Episode 5 | Labour and (De)Industrialisation in East Asia

Over the past few years, industrial policy and manufacturing capacity, especially in the high-tech sector, have been at the centre of great power rivalry between the United States and China. The White House has been pressuring companies from its East Asian allies, including the Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, to invest in the United States and open new factories, while American firms like Apple have been accused of helping China build up its industrial capacity. Amid all the techno-nationalistic rhetoric, the people whose lives and livelihoods are directly impacted by these policies are scarcely mentioned; the countries are spoken of like geopolitical abstractions, the companies like balance sheets.

Why did Western capital and companies move to East Asia to set up manufacturing facilities? Who are the people whose labour propelled the industrial rise in China and Taiwan? What are the social costs of these states’ pursuit of technological might, and how do ordinary people navigate their power and powerlessness? For Episode 5 of 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, Yangyang spoke with anthropologist Anru Lee and sociologist Ya-Wen Lei to discuss gender, labour, industrialisation, and deindustrialisation in China and Taiwan.

Guest Bios:

Anru Lee is a Professor of Anthropology at John Jay College, the City University of New York.  She is the author of In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity: Labor and Gender Politics in Taiwan’s Economic Restructuring (SUNY Press, 2004) and Haunted Modernities: Gender, Memory, and Placemaking in Postindustrial Taiwan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023), and a co-editor of Women in the New Taiwan (Routledge, 2004) and the women and gender studies section of the Encyclopedia of Taiwan Studies (Brill, 2026).

Ya-Wen Lei is a Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Her research explores law, technology, political economy, and state–society relations in China and beyond. She is the author of The Contentious Public Sphere (Princeton University Press, 2017) and The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China (Princeton University Press, 2023).

Related Materials:

Lee, Anru. 2004. In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity: Labor and Gender Politics in Taiwan’s Economic Restructuring. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Lee, Anru. 2023. Haunted Modernities: Gender, Memory, and Placemaking in Postindustrial Taiwan. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.

Lei, Ya-Wen. 2023. The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Full episode transcript:

Yangyang (00:01.798)

Listeners, I need to vent. Over the past few years, it has been hard to go through a single news cycle without getting some headlines about technology, manufacturing, and geopolitics. Can America still build? Is China eating our lunch? Can U.S. allies in East Asia, Taiwan, or South Korea help America build? Offshoring, reshoring, tariffs sanctions, AI, chips, blah, Bless their hearts.

And yet with all the policy debates and public discourse on who is winning the tech race and which superpower might lead the world of tomorrow, the countries are spoken of as geopolitical abstractions. And there seems to be very little attention paid to the people in these places whose lives are impacted by the policies and business decisions. Who is doing the building and under what conditions?

Why did manufacturing move from the US to East Asia in the second half of the 20th century? And what is the social cost of industrial growth and the pursuit of new technologies? I’m so grateful to the two guests on this show today, whose works have illuminated the human dimensions of globalization and industrial development in China, Taiwan, and the greater Sinophone world. Professor Anru Li, an anthropologist with the John Jay College at City University of New York, and Professor Ya-Wen Lei, a sociologist at Harvard University. Thank you so much for joining us.

Anru Lee (01:29)

Thank you.

Yangyang (01:30)

So we’ll begin our conversation today with a tale of two special economic zones. Anru, in your latest book, Haunted Modernities, which has just been published in Chinese in Taiwan. So congratulations on that.

Anru Lee (01:44)

Thank you very much.

Yangyang (01:45)

So it is set in Kaohsiung, the port city in southern Taiwan. And it is also home to the Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone, which is often considered the first special economic zone in East Asia. So can you tell us a bit about its establishment in the mid-1960s? What were the main industries at the time and what were the investors or their clients?

Anru Lee (02:06)

Thank you so much Yangyang for having me here to talk about the industrial development of Taiwan. The story I guess I’m telling which is different from Ya Wen’s story which is probably more contemporary. My story goes back to 1960s right at the beginning of when the United States started experiencing rapid deindustrialization for the factories and manufacturing moving outside the United States. And then Japan was the first destination and of course later as the four dragons and including Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. And so the story here today I’m telling is about Taiwan and the export processing zone that Yang mentioned, Kaohsiung export processing zone was established in 1966. And that actually was sort of the product of the second phase of Taiwan’s industrialization. First phase, of course, was import substitution, which tried to build the industrial infrastructure in Taiwan, but using Taiwan as the market, and we know that Taiwan is very small. So the market was very small. And so very quickly, Taiwan needed to find something else to expand the economic base. And at the same time, deindustrialization in one place is industrialization in another place, right? So industrialization in a place is actually deindustrialization in another place. So in this case, that when the United States and big retailers such as Walmart or today like Target or in the old days Jesse Penney’s needed to find cheap consumer products and consumer electronics and so on and so forth, garments, cheap clothes and good clothes to wear, then they started looking for sites overseas. And Taiwan then sort of entered this picture by establishing Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone, right? And by being an export processing zone, that means it is really, it was primarily to lure foreign international investment and it cut off, cut back or just reduce, right, decrease the red tape and tax incentives so that international investors will be willing to set up factories in this export processing zone.

And primarily, again, it is really light industries. It is not like a Silicon Valley of Taiwan or in United States or China that later Ya Wen is going to talk about. So we are seeing that at this stage, the point is for Taiwan to build kind of a basic industrial infrastructure and to be able to employ a lot of people who were unemployed or displaced from agriculture. And so labor intensive industries actually were better than high tech that probably required less people. And so I think that is the background of what we are talking about here.

Yangyang (05:15)

Yeah, thank you so much for this historical background and the overview. And in your book, you also mentioned, right, up until like the end of the 20th century, Kaohsiung ranked among the top three busiest ports in the world. However, by like say the 2010s, it is no longer among the top 10. And Kaohsiung of today, by many metrics, is no longer the blue-collar industrial center it once was. So what happened over the past couple of decades, right in the 1980s and 1990s? And what is also very interesting to me is that the process of deindustrialization in some parts of Taiwan also coincided with its process of political democratization. So can you talk a bit about the relationship between the two? Are they correlated and what happened?

Anru Lee (05:60)

I have to emphasize that although Kaohsiung has had the first export processing zone in the world that specializes in light industries, I also have to say that Kaohsiung continues to be, I think, the hub of heavy industries in Taiwan. So we see like still making shipbuilding, in particular, petrochemical, like upstream petrochemical companies, Formosa Plastics, actually are also based in Kaohsiung. So Kaohsiung has been a city that the industry actually runs from upstream to downstream. And so what we are seeing, industrialization, of course, always starts from downstream and then just gradually go up. I mean, and in 1980s and 1990s, we start seeing Taiwan experiencing deindustrialization and capital outflow. And the background of such is that Taiwan has been successful in terms of being the world’s manufacturing house. And a lot of wealth was accumulated. And so at that time, I think, and again, when I talk about Taiwan, really don’t… And in China too, right? We are not just talking about two economies or two countries, but we actually are talking about the global economy and how these two polities sort of located and positioned, right? So at that time, think Taiwan’s success actually kind of, on the other hand, is that the US was losing a lot of foreign reserves. So there was a great pressure from the United States to, appreciate the currency, right? And then so suddenly…Taiwan, well, on the one hand, Taiwan has been successful. So there’s a lot of money flowing around, right? On the other hand, suddenly the manufacturing was facing a lot of challenges. For example, currency appreciation and higher labor costs, environmental costs. so, and then what we were seeing is that, and then Taiwanese manufacturing started to move out, just like the US moved out 20, 30 years ago.

And so, Kaohsiung began to face this sort of gradually kind of the hollowing out of the industrial base, right? And I want to say that at this point, Taiwanese factories actually didn’t go to China. China was not the first destination because of the tension between the PRC and Taiwan, communist China and Taiwan. Actually, not like a market economy after China opened up.  So Taiwanese manufacturers actually went to Southeast Asia first, Indonesia, Thailand, and then later, of course, they came to China. But I think that’s the background of you were talking about. I mean, 1980s and 90s were indeed the time when Taiwan’s economy was sort of transforming into more service, finance-based and the same time on the other, and liberalized if we want to use that word, right? And the political situation, indeed, that was also the time for Taiwan’s democracy started to kind of a sort of a political system started to change and the martial law was lifted in 1987. But to answer your question briefly, think Taiwan sort of was, could be, was seen as a success story of modernization and modernization theory, right? When economy developed.

And then when middle class was on the rise, and then middle class started to demand like a better quality of life and then better probably civic freedom. And then we gradually saw sort of a, there was a maturing environment for political system to start changing. I think the story of Taiwan sort of a…was a good case to argue for modernization theory. And I think then Ya Wen will come in to tell us, it’s just a Chinese case, tell us, no, no, no, no, no, modernization theory actually is, it requires certain kind of political economic context. And China tells us, no, it’s not the theory, right?

Yangyang (10:13)

Thank you for giving such a nuanced answer to such a complicated question. And as we can see, right, because it is a dynamic situation and there are different contingencies and individual demands, national needs and global forces. They all shape the outcome and they are sometimes working in somewhat the same direction and sometimes they’re in conflict with each other. And as you quoted earlier, right, this really astute line in your book that deindustrialization in one place is the beginning of industrialization in another. And speaking of special economic zones or 经济特区, I think for someone of my generation who grew up in China, the first time we heard of this phrase, or even now, the first association we have is with the city of Shenzhen, which was like the metropolis on China’s southern coast that is just across the border from Hong Kong. And Shenzhen becoming the special economic zone was also this landmark event in China’s economic reforms going from socialist planning to join global capitalism. So Ya Wen, coming to you, Shenzhen features prominently in your latest book, which has been winning all the awards, The Gilded Age. So can you give us an overview of the establishment of the special economic zone in Shenzhen in the early 1980s and its evolution in particular, as you outline in the book, there are this trajectory in terms of where the value comes from from labor to land and technology.

Yawen (11:37)

Shenzhen SEZ was established in 1980. That was after the end of the Cultural Revolution. So when the Chinese Communist Party lost a huge part of its political legitimacy. So at that time, there was a decision to have the economic reform. And then at that time, as you mentioned that China didn’t really have capital, enough capital, and didn’t really have the technology and managerial expertise in terms of industrial development. But then China had a lot of land and also abundant supply of labor.

So what they did was to create a special zone and to attract foreign investment. And then the development of SCZ in Shenzhen was closely linked to transnational capital, especially from Hong Kong and from Taiwan in the very beginning. So Shenzhen was a small fishing town bordering Hong Kong in the 80s.

And then, so in the early years, the industries in Shenzhen were largely labor intensive. So textile, garments, toys, and electronic assembly, so often linked to Hong Kong’s investors who sought a cheaper labor and also lose their regulation across the border. So a huge proportion of capital was from Hong Kong. And also Taiwan, business also played a major role.

I would recommend the audience to read Professor Wu Jianming’s work, a book on the role of Taiwanese business people in the process of economic development in China. Anru’s story actually was linked to Shenzhen’s SEZ.

So as wage, roads, and land became very expensive in Taiwan and in Hong Kong, and many so-called like sunset industries like in Taiwan, particularly low margin and labor intensive manufacturing are relocated to Guangdong, which Shenzhen becoming one of the main destinations. So when I was a kid, I grew up in the context in which people talk a lot about the so-called sunset industry because that was really the period in which like Taiwanese were thinking about like where Taiwan should go. So we already have this kind of, we had this kind of industry that didn’t really that like lead to any like good future, great like bright future and how to really like regenerate economy. So that was the problem but many industries, many business people at that time decided to relocate to China because of the labor and also because of the land. then, so that actually remind us of the case of Foxconn, right? Foxconn in the end became the largest, one of the largest manufacturer in the world. So Foxconn is a striking example of this kind of relocation. So with Shenzhen becoming the like really… In Shenzhen, they have the largest factory in Longhua town. So Foxconn began to establish facility in Shenzhen in 1988. So beginning with very basic assembling work, it rapidly expanded into one of the world’s largest electronic manufacturers. So from Foxconn’s case, you can see how this kind of transnational like movement of capital and also like expertise like it was linked to China’s like growing economy and then link China, how to integrate China into global supply chain and then also the profound social and human cost of its manufacturing boom.

Yangyang (16:01)

Yeah, thank you so much. And one of the things that there may be some parallels between a city like Shenzhen and certain industrial capitals and industrial centers in Taiwan is that its dominant industries over the past few decades has also gone through this shift. Shenzhen is not just this former center of manufacturing, but it is also the birthplace and headquarter of some of the leading high tech firms in China like Huawei and Tencent.

And in your book, The Gilded Age, you beautifully illustrated how the Chinese government has been placing a lot of policy incentives over the past few years to encourage or in some ways pressure traditional labor-intensive industries to move away from the coastal regions into inland provinces and have places like Shenzhen to become these new high-tech capitals. And one question I have is that a lot of these new high-tech sectors

They cannot absorb the same amount of workforce like the traditional industries. And China is a very large country with a lot of people. So I’m curious whether or not this kind of move from labor-intensive industries to the high-tech sector is a national direction or is it more regional specific that further accentuates these regional disparities in China’s development? Or putting another words, is Shenzhen the future or is Shenzhen as the OG special economic zone, still the exception.

Yawen (17:28)

So I think from my understanding, the process actually began at a more regional, more local level. And gradually, there were more involvements from the central government. So let me begin from what happened in the mid-2000s before the financial crisis. So at that time, several provinces in China, like Shandong, like Guangdong and also places like Shanghai. The local government’s official at the provincial level began to observe that they didn’t really have enough resources for labor-intensive manufacturing because labor-intensive manufacturing actually requires a lot of land and also energy like water, electricity and land. And around that time, there was already like a land real estate housing market in China. So then land had a better use. So to overcome this kind of like the shortage of land and resources problem, local government officials in coastal province began to, they actually decided to actually move toward a more high tech oriented developmental model because they thought that was the only solution to actually to solve the limitations of a more labor-intensive manufacturing based developmental model. So they began to do that and came up with more provincial level policies. So around that time, they began to talk about like empty the cage and then changing the birds. So they began to want to have some new birds in the mid 2000s. And the situation got worse after of the financial crisis when a lot of markets of Chinese manufacturers were hit by the financial crisis. So then not only the provincial government, but the central government realized that really the necessity to move toward the kind of developmental model which was less dependent on the market, like this kind of global markets. And then they wanted to move toward a more high-end, like high-tech technology-based developmental model. And then President Xi Jinping, so was actually a party secretary at Zhejiang province at that time. And he was one of the earliest persons who, at the local level, provincial level, came up with the industrial policy of “tenglong huanniao” (腾笼换鸟). So he was was really very enthusiastic already about the high tech industry, especially like information technology, that type of industry. So when he was at the local level, so he already came up with a lot of policy. I think just after, so around the financial crisis at that time, the central government was a bit, even though they knew they have to move toward high tech oriented developmental model but they were still a bit reluctant because they had to consider employment issue because many people became unemployed when the export markets were hit by the financial crisis. So there were actually a lot of debates among government officials and even between central government officials and local governments like leader for example between like Wang Yang and and then the central government leader. But then after the financial crisis, especially after President Xi Jinping took power, it became very, very clear that they wanted to adopt this kind of more large scale, like ”tenglong huanniao” type policy to pursue a more high tech oriented developmental model because Xi was really enthusiastic about that. And after he became the president, then his policy at a local level became the policy at the national level. So I saw that this actually emerged at a local level. But then after Xi took power, it actually disseminated more widely. And then many of Xi’s policy became part of the national policy.

Yangyang (22:15)

Yeah, so I think one of the many downsides of treating a country like a geopolitical abstraction, like China does this, China wants that, is that one misses a lot of the nuances of how power is fragmented and there are different interests, conflicting interests and different ideas for development between the central and local governments, between different regions, or even among different top level leaders themselves. And if we go from national or regional policy to the people, as one thing that I really want to focus on in our conversation. And Anru, if we come back to the city of Kaohsiung. And so when these, I learned that when this, an export processing zone was inaugurated, the officials also unveiled a statue that basically featured like a Dalishi (大力士), a Herculean man pushing a wheel. And there is this inscription that read production builds the nation. However, as you yourself and many other scholars have also noted it is actually predominantly women who worked on the assembly lines and it was women’s labor that propelled Taiwan’s industrialization. And in particular, in your book, Haunted Modernities, you focused on one particular group of young women who are 25 women who drowned in a ferry accident on their way to work at the Kaohsiung Special Economic Zone. And your book focused on their lives and also their legacies, what they have symbolized. So can you tell us a bit about their story?

Anru Lee (23:42)

This particular group, the event happened in 1973. So that was really the heyday at the beginning of Taiwan’s export processing, sort of export oriented economy, industrialization. And these women ranging, well, these young women, they live on Tse-Chin, which is an island outside Kaohsiung. And so in order to go to work at Kaohsiung’s export processing zone, they had to take a ferry every morning and then go back and forth. And so everything went well until September, I think, 3rd, 1973, that particular morning. And then somehow the ferry capsized. And so on the ferry, were 74 passengers and then only 25 died and all the others were rescued. And the story then went on because the people who were saved included men, women, young, old children, so on and so forth, but the 25 died were all young, single, unmarried women ranging from 13 years old to 30 years old. And for people who know about Chinese slash Taiwanese cosmology, that that is not an accident, right? Because all people died happen to be young, unmarried women. So I think the story started from there. My book actually was not, is not exactly about this event 20, 40 years ago now, but rather what happened 40 years later when like Yang Yang said is how the collective barrier, right? Because subsequently these 25 women were buried together and then how their burial then transformed into a sort of a tourist friendly or a sanitized and a nice looking park in 2008. So my project, my book actually is dealing with the whole kind of a transformation process and why their term actually turned into a part. But I think sort of in relation to what our topic today, think an important one, I guess a few important things that can add to our conversation today is, well, like Yangyang said, and Taiwan’s particularly export oriented industrialization relies on female labor.

So these were filial daughters and they were excellent workers and they were filial daughters and die unmarried. So they died of your death, right? And then, and as Taiwanese patrilineal system goes, these women couldn’t go home because they were not married. And so they were forever homeless. So, but at the same time, I think what’s playing on, and this sort of goes back to how industrialization is not simply at the level of policy or at the level of global geopolitics, right? It’s real people’s lives. So what I am arguing in my book is that however sort of exploitive or however hard the industrial work is, which is talked a lot in the scholarly literature as well as the public policy literature, then what we are seeing is that these daughters are filial daughters.

They contribute to the prosperity of their families. So when they died unmarried and they actually became sort of the parents really were kind of, there’s deep sorrow, right? Born by the parents. But I think what I was, what I’m also arguing is that that is the collective story, right? Through these 25 women’s tragic deaths, not all women workers died, married or your death, of course. But I think this particular tragic story sort of highlighted the very contribution of Taiwanese women as not as both workers and filial daughters. And so it’s like this is a collective collective story of Taiwanese and then collective memory of Taiwanese. And then we didn’t talk about it 40 years ago, but when at this moment, then it becomes really a very precious collective memory of Taiwan. And so 40 years later, when people started thinking about how well, how we should memorize and commemorate or remember these, these daughters, and then then we see different parties then of interest and then started to kind of a envision different ways of transforming their burial sites, right? Coming back to the very issue of economy, economic development and industrialization. At this point in time in Taiwan, of course, we know that TSMC is the Taiwan industry and then light industries probably are by and large gone or the Taiwan is no longer the world’s manufacturing powerhouse right not like China anymore and and and then so Taiwan actually and and then the urban economy of Taiwan and then just like in New York where I’m based they’re probably Boston right where Yawen is based and it has become like a kind of a place making, culture led industrialization, right? The urban economy is to attract foreign investment, necessarily foreign, but investment not on manufacturing, but probably on finance, on service, and so on and so forth, and tourism, right? And so we see very similar kind of a trend in Taiwan, including Gaoxiong, which is a city. And so the background of the story actually I’m telling is sort of the next stage of Taiwan’s economic development. I’m actually very interested in hearing from, yeah, if we have time, like whether this is sort of what Chinese cities are facing, right? But in Taiwan, many cities are trying to turn, particularly Kaohsiung, to turn these sort of defunct or unused and no longer used industrial facilities into something like heritage, if I may say, to attract kind of tourists, right? They become cultural sites to be consumed.

So the background of the story actually is like these days in Taiwan, manufacturing is not probably the core of urban economy, but rather culture, kind of a cultural culture is the core of the economy. And then you don’t want to have a burial sites at the city center. You have to do something about it, right? And then so in this case, then I’m playing on how the legacy. Right? Like this is the collective memory of Taiwan and how this legacy then has been turned into a cultural capital and then probably intentionally or kind of subconsciously used by the city to promote its current economy. But at the same time, how people, right, real people, the families of these 25 young women commemorate them, remember what they did to the families and to the Taiwanese society at large, I think. So that’s what I was playing here and how the real people’s lives have turned into a memory and how then the memory is being transformed and perceived and looked at and used even in the Taiwanese context now.

Yangyang (31:43)

Yeah, Ya Wen, I do not know if you would like to follow up on the question about former sites of industrialization, capitalizing on the cultural and historical capital. One example I actually thought about is actually there were some of these abandoned or decommissioned defense industry sites, including the nuclear industry that were built in the course of Mao’s Third Front or in the Mao era and during the reform era, a lot of these sites have been decommissioned. They’re primarily located in the West. And now they have become tourist spots that are both capitalizing on that history, on the other hand, also contributing to the patriotic educational themes in China.

And so, so if we come back to the conversation about women workers, Yawen in your book, I did also notice that you mentioned in Shenzhen, right, women made up the majority of its manufacturing workers in its early years. However, in recent years, there is very sharp reversal in terms of gender ratio. And can you elaborate a bit on why is this the case? Does this map entirely onto this shift from labor intensive manufacturing sector to the so-called high tech sector? Or are there other contributing factors? Because I do also note in your book, there is, you listed the criteria, the points based system to gain a Shenzhen Hukou, a family household registration residency permit in Shenzhen and is blatantly elitist and aegis. For example, like I’m 35, I’m almost 36. And so I’m like, basically aging out of desirability to be a legal resident of Shenzhen. so, but then this, whether like some of these demographic gender racial shifts in Shenzhen is also reflective of this demographic trend in China where the younger generation born under the one child policy also have this severe gender imbalance on one hand. On the other hand, somewhat tied with Anru’s comment about the 25 maiden ladies in Kaohsiung, they were unmarried, while the Chinese government has been pushing women to get married and have more babies, and the labor force participation of Chinese women in recent years has actually dropped. So are these also contributing to the gender shift in Shenzhen, or is this shift from labor-intensive to high-tech industry the primary driving factor?

Yawen (34:15)

Yeah, I’m not a demographer, but then I think based on my own observation, I think this kind of change in gender ratio is related to the shift to a more high tech industrial developmental model, whether it’s advanced manufacturing or it’s more like high tech, like big tech model. I read a lot of book on more like intensive manufacturing. usually, for example, Professor C.K. Lee’s book on female workers on manufacturing, labor intensive manufacturing. usually, women actually do some kind of assembling jobs. And in my own observation, I also noticed that even in a labor intensive manufacturing setting, usually the technicians are guides. then there are, so they are technicians, they have some kind of, they call skill related to machine and then when for example like in Shenzhen, when Shenzhen became like more, when they have more advanced manufacturing, then that means that they actually need to have more like technician and also engineers. So in the proportion of engineers also had also become like much higher in the process of industrial upgrading. So more jobs require a technical knowledge and engineering training and thenbecause of the Yang Yang, know very well like how how I don’t know how many like female classmates you had in your profession when you were doing your PhD or when you were you are doing your physics, right? So that kind of like imbalance like gender equality was related to in education was related to the gender equality in the process of industrial upgrading. So in labor-intensive manufacturing and also in like these kind of big tech types where you have a lot of engineers. So I think I mean over time you can see that there are the proportion of female has been decreasing over time and at the same time there is also a very important change in industrial structure in China. That was the rise of service sector, especially the rise of labor intensive service jobs in industry like retail cleaning like caregiving and a lot of female workers in the factory in the old day began to move to this kind of more labor-intensive service job. So we see this kind of more the changing model, racial, gender ratio.

Yangyang (37:02)

No, it’s true. Like actually my undergraduate alma mater in China, University of Science and Technology of China, I think has consistently ranked as the most gender imbalanced university in China outside of like military or defense institutions. So then it’s USTC. And so, but what is also very interesting is, regardless, like while there is severe gender imbalance in terms of who can work in science and technology in terms of the social and expectations in China. Ya-Wen as you also listed in your book, there is a survey data, the Chinese public seems like regardless of age or gender, hold science and technology to especially high esteem compared with their counterparts in other countries. And do you know why? And in particular, one thing that I noticed is there seems to be some unevenness when you go down to the individuals that you interviewed. Some of the officials or some of the entrepreneurs might have a bit more nuanced views in terms of the pursuit of high tech development. On the other hand, is really the laobaixing, the migrant workers, the people whose labors are being exploited or whose employment prospects are being threatened by these industrial shifts. They’re the ones who seem to have the most faith in the development of science and technology strengthening China as a nation and the stronger China is better for Chinese people in general. So can you unpack some of that dimension?

Yawen (38:43)

I think I was also very really intrigued by the survey data patterns I found. I’m trying to really stand out in terms of the general public’s confidence and optimism about science and technology. So they usually hold very uncritical and optimistic view on science and technology. So usually in a really really extremely positive view and I think that is related to two things of perhaps one thing is really the like the fact that China actually there was a long tradition since the 19th century to pursue like this kind of like reform like technological development after China were I mean had wars with imperial powers and then China turned to democracy and science in this develop in this process. And I think maybe the second reason is related to the socialist tradition, like historical materialism. Because there are some countries with similar political regimes and socialist tradition. In this country, people also had more optimistic view on science and technology. And I was also very intrigued by the difference between this kind attitude in China and in other places where people actually took economic development very seriously, like in Japan, in Taiwan, in Korea, and in Singapore. These are like the tigers, right? But in these tiger places, you don’t really find people who are actually more critical about technology. So I think that this is really a huge difference in terms of people’s attitude toward technology and science. And I think for ordinary Chinese, what I observe is that really the fact that China can actually rose into a global science and technology powerhouse. I mean they really observe this great transformation and for them this is really something that would really satisfy and then they also kind of experience their improvement, the improvement in their life condition. So I think people are proud and they can really clearly see now they are like number one number two in the world so that’s very very impressive so for ordinary people they kind of saw this kind of development like globally and and then but i think for entrepreneurs who complained and who were more skeptical, I think they became skeptical because they realized that they were heavily influenced, negatively impacted by a lot of the government’s policy. So they saw that the government actually wanted to invest so much in science technology. then also the government guided these entrepreneurs in terms of selecting technology or giving them money and try to actually facilitate this kind of technology-based oriented economic development. But that’s on the one hand they saw that, but on the other hand, they also kind of feel that entrepreneur because of their struggle with the system, they realize that other infrastructure, not only science and technology, but like legal institutions are so important in like facilitating their economic behavior. And when legal institution are very like fragile, they so that this actually became like a threat to their business and their economic activity. So because of their, like they are more informed and they have experience of dealing with the government and they clearly see that China should have not only this kind of like more hard infrastructure, science, technology, these two things, but also have kind of they call soft infrastructure like legal institutions. So they became very kind of more skeptical and have more balanced view, but I think for ordinary people, I think for most of people who are not kind of influenced by a very specific policy, they kind of are not like super aware of a lot of issue, but then they kind of just think like science technology is good and they are so happy that China rose to like a superpower in terms of technological development.

Yangyang (43:17)

Yeah, so Anru, coming back to you, earlier you also mentioned like TSMC has now become the symbol of Taiwanese ingenuity and technological prowess. It has earned this nickname like the magic mountain that protects the nation. And I’m kind of curious, is there a more discernible recent shift that has been exacerbated by geopolitical tensions that elevated TSMC or the semiconductor industry in the Taiwanese public’s mind to this kind of status?

Or is this something more consistent, especially touching on what Ya Wen had just said, right? Like in Taiwanese society, of course, on one hand, there isn’t this socialist tradition. On the other hand, as a democratic society, there is also space for more dissenting voices. For example, like a company like TSMC that also consumes a lot of water and energy and resources that also causes local tensions.

Yeah, tell us a bit about that. Have you noticed any differences or any shifts in terms of Taiwanese public’s attitude to science and technology?

Anru Lee (44:23)

I found Yangyang, asked very tough questions. It’s actually an excellent question. I think I would go back to one of your earlier questions to ask about the political liberalization, the economic liberalization in Taiwan sort of came side in side. I think sort of it’s probably slightly different from the situation that Ya Wen described about China. And there might be a sort of a time lapse here in the sense that Taiwan did sort of a liberalized the political system, and democratization as usually been used. So starting from late 1990s and now we are in the middle of 2020s, I think Taiwan has experienced in two, three decades of really civic engagement. So it is the establishment of civil society, right? And I think one very important, not just like kind of a scholarly topic, but it’s a political topic that sort of talked about. And in Taiwan and beyond, Taiwan is the sort of booming of social movements in Taiwan, right? All kinds of social movements in Taiwan after the lift of martial law in 1980s. So that includes the feminist movement, women’s movement, that includes the labor movement. And then here, of course, we are talking about environmental movement. So I think there has been that there. So it’s not like TSMC suddenly, all these kind of protests or kind of concerned about TSMC or semiconductor industry actually sucking up all the water, but I think there is already kind of the concern of people’s life and quality of life in general in the public’s mind, I think, and that is the background. it’s interesting and intriguing and therefore make the situation complex is that the reason that TSMC is being called the “huguo shenshan” (护国神山)Magical Mountain, right? That protects the nation is there is this threat from the PRC.

And I don’t think it’s imagined threat, right? Because it is in a way, it’s existential threat in a way, and depending on who’s talking, but I think the concern is there. And so when we talk about TSMC, think it’s no longer probably, it’s beyond an issue of economic issue, or it’s beyond an issue of technology it probably really kind of links very closely with the national security or just the kind of the Taiwanese way of life if you want to use it in a lot of people’s minds in Taiwan. So that makes it very interesting and complicated. It is a political issue. So I think ultimately, if I would rephrase the question, we probably are asking, what the price the Taiwanese are willing to pay to have a sort of secure sense of nation, right? And then in this case, then TSMC is in the middle. I think for the time being though, the kind of going back to the ordinary people’s lives and linking it with what I say that there has been ongoing kind of a trend of social activism, right, civic activism in Taiwan. The particular case that Yangyang mentioned and we see on the media about about this group of mothers in Xinzhu, then trace the source of their drinking water and water for household use and suddenly realize that they are drinking sort of a second rate kind of water. And the cleanest water actually sort of is diverted to TSMC. But there’s another level of issue is that actually it speaks to the oversight of the Taiwanese that the laws are there, right? Water, household use, water for household use or drinking water actually has to be protected. And then there are laws to regulate, for example, where the water comes from, that there shouldn’t be for example, kind of what do call that? The garbage, the trash dumping grounds, right? There shouldn’t be industrial zones nearby. All these kind of regulations actually are there on the book to protect the source of drinking water, and essentially I think what I’m saying is that in order to unpack the relationship between TSMC being the sort of guarantee of Taiwan’s national security and extremely important economic sort of production side for not just Taiwan but global kind of a market and the cost, environmental cost and social cost that the Taiwanese have to pay, it is a good headline, but I think the reality probably needs more consideration in terms of whether there has to be a kind of line, right? And then where the line should be drawn. And I think it’s a public policy issue and the Taiwanese people and the government that should be able to talk to each other and work out a line that in all parties, if not very happy about, but can live with. And for the time being, it seems that it’s easy to say, this is a problem of TSMC, right? But I think the government actually can do a lot of things at this point. For example, get the garbage dumping area out of where the water that they are drinking, or actually it was found that there were actually factories in this kind of water reservoir area. So I think that is the first step, probably oversight of the government that they should do. And then I think that I would look forward to and I would want to see that there is open dialogue and more kind of open discussion in Taiwan to really seriously take these issues, not simply headline issues or political issues, but kind of to talk about it in a much deeper level.

I’m not offering any answers here, but I think there needs to be conversation. And in Taiwan, there is a tendency that, like in the United States, like a lot of things become very easily politicized. And therefore, the direction of conversational discussion then kind of skewed into certain direction. And I don’t think that is good for anyone here. And I’m probably not answering your question…

Yangyang (51:06)

You gave us a lot of food for thought and it is a really complicated issue. So I will stay with you and on the topic of conflicting interests and contested narratives, right? This tension between individual demands and national agendas. And since we are coming to the closing of our show, I would like to return to the story of the 25 maiden ladies and their burial site. And in your book, Haunted Memories, much of it is devoted to the question of how they should be remembered. And different groups had different answers to that question. You document how feminist organizations wanted to use this to highlight women workers’ contribution to the Taiwanese economy. And the local government also felt there is some benefits to adopting this approach, including that can be the sanitized vision can be somewhat like almost like a tourist attraction. And I also recognize that the women’s families had different priorities, including about their concerns about the women’s unmarried status, their appeal to folk religion, and in particular, some were very focused on the deification process of these young women. And so In some ways, I felt this very individualistic spiritual approach could be read as a kind of refusal or at least some kind of divergence from this collective national agenda, like appropriating their deaths to fit some kind of developmental or public narrative. So I would love to hear your thoughts about this. Or if I might put this question in a certain way.

Especially for this show, our inaugural episode talked about the legacies of COVID-19, where we also talked a lot about the question of grief, where on one hand, national governments want to appropriate public mourning to fit its agenda. On the other hand, grief is, in essence, an individual act and an individual process. So what are your thoughts about this for these women? How should they be remembered?

Anru Lee (59:04)

Thank you so much for the question. I would like to add that these 25 young women, actually, they could be considered as ghosts, right? I think that’s sort of a, are sexy, that guy always say ghosts are sexy. I’m afraid of ghosts, but people like to hear about ghost stories. But they become ghosts in the sense that because they cannot go back to their family’s ancestral tablets.

Nobody, they don’t have sons or descendants to worship them. That’s the concern of, part of the concern of the families. And the way I see it is that, and in a sort of a really, really kind of address to the, one of the larger issue both Yang Yang and Ya Wen allude to is the kind of different perspectives, right? And the way I would see it is that if I take the feminist kind of a claim, or their discourse that they are basically heroines, national heroines to help the Taiwanese development. And I would see, and the families who actually like to see, of they saw the help of local spirit mediums to elevate the status of their daughters from ghosts, right, to goddesses. And in the sense that, these young women are now serving on the side of Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy. So it’s a very interesting story, actually, and that’s why anthropology, like myself, being kind of attracted to it. And so basically, I would like to see these as not just sort of, of course, they are two different perspectives, but I like to see that they actually are two kind of different systems of knowledge production and two different systems for looking at the relationship between the dead and the living. And what we are seeing is that ghosts are really hard to control. think states like to be in charge, including living people. And I think states, if they could, they probably also want to control ghosts. But the point here, interesting point, is that ghosts are very elusive, and ghosts are powerful in the sense that, you really cannot control them.

And so, however, the stage, in this case, the Kaohsiung City government or the feminist activists and try to frame a discourse and public discourse that actually is echoed by the general public, then the truth is that those that have their lives, I mean, their own lives, right? So these are actually two kind of a systems of looking at the social relations and I would like to use that as a perspective to say they actually coexist side by side, right, even though the public discourse endorsed by the states is louder, but actuallykind of on the day to day lives. then these kind of believing deities, believing spiritual, spirituality, believing ghosts, believing kind of the right sense, the moral sense of what is, mean, how you, yeah, that relationship with living continue to be there, right? And so, so if I may, a brother of one of the sister, right, deceased woman, and then, then says that, oh, and I’m going to use Mandarin Chinese. It’s like, well, 紀念 is 紀念, 拜拜 is 拜拜, right? Commemoration is commemoration, 拜拜, well, kind of 拜拜, how is it? Worship the deities, worship the deities, so they don’t see the conflict.

And I also don’t see the conflict as a Taiwanese, and as an anthropologist and Taiwanese, I really don’t see the conflict. People can do whatever they want and they are not really kind of contractictory to each other. And the state may see it as conflict, particularly the feminists, activists may see it like, it’s conflict, only on our coast. But I think…I in the real life reality is that different views and different ways of seeing what life should be actually coexist. And I think my book is trying to kind of highlight that. And I think it goes back to what Yawen said and Yangyang, you emphasize that policymakers have the ideas and then people probably make do, interpret and then live their lives and however constrained that may be. But I like to see the sort of multi-multi-poll multi-focal kind of nature of social life is basically what I’m advocating for and believing.

Yangyang (58:10)

Yeah, so like lives and afterlives both contain multitudes. And when I was reading on haunted modernities, I was also thinking about, it reminded me of the many workers and their lives were lost in China or other parts of the world. In particular, Yawen earlier you also mentioned like Foxconn’s early investment in China and continues to be, I think, the largest private employer in China. And there were many workers who either died in the course of work or took their own lives because of exploitative conditions. And in your earlier book, The Contentious Public Square, you actually explored the Chinese civil society and state society relations, in some ways mediated by new digital technologies in the 2000s and early 2010s. And a lot has changed over the past decade. So in closing, I’m curious.

In this state-driven and in some ways public-supported techno-nationalistic development agenda, are there spaces still for not even resistance, but just alternative imagining in Chinese society today?

Yawen (59:22)

So as you know that a lot of young people today feel that playing the game, so inside what I call the cage has become less and less meaningful. For example, like a young woman don’t want to be seen, don’t want to be used as an instrument to produce future labor by the government, and many people just, many young people just as we know that embraced the idea of Tang Ping lying flat and choosing not to marry, not to have children and withdrawing from traditional expectation. So I think this is kind of the weapon of the week. It’s a public space to do a lot of resistance has been shrinking over time after I finished my first book, unfortunately.

But then people still have a lot of individual autonomy to decide and how to plan for their life. But at the same time, I still observe a lot of localized forms of collective resistance. For example, protests organized by delivery workers at a very local level. So there is no huge scale of protests in the factory like what happened in the past in Guangdong, but I still see this kind of more localized and fragmented protest.

Yangyang (01:00:56)

Yeah, thank you so much. And one of the things that I’ve been paying attention to and finding a lot of inspiration from is actually a lot of the migrant workers have taken to language and literature as a site of resistance or as bearing witness. And to close our show, I would like to read a few lines with your indulgence by a woman migrant worker.

Zheng Xiaoqiong, who was born in Sichuan in 1980 and worked for many years as a migrant worker on the assembly lines in Dongguan in Guangdong. And one of her poems was titled Assembly Line:

The assembly line is constantly tightening the valves of the city and destiny,
those yellow
switches, red wires, gray products, the fifth cardboard box
holds plastic lamps, fake Christmas trees, youth trapped on employee IDs,
Li Bai’s
burning love turned cold, or still reading his poetry softly: oh, so romantic!

In its understated flow, I see fate flowing
here in a southern city, I lower my head to write quatrains and ballads of
this Industrial Age

So with that, Professor Anru Li, thank you so much for joining us.

Anru Lee (01:02:15)

Thank you, my pleasure.

Yangyang (01:02:16)

And Professor Yao Wenlei, thank you so much for joining our show.

Yawen (01:02:19)

Thank you so much Yangyang.