Global Taiwan

Global Taiwan examines the impact of globalization on the industry and economy of Taiwan since the spectacular growth of the 1990s. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with firms in Taiwan, China, the United States, Japan, Europe, and other areas, the book analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of Taiwanese firms at a time when they face new competition from powerful global leaders and new producers in China. The contributors cover topics of enormous importance for Taiwan as well as the rest of the world, including transformations in the international economy, technological advances that enabled modularization and fragmentation of the production system, contract manufacturers, regionalization, and links with Chinese industry. The book addresses such questions as: Can Taiwanese companies be maintained and expanded with the same corporate strategies and public policies as in the past? Can these strategies still work for other countries? If changes are required, what resources can be mobilized in the public and private sectors? As massive relocation of manufacturing and services moves plants and jobs to low-wage countries like China and India, what will remain at home in societies like Taiwan?

This book traces the development of Taiwan’s relations with its diplomatic partners and its policy towards the political opponents of its political opponent - mainland China. Paying particular attention to the powers that could exercise great influence in the future of East Asia, China-Taiwan Relations in a Global Context examines the main diplomatic strategies of Taiwan and its counterparts and the major problems for Taiwanese foreign relations. To date there is very little scholarship which examines the ‘Taiwan Issue’ outside of the triangular Beijing-Washington-Taipei framework, this book does exactly that. The contributors examine the development of Taiwan’s relationship with less prominent countries and governments, and attempt to ascertain how such examinations could give rise to new variables that help explain the strategy and purpose of Taiwan’s foreign policy, as well as the reaction and response of mainland China. This book provides readers with vital information about Taiwan’s foreign policymaking and introduces rarely told stories about Taiwan’s foreign relations. The research demonstrates the ceaseless and unyielding diplomatic efforts of the Taiwanese for survival in a shrunken international space and renders for readers a better understanding of the complexity of Taiwan’s relations with the rest of the world. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Taiwan studies, Chinese politics, Cross-Strait relations and Asian foreign policy.

Thirty years of research. Over 800 interviews. One untold story. Today, Taiwan is part of the increasingly "borderless" East Asian economy. But, in the 1950s, it was just beginning to industrialize. Making Money is the tale of the manufacturing demand generated in the West and the Taiwanese businesspeople who stepped up to fill it.

Illuminating how the identities of Taiwanese diasporic subjects are contextually and historically shaped, this book advances a nuanced, complex, and differentiated understanding of globalization.

Guilloux explores the complexities and dilemmas of providing humanitarian aid to people in need and distress, especially underlined by Taiwan's unclear status in the global arena, and how in its efforts Taiwan faces both international isolation and opposition from the People's Republic of China at multiple levels.

Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context examines modern Taiwanese culture through the prism of global cultural interactions. Challenging the view of Taiwan as a product of transience and displacement, it highlights Taiwan's subjectivity, viewing the island as a site of a global development that epitomizes both resistance and negotiation in the process of cultural flows. The fourteen contributions by an international team of scholars investigate the multi-layered and multidirectional interplays between the island and the outside world, exploring the impact of complex cultural encounters on the construction, writing and rewriting of Taiwan in a global context. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the topics covered range from Taiwanese literature, cinema, food culture and tourism to cultural geography, colonial history, and folk religion, with comparisons made with Japan, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the West. Focusing on continuous cross-cultural interplays, this book affords readers a deeper understanding of identity politics and a better insight into the fluidity, changeability, and constructionist nature of culture. As such, it will be will be of great interest to students and scholars of Taiwan Studies and Cultural Studies, as well as Asian film, literature and popular culture.

An examination of the U.S.-China relationship that charts a new path for America focusing on its existing advantages Ryan Hass charts a path forward in America's relationship and rivalry with China rooted in the relative advantages America already possesses. Hass argues that while competition will remain the defining trait of the relationship, both countries will continue to be impacted--for good or ill--by their capacity to coordinate on common challenges that neither can solve on its own, such as pandemic disease, global economic recession, climate change, and nuclear nonproliferation. Hass makes the case that the United States will have greater success in outpacing China economically and outshining it in questions of governance if it focuses more on improving its own condition at home than on trying to impede Chinese initiatives. He argues that the task at hand is not to stand in China's way and turn a rising power into an enemy in the process but to renew America's advantages in its competition with China.

Migrant women are the primary source of paid domestic labor around the world. Since the 1980s, the newly prosperous countries of East Asia have recruited foreign household workers at a rapidly increasing rate. Many come from the Philippines and Indonesia. Pei-Chia Lan interviewed and spent time with dozens of Filipina and Indonesian domestics working in and around Taipei as well as many of their Taiwanese employers. On the basis of the vivid ethnographic detail she collected, Lan provides a nuanced look at how boundaries between worker and employer are maintained and negotiated in private households. She also sheds light on the fate of the workers, “global Cinderellas” who seek an escape from poverty at home only to find themselves treated as disposable labor abroad. Lan demonstrates how economic disparities, immigration policies, race, ethnicity, and gender intersect in the relationship between the migrant workers and their Taiwanese employers. The employers are eager to flex their recently acquired financial muscle; many are first-generation career women as well as first-generation employers. The domestics are recruited from abroad as contract and “guest” workers; restrictive immigration policies prohibit them from seeking permanent residence or transferring from one employer to another. They care for Taiwanese families’ children, often having left their own behind. Throughout Global Cinderellas, Lan pays particular attention to how the women she studied identify themselves in relation to “others”—whether they be of different classes, nationalities, ethnicities, or education levels. In so doing, she offers a framework for thinking about how migrant workers and their employers understand themselves in the midst of dynamic transnational labor flows.