On October 17-18, 2014 the Taiwan Democracy Project at CDDRL, with the generous support of the Taipei Economic and Culture Office, hosted its annual conference at Stanford University to examine the politics of polarization in Taiwan.
This conference brought together specialists from Taiwan, the U.S., and elsewhere in Asia to examine the sources and implications of this political polarization in comparative perspective. It will include a special case study of the Trade in Services Agreement with China that triggered this past year’s protests, as well as a more general overview of the politics of trade liberalization in Taiwan, prospects for Taiwan’s integration into the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other regional trade agreements, and a consideration of the implications for Taiwan’s long-term democratic future.
Yoonkyung Lee is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Dr. Lee works on labor politics, political economy, and democratic institutions in East Asia. She is the author of Militants or Partisans: Labor Unions and Democratic Politics in Korea and Taiwan (Stanford University Press 2011) and her research has appeared in journals such as Globalizations, Studies in Comparative International Development, Asian Survey, Critical Asian Studies, Korea Observer, Taiwanese Sociology, and Education about Asia. Her writings are also published in edited volumes including Working Through the Past: Labor and Authoritarian Legacies in Comparative Perspective (edited by Teri Caraway et al., Cornell University Press, 2015), Oxford Bibliographies in Political Science (edited by Sandy Maisel, Oxford University Press, forthcoming), New Challenges for Maturing Democracies in Korea and Taiwan (edited by Larry Diamond and Gi-Wook Shin, Stanford University Press, 2014), Contemporary South Korean Reader: A Critical Perspective (edited by Hee-Yeon Cho et al., Routledge, 2012), and From Unity to Multiplicities: Social Movement Transformation and Democratization in Asia (edited by Hee-Yeon Cho et al., SIRD, 2012). She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University (2006).
