Is China Winning the Global Game? Taiwan, Panama & Japan Reveal the New Reality | Silk and Steel

**Jamarl Thomas** (0:00)
We are joined today with the one, the only, the fantastic, Carl Zha. How's it going, man?

**Carl Zha** (0:08)
How are you, Jamar? Always good to see you.

**Jamarl Thomas** (0:12)
It's good to see you too, man. It's good to see you. So Carl Zha, he is host of, I can see this. Everybody knows who you are, but it's still like a, I don't know, stand-up comedy. Carl Zha is host of Silk and Steel Podcasts focused on China and surrounding regions, their history, culture and politics. You can follow Carl on Twitter, or you can follow his podcast at Steel, Silk, and you can subscribe to the podcast on patreon.com.
And as a key point out, Carl has a fantastic podcast that goes over the 5,000 year history of China, which you can imagine is rather immense. I seem to be having internet difficulties, Carl, so if I blink out, don't fret, it's most likely me for some reason, the computer or the signal has been weak today. But Carl, welcome to the show, man. Thank you for joining me.
Thank you for having me. Always. The reason I hit you up is because I saw these massive protests taking place in Taiwan, and how they started seemed to be, it was very weird to me, especially considering that they changed over into going after the government itself. What's going on in Taiwan? What was the cause of the protests?

**Carl Zha** (1:31)
So there's hundreds of thousands of people protesting the current Taiwan government. The original trigger was about food safety, specifically about cooking oil, because people in Taiwan actually take their food safety very seriously. But the real deep cause is that the current ruling party in Taiwan, the DPP, they have been ruling Taiwan for more than a decade now. And their popularity is at the lowest level.
The current sitting president, the quote unquote president, he was elected with like 40% of the votes. Like, he was never a very popular guy, and now he's even less so. And so now the discontent start to switching from, demanding the government doing something about regulating food safety to, hey, why are we provoking China?
Why can't we just chill and have improved the cross-strait relationship? Which is a legitimate question. Now, I think more telling is a fact that there's very few international coverage, particularly in English language media, because the first time I even noticed about reporting about this Taiwan protest is from South China Morning Post, which is an English language media in Hong Kong, based in Hong Kong, and then two by CNA, which is a Singaporean-based media channel. So that's it. If you go to Reuters, somebody went, when I posted about that on Twitter, somebody actually did a Google search, searched, trying to search Reuters article reporting protests on Taiwan. And what they come up with is hundreds in Taiwan, protesting, asking the government to expand the weapon purchase program for the United States, right?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:36)
I mean, that's the thing that they will feed you in the mainstream English language media.

**Carl Zha** (3:41)
It's like hundreds of people in Taiwan are protesting, demanding we buy expensive American weapons to fight China.
And when there's hundreds of thousands of people protesting, the Taiwan current government is like never a peep, because it doesn't fit their mainstream narrative.
Because they don't know how to spin that. You know, there's a normal spin is, Taiwan is this like David versus a Goliath story. Taiwan is this plucky David, you know, like a bastion of democracy in East Asia, standing up to the big bad authoritarian China, intending on to swallow it up, right? But when people actually say, no, like I think our government are foolish to try to provoke China, that obviously does not play with the, you know, Washington State Department agenda. So they just choose to completely ignore it. Oh, here you have the video.

**Jamarl Thomas** (4:48)
Yeah, that was part of the video of the protest. I didn't have a huge amount of it. It was just a small portion of it. But yeah, they were protesting. They were pissed off and they were going after the government itself. That's wild to me that Reuters, that's amazing. They have these inactive protests. The response to Reuters is, let's just bury it. Because I remember seeing this, well, I followed several Chinese social media sites, and I remember seeing it there. I don't remember seeing it in the media here in the United States. So fair point.
They are now calling for the government to step down. How did it change from cooking oil or cooking safety to the government needs to capitulate?