Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs Woody Duh (杜紫軍) yesterday urged Taiwan and China to exchange talent in a mutually beneficial manner and refrain from luring key people away from each other.
The strategy of many Chinese businesses to attract Taiwanese professionals with high compensation packages has seriously hurt domestic businesses, Duh said at a cross-strait industrial cooperation forum in Hsinchu.
The two sides should instead engage in a positive exchange of talent, building on the complementary nature of China’s large pool of mathematics and science talent and Taiwan’s innovative and free-thinking youth, Duh said.
Taiwan currently bars Chinese professionals from working in the country, but when the market opens up to them, China will face the same problem of seeing their workers lured away, Duh said.
He hoped China “would come up with a response to limit the malicious solicitation of talent.”
Duh said trade exchanges have increased steadily over the past three decades and the two sides have developed a complementary, yet competitive relationship.
However, faced with global competition and industrial transformation, if the two sides continue to develop based solely on their own interests, the competition between the two sides will far outpace mutual cooperation, he said.
To stem the issue, he called for cross-strait cooperation in major industries, such as the petrochemical, semiconductor and LED sectors.
On China’s proposal on industrial park cooperation, Duh said the issue is complex and should be studied first by think tanks.
Chinese National Development and Reform Commission Vice Chairman Zhang Xiaoqiang (張曉強) proposed to use park cooperation as a platform for reaching a signifcant scale of industrial exchanges.
Duh said that because the issue would probably involve matters related to customs and taxes, he thought think tanks should first study the idea in greater depth. It was agreed that China’s Tsinghua University and Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute would jointly study the matter.
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