Globalizing Taipei: The Political Economy of Spatial Development (review)

This volume is based on the well-founded premise that Taipei is a relatively understudied East Asian city (compared to, say, Seoul, Hong Kong, or Singapore). It proposes to analyze "the current political economy of Taipei's development from a globalization perspective," including "key aspects of Taipei's development process toward a global city" (p. 1). As a comparative sociologist who studies global cities and is particularly interested in East Asian political economy (but who knows relatively little about Taipei), my intellectual appetite was whetted. I also appreciated the volume's attempt to provide an insider's perspective on Taipei; with the exception of the editor and one other chapter author (both at the University of Hawai'i), all of the contributors are based in Taiwan. An edited collection grounded in conceptual issues of "globalization" and "global cities" written by scholars with detailed local knowledge offers great promise.

And this is a valuable book. I learned a great deal about Taipei from its chapters. It makes a crucial contribution by providing a wealth of information about the city, its environs, and its pattern of growth and development. Scholars interested in comparisons with other "globalizing cities" in East Asia and around the world will find gems of wisdom here, with some of the chapters singularly informative.

But the book fails to live up to its potential. There is the common dilemma of the lack of coherence for an edited collection: it is frequently a problem to make all the essays "fit." The final two chapters, under the heading "Cultural Reorientation," seemed the farthest from the book's title/theme, with the biggest "stretch" being an essay on an ethnic Chinese filmmaker from Malaysia who came to Taiwan and made movies about marginalized people in Taipei. There are also (rather unsurprising) language difficulties for some of the Taiwanese authors writing in English (most of the chapters are well-edited in this regard, but a few could use some work). However, I think the most significant problem is a failure to define clearly some of the key terminology. Editor Kwok introduces "globalization" and the idea of the "global city" in his introduction. These are increasingly popular terms, but they are also frequently invoked by people who mean quite different things. Clear analytical definitions of these two concepts would have helped readers as well as framed these issues for the chapters that follow.

The opening Kwok essay (written with Jinn Yuh-Hsu) provides a nice introduction to Taipei's urban primacy, the role of the developmental state and export-oriented industrialization in Taiwan's economic rise, and the South China Growth Triangle (Taipei-Hong Kong-Shanghai). It suggests that Taipei's trajectory is toward a "second-tier" global city, which should have implications for the sorts of "producer services" that develop-a good hypothesis that is borne out in later chapters. Leaving aside the missed opportunity to define some key terms, the facile acceptance of the inevitability of global neoliberalism caused me the most concern. Surely nations like Taiwan, where developmental states have been so crucial (and successful), should be able to mediate some of the effects of this sort of "globalization."

The first part of the book is the clearest in focus, examining "economic and spatial restructuring," and the first two essays may be the strongest in the collection. The lead-off chapter by Hsu provides a nice overview of the economic transformation of Taipei from an industrial city prior to the 1970s to an "interface city" coordinating informatics in the 1990s, with an era in between when the city emerged as a "broker" for Western buyers interested in overseas Taiwanese production in places like mainland China and Southeast Asia. This brokerage function-which also became important in places like Seoul and Hong Kong at about the same time-is currently framed by comparative sociologists as a result of the rise of "buyer-driven commodity chains" (à la...