Word: formosae
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Southward to Fortune. The 14 million Overseas Chinese living in the area they call Nanyang, the Southern Ocean, looked desperately for a way out of the rain of repressive laws. Some turned to Red China and some to the Nationalist stronghold on Formosa, but all felt that their existence was at stake. The matter was hotly argued last week in Manila's tiny sari-sari shops by the flickering light of kerosene lamps, in Bangkok's "thieves' market," where peddlers cautiously hawk rare Siamese antiques, in Singapore's Tanjong Rhu, the "millionaires' club," where wealthy...
...European imperialists regarded them as rivals. The Spanish in the Philippines were nearly wiped out before they rallied to slaughter 23,000 Chinese at Manila in 1603. At midcentury, a Chinese exile and pirate named Koxinga drove the Dutch from Formosa; later the Dutch retaliated by wholesale murders of Chinese on Java. But the colonial powers and the Overseas Chinese soon recognized that they were destined to be allies, not enemies. The one supplied technology and power, the other shrewdness and hard work; between them they reaped the fortune of the Indies...
...Endeared. The hua-chiao are often a headache not only to the countries they live in but to the rulers of Nationalist and Red China as well. Formosa, needing friends in the Far East, has friendly feelings for countries that continue to recognize it, such as the Philippines, Thailand and South Viet Nam, and it dares not recklessly rush to the support of the Overseas Chinese in every local squabble. Last week Formosa was engaged in a long, embittering dispute with Manila about the disposition of 2,700 Chinese who have overstayed their visas in the Philippines...
...there are shortcomings. The U.S. still underwrites an annual trade deficit that has ranged from $70 to $90 million, and U.S. advisers fear that this will continue until the Nationalist government provides new incentives for investment in export industries. Private U.S. investors have put only $54 million into Formosa, partly because they object to the terms of Formosa's foreign-investment law, partly because of sad experience with the widespread "squeeze" system, through which some Formosan officials almost seem determined to run foreign businesses out of the country, not bring them...
...experts on the scene, pleased by the general economic improvement, nonetheless are disturbed by Formosa's high production and consumption of consumer items, which discourages capital formation. "Formosans are consuming too much, saving too little," says one U.S. expert. Formosa now has a population of more than 10 million and one of the highest rates of population increase (3.6%) in the world. Even with heavy expenditure on land reclamation and irrigation, Formosa's currently well-fed citizens will either have to cut down their eating or start importing food...