My Take | With Hong Kong and Taiwan, time is on Beijing’s side
- While anti-China politics makes headlines, some of the island’s best engineering talent are quietly voting with their feet to work across the Taiwan Strait as the mainland’s job opportunities prove irresistible
It must be gratifying for many Hong Kong and Taiwanese people to thumb their noses at Beijing. But eventually, they will realise they can’t live on anti-China ideology alone. Reality will catch up, sooner or later.
What ought to be obvious, but is not, to many young locals, is that divorce from the mainland is out of the question. Call it autonomy, independence or what you will, geography alone forbids it, not to mention economics, politics and everything else.
As for Taiwan, all eyes are on the presidential election on Saturday. President Tsai Ing-wen looks likely to secure re-election. Beijing’s belligerence and “The Troubles” in Hong Kong have helped resurrect her political fortune. But here’s another dose of reality. Beijing can live with a second term with Tsai, but not necessarily Taiwan. Her mismanagement of the island’s economy will only worsen.
America’s squeeze on China’s hi-tech and telecoms sectors, especially its targeting of mainland companies such as Huawei and ZTE, has the unintended consequence of accelerating the long-standing brain drain in Taiwan to the mainland.
According to a December report in the Nikkei Asian Review, more than 3,000 semiconductor engineers have left Taiwan in recent years to work for mainland firms, a figure equivalent to almost 10 per cent of the island’s engineering specialists in semiconductor research and development.
