Abstract: In 1959, Taiwan dispatched its first overseas agricultural assistance mission to the Republic of Vietnam.  Consisting of highly decorated agricultural scientists and young farmers recruited from rural Taiwan, the Taiwanese development teams planted demonstration plots featuring selected high yielding crops, taught Vietnamese rural farmers modern methods of planting and cultivation, and espoused to Vietnamese policymakers a model that could tame the Communist insurgency that had taken hold in the Vietnamese countryside.  At its peak, Taiwanese development missions were present in over two dozen nations across the Global South.

This talk will discuss agrarian development in Taiwan after 1945, and then Taiwanese missions abroad from 1959 to 1980 to Southeast Asia and Africa.  Faced with an existential threat to its inclusion in the international system, Taiwan leveraged its miraculous success in cultivating a modern agricultural economy into development diplomacy.  Couched in scientific modernity, postcolonial solidarity, and economic power, Taiwanese missions during the Cold War articulated not just a vision of Taiwanese development modernity for the world, but also a sociotechnical imaginary placing Taiwan in the global vanguard of development.

Bio: James Lin is assistant professor of international studies and adjunct assistant professor of history at the University of Washington.  His research has been published in Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review; East Asian Science, Technology and Society; and History Compass.  This talk is based on his ongoing book project examining Taiwanese agrarian development in the world in the 20th century.