New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential candidate, on Tuesday proposed turning Kinmen County into a hub for Chinese tourism and investments.
The county could also become a medical and healthcare hub for Chinese medical tourists, and could import electricity and natural gas from China’s Fujian Province to ensure supply, he said.
Hou also said he “respects the wishes of” some Kinmen residents who call for a referendum on a bridge linking the county with Xiamen, China.
Putting aside the gross national security concerns related to all of those proposals, making any part of Taiwan more reliant on China would put residents at the mercy of Beijing, and is the opposite direction that Taiwan has been moving toward.
Making Kinmen reliant on gas and electricity from Fujian would put the county at the same disadvantage that faced the British in Hong Kong for several decades starting in the 1960s.
By 1965, Hong Kong was importing 80 percent of its water from China’s Guangdong Province, which at times caused fears that China would cut off supply to solve its own water woes.
Economically, the global trend is toward reducing reliance on China. Former US president Donald Trump talked about “decoupling” from China, and introduced tariffs and curbs when trading with China. The administration of US President Joe Biden has said that decoupling from China would not be possible, but has emphasized efforts to “de-risk” the US-China trade relationship.
On Aug. 9, Biden signed an executive order that would prohibit US companies from investing in “sensitive” technologies in China.
An article published by Foreign Policy on Jan. 11 last year said that to succeed in reducing reliance on China, “Biden needs to abandon his unilateral policies and mobilize collective action with countries that have substantial trade with — and investments in — China.”
Such action might be possible, since Germany last month announced that it would “reduce its dependence on China in ‘critical sectors’ including medicine, lithium batteries used in electric cars and elements essential to chipmaking,” CNN reported on July 14.
“Our aim is not to decouple [from Beijing]. But we want to reduce critical dependencies in the future,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz posted on X, in language reminiscent of that used by the Biden administration.
This follows a resolution arrived at by EU ministers at a meeting in May, when EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell said: “When a dependency is too big, it’s a risk,” in reference to the bloc’s economic relationship with China.
A DW report said that “more than 42 percent of Taiwan’s exports go to China, from where Taiwan gets around 22 percent of its imports.” The two economies are interdependent, with China supplying Taiwanese tech companies with the raw materials they need, and Taiwanese companies providing China with high-end computer chips and other components that China cannot make on its own, the report said.
The administration of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) know the risks presented by the nation’s economic reliance on China and has long made moves to reduce that reliance.
Hon Hai Group founder Terry Gou (郭台銘) — who is mulling a presidential run — told a forum in Washington that Taiwan should avoid becoming too dependent on China, and should seek closer economic integration with the US and Japan.
It is quite odd to see Hou taking the opposite approach, and espousing closer dependence of Kinmen on China.
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