Hugo Tierny is a Ph.D. candidate in military history and international relations at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) and the Institut Catholique de Paris (ICP). He has previously lived several years in Taipei, where he developed his passion for the history and geopolitics of East Asia, particularly the unique trajectory of Taiwan. His dissertation explores the links between China’s continental and maritime military strategies, with the Taiwan Strait and China’s Central Asian borderlands as case studies.