The Taiwan Studies Programme (TSP) is delighted to announce a Public Lecture by Dr Euan Graham La Trobe University in Melbourne on Contemplating Taiwan's strange centre-periphery identity in the Indo-Pacific.
Talk abstract
Taiwan leads a double life in the Indo-Pacific. It is an island of central, geostrategic importance. Its possession would improve China’s position in the Pacific substantially, by unlocking the strategic cordon presented by the First Island Chain. A potentially hostile Taiwan, backed by the United States, still presents a check on China’s aspirations to become a fully-fledged maritime and sea power. Taiwan is also pivotal to the Chinese Communist Party’s political legitimacy. Reunification would ensure President Xi Jinping’s legacy as the paramount leader who delivered the “China Dream”. For all these reasons, Taiwan is central to the Indo-Pacific. At the same time, Taipei struggles increasingly for attention, handicapped by its isolation from regional and international forums, and economic eclipse by China. And yet, Taiwan has a further symbolic and demonstrative value, as the sole ethnic-majority Chinese polity that has evolved from a military autocracy into a distinct and sometimes roustabout democracy, which its people are fiercely attached to, down to the grassroots.
Euan Graham
Euan Graham is the Executive Director of La Trobe Asia, at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He has been a close observer of Southeast and Northeast Asian security affairs for more than twenty years, in academia, the private sector, and for the British Government. He previously headed the international security program at the Lowy Institute, in Sydney. Before that he was a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore where he specialised in maritime security. Prior to this he was a research analyst in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and served at the British Embassy in Pyongyang. His most recent Analysis for the Lowy Institute is: “Trump, Kim and the North Korean Nuclear Missile Melodrama”.
Dr Graham’s research interests include Australia’s strategic policy, maritime security and strategy, the Korean Peninsula, and the US role in the Indo-Pacific. He is a regular commentator for the international and Australian media. His book Japan’s Sea Lane Security 1940–2004: A Matter of Life and Death? was the first comprehensive English-language analysis on this subject. He received his PhD from the Australian National University in 2003. Dr Graham is an Associate Fellow at the UK Royal United Services Institute.