Dancing with the enemy

From The Economist

Doomsayers in Taiwan, who a few years ago gave warning of a rapid “hollowing out” of their country's economy as manufacturing migrated to China, have been proved manifestly wrong. China, with Taiwan's abundant help but not to the island's detriment, has become the pre-eminent manufacturing base for many of the world's information-technology (IT) products. Even the initially sceptical Mr Chen is beginning to realise that Taiwan can only gain by working with China to remove the remaining barriers to cross-strait flows of people, goods and capital.

In the next few years there will be plenty of pro-independence rhetoric as the debate gets under way on Taiwan's proposed constitutional revisions that Mr Chen has said will be endorsed in 2006 and enacted two years later. But if he is sensible, the main achievement of his eight years in office will be not that he made Taiwan truly independent (which, in almost every respect, it has been for 55 years), but that he helped his country to gain unprecedented prosperity, shoulder to shoulder with China. To get there, he will need to ride the tide of Taiwanese identity with skill—and some caution.