Abstract:

For several weeks in March and April, university students in Taiwan camped out in the legislative and cabinet offices to protest the Cross-Strait Agreement on Trade in Services between China and Taiwan. Joined by hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese, spilling out to the streets, the demonstrators claim President Ma Ying-jeou negotiated the agreement with China without seeking any public input and bypassing the legislative process entirely. Implications of this historical social movement include the functioning of Taiwan's democratic institutions, which have undergone regime change but democratic consolidation remains in question. Additionally, a potential cross-strait crisis can affect U.S. - China relations in the post-Cold War era. Two important forces are also at play: China's meteoric playing-by-its-own-rules economic rise, and the evolving Taiwanese national identity after its transition to democracy. This talk will center on the national specific consequences of liberal trade and democracy for Taiwan's economic globalization and political development.

Speaker Bio:

Roselyn Hsueh is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University and currently, Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the politics of market reform, comparative capitalism, development, and other areas of international and comparative political economy. (Her publications include China's Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization (Cornell University Press, 2011) and "China and India in the Age of Gloablization: Sectoral Variation in Postliberalization Reregulation," Comparative Political Studies 45 (2012): 32-61. She received her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley and has served as a Hayward on R. Alker Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California and conducted research as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar at the Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The period from the arrest of the “gang of four” in October 1976 to the final step in the removal of Hua Guofeng in mid-1981 saw CCP rural policy go through a number of phases. The initial emphasis on a moderate version of the Dazhai model gave way to “traditional policies” (luoshi zhengce) by mid-1978; these policies were supplemented in 1979 by “responsibility systems,” the most radical of which, household contracting (baochan daohu), became a sharply divisive issue in 1980, but still not the main aspect of agricultural policy. The tide was moving strongly toward household contracting by mid-1981, but had not yet achieved unambiguous endorsement as the Party policy.

A number of inadequate approaches have dominated the literature, notably 1) a power/policy struggle between Hua Guofeng's neo-Maoists and Deng Xiaoping's reform coalition; 2) the power of the peasants; and 3) the leading role of provincial reformers. The first has no validity, the second and third must be viewed through more complex lenses. The talk will explicate the key factors and present an alternative explanation of the success of rural reform.

Frederick C. Teiwes is Emeritus Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Sydney. He received his B.A. from Amherst College and his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. He is the author of various books on Chinese elite politics including Politics and Purges in China (1979, 1993), Leadership, Legitimacy, and Conflict in China (1984), and Politics at Mao's Court (1990). Some of his most important work has been jointly authored with Warren Sun including The Politics of Agricultural Cooperativization: Mao, Deng Zihui, and the "High Tide" of 1955 (1993), The Tragedy of Lin Biao: Riding the Tiger during the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1971 (1996), China’s Road to Disaster: Mao, Central Politicians and Provincial Leaders in the Emergence of the Great Leap Forward, 1955-1959 (1999), and The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics during the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972-1976 (2007).

Economists and business scholars have long tried to construct theoretical models that can explain economic growth and development in emerging economies, but Western models have not always been fully applicable to developing economies, particularly in Asia, due to differences in political, economic and social systems. Created to address this gap, the ABCD framework of K-Strategy is a more nearly universal approach showing how inherent disadvantages can be overcome and competitive advantages achieved. Using the ABCD framework, the lecturer will analyze Korea’s success at both national and corporate levels since the 1960s and discuss the framework’s implications for Korea’s future government policies and corporate strategies. He will also demonstrate the ABCD framework’s applicability to other countries. Hwy-Chang Moon, dean of Seoul National University’s graduate school of international studies, has done extensive research and theoretical work on the ABCD framework.

Hwy-Chang Moon received his PhD from the University of Washington and is currently a professor of international business and strategy in the graduate school of international studies at Seoul National University. Professor Moon has taught at the University of Washington, University of the Pacific, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Helsinki School of Economics, Kyushu University, Keio University, Hitotsubashi University, and other executive and special programs in various organizations. On topics such as international business strategy, foreign direct investment, corporate social responsibility, and cross-cultural management, Professor Moon has published numerous journal articles and books. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the Journal of International Business and Economy, an international academic journal. Professor Moon has conducted consulting and research projects for several multinational companies, international organizations (APEC, World Bank, and UNCTAD), and governments (Malaysia, Dubai, Azerbaijan, and Guangdong Province of China). For interviews and debates on international economy and business, he has been invited by international newspapers and media, including New York Times and NHK World TV.

This event is made possible through the generous support of the Koret Foundation.