Taiwan was one of the fastest growing economies in the modern world. From a backwards colonial supplier of rice in the 1940s, it became a manufacturer of the world’s most advanced technology by the 1980s, posting sustained growth of nearly 10 percent annually across three decades with per capita income rising over 6 percent annually. For good reason it has been called a miracle economy. Scholars have traditionally explained Taiwan’s phenomenal transformation and growth through either theories of free markets, whereby small firms pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, or by reference to developmental states, where techno-bureaucrats made targeted interventions to protect and finance industrial development. Historians are now beginning to call both of these explanations into question. With the archiving of materials from governments and firms, and the opening of those archives to scholarly use, historians are finding that the documentary evidence offers a more complex picture of industrialization and economic development than previous studies—a picture that also begins to raise new questions about what we know about economies and growth.

This panel brings together historians working on different aspects of Taiwan’s industrialization and development. Emily Hill questions the state-led industrialization narrative, arguing that domestic food policies in the 1950s accidentally led to industrialization in the 1960s. Ying Jia Tan explores the development of the petrochemical industry, showing how the First Naphtha Cracking Plant in 1968 brought in FDI and radically transformed the manufacturing processes of plastic resins. Macabe Keliher continues the inquiry of manufacturing capacity in his discussion of aluminum production and industrial consumption, arguing that upstream and midstream suppliers of aluminum helped drive downstream exports in electronics, textiles, and canned goods. Discussant Megan Greene wrote one of the first books rethinking Taiwan’s development and will help shed new light on these emerging historiographical trends.

In grappling with questions of Taiwan’s position within post-war Chinese and East Asian history, this panel will be of interest to scholars of Taiwan, China, and East Asia. In addition, the focus of this panel on late industrialization and economic development will appeal to historians of capitalism and political economy; the case studies in particular industries and firms will engage business historians as well as those interested in the history of commodity production and circulation. Most importantly, the panel will speak to anyone who has ever asked how development occurs and an economy grows.