Scenarios of Taiwan Facing a China-Led Economic Integration Process in East Asia after the Financial Turmoil - An Analysis from the Globalization Schools

Abstract

Facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, several analysts have delivered a message in which China is gradually replacing the US's role in stabilizing regional financial markets in East Asia. These China-led financial stabilization projects not only reduce the impacts of the financial turmoil on East Asia, but they also make China a credible option for taking a lead role in East Asian regional economic integration. However, largely due to its complicated political background with China, Taiwan, while coping with the global financial crisis, remains an interesting topic in the theories of globalization, in which Taiwan's eagerness to join this economic integration process in East Asia, mostly led by China unfortunately, has prompted itself to move on to different trajectories of adjustment. From the theoretical schools predicting globalization developments, three different perspectives, including skepticism, hyper globalism, and transformationalism, can be applied to analyze Taiwan's responses to a China-led economic integration process in East Asia: national welfare state, competition state, and structural competition-state. This paper therefore examines these developments of Taiwan as tied to the future of the East Asian economic integration process.download