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This study explores the recent features of China's economic coercion against Taiwan by offering an up‐to‐date and in‐depth analysis of China's targeted sanctions on Taishang in Tsai Ing‐wen's first term. The paper elaborates on China's specific reasons and means for imposing informal targeted sanctions, as well as their newly observed features in comparison with the past. Heavy dependence on the Chinese economy by certain enterprises of the island has made them vulnerable to sanction targeting. Compared to the past, nationalist boycotts by Chinese consumers and online activities have had a greater influence as part of China's informal targeted sanctions. Beijing's demands for supporting the "one China" policy and the "1992 Consensus" have also become more obvious. These findings suggest that the impetus for developing the cross‐Strait economic exchanges has become more susceptible to the effects of non‐economic factors. Although Beijing's sanctions on Taishang have not yet changed Taipei's policy, they cannot be said to be ineffective. Through the tactics, Beijing definitely sends clear signals of what it wants as it advances their strategy on cross‐Strait relations to the outside world. The case studies on Taiwan provide important implications for other economies as a barometer of China's increasing economic sanction practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests the hypothesis that the links and dependency relationships between China and her special regions have changed over the past 20 years with the industrialisation of China, and the emergence of Taiwan as a source of investment and sophisticated manufactures, and Hong Kong as financial centre and supplier of services. Has this changed the size and direction of spillovers in the region, and has it curtailed or eliminated American economic leadership? We use time-varying spectral methods to decompose the links between six advanced Asian economies and the US. We find: (a) the links with the US have been weakening, while those within a bloc based on China have strengthened; (b) that this is not new – it has been happening since the 1980s, but has now been reversed by the surge in trade; (c) that Taiwan is more integrated with, and dependent on, the Chinese economy, while Hong Kong continues her separate development based on specialisation and comparative advantage; (d) that the links with the US are rather complex, with the US able to shape the cycles elsewhere through her control of monetary conditions, but the China zone able to control the size of their cycles; and (e) there appears to be no real evidence that pegged exchange rates encourage convergence; in fact the reverse may be true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2010, the People's Republic of China and Taiwan signed the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), a preferential trade agreement, which is arguably the most important agreement between China and Taiwan. In this paper, we analyze ECFA and investigate its implications for South Korea since China is South Korea's largest trade partner and Taiwan is its sixth largest. We find that ECFA will have significant political and economic implications for South Korea due to China's role in East Asia and South Korea's competition with Taiwan in the China market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]