The Black Man’s Burden: The Diaspora's Urgent Mandate to Awaken Africa's Sleeping Giants
Part II: How the Chinese Diaspora paved the way for the Chinese Economic Miracle - Taiwan
Taiwan is an island of 24 million people, consisting almost entirely of Mandarin speaking, Han-Chinese. Taiwan also boasts an extensive history of manufacturing, specifically in computer chips and computer devices and electronics. A lot of this is owed to Japan, who colonized and occupied the island for 50 years, from 1895 to 1945. While Japanese rule was brutal and suppressive at times, and positioned Taiwan lower along the economic value chain in order to generate larger spoils for Japanese colonialists, transformative changes still took place.
By building out Taiwan’s infrastructure, investing in public health and education, along with introducing new farming techniques to the local population, Japan industrialized and modernized the island. Here, we see another case of expansion of an economy’s foreign direct investment, global trade and technology through global partnership and sharing (admittedly, by means of colonial subjugation).
Furthermore, Japan itself would probably not have been in a position to yield such modernization for Taiwan if it was not for its prior exposure to, competition, and collaboration with the Western World. In 1854, US General Matthew C. Perry led several ships towards Japanese shores and forced the kingdom to end its 200 year+ period of isolationism from the rest of the world. Japan, like China shortly before it, would have to open its doors to global competition and trade. Unlike China, Japan adopted a different tact in response. It chose to embrace - rather than resist - Western influence and hegemony, striving to synergistically integrate it into Japanese culture, thinking and customs. The result of this was a philosophy known as Wakon Yosai, Japanese Spirit, Western Learning.
Taiwan learnt and acquired the ways of the Japanese that were productive and conducive to the growth and prosperity of their society. This led to rapid industrialization of the island in the Post-War period, spawning a manufacturing giant throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s. Indeed, before Made in China, there was Made in Taiwan. Once Mainland China broke from the shackles of communism and finally embraced market capitalism, Taiwanese companies also began to partner with the Mainland and induct them into the global marketplace.
And the rest was history: between 1991 and 2023, 45,523 Taiwanese investments were made in China, averaging more than 1,400 a year. Equating to a total of over $200 billion invested. The Taiwanese also played a crucial role in laying down the building blocks for China’s early industrialization and continued upwards trajectory. For that matter, look no further than major assembler of electronics Foxconn. This Taiwanese company, whom the largest tech company in the world in Apple outsources most of the production of its smartphones, tablets and laptops to, has many of the largest of its factories located on the Mainland. Its largest is based in Longhua, Shenzhen, and employs between 230,000 to 450,000 depending on global demand patterns.
China even hosts a ‘Little Taiwan’ or ‘Little Taipei’ in Kunshan. A city with one of the highest, if not, the highest income per head in the whole of China, that is a city of 1.6 million people, home to 100,000 Taiwanese people and thousands upon thousands of Taiwanese businesses.
As we learn more about China’s development story, a clear pattern begins to emerge that reinforces the virtuous and growth inducing relationship between foreign direct investment, global trade and technology. People, as the dynamic organisms that activate the three pillars of economic success, are constantly partnering with complementary organisms across families, villages, towns, cities and nations as a way of unlocking big gains. The Taiwanese and Hong Kong Diaspora of sorts, acted as a necessary bridge between China and the rest of the more modernized, business enterprise world.
I see no reason why Africa’s Diaspora of over 30 million cannot play a similar role. More of Africa needs to fully tap into and exploit the potential of its people and networks locally and globally as a means to maximizing wealth accumulation and improved quality of life.