8 ms·

China and Taiwan use the same language so China is still very attractive for oversea expansion for Taiwanese companies.

baq 3y ago
Ukraine and Russia also mostly speak the same language. Doesn’t mean much if the great leader decides to make a move, actually it is another reason to make a move.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  About 1/3 of Ukrainians know Russian.
  - voxic11 3y ago
    Ukrainian and Russian are mutually intelligible languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility#Slavic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility#Slavic Whereas different dialects of Mandarin may not be mutually intelligible > Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the standard language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese
    - alisonatwork 3y ago
      The Mandarin used in Taiwan and the Mandarin used in China are both standard Chinese and mutually intelligible.
      - foobarian 3y ago
        IIRC Cantonese and Mandarin are the two big language groups that are not mutually intelligible.
        gabagaul 3y ago
        But Cantonese isn’t spoken in Taiwan except a handful of Hong Kong immigrants. What’s your point?
        throwaway2990 3y ago
        But they do speak Taiwanese in Taiwan which you wouldn’t understand if you only spoke mandarin.
        alephnerd 3y ago
        > they do speak Taiwanese Do you mean Hakka and/or Hokkien? Hokkien which is primarily spoken across the strait in Fujian. Hakka is primarily spoken in Guangdong, Fujian, and Jiangxi. Xi himself was the Party head of Fujian for most of his career and Xi's father was the Party head of Guangdong when he was rehabilitated in the Deng Xiaoping era. This is why most manufacturing in China ended up coastal Southern China - most Chinese Taiwanese trace their heritage to there barely 2-5 generations ago at most. The younger generation (post-1989) in Taiwan speaks and understands Mandarin.
        alisonatwork 3y ago
        This whole thread has a bunch of answers which are confusing the topic. The issue is why would Taiwanese businesses care about the China market? Aside from the fact that the China market is massive, there is a simple answer: Taiwan and China have the same business language, and that is Standard Chinese aka Mandarin. Yes, lots of Taiwanese people also speak other Sinitic languages that are not Mandarin, and are not mutually intelligible with it. And lots of Chinese people also speak other Sinitic languages that are not Mandarin and are not mutually intelligible with it. And even some variants of Mandarin itself are not mutually intelligible. But - outside of Cantonese in HK and Macau - none of those languages are used as the primary business language anywhere in either China or Taiwan, so it's an interesting side note but doesn't change the point. All that said, aside from the Chinese market being massive, and the common language being convenient, there is a much bigger elephant in the room that explains why Taiwanese companies might not have a fun time doing business in China: politics. It doesn't matter how much money Taiwanese companies might want to make if the CCP can threaten to turn off the spigot any time they want to influence Taiwanese politics, which unfortunately nowadays appears to be all the time. Sure, it's leaving a lot of money on the table, but doing business with Japan or the US or other countries that aren't run as a single party dictatorship whose leadership has a stated platform of dismantling your own government might be a less risky option.
      - throwaway2990 3y ago
        Outside of Taipei, a lot of people speak Taiwanese. (While they also speak mandarin if you don’t know Taiwanese you can only understand a bit of what people say)
    - 0x38B 3y ago
      Nearly every Ukrainian understands Russian, but many Russians would only understand the gist of what Ukrainians are saying, because the languages only share about 60% of their vocabulary. A lot of common, everyday words differ in Ukrainian and or arise from different roots (e.g Polish).
      - beebeepka 3y ago
        Oh no, only 60%? Surely that's plenty for a conversation, no? Now I wonder if this number, provided it is a real one, went up or down during the last 30 years. I would bet on lower but it's only a gut feeling.
        vkou 3y ago
        > Oh no, only 60%? Surely that's plenty for a conversation, no? It's plenty for communication, not plenty for a conversation. (It's also a mirror for colonialism, by the way, where the occupied speak the language of the occupier, but the occupiers can't be arsed to learn the language of the occupied.)
        mabster 3y ago
        It's not even necessarily enough for communication. With the Pareto curve on word commonality it's really quick to get high percentages of vocabulary. But it's the words you don't know on a sentence that are usually the important ones.
        beebeepka 3y ago
        You are right. 60% is nothing, especially given the political situation /s can't even talk about chips and language without being attacked by the crew
        MiguelX413 3y ago
        • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39295035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39295035 • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39294267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39294267 • https://german.stackexchange.com/a/53783 https://german.stackexchange.com/a/53783 It's a linguistic topic. Good luck trying to talk with Germans as an English speaker.
    - dheera 3y ago
      > Whereas different dialects of Mandarin may not be mutually intelligible Except for some slang words which nobody would use in business anyway, Sichuanese is largely intelligible to native Mandarin Chinese speakers if spoken slowly and repeated a couple times. People from Sichuan can also speak standard Mandarin. The written language is identical. As for Taiwan and China it is even less an issue. The very few words that are different may be the source for some humor sometimes but that's it. It's kind of like how British people say "lift" and Americans say "elevator". If you're not brain-dead you'll figure it out pretty quickly and maybe crack a joke or two about it. When you see a sign that says "lift" you don't panic and say that it's not intelligible, you can make some sense of the word. It's a non-issue in practical terms.
    - iskander 3y ago
      I was born in Kiev and spoke Russian at home. Can barely understand Ukrainian unless it's spoken slowly by a native Russian speaker. I can get the gist of what Zelensky is saying in an interview but can pretty much never understand native Ukrainian speakers. I think there's also a gradient of dialects and accents West to East, so I'm sure you can find some Ukrainian villager I would understand better but in general they're not mutually intelligible (to me).
      - throwaway2037 3y ago
        Wow. Did you attend Russian language-only schools when growing up? Is this common in your generation?
        iskander 3y ago
        Moved to the US as a kid (by way of Estonia and then Italy), went to a year of Russian language "transitional" school here. So don't have any insight on the Ukrainian school experience.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - aswanson 3y ago
      How close is mandarin to Cantonese?
      - tmtvl 3y ago
        About as close as English and Swedish.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - Baeocystin 3y ago
        I have warm memories as a kid going with my Mom to the daily market, and watching people communicating by furiously writing words in their hands, in addition to the simplified tradespeak between the language groups. It's an interesting thing, having both a shared writing system and mutually unintelligible spoken language!
    - numpad0 3y ago
      Maybe it should be more recognized that what the quote "a language is a dialect with an army" means is that borders of nations don't coincide with borders for languages, or put more simply, it has such two meanings that, there are languages that are realistically just weird accents on one another, and one "language" that are realistically two or more. I have some confidence with dialects of my primary language(not Chinese) within ~150mi of where I am; beyond that, mutual intelligibility with local dialects isn't guaranteed. Yet, those dialects are rarely considered(including by speakers) to be separate from the standard. They're just local accents. That aren't even intelligible to city dwellers.
    - datameta 3y ago
      To me, cantonese may as well be a separate language from Beijing Mandarin.
      - TrickyRick 3y ago
        I mean it is? "Cantonese (traditional Chinese: 廣東話; simplified Chinese: 广东话; Jyutping: Gwong2 dung1 waa2; Cantonese Yale: Gwóngdùng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese
        datameta 3y ago
        I simply left room for error.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Around 1/3 are native speakers but the number of know Russian is significantly higher as it’s the formal business language the way English is in a lot of the world. Hard to find exact numbers, but according to Wikipedia a 2008 gallop poll had 80% of Ukrainians claim to prefer Russian as the language of business.
    - Waterluvian 3y ago
      Ahh TIL! Thanks.
    - tastyminerals2 3y ago
      Well, this is pretty much dated. You would be surprised to learn how the tables started to turn starting from 2014 and finished turning today.
      - theultdev 3y ago
        Is this an anecdote of your experience or? 11 years does not seem like long enough time for a language to first start declining and then end as being the primary formal language.
        VincentEvans 3y ago
        It’s not “declining” but rather being actively replaced and rejected by the population. When your nation suffers brutal aggression perpetrated by the neighbor - it makes it no longer fashionable to speak the language of the aggressor. The fact that Russia also denies that Ukraine and Ukrainians are even a real nation and culture distinct from Russia fuels the sentiment too.
        vkou 3y ago
        Organically, no, 11 years is not long enough. But you may recall that in 2014, a few political directives regarding culture and language use have been made by the Rada, and then a few political decisions were made in the Kremlin, and then everything turned to shit (To put it simply). It's easy to do a lot in 11 years when you start banning foreign-language media, stop using a language for government services, stop teaching it, etc, etc.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    In reality it’s certainly over 90% (probably closer to 99%)
    - 0x457 3y ago
      The only Ukrainians I've that that didn't speak Russian are 2nd gen immigrants outside of Ukraine. Often hilarious because their parents often barely speak Ukrainian themselves.
  - protomolecule 3y ago
    "83% of Ukrainians responding to a 2008 Gallup poll preferred to use Russian instead of Ukrainian to take the survey." [0] [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100518073110/http://www.gallup.com/poll/109228/Russian-Language-Enjoying-Boost-PostSoviet-States.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20100518073110/http://www.gallup...
rjzzleep 3y ago
Most of their construction material comes from China and most of Taiwanese exports go to China. Taiwan will never compete on the global market for most of its products. This current policy is economic suicide, and anyone not blinded by ideology knows it. Not a single US president pushed for a FTA with Taiwan. So far every single one has opposed it, while on the back bullying Taiwan to open their markets to dump cheap American pork into it, completely against the will of the Taiwanese people by the way. The current result is that Taiwanese wages have stagnated for decades and as a result save for a select few that go to Japan and the US, a lot of other people look for opportunities in Mainland China. What made Taiwan so successful in the past is what makes Dubai and Singapore so successful now. Open trade with everyone, and easy business opportunities. Both things that it no longer engages in. BTW the big joke nobody really seems to know is that the pro independence party has never submitted a bid for independence, while the pro China party has.
- Xunjin 3y ago
  Why people keep believing that "open trade" solves everything and makes "easy business opportunities"? You can have open trade but also subsidy a portion of your economy to make that "open trade" not so open anymore. I'm not against it, just saying that a single specific decision makes Dubai and Singapore success is a reductionism that helps in nothing the discussion. Let take OPEC in matters, would you say they follow a "free trade" ideology?
- berserk1010 3y ago
  Many wrong things with comments. Your pro-china KMT bias is showing > Taiwan will never compete on the global market for most of its products. the aggregate brand value of Taiwan's 25 largest brands totaled US$13.84 billion in 2023, a 5 percent rise from 2022 and marking the fourth consecutive year of the value surpassing the US$10 billion mark. https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202312020012 https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202312020012 > The current result is that Taiwanese wages have stagnated for decades The average annual salary for full-time employees in Taiwan reached an eight-year high of NT$694,000 (US$22,242) this year (2023). https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202311290017 https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202311290017 Taiwan to surpass Japan in GDP per capita this year (2023): JCER https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Taiwan-to-surpass-Japan-in-GDP-per-capita-this-year-JCER https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Taiwan-to-surpass-Japan-in-G...
gpapilion 3y ago
Taiwanese companies run most of the major hightech manufacturing in China. For example, Foxconn is a taiwanese company. Most of my dealings with these types of manufactures has been in discussions of how to circumvent tariffs, not in really exiting manufacturing in the mainland. When I look at what occurring, I think it has more to do with their cheapest labor force is in China. So the scale and profit is hard to leave.
- aswanson 3y ago
  The Chinese labor force has been reaching parity recently. Hence pushes into Vietnam & India for manufacturing.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > Hence pushes into Vietnam & India for manufacturing. Doesn't help Taiwanese companies long term. They had an advantage in Mainland China being Chinese speaking. Already in India, Tata is becoming the Indian version of Foxconn for most manufacturers and VinGroup or Korean Chaebols like Lotte (SK has a FTA with Vietnam) the Vietnamese version of Foxconn in Vietnam. While South Korean and Japanese companies were actively de-risking in China by returning to ASEAN+India in the early-mid 2010s, Taiwanese companies only began doing this in the late 2010s after the 2015-16 recession.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
It’s more than that: most of the Taiwanese companies are owned/controlled by mainlanders who still have a lot more economic power than native Taiwanese, even if the latter has more political power these days.

baq 3y ago

Ukraine and Russia also mostly speak the same language. Doesn’t mean much if the great leader decides to make a move, actually it is another reason to make a move.

Waterluvian 3y ago
About 1/3 of Ukrainians know Russian.
- voxic11 3y ago
  Ukrainian and Russian are mutually intelligible languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility#Slavic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility#Slavic Whereas different dialects of Mandarin may not be mutually intelligible > Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the standard language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese
  - alisonatwork 3y ago
    The Mandarin used in Taiwan and the Mandarin used in China are both standard Chinese and mutually intelligible.
    - foobarian 3y ago
      IIRC Cantonese and Mandarin are the two big language groups that are not mutually intelligible.
      - gabagaul 3y ago
        But Cantonese isn’t spoken in Taiwan except a handful of Hong Kong immigrants. What’s your point?
        throwaway2990 3y ago
        But they do speak Taiwanese in Taiwan which you wouldn’t understand if you only spoke mandarin.
        alephnerd 3y ago
        > they do speak Taiwanese Do you mean Hakka and/or Hokkien? Hokkien which is primarily spoken across the strait in Fujian. Hakka is primarily spoken in Guangdong, Fujian, and Jiangxi. Xi himself was the Party head of Fujian for most of his career and Xi's father was the Party head of Guangdong when he was rehabilitated in the Deng Xiaoping era. This is why most manufacturing in China ended up coastal Southern China - most Chinese Taiwanese trace their heritage to there barely 2-5 generations ago at most. The younger generation (post-1989) in Taiwan speaks and understands Mandarin.
        alisonatwork 3y ago
        This whole thread has a bunch of answers which are confusing the topic. The issue is why would Taiwanese businesses care about the China market? Aside from the fact that the China market is massive, there is a simple answer: Taiwan and China have the same business language, and that is Standard Chinese aka Mandarin. Yes, lots of Taiwanese people also speak other Sinitic languages that are not Mandarin, and are not mutually intelligible with it. And lots of Chinese people also speak other Sinitic languages that are not Mandarin and are not mutually intelligible with it. And even some variants of Mandarin itself are not mutually intelligible. But - outside of Cantonese in HK and Macau - none of those languages are used as the primary business language anywhere in either China or Taiwan, so it's an interesting side note but doesn't change the point. All that said, aside from the Chinese market being massive, and the common language being convenient, there is a much bigger elephant in the room that explains why Taiwanese companies might not have a fun time doing business in China: politics. It doesn't matter how much money Taiwanese companies might want to make if the CCP can threaten to turn off the spigot any time they want to influence Taiwanese politics, which unfortunately nowadays appears to be all the time. Sure, it's leaving a lot of money on the table, but doing business with Japan or the US or other countries that aren't run as a single party dictatorship whose leadership has a stated platform of dismantling your own government might be a less risky option.
    - throwaway2990 3y ago
      Outside of Taipei, a lot of people speak Taiwanese. (While they also speak mandarin if you don’t know Taiwanese you can only understand a bit of what people say)
  - 0x38B 3y ago
    Nearly every Ukrainian understands Russian, but many Russians would only understand the gist of what Ukrainians are saying, because the languages only share about 60% of their vocabulary. A lot of common, everyday words differ in Ukrainian and or arise from different roots (e.g Polish).
    - beebeepka 3y ago
      Oh no, only 60%? Surely that's plenty for a conversation, no? Now I wonder if this number, provided it is a real one, went up or down during the last 30 years. I would bet on lower but it's only a gut feeling.
      - vkou 3y ago
        > Oh no, only 60%? Surely that's plenty for a conversation, no? It's plenty for communication, not plenty for a conversation. (It's also a mirror for colonialism, by the way, where the occupied speak the language of the occupier, but the occupiers can't be arsed to learn the language of the occupied.)
        mabster 3y ago
        It's not even necessarily enough for communication. With the Pareto curve on word commonality it's really quick to get high percentages of vocabulary. But it's the words you don't know on a sentence that are usually the important ones.
        beebeepka 3y ago
        You are right. 60% is nothing, especially given the political situation /s can't even talk about chips and language without being attacked by the crew
        MiguelX413 3y ago
        • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39295035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39295035 • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39294267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39294267 • https://german.stackexchange.com/a/53783 https://german.stackexchange.com/a/53783 It's a linguistic topic. Good luck trying to talk with Germans as an English speaker.
  - dheera 3y ago
    > Whereas different dialects of Mandarin may not be mutually intelligible Except for some slang words which nobody would use in business anyway, Sichuanese is largely intelligible to native Mandarin Chinese speakers if spoken slowly and repeated a couple times. People from Sichuan can also speak standard Mandarin. The written language is identical. As for Taiwan and China it is even less an issue. The very few words that are different may be the source for some humor sometimes but that's it. It's kind of like how British people say "lift" and Americans say "elevator". If you're not brain-dead you'll figure it out pretty quickly and maybe crack a joke or two about it. When you see a sign that says "lift" you don't panic and say that it's not intelligible, you can make some sense of the word. It's a non-issue in practical terms.
  - iskander 3y ago
    I was born in Kiev and spoke Russian at home. Can barely understand Ukrainian unless it's spoken slowly by a native Russian speaker. I can get the gist of what Zelensky is saying in an interview but can pretty much never understand native Ukrainian speakers. I think there's also a gradient of dialects and accents West to East, so I'm sure you can find some Ukrainian villager I would understand better but in general they're not mutually intelligible (to me).
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      Wow. Did you attend Russian language-only schools when growing up? Is this common in your generation?
      - iskander 3y ago
        Moved to the US as a kid (by way of Estonia and then Italy), went to a year of Russian language "transitional" school here. So don't have any insight on the Ukrainian school experience.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - aswanson 3y ago
    How close is mandarin to Cantonese?
    - tmtvl 3y ago
      About as close as English and Swedish.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - Baeocystin 3y ago
      I have warm memories as a kid going with my Mom to the daily market, and watching people communicating by furiously writing words in their hands, in addition to the simplified tradespeak between the language groups. It's an interesting thing, having both a shared writing system and mutually unintelligible spoken language!
  - numpad0 3y ago
    Maybe it should be more recognized that what the quote "a language is a dialect with an army" means is that borders of nations don't coincide with borders for languages, or put more simply, it has such two meanings that, there are languages that are realistically just weird accents on one another, and one "language" that are realistically two or more. I have some confidence with dialects of my primary language(not Chinese) within ~150mi of where I am; beyond that, mutual intelligibility with local dialects isn't guaranteed. Yet, those dialects are rarely considered(including by speakers) to be separate from the standard. They're just local accents. That aren't even intelligible to city dwellers.
  - datameta 3y ago
    To me, cantonese may as well be a separate language from Beijing Mandarin.
    - TrickyRick 3y ago
      I mean it is? "Cantonese (traditional Chinese: 廣東話; simplified Chinese: 广东话; Jyutping: Gwong2 dung1 waa2; Cantonese Yale: Gwóngdùng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese
      - datameta 3y ago
        I simply left room for error.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Around 1/3 are native speakers but the number of know Russian is significantly higher as it’s the formal business language the way English is in a lot of the world. Hard to find exact numbers, but according to Wikipedia a 2008 gallop poll had 80% of Ukrainians claim to prefer Russian as the language of business.
  - Waterluvian 3y ago
    Ahh TIL! Thanks.
  - tastyminerals2 3y ago
    Well, this is pretty much dated. You would be surprised to learn how the tables started to turn starting from 2014 and finished turning today.
    - theultdev 3y ago
      Is this an anecdote of your experience or? 11 years does not seem like long enough time for a language to first start declining and then end as being the primary formal language.
      - VincentEvans 3y ago
        It’s not “declining” but rather being actively replaced and rejected by the population. When your nation suffers brutal aggression perpetrated by the neighbor - it makes it no longer fashionable to speak the language of the aggressor. The fact that Russia also denies that Ukraine and Ukrainians are even a real nation and culture distinct from Russia fuels the sentiment too.
      - vkou 3y ago
        Organically, no, 11 years is not long enough. But you may recall that in 2014, a few political directives regarding culture and language use have been made by the Rada, and then a few political decisions were made in the Kremlin, and then everything turned to shit (To put it simply). It's easy to do a lot in 11 years when you start banning foreign-language media, stop using a language for government services, stop teaching it, etc, etc.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  In reality it’s certainly over 90% (probably closer to 99%)
  - 0x457 3y ago
    The only Ukrainians I've that that didn't speak Russian are 2nd gen immigrants outside of Ukraine. Often hilarious because their parents often barely speak Ukrainian themselves.
- protomolecule 3y ago
  "83% of Ukrainians responding to a 2008 Gallup poll preferred to use Russian instead of Ukrainian to take the survey." [0] [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100518073110/http://www.gallup.com/poll/109228/Russian-Language-Enjoying-Boost-PostSoviet-States.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20100518073110/http://www.gallup...

rjzzleep 3y ago

Most of their construction material comes from China and most of Taiwanese exports go to China. Taiwan will never compete on the global market for most of its products. This current policy is economic suicide, and anyone not blinded by ideology knows it. Not a single US president pushed for a FTA with Taiwan. So far every single one has opposed it, while on the back bullying Taiwan to open their markets to dump cheap American pork into it, completely against the will of the Taiwanese people by the way. The current result is that Taiwanese wages have stagnated for decades and as a result save for a select few that go to Japan and the US, a lot of other people look for opportunities in Mainland China. What made Taiwan so successful in the past is what makes Dubai and Singapore so successful now. Open trade with everyone, and easy business opportunities. Both things that it no longer engages in. BTW the big joke nobody really seems to know is that the pro independence party has never submitted a bid for independence, while the pro China party has.

Xunjin 3y ago
Why people keep believing that "open trade" solves everything and makes "easy business opportunities"? You can have open trade but also subsidy a portion of your economy to make that "open trade" not so open anymore. I'm not against it, just saying that a single specific decision makes Dubai and Singapore success is a reductionism that helps in nothing the discussion. Let take OPEC in matters, would you say they follow a "free trade" ideology?
berserk1010 3y ago
Many wrong things with comments. Your pro-china KMT bias is showing > Taiwan will never compete on the global market for most of its products. the aggregate brand value of Taiwan's 25 largest brands totaled US$13.84 billion in 2023, a 5 percent rise from 2022 and marking the fourth consecutive year of the value surpassing the US$10 billion mark. https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202312020012 https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202312020012 > The current result is that Taiwanese wages have stagnated for decades The average annual salary for full-time employees in Taiwan reached an eight-year high of NT$694,000 (US$22,242) this year (2023). https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202311290017 https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202311290017 Taiwan to surpass Japan in GDP per capita this year (2023): JCER https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Taiwan-to-surpass-Japan-in-GDP-per-capita-this-year-JCER https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Taiwan-to-surpass-Japan-in-G...

gpapilion 3y ago

Taiwanese companies run most of the major hightech manufacturing in China. For example, Foxconn is a taiwanese company. Most of my dealings with these types of manufactures has been in discussions of how to circumvent tariffs, not in really exiting manufacturing in the mainland. When I look at what occurring, I think it has more to do with their cheapest labor force is in China. So the scale and profit is hard to leave.

aswanson 3y ago
The Chinese labor force has been reaching parity recently. Hence pushes into Vietnam & India for manufacturing.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > Hence pushes into Vietnam & India for manufacturing. Doesn't help Taiwanese companies long term. They had an advantage in Mainland China being Chinese speaking. Already in India, Tata is becoming the Indian version of Foxconn for most manufacturers and VinGroup or Korean Chaebols like Lotte (SK has a FTA with Vietnam) the Vietnamese version of Foxconn in Vietnam. While South Korean and Japanese companies were actively de-risking in China by returning to ASEAN+India in the early-mid 2010s, Taiwanese companies only began doing this in the late 2010s after the 2015-16 recession.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

It’s more than that: most of the Taiwanese companies are owned/controlled by mainlanders who still have a lot more economic power than native Taiwanese, even if the latter has more political power these days.