The Hoover Institution Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and the Program on the US, China, and the World invite you to Guardians of Economic Sovereignty: How Taiwan and Singapore Navigate Chinese Capital Through National Security Review.

This event is free and open to the public. It will be held at the Hoover Institution in HHMB 160 on Wednesday, January 16 from 4:00-5:15pm. Register to attend in person or virtually. 

Professor Chen will discuss two distinct strategies for scrutinizing outbound investment from China, as adopted by Taiwan and Singapore—both key trade partners of China. Growing concerns over Chinese investment have led to stricter national security reviews worldwide, yet the actual enforcement of these reviews remains understudied, particularly outside the U.S. context. He contrasts Singapore's reliance on ex post monitoring with Taiwan's emphasis on ex ante screening. Additionally, he highlights how Singapore leverages privatized monitoring to reinforce investment scrutiny, while Taiwan incorporates elements of private enforcement. The discussion underscores the importance of utilizing market intermediaries as enforcement agents, serving as a crucial supplement to the traditional framework of national security reviews. Both cases demonstrate how the private sector can take a proactive role in enforcing national security reviews.

Speaker Bio
Weitseng Chen is a faculty member at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law, specializing in law and economic development, law and politics, and legal history in the context of Greater China. He has recently published several books, including Regime Type and Beyond: The Transformation of Police in Asia (CUP, 2023), Authoritarian Legality in Asia: Formation, Development and Transition (CUP, 2019), The Beijing Consensus? How China Has Changed the Western Ideas of Law and Economic Development (CUP, 2017), Property and Trust Law: Taiwan (with Yun-Chien Chang & Y. J. Wu, Kluwer, 2017), and Law and Economic Miracle: Interaction Between Taiwan’s Development and Economic Laws After WWII (in Chinese, 2000). Weitseng Chen earned his JSD from Yale Law School. Prior to joining NUS, he served as a Hewlett Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and practiced as a corporate lawyer in the Greater China region with Davis Polk & Wardwell.

On October 19, the Hoover Institution's Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region held a joint event with National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, to discuss how to deepen U.S.-Taiwan cooperation in semiconductors.  

Taiwan is one of Asia’s most prosperous and successful liberal democracies, the world’s leading innovator in and producer of semiconductors, and a trusted partner in critical supply chains. While Taiwan stands at the center of the global semiconductor economy, its lack of diplomatic recognition and formal alliances contributes to its existential vulnerability to being invaded or otherwise involuntarily absorbed into the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

This event brought together participants from the Hoover Institution to discuss these issues with Taiwan counterparts, and to consider the recommendations of a new Hoover Institution report entitled “Silicon Shield: US- Silicon Triangle: The United States, Taiwan, China, and Global Semiconductor Security.” The report is available for free download at the project website. 

For more on this topic, see the Hoover Institution's Working Group on Semiconductors and the Security of the United States and Taiwan. Some of the report chapter authors have also participated in podcasts about the report, which you can listen to here: 

Matt Turpin, on mitigating China's non-market behavior in semiconductors
Chris Ford, on how the United States can reduce vulnerabilities in semiconductor supply chains 
Mary Kay Magistad, on the future of U.S.-China competition
Glenn Tiffert, on why China struggles to produce advanced semiconductors

In addition, in July 2023, the report's editors appeared in Washington DC for a launch event. 

Participants
Terry Tsao is a seasoned executive and industry leader, currently serving as the Global Chief Marketing Officer and President of Taiwan at SEMI. In his current capacity, Terry Tsao assumes the responsibility of directing corporate marketing strategies of SEMI, encompassing various critical areas such as strategy formulation, association operations, product marketing, and market communications. Moreover, he leads the SEMI Market Intelligence Team, driving data-driven insights and actionable intelligence within the organization. In his leadership position for SEMI Taiwan, Tsao oversees all aspects of activity planning, product offerings, and service content. With over 16 years of experience at SEMI, Tsao has significantly advanced Taiwan's semiconductor community and spearheaded crucial policy initiatives within the global semiconductor industry. Prior to his current position, Tsao held dual roles as the President of SEMI Taiwan and the President of SEMI Southeast Asia, leveraging his extensive experience to drive advancements in the semiconductor industry across multiple regions.

Tain-Jy Chen is a senior professor of economics at TSE, and also a professor emeritus of National Taiwan University. In addition to teaching, he has previously served as the president of Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research, a think tank specializing in economic policy studies, and also in the Taiwan government, as the minister for Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) and National Development Council (NDC). This experience gives him wide exposures to policy formations and implementations. As an economist, his research interests are in economic development and trade policies. He earned a Ph.D. degree in economics in 1983 from Pennsylvania State University. He has published extensively in academic journals, mostly in the fields of trade, investment, and industrial development. His recent work focuses on industrial development of China and the US-China trade war.

Kuo-Chun Yeh is a professor at the Graduate Institute of National Development, a researcher at Center for China Studies, and Coordinator of China Research Program, National Taiwan University.  He is Secretary-general of the Chinese Association of Political Science (CAPS Taipei).  Since 2021 he has been an EU Jean Monnet Chair focusing on the EU-China industrial competition.

Burn-Jeng Lin is a Distinguished Senior Professor at National Tsing Hua University, a position he has held since retiring as Vice President of TSMC in 2016. He joined TSMC as a senior director in 2000 and became Vice President in 2011. Prior to that, he founded and led Linnovation, Inc. From 1970 to 1992, Dr. Lin worked at IBM, where he held various technical and managerial positions and was the first person to propose immersion lithography, a technique that eventually became viable in the 1980s. Dr. Lin is an IEEE Life Fellow and SPIE Fellow and was elected to the membership of the United States National Academy of Engineering in 2008 and as an Academician of Academia Sinica in 2014. He received a B.S. from National Taiwan University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Ohio State University.

FEATURING:
Larry Diamond - Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
James O. Ellis - Annenberg Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Kharis Templeman - Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution
H.-S. Philip Wong - Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University

Join the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, together with the Program on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region at the Hoover Institution, on Wednesday, March 8, from Noon–1 PM Pacific, for Semiconductors and Geo-technology: ‘Know-how’ is Power, a discussion with Dr. Chun-Yi Lee, Associate Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations, and Director of the Taiwan Studies Program, at the University of Nottingham. The session will be moderated by Charles Mok, visiting scholar at the Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPi).

Geopolitics is conventionally understood as a struggle for power. The focus of geopolitical analysis is typically on states; power is understood in terms of states’ economic and military strength. In the era of globalisation, production relies on complex supply chains. While this paper focuses on the production of a hi-tech product—semiconductors—it argues more generally that technology production and supply chain ‘know how’ is implicated in geopolitical power. Through an elaboration of the concept of ‘geo-technology’, this paper argues that a consideration of technology production capacity (or ‘know-how’) can enrich conventional understandings of geopolitics.

The US, Taiwan and China play different roles in the global semiconductor manufacturing supply chain. The leading semiconductor designers are based in the US, while the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) produces most of the world’s high-end chips. China, on the other hand, is an economic and manufacturing powerhouse, but remains at the low end of the manufacturing supply chain. This paper argues that the US and Taiwan have significant leverage in the production of semiconductors, granting them geopolitical power. It therefore asks if Taiwan, and the US, can use their technological 'know-how’ to gain further leverage in the geopolitical tug of war with China. Data of this paper will come from semi-constructed interviews in Taiwan and Japan, approximately twenty elite interviews from technology policy analysts, policy makers and high-skilled engineers, along with relevant policy analyses. The paper aims to explore the link between human talents in the semiconductor supply chain and geopolitics.

This session is part of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March, hosted at the Cyber Policy Center with the Program on Democracy and the Internet. Sessions are in-person and virtual, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance. Registration is required. 

About the Speaker
Dr. Chun-Yi Lee is Associate Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations, and Director of the Taiwan Studies Program, at the University of Nottingham. Her first book, Taiwanese Business or Chinese Security Asset?, was published by Routledge in 2011. She is currently working on her second monograph, on semiconductor manufacturing and geopolitics. She is editor in chief of the on-line academic magazine, Taiwan Insight, and co-editor of the ‘Taiwan and World Affairs’ book series with Palgrave.

Tuesday, May 3, 2022 from 4:30 - 5:45 pm PT, the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific (PTIP) at the Hoover Institution will host a special event examining Taiwan's acute dependence on foreign energy imports. The event will be online and is free and open to the public. Please register at the event page.   

In 2020, 93 percent of the energy consumed in Taiwan came from imported fossil fuels: oil, coal, and liquid natural gas. Taiwan’s government is also phasing out nuclear power, with the last nuclear generation unit scheduled to be shut down in 2025. This overwhelming reliance on imports is at odds with Taiwan’s pledges to reduce its carbon emissions to net-zero by 2050. It also presents a serious security vulnerability: a prolonged disruption of energy supplies could quickly bring Taiwan’s economy to a halt, including its strategically important semiconductor industry.

In this event, three experts on Taiwan’s energy policies will discuss Taiwan’s changing energy mix, its ambitious plans for developing renewable energy sources and lessening dependence on imports, and how Taiwan’s exclusion from important international energy bodies such as the International Energy Agency adds to its energy security challenges.

Ker-hsuan Chien is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Technology Management at National Tsing Hua University. Her research focuses on the socio-technical aspects of the energy transition in Taiwan. She is particularly interested in how the state’s industrial policies, the pressures from international corporate governance, and the materiality of the electric power system co-shape the path of Taiwan’s energy transition.

​Kuan-Ting Chen (he/him) is currently the Chief Executive Officer of the Taiwan NextGen Foundation, a Taipei and Chiayi-based think tank working to make Taiwan more sustainable, diverse, and inclusive. Previously, he served as the Deputy Spokesperson and Chief Research Officer at Taipei City Government. In this position, he worked to strengthen Taipei's national and international standing, formulated methods to realize public policy objectives, researched and generated activism for new policy directions, and initiated the Taipei City Government’s international internship program. 

On February 7, Wendy Cutler spoke about the prospects for strengthening U.S.-Taiwan economic ties. Abstract is below; video is now available at the Hoover Institution Program on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific (PTIP) event page.  

It's alive! This book volume on Taiwan politics during the Ma Ying-jeou years (2008-2016), which I've edited with Chu Yun-han and Larry Diamond, just arrived in the mail from Lynne Rienner Publishers this weekend.

This is our attempt at a deep dive into various aspects of Ma-era politics, including party politics and elections, political institutions and governance challenges, trends in public opinion and democratic values, civil society and social movements, and cross-Strait and US-Taiwan-PRC relations. This look at the Ma years parallels somewhat our earlier book on the Chen Shui-bian era.

We were fortunate to be able to assemble a great group of contributors for this book--about half based in Taiwan and half abroad--who offer a variety of perspectives on the politics of the Ma years. The scholarship here draws on years of conferences, papers, and conversations that started even before President Ma left office, including with some of the key participants in and outside of the Ma administration. (Chapter 15, for instance, is by Szu-yin Ho, who served for two years as deputy Secretary-General of Ma's National Security Council.) This sort of cross-national collaboration is less common than it should be (in part because it's logistically hard to pull off!), but I am convinced the final product is much stronger for it.  

Among the many great contributions here, let me especially highlight three that provide original, provocative answers to important questions about the Ma era:

• In Chapter 3, Austin Wang explains how Tsai Ing-wen emerged from obscurity as unrivaled leader of the DPP during its years in opposition, despite having never previously held elected office;
• In Chapter 4, Nathan Batto shows how President Ma's recurrent troubles with the legislature had more to do with deep divides within the ruling KMT than they did with the obstructionist tactics of the opposition DPP and with Ma's party rival, Speaker Wang Jin-pyng;
• In Chapter 7, Isaac Shih-hao Huang and Shing-yuan Sheng demonstrate that having a majority in the Legislative Yuan does not mean a party has complete control over the Legislative Yuan, and that the legislature's decentralized law-making process makes it challenging for the executive branch to get high-priority legislation approved, whether or not the president's party holds a majority. 

For more thoughts on those issues and a broader overview of the book, check out the introductory chapter, which is available ungated from the publisher's website. 

The Taiwan Democracy and Security Project at Stanford University is hosting a presentation today by Gary Hamilton, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Washington. Prof. Hamilton will speak about his new book from Stanford University Press, Making Money: How Taiwanese Industrialists Embraced the Global Economy. 

The talk is free and open to the public. Additional details can be found at the official event page. 

Abstract
Making Money: How Taiwanese Industrialists Embraced the Global Economy is a record of a thirty-year research project that Gary G. Hamilton and Kao Cheng-shu began in 1987.  A distinguished sociologist and university administrator in Taiwan, Kao and his research team (which included Prof. Hamilton during his frequent visits to Taiwan) interviewed over 800 owners and managers of Taiwanese firms in Taiwan, China, and Vietnam.  Some were re-interviewed over ten times during this period.  The length of this project allows them a vantage point to challenge the conventional interpretations of Asian industrialization and to present a new interpretation of the global economy that features an enduring alliance between, on the one hand, American and European retailers and merchandisers and, on the other hand, Asian contract manufacturers, with Taiwanese industrialists becoming the most prominent contract manufacturers in the past forty years.

Bio
Gary G. Hamilton is a Professor Emeritus of International Studies and Sociology at the University of Washington.  He specializes in historical/comparative sociology, economic sociology, with a special emphasis on Asian societies. He is an author of numerous articles and books, including most recently Emergent Economies, Divergent Paths, Economic Organization and International Trade in South Korea and Taiwan (with Robert Feenstra) (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Commerce and Capitalism in Chinese Societies (London: Routledge, 2006), The Market Makers: How Retailers Are Changing the Global Economy (co-editor and contributor, Oxford University Press, 2011; paperback 2012), and Making Money: How Taiwanese Industrialists Embraced the Global Economy (with Kao Cheng-shu, Stanford University Press, 2018).

My latest review essay, entitled "The China Model: How Successful is the Chinese Regime?" is now out at the Taiwan Journal of Democracy.

More on the themes of that piece below, but first, If you are a China-watcher, you really need to read Edward Wong's terrific new article in the New York Times, "A Chinese Empire Reborn." Wong was a China correspondent for the NYT for a decade, and he cuts through a lot of the crap about the nature of the Chinese regime. China's rise as a global power, he rightly notes, is occurring mostly through its accumulation of economic and military clout, rather than through emulation of its system and values by ordinary people and elites in other countries. That is, China's rise to date has been mostly about increasing its "hard", not "soft", power, and that order shows few signs of changing anytime soon.

There's one assumption in that essay that bothers me a bit, though. It's that the Chinese regime is inevitably going to continue its ascension in the world--that is, though it probably won't attract more admirers or imitators any time soon, China's relative hard power will continue its rapid increase. Here's the end of Wong's essay:

What I question is Wong's implicit assumption that China will inevitably continue on an upward trajectory over the next several decades. It's true that the relative power of the United States is declining ("fading" is a bit strong, but we'll leave that aside for now), as it has been since its early post-Cold War peak. It's also true that the "liberal hegemony" of the current global order, and especially the capacity, and willingness, of the United States to maintain it, is under considerable short-term threat right now.

But it is not obvious to me that China is especially well-positioned to benefit from these trends, because it's not self-evident that its current economic expansion will continue much longer, or that Chinese leaders will be able to adapt very effectively to the challenges looming on the horizon. The Chinese economy has grown quickly over the last 35 years, but despite many assertions that China's growth record is unprecedented, it is not--over a similar time interval, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and before them Japan registered equally impressive growth, with a much more equal distribution of gains, to boot. And those earlier "economic miracles" followed a broadly similar pattern--a greater role for market forces, increasing connectivity to the global economy, export-oriented development, high savings rates, broad investment in education and infrastructure, but a continued privileged role for an activist state. 

Here's the kicker: in all of those cases, the economy inevitably slowed down, and at the same time their  "demographic dividends" also ended. The transition to a different growth model has been wrenching, and it's not clear that Japan, or South Korea, or Taiwan or Singapore has hit on the right balance of reforms--in particular, improved corporate governance, strengthened rule of law, and banking reforms--that would improve their long-term economic prospects. (Singapore has probably come the closest so far.) So why should we expect China to? On all these dimensions, China actually looks much worse than its Asian predecessors, and it has the added burden of a hugely unequal distribution of wealth and a political system that suffers from a grievous, long-term legitimacy deficit. (This leaves aside, too, the question of whether its reported GDP figures actually reflect anything close to reality.) It also is facing a dire demographic picture made worse by the One-Child Policy: its workforce-age population is already declining, and its total population is projected to begin falling in less than 20 years. That does not sound like a country destined for global hegemony to me.

For a more detailed discussion, check out my essay at the Taiwan Journal of Democracy.