Scared strait: Taiwan

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Hello and welcome to the intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. World Rugby, the governing body for international rugby union, has made what may be a momentous decision banning trans women from the women's game. We look into the science that informed their decision and into the heated discussion around it. And for all but the most attentive birdsong is lost in the bustle of life. Now a London musician has composed an album built entirely around the tunes of endangered birds, turning ears towards a soundscape that's slowly disappearing. First up though, On Saturday, Taiwan enjoyed its national day celebrations. President Tsai Ing Wen gave a speech to mark the occasion. She called for the de escalation of tensions with mainland China, asking Beijing to jointly facilitate cross strait reconciliation and peaceful dialogue. But Beijing dismissed the message and just a few hours later released a video threatening military invasion. It was just the latest bit of propaganda ramping up China's claim over Taiwan. Last month, the army released a video depicting an attack on American forces in Guam. The message was don't defend Taiwan in what would swiftly become a messy regional war.

What we're seeing in the last few months is a level of military activity, a level of muscle flexing by China around Taiwan. The that is unprecedented in 20 years.

Shashank Joshi is the Economist's defense editor.

We have seen aerial exercises, naval exercises on all sides of the island, and some of that is in response to American efforts to bolster their own ties to Taiwan. In the past several months, we have seen very senior US Officials visit Taiwan, Taiwan in ways that would probably have been considered provocative, even reckless, if that had happened several years ago.

And so this is a clear escalation of tensions that have actually been around for some time. It is.

I mean, China and Taiwan have had their ups and downs. You know, China fired missiles into the sea around Taiwan back in the mid-1990s in a huge crisis. But things stabilized for a long time. There was a sense on the Chinese side economic ties and cultural ties with the island were expanding in a way that might fulfil the Chinese ambition to reunify Taiwan with the mainland bloodlessly, without the need for an invasion. What's happened in the last four years is that things have got pretty rocky again. That's partly because you've had the ascendance in Taiwan of the Democratic Progressive Party, a party led by Tsai Ing Wen, who are not very China friendly, who prefer to keep a little bit of distance from China than its opponents. And I think a sense within China that reunification is just not going to happen peacefully and that if China wants Taiwan back, something that they've been claiming since 1949 when the nationalists fled to the island, this is going to take a lot more muscle flexing and a.

Lot more pressure, which explains the ramping up of the tension of the rhetoric.

Yes, it's not just the muscle flexing, though. It's not just warships and planes. It's also diplomatic pressure. You know, Taiwan is a tiny island, and if you're a country and you want to have relations with Beijing, one of the things that Beijing demands is that you have to cut relations with Taiwan. It has also hounded countries and private companies who have inadvertently undermined China's position. So, for example, China has attacked hotel chains like Marriott, airlines like Delta, other fashion companies like Zara, not to list Taiwan as a country on the dropdown menus on their websites.

But the most acute form of pressure is still the saber rattling, the military stuff. How likely is it to your mind that China would try to actually take Taiwan back by force?

If you look at the reports by the Department of Defense in America, they say the Chinese have not been building their amphibious fleet in a way that would indicate any kind of invasion in the short term. China has never practiced for the kind of invasion that it would take to seize the Is in fact no country really, since World War II, maybe since Korea, has conducted an amphibious assault against a very well defended shore in a way that would be required for China to take Taiwan. So it's relatively unlikely we're going to see an invasion anytime soon.

But in the event that analysis isn't accurate, could Taiwan defend itself from an invasion?

Well, experts say in theory the island is very defensible. There are good reasons for that. Taiwan is a mountainous country. It's easy for defenders to hide. It has very, very, very good missiles. Some of them are better than American missiles. Anti ship missiles would probably make mincemeat of an invading Chinese force. The worry is that its ability to defend itself is shrinking. Every year the People's Liberation army is adding to its forces more than the sum total of Taiwan's entire armed forces. That gives you a sense of the scale of this.

And what about outside forces, though it wouldn't necessarily just be two forces facing off.

No, America doesn't have a formal alliance with Taiwan, but it has long implied it would help repel an invasion, Assuming that Taiwan hadn't provoked a war in the first place by declaring independence, for example. America has sold Taiwan lots of weapons, $13 billion worth, in the last week. It's just agreed a package of even more weapons, particularly very capable missiles. But the question is, would an American president be willing to send troops to defend a very faraway island whose defense spending has fallen steadily as a share of GDP over the last 20 years? And I think there are increasingly questions over whether this American president or in fact, future American presidents would be willing to take that kind of step.

But how would that play out more broadly in the region if America didn't respond?

If China was to invade and seize Taiwan successfully, you know, this would be an event that I think would be seen in the same terms as the German occupation of the rhineland in the 1930s. It would send shockwaves through Asia. It would prompt profound concern about the nature of China's rise. It would wreck American credibility and damage America's standing in the region. And if you look at where Taiwan is on a map, you know, it would push China's eastern frontiers considerably to the east into the first island chain of countries in the Pacific. And it would make Japan, which of course is a US treaty ally, extremely hard to defend. And therefore, you know, the strategic consequences of a loss of Taiwan are absolutely profound. And I think that explains why, despite all of the costs, most American politicians are still very, very supportive of Taiwan.

But of course the better outcome is that it simply doesn't come to that. I mean, what do you think is the right way to deal with this rising aggression without it spilling out into outright conflict?

Well, the best thing to do is to make sure that China realizes any invasion would be so costly, such a gamble, that it would risk the survival of the Communist Party itself. And the first step to doing that is to transform Taiwan's own defences. That isn't just about rebalancing Taiwan's armed forces away from traditional capabilities like, you know, fancy warplanes, planes and big tanks towards asymmetric capabilities, anti ship missiles and sea mines and zippy mobile missile boats. But it's also about overhauling the way Taiwan thinks about defense, preparing Taiwanese society for that kind of scenario. The problem is it's difficult when you have a society like Taiwan's where only a fifth of people think that war is going to happen in the first place. You know, they dismiss the possibility. And so if Taiwanese don't think a war is going to come, if they think that China is so culturally, linguistically similar to the island that it simply won't come to blows, then it's very hard to persuade them to spend more on defense and to turn themselves into a kind of fortress society that would have far reaching implications for the country's society and its economy.

Thanks very much for your time, Shashank.

Thank you, Jason.

The inclusion of trans women in women's sport has made for a notoriously bad tempered debate. Some female athletes complain that it's unfair to make them compete against people who, despite gender identities and medical procedures, remain biologically male. For years, the International Olympic Committee has allowed trans women to take part in women's events. Its rules require those athletes to reduce the amount of testosterone in their blood for at least a year before competing. The idea is that suppressing the hormone will reduce or eliminate the athletic advantages conferred by male physiology. That precedent has been followed by other sporting bodies, but not World Rugby. The organization has just barred trans women from playing rugby union at international level. The development came after expressions of concern from some players and referees not just about fairness, but the potential physical dangers of allowing trans women to play the women's game.

Well, it's crushing. The IOC has made extremely clear that they consider a human right and that that right extends to every athlete.

Veronica Ivy is an international track cyclist and a trans woman. She questions why, if World Rugby is concerned about safety, it isn't also barring from the game the largest, strongest players who have been women since birth.

World Rugby is trying to say that trans women have X amount of more strength, power, whatever, than CIS women, but that they're not excluding any cisgender women who are similarly bigger, stronger, faster. So this isn't a policy based on tackling power, for example. So if they really cared about tackling injuries, they should have a policy based on maximal tackling power or something like that. And then you have to exclude any athlete, whether they're cisgender or trans or intersex, based on that quality. But that's not what they're doing.

So, personally, I'm really pleased the decision.

Has been welcomed by Sharon Davis, a former Olympic swimmer who won silver in the 1980 Games in Moscow.

I competed during the period of the East German State doping program, where they took young females and put them through male puberty by giving them lots of testosterone. And they totally and utterly dominated women's sports for nearly 20 years. So most of my silver and bronze medals had all of my silver and bronze medals behind East Germans, every single one of them. So although it's a different scenario, the result is the same. Testosterone will give an absolutely massive advantage. It's just not fair. And in sports like rugby and boxing and taekwondo, it's out and out dangerous.

Our technology editor, Tim Cross, has been looking at the science on which World Rugby says it based its ruling.

The evidence is sort of in two strands, basically, and the first is the difference when it comes to sport between males and females. And this is one of those cases where science confirms what common experience suggests. And so the way to summarize it is, you know, most males are bigger and stronger and faster than most females. And also the biggest and strongest and fastest males are bigger and stronger and faster than any males, females. So that's one strand of evidence. And then the second one is around this sort of question of testosterone. Because what makes World Rugby's decision quite significant is that they're sort of departing from, I guess you could call it the consensus, although maybe that's a bit strong for something this new. But the International Olympic Committee, they've been okay with the idea of trans women competing in women's sports for quite a long time now. You basically have to sign a declaration of good faith to say, you know, I'm doing this because I genuinely have gender dysphoria. And the other thing you have to do is suppress your testosterone levels so that they fall below what's normal in most men. And I think the idea behind that rule is that testosterone is the main male sex hormone People who are doping for strength, they still often take testosterone or one of its sort of chemical relations. So I think the idea was that suppressing testosterone therefore ought to reduce performance, and hopefully that will be enough to bring people who'd gone through a male puberty kind of more in line with people who'd gone through a female one.

So what does the science say about the impact, though, of suppressing testosterone on performance?

Well, what science we have, and we should say at the start, this is still a sort of pretty new area of investigation, but what science we have suggests on the whole that it doesn't actually seem to make much of a difference. So two of the researchers who presented to World Rugby put out a review paper, which is, when you go back through the literature, you find all the relevant studies and then try to summarize what they say. And they found 11 studies which measured different things. So some measured strength directly, some measured things like the cross sectional area of muscles, so the size of your muscles, and some measured something called lean body mass, which is your total body weight minus the amount of fat you're carrying. And these are people who'd transitioned and who'd been suppressing their testosterone for between one and three years. And basically they found that there was a reduction, but the size of the reduction was pretty small, it was around about 5%. And of course, that's not really of the same magnitude as the size of the male advantage.

It sounds as if there is something, at least in the scientific literature, of a consensus coming together.

Yeah, I think there's certainly a balance of evidence on one side. There are some things that point in the other direction, though. So there's a study of middle distance trans runners, for instance, which seem to show that testosterone suppression there has a big impact on performance. And if somebody was in, say, the 50th percentile in men's running, then after transition, they'll be roughly in the 50th percentile in women's running. In other words, your relative standing stays the same, which means your performance gets worse, because on average, males run faster than females. But that study gets criticised in the scientific sense because it wasn't possible to control for things like training. There may be kind of more clarity coming down the pipe because there is at least one big study that's being organised which is going to look specifically at trans athletes and specifically at sporting performance. So it'll be interesting to see where that comes. But I think for now I'd say there's sort of a preponderance of evidence to suggest that actually suppressing testosterone doesn't quite do what the IOC would like it to do.

And what knock on effects might that decision have for other sports, for example?

Well, again, so I think there's sort of two questions around that. I mean, one is what knock on effects it will have in rugby. So world Rugby only have the power to directly regulate the international games. What happens in individual countries is up to the rugby authorities in those countries. But they do expect that that will have some impact on the top level of the club game because the kind of players that compete in international matches are drawn from the top clubs. And then, yeah, there's this question of other sports as well. And I think world rugby will tell you that other contact sports and also combat sports, you know, boxing or wrestling or whatever, they've been following this pretty closely because they have the same safety worries. And then there are other sports where there isn't really a safety argument, like running or athletics or cycling. And I think there it'll be really interesting to watch because essentially what's happened with this World Rugby decision is you've now got two duelling precedents. So up until now, everyone could follow the IOC guidelines and say, well, if it's good enough for the ioc, it's good enough for us. And I guess, you know, world Rugby doesn't quite have the cachet that the International Olympic Committee does, but it does give people a different precedent that they might choose to follow.

Tim, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

For some city dwellers, lockdowns brought one small joy. In place of rumbling engines and rowdy pedestrians, they could hear the chirps and trills of wood pigeons, wrens, owls and sparrows. Inspired by this new soundscape, a London based composer recently released a whole album built from birdsong, innovating on a centuries old musical tradition.

Cosmo Sheldrake is a multi instrumentalist, composer and singer from London. He's just released an album, Wake Up Calls, which consists of 13 tracks composed almost entirely from British birdsong, drawn from the red and amber lists of endangerment.

Saskia Solomon writes about culture for the Economist.

The album covers a full day of birdsong from the nighttime chirrups of the nightingale, a nightjar through the daylight mating calls and ending with the evening ensemble. It's eerily beautiful. There's this swelling ambient bird song throughout. The Skylark, for instance, is sprightly and flute like in sound. And then there's the Missel Thrush which is playful and harmonic.

It's a project that I've been working on for a number of years. It's slowly organically growing together.

That's Cosmo Sheldrake, the composer.

Originally it was my girlfriend painted me a picture of an owl and then asked me for an owl in return. And so I'd got recordings of each of the British owls and chopped them together and made a piece for her. I was also at the time, very interested in making music from recordings of extinct animals. And then slowly both of those things shifted and formed this project more focused around endangered birds.

How did you go about it?

A lot of the pieces I originally started composing mainly for people to wake up to. So it was customized alarm clock music. And then I ended up with this collection of tunes. Bits here, bits there. And during lockdown, just being surrounded. I escaped from London and moved to Dorset. My studio is right next to a bird feeding table with a huge window and I was just surrounded by birdsong. And it just felt like an appropriate time to kind of weave it all together and wrap it all up.

And how did you actually capture the sounds?

Some of them I recorded myself. So I spent many evenings crouching by a hedge waiting for a nightjar to strike up and cycling around some of the downlands near here, finding skylarks and then leaving mics taped in the hedgerows and sitting there with headphones with long cables just waiting for the birds to sing. And then some of them friends lent me or I found in archives. But yeah, it's a kind of real patchwork quilt of different sources.

And is it an appreciation of or a kind of musical activism in terms of the endangered species part?

I guess a bit of both. On the one hand, it's just my response to spending this time listening to and being immersed in birdsong, but it's also an attempt to bring to our awareness this absolutely amazing sonic landscape which is rapidly disappearing.

By immortalizing and building on these avian compositions, Cosmo is tapping into a rich history.

Wake Up Calls leans heavily into a long standing tradition of musicians taking inspiration from birdsong. Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven and Handel each took inspiration in birdsong. Some of the most well known melodies were inspired by birds, such as Vaughan Williams, Lark Ascending. And edward elgar's fly singing bird. The 20th century French composer and ornithologist Olivier Missien referred to birds as God's own musicians. And it was his lifelong mission, he said, to give birdsongs to those who dwell in the cities and have never heard them. Often birdsong would be transliterated into music for flute and piano, and sometimes even violin. But today, thanks to technology, artists and musicians like Mrs. Sheldrake can now have new ways of synthesizing nature's sound with music. And albums like Wake Up Calls enables you to really understand the different nuances across the board of birdsong and what stands to be lost.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligent. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer the link is in the show Notes. See you back here tomorrow.