The Origins of the Developmental State in Taiwan: Science Policy and the Quest for Modernization

by J. Megan Greene

The rapid growth of Taiwan’s postwar “miracle” economy is most frequently credited to the leading role of the state in promoting economic development. Megan Greene challenges this standard interpretation in the first in-depth examination of the origins of Taiwan’s developmental state.

Greene examines the ways in which the Guomindang state planned and promoted scientific and technical development both in mainland China between 1927 and 1949 and on Taiwan after 1949. Using industrial science policy as a lens, she shows that the state, even during its most authoritarian periods, did not function as a monolithic entity. State planners were concerned with maximizing the use of Taiwan’s limited resources for industrial development. Political leaders, on the other hand, were most concerned with the state’s political survival. The developmental state emerged gradually as a result of the combined efforts of technocrats and outsiders, including academicians and foreign advisors. Only when the political leadership put its authority and weight behind the vision of these early planners did Taiwan’s developmental state fully come into being.

In Taiwan’s combination of technocratic expertise and political authoritarianism lie implications for our understanding of changes taking place in mainland China today.

238 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2008

About the author

Associate Professor at the University of Kansas Department of History, and Director of the Center for East Asian Studies.

Professor Greene's field of study is the history of the Republic of China under the KMT both in China and on Taiwan. Specific research interests include nation and state-building projects in the areas of science, the economy, academia, and ideology. She is currently working on a project on scientific and technical modernization in inland China during the Sino-Japanese war.

She is the author of The Origins of the Developmental State in Taiwan: Science Policy and the Quest for Modernization (Harvard University Press, 2008), a study of industrial science policy in China and Taiwan under the KMT. She co-edited with Robert Ash of Taiwan in the 21st Century: Aspects and limitations of a development model (Routledge, 2007) that examines the extent to which Taiwan can serve as a development model for other states. She also collaborated with William Bowman and Frank Chiteji on the reader Imperialism in the Modern World: Sources and Interpretations (Prentice Hall, 2006).

Reviews

[Nelson]

UPDATE: I said in my original review that her assertion that 1960s Taiwan wasn't a developmental state yet because they only started educating people in science, but didn't coordinate with industry, was erroneous because there weren't any science and engineering jobs there yet. Here is further evidence from Mazzoleni and Nelson that corroborates my point: "The growth of the educated labor force during the early stages of catch-up in both Korea and Taiwan outstripped the economy's ability to create jobs for graduates of the national universities..." (p. 392).

Worthwhile read, although it had a lot more potential. Greene is a historian and used a lot of original sources, but it would've been better if there was some economic analysis or some interesting science in it (e.g. like in Chris Miller's Chip War). Another goodreads reviewer raised the possibility of detailing accounts of the struggles of some of the scientists to make the narrative more interesting, which I like.

Earlier this year, I finished The Chile Project: The Chicago Boys and the Fall of Neoliberalism, a fascinating account by UCLA economist Sebastian Edwards. The Chilean and Taiwanese experiences had some things in common: Most notably, both received substantial technical assistance from the United States, much of which was channeled through USAID in both instances. One fundamental difference was that the US invited Chileans there to study economics, at the most right-wing of the top schools, the University of Chicago, in order to spread capitalism. Americans didn't do the same for Taiwan, and although she didn't mention it--the reason is obvious: Taiwan was already firmly anti-Communist.

The result is that Taiwan's top economic policymakers weren't economists: K.T. Li (physicist), YS Sun (electrical engineer), Wu Dayou (physicist), and KY Yin (electrical engineer). That must have had an impact on why Taiwan thought science was so important to development, which I don't recall Greene mentioning. Last I checked, Chile's scientific capacity is underdeveloped, in spite of its economic leadership in Latin America.

Greene also wrote that Wu Dayou didn't have much pull as a policymaker because he was a physicist. Which reminded me of a scene from Oppenheimer, where they dude that wanted to make a hydrogen bomb instead of an atomic bomb accused Oppenheimer of turning into a politician and leaving science behind. Speaking of which, I think they should make a movie out of K.T. Li.

According to Greene, development of science in Taiwan can be divided into the following intervals:

1. pre-Taiwan, classical Chinese period: Education emphasized Confucian classics, science mostly imported from missionaries.
2. pre-Taiwan during WWII: Science seen as necessary for defense purposes.
3. The GMD flees to Taiwan after losing to the Communists, and emphasizes education in Chinese identity at the expense of science. Greene doesn't mention the "why," but it's clear the GMD was afraid the existing population in Taiwan was too brainwashed by the Japanese during their fifty-year colonization, so they had to change emphases.
4. 1950s: Science mostly done by the initiative of scientists themselves and foreign advisers, not the state.
5. 1960s: State gets interested, starts pumping money into science education, but only plans. University graduates aren't properly trained for the workforce. So Taiwan at the time was a "developmental state" in planning only.
6. 1970s: Strong coordination between government, academia, and industry. The establishment of the Industrial Technology Research Institute to assist the private sector with R&D, and creation of the Shinzu science park, the repatriation of engineers educated abroad.

Her description of the 1960s as a period in which the state only took interest and only planned, is, in my opinion, flawed. The economy was still growing rapidly during that period. But you have to wait. You can't go from a country of rice farmers to a tech superpower overnight; that's ridiculous. She even quoted K.T. Li, who during that period said that you can't see the results of the education for another generation. Furthermore, she should read Lant Pritchett's paper, "Where has all the education gone?" in which Pritchett posits that improved education hasn't lifted economic growth because there is no demand for educated labor. Additionally, Greene also quoted Li in saying that only THEN (1970s) was Taiwan ready for a transformation into a technology economy.

As for the 1960s being a time when people were educated for the wrong job, well, she mentioned an American adviser who gave an assessment of Taiwan's higher ed system in the late 1970s (much later than the period in which it was supposed to be happening) saying the same thing. Furthermore, people in Taiwan are still saying that college graduates are still ill-equipped for the workforce.

[Jim Gulley]

How did Taiwan’s post-WWII developmental state come into being? Was it inevitable? What role did the ROC’s relocation from mainland China to Taiwan play in this transformation? These are the principal questions Greene is tackling to augment the social science historiography of Wade, Amsden, Johnson, and Cheng Tunjen. She argues that state-sponsored science and technology (S&T) planning was critical to Taiwan’s economic development and has been ignored by the extant scholarship. The evidence she presents to support her claims are a litany of bureaucracies, commissions, and conferences formed to plan and implement S&T policy that came and went from 1949 to the mid-1980s. The book makes a convincing case that the government expended great effort in S&T planning and that its role in this regard is overlooked in the historiography. However, she fails to demonstrate that the state effectively implemented the plans, with the few notable exceptions of the industrial parks, tax incentives, and infrastructure improvements. Greene does supply evidence supporting the thesis of Hamilton and Kao. She emphasizes the importance of US aid, international technology transfers by private enterprises, and that small manufacturers utilizing a moderately tech-savvy workforce drove Taiwan’s developmental economy.

[Chyi]

从科技发展角度探讨台湾何以成为“发展型国家”的著作，作者认为70-80年代台湾技术官僚与政治精英的结合，以及外国科技顾问（主要是美国）的建议被有效吸收，是台湾得以成功的重要原因。这两项因素，在中国大陆都受到不同程度的制约，因而“台湾的今天是否会成为大陆的明天”尚有待历史的检验。

[Yeast]

A bird-eye-view history focusing on the highest-level technocrats trying to push for R&D policies in Taiwan's 1950s and 60s, a time when, contrary to the linear narrative in previous scholarship, science was much treated as an outgrowth of military research or ideological stances. How scientists really felt and struggled in the period would be another book to write though.