While he was on his way to visit the Vatican at the end of last month, Vice President Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) made a low-key airport stopover in the Indian capital, New Delhi. The stopover is reminiscent of that made by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in Mumbai in April 2012 when he was on his way to visit Africa. It is a sign of the Indian government’s goodwill toward Taiwan.
Meanwhile, India has been holding national elections, with the voting taking place in stages. The results are to be announced today. The outcome of the election may have a positive influence on relations between Taiwan and India.
Taiwan has long overlooked the importance of India to itself. From an economic point of view, the two countries’ economic and business structures are largely complementary. A newly released World Bank report says that, calculated on the basis of purchasing power parity, India is now one of the world’s three biggest economies.
Taiwan, with its export-oriented economy, cannot afford to overlook such a huge market. However, trade with India represents a mere 1.1 percent of Taiwan’s total foreign trade, clearly much less than it could be considering India’s economic might.
The recent controversy over the cross-strait service trade agreement has brought out into the open the worries that many people harbor about Taiwan’s excessive dependence on the Chinese market.
If Taiwan did more to develop links with India, it could reduce its reliance on China. In fact, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research and an Indian think tank have completed a study on the feasibility of a Taiwan-India economic and trade framework agreement. This should be taken as the basis for launching official negotiations at the earliest opportunity.
Furthermore, India is a prospective member of the planned Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), so starting negotiations with India on an agreement on economic cooperation would boost Taiwan’s prospects for joining the RCEP.
Rather than going on about future agreements such as the RCEP and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the government should make a pragmatic adjustment in its perspective and add negotiations with India on an economic cooperation agreement as a priority item to its agenda.
Another important field of cooperation with India is that of Chinese-language teaching. India has made Chinese an optional subject in more than 10,000 secondary schools, but the limited number of teachers available has prevented the plan from being fully implemented.
Although China has expressed willingness to support the plan, the generally poor state of relations between China and India makes the latter reluctant to welcome China’s Confucius Institutes.
In contrast, India has shown a welcoming attitude toward Taiwan’s proposals of setting up Taiwan Education Centers to teach the Chinese language in Indian universities.
Although Taiwan’s plans for implementing Chinese-language education abroad have in many parts of the world been outpaced by the Confucius Institutes, which have considerable resources at their disposal, the situation in India is somewhat the reverse.
The Ministry of Education appointed National Tsing Hua University, which has close relations with India, to draw up plans for delivering Chinese-language teaching to Indian students and the university has already set up four teaching centers in institutes of higher education, including state-run polytechnic colleges and universities.
However, India has plenty of room for expansion in terms of Chinese-language teaching. If government departments in Taiwan set their minds to developing the Chinese language teaching market in India, it will be possible to use this as a platform to further expand economic, business and political relations. The Taiwan-India relations of tomorrow may look very different from those of today.
This month’s general election in India may also provide a good opportunity for further promoting Taiwan’s relations with India. Opinion polls indicate that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has a strong chance of winning the vote, in which case its leader, 63-year-old Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, would become prime minister. If Modi forms a Cabinet, his government is expected to focus on economic development and that would be a good opportunity for Taiwan to expand its economic and business exchanges with India.
Modi visited Taiwan in 1999, when he was general secretary of the BJP, making him one of a handful of important Indian political figures to have made such a visit. While serving as Gujarat’s chief minister, he has also worked to attract Taiwanese investors and he has a very positive attitude toward Taiwan. If his party wins and he becomes prime minister, it will be possible for relations between Taiwan and India to enter a new phase of development.
Rather than continually arguing the pros and cons of economic and business relations between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, Taiwanese should seize the opportunity to re-examine India’s importance for Taiwan.
Fang Tien-sze is an assistant professor in National Tsing Hua University’s Center for General Education.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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