Word: islanders
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ends up talking about China. On a Saturday morning in early May, Ma, casually clad in a red polo shirt and blue jeans, is marketing Taiwan as a tourist destination to foreign diplomats at a restaurant perched on a forested hillside in the county of Hualien on the island's east coast. The government, he tells them, is upgrading bike trails in the area and hopes to get World Heritage Site status for a nearby gorge, which Ma compares to the Grand Canyon. The diplomats chat about the local hotels and scenic spots for a few moments, but then quickly...
...visit Taiwan for the first time last year and are arriving by the thousands each day, he notes, giving the recession-hit local economy a welcome, albeit minor, boost. He stresses that he wants Taiwan to benefit economically from better ties with China - but he won't let the island be assimilated by the rising giant. "I won't sell out Taiwan," Ma told TIME, adding that "I'll sell China Taiwan fruit ... We're trying to create an atmosphere of peace." (See the world's most influential people...
...extent, Ma is simply taking the next logical steps toward normalizing relations between two governments that technically don't recognize the other's right to exist, but which have inevitably been drawn together economically. Taiwan is a global center of IT manufacturing, and in recent years, the island's companies have for competitive reasons been compelled to open factories on the mainland, taking advantage of a liberalization of Taipei's restrictions on such investments. More than a million people from Taiwan now live in China in industrial centers near Shanghai in the east and in Guangdong province in the south...
...easing of tensions has come about in part because Ma, a Harvard Law School graduate and former Taipei mayor, is a far more palatable politician to Beijing than his more confrontational predecessor, Chen Shui-bian. China's leaders ultimately want the island and the mainland to reunite. During his eight years as President, Chen irked Beijing by flirting with ways of making Taiwan more formally independent, such as scheduling a referendum on applying for U.N. membership under the name Taiwan. Ma, on the other hand, has promised not to declare Taiwan an independent state, a position that has made...
...Though maritime trade has been picking up recently due to a resumption in Chinese commodity imports, pushing up the Baltic Dry Index from its lows, the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore estimates there are about 150 ships in the vicinity of the island-state, although the number of vessels could be significantly higher than the official figures. That's in addition to 400 to 500 ships that are using Singapore's port at any given time. Most of the vessels outside Singapore are idle and have been stripped to skeleton crews of three or four in contrast...