How has Maroš Šefčovič been following the disputes between the EU and China over the additional tariffs on Chinese EVs? Has he voluntarily jumped into the job ring for the highly challenging trade portfolio? The Slovakian has experience; he has been an EU Commissioner since 2009 – with a brief interruption. However, he has not held the trade portfolio so far. Šefčovič has already seen in recent months that the task will not be easy. He now made a convincing impression at his hearing before MEPs – including with his approach to China.
Our second analysis looks at the plight of China’s super-rich, whose numbers are dwindling. The People’s Republic now has only 753 people with a fortune of at least one billion US dollars. Since the peak of 1185 in 2021, China has lost 432 billionaires. Jörn Petring took a look at the latest Hurun List. It reveals which sectors are particularly deep in crisis – and which technologies and developments are currently shaping the world.
The eternal Commissioner is allowed to stay. Maroš Šefčovič, who has been EU Commissioner since 2009, convinced the MEPs of the relevant parliamentary committees during the hearing: The EU Commissioner-designate for Trade and Economic Security and for Interinstitutional Relations and Transparency appeared before the Trade Committee (INTA) and the Committee on Constitutional Affairs (AFCO) and received confirmation. He will take over Valdis Dombrovskis’s trade portfolio amidst the tense trade dispute between Brussels and Beijing.
There will be no change of direction in the Trade Directorate under Šefčovič: The EU must strive for a “reset” with China and better “balance” trade relations, the Slovakian said on Monday. To this end, Šefčovič wants to increase the use of trade defense instruments. “We need a level playing field,” he repeated several times. He described China as the EU’s “third biggest and most challenging trading partner.”
He intends to “advance our de-risking strategy” as the EU “cannot afford costly dependencies” and will not “tolerate coercive practices.” When two French MEPs asked whether he wanted to introduce a new instrument to combat Chinese overproduction, he gave an evasive answer. Šefčovič promised an “agile” trade and economic security policy for the EU. “Will this century be Chinese? Will the century be American? I think we can make sure that essentially will be also European.”
Šefčovič generally handled the three-and-a-half-hour hearing with confidence. His many years of experience allowed the former Slovakian diplomat to pepper his answers with details and anecdotes while remaining vague on politically sensitive topics.
He repeatedly emphasized his support for Ukraine, probably to dispel any doubts about his relationship with the EU-critical Slovakian Fico government. Only last week, Slovenia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico had signed a strategic partnership with China’s President Xi Jinping. In a short press statement after the hearing, Šefčovič said that his work in the Commission had “always been guided by general European interests.”
After the hearing, INTA Chairman Bernd Lange (SPD) praised Šefčovič, saying that he had clearly shown where the EU’s priorities should lie in a globalized world and that he would defend the EU’s interests.
During the hearings, Šefčovič touched on a number of issues that indirectly affect trade with China:
The hearings of the EU Commissioners-designate will continue until the middle of the month. Next up on Wednesday is Jozef Síkela, who will potentially be responsible for Global Gateway, the rival program to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The designated EU Commissioner for External Relations, Kaja Kallas, will then answer questions from MEPs next Tuesday.
Rupert Hoogewerf is one of the most knowledgeable experts on China’s super-rich. Since 1999, the Englishman has been publishing the so-called Hurun Report, a list of the names of China’s billionaires. But the data is more than just gossip about the upper ten thousand. According to Hoogeweerf, the Hurun China Rich List mirrors the Chinese economy, revealing which industries are booming and which are going through a crisis.
One of the key findings of this year’s analysis is that the difficult economic situation has not spared the country’s wealthiest. According to Hurun, the number of billionaires fell significantly last year by 142, leaving only 753 people in China with a fortune of at least one billion US dollars. The number is even smaller if the dozens of Taiwanese entrepreneurs, such as Foxconn founder Terry Gou, who are included in the China list, are excluded.
Since the peak of 1,185 in 2021, the People’s Republic, Hong Kong and Taiwan have thus lost 432 billionaires, which corresponds to around a third. “The Hurun China Rich List has shrunk for an unprecedented third year running, as China’s economy and stock markets had a difficult year,” says Hoogewerf.
Another finding is that extraordinary wealth is shifting – not towards the socially disadvantaged, but from one sector to another. Half the entrepreneurs on the list were not yet members of the billionaires’ club five years ago. And as many as 80 percent of those listed had less than one billion US dollars ten years ago. The Hurun Report concludes that the old real estate developer elite is making way for a new generation in sectors such as technology, renewable energies, consumer electronics, e-commerce, consumer goods and healthcare.
Zhang Yiming, founder of TikTok parent company ByteDance, reached the top spot for the first time with a fortune of 49.3 billion dollars. The 41-year-old also wasn’t on the list ten years ago. His rise reflects the global popularity of TikTok in recent years. Zhang is the 18th top-ranked entrepreneur in China in 26 years. By comparison, there were only four leaders in the US during the same period: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. Hurun boss Hoogewerf sees this as a clear sign “of the dynamism of the Chinese economy.”
The entrepreneurs who have recently been successful are those who have been able to expand internationally with their apps. Zhang Yiming did this with his video platform, as did Colin Huang with the shopping app Temu and Chris Xu with the fast fashion app Shein. What all three companies have in common is that they are under high international pressure. TikTok faces a ban in the USA, where it is branded as a propaganda tool of the Communist Party. Temu and Shein, on the other hand, are suspected of profiting from the state labor transfer programs for Uyghurs in China.
Political decisions around the world could therefore have a significant impact on the rise and fall of entrepreneurs in the Hurun ranking. These are all difficult conditions for lasting recipes for success. A good example is electric cars. In the past decade, Chinese manufacturers sprang up like mushrooms, before fierce competition and extra tariffs began to take their toll. The stock market values of the companies have fallen accordingly, falling well below the peaks of 2021 and dragging down the private wealth of their owners in the process.
In contrast, the triumph of smartphones seems to be even more unstoppable. The wealth of Tencent’s Pony Ma and Netease’s Ding Lei has catapulted by 30 billion US dollars each within a decade. Other entrepreneurs from the same sector, such as Lei Jun from Xiaomi, have tripled their wealth in the same period. Wang Laichun, whose company Luxshare Precision produces electronic components for smartphones, even increased his wealth sevenfold.
CATL founder Robin Zeng (lithium batteries) and Li Zhenguo from Longi (solar modules) were not yet part of this exclusive club a decade ago. Their rise is emblematic of the upswing in electromobility and green energy in China and elsewhere in the world. Cai Haoyu has also expanded globally with the online gaming platform Mihoyo. Anyone with children can imagine why online gaming generates a lot of revenue for companies.
For the first time in three years, Zhong Shanshan had to give up his top spot. The 70-year-old entrepreneur, who controls the Chinese drinking water brand Nongfu Shan, among others, ranked second with a fortune of 47.9 billion US dollars. Tencent founder Ma follows in third place.
Meanwhile, Beijing remains the Chinese city with the most billionaires in China, although it is now closely followed by Shanghai, which is home to only three fewer super-rich people. Shanghai overtook Shenzhen for the first time since 2013.
The Big Lie has become bigger. The false claim of a rigged, stolen 2020 US presidential election embraced by Donald Trump and his cult has brought about the end of fact-based accountability. This is having profound and lasting implications on a deeply troubled Sino-American relationship.
Sinophobia is a visible manifestation of how the Big Lie has corrupted norms of the American body politic. Irrational fears of China have taken on a life of their own. That includes any of a number of alleged threats to the US: China’s large share of the US trade deficit; the feared back door of Huawei’s 5G network; Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs) and dock-loading cranes; the vulnerability of US infrastructure to a so-called Volt Typhoon hacking network; and the potential of TikTok to assault the character and privacy of innocent American teenagers.
I have argued that these fears stem from false narratives aligned with America’s anti-China political agenda. Such narratives are not pulled from thin air. They reflect projections from the distorted facts of what academic psychologists call a “narrative identity,” which “reconstructs the autobiographical past.” In the US, that past unfortunately reflects a toxic strain of identity politics traceable to a long history of racial and ethnic prejudice. To be sure, as I also detail in my book, China is equally guilty of embracing and promoting false narratives about America to suit its own purposes.
In examining the corrosive effect of false narratives on the China debate in the US, I have stressed the distinction between the potential to inflict harm based on circumstantial evidence and conjecture, and the intent to do so based on the “smoking gun” of hard evidence. The exaggerated fears of Sinophobia largely fall into the former category.
For example, US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo asked Americans to imagine what might happen if Chinese EVs were turned into destructive weapons on US highways. FBI Director Christopher Wray warned of an attack on critical infrastructure if China decides to activate its embedded malware. Fears that China will invade Taiwan in 2027 reflect a dated hunch by retired Admiral Phil Davidson, former head of the US Indo-Pacific Command. The key words – imagine, if, and hunch – speak volumes to the dangers of acting on conjecture.
But that hasn’t stopped US politicians. Recent hearings of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party are reminiscent of the red-baiting used by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s to target alleged Communist sympathizers. The House’s penchant for conjecture also spurred the recent passage of 25 anti-China bills – a rare flurry of legislative activity in late September now known as “China Week.”
The Big Lie has precipitated an even more troubling outcome: false narratives are no longer spun out of fact-based fragments of narrative identities. False narratives have become outright lies.
Consider recent press reports of the espionage indictment of five Chinese graduates from the University of Michigan for taking photos near a US National Guard training exercise that involved Taiwanese military personnel. The reports turned out to be wildly exaggerated: the five men were more than 50 miles from a military base and were charged not with espionage but with lying to the police.
This largely fictitious news item has Sinophobia written all over it. It resulted in a Republican state senator in Michigan attempting to scrap subsidies for a new 2.4 billion US dollar battery-component plant to be built by a US subsidiary of Gotion High-tech, a Chinese company. Never mind that Gotion’s largest shareholder is Volkswagen, not the Communist Party of China, as US politicians allege. The company has become an election issue in swing-state Michigan.
The Big Lie also shows up in other aspects of Sinophobia. Last year, FBI Director Wray, a Trump acolyte with well-established anti-China credentials, sounded a very public alarm that “China already has a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined.”
Maybe not. According to the new World Cybercrime Index compiled by researchers at the University of Oxford, the world’s top cybercrime threats originate from, in descending order, Russia, Ukraine, China, the US, Nigeria, Romania, North Korea, and the United Kingdom. In fact, China only narrowly beat out the US for third place.
I am not arguing that China or any other foreign actor should be ignored as a potential threat to American cybersecurity. Rather, senior US officials must be more transparent about the global scope of cyberhacking – and own up to America’s role in propagating it.
As lies replace truth, Sinophobia not only destabilizes the world’s most important bilateral relationship; it also results in serious policy blunders. Just as the US government once blamed Japan for America’s trade deficit, now it has directed its ire at China, imposing high (and possibly even higher) tariffs on Chinese imports. Never mind that bilateral action cannot eliminate a multilateral trade deficit stemming from a domestic-savings shortfall.
The results can be perverse and self-destructive. The US effectively banned Chinese-made EVs when it needs cost-efficient, high-quality green technologies to address climate change. And exaggerated fears of China’s cyberhacking are dominating the legislative agenda.
Thanks to the Big Lie, facts are in short supply as the US approaches its most consequential presidential election in modern history. This raises a deeper question: What comes next? The Big Lie has ushered in a climate where facts are no longer a prerequisite for political discourse and policymaking. That jeopardizes the future of all Americans. One can only hope voters bear this in mind when casting their ballots.
Stephen S. Roach, a faculty member at Yale University and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, is the author of Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China (Yale University Press, 2014) and Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (Yale University Press, 2022).
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024. www.project-syndicate.org
Editorial note: Now more than ever, discussing China means controversial debates. At China.Table we want to reflect the diversity of opinions to give you an insight into the breadth of the debate. Opinions do not reflect the views of the editorial team.
On Monday night, citizens in Taiwan’s capital Taipei took one last photo of the Xinsheng-Heping pedestrian bridge before it is finally demolished. There had even been street protests against the demolition of the elevated crossing built in 1982 – one of the last of its kind in the city. The preservationists argue that the bridge is part of Taiwan’s identity. It has also played a role in numerous films that have entered the collective memory of the islanders, including classics celebrated in the West such as Edward Yang’s “Yi Yi” and Ang Lee’s “Eat Drink Man Woman.”
How has Maroš Šefčovič been following the disputes between the EU and China over the additional tariffs on Chinese EVs? Has he voluntarily jumped into the job ring for the highly challenging trade portfolio? The Slovakian has experience; he has been an EU Commissioner since 2009 – with a brief interruption. However, he has not held the trade portfolio so far. Šefčovič has already seen in recent months that the task will not be easy. He now made a convincing impression at his hearing before MEPs – including with his approach to China.
Our second analysis looks at the plight of China’s super-rich, whose numbers are dwindling. The People’s Republic now has only 753 people with a fortune of at least one billion US dollars. Since the peak of 1185 in 2021, China has lost 432 billionaires. Jörn Petring took a look at the latest Hurun List. It reveals which sectors are particularly deep in crisis – and which technologies and developments are currently shaping the world.
The eternal Commissioner is allowed to stay. Maroš Šefčovič, who has been EU Commissioner since 2009, convinced the MEPs of the relevant parliamentary committees during the hearing: The EU Commissioner-designate for Trade and Economic Security and for Interinstitutional Relations and Transparency appeared before the Trade Committee (INTA) and the Committee on Constitutional Affairs (AFCO) and received confirmation. He will take over Valdis Dombrovskis’s trade portfolio amidst the tense trade dispute between Brussels and Beijing.
There will be no change of direction in the Trade Directorate under Šefčovič: The EU must strive for a “reset” with China and better “balance” trade relations, the Slovakian said on Monday. To this end, Šefčovič wants to increase the use of trade defense instruments. “We need a level playing field,” he repeated several times. He described China as the EU’s “third biggest and most challenging trading partner.”
He intends to “advance our de-risking strategy” as the EU “cannot afford costly dependencies” and will not “tolerate coercive practices.” When two French MEPs asked whether he wanted to introduce a new instrument to combat Chinese overproduction, he gave an evasive answer. Šefčovič promised an “agile” trade and economic security policy for the EU. “Will this century be Chinese? Will the century be American? I think we can make sure that essentially will be also European.”
Šefčovič generally handled the three-and-a-half-hour hearing with confidence. His many years of experience allowed the former Slovakian diplomat to pepper his answers with details and anecdotes while remaining vague on politically sensitive topics.
He repeatedly emphasized his support for Ukraine, probably to dispel any doubts about his relationship with the EU-critical Slovakian Fico government. Only last week, Slovenia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico had signed a strategic partnership with China’s President Xi Jinping. In a short press statement after the hearing, Šefčovič said that his work in the Commission had “always been guided by general European interests.”
After the hearing, INTA Chairman Bernd Lange (SPD) praised Šefčovič, saying that he had clearly shown where the EU’s priorities should lie in a globalized world and that he would defend the EU’s interests.
During the hearings, Šefčovič touched on a number of issues that indirectly affect trade with China:
The hearings of the EU Commissioners-designate will continue until the middle of the month. Next up on Wednesday is Jozef Síkela, who will potentially be responsible for Global Gateway, the rival program to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The designated EU Commissioner for External Relations, Kaja Kallas, will then answer questions from MEPs next Tuesday.
Rupert Hoogewerf is one of the most knowledgeable experts on China’s super-rich. Since 1999, the Englishman has been publishing the so-called Hurun Report, a list of the names of China’s billionaires. But the data is more than just gossip about the upper ten thousand. According to Hoogeweerf, the Hurun China Rich List mirrors the Chinese economy, revealing which industries are booming and which are going through a crisis.
One of the key findings of this year’s analysis is that the difficult economic situation has not spared the country’s wealthiest. According to Hurun, the number of billionaires fell significantly last year by 142, leaving only 753 people in China with a fortune of at least one billion US dollars. The number is even smaller if the dozens of Taiwanese entrepreneurs, such as Foxconn founder Terry Gou, who are included in the China list, are excluded.
Since the peak of 1,185 in 2021, the People’s Republic, Hong Kong and Taiwan have thus lost 432 billionaires, which corresponds to around a third. “The Hurun China Rich List has shrunk for an unprecedented third year running, as China’s economy and stock markets had a difficult year,” says Hoogewerf.
Another finding is that extraordinary wealth is shifting – not towards the socially disadvantaged, but from one sector to another. Half the entrepreneurs on the list were not yet members of the billionaires’ club five years ago. And as many as 80 percent of those listed had less than one billion US dollars ten years ago. The Hurun Report concludes that the old real estate developer elite is making way for a new generation in sectors such as technology, renewable energies, consumer electronics, e-commerce, consumer goods and healthcare.
Zhang Yiming, founder of TikTok parent company ByteDance, reached the top spot for the first time with a fortune of 49.3 billion dollars. The 41-year-old also wasn’t on the list ten years ago. His rise reflects the global popularity of TikTok in recent years. Zhang is the 18th top-ranked entrepreneur in China in 26 years. By comparison, there were only four leaders in the US during the same period: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. Hurun boss Hoogewerf sees this as a clear sign “of the dynamism of the Chinese economy.”
The entrepreneurs who have recently been successful are those who have been able to expand internationally with their apps. Zhang Yiming did this with his video platform, as did Colin Huang with the shopping app Temu and Chris Xu with the fast fashion app Shein. What all three companies have in common is that they are under high international pressure. TikTok faces a ban in the USA, where it is branded as a propaganda tool of the Communist Party. Temu and Shein, on the other hand, are suspected of profiting from the state labor transfer programs for Uyghurs in China.
Political decisions around the world could therefore have a significant impact on the rise and fall of entrepreneurs in the Hurun ranking. These are all difficult conditions for lasting recipes for success. A good example is electric cars. In the past decade, Chinese manufacturers sprang up like mushrooms, before fierce competition and extra tariffs began to take their toll. The stock market values of the companies have fallen accordingly, falling well below the peaks of 2021 and dragging down the private wealth of their owners in the process.
In contrast, the triumph of smartphones seems to be even more unstoppable. The wealth of Tencent’s Pony Ma and Netease’s Ding Lei has catapulted by 30 billion US dollars each within a decade. Other entrepreneurs from the same sector, such as Lei Jun from Xiaomi, have tripled their wealth in the same period. Wang Laichun, whose company Luxshare Precision produces electronic components for smartphones, even increased his wealth sevenfold.
CATL founder Robin Zeng (lithium batteries) and Li Zhenguo from Longi (solar modules) were not yet part of this exclusive club a decade ago. Their rise is emblematic of the upswing in electromobility and green energy in China and elsewhere in the world. Cai Haoyu has also expanded globally with the online gaming platform Mihoyo. Anyone with children can imagine why online gaming generates a lot of revenue for companies.
For the first time in three years, Zhong Shanshan had to give up his top spot. The 70-year-old entrepreneur, who controls the Chinese drinking water brand Nongfu Shan, among others, ranked second with a fortune of 47.9 billion US dollars. Tencent founder Ma follows in third place.
Meanwhile, Beijing remains the Chinese city with the most billionaires in China, although it is now closely followed by Shanghai, which is home to only three fewer super-rich people. Shanghai overtook Shenzhen for the first time since 2013.
The Big Lie has become bigger. The false claim of a rigged, stolen 2020 US presidential election embraced by Donald Trump and his cult has brought about the end of fact-based accountability. This is having profound and lasting implications on a deeply troubled Sino-American relationship.
Sinophobia is a visible manifestation of how the Big Lie has corrupted norms of the American body politic. Irrational fears of China have taken on a life of their own. That includes any of a number of alleged threats to the US: China’s large share of the US trade deficit; the feared back door of Huawei’s 5G network; Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs) and dock-loading cranes; the vulnerability of US infrastructure to a so-called Volt Typhoon hacking network; and the potential of TikTok to assault the character and privacy of innocent American teenagers.
I have argued that these fears stem from false narratives aligned with America’s anti-China political agenda. Such narratives are not pulled from thin air. They reflect projections from the distorted facts of what academic psychologists call a “narrative identity,” which “reconstructs the autobiographical past.” In the US, that past unfortunately reflects a toxic strain of identity politics traceable to a long history of racial and ethnic prejudice. To be sure, as I also detail in my book, China is equally guilty of embracing and promoting false narratives about America to suit its own purposes.
In examining the corrosive effect of false narratives on the China debate in the US, I have stressed the distinction between the potential to inflict harm based on circumstantial evidence and conjecture, and the intent to do so based on the “smoking gun” of hard evidence. The exaggerated fears of Sinophobia largely fall into the former category.
For example, US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo asked Americans to imagine what might happen if Chinese EVs were turned into destructive weapons on US highways. FBI Director Christopher Wray warned of an attack on critical infrastructure if China decides to activate its embedded malware. Fears that China will invade Taiwan in 2027 reflect a dated hunch by retired Admiral Phil Davidson, former head of the US Indo-Pacific Command. The key words – imagine, if, and hunch – speak volumes to the dangers of acting on conjecture.
But that hasn’t stopped US politicians. Recent hearings of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party are reminiscent of the red-baiting used by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s to target alleged Communist sympathizers. The House’s penchant for conjecture also spurred the recent passage of 25 anti-China bills – a rare flurry of legislative activity in late September now known as “China Week.”
The Big Lie has precipitated an even more troubling outcome: false narratives are no longer spun out of fact-based fragments of narrative identities. False narratives have become outright lies.
Consider recent press reports of the espionage indictment of five Chinese graduates from the University of Michigan for taking photos near a US National Guard training exercise that involved Taiwanese military personnel. The reports turned out to be wildly exaggerated: the five men were more than 50 miles from a military base and were charged not with espionage but with lying to the police.
This largely fictitious news item has Sinophobia written all over it. It resulted in a Republican state senator in Michigan attempting to scrap subsidies for a new 2.4 billion US dollar battery-component plant to be built by a US subsidiary of Gotion High-tech, a Chinese company. Never mind that Gotion’s largest shareholder is Volkswagen, not the Communist Party of China, as US politicians allege. The company has become an election issue in swing-state Michigan.
The Big Lie also shows up in other aspects of Sinophobia. Last year, FBI Director Wray, a Trump acolyte with well-established anti-China credentials, sounded a very public alarm that “China already has a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined.”
Maybe not. According to the new World Cybercrime Index compiled by researchers at the University of Oxford, the world’s top cybercrime threats originate from, in descending order, Russia, Ukraine, China, the US, Nigeria, Romania, North Korea, and the United Kingdom. In fact, China only narrowly beat out the US for third place.
I am not arguing that China or any other foreign actor should be ignored as a potential threat to American cybersecurity. Rather, senior US officials must be more transparent about the global scope of cyberhacking – and own up to America’s role in propagating it.
As lies replace truth, Sinophobia not only destabilizes the world’s most important bilateral relationship; it also results in serious policy blunders. Just as the US government once blamed Japan for America’s trade deficit, now it has directed its ire at China, imposing high (and possibly even higher) tariffs on Chinese imports. Never mind that bilateral action cannot eliminate a multilateral trade deficit stemming from a domestic-savings shortfall.
The results can be perverse and self-destructive. The US effectively banned Chinese-made EVs when it needs cost-efficient, high-quality green technologies to address climate change. And exaggerated fears of China’s cyberhacking are dominating the legislative agenda.
Thanks to the Big Lie, facts are in short supply as the US approaches its most consequential presidential election in modern history. This raises a deeper question: What comes next? The Big Lie has ushered in a climate where facts are no longer a prerequisite for political discourse and policymaking. That jeopardizes the future of all Americans. One can only hope voters bear this in mind when casting their ballots.
Stephen S. Roach, a faculty member at Yale University and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, is the author of Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China (Yale University Press, 2014) and Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (Yale University Press, 2022).
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024. www.project-syndicate.org
Editorial note: Now more than ever, discussing China means controversial debates. At China.Table we want to reflect the diversity of opinions to give you an insight into the breadth of the debate. Opinions do not reflect the views of the editorial team.
On Monday night, citizens in Taiwan’s capital Taipei took one last photo of the Xinsheng-Heping pedestrian bridge before it is finally demolished. There had even been street protests against the demolition of the elevated crossing built in 1982 – one of the last of its kind in the city. The preservationists argue that the bridge is part of Taiwan’s identity. It has also played a role in numerous films that have entered the collective memory of the islanders, including classics celebrated in the West such as Edward Yang’s “Yi Yi” and Ang Lee’s “Eat Drink Man Woman.”
