Taiwan's real problem: it needs China more than China needs it

A new era has clearly dawned in cross-strait relations, and both sides will adjust accordingly in the coming years.

Beyond the short-term euphoria of the overwhelming mandate for the pro-independence DPP in both the presidency and parliament, some hard realities will, before long, settle in on the island.

As with the rest of Asia, Taiwan is grappling with how to handle a rising China. That it has rejected the accommodationist stance of the KMT is an obvious indication of its unease with the prospect of economic dependence on a massive neighbor whose political system it has no desire to be absorbed into. Yet it is hard to see just how this economic dependence can be substantially reduced by any government, however determined its pursuit of lasting autonomy from the mainland. Whether it likes China or not, its relationship with China will continue to be the defining one for Taiwan.

While from the 1990s Taiwanese businesses could not fathom being denied access to the mainland's lucrative supply of cheap labor, today they increasingly can't fathom being denied access to the mainland's massive market. China's recent financial and economic difficulties have only more sharply highlighted the island's awkward intertwinement with it, rather than offering a way out of Beijing's orbit.

One is tempted to argue that Taiwan has none but itself to blame. It has fallen behind South Korea as a high-end producer and exporter, much like Hong Kong has been squeezed by Shanghai to the north and Singapore to the south as a leading financial hub. Arguably the very fact that Taiwan and Hong Kong have been the main conduits for China's opening to the world has rendered their comparative advantages less and less salient than those of the other "little dragons" of a generation ago. In reality, there is little that either could have done to avert their present crises with respect to the mainland.

The outgoing KMT may have been too naively hopeful of its capacity to tune a cross-strait integration in Taiwan's favor, but it recognized the fundamental inevitability of such an integration in one form or another. If the DPP in its triumphalism thinks otherwise, it will relearn the hard way that dependence on the mainland isn't simply the fault of a greedy industrial and commercial elite; it reflects plain economic common sense.

Taiwan needs China more than China needs it; it has little left that Beijing can't get from other trade partners, notably South Korea. On the other hand, nothing can replace the combination of size and proximity of the mainland market for Taiwan - and nothing ever will.

Taiwan must reverse this imbalance so that it enjoys leverage over the communist dictatorship instead of the other way around. It will most certainly not accomplish this by trying to steer away from Beijing - that will only hasten its descent into servitude. As Ukraine must do with respect to Russia, Taiwan must acquire and exercise the finest of all skills: confronting a far stronger adversary on his own terms. America will not come to the rescue - no more than western Europe will rush to Ukraine's. Freedom can only triumph by converting the unfree from within - the free world is today paying the price for the American effort to impose it from without.

Such is the magnitude of Taiwan's mission and mandate in the global family of nations.