India and Taiwan are on the same latitude but that’s about all they have in common.
India is Taiwan’s 15th or 16th largest trading partner, which works out to about $8 billion in bilateral trade and 200 Taiwanese companies with $4 billion in investment. If you look at the size of India, this is very small, says Mumin Chen, formerly with Taiwan’s trade and cultural mission in Delhi.
He is now back to his job as professor of international relations at National Chung Hsing University in Taichung. Mumin Chen was speaking to StratNews Global on The Gist programme and believes there is a gap between India and Taiwan.
“India’s power is quite influential because of yoga, food, Bollywood, so people know about India but they don’t know what they can do in India, where do they go, what places to visit.”
Taiwan has 150 universities he pointed out but there are none teaching Indian studies or languages like Hindi. The same applies to India where people have heard about Taiwan but few have visited and knowledge draws from study of East Asia with the focus on China and Japan.
In the case of China, Taiwanese companies have invested $200 billion and there are over one lakh firms from the island doing business on the mainland.
“For Taiwan, China used to be a very big market and Taiwanese firms made huge profits there but in the years since Xi Jinping came to power, the business environment has deteriorated and the political situation more tense,” Mumin Chen noted.
But there is growing interest in India given that China is becoming difficult to operate in. He says there are at least four Taiwanese electric vehicle companies that have set up shop in India. A Taiwanese semiconductor firm has also tied up with Tatas for a foundry.
In his view, the only country today with potential for high economic growth is India. The population of all the 10 ASEAN countries is not even half that of India.
Tune in for more in this chat with Mumin Chen, professor of international relations at Taiwan’s National Chung Hsing University.
