Weatherhead faculty member Andrew J. Nathan addresses the most fraught geopolitical situation in East Asia head-on in a new essay for the China Books Review.
Titled “Zero-Sum,” the article assesses three new books about Taiwan’s internal politics and its relationship with the People’s Republic of China: Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China by Eyck Freymann; The Taiwan Tinderbox: The Island-Nation at the Centre of the New Cold War by J. Michael Cole; and Contested Taiwan: Sovereignty, Social Movements, and Party Formation by Lev Nachman.
The article is especially timely in the wake of the visit to Beijing this week by Cheng Li-wun, head of Taiwan’s Kuomintang opposition party, as part of a six-day tour in which she also visited Shanghai and Nanjing. Cheng has framed her visit, which included a joint public appearance with Chinese president Xi Jinping, as a “journey of peace.”
Andrew J. Nathan is the Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science in Columbia’s Department of Political Science. A veteran scholar of the PRC’s internal and foreign policy, as well as on human rights, he began sponsoring a series of Taiwan-focused lectures and other events at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute earlier this academic year.
The “zero-sum” scenario indicated by the title of Professor Nathan’s China Books Review piece is one in which, as he writes, “the reasons why the US cannot abandon Taiwan are the same reasons why China must control Taiwan.” He devotes the most space in his essay to Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China by Eyck Freymann, a Hoover fellow at Stanford University, and Freymann’s arguments for why Taiwan remains a core strategic interest for the United States. Readers have a chance to hear from Freymann himself, and learn more about those arguments, when he appears at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute in person on Monday, April 20, for a talk co-hosted by the China and the World Program.
Read “Zero-Sum” by Andrew J. Nathan
Learn more about Eyck Freymann’s April 20 Columbia talk
