Cross-strait Trade after Opium War: 1860-2005

Tracing the history back to the 17th century, Taiwan had already started trade with other countries then due to excellent location and convenient marine transportation in the oceans. Such great qualifications stress Taiwan's importance in the international regime. This thesis includes 6 chapters. Besides the introduction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 is the description of data sources and gives a picture of the then background. Chapter 3 describes the importance of China's trade market from Taiwan's point of view. This chapter covers Taiwan's trade dependence, export dependence and import dependence on China. Also exports-imports ratio of Taiwan's trade with China is also addressed. It displays the rise and fall of China's share of Taiwan's exports, imports or total trade volume. When Taiwan just opened its ports in 1860, China was Taiwan's most important export market. However, the volume of Taiwan's exports to China shrank dramatically in 1902 during Japanese colonial rule and Taiwan's main export markets switched from China to Japan. After the recovery of Taiwan, China and Taiwan maintained a close trade relationship under the Nationalist Government administration. After then, the two sides were separate for almost 40 years. When both of them opened to each other, Taiwan's exports to China have multiplied. China became Taiwan's largest export market in 2002. As for Taiwan's imports from China, it hardly fluctuated. Even in 2005, China's share of Taiwan's imports was still only around 10%. Chapter 4 and 5 address the changes in the trade commodities between China and Taiwan. They display the rise and fall of the trade items and following the description give a general picture of that after 1988. Tea and sugar covered over 90% of Taiwan's exports in late 19th century. The main export market was China. In Japanese colonial rule, sugar and rice was the most important goods. They occupied almost 70% percent of Taiwan's exports and the export destination was Japan. Other export goods such as sub-agricultural products, fishery products, textile products and industrial products were not as important as tea, sugar and rice. In Chapter 4, changes of Taiwan's economic structure were also discussed. As for the imports, agricultural products, fertilizer, industrial products, textile products and other daily living products accounted for around 40%~50% of the total imports. The import goods are more various than export goods. In the last section of Chapter 5, policy evolution of the two sides is also addressed. Chapter 6 is the conclusion of the tables and figures. Future perspectives are also given in this part