Cross-Strait Relations: Taiwan's China Dilemma and Beijing's Taiwan Dilemma
We invite you to join us for a talk by Professor Syaru Shirley Lin and Professor Harry Harding. They will speak on “Cross-Strait Relations: Taiwan’s China Dilemma and Beijing’s Taiwan Dilemma.” Most importantly, they will draw on implications for Hong Kong in this talk, particularly focusing on the younger generation. The talk will be followed by a brief Q&A.;
While Beijing regards Hong Kong and Taiwan as Chinese, people in both places are consolidating separate local identities. And as Taiwan and Hong Kong experience the uneven socio-economic consequences of globalization, they are weighing the costs of deeper integration with China against the opportunities presented by China’s large and growing economy. The emergence of local identities and the debates over further integration with China are especially evident among the younger generations. Both these trends pose serious challenges for Beijing, which wants to deepen Hong Kong’s political and economic integration with the mainland and hopes to secure Taiwan’s unification with China. Several alternative policies are available to China: deepen economic integration with Taiwan and Hong Kong in the hopes of a positive political spillover, liberalize China’s political system so as to reduce the gap in political structure and values with Hong Kong and Taiwan, or place greater political, economic, and even coercive pressure on Hong Kong and Taiwan to stem the trends toward localism and separatism. But all these three options carry costs and risks for Beijing, alongside uncertain benefits. Our speakers will explore these dilemmas for Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, and place them in the context of the growing backlash against economic liberalization and regional economic integration around the world.
We invite Syaru Shirley Lin (former partner at Goldman Sachs, founding faculty member at master’s program in global political economy at CUHK) and Harry Harding (visiting Professor of Social Science at University of Virginia) to discuss.