Being Taiwan. On January 13, in one of this year’s first major elections, voters chose Lai Ching-te—also known as William Lai—as the next president of Taiwan. Lai belongs to the Democratic Progressive Party, which has now won the the country’s last three presidential elections.

In October, Hsin-Hsin Pan, sociologist at Soochow University in Taipei, explored how last week’s vote would be fundamentally a referendum on Taiwan’s relationship with China, why Taiwanese public opinion has been steadily shifting away from unification with the mainland, and why more and more people on the island are fearing an invasion by China.

Tariff men. In July, the American economist Katheryn Russ explored the U.S. administration’s new approach to global trade, presenting a different side of the global shift that Martin Wolf examines today.

Russ, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, explores the U.S. administration’s thinking on jobs and the climate behind its break with generations of traditional U.S. trade policy. She also looks at how the administration is putting these ideas into practice, whether with subsidies to American manufacturers or through restructuring global supply chains.

The Oslo connection. Despite all the partisan malice that might seem to be consuming the democratic world, there’s a widespread, enduring consensus on the indispensability of democracy itself—and the ideas of human freedom it’s built on. That consensus may be fractured, but it’s deep and still resilient.

You can see it in the global response to the invasion of Ukraine, broadly understood as an attack by a powerful autocracy not on an emerging democracy only but on democracy as such.

You can see it in the global response to other assaults on human freedom when they break into the news—whether it’s Tehran’s crackdown on Iranian women protesting after the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the regime’s morality police; Moscow’s cynical, ultimately fatal imprisonment of Alexei Navalny; or Beijing’s Wild West–style cash bounties on dissidents from Hong Kong.

The Signal isn’t just part of this consensus; we’re actively committed to it. It’s central to our mission and underlies some of the most vital questions we explore. Which is why we’re delighted to partner with the Human Rights Foundation on this, the first Signal extra.

In 2009, HRF inaugurated the Oslo Freedom Forum to pay tribute to survivors of Nazism and Soviet communism. They’ve since developed it into an annual event that gives an international platform to democratic dissidents from around the world; cultivates an international network that supports them throughout the year; and in all of it, raises international awareness of what’s at stake in the global clash between dictatorship and democratic life.

And what’s at stake isn’t always so easy to see from the vantage ground of the West. What would the casual shopping choices of European consumers have to do with almost unimaginable political repression in a place like China’s Uyghur region? 

Why would such phenomenally generous sums of money be coursing into prestigious American institutions from the autocracies of the Persian Gulf? Or how would ethically minded investments made with the best of intentions end up supporting authoritarian economies?

Once in a while, the news might include the innocuous-looking citizen of a democratic country arrested and jailed in an autocratic one, only for us to wonder, what did she do to find herself in that kind of trouble? It can be hard to recognize a pawn when we don’t see the board.

Over the next six weeks, we’ll be featuring conversations with participants in this year’s Forum, beginning Thursday with Jason Rezaian. Rezaian is an American journalist, a columnist for The Washington Post, and the author of Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison.

As ever, we’ll love your thoughts along the way: mail@thesgnl.com.

—John Jamesen Gould

This is The Signal. For centuries, change and uncertainty have defined the modern world—and for longer than most of us have been around, media has been central to how we orient ourselves in it and decide its future. Today, with change accelerating and uncertainty spreading, media increasingly determines what we see, how we understand it, and ultimately how we all relate to one another.

Now, technology and culture are combining to shape this situation in ways that would have been hard to predict before the last few years. The digital social networks that drive the distribution of media output to consumers have refined advanced capabilities in using algorithmic learning to predict, manipulate, and monetize user emotions and behavior. The news industry feeding these networks has, meanwhile, become a battlefield for elite moral and political conflicts, leading to coverage that can feel bewildering and alienating to those on the outside. In this context, there’s an atmospheric pressure to embrace dogmatic belief where we have the opportunity to think, defaulting to conflict over communication. Trust in this whole ecosystem has been falling for years. Data shows it. Everyone feels it in some way. It’s an intuitively experienced reality.

The Signal is for people who want something different. We share a firm commitment to liberal democracy, and a deep belief in humanity, but above all we’re in the business of complexity at a time of chronic change and uncertainty. We understand that no one owns the truth, that those who think differently from us often know something we don’t, and that what any of us does know is always overshadowed by mystery. Which is why everything The Signal does starts with questions, and every answer we find leads us to more of them.

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—John Jamesen Gould