That is changing now, which as you say is the big story, but in my dissertation I document various historical factors which led to Taiwan having a very strong middle class. One of these is the famous land reforms, but I found that those were far less important than I had previously supposed. In fact, land was already fairly equitably distributed in Taiwan before the landreforms, owing to factors that can be traced back to the Qing dynasty. Whereas on the mainland absentee landowners had weilded absolute power, in Taiwan it was the owner of the surface rights who was dominant – partially because of the realities of a weak state and a frontier society…

The growing wage gap is a hot topic now in Taiwan too: the rich are getting richer by investing in China, which means that the money isn’t trickling down to other Taiwanese as much.