
Following an official visit of U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, relations between the island state known as the Republic of China and its direct neighbor, the People's Republic of China, have cooled considerably.
Apart from an increasing number of military exercises off the coast of Taiwan stoking fears of an escalation of the long-running conflict, the People's Republic also has, to a certain extent, halted trade with Taiwan.

While an import ban on certain Taiwanese fruits and fish is unlikely to become a source of global tensions, China's export stop on sand, a resource essential for the manufacturing of semiconductors, could prove devastating for countries like the United States.
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The United States are not the only one profiting from Taiwanese exports.
Germany, South Africa, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Japan are Taiwan's principal trade partners in Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and Oceania, respectively. Germany and Japan are especially reliant on the island's industry, with exports taking up 40 percent of the $21 billion in trade with the European country and 34 percent of the Japanese-Taiwanese trade volume of $86 billion.
The basis of the tensions between China and Taiwan is the hitherto unresolved question of independence. After the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, the remaining supporters of the defeated Kuomintang retreated to the island. Once established there, they proclaimed the Republic of China, while the People's Republic sees the island, which is now governed democratically, as its own province.
Largely ignored in this equation is the role of Taiwan's indigenous peoples, 16 of whom are officially recognized as ethnic minorities. After a long history of colonization by the Netherlands, Spain, China and Japan, they still made up about 2.4 percent of the population in 2019.