UPDATE: AP reports 400 missing in Pingtung after landslide buries village. Several pics of the amazing flooding.
Hope you're not too bedraggled after the typhoon this week. Taiwan really took it on the chin. Here and there people still managed to blog, though....
- Demo says we can save Taiwan's creative industries with China there but its money here.
- Brian Dunn looks at small craft operations in the Strait.
- Dave's Landslide blog has a post on the riverbank erosion here during Sinlaku last year. You know, the one where the hotel fell into the river in Nantou? Deja vu.
- David reviews Yang Yang.
- Jerome blogs on art, identity, and Freddy Lim.
- Fili offers a living guide to Tainan.
- J Michael reviews Scott Kastner's new book Trading with the Enemy.
- Taoyuan Nights says Taiwan will tackle the deficit, but not today.
- Last week's links from Todd.
MEDIA: FT asks whether Taiwan's D-Ram companies can raise enough cash to upgrade to 50-nanometer tech? If not, they are in deep trouble. The Australian reports that dollar diplomacy will end in the South Pacific as CCP and KMT strike a deal. China says it won't mess with Taiwan's allies. Right.... . US makes Taiwan part of visa-waiver program for Guam and other Pacific islands. The on-again, off-again negotiations for a US-Taiwan trade pact appear to be on again. Finally: the Taiwan government plans to begin installing rooftop solar units in 2010. Commonwealth magazine argues state capitalism created Taiwan miracle, calls for more. CFR has audio of talk on balancing China and India. Mayor Hau promises cooperation with probes into mess President Ma left when he was mayor of Taipei. More rain expected for next couple of days in wake of typhoon.
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5 comments:
I have a few sources that would contradict Commonwealth Magazine (A GIO rag) and assert that the indigenous dynamic played a greater role in the Taiwan miracle.
The state was actually forced to liberalize under US pressure. Taiwanese families who had seen their land subdivided by land reform maintained extended family networks from which they could draw on to provide capital and cheap labor. It was common for entire extended families to participate on some level in the small to medium sized family enterprise.
In some cases entire towns like Cao Tun and Ho Mei employed these networks to participate in piece work for a single industry. Caotun had once been the umbrella capital and Homei a textile hub.
Many of these enterprises also employed poor Waishengren to augment their own family labor pool.
Awesome picture, props to the Bluesman.
This week’s Boston Globe “The Big Picture” feature is about Morakat. Very good photos from Taiwan, China, and the Phillipines. (Those of you unfamiliar with The Big Picture will love it – I recommend checking out the Solar Eclipse feature too.)
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/08/typhoon_morakot.html
As for state capitalism… give me a break. With the amount of money the US was pumping into a well-educated country with room to grow, it would’ve been difficult to screw up (yet the early years were indeed screwed up).
The Commonwealth magazine makes a lot of assertions but provides very little in terms of either facts or arguments to back up those assertions.
The article describes some efforts by the government to direct industry, but those efforts seem most significant in their "tax incentives" - or to put it another way, reducing taxes and getting the government out of the way so those industries can thrive. Some infrastructure projects are also mentioned but nothing extraordinary.
Ignored are other factors like the industrial history and educated workforce Taiwan had developed as part of Japan. Also ignored is the fact that other potential low-cost exporters around the world such as China and countless British colonies that were gaining independence (including India) had generally embarked on disastrous communist or socialist economies that took them out of the competition. Also ignored is the fact that population growth is not necessarily a negative; as we clearly see in modern times cheap labor can be a real draw for industries.
I've often wondered what really caused the economic boom in Taiwan. Sadly the Commonwealth Magazine article doesn't help much.
These pictures really show the devastation that has hit the Taiwanese people. GlobalGiving.com, the internationally recognized marketplace for philanthropy that connects individual donors to the causes they care most about, is also providing immediate assistance of Typhoon Morakot in Taiwan. Please donate at: http://www.globalgiving.com/projects/taiwan-typhoon-relief-and-assistance-fund/ .
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