Assuring Taiwan’s Innovation Future
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
January 2020
Innovation has been a source of comparative advantage for Taiwan historically. It has also been an important basis for U.S. firms, investors, and government to support Taiwan’s development while expanding mutually beneficial linkages. Yet, both Taiwan’s innovation advantage and the prospect of jointly developed, technologically disruptive collaborations face challenges. This study examines five pressing challenges to Taiwan’s innovation future and proposes an array of specific solutions to promote Taiwan-based innovation, better leverage partnerships with U.S. and other international players, and bolster Taiwan’s standing in the global marketplace. A particular focus is the need to foster a next generation talent pool with expertise in computer and data sciences, machine learning, and other fields that could contribute to the integration of software with Taiwan’s long-standing comparative advantages in hardware. To this end, forward-looking partnerships between Taiwan and U.S. players could naturally complement a revitalized and broadened innovation strategy for Taiwan.
The Korean Way With Data: How the World’s Most Wired Country is Forging a Third Way
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
August 2020
This volume digs deeply into what we call “the Korean way with data.” It explores Korea’s distinctive experiences, successes, failures, and recalibrations. And it aims to address the question of what can and should be learned from innovative Korean policies and practices. There has been a proliferation of policy and regulatory models, and international internet governance is up for grabs as countries experiment, innovate, and share their policy experiences and practices. Korea, in particular, is a digital pacesetter because it is perhaps the world’s most connected country. Indeed, precisely because Korea is such a wired country, much can be learned by examining its policies and regulations in more detail. Unfortunately, however, Korea’s digital policies are still not widely known, in part because little has been written in English about Korea’s distinctive frameworks, standards, and models. Yet Korea has over the past two decades pioneered important approaches to data governance while accumulating a body of experience with best practices—and sometimes not-so-best practices that it has had to tweak, amend, or replace. These experiences provide useful lessons.
Overcoming Taiwan’s Energy Trilemma
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
April 2020
Because it imports nearly all of the fuel that powers its economy, Taiwan is unusually vulnerable to energy market risks. Still, Taiwan has had to manage such traditional risks before, and while political and market disruptions can of course be challenging to any economy, it can most likely weather these types of prospective shocks. Taiwan’s more pressing energy challenge, therefore, is that these risks are being eclipsed by new dynamics that are reshaping future energy security, affordability, and sustainability—the so-called energy trilemma. Bluntly put, a paradigm shift is underway in how major energy stakeholders—such as government policymakers, producers, utility companies, and industrial end-users—approach their energy needs. Taiwan needs to look not just to the energy it needs right now but also to the energy it will need ten to twenty years from now if it is to power its future. The number one and two drivers of this will be technological change and decarbonization, not necessarily the old drivers of cost and security. This paper focuses on two elements of the paradigmatic transformation that are especially relevant to Taiwan’s future: (1) the rise of new energy and storage technologies, and (2) the dynamics of liquefied natural gas pricing. In particular, it looks at several ways in which new investment partnerships between Taiwan and U.S. players could bolster Taiwan’s ambitious efforts.
Managing Instability on China’s Periphery
Council on Foreign Relations
September 2011
China’s growing global engagement and presence has increased the number of conceivable places and issues over which it could find itself at odds with the United States, but potential developments in the territories immediately adjacent to China remain the most likely—and the most worrisome—sources of friction. In this CFR study, Scott A. Snyder, Joshua Kurlantzick, Daniel Markey, and Evan A. Feigenbaum provide policy options for preventing a major crisis and mitigating the consequences in North Korea, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Central Asia.
The United States in the New Asia
Council on Foreign Relations
November 2009
In this Council on Foreign Relations special report, Evan A. Feigenbaum and Robert A. Manning examine Asia’s regional architecture and consider what it means for the United States. They identify shortcomings in the region’s existing multilateral mix and contend that the United States must increase its involvement in shaping Asian institutions in order to advance U.S. strategic interests and protect the competitiveness of American firms. The authors outline six principles for U.S. policy toward Asia as a whole and recommend particular policies toward Northeast and Southeast Asia. Among other steps, they urge the United States to maintain a strong presence at Asian meetings; avoid intractable security issues and focus instead on topics ripe for cooperation; make use of ad hoc groupings as well as formal ones; vigorously pursue regional and global trade liberalization efforts; and view some Asian institutions that exclude the United States as acceptable, just as with the European Union. The report also presents thoughtful recommendations for how Washington can influence the multilateral landscape in ways beneficial to American interests. The result is a document with important implications for U.S. policy toward a region that promises to play a central role in shaping the coming era of history.
Eurasia Group
August 2011
In this comprehensive look at the future of China’s political economy, Eurasia Group’s China team examines the maladies that confront Chinese leaders and the solutions they have prescribed to remedy them. Their blueprint is the 12th Five Year Plan, a set of strategic goals and binding economic targets through which they aim to alter China’s macroeconomic landscape in far-reaching ways, with effects that are likely to be felt for a decade to come. But the report argues that China’s economic landscape will not change as fundamentally as the Plan’s designers (and many foreigners) hope. And that, in turn, means that China in five years will be more brittle and beset by social difficulties. Although China should have little trouble muddling through until then, Chinese leaders will likely face starker choices when the plan has run its course in 2015 than they do today.
Stanford University Press
2003
In the spring of 1987, the father of China’s strategic missile program, Qian Xuesen, told colleagues that China must steel itself for a century of sustained “intellectual warfare.” His use of a military metaphor was not a linguistic quirk, but reflected the central role of the military in China’s emergence as a modern state, especially in the period since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Over the course of the Communist era, a uniquely military approach to China’s development became embedded in the ideologies of the country’s political leadership, in policy choices about national security and economic development, and in the organizational solutions adopted to put these policies into practice. This book tells the story of how and why the Chinese military came to play such a powerful role in China’s economic and institutional development. It weaves together four stories: Chinese views of technology since 1950, the role of the military in China’s political and economic life, the evolution of open and flexible conceptions of public management in China, and the technological dimensions of the rise of Chinese power. But the book primarily explores and explains a paradox. This military approach to technology and development emerged during China’s period of greatest external threat, 1950-69. Yet these policies and management methods persist even as China enjoys perhaps its most benign strategic environment since the 1840s.
Chinese language edition of China’s Techno-Warriors
National Defense Press (Taipei)
2006
中共戰略飛彈計畫之父錢學森在1987年春向他的同僚表示，中國必須下定決心面對下個世紀長期的「知識戰爭」。錢學森此種軍事譬喻並非中文所謂的雙關語，而是反映出中共自1949年建政以來，共軍在中共成為現代化國家過程中所扮演的關鍵性角色。軍方在中共主政的年代裡，構建出一套以軍事發展國家的獨特辦法，並且深深植入政治領導人的腦海之中，左右國家安全與經濟發展相關的政策抉擇，也深深影響用以實行這些政策的組織方案。本書意在討論中共軍方如何、以及為何會在國家的經濟與工業發展史中扮演如此重要的角色。全書聚焦於四個主要的議題：中共自1950年以來抱持何種科技觀點；軍方在中共政治與經濟領域中扮演何種角色；中共開放而具有彈性的公共管理機制如何形成與演變；科技在中共崛起的過程中有那些層面的影響。然而，本書最主要的目的，在於探討並解釋一種矛盾的現象：中共以軍事帶動技術與發展的獨特做法，成形於外來威脅最嚴重之際，也就是1950至1969年這段期間，但即使後來面臨了自1840年以來或許最具善意的戰略環境時，這些觀點、政策選擇和組織方案為何仍然持續存在。
Strengthening Fragile Partnerships
Author for the Central Asia Study Group and Project 2049 Institute
February 2011
… an honest appraisal needs to acknowledge the many shortcomings of these American efforts. To date, and in nearly every respect, the United States has failed to achieve its initial, ambitious, strategic objectives in Central Asia … Clearly, it is time for Americans and Central Asians, working together, to reassess their relations in this important but volatile region. Our study group has considered U.S. interests in Central Asia. On that basis, we propose guidelines for American policy. In key areas, we put forth a bipartisan action agenda aimed at creating a more effective and enduring partnership between the United States and the nations of Central Asia.
Change in Taiwan and Potential Adversity in the Strait
RAND
1995
Written in 1995, during Lee Teng-hui’s presidency, examines domestic change in Taiwan during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Analyzes the dominant trends and features associated with rapid change in areas as disparate as the institutional character of Taiwan’s political system, generational change and the shifting ethnic composition of Taiwan’s elite, the breakdown of the ruling Kuomintang, accelerating offshore investment, continuing economic integration with the mainland, and the connections between economic activity abroad and foreign policy formulation at home.
Evan A. Feigenbaum 