ABSTRACT
Taipei has not been a key city in studies of the world/global city, but it deserves description and analysis because of the role it plays in east-Asian regional-city networks in particular and the whole capitalist world system in general (see Figure 12.1). A few studies do exist, but most were either published in Chinese or regard Taipei as an individual case to be compared with other world cities (Hill and Kim, 2000; Smith, 2004). The studies of C. H. Wang (2003), J. H. Wang (2004), and the contributors to Globalizing Taipei (Kwok, 2005) are the few cases published in English that focus specifically on Taipei. The former two characterize Taipei as a secondary world city while the latter focuses on issues of economic and spatial restructuring, state and society realignment, social differentiation, and cultural reorientation. Nevertheless, more work is required to determine Taipei's particularities and contextual settings.
