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
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
The past few months have seen tremendous strides in India’s journey to develop a vibrant semiconductor and electronics ecosystem. The nation’s established prowess in information technology (IT) has earned it much-needed revenue and prestige across the globe. Now, through the convergence of engineering talent, supportive government policies, an expanding market and technologically adaptive entrepreneurship, India is striving to become part of global electronics and semiconductor supply chains. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Vision of “Make in India” and “Design in India” has been the guiding force behind the government’s incentive schemes that span skilling, design, fabrication, assembly, testing and packaging, and