Liberalization and internationalization are the primary thrust of the Taiwan government's economic policy. It is a strategy compatible with the ongoing globalization of the world economy. Despite this, the progress of this internalization of Taiwan's economy is not yet satisfactory.
Foreign Policy magazine, in tandem with the international management consulting firm A. T. Kearney, released a study that ranked countries on a number of scores ("Globalization Index: 2003," Jan./Feb. 2003). The overall globalization ranking was calculated based on a composite of each nations' economic ranking, personal ranking, political ranking and technological ranking.
Taiwan received an overall globalization ranking of only No. 34.
This low ranking is thanks to the oppression of the Chinese government. This result fully demonstrates that the efforts of some members of the unification camp in actively urging trade and economic relations between China and Taiwan push Taiwan into a corner of isolation.
Taiwan ranked No. 29 for its economic ranking, its personal ranking [which is a composite of international travel and tourism, international telephone traffic and income payment and receipts] was No. 30, and it ranked No. 17 in technology.
Yet politically, Taiwan ranked only No. 62, dead last of the 62 nations in the study. The poor political ranking is due to two factors, the small number of embassies Taiwan runs and participation in international organizations.
As a result of China's efforts to stifle Taiwan's diplomacy, Taiwan's performance in these two areas is even worse than some smaller countries. China's motive is plain and simple: to isolate Taiwan so that Taiwan won't be able to accomplish economic globalization, leaving it a clean path to sinicization.
Beijing both coerces and solicits Taiwanese investment in China, and manipulates Taiwanese businesspeople to accept direct links, so as to strengthen Taiwan's economic dependency on China. China didn't just worked to obstruct Taiwan's efforts to join the WTO for more than 10 years, but in fact also used coercion on the Asian Development Bank to change the membership title of Taiwan in an effort to drive Taiwan out of the organization.
Coercion
Facing China's isolation policy, the proper response for Taiwan is to actively seek breakthroughs. While Taiwan does not have embassies in many countries, it does have representative offices with substantive diplomatic functions. If these representative offices can strengthen their role in facilitating economic cooperation and negotiations, Taiwan's process of globalizing will be all the better.
Currently, the biggest problem with Taiwan's overseas representative offices is the disparity between their names and what they truly are.
In fact, even Taiwan's own overseas businesspeople are often understandably clueless with respect to the names of their country's overseas representative offices. The government must put in more effort to rectify the names of these offices. If they cannot carry the official title of embassy or consulate, there is no harm in calling them economic and trade service offices. But, the word "Taiwan" must appear somewhere in their names.
The should not use "East Asia," or "Far East." These words neither have close relation to Taiwan nor can they help businesspeople locate the offices from which they can obtain services. Greater effort should go into ensuring that the representative offices are listed along with Taiwan's embassies and/or other foreign government agencies in the same directories.
These offices should also add the word "Taiwan" in big letters at the top or in the introductory flash presentation of their Web pages, so that more people seeking to get in contact with them would be able to identify them without hassle.
In addition, Taiwan must aggressively pursue more opportunities to participate in international organizations. As for organizations to which Taiwan already belongs, it must seek to play a more meaningful role. Since Taiwan transformed from a developing into a developed country not long ago, its developmental experience is a major asset to the WTO. This experience should be put to good use.
Taiwan is in a unique position to look after the interests of both developed and developing countries. This is better than passively protecting the interests of Taiwan or even wasting time and energy by waffling on commitments, which would only provoke the resentment of other countries. The negotiation on tariff reduction of rice wines is one such example.
Taiwan's personal ranking of course failed to reflect the genuine strength of the country. The China factor plays into this as well. As a result of Chinese restrictions and oppressive measures, it has been extremely inconvenient for Taiwanese to travel to some countries for business or pleasure.
Therefore, they have fewer opportunities to participate in international organizations. Plus, the name of the country -- the ROC -- and its appearance on Taiwanese passports often causes foreigners to confuse Taiwan with China.
Taiwanese are frequently excluded from entry into international events because they were mistaken for Chinese citizens. For example, some Taiwanese students applying to German schools recently were asked to provide verification of their degrees from Chinese authorities.
As for the economic side, while Taiwan has long become a major international economic and trade power, with a global economic ranking of No. 14, the level of economic dependency on China is much higher than any other countries, and this "go west" phenomenon has become a trend. The country's annual investments in China is higher than 2 percent of the GNP. A number of businesses in Taiwan not only set their eyes on China, but in fact feel that if they did not actively invest in China, they would soon lose their competitiveness.
Sinicization
Based on objective and honest observations, the level of Taiwan's globalization is indeed relatively low, while the level of sinicization relatively high. Fortunately, some Taiwanese completely disregard the political implications behind this phenomenon, and the future side-effects of economic and trade constraints imposed by China. They continue to pressure the government to speed up economic sinicization.
Hopefully, the government could genuinely face up to this dangerous phenomenon and immediately draft some strategies to counter it, so as to ease the sinicization trend and usher Taiwan toward globalization. Recall that Taiwan ranks No. 17 in technology -- the only factor that does not involve the China factor.
The ranking over which China has the most sway, falls in fact in the last place. If people continued to mistaken sinicization for globalization, Taiwan will not only be excluded from the express train to globalization, it may even become severely marginalized.
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