Ancestral Vibes in Taipei

NOW THAT ONE IS getting there, ancestor worship seems to make much more sense. We reached Taipei in the precise middle of the Ghost Month during which the gates of afterlife open in Chinese cosmology. ‘Afterlife’ is so much less judgmental than heaven or hell. These gates open on to a two-way street.

Departure jostles with arrival, although ghosts on a nostalgia trip are naturally preponderant. They are also hungry. Whatever the pleasures may be of the Chinese afterlife, rice and noodles are obviously not among them. The living welcome spirits with food and paper money visible on stalls full of joss sticks and lanterns and effigies set up for sale during this propitious lunar month. At nightfall people release lanterns on rivers, burn paper money and celebrate that most precious cell in the honeycomb of humanity, the family.

IS PAPER MONEY an anachronism or an oxymoron? What is real money except notional paper or, these days, a plastic promise? No one in Taipei was handing out credit cards to ancestors. But one must not be flippant, particularly when one is in the queue to the Great Ether in the Sky. It strikes me that people who measure time by the moon rather than the sun are blessed with more imagination. The moon is inconstant, as beauty must be: temperamental, parsimonious, more powerful in memory than in sight. The moon is the guardian of ghosts.

LIKE ALL SUCCESSFUL cities Taipei has two faces. The economy leaps ahead during the day: Taiwan now has a higher per capita income than Japan, as one is informed by more than one proud citizen, having multiplied eight times over the last four decades. The evening belongs to leisure. Leisure is eastern calm, not frenetic. Pavements expand into streets; the thoroughfare becomes a park. Food stalls cater for late hours. Music, now in the custody of part-time maestros

with instruments, replaces the hum and screech of cars. Soft smiles displace tension and frown on faces. This is also the land of high-tech, so maybe there is some Big Brother churning out photographic fodder for an unknown vault, but who cares? A sense of pride in achievement without the sacrifice of freedom breeds indifference to any possible surveillance in the name of security rather than fear. Freedom has not been won easily in Taiwan, so it is preserved with care.

TAIWAN NO LONGER wants to be the Other China. It wants to be itself. On paper, the number of countries denying its formal existence keeps growing; more significantly, the number of international flights to Taiwan keeps rising along with the figures in its national bank account. In the second quarter of 2024 alone Taiwan recorded a current account surplus of $21,819 million in its foreign trade. That’s American dollars. In the decade between 2012 and 2022, the current account balance averaged 12.7 per cent of GDP as compared to 1.9 per cent for Asia-Pacific, according to the solemn statistician. Even for someone who understands economics even less than mathematics, this sounds like news one could live with.

Beijing, once again in the grip of an acquisitive avatar, has promised to swallow Taiwan in three years, but that will be a very long thousand days. The reaction to this threat is quietly robust. Taiwan is counting on the abacus to better times, not counting down to doomsday.

One wonders: Has Beijing calculated the cost of its political ambition? China, having gulped Tibet but not quite digested it, is the only country with active or dormant territorial claims on virtually every neighbour: Japan, Russia, across the Pamirs and the Himalayas, Vietnam, Philippines. Pakistan surrendered a chunk of Kashmir seized from India in 1948 to become a supplicant state.

The news is peppered by reports of Beijing’s jet fighters flitting through skies and battleships foaming through on the waves. But no one in Taiwan is dying of dread, or seems particularly terrified even if concern is a legitimate part of the establishment’s discourse. This is not a puzzle if you appreciate the reasons for Taipei’s confidence: domination of production in the semiconductor industry. Its exports amount to a quarter of the country’s GDP. You can always add more impressive details from any glance at a prime product of the chip-world, the internet. You supply the chip and America needs you as much as you need America.

SEMICONDUCTORS are the brains of contemporary life. They are inbred into every minute of today’s existence. They control need, comfort, income, outcome; they are the heart, mind and body of the 21st century. Statistics about Taiwan’s silent triumph in this business are spread across the internet through search engines if you want to check. In rounded percentages, Taiwan produces 90 per cent of the world’s advanced semiconductors needed for quantum computing or artificial intelligence (AI) or any number of innovations I have absolutely no knowledge of. In contrast, China produces only 16 per cent of the chips it needs and imports $400 billion worth each year. One Taiwan company, TSMC, has an astonishing 56.7 per cent of the international market share; the next biggest producer, Samsung, has just 8.5 per cent. The only American company in the vicinity is GlobalFoundries, with 6.6 per cent.

Taiwan is delighted to tell anyone who cares to listen that its exports to China have come down and its exports to the US have gone up. So let us discuss what happens if someone in Beijing gets irrational enough to press the destructive button of war. In theory Beijing may want to capture these factories intact, but what prevents the Taiwanese from blowing up what they have created instead of handing them over meekly to the enemy in case the US refuses to protect its ally in a military confrontation? The algorithms of possibility are startling. If the Taiwanese flatten the semiconductor supply lines, America’s superpower tech industry goes on a long, long holiday to nowhere. Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm lead a crowd of companies into bankruptcy. This is only the beginning of an epic story. American products disappear, markets crash, jobs freeze, cities get inflamed. Washington is clueless about the remedy, which has happened before.

Moscow sits back and enjoys the fun. Russia makes its own chips, not least because of the sanctions imposed after the Ukraine war.

Someone in Beijing should get the point: geography is so 20th-century as a reason for conflict. The disputes of the 21st century should be ideological, an existential debate between freedom and dictatorship to start with.

Taiwan’s motto is practical. You can’t become invincible, so become indispensable. Wise.

I GOT A TELLING lesson in the different hues of ancestor worship on the way back during a family visit in Singapore. They dine early in the east, so the sun was still in the lower sky when we reached our table at Marina Bay. A drone, of the kind you now see at every cricket match, began to flutter above the eyeline, twinkling on its radials. My nine-year-old grandson, his imagination lit by the sight, posed a conundrum: “If you were sitting in a metal box without safety belts in a spaceship, would you jump out if I gave you a trillion dollars?” My Inner Socrates rose to action: if I jumped out of a spaceship I would be dead, so what good would a trillion dollars be to a dead grandfather? He didn’t pause. “Have you made a will in my name?”

Moral of the story: Don’t argue with the future. Submit, and hope they keep the joss sticks burning when you return during Ghost Month.

About The Author

MJ Akbar

MJ Akbar is the author of, among several titles, Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan. His latest book is Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns

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