With a territory consisting of 36,000 square kilometres and a population of 23 million, the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan, Penghu, Jinmen and Mazu had, in 1970, the year prior to its withdrawal from the United Nations (UN), a population larger than two thirds of the countries in the world. In 1996, its population exceeded that of three quarters of the member nations of UN. However, the question of Taiwan being a nation in the international order is, strangely, still debated. To enquire into this delicate issue, Dr. Man-houng Lin will address to what extent the statehood of the ROC on Taiwan has or has not been secured by the Treaty of Peace between the Republic of China and Japan, singed and turned effective in 1952, and often referred to as the “Taipei Treaty.” (Taibei heyue) She will also illustrate that not only the People’s Republic of China, but also the Taiwanese in general have been unclear about Taiwan’s status as a sovereign state on the world stage. Meanwhile, in this special seminar Dr. Lin will further depict the background of the Taipei Treaty in terms of the long-term history of the Asian Pacific region. She will show how the Cold War made the Taipei Treaty, and ironically, how the ideological attachment of Taiwan with the Chinese mainland has also blurred this treaty. 

Man-houng Lin received her Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University. She has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica since 1990, and Professor at the Department of History, National Taiwan Normal University since 1991. Her research interests include treaty ports and modern China, native opium of late Qing China, currency crisis and early nineteenth-century China, and Taiwanese merchants' overseas economic networks during the Japanese colonial period. She has published 5 books and about 70 articles in Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean. From May 2008 to December 2010, Dr. Lin was President of the Academia Historica, the Republic of China (Taiwan).

Taiwan’s special municipality elections have been viewed by many as the “mid-term” for the Ma Ying-jeou presidency, bearing important political significance for the 2012 presidential election. In this special seminar, Professor Yun-han Chu, one of the leading political scientists in Taiwan and also President of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, will analyze the recent special municipality elections and their implications for Taiwan’s future political trends. Professor Chu will provide firsthand information about these recent election campaigns and what they reveal about the state of democracy in Taiwan. In analyzing the election results, he will also shed light on how the race for the presidency in 2012 is shaping up.

Yun-han Chu is Distinguished Research Fellow of the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica and Professor of Political Science at National Taiwan University. He serves concurrently as president of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. Professor Chu received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota and joined the faculty of National Taiwan University in 1987. He specializes in politics of Greater China, East Asian political economy and democratization. He is a three-time recipient of the Outstanding Research Award from Taiwan’s National Science Council. He currently serves on the editorial board of International Studies Quarterly, Pacific Affairs, China Review, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of East Asian Studies and Journal of Democracy. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of eleven books. Among his recent English publications are Crafting Democracy in Taiwan (Institute for National Policy Research, 1992), Consolidating Third-Wave Democracies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), China Under Jiang Zemin (Lynne Reinner, 2000), and The New Chinese Leadership (Cambridge University Press, 2004). His works have also appeared in some leading journals including World Politics, International Organization, China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, and Asian Survey.

In this special seminar, Professor John F. Copper will introduce his new book on Taiwan during the Chen Shui-bian era. This is one of the very first books in the western scholarship assessing the process of democratization in Taiwan during the Chen Shui-bian presidency and after. The speaker will delineate and evaluate the factors that produced the Taiwan political miracle up to 2000, when Chen was elected president and Taiwan’s democratization was reportedly consolidated with a change in ruling political parties and a president that was said for the first time to represent Taiwan’s majority. Several key factors the local population in particular considered important to the democratization process, such as economic growth, political reform, ethnic relations, freedom of the press, and clean government, will be carefully assessed in this talk.    

John F. Copper is the Stanley J. Buckman Distinguished Professor of International Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of more than twenty books on Asia and international affairs. He has testified several times before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee and its Sub-committee on Asia and Pacific Affairs. He was a member of the Board of Governors of the East West Center from 1983 to 1989, and was the recipient of the International Communications Award in 1997. 

For the last decade, China has been at the forefront of pushing for regional economic integration, e.g. ASEAN-China FTA, Hong Kong-China CEPA, and China-Taiwan ECFA. Could this process culminate into a movement toward a European Union-style economic bloc? What are the implications of this development for US economic welfare? US unions have long viewed the cheap goods from China as harmful to US workers; and some US economists have recently blamed the cheap credit from China for the 2008 implosion of the US financial system. The present escalation of Chinese and US rhetoric on the exchange rate is worryingly akin to the mutual pawing on the ground before the great leap forward at each other. What is the sensible solution? There is no sign that the impasse over the Doha Round of trade negotiations would be resolved in the medium-term.  It is very surprising that China has adopted a near hands-off approach on this issue because it has been the biggest beneficiary of the open multilateral trading system. Has China's failure to help strengthen the WTO framework emboldened protectionism, much to its own detriment and the world's? In this seminar, Professor Woo will examine China's strategy of external economic engagement, including the recently signed ECFA between Beijing and Taipei. Woo argues that part (and only part) of the reason why China does not already have a coherent strategy could be that its present governance institutions create disincentives to move quickly to embrace such a strategy.  

Wing Thye Woo is Professor of Economics at U.C. Davis, Yangtze River Scholar at the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, Director of the East Asia Program within The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He received an M.A. in Economics from Yale University, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. He has advised the U.S. Treasury Department, the IMF, World Bank, and the United Nations. Professor Woo has published extensively, and his current research focuses on the economic issues of East Asia, international financial architecture, comparative economic growth, state enterprise restructuring, fiscal management, and exchange rate economics.