2026 Issue 29

It has been nearly four years since Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, visited Taipei and met with President Tsai Ing-wen.  Thomas Shattuck provides an overview of what has changed and what hasn’t since then.

One of the most important shifts has been the economic orientation of Taiwan as Chris Norton points out in Nikkei Asia this week.  A decade ago, Taiwan’s economy was overwhelmingly focused on the PRC, but today that dependence is much less with the United States as Taiwan’s largest trading partner.  Today the Taiwanese economy outperforms its bigger and aggressive neighbor and suggests that other countries can undertake a transition away from the PRC as well.

Bobby Ghosh in Foreign Policy puts the US and PRC performance in a recent Pew survey into perspective.  Eswar Prasad in the Financial Times comments on the need for the PRC to adopt a new economic model, something that Chinese economists have been calling for since Xi Jinping entered office more than a dozen years ago.

Nathan Law, an activist for Hong Kong democracy, points out in The Guardian that the UK Labour Government is not following through on its commitments to Hong Kong citizens and appears to be bowing to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party.