Taiwan is likely to face supply chain disruptions amid the heightened territorial dispute in the East China Sea between Japan and China, local media said.
The territorial dispute over the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) has spurred anti-Japanese protests across China, prompting well-known Japanese companies to suspend their operations at various Chinese plants.
The close three-way partnership between Taiwan, Japan and China makes Taiwan prone to exposure to supply chain disruptions in the event of a trade war between the world’s second and third-biggest economies, the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) quoted Bureau of Foreign Trade Deputy Director-General Chen Ming-shy (陳銘師) as saying.
For example, Japanese firms ship critical auto parts to Taiwan which Taiwanese workers assemble, adding value before they are shipped onward to assembly plants in China, Chen said, adding that any trade war between Japan and China could seriously disrupt this supply chain.
China is Japan’s top exporting and importing country, while Japan is Taiwan’s top importing country and its fourth-largest exporting country, official data indicate.
Eberhard Sandschneider, director of the Research Institute of the German Society for Foreign Policy in Berlin, said in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel that the dispute has a greater potential of triggering a trade war than it does an armed clash.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last