Tue, Jul 29, 2025 page8

• The hidden cost of ‘unification’

  • By Julien Oeuillet 曾樂昂
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  A few weeks ago in Kaohsiung, tech mogul turned political pundit Robert Tsao (曹興誠) joined Western Washington University professor Chen Shih-fen (陳時奮) for a public forum in support of Taiwan’s recall campaign. Kaohsiung, already the most Taiwanese independence-minded city in Taiwan, was not in need of a recall. So Chen took a different approach: He made the case that unification with China would be too expensive to work.

  The argument was unusual. Most of the time, we hear that Taiwan should remain free out of respect for democracy and self-determination, but cost? That is not part of the usual script, and yet, it is a compelling angle, especially for apolitical or undecided citizens.

  To be clear, the core reason Taiwan should remain its own country is its distinct identity, political system and, most importantly, its right to self-determination.

  However, Chen’s argument could sway those who still believe the two sides of the Taiwan Strait share enough cultural or even economic ties to justify unification. Even if you care only about your wallet and are willing to trade freedom for prosperity, unification would not give you what you hope for.

  His argument is that past a certain point, size becomes a liability. The larger a country grows, the more expensive it becomes to govern. You can either maintain efficiency through bloated budgets (at the expense of the population) or you lose efficiency altogether.

  Chen focused on the cost of law enforcement. There is a baseline cost to creating laws, but applying and enforcing them scales with size. In large countries, enforcement becomes increasingly difficult, even in authoritarian states such as China, where the state’s rule is supposed to be absolute. The result, Chen said, is that “rule of law” gives way to arbitrary rule.

  There is more: A subjugated Taiwan would lose fiscal independence. Taxes would not fund Taiwanese roads or schools; they would disappear into the massive machinery of the Chinese state.

  To illustrate the point, Chen presented a graph comparing two metrics: marginal governance cost and marginal scale benefit. The first measures how much it costs to govern a population, the second how much wealth a country gains from its size.

  According to Chen’s model, the two curves cross at about 150 million people, but beyond that, a population becomes a burden rather than a benefit. China has long since passed that point. Meanwhile, countries such as Germany and Japan hover near the “optimal” size.

  Chen compared it to trimming a company: Sometimes, staying lean means staying efficient. He likened it to parenting. “If you have two kids, you know what they are up to. If you have 120, your household becomes unmanageable,” and face it: Raising two kids is already hard enough.

  Tsao offered a similar take.

  When I asked him the best way to resist what he called “the evil of unification,” he surprised me by answering that it is to make Taiwan’s judiciary and executive branches even more efficient.

  If you think Taiwan is already hard to govern, just imagine it as a province of a behemoth state.

  This idea resonates deeply with me. My career has taken me from Belgium to Lithuania to Taiwan, all small nations that punch above their weight. I have even made documentaries about Europe’s microstates. What I have consistently found is not just that small countries are wealthier, but that they are also more livable. They work better. They feel closer to the ground.

  In small European states, people complain about taxes, but they receive solid services in return. Public infrastructure works. Bureaucracies remain accessible. You can get things done. No utopia, sure, but compared with sprawling giant states, small democracies feel human.

  Chen’s argument might be unconventional — and it is not meant to be the central one — but it reflects something I have witnessed firsthand: There is dignity in smallness. There is value in a nation that operates on a human scale.

  Taiwan not only deserves the right to exist; it might also possess something more practical — the sheer luck of being a small country that works.

  Julien Oeuillet is a journalist in Taiwan. He is the founding editor of Indo-Pacific Open News. He also writes and produces radio and television programs for several English-language publications globally.
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