Material World – Straits and narrow
Taiwan is an island about a hundred miles from the Chinese mainland, across the Taiwan Strait, and is officially the Republic of China. Its population is just under 24 million, its land area about the same as the Netherlands, and it is ranked 22nd in the list of the world’s largest economies. In particular it is the leader in the manufacturing of semiconductors, which are used in computers, smartphones and many other products. It is a big trading partner for a number of countries, with exports massively exceeding imports. The US, for instance, has a trade deficit with Taiwan of around $50bn a year. The UK, however, exports about £5bn a year to Taiwan, and imports around £3.6bn; the biggest exports from Britain are beverages and tobacco, also cars, while the imports are headed by office machinery and metal goods, and nearly £2bn of financial services are ‘exported’ each year from the UK.
Taiwan was once joined to the Asian mainland. The so-called indigenous people there, who speak a variety of languages, number around six hundred thousand. Over the centuries Taiwan was visited at various times by people from China and Japan. In the sixteenth century Portuguese sailors termed it Ilha Formosa (‘beautiful island’), and it was sometimes known as Formosa. In the following century the Dutch East India Company controlled part of the island and encouraged Chinese farmers to migrate there and cultivate rice and sugar. Later in the seventeenth century the Qing dynasty rulers of China annexed the island, which was again invaded by Japan in the late nineteenth century. From 1895 Taiwan was ceded to Japan after a war, and much industrialisation took place. In 1949 the Nationalist Party was defeated by the Chinese ‘Communist’ Party in the civil war and escaped to Taiwan.
Nationalist rule was extremely vicious and authoritarian, with martial law in force until 1987 and political opposition suppressed by means of imprisonment and execution. After that a transition to capitalist-style democracy took place, and links with mainland China (the so-called People’s Republic) increased. Taiwan businesses have invested over $200bn in China, and trade across the straits is around $160bn a year, with China being Taiwan’s biggest trading partner. Taiwan has over fifty dollar billionaires, the richest being Barry Lam, who is worth $11.7bn. In 2024 the combined wealth of the top fifty increased from $155bn to $174bn (forbes.com). At the same time, there are officially 400,000 unemployed and a large number of homeless people (drastically undercounted in government statistics).
At the end of last year, China’s leader Xi Jinping said in a speech that ‘The people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are one family. No one can sever our family bonds, and no one can stop the historical trend of national reunification.’ Over the centuries, the borders of China have expanded massively from the original area around the valleys of the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers. They now include the so-called autonomous regions of Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang (which means ‘new frontier’). But as for the idea of ‘one family’, this is just nationalistic nonsense.
China’s interest in Taiwan is for two reasons. One is financial or industrial, with Taiwan being economically very important in a number of areas, as mentioned above. The other is strategic, with Taiwan an important location in the South China Sea and potentially a significant part of China’s naval empire. The Chinese government views Taiwan as a province of China, which will one day be re-united with it. However, there is a Taiwan independence movement, which believes it should be an independent state, which in effect would be a formalisation of the current situation.
Large Chinese maritime forces have been assembled around Taiwan, and the use of force to achieve unification is still in principle on the table. China’s armed forces are far more powerful than those of Taiwan, though any invasion would be likely to be costly in terms of lives and also expensive in terms of materiel. The US Council on Foreign Relations states that ‘To invade Taiwan, China would have to conduct an extraordinarily complex military operation, synchronising air, land, and sea power as well as electronic and cyberwarfare’. Which does not mean it will never happen, though. The invasion of an offshore island would inevitably be more problematic than the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This is clearly a case of a very powerful capitalist country, one that is still expanding its economic and military might, seeking to conquer another territory as a way of increasing its power and influence.
PAUL BENNETT