The Chinese People’s Liberation Army responds to each gesture of Taipei’s independence with military maneuvers that test its occupation or blockade, including, in addition, exercises that simulate an attack with live fire, the last time just days ago.
Taiwan denounces it each time and gives details of Beijing’s harassment of the island. The US supports it directly or indirectly with words, maneuvers of its army in the Indo-Pacific, support in supplies or visits from authorities. The island is a centerpiece in his strategy to contain China. After all, China, the factory of the world, basically trades its products by sea and has the passage of container ships through the Taiwan Strait as a critical itinerary, for example.
And yet everything begins to change.
Taiwan is the main link in the first of up to three island chains with which Washington tries to contain China’s expansion into the Pacific and Indian Oceans. And that’s why it’s key.
But the People’s Republic of China extends its influence and now looks face to face at the first world power between the second and third rings, as can be seen in the previous image. Beijing’s influence is growing with alliances in various archipelagos – and the authorization by the Solomon Islands to deploy Chinese People’s Liberation Army troops in the area is its paradigmatic case. This makes the US strategy more porous.
But also in Taiwan, the heart of the front line, there are data that call into question whether everything is a no towards Beijing. Because Taipei’s is an economy focused on China.
The close and growing economic relationship between the two Chinas, deepened by Beijing’s open-arms policy towards Taiwanese businesses, entrepreneurs and workers, has meant that now, compared to a decade ago, their trade relationship is on the way to multiplying by three.
And it is that Taiwan, a prosperous country with export pillars, sends its products (the majority, over a third of the total, electronic components) to the whole world but really the great part goes to the People’s Republic of China. More than half of what the Taiwanese export goes there (56% in 2021) while they import about a fifth of this, exactly 21% in that year 2021.
The People’s Republic is, in fact, the origin of most of the investments originating in the island.
Maintaining cooperation, given the numbers, thus seems almost obligatory for Taipei in order to maintain a GDP that in 2022 stood at 828,660 million current dollars (parallel to that of Switzerland and Turkey) and a per capita wealth of 35,510, similar to Kuwait or Japan.
Its 23 million inhabitants, less than half the size of Spain, therefore face what Wu Jieh-min, a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Academia Sinica of Taiwan, summarizes in Vanguardia Dossier, as follows: “The Taiwanese know that the so-called status quo is temporary, uncertain, that the future cannot be frozen forever. In fact, it is increasingly influenced by rapid geopolitical changes.
Another thing is the US reaction to relevant changes in the region. And its consequence for the escalation of confrontation between the two great powers, growing and the basis of what is summarized as “the new world disorder.”
