As a Taiwanese fighter jet screeched over the lush green fields of eastern Hualien County last week, pomelo farmer Mulin Ou sat in his orchard counting the cost of China’s latest push to pressure the island.
Tensions across the Taiwan Strait have risen to their highest level in decades as China fumes earlier this month over a visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Beijing, which claims democratic Taiwan for itself, responded by launching exercises, sending missiles into waters around the island – and torpedoing exports of certain fruit and fish products to China with new import bans.
The overall impact of China’s recent economic sanctions has been limited. But producers like Ou pay a painful price.
“Our mainland orders have all been cancelled. Our grapefruits have no way of getting there,” he said.
His farm in Hualien’s Ruisui Township has shipped about 180,000 kilograms (397,000 pounds) of the citrus fruit to the mainland every year for several decades.
“Customers are waiting for the grapefruits, but there’s nothing we can do, it’s a political issue,” he shrugged.
– grouper chumps –
Taiwanese farmers and producers have increasingly had to adjust to import bans from China – with Beijing authorities typically citing sudden regulatory discrepancies rather than a direct link to politics.
After Pelosi’s visit, China announced bans on Taiwanese citrus fruits and some mackerel, while halting its own exports of natural construction sand to the island.
The month before her visit, it targeted grouper, the vast majority of which had previously gone to Chinese consumers.
Taipei said the move was politically motivated, while China claimed it found some fish contaminated with banned chemicals.
A year earlier, pineapple imports were halted after Chinese authorities claimed to have spotted pests in shipments just as the annual harvest was underway.
Hans Chen, a third-generation farmer from the Lijia Green Energy and Biotechnology Company, said at a grouper facility in Pingtung, Taiwan’s southernmost county, that he would be “severely affected” if sanctions aren’t lifted by the end of the year.
Chen, 35, manages a farm of about 500,000 groupers and 90 percent of his exports go to China.
He said the ban was imposed without warning and comes at the worst possible time for producers already impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.
The fish farmer says his business and others rely too heavily on the lucrative Chinese market and are having to diversify away from their aggressive neighbor in the wake of the surprise ban.
“Everyone was of the opinion that the Covid-19 situation is slowly improving and the Chinese market is slowly stabilizing and prices will rise again, so there will be … some profit to recoup the previous losses,” he said.
“Therefore, everyone’s fear and the impact (of the sanctions) is very great.”
– Symbolic and limited –
China remains Taiwan’s largest trading partner, with the mainland accounting for 28 percent of total exports.
But Taiwan’s government and businesses have also pushed economic diversification in response to Beijing’s mounting aggression under President Xi Jinping, China’s most authoritarian leader in a generation.
Since 2016, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen has been pursuing a “New Southbound Policy” to increase trade with the rest of Southeast and East Asia.
Taiwan is also seeing a surge of sympathy from like-minded democracies in the region.
Much of last year’s pineapple harvest was saved when Japanese consumers bought “freedom pineapples” in solidarity.
And China has been cautious about its targets so far.
Taiwan is one of the world’s largest semiconductor chip makers, and Beijing has avoided hitting a market it relies on to meet domestic demand.
“China is very picky about the tools it uses to impose economic sanctions on Taiwan,” Christina Lai, a research fellow at Taiwan’s state-run Academia Sinica, told AFP.
“It has always refrained from harming its domestic economy and technology industry. Beijing cannot afford to ban the most important imports from Taiwan – semiconductors, high-end instruments or machines,” she added.
The overall impact on Taiwan’s economy is therefore “very limited,” said Fan Shih-ping, a professor at National Taiwan Normal University.
“It is political manipulation as China wants to show that it is in charge and in control of Taiwan,” he added.
But for farmers, who have fallen victim to the recent surge in tensions, the scale of the sanctions feels seismic.
“We are looking for help from the government if they can help us in any way,” Ou said.
“We need to start finding some sales within the country. That’s a big headache.”
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