ARI Working Paper Series

The relationships between globalization and the development of nationalism are central to the current debates about globalization. This study reveals how the global economy has been strategically incorporated into the nation-building process by China in terms of its attitude to Taiwan. Under its “One China Policy,” China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and denies Taiwan’s status as an independent political entity. While Taiwanese business people in China lead privileged lifestyles as a result of Taiwan’s current economic power in relation to the “mainland,” they are, because of China’s political and military might, vulnerable to political surveillance and harassment by the Chinese.

This empirical study illustrates:
1) the formal and informal Chinese censorship of Taiwanese business people’s political ideology and action; and
2) the coping strategies Taiwanese business people in China employ in their associations with Chinese people and in the management of their capital and factories. The Chinese regulations and the counterstrategies from Taiwanese business people, this paper observes, work to create and sustain differences and boundaries between Taiwanese business communities and their Chinese hosts. These findings indicate that, despite frequent and sweeping assertions of a pan-economic “Greater China,” the relationship between Taiwan and China, even in the context of this proliferating monetary exchange, is characterized by asymmetrical economic and political stratification. Global economic processes can be key sites for nationalist contestation, dispute and discipline, and the concerns of nationalism and national identity still occupy the very centre of attention and controversy in the process of globalization.