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In this special seminar event, Dr. Szu-yin Ho will examine the current Taiwan-China relations within the framework of international relations theory. He will elaborate how both sides of the Taiwan Strait perceive this relationship, what the implications for the building of new institutions are after President Ma Ying-jeou took office, and what kind of signals these new institutions have delivered. Dr. Ho will also give his concerns and predictions about the future relationship across the Taiwan Strait. In this special seminar, Professor Wei-chin Lee from Wake Forest University will comment on Dr. Ho's speech.

Szu-yin Ho is Professor of Political Science at the National Chengchi University. He received his BA degree (1978) in English Literature from National Taiwan University, MA (1983) and Ph.D. (1986) in Political Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara. After receiving doctoral degree, Professor Ho first joined the Academia Sinica, then moved to the Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. He later served as the Deputy Director of the Institute from 1994 to 1999 and the Director from 1999-2003. From 2003 to 2008 he served as the Director of International Affairs of the KMT, Taiwan's current ruling party. After the presidential election in 2008, he moved to become the Deputy Secretary-General of the National Security Council in the Presidential Office, overseeing the country's foreign affairs. After two years of service in government, Mr. Ho went back to academia. Professor Ho specializes on international relations, comparative political economy, sampling survey, and Chinese politics. He had published books and articles, in both Chinese and English, along these lines of research.

Wei-chin Lee received his Ph.D. in Political Science from University of Oregon. He is Professor of Political Science at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He has published several books, including the latest edited volume on Taiwan's Politics in the 21th Century (2010). His articles have appeared in various scholarly journals. His teaching and research interests include foreign policy and domestic politics of China and Taiwan, US policy toward East Asia, international security, and international institutions. He is currently serving as an advisor to the Taiwan Benevolent Association of America.

This is a special event cosponsored by CDDRL and Taiwan Benevolent Association of  America.

As a sociologist who works on the conjunction and conflicts between political, economic and cultural-cognitive networks, Eiko Ikegami has been conducting research on long-term social processes that underlie and perpetuate modern Japanese social
relations with a number of different topics. It is from this long-term view point, that Ikegami offers a distinctive angle to articulate the grave difficulties that contemporary Japanese capitalism is facing. She expresses the social significance of the current radical transformation of Japanese capitalism as a historic turning point in redirecting institutions of Japanese trust and justification. For example, she investigates developments in popular consciousness of egalitarian views that clung to the myth that "we all are in the middle strata" and of distinctive gender roles closely linked to the particular style of Japanese capitalism. Ikegami considers these institutional transformations not only as a postwar product, but in a critical way as the result of path dependent developments of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization for more than a century. Using keywords such as uncertainty, networks, trust, and justification, her talk will present a bold synthesis that outlines the long-term process of institutionalization that produces mutually connected socio-cultural-cognitive systems in which the distinctive Japanese style of capitalism has been embedded.

Born and raised in Japan, Eiko Ikegami was a journalist for the Japan Economic Journal (Nikkei or Nihonkeizai Shinbun) before she moved to the US. Ikegami is currently Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at the New School for Social Research in New York. Ikegami's book, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 1995), has been translated into Spanish, Korean, and Japanese, and is widely considered the definitive statement on the subject. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2005), won five book awards in various fields including the Distinguished Contribution Book award in Political Sociology from the American Sociological Association, and the John Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, which cited the work as "the most important book on Japan to have appeared in recent years." In 2003, Ikegami was elected Chair of the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the ASA.

Her core research interest has been related to the question: How did a non-Western society such as Japan achieve its own version of modernity without traveling the route taken by Western countries? More recently, Ikegami has been working on three distinct areas of research: a project on trust and uncertainty in Japanese capitalism; the completion of a book project on the Gion Festival, Community, Gender, and Shrine in Kyoto; and, funded by the National Science Foundation, Ikegami currently leads a team of one dozen graduate students in conducting ethnographic research of online communities using 3-D virtual worlds in Japan and in the U.S. Ikegami’s theoretical interests uniquely combine culture and network concepts with the literature of civil society, which has prompted an initiative in the form of a series of workshops in Paris (Sciences Po) and New York, to study the trajectories of civil societies in non-western settings.