Pegatron Corporation (和碩聯合科技) Chairman Tung Tzu-hsien (童子賢) argued on July 22 that Taiwan's ambition to act on its own terms does not exempt it from the gravitational pull of larger geopolitical forces — framing the island's cross-strait predicament through a sustained metaphor: the Earth orbiting the Sun.
Tung delivered the remarks at the Taipei launch of "The Lee Teng-hui Era in Taiwan: Reshaping an Accidental State" (《台灣的李登輝時代：意外國度的重塑》), a major new study by Stanford University historian and Hoover Institution senior fellow Hsiao-ting Lin (林孝庭). The event drew a high-profile audience including Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍), former Democratic Progressive Party (民進黨) Chairman Hsu Hsin-liang (許信良), former Taipei County Magistrate Yu Ching (尤清), Academia Historica (國史館) Director Chen Yi-shen (陳儀深), and Lee An-ni (李安妮) — daughter of the late president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) and chairwoman of the Lee Teng-hui Foundation (李登輝基金會).
Speaking for roughly 10 minutes at the opening ceremony, Tung — whose company manufactures electronics for Apple and other global brands — argued that history itself functions like big data, encoding patterns that allow the trajectory of events to be predicted. "History is not just stories," he said. "You can find a great deal of big data and algorithms within historical material, and through them, you can actually predict the next step — which is essentially what AI is trying to do today."
A Three-Decade Shift in the Cross-Strait Balance
Tung anchored his argument in a close reading of Taiwan and China's economic trajectories since 1996 — the year Taiwan held its first direct presidential election, a milestone Beijing responded to by firing ballistic missiles across the Taiwan Strait. The crisis required the deployment of two U.S. aircraft carrier groups to stabilize the situation, a sequence Tung offered as evidence that domestic achievement and external constraint are inseparable.
At the time, China's per capita income stood at roughly $705 while Taiwan's was approximately $13,000 — a ratio of nearly 19 to one. Three decades on, the figures have converged sharply: Taiwan's per capita income reached $39,900 in 2025 as China's climbed to around $13,000, narrowing the gap to approximately 4.5 to one. The economic transformation inside China, Tung suggested, poses a profound internal challenge for Beijing — how to reconcile ideological foundations built on proletarian governance with a population that has all but left the proletariat behind.
Taiwan's own standing has also shifted, though in a different register. Since 2025, Taiwan's dominance in semiconductor manufacturing has drawn pointed attention — and frustration — from Washington. "There are things about Taiwan that make President Trump both envious and resentful," Tung said, alluding to repeated U.S. complaints that Taiwan has captured American chip manufacturing. Taiwan's weight in global affairs, he argued, is categorically different today from what it was 30 years ago.
Taiwan's Democratic Record Stands Apart in the Region
Tung situated Taiwan's political evolution within a broader East Asian comparison, contrasting it with countries that took markedly different paths over the same period. Taiwan and South Korea, he argued, are among the region's fortunate cases — both societies passed through violent ruptures, Taiwan's Kaohsiung Incident and South Korea's Gwangju Uprising among them, yet both ultimately arrived at open, competitive democracies. Myanmar's brief democratic opening around 2010 was quickly extinguished. Thailand's military-royalist alignment has kept structural reform gridlocked. Singapore's remarkable economic achievement, he implied, came bundled with a political order that constrains as much as it enables.
Taiwan's democratic transition has produced a level of civic consciousness, human rights awareness, and social progress that would have been unimaginable 30 or 40 years ago, Tung said — and he suggested this represents the single greatest common ground among Taiwan's 23 million people, regardless of political affiliation.
Earth Keeps Spinning, but Cannot Escape the Sun
The conceptual core of Tung's address was drawn from planetary physics. Earth, he said, rotates freely on its own axis — but it cannot escape the solar system's gravitational field. The Moon, close as it is, shapes the tides. Jupiter, remote as it seems, exerts a measurable pull on Earth's orbital path. No act of will changes these physical relationships.
"If you only remember to act on your own will and forget that external forces exist," he warned, "the quality of your decisions will be very poor." A policymaker who focuses exclusively on domestic agency ignores the structural forces that constrain every small state. But one who surrenders entirely to external pressure ignores Taiwan's genuine capacity to act. Both failures, he said, lead to bad outcomes.
To illustrate how historical gravity operates regardless of preference, Tung reached for two European examples. Wales and Scotland, he noted, never wanted to be absorbed into an English-led union — yet both were pulled into it by the accumulated forces of geography, power, and historical circumstance, the same kind of gravitational logic he sees governing Taiwan's position in the region. Finland, he added, cannot replicate Switzerland's centuries-old neutrality simply by declaring it; Russia's proximity makes that posture unavailable.
For Taiwan, Tung concluded, the lesson is not resignation but strategic clarity: to defend democratic progress, economic prosperity, and civic freedoms with full awareness of the forces that no island — however determined — can simply wish away. （Related： How Taiwan's Ex-President Wages a Quiet Offensive Across Europe ｜ Latest ）
