Former president Lee Teng-hui (
This statement plays to the longstanding economic discourse in Taiwan that differentiates between us and them. This discourse also encompasses China's "united front" strategy, which says that Beijing is trying to achieve unification through economic means and using business to restrict politics.
The so-called "greater China economic area" is not an economic theory. It is an imaginary community based on businesspeople, Chinese culture and language and economic interests. A "Chinese economic outlook" means placing Taiwan's economy within China's, and using China as the point of departure when interpreting Taiwan's economic problems.
Apart from cultural, ethical and economic considerations, the theoretical grounding for believers in the idea of a greater China economic area is free trade and neoliberalism. They boast that globalization and free trade will create a bigger pie, but say nothing about how much of that pie Taiwan will get, not to mention how many jobs it may cost Taiwan.
Next, people with ulterior motives have recently proposed an economic discourse proposing that research and development (R&D) take place in Taiwan, while production takes place in China, in order to make the government feel good about moving the manufacturing sector to China. They seem to believe that Taiwan will smoothly transform into a knowledge-based economy if it keeps the R&D sector and lets go of manufacturing.
However the US government has realized in recent years that keeping a domestic R&D capacity while moving manufacturing overseas is simply wishful thinking. R&D and manufacturing cannot be separated -- innovation comes from learning by doing during the manufacturing process.
Thus, when you lose manufacturing, you also lose your R&D capacity. Manufacturing has always been one of Taiwan's strong suits, and there is really no reason to abandon the strategy of upgrading traditional industry merely to seek low production costs in China. More importantly, traditional industry is one force in maintaining job opportunities and social stability.
As all this faulty thinking becomes mainstream, it is not surprising to hear people say that Taiwan is still not sufficiently open vis-a-vis China, despite the fact that China gets 90 percent of Taiwan's external investment and 40 percent of its exports, and that 79.5 percent of Taiwan's information hardware is manufactured there.
Although China wants nothing more than to attract Taiwan's industry, the overall political and economic environment, social relations, culture and other intangible factors so crucial to Taiwan's economic development can hardly be duplicated in the short term. These factors, which are closely related to Taiwan and its people, are precisely the key elements Taiwan needs to avoid being marginalized by China.
Once the economic discourses and public policies upholding Taiwan consciousness have been affirmed, policy implementation will follow as a matter of course. This is true not only for the digital industry. Any sector closely related to Taiwan or the atmosphere unique to Taiwan that cannot be duplicated are the source of Taiwan's sustainable economic development.
Huang Ter-yuan is a doctoral student in the Sun Yat-sen Graduate Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities at National Chengchi University.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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