Professor of Sociology, Harvard University
I study the intersections of technology, law, society, and political economy. My research examines how state power, market forces, and technological change interact to reshape work, governance, and public life—from China's digital economy to the global politics of critical industries.
I am a Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and a Senior Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. My research examines large-scale political and socioeconomic transformations by analyzing the interactions among states, markets, law, and technology—and how different social groups experience, negotiate, and contest these changes. I find myself drawn to projects that illuminate macro-level transformations through multilevel and multidimensional analysis.
My research interests have been deeply shaped by my personal experiences, interdisciplinary background, and training. I grew up in Taiwan during its transition from authoritarian rule to democracy and came of age in the aftermath of its “economic miracle.” Witnessing these profound political and economic transformations sparked my enduring interest in how large-scale social change unfolds and affects people’s lives. I earned an LLM and a JSD from Yale Law School and later a PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan. At Michigan, I was trained in an unusual and intellectually expansive area called “Power, History, and Social Change.” After receiving my PhD in 2013, I served as a Junior Fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows from 2013 to 2016, where I was constantly in conversation with scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. This winding path through law and sociology—and my exposure to a wide variety of disciplines—continues to shape the questions I ask and how I approach research.
My book projects reflect this intellectual orientation. My first book, The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China, examines how law, the media, and the internet unexpectedly enabled the emergence of a contentious public sphere under authoritarian rule, as well as how the Chinese state subsequently sought to contain it. My second book, The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China, investigates China’s pursuit of technology-driven development and its consequences for the state, businesses, workers, and citizens. The book situates this transformation within the transnational context of neoliberal globalization, through which the United States actively facilitated China’s integration into the global economy. It concludes as that era begins to unravel amid intensifying geopolitical tensions between the United States and China.
My current book project takes up the story from the other side of this geopolitical transformation. It examines how the United States is using geopolitical leverage and industrial policy to rebuild advanced manufacturing, particularly by seeking to relocate advanced semiconductor production from Taiwan to the United States. Focusing on TSMC’s expansion into Arizona, the project explores how geopolitical competition reshapes states, industries, organizations, work, and local communities across national borders.
Methodologically, I am primarily a qualitative and comparative sociologist. Substantively, my work brings political sociology into conversation with economic sociology, the sociology of work and labor, science and technology studies, law and society, development, and China studies.
My scholarship has received awards and fellowship support from the American Sociological Association, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, the Law and Society Association, the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, among other institutions.
Beyond my work, I enjoy running and swimming—both very slowly—taking long walks, learning French, and sharing good meals with my students. I also travel regularly throughout Asia and Europe, and I make an excellent Hungarian chicken paprikash!
Princeton University Press, 2023
Princeton University Press, 2018
The semiconductor shortage, intensifying U.S.–China rivalry, and fears of dependence on overseas supply chains have set in motion one of the most consequential industrial migrations of the twenty-first century. At its center is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s leading chipmaker, whose expansion from Taiwan to Arizona has become a test of what it takes to move advanced industrial capacity from one society to another.
Based on years of fieldwork in the United States and Taiwan, The Great Chip Migration offers an inside account of this extraordinary undertaking. It asks: What made the transplantation of TSMC’s leading-edge production to Arizona possible, and what are the achievements and limits of the industrial capacity being created there?
The book begins with a puzzle. Advanced production depends on specialized knowledge, supplier networks, institutions, labor markets, and social arrangements built over decades. Yet TSMC achieved leading-edge production in Arizona before much of this supporting system could be developed locally. The book explains how. U.S. geopolitical leverage initiated the migration, and industrial policy translated geopolitical ambition into a concrete investment project. TSMC then bridged the gap between the demands of production and the capacities available in Arizona by transferring engineers, organizational routines, and supplier relationships from Taiwan; maintaining extensive cross-border connections; and relying on regional institutions, workers, and families to meet needs that neither the state nor the firm could address alone.
These arrangements illuminate both the transplant’s remarkable accomplishment and its continuing limits. Technical success can coexist with higher costs, dependence on Taiwan, organizational conflict, workforce instability, and household disruption. The central question is therefore not simply whether Arizona can produce advanced chips. It is whether this achievement can become locally rooted and socially sustainable—and whether Arizona can reproduce the people, knowledge, institutions, and relationships on which advanced production depends.
Following policymakers, executives, engineers, educators, workers, and families across the United States and Taiwan, The Great Chip Migration shows how powerful states and firms can initiate and accelerate industrial transplantation while dispersing its unresolved coordination costs among state and local institutions, workers, and families. Community colleges are asked to create a workforce on a geopolitical timetable. Taiwanese engineers and their spouses sustain a demanding transnational production system. Local institutions improvise around responsibilities that industrial policy has only partially anticipated or funded.
Where most accounts ask who will prevail in the global chip race, The Great Chip Migration reveals what moving that race onto new ground requires. It argues that geopolitical power can make advanced production mobile, but cannot by itself make that production locally rooted or self-sustaining. By tracing industrial transplantation from international power struggles to factories, community colleges, local institutions, and homes, the book shows how geopolitical competition is remaking—and testing—the social foundations of advanced production.
Journal articles and book chapters
My own professors transformed not only how I understood society but also how I imagined the possibilities for my own life. At the University of Michigan, I was extraordinarily fortunate to learn from brilliant and generous scholars, including Greta Krippner, Mark Mizruchi, Peggy Somers, Yu Xie, Mary Gallagher, and Rob Jansen. Their intellectual generosity and confidence in me were especially meaningful as I navigated an unconventional path from law to sociology. Their example continues to shape how I teach and mentor.
Since joining Harvard in 2016, I have had the privilege of advising and mentoring approximately thirty students and fellows from diverse backgrounds. They include PhD students in the Department of Sociology, LLM and SJD students at Harvard Law School, master’s students in the Regional Studies–East Asia program, undergraduates, and postdoctoral fellows at the Fairbank Center and the Weatherhead Center.
I particularly enjoy working with students interested in the intersections of technology, law, society, economy, and politics. Mentoring is among the most meaningful parts of my work, and I value the opportunity to accompany students as they develop their ideas, confront intellectual challenges, and find their own scholarly paths.
I welcome inquiries about research collaborations, speaking invitations, and prospective student advising. Feel free to reach out.