Strait shooting? The growing peril to Taiwan

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. SARS-CoV-2 won't be the last bug to make the jump from animals to humans. The danger is, in fact, only growing. We look into what it is that's making these zoonotic diseases more likely and what might be done to better the odds. And it's tempting to think that dogs would speak their minds to their minders if they could. Some people have even tried to make it possible, setting up buttons for dogs to push, each one linked to a word. We ask whether that button-pawing counts as language. But first, When a Chinese spy plane attempted to fly undetected beneath Taiwan's radar systems last week, it was just the latest worrisome incursion. Warplanes from the mainland have repeatedly circled the island in recent months, adding to growing fears that China may one day attempt to seize Taiwan by force. Leaders in Beijing say there's only one China and that Taiwan, an island of 24 million people 100 miles off its is just a rebellious part of it. The Taiwanese used to agree that their island was part of China, albeit not a communist part. But they have taken to electing governments that stress its separateness. In a sign of ramping tensions, earlier this month Taiwan's foreign minister, Joseph Wu, said the island would defend itself to the very last day. We are willing to defend ourselves, and it's without any question.

And we will fight the war if we need to fight a war.

But the war war is unlikely to involve only the island and the mainland. China's Vice Foreign Minister, Le Yucheng, recently said that there is simply no room for compromise on the Taiwan question. The One China principle is China's red line, he said. No one should try to cross it.

If you're looking at the kind of indicators of trouble, a lot of them are flashing red.

David Rennie is our Beijing bureau chief.

So on the Chinese side, we're seeing a tempo of sort of incursions into airspace that is on the edge of Taiwan's own airspace at a rate that we've not seen since the mid-1990s. And there's a lot of political rhetoric flying around. We saw on April 23rd, Xi Jinping, the Supreme Leader, went and commissioned 3 very large warships, 2 ships and 1 submarine, on the same day. And the state media was pointing out delightedly that one of these ships, a helicopter carrier, which is a bit like a small aircraft carrier, is exactly what you would need to drop soldiers onto the mountainous island, i.e., Taiwan. So the sabre rattling is very loud.

But in any case, as you say, the indicator lights are flashing. Why is that? Why have tensions gone up so fast?

Part of it is probably to test the new Biden administration. The Chinese are very disdainful of America at the moment. China has this sort of overarching story that the election of Donald Trump, America's bad handling of COVID the very ugly election of 2020, and even the riots in January, they are signs of an American democracy that is on its last knees, that's in decline. I've heard Chinese officials say that Joe Biden may have won, but he won narrowly, he's an old man. So I think the Biden administration thinks that they're being tested and they need to show resolve. And they've certainly said some quite strong things in support of Taiwan.

So certainly some saber rattling, as you say, some muscle flexing, but do you think it would actually lead to an attempted takeover of the island?

So when you're trying to interpret the Chinese saber rattling, you really need to separate out two things. One is a judgment about whether China could do this, and the other is whether China thinks this is the moment to try and do this. And I think one of the things that make this hard is that we know a ton about China's capabilities, 'cause we can see the aircraft carriers, we can see them building these missile bases, There is no doubt that China is far stronger than it used to be, and probably in a fight close to Taiwan where China has home advantage, it would be really, really hard for the Americans to beat them. On the question of intent, that's a much, much harder question because it's a very secretive country. The Supreme Leader, Xi Jinping, basically is the guy that is going to take the decision. And there the evidence is, I think, scantier than some of the claims you hear in Washington. So you will hear people, including American admirals saying, well, we know that he's extremely ambitious. He has basically said that his personal legacy as a ruler is linked to taking back Taiwan. The truth is that's probably reading a little bit too much into basically 2 or 3 ambiguous statements made in public by Xi Jinping over the last few years.

And is it clear-cut that America would defend Taiwan if an invasion were to occur?

It's not. And America prefers that it shouldn't be completely clear-cut because for the last 40 years, the idea has been that if America promised to turn up, then that would be provocative to China, but also might encourage radicals in Taiwan to do the thing that China says would trigger a war for sure, which is formally declare that Taiwan is an independent country. And so America has this policy of strategic ambiguity. Now, at the same time, it is very clear that America also thinks that it has to have a really credible deterrence, that the Chinese military has to believe that America would turn up and that America would turn up with the right forces to beat China.

And do you have a sense for how well this policy of strategic ambiguity is actually working?

One of the hardest questions of trying to work out whether there'll be a war is guessing the intentions of China's leadership. And that really means one man, Xi Jinping. And there, there's a big trade-off. This is the 100th anniversary year of the Communist Party. We are entering into this summer of an extraordinary propaganda tsunami, where they will be talking about how the Communist Party is the most effective, efficient, and wise government in the world. Look at the economic growth for the last 4 decades. There are economic reasons for them to stay their hand because China's computer companies, tech industries, are completely dependent on semiconductors from one of the world's most important companies. Although it's not very well known, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation makes the lion's share of the world's most advanced computer chips. In these ultra high-tech fabs on the island of Taiwan. So much of that would be in real danger if there was a really bad war with America. They would face an economic shock, a diplomatic shock. And so they would have to have a really good reason to take such a gigantic risk.

It sounds as if there are more reasons to hold off such an invasion than there are to pursue one now. I mean, why are the lights flashing so brightly then?

The passage of time is a real dilemma for China. So if you're looking at China's growing economic strength or China's growing military strength, every year that passes looks like an advantage. So you could wait. But if you look at every year that passes in terms of how the Taiwanese people think of themselves, if you ask them what their identity is, every year that passes they're more likely to say they're Taiwanese. So there is a problem with the passage of time. On the one hand, China keeps getting stronger. On the other hand, the people of Taiwan which is a multi-party democracy where people get to choose their own leaders, they are less and less interested in becoming part of China.

And this whole discussion sort of presumes that the only way out here is some kind of confrontation. I mean, there is an offer on the table from Beijing to Taiwan to settle matters peacefully.

Yes, the good news is that China's plan A is what they call peaceful reunification. And the offer is a bit like the offer made to Hong Kong, lots and lots of autonomy under one country, two systems, that Taiwan would still be capitalist and would have its own local government and would just have to, you know, accept overall leadership from China. The problem with that offer is that the Taiwanese people have run their own affairs for the last 70 years, and they have never been under communist Chinese rule. They consider themselves a separate country. And as communist China becomes more and more authoritarian and hardline, and in particular as China has spent the last couple of years breaking, if not smashing, all of its promises of preserving Western-style freedoms in Hong Kong, the people of Taiwan can see that. The peaceful offer that China thinks is a pretty good deal looks less and less credible to the people of Taiwan. So that's another reason for real gloom, that this fragile equilibrium that has kept the peace for the last several decades is really breaking down. And it's breaking down because of China's own aggressive authoritarian behavior.

David, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondents, take out a subscription to The Economist. Get a great introductory deal at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. Since 1900, the planet has lost more trees than it did in the than in the preceding 10,000 years. Almost half of habitable land is now used for farming. That repurposing of the Earth has all kinds of knock-on effects, from reducing water security to increasing net carbon emissions. It's also correlated with a rise in brand-new pathogens. Of the more than 200 new infectious human diseases found between 1940 and 2008, Nearly two-thirds had made the jump from vertebrate animals.

The more intensely that humans engage with nature and wildlife, the more risk there is for diseases to spill over.

Claire McHugh writes for The Economist.

In the past 20 to 30 years or so, there's a growing body of evidence that's pointing the finger at the way we harm the environment. It's just worth bearing in mind that it's not at the point of saying that there's a cause and effect between these harmful environmental practices and the outbreak of zoonotic diseases, but it's more that one is a factor in the other. So if you look at the detective work around the search for the origins of COVID-19, there's a lot of competing theories, and we might not ever get to the bottom of that particular question, but the science suggests that there is a connection here, but more research is needed to understand exactly how the disease arrives in humans.

So what kind of environmental practices are implicated in emergent diseases?

It's anything to do with clearing wilderness. So as the world's population has grown, these vast swathes of forest have been cleared for urbanization, industry such as mining, and agriculture. At the same time as humans have radically changed the surface of the Earth, there's been a more frequent arrival of new pathogens. So science suggests that infectious disease outbreaks are actually on rise, and of these, the majority are zoonotic. That means that they've been transmitted from an animal to a human, for example, the influenza virus or the virus that causes HIV/AIDS, and most recently COVID-19. But there are other diseases too, not necessarily zoonotic ones. So vector-borne diseases have also been on the rise. These are diseases such as Zika and dengue fever, which are transmitted by the infected bite of a mosquito or another creature such as a tick.

But one clear factor here that you point out is the clearing of land. Why would it be that cutting trees down leads to an increase in pathogens, in disease?

So if you think about what happens when you cut down trees, you're cutting down trees to make way for human activity. This then increases the contact between humans and wildlife in a way that would never normally happen in nature. Scientists found that there was a correlation between a loss of forest cover and Ebola outbreaks in Central Africa between 2004 and 2014. Ebola is a deadly virus, and it's transmitted by infected primates, so apes and fruit bats. There was also a study that was done in 2017 that looked at 67 countries where malaria is actually endemic, and they found that there was a positive association between the rates of deforestation and the prevalence of malaria. In the majority of the cases, those researchers found that it was agriculture and rural population growth that were driving the deforestation.

And what about agriculture itself as a potential contributor to this problem?

Yeah, so it's not that agriculture creates disease as such, but it creates scenarios in which the transmission of disease is more likely to happen. So I think one big element of agriculture and disease outbreak is that it's reducing biodiversity. And what happens as a result of that is that creatures like rodents, mosquitoes, bats, and some primates can proliferate. And these are also creatures that have been known to harbor zoonoses.

And another place where animals and humans interact after a fashion, I suppose, is in wildlife markets. And certainly the market in Wuhan was implicated in the original transmission of SARS-CoV-2. How does that figure into the dynamic here?

Yeah, so there's a lot of focus on wildlife markets and the role they play in disease outbreak. I think it's basically that you are cramming animals together in unnatural conditions in a way that they would never be in the wild, and you're also putting humans in close contact with these wild creatures and therefore just creating lots of susceptible bodies for these viruses to jump into. The SARS outbreak in 2002 was thought to have been started by somebody eating a contaminated civet, which is a little animal, which was probably infected by a bat which carried the original SARS coronavirus. The global wildlife trade has increased in value fivefold between 2005 and 2019. So in 2019, it was worth $107 billion.

And in April, the World Health Organization actually called for countries to suspend the sale of these live wild animals I mean, tighter control of wildlife markets is one thing, but if a greater driving force here is land use change and population growth, a lot of this stuff is going to be impossible to control.

Yes. And, you know, one of the experts that I spoke to made that point that diseases like Zika and West Nile, none of those came from wildlife markets. So we really need to be looking at which parts of the world have really high biodiversity and are also at high risk of land use change. So, you know, the Brazilian Amazon, for example, or Central Africa and the rainforest of the Congo, how the people who live around these forests interacting with nature and the wildlife within it, the more we can educate these people on the risk of interacting with wildlife in a certain way and having more sustainable environmental practices, whether that's regulations on agriculture or rules around wet markets and the hunting of bushmeat, then all of these things could prevent disease spillover. Because it's not just environmental factors that play a role, it's other things such as migration. What role does conflict play in all of this? So biodiversity and the environment are just one of a complex interplay of factors that affect disease outbreak in humans. But the staggering cost of the pandemic has shown that it is so important to protect biodiversity, not just climate change, because We cannot afford another pandemic.

Thanks very much for your time, Claire.

Thanks, Jason. It was great to chat.

Dog.

Hey, dog.

That's right, you dog.

Bunny is a canine TikTok star with more than 6 million followers. Her owner, Alexis Devine, says she's taught Bunny to communicate with her by pressing buttons.

I've been teaching Bunny to speak using AAC, or augmentative and alternative communication, for about—

She isn't the only dog owner who's touting her canine companion's cleverness at communication. There's also Stella.

Stella, what's wrong?

Who is owned by Christina Hunger, a speech pathologist. But how much of this poking at buttons is an expression of language?

Dogs are incredibly expressive, and so many humans want to know if they could speak to us, what they would say.

Lane Greene writes Johnson, our column on language.

But linguists have been skeptical for some time now of the idea of talking animals.

So before we get into the principled linguist's argument, let's just have this out. These dogs I've seen on the internet evidently forming sentences with buttons. Are they communicating? Are they talking?

Well, I think we have to start with forming sentences. Mostly what they're doing is stepping on buttons that play a single prerecorded word. So It's considered an achievement when they step on a button that says "food" when they want food and step on a button that says "outside" when they want to go outside. But their owners also claim that they will string along a couple of words into meaningful utterances, maybe the owner's name, like Christina, and then "food" and then "love you," meaning something like, Christina, if you give me food, I will love you, presumably. We have communication, but I think the question is whether that communication can really be called language.

So is it? I mean, what are the arguments here?

Well, one of the founding moments of modern linguistics is in the 1950s when B.F. Skinner was at the height of his fame as the proponent of behavioralist psychology. And he basically would condition pigeons and mice to do things by giving them a stimulus and then a reward, and that feedback would cause certain behaviors. And Skinner wrote that human language was very little different, that it was essentially a conditioned response, a response to a stimulus. If people get praised for speaking, they'll speak more. Noam Chomsky, who's one of the founding fathers of kind of modern linguistics, just devastated that position of Skinner's in a review of his book and described all of the ways in which human language is unpredictable and complex and completely different from something so simple as a conditioned response to a stimulus. Human language is incredibly complex. We do things like talk about things that aren't true, things that might be true, conditionals like if-then situations. We joke, we play, we create fiction, we lie. We do lots of things that are not strictly very are useful a lot of the time.

Okay, so fair enough, this is not language per se, but these dogs do seem at least to be trying to communicate?

Well, yes, they do seem to be trying to communicate. In fact, dogs have been able to understand lots of words, and we know quite a bit about what they can understand. There are even dogs that have learned to memorize the names of hundreds of their own toys. Some breeds are more intelligent, and Border Collies seem to be very good at this kind of thing. And Christina Hunger, who is Stella's owner, she works with children who are unable to speak or are developing speech quite late, or having trouble with it. And in the field that she works in, she often uses tablet computers to get children to press buttons that help them communicate rather than speaking as they might with their mouth. And this gives the families and the children a lot more communication than they otherwise would get. And so this is what led Ms. Hunger to kind of come up with a button system for her dog.

Okay, so we can't call it language yet, but I mean, you have to laud the effort to try to turn the rich communication systems that do exist into something that we can more easily perceive.

Well, first I just want to inject a note of skepticism about what we're actually seeing. We don't have any outside verification that these dogs are really systematically using these buttons to communicate correctly, although Bunny, one of the two we've been talking about, is being studied at the University of California San Diego in the comparative cognition lab there. But in the meantime, I would say that rather than try to rig up this button system, there are lots of good books you can buy about your dog's own system of communication, the way your animal will communicate naturally and comfortably. And if you learn your dog's signals, You might find you know exactly when they want to go outside, when they're hungry, when they want to snuggle, when they want to be left alone, and so forth. And so I think one of the whole points of having a dog is to have another species in your house. Because after all, even the best-trained dog is a pretty poor conversationalist in human terms, but they are brilliant ones on their own.

Lane, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review, and we'll see you back here tomorrow.