The government has recently reinforced its ban on job banks helping companies to recruit Taiwanese staff to work in China and told them to delete any such vacancies from their listings.
From the short-term national security perspective, I completely support the ban, given the close connection between talent flow and national security.
However, this ban can only cure the symptom. The only way to cure the cause is to think harder about why talented Taiwanese can be poached by China.
People can accuse China of twisting the arms of Taiwanese with crude offers of big money.
However, on the other hand, why are Chinese companies willing to pay salaries at least twice as high as their Taiwanese competitors for the same employees, while Taiwanese firms think they pay their employees too much?
A friend of mine told me something about his experience of negotiating salaries with Taiwanese and Chinese companies. In summary, although China does have a tendency to grab employees by offering high salaries, this is aimed not only at Taiwanese, but to grab talent from around the world.
In contrast, when Taiwanese companies talk about salaries, they often start by saying: “You know, the situation here in Taiwan is a bit different from China, so salaries here can hardly compare with over there.”
The salaries they offer are usually less than half of those in China, or even only one-third. How, then, can Taiwan expect to retain talent, let alone attract talent from all over the world?
The problem is clearly a matter of salaries. According to news reports, most of the vacancies deleted from job bank listings were in preschool education.
This shows that the outflow of talent from Taiwan does not only affect the technology sector.
Brain drain is an unfortunate result of Taiwan’s long-standing practice of keeping salaries low. Talented people might go over to China, or they might go off to Japan, South Korea, the US or Europe.
This is a long-term national security problem, and the solution is definitely not to restrict the publication of recruitment ads.
When salary earners feel that their talent is out of proportion to their salary, this discrepancy becomes a loophole through which China can influence Taiwan’s national security.
Yang Li-jing is a freelancer.
Translated by Julian Clegg
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS