Shelley Rigger is a professor of East Asian politics at Davidson College and a non-resident fellow at the Taiwan Studies Program at Nottingham University. She is the author of numerous books and articles about Taiwan’s society and domestic politics as well as cross-strait issues, including Why Taiwan Matters (2011), and most recently, The Tiger Leading the Dragon (2021). The following is a lightly edited transcript of an interview that took place largely before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.