Dr Min-Hua Chiang

Many Taiwanese firms have left China to avoid the higher tariffs, set by the US, against Chinese goods in recent years. Several important semiconductor firms, including Taiwan’s TSMC, are prohibited to sell key components and equipment to China. In addition, China’s subdued economy, the government's crackdown on private business and the strict control on data and information outflow have made the country a less favourable investment destination.

In contrast to the declining investment in China, Taiwanese firms have started to relocate their factories in the USA, Japan and other countries in Europe and Asia. The new global supply chain network is in formation and Taiwanese firms will continue to play a key role in bringing the relevant countries together in the new political and economic setting.

Dr Fernando Casal Bertoa

Party system institutionalisation has been traditionally viewed as an essential condition for the consolidation of democracy (Mainwaring, 1999; Hicken and Kuchonta, 2014; Casal Bértoa, 2017). However, there is a far less agreement in the literature about what institutionalises party systems in the first place.

Seeking to fill this gap, the current project, building on a mixed-method approach, aims to provide an answer to the question of how such institutionalisation occurs and why the degrees of institutionalisation vary across countries. Specifically, and in collaboration with Don S. Lee (Sungkyunkwan University), we conduct a comparative analysis of the process of party system closure in 21 Asian democracies, relatively overlooked regional cases in this literature, since the end of WWII until 2021.

Asia provides excellent cases for such analysis, because its democracies show diverse degrees of institutionalisation in electoral and governmental dimensions of party systems (Lee and Casal Bértoa, 2021). In the end, this variety will lead us to observe wide inter-state variation in party system institutionalisation.

Using a recent innovative index of measuring party system institutionalisation by Casal Bertoa and Enyedi (2021), the paper will first present differences in the levels of party system institutionalisation in Asia in a comparative perspective. Then, after a thorough review of the literature on different sources of systemic institutionalisation (Mainwaring and Bizarro, 2018; Chiaramonte and Emanuele, 2019; Enyedi and Casal Bértoa, 2020), it will state eight different “working” hypotheses (ie party institutionalisation, fragmentation, polarisation, democratic experience, economic development, constitutional type of regime, electoral system design, historical legacies). In our empirical analysis, we test these hypotheses using both statistical analysis and an in-depth case study (ie South Korea).

Thus, in our qualitative analysis section, we use process-tracing to unravel the “causal mechanism” linking each of the variables found significant in the quantitative section and the outcome (ie high party system closure).

Website: whogovernsasia.com

Professor Benjamin Penny

Benjamin is currently working with the Taiwanese new religion Weixin shengjiao, which is based in Taichung and Nantou county.

His work primarily focuses on their interpretations of fengshui, the Yijing, and the figure of their primary god Wangchan Laozu, who was the pre-Qin thinker Guiguzi in his human life.

Dr David O'Brien

Awarded 235,000€ for the project ‘Narrating the 'new silk road': Chinese 'huayuquan' (discourse power) in OBOR/BRI externally-directed propaganda’ funded under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND grant as part of the POLONEZ BIS 2 programme. Principal investigator, based at Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.

The goal of this project is to map the ways in which China, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and their international agenda, are represented in Chinese externally directed propaganda (‘exoprop’) regarding the Belt and Road Initiative (OBOR/BRI), and to explore the effectivity of this exoprop: the way it is perceived and interpreted by non-Chinese audiences beyond China’s borders. 

Professor Yi-Hsin Elsa Hsu

Professor Yi-Hsin Elsa Hsu has dedicated her career to Taipei Medical University for over two decades, amassing a wealth of teaching and research experience. Her expertise spans a wide spectrum, delving into Taiwan's national health insurance data, healthcare management, and pioneering teaching methodologies.

Yi-Hsin actively participates in diverse research endeavours encompassing healthcare management, health insurance, innovation, and entrepreneurship education. Her collaborations extend to the Taiwan Research Hub in the UK with the project "Public Policy in A Time of Crisis: Comparing British and Taiwanese Government Responses to Covid-19".

Yi-Hsin’s current research projects include:

1. "Problem Solving for Better Health" Project, a collaboration with the Dreyfus Foundation in the USA
2. "Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education Program" funded by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan
3. "Adopting the structural equation model to explore factors affecting medical students’ attitudes toward entrepreneurship" granted by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan
4. "Golden Dream Project" granted by TSRI Group

Yi-Hsin is committed to interdisciplinary research, seeking innovative approaches to teaching. Her overarching goal is to drive societal progress, and she eagerly anticipates global collaborations with fellow scholars who share her vision for a better world.