Day: August 9, 2022

China’s outsourcing of rare earth mining to Myanmar has prompted a rapid expansion of the industry there, fuelling human rights abuses, damaging the environment and propping up pro-juna militias, according to a new report published Tuesday by rights group Global Witness.

The report, entitled “Myanmar’s Poisoned Mountains,” used satellite imagery to determine that what amounted to a “handful” of rare earth mines in Myanmar’s Kachin state in 2016 had ballooned to more than 2,700 mining collection pools at almost 300 separate locations, covering an area the size of Singapore, by March 2022 — slightly more than a year after the military seized power in a coup.

Global Witness found that China had outsourced much of its industry across the border to a remote corner of Kachin state, which it said is now the world’s largest source of the minerals used in green energy technologies, smartphones and home electronics.

“Our investigation reveals that China has effectively offshored this toxic industry to Myanmar over the past few years, with terrible consequences for local communities and the environment,” Global Witness CEO Mike Davis said in a statement accompanying the release of the report.

The local warlord in charge of the mining territory, Zakhung Ting Ying, has become the “central broker” of Myanmar’s rare earth industry, the report said, along with other leaders of militias loyal to the military regime, making backroom deals with Chinese companies that are illegal under the country’s laws.

It said that his militia’s links to the junta mean “there is a high risk” that revenues from rare earth mining are being used to fund the military’s human rights abuses and crushing of dissent. Rights groups say security forces have killed at least 2,167 civilians and arrested more than 15,000 others since the Feb. 1, 2021, coup, mostly during peaceful anti-junta protests.

“Rare earth mining is the latest natural resource heist by Myanmar’s military, which has funded itself for decades by looting the country’s rich natural resources, including the multi-billion-dollar jade, gemstone and timber industries,” Davis said.

“Since the 2021 coup, the regime has relied on natural resources to sustain its illegal power grab and with demand for rare earths booming, the military will no doubt be spotting an opportunity to fill its coffers and fund its abuses,” he added.

Global Witness noted that the processes used to extract heavy rare earth minerals have polluted local ecosystems, destroyed livelihoods and poisoned drinking water. It said multiple health issues reported near the rare earth mines in China have also been reported by residents living close to the mines in Myanmar.

Meanwhile, civil society groups and community members — including indigenous people — who speak out against the illegal industry or refuse to give up their land to make way for new mines face threats from the militias who run the area, the report said.

Supply chain at risk

Global Witness said that its findings come amid a huge increase in demand for the minerals as production of green energy technologies ramps up. Sales of processed rare earth minerals for magnet productions are expected to triple by 2035.

The group warned of a high risk that the minerals are finding their way into the supply chains of major household name companies that use heavy rare earths in their products including Tesla, Volkswagen, General Motors, Siemens and Mitsubishi Electric.

Davis said the report’s findings demonstrate the need for the international community to broaden sanctions against the junta to include rare earth minerals.

“The disturbing reality is that the cash that is fuelling the environmental and human rights abuses caused by Myanmar’s rare earth mining industry ultimately stems from the global push to scale up renewables,” he said.

“As the climate crisis accelerates and demand for these low-carbon technologies skyrocket, today’s findings must be a wake-up call that the green energy transition cannot come at the cost of communities in resource-rich countries, and must instead be equitable and sustainable, prioritizing the rights of those who are most impacted.”

Global Witness called on companies to stop mining heavy rare earths in Myanmar and ensure that minerals from the country do not enter the global supply chain.

It also urged governments to impose import restrictions for rare earths produced in Myanmar, impose sanctions on armed actors illegally profiting from the industry, and introduce stronger policies to reduce the harms associated with extracting the minerals.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that about 240,000 tons of rare earth minerals were mined globally in 2020, with China accounting for 140,000 tons, followed by the United States with 38,000 tons and Myanmar with 30,000 tons.

Though China is the world’s largest producer of rare earth minerals, it buys the ore from neighboring Myanmar, exploiting its cheaper labor.

Myanmar exported more than 140,000 tons of rare earth deposits to China, worth more than U.S. $1 billion between May 2017 and October 2021, according to China’s State Taxation Administration.

Authorities in Xinjiang are implementing new lockdowns in response to a coronavirus outbreak thought to have originated with Chinese tourists who visited the western region’s Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, local officials said.

After Chinese media reported that the number of COVID-19 infections in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region had begun to rise, authorities in Ghulja (in Chinese, Yining) and other urban areas ordered residents to quarantine, the sources said.

The number of infected people in Xinjiang rose to 274 from July 31 to the end of the first week of August, according to an Aug. 7 report on Tengritagh (Tianshan), the official website of the Xinjiang government. The new variant of the virus was first detected in the Ili Kazakh (Yili Hasake) Autonomous Prefecture, where Ghulja is located, and spread widely from there.

Because of the COVID-19 outbreak, authorities have divided Xinjiang into 45 high-risk areas, 34 medium-risk areas and nine low-risk areas, and implemented quarantine measures at different levels, the report said. Those areas include the cities of Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi), Ghulja (Yining), Aksu (Akesu), Kumul (Hami), Chochek (Tacheng), Bortala (Bole), and Kashgar (Kashi).

Chinese government officials told reporters at a press conference in Urumqi on Aug. 8 that there were 34 infected people in Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, which is in the northern part of Xinjiang, but they did not say how and where they caught the highly contagious respiratory virus. 

A community official said that the new infections were thought to have been brought by Chinese tourists from Gansu province, and the first viral outbreak in Ghulja was found in Uchon Dungan village.

A Chinese government official in Samyuzi village told RFA that quarantine measures have been implemented in his village, and that residents are prohibited from going outside.

A security official in Ghulja’s Mazar village said the epidemic in Ghulja was first detected in Mai village, also known as the Uchon Dungan village, and that the virus was spread by Chinese tourists from Gansu province.

The official, who declined to give his name for safety reasons, also said that he and others now were busy with quarantine-related work and that there were five infected residents in the village, who ate in one of the same restaurants where the Chinese tourists ate.

“They are being treated now,” he said. “They got infected while they were eating with some Chinese tourists from China proper. They got the virus from those tourists. The ones who got infected were [ethnic] Hui and Dungan [Chinese Muslims].”

“The government checked all the people who went to eat in that restaurant and also where those Chinese tourists went while they were traveling here,” he said. “We heard that the Chinese tourists came from Gansu province.”

The village security officer also said there were two infected people in Borichi hamlet of Yengitam village, who ate in the same restaurant where the Chinese tourists dined.

He told RFA that he learned about the local COVID-19 infections from other community officials on the Chinese instant-messaging platform WeChat, but that he did not know where or how the infected people were being handled because information was not passed on to lower-level officials like him.

“They also went to the same restaurant with those Chinese tourists,” he said.

Two of the infected residents of Uchon Dungan village had been renovating their houses and bought some construction materials in Chinese provinces, he added.

Uchon Dungan village residents have not been allowed outside for several days and are performing COVID-19 tests at home, the village security official said. 

When COVID-19 first sprang up in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, Uyghur and Kazakh residents in Xinjiang were increasingly being confined to “re-education” camps. They have since been subjected to lockdowns during local coronavirus outbreaks.

At that time, residents said that authorities were testing unknown drugs on them, according to an earlier RFA report.

Ghulja city was also locked down due to a rising number of COVID-19 cases in late 2021. Desperate residents short of food were forced to complain to authorities despite official warnings to keep quiet, sources told RFA at the time.

In late January, Chinese government health officials issued a statement about new COVID-19 infections in Qorghas (Huocheng) county, located between Ghulja and the border to Kazakhstan, in Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, and said a lockdown had been implemented as a measure to curb the spread of virus.  

COVID cases in Tibet

Meanwhile, neighboring Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) reported four COVID-19 infections on Aug. 7, the first sign of the virus in the region since a single case was found at the start of the pandemic in January 2020. 

Asymptomatic infections were detected in four travelers between the ages of 47 and 61 from Ngari prefecture, according to local Chinese health authorities. 

Also on Aug. 7, 18 people tested positive for the coronavirus in Tibet’s capital Lhasa — the youngest being 3 years old and the oldest 76 — though only two people in the group were symptomatic, the TAR government’s report said. They all had traveled from Shigatse to Lhasa by train earlier this month.

The members of the group and people who had contact with them are in quarantine for observation. 

“COVID has spread to Lhasa now, and there are 18 [people] who have tested positive for it,” said a Tibetan source who declined to be identified. “There has been a lot of commotion in the city since yesterday as the number of COVID cases rises. Stores are crowded with panicked shoppers trying to buy essential goods and facemasks.” 

The source said he believed the actual number of infections in the area to be higher than what Chinese health officials reported. 

“[T]he number is likely to rise in the coming days,” he said.  

After the cases emerged, officials in Shigatse, Tibet’s second-largest city with a population of about 800,000 people, imposed three days of restrictions, during which people were banned from entering or leaving the city and various public venues, group events were canceled, and a traditional sports event scheduled to take place on Aug. 8 was postponed. 

Areas are being locked down, and mass testing is under way in Lhasa and other cities, and authorities have sent notices to some offices and parents of schoolchildren not to travel. 

The TAR People’s Hospital in Lhasa has stopped seeing out-patients because of the rising number of COVID-19 cases, the report said.

Religious activities and related gatherings and pilgrimages to Tibetan Buddhist sites have been suspended, according to an advisory issued by the Lhasa Buddhist Association on Aug. 8. 

Additionally, Lhasa residents were directed to minimize their circumambulations around the Bharkor and Potala Palace to avoid huge crowds. 

“The Chinese government has started imposing COVID-related restrictions in Lhasa and prompting people to get COVID tests,” said a Tibetan who declined to be named so as to speak freely. 

Tourists and visitors to pilgrimage sites also were being restricted, the source added. 

Translated by RFA Uyghur and by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibetan. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

The family of a 47-year-old Cambodian man is seeking justice after he ducked into a café to avoid a rainstorm, got caught in a police raid on on-line cockfight gambling, and suffocated during a rough interrogation, his daughter said Tuesday.

Soung Dorn, who was deputy chief of Rong village in the central province of Kampong Thom, died Sunday evening at the hands of a military policeman who pressed his arm over his windpipe until he stopped breathing, Nearadey Din told RFA after reporting the death in an appeal for justice on Facebook.

“As he came from a meeting, it was raining and he took shelter in a coffee shop. Then a military police officer grabbed my father and pressed his neck until he could not breathe, and he died,” she wrote on Facebook.

I’m still so sad and shocked, I feel like fainting,” she told RFA Khmer.

“This should not have happened to my father. They can make an arrest, but why make people die?”

Nearadey appealed on Facebook to Prime Minister Hun Sen and the chair of the Cambodian Huma Rights Commission “to seek justice for our father, who has suffered atrocities and such inhumanity.”

In response to the incident, the commander of the National Gendarmerie, Sao Sokha, told local media that he had ordered the suspension of officials involved in the arrest on Sunday and set up a commission to investigate the case immediately.

But Nearadey told RFA on August 9 that her family and villagers reject the police forensic results that said Soung Dorn died of a heart attack. She said that her father was healthy and never had heart disease or any other disease.

People shouted that he did not look good and suggested taking him to the hospital first, and arrest of him later, but they refused to do so,” said Nearadey, referring to military police.

Nearadey also rejected claims by National Gendarmerie spokesman Eng Hy, who wrote on his Facebook page that officers had tried resuscitate her father with CPR. She said the military police left her father to die and then took him to a district hospital.

Attacks on civilians by Myanmar’s junta since its takeover in February 2021 constitute crimes against humanity and include the widespread sexual assault of women and the torture of children, a United Nations investigative unit said in an annual report Tuesday.

The Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) said it had gathered evidence that sexual and gender-based crimes, including rape and other forms of sexual violence, and crimes against children have been perpetrated by members of the security forces and armed groups.

The IIMM said in its report that children in Myanmar have been tortured, conscripted and arbitrarily detained, including as proxies for their parents.

“Crimes against women and children are amongst the gravest international crimes, but they are also historically underreported and under-investigated,” Nicholas Koumjian, head of the IIMM, said in a statement issued by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights in Bangkok that accompanied the release of the report.

“Our team has dedicated expertise to ensure targeted outreach and investigations so that these crimes can ultimately be prosecuted. Perpetrators of these crimes need to know that they cannot continue to act with impunity. We are collecting and preserving the evidence so that they will one day be held to account.”

Other vulnerable groups impacted by the crimes include members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex community in Myanmar, according to the IIMM.

The IIMM said it has collected more than 3 million pieces of information from almost 200 sources since starting operations three years ago, including interview statements, documents, videos, photographs, geospatial imagery and social media material.

Since the Feb. 1, 2021 coup, the IIMM said it had found “ample indications” that crimes have been committed in Myanmar “on a scale and in a manner that constitutes a widespread and systematic attack against a civilian population.”

The report found that the geographic scope of the potential crimes had expanded to include Chin, Kayin, and Kayah states, from Yangon, Naypyidaw, Bago, Mandalay, Magway and Sagaing regions a year earlier.

Additionally, the IIMM reported the number of instances of potential criminality had also increased from a year ago, including with the junta’s July 25 hanging of four democracy activists in the country’s first judicial executions in more than 30 years, which drew public and international condemnation.

Koumjian noted that the report came just two weeks ahead of the five-year commemoration of clearance operations that displaced nearly 1 million ethnic Rohingya from western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, most of whom remain in refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh.

“While the Rohingya consistently express their desire for a safe and dignified return to Myanmar, this will be very difficult to achieve unless there is accountability for the atrocities committed against them, including through prosecutions of the individuals most responsible for those crimes,” he said.

The IIMM said it is sharing relevant evidence to support international justice proceedings currently underway at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

Township targeted

The IIMM report came as residents and aid workers in Sagaing region told RFA Burmese that the military had razed around 700 houses from 30 villages in Tabayin township during its scorched earth offensive in the area between Jan. 1 and Aug. 8.

Around 4,000 people are in need of assistance as a result of the burnings, they said.

A resident of Tabayin, who spoke on condition of anonymity citing security concerns, said junta troops had continued to use arson attacks in their search for opposition forces in the township as recently as Monday, when they burned down Mu Kan village on the road between Ayadaw and Shwebo townships.

“The fires started [Monday] morning. Mu Kan is almost gone,” said the resident, who said the perpetrators belong to a military unit that had torched at least one other village in the township since January.

“Even though we called it a village, it’s like a big town. It has a hospital and clinics. Currently, the residents are on the run. We heard some people have also been arrested. The army has set up camp there.”

Residents told RFA there are more than 800 houses in Mu Kan and said this was the second time the military had set fire to the village, after burning more than 160 houses there in June.

A member of the Tapayin Township Brothers aid group said that the estimated 4,000 residents left homeless due to the arson attacks since the start of the year are enduring severe difficulties and “in need of urgent help.”

“Residents of 30 villages lost around 700 houses in the fires,” said the aid worker, who also declined to be named, citing a list the group had compiled of military arson attacks in the township.

“The situation in Tabayin township is getting worse lately. The villagers’ lives have been disrupted, especially those who lost their homes. They need a lot of help. Everyone in the region has been affected, so aid donations have dwindled significantly.”

The aid worker said that a few charity organizations and the shadow National Unity Government (NUG) have provided some assistance to the township, “but it is not enough.”

He said his organization had provided 346 houses in 17 villages with 30,000 kyats (U.S. $14) each, but the need for assistance remains substantial.

Helpless against attacks

A resident of Tabayin’s Ma Ya Kan village, who asked to remain unnamed, said troops are “targeting the villages” and inhabitants are helpless to stop them.

Refugees are in need of food, clothing and shelter, he said, adding that the military had also destroyed the crops in their fields.

“The military arrests anyone they see in the villages, uses them as porters, and finally kills them. If they see residents wearing earrings on them, they tear them off. That’s how bad it is,” the Ma Ya Kan villager said.

“We have no place to live, so we have to cut down trees and build shelters from the rain. It’s happening all over the area and people don’t have the ability to help one another.”

RFA attempts to reach junta Deputy Information Minister Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for comment went unanswered Tuesday, but the regime spokesman has previously dismissed reports of the military burning civilian homes.

A member of the anti-junta People’s Defense Force (PDF) paramilitary group in Tabayin said the armed opposition had been outgunned by the military and was forced to withdraw from the area.

“The military is carrying out the most brutal acts. They burn down whole villages. They come in with helicopters and fire from the air,” he said.

“The situation has become very bad and the people are suffering. There are no villages in the area that escape the arson attacks. The more they do this, the more militant the people become.”

Sources in Tabayin told RFA that the military used helicopters to attack the township twice in the past week alone, killing at least 10 civilians and PDF fighters.

According to research group Data For Myanmar, the military has razed nearly 19,000 homes between the coup and May 31 this year. Sagaing region was the hardest hit, with some 14,000 homes destroyed, the group said.

Security forces have killed at least 2,167 civilians and arrested more than 15,000 others since the coup, mostly during peaceful anti-junta protests, according to Bangkok-based NGO Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

Police in northern Vietnam this month raided eight centers of an ethnic religious group described by authorities as an illegal separatist organization, a charge the group denies, sources say.

On Aug. 2, public security officers and police armed with guns and shock batons raided separate locations of the Duong Van Minh religious group in the Bao Lam district of Cao Bang province, sources told RFA.

“The local authorities came at 3:00 a.m. when people were still sleeping,” said one witness to the raids, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “They gathered at the houses that keep funeral and ritual objects and demolished them.”

“We were given no notice that the raids would take place,” he said. By early morning, all local establishments of the group had been destroyed, he added.

Authorities then ordered followers of the Duong Van Minh religion to take down altars kept in their homes for family use and to surrender any items used for worship, saying police would use force to confiscate any objects not handed over, local sources said.

“Almost all families were determined to protect their houses and altars and did not let authorities’ representatives inside,” one follower said, also declining to be named because of safety concerns.

“Some asked the officials whether they had any documents allowing them to come in or orders telling them to demolish the houses. The police responded that they had confidential documents and orders but were not allowed to let local people see them,” he said.

Police then broke down the doors of the families’ homes, destroyed altars and hung pictures of former Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh in their place. Vietnamese flags were also placed at the houses’ front doors, sources said.

Calls seeking comment from the People’s Committees of Cao Bang province and Bao Lam district rang unanswered this week.

The Duong Van Minh sect was founded in 1989 with the stated goal of promoting the elimination of outdated, expensive and unhygienic funeral customs. There are are at least 8,000 ethnic Hmong practitioners of the religion in four provinces in Vietnam’s northern mountains.

The religion is not officially registered, and government authorities say the sect is conspiring to establish an independent Hmong state and break away from Vietnam, a charge the group denies.

Police have been working for the past year to eliminate the sect, according to state media reports, and an Aug. 9 article published on the website of the Cao Bang Broadcasting Station said that Bao Lam district authorities were now fully mobilized to suppress the religion.

Largest campaign to date

Speaking to RFA, Vu Quoc Dung—executive director of VETO!, which monitors religious freedom in Vietnam—called the August raids the largest campaign carried out against the Duong Van Minh religion to date.

“It was a systematic campaign, as it mobilized all agencies and associated unions as participants,” he said.

“And the government this time applied the same measures in different places, such as forcing locals to sign a commitment to leave the religion, removing altars, banning worship gatherings on Sundays and burning or demolishing the Duong Van Minh religion’s funeral houses.”

Dung said the campaign to eliminate the Duong Van Minh religion is being directed by leaders at all levels of the Communist Party of Vietnam, and the crackdown has now been conducted across four northern provinces, affecting around 10,000 followers.

Followers of the religion say they are determined to protect their beliefs, however.

“There was widespread discontent among followers after authorities broke into their houses without showing any legal documents or orders, and many are saying that local authorities have broken the law by doing this,” one Duong Van Minh follower told RFA. “Many now plan to reinstall their altars and file complaints against those acts.”

Vietnam’s government strictly controls religious practice in the one-party communist country, requiring practitioners to join state-approved temples and churches and suppressing independent groups.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in a report released April 25 recommended that the U.S. government place Vietnam on a list of countries of particular concern because of Vietnamese authorities’ persistent violations of religious freedom.

Translated by Anna Vu for RFA Vietnamese. Written in English by Richard Finney.

Prolonged military exercises around the democratic island of Taiwan by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could mean a longer-term impact on the island’s trade and economic development, especially if Beijing decides to normalize blockading the island, analysts told RFA.

Some cited recent activity as suggesting that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is shifting from a policy of seeking peaceful “unification” to an emphasis on military force to put pressure on the island, which has never been ruled by the CCP, nor formed part of the 73-year-old People’s Republic of China.

They said there are growing concerns that China will normalize military exercises, ignore the median line of the Taiwan Strait, and use ongoing military exercises to blockade the island and prepare the PLA for invasion.

Tso Chen-Dong, political science professor at National Taiwan University, said military action was unlikely to occur immediately, however.

“They need to take into account how they would actually do this, and they will only get behind the idea if it’s doable,” Tso told RFA. “Otherwise, it’s not very useful just to look at the numbers of troops on paper.”

“The main thing is that they want to use this opportunity to put further pressure on the relationship with Taiwan,” he said.

According to Wang Chi-sheng of Taiwan-based think tank the Association of Chinese Elite Leadership, China’s People’s Liberation Army has already been doing this by repeated incursions over the median line and into Taiwan’s territorial waters near the islands of Kinmen and Matsu, which are visible from China’s southeastern province of Fujian.

“Flying over the median line of the Taiwan Strait is an attempt to erase that line by means of a fait accompli,” Wang told RFA. “Chinese ships have also started moving into [Taiwan’s] restricted waters around Kinmen and Matsu, which they haven’t done up until now.”

“The focus is on normalization,” he said, adding that Beijing’s future intentions will only likely become clear after the CCP’s 20th National Congress later this year.

He said Beijing will likely continue to insist on “unification” with Taiwan, which has never been ruled by the CCP nor formed part of the 73-year-old People’s Republic of China, under the same system it currently applies to Hong Kong, where a citywide crackdown on dissent is under way.

Repeated incursions

Taiwan government legal expert Shen Shih-wei agreed, saying that the positioning of the military exercises following Pelosi’s visit made repeated incursions across the median line.

“This has a very significant impact on the compression of our airspace for training purposes, and on international flight routes,” Shen told reporters.

“This kind of targeted deterrence [contravenes a United Nations charter], which stipulates that no country should use force to threaten the territorial integrity or political independence of another country,” he said.

“We believe that the CCP is very clear about these norms, and we hope that it will abide by them.”

Vincent Wang, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Adelphi University, said Taiwan’s democratic way of life is walking a tightrope, as far as the CCP is concerned.

“This is why China had such a big reaction to Pelosi’s visit,” he said. “China doesn’t want the world to see a high-ranking U.S. politician visiting a democratic society [run by people it considers Chinese] yet is independent of China,” Wang said.

“The visit was a public show of support for Chinese democracy [as China sees it],” he said.

The visit doesn’t appear to have deterred other foreign politicians from visiting Taiwan.

Britain’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee said it will send a delegation to the island by the end of the year.

“If American dignitaries can visit Taiwan one after the other, this will provide moral support for people from other democratic countries who want to make similar visits,” Wang said.

He said recent economic sanctions imposed on more than 100 Taiwanese food companies would have a short-term impact on trade with China, which accounts for 30 percent of exports in that sector, but later recover.

Blockade concerns

Meanwhile, Frank Xie of the Aiken School of Business at the university of South Carolina, said the CCP’s lifting of a fishing moratorium in the area could mean it starts blockading the island.

“Such a blockade would have a huge impact on international shipping and air traffic, further amplifying the global supply chain crisis,” Xie said.

“Taiwan, including its chip industry, would bear the brunt of the impact.”

Xie said the military exercises have had a small impact on international trade, mainly in the field of transportation, including flight delays and cargo ship detours to avoid military exercise areas.

But a longer-running blockade would be hugely damaging to Taiwan, both because of the increased risk of miscalculations, and the economic impact from increased transportation costs, Xie said.

A Taiwanese businesswoman surnamed Lee who has run a plastics business in mainland China for many years, says many Taiwanese businesses in mainland China are currently thinking about relocating.

“Of course they’re nervous, because most of the Taiwanese businesses are in coastal areas, which is where the military exercises are,” Lee said. “But there’s very little they can do.”

“If they were to relocate to Taiwan, that would be easier said than done … because it’s hard to find cheap labor,” she said. “But many countries in Southeast Asia aren’t very stable.”

William Yu, an economist at UCLA Anderson Forecast, said Taiwan’s economy is still in a robust state despite the rising tensions with China, however.

“There will be no impact on Taiwan’s economy in the short term,” Yu told RFA. “Even if there is a bigger negative impact [later], it will turn into a positive impact in the longer term.”

He said many Taiwanese businesspeople had already returned to the island in the wake of the U.S.-China trade war in 2018, giving the domestic economy a strong boost as they relocated high-end manufacturing operations to the island after years of outsourcing to China.

“Continued military exercises will make cross-strait relations worse and worse, and it will become increasingly difficult for Taiwanese businessmen to survive in mainland China,” Yu predicted.

“On the other hand, it will encourage Taiwanese businesspeople to return, which is good for Taiwan’s economy,” he said.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.