Not long ago, Singaporean Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said in a public speech that Singapore risked becoming a “Taiwan story” and would lose its global competitive edge if it closed its doors to talented individuals from overseas. He said this would lead to a fall in average salaries and a brain drain, because local professionals would move to China, the US and other countries.
Singapore, itself predominantly an ethnic Chinese state, has always regarded Taiwan as a province of China. Ideologically, its views are very similar to the views of Taiwan’s pro-unification academic and media circles, and as such it despises and is hostile to any measures that highlight Taiwan’s political and economic sovereignty, describing all such measures as “isolationist.”
It is true that the nation has been experiencing a brain drain in recent years. However, the reason is not that it restricts talented foreign individuals from coming to Taiwan. If that was true, Acer would not have been able to hire former chief executive Gianfranco Lanci. The reason for the brain drain is that China is a great magnet for talent.
China has attracted Taiwanese investments by offering attractive policies. Since investments are productive in nature, technical talent has followed in their wake.
However, if Taiwanese business did not go west, strong domestic investment would surely attract talent from all over the world. In the 1990s, when the nation was creating its economic miracle, Taiwanese companies mainly invested domestically and they attracted large numbers of talented individuals from overseas. For example, Morris Chang (張忠謀), chairman and chief executive of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, moved to Taiwan in 1985 and founded his company here one year later. Who says Taiwan prevents overseas talent from coming here to work?
Last year alone, formal applications from Taiwanese companies for investment in China exceeded US$10 billion. Add on other investments for which applications were never filed and the total amount of Taiwanese investments in China last year exceeded US$20 billion. This is equivalent to 57 percent of the major private investments in Taiwan — US$35 billion — and 27 percent of the nation’s total private investment — US$73 billion. With such massive capital outflows to China, it would be another miracle if the talented Taiwanese individuals were not attracted to China. It is clear that it is the over-heated “China fever” that causes the outflow of talent.
Taiwan’s pro-China media have attached great importance to Shanmugaratnam’s “Taiwan story” and are using it to attack the government’s policy for attracting foreign talent. But what is it that they really want? They want the government to relax its regulations restricting the import of talented Chinese individuals in order to realize their dream of a “one China” market as soon as possible.
The true story of Taiwan, then, is the story of how, over the past dozen years, China has attracted more than US$20 billion away from Taiwan every year, reaching a total of more than US$400 billion. It is the story of how national industry has been hollowed out, how the average salary has declined to the same level it was 13 years ago, how youth unemployment has continued to increase, how the brain drain has never stopped and how the wealth gap has rapidly widened. While all this has been going on, the public suffers and the suicide rate keeps climbing.
Indeed, the lost 13 years are a unique period in modern eastern economic history. This is the true Taiwan Story.
Huang Tien-lin is a former presidential adviser.
Translated by EDDY Chang
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS