See how the Lai lands: Taiwan's new president

This episode discusses the political and societal implications of William Lai's inauguration as Taiwan's new president, focusing on his stance towards China and the domestic challenges he faces.

1. William Lai's presidency begins under the shadow of China's disapproval and the delicate political balance of Taiwan’s status.
2. Lai advocates for strengthening Taiwanese identity and self-determination while maintaining the status quo with China.
3. Domestic challenges loom large, with political strife evident in Taiwan's parliament.
4. Lai's approach includes bolstering Taiwan’s defenses and enhancing ties with other democratic nations.
5. The Taiwanese public largely supports maintaining the status quo, reflecting a cautious optimism about the future.

1: Inauguration Overview

The episode opens with an overview of William Lai's inauguration ceremony, capturing the mix of traditional elements and the charged political atmosphere. Alice Hsu: "William Lai is known for being an advocate of Taiwanese identity, sovereignty, and self-determination."

2: Domestic and International Stance

Discussion on Lai's pragmatic yet firm approach towards China, maintaining peace without provoking unnecessary conflict. Alice Hsu: "He's committed to keeping the status quo."

3: Public Opinion and Future Challenges

Analysis of public opinion in Taiwan and the potential future challenges Lai might face during his presidency. Alice Hsu: "Polling shows that 80% of the Taiwanese public wants to see reciprocal cross-strait exchanges."

1. Understand the importance of national sovereignty in global politics.
2. Recognize the role of public opinion in shaping political actions.
3. Learn about the balance of maintaining traditional values while embracing modern governance.
4. Explore the impact of international relations on domestic policies.
5. Stay informed about global political changes and their implications.

Domestic divisions are already complicating the daunting task William Lai Ching-te has set himself: strengthening Taiwan while maintaining its ambiguous geopolitical status quo. With more and more big firms choosing to stay private—with good reason—the stockmarket is shrinking (09:37). And dating apps are putting an end to the lonely-hearts advertisement (16:47).

People

William Lai Qingde, Alice Hsu

Companies

None

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

Alice Hsu

Content Warnings:

None

Yahoo Finance
When it comes to your finances, you think you've done it all. You've saved, you've researched, and you've invested all that you can. Now it's time to take those investments to the next level by using the brand behind every great investor. Yahoo. Finance as America's number one finance destination, Yahoo.

Finance has everything you need, whether you're a seasoned trader or just dipping your toes into the market. Join the millions of investors who trust Yahoo Finance to guide them on their financial journey. For comprehensive financial news and analysis, visit Yahoo Finance.com comma. The number one financial destination, Yahoofinance.com dot.

Jason Palmer
The Economist hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

There are fewer and fewer stock market listings these days because more and more companies are choosing, with good reason, to stay private. We look at how to stop the market disappearing altogether, and there's a genre of advertisement that's on the way out that already feels anachronistic. The lonely hearts adjust. Our correspondent sifts through centuries of them, finding that even as society has shifted, what the lonely want has stayed the same.

But first.

Alice Hsu
Taiwan's national events are always somewhat delicate, given its complicated political status. And the inauguration of William Lai Qingda, Taiwan's new president, was no exception. Alice Hsu is our senior China correspondent and co hosts Drum Tower, our weekly show on China. On Monday, I joined thousands of others in front of the presidential office in the capital, Taipei, to watch him ascend to Taiwan's highest office. There was all the pomp and circumstance of the Republic of China, which is Taiwan's official name and dates back to 1912, when it was founded in mainland China.

So there was a 21 gun salute, the national anthem, and lightsing the taking an oath before a giant portrait of Chiang Kai shek.

But many people in Taiwan no longer identify with China. William Lai in particular, is known for being an advocate of taiwanese identity, sovereignty, and self determination.

He's promising to make the country the world's Taiwan rather than China's Taiwan, and Beijing is not too happy about it. Chinese officials say Mister Lai is a separatist who should be nailed to a pillar of historical shame. They say Lai will steer Taiwan towards war, even though China is the one stepping up aggression around the island. Maintaining the status quo and Taiwan's de facto independence is not going to be easy now. Alice we spoke about William Lai in January when the election was first held.

Jason Palmer
Remind us where he stands in this delicate dance between Taiwan and China. So William Lai was the outgoing president, Tsai ing wen's vice president. He's a deeply experienced politician, and actually he's these days known for being quite pragmatic and moderate. But still, he's somebody who hopes to strengthen Taiwan and who speaks up quite a lot about Taiwan's sovereignty. And that's something that China doesn't like.

Alice Hsu
In his inauguration speech on Monday, Lai Tingda actually didn't say anything very surprising. He said mostly the same things that Tsai Ing wen has said. He said he doesn't want to provoke China. He's committed to keeping the status quo. And he didn't call for any kind of constitutional change or declaration or referendum on independence.

But he did make it very clear that China should stop intimidating Taiwan. And he also invited China to open up tourism and student exchanges across the Taiwan Strait.

So Lai was trying to make it clear that he wants to preserve peace and stability. At the same time, he said Taiwan's people should have no delusions about China's intentions to annex the island.

China's response to William Lai's statements was, predictably, quite disapproving. Chinese officials have said, no matter what Lai says, the fact is Taiwan is a part of China and its future should not be decided by the 23 million people of Taiwan, but by the 1.4 billion citizens of China, of which, again, Taiwan is a part. Okay, so clearly, leaders in China are not too happy about this. But what about the general public? How do they feel about Mister Lai?

Well, Mister Lai's cross straight stance actually does reflect taiwanese public opinion. If you look at the polling, the vast majority of taiwanese people are in favor of keeping the status quo for now or forever. Actually, if you look more closely at the polling, only about a quarter of taiwanese people say they want to move towards independence, whether now or later, and only 7.4% want to move towards unification. So when Mister Lai says, I'm gonna keep the status quo, that is very popular. And actually, when he says, I want to have exchanges with China, that's popular too.

Polling shows that 80% of the taiwanese public wants to see reciprocal cross strait exchanges.

One of the people I met at the inauguration was a 60 year old dentist named Zhang Guanyin. And he told me that he actually went to high school with Lai Tinge. So he was extremely proud, very excited to say, like, my high school classmate is now the president. I'm so happy to be here. But at the same time, when I asked him, where do you hope President Lai will take Taiwan?

He said, well, I hope that we can have peaceful dialogue with China. You know, that's the only way that we can lower tensions. And he's not alone. A recent study by National Taiwan University found that more than half of Taiwan people believe war could happen in the next five years. So again, the public in Taiwan is concerned.

They are proud to be taiwanese. They assert that identity, but at the same time, they want to avoid conflict, and they're eager to keep the status quo. And how does Mister Lai say he's going to walk that delicate line? Well, basically, two things Mister Lai says. One, Taiwan needs to bolster its defenses.

People need to have no delusions about China's intentions and get serious about defense. And also, Taiwan needs to strengthen its ties with other democratic nations. He actually said he wants Taiwan to become the democratic world's mvp, the most valuable player. And one way to do that is to make Taiwan a key supplier of sensitive technologies like advanced chips, which Taiwan already dominates, but also equipment for AI, drones, satellites, and other kinds of military gear. So a bunch of ambitions, from international diplomacy to industrial policy.

Jason Palmer
What do you rate his chances to be to get all of that done? Well, Mister Lai is going to face major domestic challenges. Actually, the main difference between him and his predecessor, Tsai Ing wen, is that Mister Lai was elected as president, but his party has lost the majority that it held in parliament for the last eight years. And even in the days right before his inauguration and following his inauguration, you could already see that divisions within parliament were causing turmoil. There was a big fight that broke out when opposition parliamentarians tried to push through a set of reform bills without following standard process, and six parliamentarians ended up in the hospital yesterday, the day after the inauguration, the parliamentarians returned to their standoff in the chamber and thousands of people gathered outside the parliament to protest.

Alice Hsu
A lot of the protesters were saying they were angry because they thought the opposition parties were trying to expand their power in an unconstitutional way. So you can see that Mister Lai already has his work cut out for him with all these domestic divisions. And I suppose those kinds of divisions are exactly the sort of thing that officials in Beijing would like to see. Yeah, actually, a chinese official recently said Lai Qing de is a traitor to mainstream public opinion. So you can see that China is really playing up these divisions.

And Mister Lai addressed this in his inauguration speech directly. He called on all political parties to cooperate in the nation's interests, and he hinted that there is a danger of certain political parties working with hostile forces, aka China. So, you know, Jason, it's really not an easy job for Mister Lai. He wants to be a stability and continuity president. He wants to maintain peace.

He wants to maintain the status quo. But he is facing a lot of pressure, not only from across the Taiwan Strait, but also from within Taiwan itself. Thanks very much for joining us, Alice. Thank you. If you're a subscriber to Economist podcasts plus, you can hear more from Alice on this week's episode of Drum Tower.

Jason Palmer
Its the second in a three part series focusing on another regional neighbor, Japan, and why blue collar chinese workers are heading there in droves. Find it wherever you got this show. And if youre not a subscriber to Economist podcasts plus its a great time to sign up until the end of the month. Its half off, just a couple of bucks a month. Search for Economist podcasts to get yourself behind the velvet rope.

Janice Torres
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What would you like the power to do? Bank of America NA copyright 2024.

Jason Palmer
Pretty much the most basic thing in economics is the law of supply and demand. When the price of something goes up, producers are supposed to want to bring more of it to market. Pretty fundamental stuff in theory, but that is not what's happening in global stock markets.

Mike Bird
Stock prices have been doing pretty well in the last year or so. They're up around 17% globally. That puts them pretty near record levels. Mike Bird is our Asia business and finance editor and a host of our sister show money talks. You might well expect that the price going up would induce more companies to bring their stocks into the market.

But what's actually happening is that the supply of stocks, both in the US and globally, is shrinking. The pace of company listings is going slower than it was last year, and a lot of big companies like ByteDance, OpenAI, and SpaceX are remaining private for much longer. Well, why? There's some interesting arguments around this. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has fretted about this a little bit this year.

He's cited a number of things, including demand for environmental, social, and governance reporting for listed companies, which obviously private companies don't have to do as much of pressure to meet investor demands for quarterly earnings, things that listed companies face that unlisted ones don't. But it's also a side effect of something more positive that's happening for company founders, which is that you simply have more options for raising cash. You can stay private for a lot longer. Private equity funds have gotten much bigger. They managed about $8.2 trillion by the middle of last year, more than twice the amount they did in 2018, not all that long ago.

Lots of funds are willing to invest in companies, whether they've gone public or not. There's also been a rise in intangible assets. So these are things that companies hold. Not physical things like machinery and buildings and land, but things like copyright and software and brand value and intellectual property. Now, it's hard to put valuations on those things.

And stock market requirements for financial disclosures really favor companies with tangible assets, those physical things you can't hide machinery or buildings, but intangible assets like ideas, research, and the output of research is more closely guarded because you don't want all of your competitors to see these things as soon as you've come up with them. Withholding that sort of information may mean the company is undervalued if it lists in public markets, whereas private investors may have a better idea of what's going on with the company. So sound reasons, many of them, but it sounds as if lots of things will then be going on more behind closed doors, I guess. What does that mean for investors? I think that's exactly right.

And behind closed doors is the crucial element there. Public markets are more transparent than private markets. All of these listing requirements, which companies no doubt occasionally find annoying, means that we have a lot of data on the aggregate strength of the market, what's going on on corporate balance sheets, what's going on with investments in the way that we don't have for private equity investments. Fewer stocks in public markets means less for investors, for analysts, for regulators to monitor. There's also a question of whether this may reduce public support for business friendly government policies.

If you're invested in the stock market, you have a keen interest that the government isn't over regulating everything, overtaxing corporate enterprise. If these companies are simply unlisted, they're not accessible to you, you have much less of an interest in that being the case. Basically, as an ordinary person, you're less likely to benefit from corporate profits and any growth in corporate profits. So what does that mean for the stock markets themselves then? Will they just get smaller and smaller?

Well, there's something interesting going on here and it is basically that the changing behavior of institutional investors, so big investors like banks, insurance companies, pension funds, may limit the damage of a shrinking stock market. So among those institutional investors, private equity investments now make up about 10% of their assets. That's up from 6% five years earlier. That's basically the mirror image of the decline in their investment in listed companies. So basically, there is still a way for households, for ordinary people to find exposure to these new private investments through things like pension funds, through mutual funds.

As long as they can get access to private equity, there is still some amount of exposure that an ordinary investor can get to what are otherwise quite opaque and private markets. So if the long run of this is that there are fewer listed companies, people don't get to see as much what's going on with their money, the connection with business and policy is broken a little bit. How to reverse this trend? Well, there are a number of things that people talk about. One is that regulators could impose tighter requirements on large companies that don't list.

That's quite difficult to do. Or they could perhaps reduce the information that companies are forced to share when they go public. This is a more popular option, although it's had mixed results in the past. In America, the Jobs act that you may remember from the Obama era passed in 2012, reduced requirements on new companies ipoing. And it did boost flotations, ipos by about 25%, according to some research.

But crucially, it did so by boosting lower quality offerings from companies that then underperformed. So it's not really solving the issue. You are getting a bigger stock market, but not by the means that you really want. So what is going to fix it if that straightforward policy is not? Well, ironically, the best hope for stock markets is probably the greed of private equity investors.

Public markets still provide an opportunity for private equity investors to turn those private holdings into money. And actually, there aren't always a lot of other ways to do this. If you've invested in a promising young company and it's turned into a behemoth, but it's privately owned, you'll eventually want to reap the profit on that. Private equity funds right now are sitting on more than $3 trillion in unsold assets. And because there aren't as many stock market listings, there are investors who want their money turned into cash at some point when they desperately want that money back.

These private equity funds will have to think about going for flotations of some of these companies. But until then, shrinking markets are still a cause for some reasonable concern. Mike, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

Catherine Nixey
It turns out that Mister Darcy was undermining. Catherine Nixie is a Britain correspondent for the Economist. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen implies that he's a really picky paramour because he likes his beloved to have fine eyes, a thorough knowledge of music and a mind improved by extensive reading.

But if you read actual georgian lonely heart advertisements, it becomes clear that he was pretty lax. Others were much fussier, demanding, among other things, that their beloveds should be not fat, have a good set of teeth and a bosom that is full, plump, firm and white.

Lonely hearts advertisements are more than 300 years old, and now they are almost over. Dating apps have taken their place. Tinder is running ads now in british cinemas which tempt viewers to just go out and find someone romantic. Adverts once spread over pages and pages of newspapers and periodicals, but now their presence has withered away. But their historical value remains brief as a haiku, but often far blunter.

These ads illuminate Britain's centuries long search for the one, that elusive soul who is willing, loving and, as one romantic advertiser requested, of no bodily deformity.

Lonely hearts have always existed. But the lonely hearts genre itself dates back to the late 17th century. Perhaps the very first example appeared in 1695 in a pleasingly titled pamphlet on collections for the improvement of husbandry and trade. Appropriately, near promotions for a stallion and a bird appeared an advert for a gentleman of about 30 years of age. They came about in this period because the industrial revolution manufactured not just products on an industrial scale, but loneliness on it as well.

In the 18th and 19th century, hundreds of thousands of Britons migrated each year to London, where many experienced the kind of acute isolation that only crowds can offer. London, which had a million inhabitants by 1800, offered numerous potential lovers. But without the filters of family and friends, it felt almost impossible, one novelist. Wrote, to find the one eel out of a colossal bag of snakes. But where connections couldn't help people to find suitable matches, advertising stepped in.

This offered a way to filter London's thousands by such criteria as their weight, which, as adverts made clear, should favour plumpness, their skin, which should be clear, their ankles shapely, was preferred, and even their opinions, such as perhaps on that all important question of eels versus snakes.

The romantic movement may have thrived in Britain at the turn of the 19th century, but it seems to have taken quite some time to make its way to Dorset. There, in 1832, a widower placed an ad explaining that he desired a new wife because his last one was dead, and he wanted someone to look after. The pigs while I'm out at work. In some ways, if you read through these lonely harts herds, they're evidence of great change in Britain. Few today are going to demand pig husbandry from their paramour.

But in another way, very little is different. As long ago as the 17th century, one plump, fresh, free and willing widow was advertising for a nice young workman to in what is arguably another amateur. First send me a picture of your tool. That might have been satire, but people's preferences have remained startlingly similar. Georgians wanted men who are tall, rich, and educated, and women who are young, shapely, and intelligent, though not, one advert warned a wit.

And research on modern dating apps shows that women still tend to look for wealth, status, and height, while men seek out women who are slim, young, and educated, but not too educated. Wits are still unwanted.

As the genre aged, it changed. Victorians specialized in starchy soppiness, while racy edwardian bachelor girls merely sought chums.

The tone changed, too, from blunt requests to self referential irony. In the London Review of Books, a worthy literary magazine, advertisers started to brag about their beetroot wine rather than their bodies, and to say such obliquely brainy things as sexually I'm more of a Switzerland. Other advertisers offered possibly ironic confessions, likes. To be referred to as wing commander. In the bedroom, exclaimed m 41, while f 29 listed her hobbies as crying and hating men.

But even in these archly worded adverts, the age old blend of self love, self loathing, and hope that all dating and genders can be detected. I hate you all, began another unusually honest ad, also in the London Review of Books. I hate London. I hate books. I hate this column, and I hate all the goons who appear in it, though it added, hinting that some hope remained.

If you have large breasts and are younger than 30, then the author wrote, I put all that aside and meet you.

Jason Palmer
That's all for this episode of the intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

Yahoo Finance
When it comes to your finances, you think you've done it all. You've saved, you've researched, and you've invested all that you can. Now it's time to take those investments to the next level by using the brand behind every great investor. Yahoo. Finance as americas number one finance destination, Yahoo.

Finance has everything you need, whether youre a seasoned trader or just dipping your toes into the market. Join the millions of investors who trust Yahoo finance to guide them on their financial journey. For comprehensive financial news and analysis, visit yahoo. Finance.com. Comma.

The number one financial destination Yahoo. Finance.com dot.