Each year, the College of Social Sciences and the Global Asia Research Center organize invite a globally renowned scholar, serving as the NTU-Kim Koo Professor and teaching a mini-course. This annual NTU-Kim Koo Professorship Lecture Series enable students and faculty members to exchange scholar ideas with distinguished scholars beyond Taiwan.
This year, the GARC is honored to have Professor Gi-Wook SHIN from Stanford University as the NTU-Kim Koo Professor. Professor Shin is the founding director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Korean Studies Program at Stanford University. He is also a professor in the Department of Sociology and the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea. He has authored several outstanding works exploring social movements, nationalism, international relations in Korea, and social innovation and talent migration in East Asia.
In his mini-course “Talent Giants in the Asia-Pacific Century” at National Taiwan University, he explores how major countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, Australia, China, India, and South Korea, utilize different strategies to attract international talent, the challenges these policies face, and their impact on other countries (including Taiwan). The course also includes a public lecture on how South Korea’s social sentiment has shifted from anti-Japanese to anti-Chinese.
Professor Ching Kwan LEE is a sociologist in the Sociology Department at UCLA. She is also the series editor of Cambridge Elements in Global China, and a convener of the Global Hong Kong Studies @UC initiative. Her research interests include global and comparative issues such as labor, political sociology, global development, decolonization, comparative ethnography, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and Africa.
Professor Lee published several award-winning books, exploring capitalism in the contemporary China. For instance, Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (California, 1998) examines the structuring of gender and labor in factory settings in Hong Kong and Shenzhen during South China’s rise as a global manufacturing hub. Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (California, 2007) narrates the reformation of the Chinese working class across two regional economies, highlighting the concurrent decline of socialism and the rise of capitalism within the nation. The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (Chicago, 2017) traces the activities of Chinese state investors in Zambia, contrasting their interactions with African state and labor entities against those of other international private investors.
Professor Lee’s recent publications focus on the current situation in Hong Kong, including Hong Kong: Global China’s Restive Frontier (Cambridge, 2022) and an ongoing monograph, Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Struggle for Decolonization (Harvard, under contract).
