Onshoring

摘要

In the smoke-and-mirrors statistics for foreign investment in China, Hong Kong appears as the biggest investor, followed, oddly, by the Virgin Islands. Trailing in sixth place, behind Japan, South Korea and America, is Taiwan. But if investments were traced back to their true origins, Taiwan might well turn out to be the largest. The capital flow from Taiwan to China is turning the mainland into a global leader in information-technology (IT) equipment, albeit one that still relies mainly on imports for the more advanced components. In 2002, China overtook Japan and Taiwan to become the world's second-largest IT hardware producer after America. The steep upward curve of China's IT exports is almost exactly matched by its imports of IT components from Taiwan. China is now the world's biggest IT hardware exporter to America. Yet more than 60% of these exports are made in China by Taiwanese companies.