Map Shows Why Taiwan Is So Important to the World

A map of maritime traffic around Taiwan underscores the importance of the self-ruled island to global trade as Taipei gears up for elections. Open-source ship-tracking website MarineTraffic illustrates the sheer volume of ship activity in the region in 2022, the most recent year with complete data available. The darker the hue of an area, the more densely packed the routes. Taiwan sits at the nexus of shipping lanes providing raw materials to manufacturing powerhouses China, Japan, and South Korea. These three countries comprised nearly 40 percent of the world’s manufacturing output in 2019. Nearly half of the world’s 5,400 container…