Foreword
by Ezra F. Vogel
¡@It is hard for a generation that has grown up since Taiwan's
economic takeoff to imagine how poor Taiwan was in the late
1940s and how uncertain it was whether Taiwan could modernize.
At the time no non-Western nation except for Japan had made
the industrial breakthrough. Many observers at the time thought
the Philippines and South American countries were far more likely
to achieve economic take-off than Taiwan and South Korea, the
great success stories of industrialization in the 1960s and
1970s.
¡@The story of modernization has largely been told by economists
and political scientists as if the process required only good
political leadership and economic inputs. But without individual
entrepreneurs and without capable technocrats guiding the process,
it is highly questionable whether political policies, economic
circumstances, and letting markets alone would have been enough.
¡@In the case of Taiwan, there were two great leaders of economic
modernization, K. Y. Yin (Zhongrong Yin, ¤¨¥ò®e) and K. T. Li (Guoding
Li, §õ°ê¹©).
¡@Sophia Wang, who completed her Ph. D. at MIT in 1984 and was
an associate in research at Fairbank Center at Harvard, began
to interview K. T. Li in 1992. As she continued her interviews,
K. T. Li became involved in the project, gave Wang access to
all kinds of materials, and allowed her to continue the interview
process for another year and a half. The result is that before
K. T. Li passed away in 2001, the story of what he did and how
he did it has been here preserved for history.
¡@K. T. Li was born in 1910, five years after Chen Yun, the technocrat
who was to guide Mainland China's economic modernization that
began a full two decades later than that of Taiwan.
Born in Nanjing, K. T. Li had studied mathematics and then physics
on the mainland, became a professor in China, won a scholarship,
and went off to Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, England where
he was considered a very promising scientist.
¡@In the late 1940s K. T. Li went to Taiwan and within a decade
was working at the Council for U.S. Aid (CUSA). The program
of U.S. aid was able to attract the very best bureaucrats in
Taiwan by offering them above-scale salaries, to work in planning
how to use aid money from the United States. Because Chiang
K'ai-shek needed U.S. aid, and because the U.S. government was
concerned with avoiding the corruption of Kuomintang officials
which had been a serious problem on the mainland, Chiang K'ai-shek
had little choice but to listen to his technocrats who were
linked up with U.S. aid programs.
¡@Since K. T. Li was so closely involved with the economic development
of Taiwan, Wang has chosen to tell K. T. Li's story in the context
of the economic development. K. T. Li served as Deputy head
of CUSA. He served as Minister of Economic Affairs and later
as Minister of Finance and then as Minister without Portfolio.
But these titles do not tell the full story for K. T. Li had
the confidence of Chiang K'ai-shek and after Chiang died in
1975 even more the confidence of his son. K. T. Li had a well-deserved
reputation of being not only technically competent, but selfless
in his commitment to Taiwan, and very wise in making judgments
about what would work in Taiwan. I had the pleasure of meeting
K. T. Li on a number of occasions, and my impressions are completely
consistent with his reputation. He was sharp and completely
focused on the issues of what it would take to provide Taiwan
the economic and technical progress that he hoped for. He was
particularly committed to training a new generation of skilled
scientists and engineers, and he continued to play an important
role in promoting Taiwan's technical development even after
he officially retired in 1988.
¡@K. T. Li was junior to K. Y. Yin and worked closely with Yin
until Yin died in 1963. After that time K. T. Li took over the
key responsibility for long term economic and technical planning,
whatever his title was.
Since the story of Taiwan was so closely linked with the United
States, K. Y. Yin and K. T. Li always stressed the importance
of free enterprise. But many of the issues they wrestled with,
how to get funds from agriculture to industry, how to attract
foreign capital, how to provide government guidance for development
without destroying initiative, how to train high quality technical
specialists sound very much like the issues that Chen Yun was
wrestling with after 1978 when mainland China began the policy
of reform and opening. And the sense of state responsibility
for development that officials like Chen Yun had are not completely
different from those that K. Y. Yin and K. T. Li had for Taiwan.
In Mainland China, Chen Yun talked about a "socialist commodity
economy" and stressed the importance of government planning.
The key concept that K. Y. Yin had was of "planned market
economy." Mainland China had more state enterprises, but
in Taiwan companies in ship-building and petroleum in the era
of K. Y. Yin and K. T. Li are still government enterprises.
And in many sectors in Taiwan, now populated with private companies,
the companies were begun first as public companies.
¡@Sophia Wang received K. T. Li's endorsement to translate her
Chinese version of the book into English before he passed away.
In a sense, this is K. T. Li's book for a Western audience.
He had written earlier books about his views, but this may be
considered an integrated picture of what he was doing to bring
about economic and technical development of Taiwan.
¡@Wang has very wisely decided to add an introduction to tell
about K.Y. Yin. Unfortunately, no one conducted the interviews
with him as Wang did for K. T. Li. But on the basis of documentation,
Wang has written an introduction that tells the basic story
of K.Y. Yin, thus providing the broad context of the four decades
of industrial development that changed the face of Taiwan. |
