History Makes The News

In the time it takes you to put on just one elbow pad, you can access hundreds of cutting-edge news articles from all around the globe. Yet making sense of international events can be tricky. To really get it, you need to understand something about historical context.

Take for example the present-day situation between the United States, the People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan. Right now, early June 2023, there’s a steady flow of news about rising economic, political, and military tensions connected to the island. But how did we get to this point? What are the stakes? Why does there seem to be so little room for compromise when it comes to Taiwan? To answer those questions, you need to understand the history of China and Taiwan from the fall of China’s Qing Dynasty through the post-Cold War period. This episode provides a short overview of that complex history and gives you some ideas of where to find additional resources.

Pre-episode stuff: Keep up with the strangeness of now by signing up for the totally free YAAW email list. Just fill out the form at the top of the page at findyourselfinhistory.com . Thanks!

Transcript

YAAW Podcast | Episode 12 | Doug Sofer

History Makes The News

Cold Open

[Fade in theme]

Hey again and welcome back to this headline-making podcast about how history helps you make sense of the Strangeness of Now.

[pause]

Listener, since this show is on the Internet, I’m officially obligated to deliver at least 41.8% of my content in the form of a list, a meme, a list of memes, a video of an adorable baby animal who thinks he’s people, or some kind of quiz.

[Pause]

So in order to keep my podcasting license in compliance, let’s go with that quiz option.

[pause]

The name of today’s quiz is:

[Switch to deep-voiced announcer effect] “Real Headline Or Not?”

[pause]

Whoa! Where did that professional announcer-guy come from?

[Pause]

So anyway it’s June, 2023 and I’m going to read three news headlines to you. Two are from actual news sources written within the past month or two—

[Dramatically] And one—is just made-up.

Now it’s your turn to guess if it’s a…

[Crowd again] “Real! Headline! Or Not!”

[Pause]

Whoa! Where did that live studio audience come from?

I guess we’ll just roll with it:

Mr. Mysterious Announcer Voice Person, please read headline number one.

 “[QE] Chinese warship passed in ‘unsafe manner’ near destroyer in Taiwan Strait, US says”[1]

Now read headline Number 2:

“[QE] China criticizes US plan for trade deal with Taiwan.”[2]

And Headline Number 3:

“[QE] Current events in Taiwan only make sense when you understand something about the fall of Imperial China, late 19th century empire-building by industrialized countries, the two world wars, the Cold War and the post-Cold War era.”

[pause]

So which of those sounds out-of-place? Contestants, you have fifteen seconds to answer.

[Play game show version of theme]

Let’s see what you’ve got. Yes! You’re correct! That third one was not a real headline at all!

[audience applauding and incessant dinging]

Fade in theme vamp]

[Pause]

Hey, nice job on that quiz—or that game show—or whatever that was.

The strange thing, though, is that even though there was something off about that last headline, the point it made was not any less true than the real ones.

Understanding anything about present-day tensions over Taiwan really does require some historical context—about how industrial countries undermined the legitimacy of China’s inherited monarchy, and how the world wars, the Cold War, and its aftermath led to the complicated situation we’re in today.”

[pause]

So wait—is this going to be another podcast complaining about all the stuff the news gets wrong?

No, not really.

[pause]

But today’s episode is about why even the best news journalists in the world—folks who are doing their jobs as well as can be done—can still give you a pretty skewed view of the world if you don’t have the historical context to make sense of what they have to say.

It turns out that you need historical context every bit as much as you need to follow high-quality news sources—in order to really start to understand the state of this planet and its people.

[pause]

And yes I understand that it can throw you off balance to find out that exploring stuff that’s old—is required for comprehending stuff that’s news.

But the good news is that I’m a professional historian and I’ve been trained to help you resolve contradictory situations just like this one.

My name is Doug Sofer—and I’m a weirdo, just like you.

Theme & Call for Sponsors

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China: Empire to ROC to PRC

So the media tells us that news is something new. That’s because it is!

The Oxford American Dictionary that lives on my Mac tells me that the word news is in fact the plural of new—and that it comes from Late Middle English, by way of Old French by way of Latin—for the four of you who may have been wondering.

[pause]

So if news basically means a bunch of new things, why do we need to understand a bunch of old things—what’s definitely not known—as olds?

It turns out that You Are A Weirdo—[Divebomb]

—is the name of this podcast.

And one remarkably weird aspect of today’s world is the sheer amount of information that we present-day peeps now have at our disposal.

A constant barrage of 24-hour news channels, blogs, websites, video media, social media, radio and podcasts—even actual paper newspapers and magazines and current events paperback books—raging rivers of up-to-the-minute truths, half-truths, and lies, constantly flowing into our brains via our eyes and ears.

How do we make sense of all that stuff?

One answer is that we must explore the past.

This episode is called “History Makes The News”—because understanding this longer view brings greater clarity to events of the present day.

[Pause]

To illustrate, let’s look at the first one of those real headlines that our fake announcer read a couple minutes ago.

[Pause]

That first headline was, once again:

“[QE] Chinese warship passed in ‘unsafe manner’ near destroyer in Taiwan Strait, US says.”

[pause]

The article attached to the headline is from Reuters News Service, and it’s pretty straightforward: One warship from the U.S. Navy and another one from the Chinese Navy got dangerously close to one another—about 150 yards or 137 meters.

Though one-and-a-half U.S. football fields may seem pretty far, it’s clear from the context of the article that it’s way too close for comfort for enormous, gazillion-ton vehicles and that are packed with explosive things and that float on water—and that don’t really have brakes.

As the headline states, U.S. officials said that the Chinese vessel was being commanded in “’an unsafe manner’” while their Chinese counterparts said that the U.S. was “‘deliberately provoking risk’” around Taiwan.

[pause]

The reason this close call is important, then, is connected to the immediate context of this rivalry between these countries.

If you’re even slightly paying attention to international news these days, you know that the U.S. and China are doing a lot of military and political muscle-flexing in and around Taiwan.

[pause]

But then this Reuters article that I picked more-or-less randomly adds another time-dimension to the story—mentioning a longer history of the U.S. and China and their relationships to Taiwan.

And it does so right in paragraph three.

The order of paragraphs matters here because fact-based, so-called straight-news articles are arranged in terms of priority.

The most important info is at the top—in the first paragraph called the lead/lede; the second-most important stuff in paragraph two; and so on.

That’s the so-called inverted pyramid structure used in most straight-news articles—though it’s really just an upside-down triangle.

[pause]

So here’s what the Reuters reporter says about this history:

“[QE] The People's Republic of China (PRC) has claimed self-ruled Taiwan as its territory since the defeated Republic of China government fled to the island in 1949 after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong's communists. Taiwan's government says the PRC has never ruled the island and U.S. President Joe Biden has said the U.S. would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.”

And then it moves on.

But wait: That’s a whole lot of history tightly packed into just two short sentences. It’s more of a quick reminder to readers that this conflict has deep, deep roots, rather than being a complete explanation.

In fact, in order for this article—or really any article about Taiwan—to make any sense, requires a pretty solid grasp of that historical context.

[pause]

So here now, just for you, is a slightly longer version of that history.

It starts four thousand years ago.

[Separator music]

China & Taiwan to 1949

Before 1912, China’s leaders came from imperial dynasties—royal families who commanded empires.

Conservative estimates place the first Chinese dynasty—the Xia—

spelled X-i-a—

at something like 2,200 BC or BCE.[3] Again, that chronology means that dynastic rule of one kind or another dominated Chinese politics for something like four millennia.

[pause]

Thousands of years and a couple dozen lines of imperial families later came the last of those dynasties—called the Qing—Q-i-n-g—which first came to power in 1633.

A couple centuries later, in the middle of the 1800s, China’s political situation got messier because of a series of conflicts called the Opium Wars—between Britain and China.

Britain—used military force to open China’s markets to the import of opium grown in British India—a drug that had been illegal in China at the time.

In both the first Opium War from 1839–1842 & the second from 1856–1860, Britain used brand-new, cutting-edge industrial technologies to overwhelm China’s older military technologies and its then-out-of-date navy.

For example, new British steam ships could travel against river currents where wind-powered vessels couldn’t go.

These first steam vessels were actually hybrids—with sails as well as coal-powered steam boilers—sort of like floating, gun–laden Priuses—but this early industrial technological advance gave the British major advantages over China’s sailing war ships.

[pause]

In the Second Opium War in the late 1850s, France joined in as well.

By then, both the British and French military forces used explosive artillery rounds that they created in their factories.

They fired these new shells from rifled cannons—tubes with internal spiral grooves called rifling—that allow for straighter, more precise travel over longer distances than spherical cannonballs fired from older smooth bore cannons could ever travel.

[Pause]

Frequent listeners to this podcast will notice that many episodes bring up the industrial revolutionin one way or another. That’s not a coincidence; factory production marks one of the most important separators between our strange present-day and the normal past for most of the human experience.

[Pause]

In fact, from a Chinese perspective, industrialism and its consequences transformed 4,000 years of normal, turning it into something unusual and unfamiliar.

[Pause]

By the end of the 1800s, industrialized countries used their militaries to conquer enormous areas formerly under Chinese control.

Britain, France, Russia, the newly unified German Empire and the newly modernized Meijigovernment of Japan carved out spheres of influence in China.[4]

[pause]

In fact, Japan’s part in the late-19th century industrial feeding frenzy came to a head in the 1894–1895 Sino-Japanese War.

[Aside] Sino—S-I-N-O—refers to China.

Japan’s victory led to a treaty in April of 1895 in which China’s imperial government handed over the island of Taiwan to Japanese control.

[pause]

The ultra-super-accelerated version of what came next was a series of multiple crises and declining prestige of China’s imperial government, which eventually led to an outright collapse of the Qing Dynasty.

At that point, many people in China lost faith in the concept of inherited monarchy itself and called for a republic—a government of, by, and for the people.

Astute long-time listeners may remember that in episode two of this podcast called, “You Don’t Get The Joke,” that by the first decade of the 20th century, Chinese humorists were openly roastingimperial officials.

If you missed, it, the episode includes a joke from 1907—involving a poop-covered canine.

It was not a flattering portrayal of the government.

[Pause]

By 1911, a broad coalition of middle-class nationalists & various revolutionary groups overthrew the Qing dynasty and established the Republic of China the year later.

[Pause]

But proclaiming the new government’s existence didn’t just magically mean that everyone accepted this new system of rule; you don’t just erase four thousand years of hereditary power overnight.

Instead, China broke apart into regions controlled by different warlords, as the new Republic attempted to unify the country.

That task fell to the new Chinese republic’s leader, who’s known in the West as Sun Yatsen—but whose actual name is more like Sun Yixian [Soon-Zhong-Shen] who lived between 1866–1925.

We’ll call him by his family name of “Sun” [Soon] for the rest of this episode.

[Pause]

And Sun faced much larger challenges than Westerners pronouncing his name wrong for a century or so.

First, just two years after 1912, World War One began.

At the end of that war, the Treaty of Versailles awarded Germany’s Chinese territories to the Empire of Japan—since Japan had fought on the side of the victorious allies—against Germany.[5]

Those in the new Chinese Republic were outraged and felt betrayed and insulted once again by Westerners—whose governmental system Sun’s Chinese republic had to some extent emulated.

But the end of the first world war also saw the rise of another kind of governmental system—in neighboring Russia.

Russia had also been controlled by royal families for many centuries—though Russia’s monarchy was thousands of years younger than China’s.

But disastrous military performance in the later part of the First World War led to the Russian empire’s implosion.

In early 1917, a broad coalition of Russians who didn’t like the government came together in the so-called March Revolution and overthrew the Russian empire.

By the end of the year, during the so-called October Revolution, Russian communists called the Bolshevik Party overthrew the coalition government and established the Soviet Union in its place—the first communist revolution to take power for any length of time.

[Pause]

Back in China, Sun fought to keep two political factions from tearing the new Chinese republic apart.

On one side were Communist revolutionaries who wanted to turn China into something roughly like the Soviet Union in Russia. They would eventually be led by Mao Zedong who lived from 1893–1976.

On the other side were those who wanted the republic to become an industrial capitalist state—very roughly like Britain or the United States. This side would eventually be led by the man known in the West as Chiang Kai-shek who lived from 1887–1975. Chiang Kai-Shek’s actual Chinese name sounds almost nothing like Chiang Kai-Shek and is pronounced something more like Jiang Zhongzheng. [JeeONG-Zhong-Zheun]—

Or at least that’s my best shot at it as someone who obviously doesn’t speak Chinese—after like fifty takes.

Here’s how Google says it.

And here’s Apple’s text-to-speech voice—Taiwanese accent selected.

I’ll just call him by his family name—Jiang.

[Pause]

So Jiang’s faction would eventually call themselves the Nationalists. 

[Pause]

At first, Sun had fans amongst both Chinese communists and Chinese nationalists alike so he managed to hold the fragile Chinese Republic together.[6]

But Sun died in 1925, at which point the whole Republic fell apart.

[Pause]

The Chinese Civil War between Communists and Nationalists happened in two phases—first between 1927–1937.

But in 1937—the increasingly aggressive and expansionist Empire of Japan invaded the rest of China from its bases in those former German territories it had gained in the Treaty of Versailles—and from Taiwan, which it had conquered at the end of the Sino-Japanese War.

Chinese Communists and Nationalists temporarily put aside their differences at that point.

After Japan’s defeat at the end of WWII in 1945, the civil war between Nationalists and Communists resumed.

That same year—1945—the Nationalists’ political party called the KMT or Kuomintang [GWO-MEEN-DAHNG], took over the island of Taiwan. 

[Pause]

The once-again quick version of what happened next is that the Communists finally won the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China.

That next year, the Communists defeated or got on their side the remaining regional warlords—and effectively united almost all of China for the first time since the Qing Dynasty had collapsed in 1911—nearly four decades earlier.

[Pause]

But the Nationalists under Jiang retreated to Taiwan with half-a-million troops and set up a government-in-exile there, which they continued to call the Republic of China or ROC.

Jiang lived until 1975—a quarter of a century after the victory of the Communists on the mainland.

[pause]

And that fact is in large part why the government of the Peoples’ Republic of China view Taiwan as an openly hostile nation.

To this day, Taiwan calls itself the home of the ROC—for Republic of China—created by the side that had opposed the People’s Republic of China in the country’s civil war.

And it’s why most Taiwanese still see their land as a country entirely independent of the People’s Republic of China.

[pause]

So that’s the basic history.

But that story gets even more complex during the Cold War and beyond. That period helps to explain how the United States came to play an increasingly important role in what had once been a Civil War between two factions of the Chinese Republic.

Cold War and Beyond

During the Cold War, the United States and Western European countries worked to support non-communist societies around the world—like Taiwan.

As the head of Taiwan’s government, Jiang believed—with good reason—that the island was in danger of being conquered by mainland China.

And Mao Zedong and the mainland Chinese communists believed—with good reason—that their fragile new country was in danger of being attacked by anti-communists.

As a result, both governments took iron-fisted, undemocratic approaches to governing.

The history of the People’s Republic is better known in the West.

It installed a one-party communist dictatorship that limited individual freedom, restricted freedom of the press, and used brutal force to suppress dissent.

[Pause]

But Taiwan’s government also installed a one-party dictatorship under the Nationalist KMT. And it also limited individual freedom to criticize the government. And also restricted freedom of the press, and also employed brutal force to suppress dissent.

[Pause]

Taiwan’s government did not finally end its military dictatorship until 1987.

Up to that point, the KMT government had massacred tens of thousands of dissenters and threw something like 140,000 into political prisons.

[Pause]

But then in 1996, after the Cold War had ended, Taiwan held legitimate democratic elections and began a slow process of healing for its half-century of dictatorial policies.

Today the island of Taiwan is home to a dynamic, pluralistic society of 23 million people. It’s got a successful economy and its citizens enjoy freedom of expression—all hallmarks of a prosperous country.

[Pause]

But Taiwan’s official status as a country remains unclear.

Only thirteen other nation-states around the world officially recognize Taiwan as a completely sovereign and independent country—

In fact, today as I’m recording this episode, the Central American country of Honduras has just opened its new embassy in Beijing. [7] It switched recognition from Taiwan ROC to the PRC earlier in the year, in March 2023.[8]

Eleven of the countries that do recognize Taiwan are either small island nations themselves—or island-like places surrounded on all sides by another country.[9]

[Pause]

So where does the U.S. fit into this situation?

It’s also complicated.

The U.S. supported the Republic of China in Taiwan during the early Cold War, but during the presidency of Richard Nixon from 1969–1974, U.S. officials realized that engaging in dialogue with the People’s Republic of China could help further break it out of the political orbit of Soviet Russia.

China’s communist party had already expressed disillusion with the Soviet communist party in the 1960s.

Chinese party officials accused the Soviets of so-called “revisionism”—altering communist ideals in order to keep the Soviet bureaucracy in power, thereby creating a new ruling class—instead of standing up for the working classes like they were supposed to.

This divide between the Soviet Union and China came to be known as the “Sino-Soviet split”—because Sino- still means China.

By talking to the People’s Republic of China, the U.S. attempted to deepen this divide between the governments of China and the Soviet Union.

And it worked!

The effort culminated in 1979 under the administration of Jimmy Carter when the United States officially and formally recognized the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate government of China for the first time.

In the process, it officially and formally un-recognized the Republic of China, based in Taiwan.

[Pause]

Yet the U.S. didn’t just abandon Taiwan. That same year in 1979, the U.S. promised to continue economic, military, and officialish-but-not-really-official diplomatic connections with Taiwan through a new officialish-but-not-really-official organization called the American Institute in Taiwan.

It’s part of the Federal Government and it does most of the things that U.S. Embassies do around the world. But it’s not an embassy.

[Pause]

And it’s not NOT an embassy.

[Pause]

And that’s where we still are today. The U.S. government doesn’t officially recognize Taiwan, but it has a whole convoluted way through which to officiallishly-but-not-really-officially work with its government and people.

[Pause]

The People’s Republic of China, for its part, has claimed since before its victory in 1949 that its goal was to defeat the Nationalists and control all of what they consider to be under Chinese jurisdiction.

So does all that help us better understand what’s going on today? Let’s jump over to the conclusion and think about it.

[Separator Music]

Conclusion

An article about two nations’ naval vessels getting too close to one another is definitely news.

But a news article about two naval vessels getting too close to one another next to a large and populous island that one of those powers believes is operating under a rogue government and that should be part of its territory—while the other naval power attempts to keep its promises to retain its officialish-but-not official support for that island-nation’s independence—that’s big news.

[pause]

There is much more context behind today’s situation that requires much more than a 20-something minute podcast episode to make sense of.

To really get what’s going on today, I urge you to look for solid, well-researched sources—including but not necessarily limited to the ones I’ve put links up for on findyourselfinhistory.com.

[Pause]

One of those sources I do link to is the Economist news magazine out of London, which published an in-depth look at the situation in Taiwan in an April 2023 series of articles. And one of those pieces carries this subtitle:

“[QE] Understanding Taiwan requires study of its history”

[pause]

Hey! That’s the main point of this whole episode!

You know, come to think of it, that subheader is pretty similar to the fake headline we began with in today’s intro.

So I guess if you look hard enough, you can find good news sources that put present-day events into richer, broader contexts.

[Pause]

Either way, one of the strange realities of today’s world is that we have more access to bleeding-edge, up-to-the-minute information than ever—about the entire globe.

But without having a longer view—without history—we’re going to get confused by the news.

And when we lack that background, it’s easy to let other people tell us what the context is—to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.

[pause]

People like you and me who are part of representative political systems, have a responsibility to know what’s going on in this big crazy world.

[Pause]

And part of that responsibility includes understanding not just the new news but also the old newsthat helps us understand why the news is newsworthy.

[Fade in theme]

Outro, teaser, credits

We’ve completed our twelfth episode! A solid dozen!

That’s two more than most seasons of Game of Thrones; and four more than Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power which cost 

So I think we can call this the end of Season One!

Congratulations! We did it!

[Pause]

Because we made it to the end of the season, I’ll be taking a short break—just a few more breaks between episodes than normal.

During that brief interlude I plan to try to market the heck out of this thing—and “[QE] Marketing the heck out of things” was not the name of any of the classes that they offered in history grad school, which means I’ll need to learn some things in order to do this well.

Wish me luck!

[pause]

You may find the references to the historical sources, sound files, and other information used for this and other episodes at findyourselfinhistory.com .

I’d love to hear what you think about this podcast. Chuck an email my way at doug@findyourselfinhistory.com .

Some parts of today’s episode came out of my history-of-world-civilizations course that I’ve taught for a couple of decades at Maryville College.

Maryville College—right outside of Knoxville, TN—and so close to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park that we’d happily let the river otters audit our classes for free if any of them could figure out how to log into our course management platform.

Maryville College: Everyday Unexpected. Learn more at maryvillecollege.edu 

[Fast, lawyerly] Opinions expressed in this podcast are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Maryville College, its administration, faculty, staff, students, board of directors or any official mandarins representing the nine top grades of the civil service.

This podcast episode was researched, written, edited, narrated, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are copyright 2023 Doug Sofer. The theme song was written and performed by Doug Sofer with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. You can find out more about Matt at trimboli.com .

Thanks for listening.

[1] Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinese-warship-passed-unsafe-manner-near-us-destroyer-taiwan-strait-us-2023-06-04/ 4 Jun., 2023, accessed 5 Jun, 2023.
[2] Associated Press, https://apnews.com/article/china-criticizes-taiwan-united-states-trade-deal-3602c2299c451203a537143926b7cd31, 1 Jun., 2023, accessed 8 Jun., 2023.
[3] John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History, Kindle Edition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 30 (location 736).
[4] Cite map in Bentley & Ziegler, e.g.
[5] Treaty of Versailles, Section VIII, Articles 156–158. See https://books.google.com/books?id=ItATAAAAIAAJ .
[6] Fairbank & Goldman, 279.
[7] Lindsay Maizland, “Backgrounder: Why China-Taiwan Relations Are So Tense,” Council on Foreign Relations at https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-taiwan-relations-tension-us-policy-biden , updated 18 Apr., 2023, accessed 7 Jun., 2023.
[8] https://www.npr.org/2023/06/11/1181542535/honduras-has-opened-an-embassy-in-china-after-breaking-off-ties-with-taiwan
[9] Republic of China, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Diplomatic Allies” at https://en.mofa.gov.tw/AlliesIndex.aspx?n=1294&sms=1007 , accessed 7 Jun., 2023.