Taiwanese Entrepreneurs and the Partition of China

Françoise Mengin, Senior Research Fellow at Sciences Po Paris

5 March, 2013

The Republic of China that retreated to Taiwan in 1949 has continued to maintain its de facto independence. Yet the Communist authorities have never abandoned their aim at reunifying the island with the PRC de jure. As well as growing military pressure, Beijing’s irredentist policy is premised on encouraging cross-Straits economic integration. Responding to preferential measures, Taiwanese industrialists massively relocated their activities on the mainland. Fragments of a nation torn apart by contradictory claims, these entrepreneurs are vectors of a unification imposed by the Chinese Communist Party, promoted but postponed by the Kuomindang, rejected by Taiwanese pro-independence parties.
Within the context of what can be described as an unfinished civil war, socio-economic dynamics are embedded in conflicts over sovereignty. Transnational actors have been able to free themselves from security constraints, and take advantage of new forms of government in a reformist China, to ultimately restructure the democratic political environment within Taiwan itself, and, in so doing, relations between Beijing and Taipei.
Due to its irreducible uniqueness, the Taiwan issue provides a number of enlightening lessons on the relationship between the political and economic spheres: a fictitious operation of depolitization has governed the opening of the Sino-Taiwanese border in order to postpone any resolution of the sovereignty issue. By combining a renewed approach to the sociology of international relations and to international political economy, the author highlights the competing, and fragmented, elements within one of the most intractable contemporary territorial disputes.

Françoise Mengin, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for International Studies and Research at Sciences Po, Paris, has spent most of her career in research examining the place of Taiwan within Greater China, especially from the perspective of State formation. Amongst her publications are: Trajectoires chinoises: Taiwan, Hong Kong et Pékin (Karthala, 1998) ; as well as editing Cyber China: Reshaping National Identities in the Age of Information (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and co-editing with Jean-Louis Rocca, Politics in China: Moving Frontiers (Palgrave, 2002).

Book description: Fragments d’une guerre inachevée