J. Megan Greene's The Origins of the Developmental State in Taiwan makes an important scholarly contribution by tracing the evolution of science and technology planning and policymaking through the course of the Kuomintang (KMT) regime from the Nanjing Decade to 1980s Taiwan. The one blemish on this major accomplishment is the rather clumsy imposition of the developmental state framework on top of an otherwise compelling and insightful historical narrative.
Greene documents well the twists and turns of the KMT's science and technology (S&T) policies. In Nanjing, the KMT recognized the importance of S&T and created several institutions, including Academia Sinica, in order to promote science and technical manpower. However, the state did not pursue a comprehensive policy towards science and technology until the war with Japan spurred the adoption of policies for defence-related technical manpower training. Greene maintains that as a result the KMT regime's policy on an active state role in S&T planning and research and development (R&D) in the late 1940s was broadly consistent with those of the contemporary major advanced industrial countries. However, the KMT state dropped these ambitions when it fled to Taiwan for a variety of reasons including lack of funds, lack of leadership (as the previous leaders of state S&T organizations either did not go to Taiwan or were moved to other positions) and a limited need for skilled S&T manpower given Taiwan's level of economic development.
Greene shows how through the mid-1960s the major proponents for emphasizing manpower policies and R&D guided by state institutions were American advisers to the KMT government and Taiwan's academics. The political leaders remained uninterested. The technocrats, however, were becoming more concerned about the need for more proactive S&T planning from the early 1960s, at least in the case of K.T. Li, and during the late 1960s they embarked on a series of institutional reform using foreign advisors' recommendations to legitimate their activities. Greene argues that the real turning point was the late 1970s when the state leaders gave full backing to new institutions for S&T planning. K.T. Li headed the new co-ordinating office of the Committee on Applied Technology in 1976 and the technocrat Y.S. Sun became premier in 1978. Both had the blessing of Chiang Ching-kuo. In part influenced by the recommendations made by the board of Texas Instruments when it came to visit Taiwan in 1978, the state adopted the 1979 Science and Technology Plan that laid out specific tasks for various ministries and R&D tasks for the various government institutes. Among other outcomes of this plan were Hsinchu's world-renowned science park and the mechanism by which Taiwan's major public research institute, ITRI, would spin-off technologies into commercial companies. Li created the Science and Technology Advisory Group in 1979 to incorporate the advice of foreign and overseas Chinese experts into S&T policy and, although not mentioned in this book, STAG would eventually absorb the Committee on Applied Technology in 1989.
As well as contributing insights on the S&T policy angle of the more widely known story of foreign advisors' influence on state economic policy in Taiwan, this book also offers surprising insights into the struggle to encourage the study of the sciences and engineering in KMT-ruled China and Taiwan. With both China and Taiwan now associated with educating large numbers of engineers and scientists, the fact that encouraging the growth of these disciplines in Republican China and post-war Taiwan was an uphill struggle is eye opening. As late as 1960 there were fewer than 2,000 science and engineering graduates in Taiwan. Indeed, engineering only surpassed social sciences and humanities as the most popular discipline in 1978. Taiwan's experience suggests strongly that not only was active technical manpower training necessary, but the development of industries with demands for skilled engineering jobs was essential to spur students to take up these technical disciplines in large numbers.
The one problematic feature of this fascinating historical narrative is the use of the framework of the developmental state as the lens to interpret institutional and policy developments in Taiwan. Thankfully, the use of the developmental state is really confined to the introduction and the conclusion, which in itself suggests that its use was wholly unnecessary to the account. Beyond being unnecessary, there are several problems with using the developmental state.
First, the developmental state concept has already roundly and rightly been criticized as offering a politically implausible account of development. While state intervention can be a positive force for economic development, the classic developmental state formulation (C. Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle, Stanford University Press, 1982), a formulation Greene explicitly embraces, of the state steering business and everyone else for its own developmental policy goals ends – even if these ends often benefitted business as well – is at best only true at certain moments, such as Korea in the early 1960s, where the state gained extremely strong leverage over business. As has been demonstrated by Samuels (R. J. Samuels, The Business of the Japanese State, Cornell University Press, 1987) and many others, there has been much more contestation and contention between the state and business in Northeast Asia, the supposed heartland of the developmental state, than the developmental state paradigm recognizes.
Second, by looking at S&T policy in a rather narrow sense without extending the analysis much in the direction of industrial policy in S&T-intensive areas, such as Taiwan's foray into electronics in the 1970s, Greene cannot really make a convincing case for the Taiwanese state being a developmental state as she defines it. The account offered is one of the state reorganizing itself over time to prioritize science and technology rather than the state imposing its will on other actors in its economy. What we do know from accounts of S&T policy within this larger industrial policy context in the 1970s and 1980s is that it was contentious within the state itself and between the state and business. By intentionally ignoring the wider industrial policies, Greene fails to consider other important factors affecting policy in the 1970s, such as Arthur D. Little's consulting on industrial upgrading incorporated into the Sixth Four-Year Plan in 1972. The two problems of the unrealistic politics of the developmental state framework and the narrow scope of investigation vis-à-vis the framework thus combine to inflate each other.
Fortunately, the developmental state is superfluous to an otherwise illuminating story of the twists and turns of S&T policymaking over six decades of KMT rule. Through expert mining of the Academia Sinica archives, Greene has been able to shed further light on the crucial role that K.T. Li and others, such as Zhu Jiahua, played in creating Taiwan's successful S&T policies and policymaking institutions. She illuminates the policy implementation behind important features of Taiwan's development, such as the public research institutes that spearheaded technology-intensive industrialization and the manpower training that led to Taiwan's wildly successful system of technical education. In sum, this book is a major contribution to understanding the KMT on Taiwan and its antecedents.
