't elected by the majority in the

Taiwanese system, it's just whoever gets the most and he got

something like 40 to 42 percent of the vote which was the most and he's dealing with the divided

legislature as well so it's going to be very interesting how Taiwan's domestic political

landscape affects his dealings both with the mainland and also with the international community.

Are there mainland loyalists in the Taiwanese government?

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