Taichung

Taiwan's geographic centre falls near Taichung, and this accident of geometry became the city's defining economic logic. When the Japanese colonial government built Taiwan's railway network in the early 1900s, Taichung Station became the midpoint between Taipei's political capital and Kaohsiung's industrial port. The city grew as a facilitation node—not originating flows but enabling them, the way coral reefs create structure that channels nutrients for entire marine ecosystems.

The Japanese planned Taichung as a colonial model city in 1900, laying a grid street pattern and building administrative infrastructure that replaced the Qing dynasty settlement. Population grew from 54,000 in 1920 to 270,000 by 1945. The Kuomintang's retreat from mainland China in 1949 brought an influx of military and administrative personnel. Taichung absorbed them into a mixed economy of agriculture and light manufacturing—adaptive radiation from a single transit-hub origin into multiple industrial niches.

The city's industrial transformation accelerated in the 1970s through the Taichung Export Processing Zone and later the Central Taiwan Science Park (established 2003), which employs 53,000 workers and generates over NT$1.2 trillion ($37 billion) annually. TSMC, the world's largest semiconductor foundry, operates a major fabrication facility in the Science Park and plans four new 1.4-nanometre fabs in Taichung's Xitun District. Giant Manufacturing, the world's largest bicycle maker founded in Taichung in 1972, produces roughly one million frames annually. The precision machinery cluster in Dali and Nantun districts supplies manufacturing equipment across Southeast Asia.

Taichung's 2.8 million residents make it Taiwan's second-largest city. The National Taichung Theater (designed by Toyo Ito, opened 2016) anchors a cultural sector built deliberately to compete with Taipei for talent. Property prices run 40-50% below Taipei's, creating competitive exclusion in reverse—talent priced out of Taipei finds habitat here. Net migration has been positive for over a decade. Like a beaver dam that creates an entirely new ecosystem upstream, Taichung demonstrates that deliberate infrastructure investment can establish an alternative stable state—a second major urban node outside the capital's dominance, sustained by network effects that now feed themselves.