Who Needs Taiwan?

<>(Laura Li/tr. by Scott Williams)

Elementary school teachers like to play a game in which they have the children list the names of one to three of their best friends. The child named most often is declared the most popular and wins an EQ prize. But what about the poor children who aren't listed even once, those who know that their best friends are closer to others than them and must endure the pain of having been rejected?

While working on this month's cover stories, we saw many nations in our region cozying up to one another in the version of the friends game that involves ASEAN and various partners or combinations of partners (a game we call ASEAN+N) and couldn't help but feel a little rejected. The sense of "not belonging" is so strong, we don't even know whether Taiwan should be considered a part of Northeast Asia or Southeast Asia.

Setting aside the reasons for Taiwan's lack of reciprocal friendships, the ASEAN +N situation has provided us with valuable knowledge, and, if our EQ is high enough, we can work out a solution.

The first lesson is that there's strength in numbers. We're seeing the old proverb that "ten chopsticks can't be broken" playing out in modern Southeast Asia. ASEAN's "chopsticks" speak different languages, have differing customs, and vary widely in their levels of wealth, making their relationship far more complex than that of brothers. If they are able to recognize the need to form an alliance, to set aside old enmities and learn to get along with people completely different from themselves, in order to survive and grow strong, what makes Taiwan think it can go it alone?

The second lesson involves the strong and the weak engaging wisely with each other. The relationship between ASEAN and mainland China has been instructive in this regard.

While most of China was still wearing blue Mao suits into the 1990s, in that decade ASEAN produced its own Four Little Tigers: Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Unfortunately, the 1997 East Asian financial crisis turned the tigers into ailing kittens and forced them to play catch up to the Chinese economy they had so recently been outperforming.

While one side shrank and the other grew, both acted intelligently: Instead of crushing the Tigers, as some had feared China might, it provided ASEAN with financial support and began hosting an annual ASEAN Expo in Nanning, Guangxi. The Tigers, meanwhile, were humble and respectful in their dealings with China, even going so far as to refer to their alliance with it as China+1 (ASEAN).

In this environment of mutual respect, mainland China solidified its leadership position, while ASEAN saw Japan, Korea and many other nations clamoring for closer ties with it once it had negotiated links with China. ASEAN's economy is only a bit over one-tenth the size of the combined Chinese, Japanese, and Korean economies, but the image of these latter players nevertheless takes on a whole new cachet when they align themselves more closely with ASEAN.

Some say that Southeast Asia's long history of colonization at the hands of Europe, the US, and Japan has taught it how to "schmooze" with bigger nations. If that's the case, shouldn't Taiwan be able to as well? Moreover, Taiwan may be a small, solitary island, but it has tremendous global reach. Our businesspeople have managed to put down roots in all the nations of ASEAN and the communities of Taiwanese abroad have never abandoned us. If we approach this issue properly, we should be able to become an important member of ASEAN+N.

Taiwan has an export-oriented economy and therefore needs good relations with others. But who can Taiwan ally with? And who wants to ally with Taiwan? How would we bring about such alliances? Do we attempt a single breakthrough or seek to advance on multiple fronts? How do we balance questions of precedence, power, and winners and losers? We need a more thorough public debate that gives equal weight to all points of view, and we need it now.

This issue also features summery stories on the revival of classic Taiwanese saucery, Taipei's green elementary schools, the Daxueshan firefly community, and Taiwan's delightful urban busking scene.