In just half a century, Taiwan transformed from an agricultural colony into an economic power, spurred by efforts of the authoritarian Republic of China government in land reform, farmers associations, and improved crop varieties. Yet overlooked is how Taiwan brought these practices to the developing world. In the Global Vanguard elucidates the history and impact of the “Taiwan model” of agrarian development by incorporating how Taiwanese experts took the country’s agrarian success and exported it throughout rural communities across Africa and Southeast Asia. Driven by the global Cold War and challenges to the Republic of China’s legitimacy, Taiwanese agricultural technicians and scientists shared their practices, which they claimed were better suited for poor, tropical societies in the developing world. These development missions were portrayed in Taiwan as proof of the Republic of China’s modernity and were crucial to how the ruling government sought to hold onto its contested position in the international system and its rule by martial law at home. This talk will draw especially from Chapter 4, on Taiwan’s agrarian development missions to the Republic of Vietnam.

Speaker:

James Lin is a historian of modern Taiwan and the author of In the Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan, winner of the Agricultural History Society’s Henry A. Wallace book award. He is an associate professor in the Jackson School of International Studies and Department of History at the University of Washington, and chair of the UW Taiwan Studies Program.

Moderator:

Pei-Chia Lan is the Wang and Chen Senior Fellow in Taiwan Studies at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of the Taiwan Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. As a qualitative sociologist, she studies the complexity of intersecting social inequalities in everyday life, shaped by macropower dynamics such as globalization and international migration. 

Before joining Stanford in September 2026, Lan was a distinguished professor in the Department of Sociology at National Taiwan University, where she was the founding director of the Global Asia Research Center and recipient of five teaching awards.