Economic Geography

Globalization and Regional Development

Seminar on Economic Geography

Geographies of Globalization

Seminar on Human Geography

One of my key researches concentrated on the development of the Hsinchu region, a widely claimed successful “technopolis” in the latecomer industrialization model. I published a series of papers (both in Chinese and English) on the labor market, technology learning, industrial organization and dynamic institutionalism of the Hsinchu Region and its connection with Silicon Valley. Most of these papers were published in prominent geography journals, such as the Journal of Economic Geography; Regional Studies; Environment and Planning A; Geoforum, and the like (see my homepage to download).

Recently, I have extended my research to cover the triangular connection between Silicon Valley, Hsinchu and Shanghai. China, as a market outlet in the new wave of high technology investment, becomes salient as it approaches the trend toward globalization. This research concluded that Taiwan’s high technology firms used their savvy to combine their business experience with Silicon Valley, the technology hub, and their cultural affinity with China’s market, to play a bridging role in the triangular connection. In other words, Taiwan strategically took the position of interface, and the transnational technical community helped in shaping the process.

From 2005 on, I have been engaging in a new research project to investigate the spatial politics of the interaction between economic neo-liberalization and political neo-populism in Taiwan after the economic restructuring and political transformation in the late-1980s. This research aims to investigate the regional transformation caused by hegemonic neo-liberalization discourses and the inherited interventionist state policies in Taiwan. A number of key issues will be addressed in this research, such as how do local politics shape the de-regulation and re-regulation process in the neo-liberalization regime, how does the issue of political legitimacy from the local loyalty affect the free market logic of the neo-liberalization project, and how do these seemingly contradictory forces result in the politics of scale in the regionalization process?