A map of maritime traffic around Taiwan underscores the importance of the self-ruled island to global trade as Taipei gears up for elections.
Open-source ship-tracking website MarineTraffic illustrates the sheer volume of ship activity in the region in 2022, the most recent year with complete data available. The darker the hue of an area, the more densely packed the routes.
Taiwan sits at the nexus of shipping lanes providing raw materials to manufacturing powerhouses China, Japan, and South Korea. These three countries comprised nearly 40 percent of the world's manufacturing output in 2019. Nearly half of the world's 5,400 container ships passed through the Taiwan Strait in 2022, according to a November 2023 report by the U.S. Naval Institute.
The slideshow shown above shows real-time maritime traffic accessed Friday. Ship density around Taiwan is shown to dwarf that of Africa's Cape of Good Hope and even the Suez Canal, one of the world's most heavily trafficked shipping routes.
Coupled with Taiwan's strategic location is its central role in technological supply lines as the preeminent chipmaker. The island manufactures more than 90 percent of the world's advanced semiconductors.
"A disruption to peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait would seriously damage the global economy, and the spillover would affect all economies around the world," a senior official in the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden said on background Thursday in a teleconference with the press centered on Taiwan's election.
The national elections will be held on Saturday. China has warned the electoral contests, which pit the Beijing-skeptic ruling Democratic Progressive party against its more China-friendly rival the Kuomintang, represent a choice between peace or war.
Newsweek has reached out China's Foreign Ministry with a written request for comment.
A war with China, which boasts the world's largest army and navy by number of hulls, would rattle worldwide commerce.
According to recent modeling by Bloomberg, such a war would deal a $10 trillion blow to global economy, cutting world GDP by a whopping 10 percent.
Taiwan's main security guarantor, the U.S., has repeatedly come out in support of its democracy and strategic importance.
"The United States has full confidence in Taiwan's democratic processes, and there is strong bipartisan support for its free and fair elections," the U.S. official said.
Calling Taiwan a "model for democracy," the official said Washington opposes all "outside interference or influence in Taiwan's elections" or "unilateral changes to the status quo from either side."
Taiwanese officials have accused China of increasingly sophisticated and multifaceted operations aimed at swinging the election in its favor.
Though Washington switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, it has maintained friendly relations with Taiwan, a de facto diplomatic presence, and regular arms sales, much to China's chagrin.
However, the U.S. also continues to favor the status quo, in which self-ruled Taiwan does not officially declare independence, which China has said it would go to war over.
Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has said the island is already independent and therefore does not need to make such a declaration.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Micah McCartney is a reporter for Newsweek based in Taipei, Taiwan. He covers U.S.-China relations, East Asian and Southeast Asian ... Read more
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