Countries friendly with China are often reluctant to open full-fledged embassies for Taiwan due to the obvious cold relations between the latter and mainland China.
Countries friendly with China are often reluctant to open full-fledged embassies for Taiwan due to the obvious cold relations between the latter and mainland China. But this has not hampered even China from being Taiwan’s number one trade partner.
The story however changes in India, where Taiwan’s representative to India Wenchuyi Ong has found it impossible to meet West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to discuss investment opportunities in the state. Taiwan has opened a Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre in Delhi.
While ambassador Ong dismisses ideological reasons behind Bhattacharjee’s refusal to meet him, he does point out that he has had no trouble meeting the chief ministers of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and the deputy chief minister of Bihar.
“I was told that the chief minister of West Bengal was busy with the assembly elections, and so could not meet me,” he said. “Ideology should not be a problem since our biggest trade partner is China and we do significant business with Vietnam as well,” he said, adding, “And unlike these two countries the Left government in West Bengal is a democratically-elected one,” he said.
Despite the snub, the ambassador said Taiwan will be opening a trade centre in Kolkata. “We are eager to open a trade office there, because of a sizeable presence of Hakka people in the city,” he said. Kolkata has a famous Chinatown called Tangra.
In fact, in a strange reprisal of the Tata Nano story, Gujarat chief minister met Ong at least four times in the past year and a project for manufacturing machinery has almost been finalised for the state.
“Taiwan’s strength is manufacturing machinery, food processing and hi-tech electronic manufacturing. We also design our projects keeping in mind local job requirements so that long-term goodwill is created,” he said.
“We have already invested in Andhra Pradesh where we have helped set up Apache shoes, which produces footwear for Adidas, and in Tamil Nadu. The Apache investment is nearly $ 300 million,” he said.
Sources in the industry ministry in Bengal, however, confirmed that the Left Front government may have some reservations about getting business from Taiwan, especially in the 60th year of the People’s Republic of China.
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