What will the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) presidential hopeful Frank Hsieh's (
International competitiveness begins at home. As international competition strategist and Harvard professor Michael Porter says: "Paradoxically, the enduring competitive advantages in a global economy lie increasingly in local things -- knowledge, relationships and motivation that distant rivals cannot match."
A company's competitive advantage is the most important factor affecting its competitiveness, and such advantages are determined by the effective use of production factors. This requires constant innovation, which in turn requires cooperation with academia.
Collaboration between industrial and academic circles thus becomes the source of competitiveness. Silicon Valley in California, Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and Hsinchu Science Park are all successful examples.
Such collaboration applies not only to the high-tech industry but also to the agricultural and general industries. Taiwan's achievements in this respect are much greater than China's, and should not be underestimated. Taiwan's orchid exhibition this year, another successful example of industry-academia collaboration, resulted in orders worth several billion US dollars.
Second, the world is not flat. Many Taiwanese treat Thomas Friedman's bestseller The World Is Flat as their Bible and use it to criticize the government's business policy. However, Harvard professor Pankaj Ghemawat says that this and similar books, such as The Death of Distance by Frances Cairncross, are only sensationalist statements.
Ghemawat says foreign direct investment accounted for just 10 percent of total global investments between 2003 and 2005, which means that 90 percent of investments actually were domestic. If the world were flat, proportions would be reversed.
Other areas related to internationalization such as international migration, and international telecommunications, research and education, charitable donations, patents, stock investments and trade account for less than 10 percent of GDP. It is evident that the world is not flat.
Third, the Chinese market is one of Taiwan's markets, not the only one. Today, about 70 percent of foreign investments by Taiwanese companies is concentrated on China, the highest in the world. This runs counter to common sense. You should not put all your eggs in one basket.
Some commentators like to cite South Korea as an example, but the fact is that Seoul has been promoting global investments in recent years. Hyundai Motor Co is the second-largest company in India, a huge market of 1.1 billion people, and white wares from LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics have a 30 percent to 40 percent market share.
According to the Indian government's official statistics, by the end of March, South Korea's total investment in India was about 70 times more than that of Taiwan. The Indian market is gigantic, and it is highly complementary to Taiwan. By investing in China, Taiwan can eventually enter the US market. By investing in India, it will eventually be able to enter the emerging Central Asian, Eastern and even Western European markets. India is thus the best jumping board for the global arrangement of Taiwanese businesspeople.
Hopefully, Hsieh's team will remember these three principles for promoting global arrangement on a Taiwanese foundation and create another economic miracle for Taiwan.
Mark Wen is a professor in the department of civil education and leadership at National Taiwan Normal University.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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