Must a city be large to be competitive? An annual report entitled the Global Urban Competitiveness Report prepared by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a group of international academics is very helpful in answering this question. While the report focuses on different aspects each year, it is clear that the size of a city is not in direct correlation to competitiveness. Some very small cities lead others in terms of competitiveness.
While the 2006 study was headed up by metropolises such as New York, London, Paris and Los Angeles — all several times bigger than Taipei in terms of population — the top 20 also included Copenhagen, Philadelphia and Santiago, which are much smaller than Taipei. Last year, there were slight changes in the makeup of the top 20 cities. New York, London and Paris were still in the lead, but the number of cities with populations smaller than Taipei increased to 10.
In 2006, Taipei ranked No. 48, and last year, 112, while cities that ranked in the top 20 such as Copenhagen, Stockholm, Washington, Boston and Helsinki only had populations of 500,000 to 600,000, a mere fifth of Taipei’s population. Megalopolises such as Mexico City, Chongqing and even Shanghai often lagged behind Taipei in terms of competitiveness. The rankings of cities around the world clearly show that it is not true that cities must be large to be competitive.
If it is true that cities must be large to drive a nation’s development, like the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has been saying, smaller nations such as Sweden with a population of only 9 million, Switzerland with about 7 million, Denmark and Finland with 5 million each and Norway with only 4 million would never have developed at all.
Their populations are not even half the size of Shanghai or Mexico City and even if their populations were combined, they would still be smaller than Chongqing’s. However, these countries always rank high in national competitiveness, way ahead of China with its population of more than 1 billion people. In addition, while the population of their capital cities may only be several hundred thousand, they rank far ahead of metropolises like Beijing, Shanghai and even Tokyo and Hong Kong in competitiveness.
Less developed or newly industrialized countries need to make a conscious effort to concentrate their resources in large cities and using the countryside as a base for providing markets and cheap labor to support urban development. However, this strategy is not necessarily applicable to a developed nation, and totally unsuitable for a small nation like Taiwan.
Taiwan did use rural areas as a base from which to gather and send resources to cities to aid urban development.
Before its economy took off, Taiwan adopted a strategy of using agriculture to support industry that involved exploiting villages to support the development of Taipei, which at the time had a population of only 200,000.
The combined population of Taipei and Kaohsiung is now more than 6 million and when the population of the combined metropolises of Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung surpasses 10 million, it will be impossible to keep Taiwan’s main economic base within Taiwan. By that time, Taiwan’s base must be located outside of Taiwan itself.
Taiwan was already a developed nation when it joined the WTO.
We must learn how the smaller nations in Europe and even Singapore enhanced their competitiveness.
Instead, the government is looking backward to emulate the regional development strategies of large developing countries.
Lin Cho-shui is a former Democratic Progressive Party legislator.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Last week, Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) unveiled the location of Nvidia’s new Taipei headquarters and announced plans to build the world’s first large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer in Taiwan. In Taipei, Huang’s announcement was welcomed as a milestone for Taiwan’s tech industry. However, beneath the excitement lies a significant question: Can Taiwan’s electricity infrastructure, especially its renewable energy supply, keep up with growing demand from AI chipmaking? Despite its leadership in digital hardware, Taiwan lags behind in renewable energy adoption. Moreover, the electricity grid is already experiencing supply shortages. As Taiwan’s role in AI manufacturing expands, it is critical that
RSS