ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to illustrate that the period 2005 to 2010 envisaged the greatest change. From 1987 to 2004 (Chapters 3 to 5), the interaction between Taiwanese business people and local Chinese governments was built on the tendency of gradually increasing meeting frequency and more institutionalised interaction, and Taiwanese investors became more involved in participating in local policy discussion. Continuing into this period, the meeting frequency between Taiwanese business people and local officials continued to rise, to the extent that they were too numerous to be recorded accurately. Their interaction pattern evolved in a more institutionalised status, and the national TBA, also known as the Association of Taiwan Investment Enterprises on the Mainland was established in 2007. This development could be argued as being a contradiction to our previous observations (Chapter 3): previously we mentioned how difficult it was to establish an association in the early 1990s when Taiwanese business people had started to negotiate with local officials; furthermore, after TBAs were established in different localities (also discussed in Chapter 3) the Chinese government expressed concerns with regard to a national TBA in China. Nevertheless, in this chapter we will explain that this change is not alien to the Chinese government’s consistent logic, the rational choice of using Taiwanese businessmen to achieve their political goal. At the third level, this chapter will disclose that during this period although the meeting frequency of Taiwanese business people and local officials were not kept track of due to their abundance, and there was a national TBA as the middle man to negotiate with the Chinese government, most Taiwanese business people had not felt that they could become more involved in local governments’ policy decisions. On the contrary, according to recent interviews in July 2009, most of my interviewees expressed that Taiwanese business people’s ‘privilege’ had gone. Although Taiwanese investment was still important to local governments, compared to the past, Taiwanese businesses seemed not to have such easy access to local officials in terms of discussing their core interest of investment anymore. This point will be discussed in depth in this chapter.
