ABSTRACT
My first trip to Taiwan was in 1969 to study Mandarin, the only place Americans could go to experience it as a living language, given that we had no access to the Chinese mainland. I returned to teach English during the momentous years of 1970–1972. In a graduate programme in Sociology I began to read theories of development based mostly on Latin America and Africa with virtually nothing about Asia. On the suggestion of my advisor I wrote my dissertation on Taiwan’s experience, based on fieldwork conducted during another momentous period, 1977–1978. I concluded that while Taiwan’s economy was greatly influenced by its incorporation into the world capitalist system, the state there, which was committed to development with equity, was much stronger vis-à-vis local society and multinational corporations, enabling there to be development within the context of dependency. The book, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle (1986), reviews Taiwan’s experience up to the mid-1980s stressing the role of the state, but predicting that the political system, dominated by mainlander refugees, had become anachronistic and would undergo changes. The ‘developmental state model’ has also reached the end of its useful life. I have published numerous pieces about Taiwan and am currently applying Bourdieu’s theory of social fields to rethink the process of democratisation in a comprehensive way.
