Taiwan's Hidden Powers & Potential Threats

So today we're going to have a little chat about Taiwan.

Taiwan is a, some of us in the 80s would have read on the back of our radio sets made in Taiwan.

Or toys and everything.

Yeah.

Either China

or Taiwan.

But Taiwan is very, very, very close to China.

Imagine kind of like, you know, the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway, like it is quite close.

And it's very much gone its own way, even though China believes it's still a part of Taiwan's part of China.

And we will be getting into all of that.

So it's quite a large island.

If you look at a map of China, you'll see it's the largest island of China, much bigger than Hong Kong.

Good size population.

I think there's 23 million, which is big by European standards, but not overly big by Asian standards.

Very fast growing economy.

We'll be getting into that.

But what's interesting is that from 1895 to 1945, so 50 years, Taiwan was a Japanese colony.

China wouldn't have liked that.

Yeah, yeah.

I suppose part of China was...

Well, China wasn't able to do anything about that really for large periods because, you know, they were firstly, you know, the British and some of the other European powers, you know, forced China into kind of trade concessions they didn't want.

Then the Japanese took over kind of northern China from Korea into a place called Manchuria.

So, yeah, it might have bothered them, but there wasn't much they could do.

But the legacy that the Japanese left was a bit like, you know, seen from the life of Brian.

You know, what have the Romans ever done for us? I'm part of the People's Front of the G.A.