important as what taiwan does is what washington does. i'm wondering if you step back from all of this, where do you think u.s. china relations are? because that's going to determine whether this particular hot spot explodes. it started off badly with the anchorage summit and such, seems to have gotten better since the last biden/xi summit. has there been genuine progress on building a kind of working relationship or was that just show and no substance? >> if you look at u.s./china relations, exactly like you mentioned, it's probably more important factor for how china thinks about taiwan than just what's happening domestically within taiwan. in the last couple of months, particularly since the biden xi meeting outside of san francisco, we've seen u.s. china relations stabilize to some extent. i would still say competition still defines u.s./china relations but it is interesting