A Blessing From Heaven

One day, a friend told me a story about a young girl who flew over Taiwan in an airplane and saw outside her window a shaft of golden light shining down through the clouds, illuminating the island below. According to my friend, the girl considered this to be confirmation of heaven’s blessing on the people of Taiwan. I was told that the country’s economic success and affluence is heaven’s reward to the people for their hard work, frugality, and piety. The girl’s vision is an apt metaphor for the devolution of capital from the core to the periphery, as transnational corporations went overseas in search of cheap labor, and states intent on development welcomed their capital investments (Sharpston 1975, 119). ¹ However, heaven did not reward every virtuous country so lavishly. Taiwan was one of only five countries that U.S. transnational corporations deemed politically safe for investment, and in which they concentrated 85 percent of their subcontracting (Landsberg 1987, 225). ² How the Taiwanese tapped into global capital flows, and transmitted this capital to the local level, is an important part of the story of Taiwan’s economic development. In this chapter, I examine Taiwan’s specific relationship to the world economy, and the distribution of income in the shoe industry.