Hsinchu Technopolis: a Sociotechnical Imaginary Of

CRS0010.1177/0896920517705440Critical SociologyHsu 705440research-article2017 Article Critical Sociology 2018, Vol. 44(3) 487 –501 Hsinchu Technopolis: A © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: Sociotechnical Imaginary sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920517705440DOI: 10.1177/0896920517705440 of Modernity in Taiwan? journals.sagepub.com/home/crs Jinn-Yuh Hsu National Taiwan University, Republic of China Abstract The Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park (HSIP) – a special zone established by the Taiwanese government to attract overseas talented engineers back to Taiwan – has been referred to as ‘a Silicon Valley of the East’. As a dreamscape of Taiwan’s modernity, the HSIP aimed to exhibit futuristic ways of organizing employment and living a modern lifestyle. However, the success of the HSIP has created and deepened social and urban contradictions with its neighboring, mostly rural, areas. The government subsequently proposed the Hsinchu Science City (HSC) plan and the Unpolished Jade Project (UJP) to ‘harmonize’ the contradictions between these areas. Consequently, it led the HSIP to turn from an industrial enclave to an urban megaproject, or zone-city. The zone-city has shaped fantasies of modernity in the local people and inspired in them a will to improve. At the same time, it has raised suspicions of land grabbing and dispossession. This article argues that the production of space through zone-cities, an urban form that has been phenomenal in the East Asian context, revolves around a dialectic between the desire for regional improvement and the greed of land speculation. The inherent tension between both sides of this dialectic thus poses an ethical and practical challenge for critical approaches in urban studies. Keywords modernity, desiring subject, speculative urbanization, zone-city, Taiwan Introduction The Hsinchu Region, the Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park (HSIP) and its neighboring highway extending all the way to Taipei, is often praised as one of the most successful technopoles in the world. Also referred to as ‘a Silicon Valley of the East’ (Hall and Castells, 1994; Mathews, 1997), the HSIP can be conceived of as a paradigmatic example of how a late devel- oper has met the global industrialization trend (Hsu, 1997). Currently, the area is home to Corresponding author: Jinn-Yuh Hsu, Department of Geography, National Taiwan University, No.1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd., Taipei 10617, Taiwan (R.O.C.). Email: [email protected] 488 Critical Sociology 44(3) Taiwan’s most rapidly growing microelectronics industries, such as those of Integrated Circuits (IC) and Personal Computers (PC). Before the establishment of the HSIP, however, Hsinchu County contained only a rudimentary amount of industry, one based largely around lighting manufacture and natural gas. In the 16 years between 1964 and 1980 the amount of light bulb factories in Hsinchu grew from only three to over 500. In 1980, the Hsinchu area manufactured over 80 percent of total light bulb exports from Taiwan, making Taiwan the number one light bulb exporting country in the world. Seeking to promote Hsinchu’s industrialization further, the Taiwanese government established the HSIP on the edge of Hsinchu City, starting a brand new chapter in local industrial history. The resulting economic success of the project led to social and economic disparity between the HSIP and its neighboring areas. In order to address this contra- diction, local governments subsequently created two new technopolis projects in sequence. Accordingly, the special economic zones such as the HSIP changed from industrial enclaves to urban megaprojects, or zone-cities. Such an urbanization process has become phenomenal in East Asia, where states have used zon- ing technology to maintain exportist regimes of accumulation (Jessop and Sum, 2006). The Tsukuba Science City in Japan and Taedok Science Town in Korea, in addition to the HSIP, are well-noted early examples (Castells and Hall, 1994), and New Songdo City in Korea and Taoyuan Aerotropolis Project in Taiwan are recent ones. These technopoles have not only been designed for the growth of high-technology industries, they have also become one of the key types of new urban spaces for attracting and shaping the fantasies of and aspirations for modernity in new urbanities (Bach, 2011). Modernity is projected into these spaces through fantasies of technological superiority and social ordering that have been mobilized by urban designers. Such social-technical imaginaries or dreamscapes of modernity (Jasanoff, 2015) have been supported not only by the advancement of technology but are also inspired by the will to improvement by the local people and governments in the zone-city areas. But the imaginaries of zone-cities are not without their contradictions. A number of cases have showed that speculative forms of urbanization can shape technopolis-based megaprojects into elaborate real estate hoaxes; the development of zone-cities thus faces the suspicion of land grabbing despite its apparent guise of high modernist planning and lifestyle (Easterling, 2014; Shin and Kim, 2015). It seems the politics of space production in the zone-city may revolve around the dialectics of the desire for regional improvement and the greed of land speculation; the symbiosis of and confrontation between the two pose an ethical and practical challenge to critical approaches in urban studies. Concerned by the politics of space in the zone-city, this article will focus on answering the fol- lowing three questions. First, given the social context of late industrialization, to what extent can the HSIP materialize the imagination of a Silicon Valley in Taiwan? Second, what is the impact of the HSIP’s success on the neighboring areas at different stages? Finally, how do local governments and people respond to the impact of the HSIP? While answering these questions, it is important to realize that the search for modernity and the will to improve almost always constitute a desire for development for ‘underdeveloped’ people. The pursuit of this desire often brings forth divergent trajectories of economic and spatial development that are often contradictory, evoke differing imaginations of modernity, and are thus important to attend to. The rest of the article is organized as follows. The next section examines the key concepts and the theoretical framework. The third section offers an empirical investigation of the imagination of Silicon Valley in Hsinchu. Section four will then explore the contradictions caused by the development of the HSIP and the consequent projects proposed to ameliorate them. Finally, the fifth section summarizes the findings, offers concluding remarks on the politics of imagination surrounding the HSIP, and wraps up the article. Hsu 489 Modernity, Development and the Desiring Subject For a considerable period of time, dominant geopolitical thought has perceived development as constituting a unilinear sequence of societal change, from the traditional to the modern and from the barbarian to the civilized. More importantly, it has converted time into space. In terms of ideas, it provided a natural link between the European past and the global present outside of the modern world. Moreover, this link was defined in terms of what the latter lacks and the former has to offer to make up for this deficiency (Agnew, 1998; Escobar, 1995; Ferguson, 2006). As such, in the mainstream geopolitical worldview the world is binary, divided into the ‘West’ and the ‘Rest’. All the rest can or should do is follow in the past footsteps of the West. Hence, the Western past is the Rest’s present, and mainstream thought tends to totalize the comparison between the two parts. By doing so, the development of different people in different localities is not judged by their own conditions, but instead categorized along the stages of the Western developmental trajectory. As such, since human rationality is associated with the modern, or modernity, the Western context has become the universal history for the people in the Rest to pursue or imitate (Amsden, 2001; Mitchell, 2000). But, as Harvey (1996) and Mitchell (2000) pointed out, modernity, or modern civilization, was not a product of the West but a result of its interaction with the non-West (the Rest) during western colonization. After the colonial encounter, modernity was created and internalized in Western soci- eties, and then imposed upon the Rest as Western technological, ideational, and civilizational superiority. In a sense, the de-colonization of later times became tantamount to the acquisition of modernity, or Western civilization (Kothari, 2005; Wagner, 2012). Consequently, particularly after the colonization era, aspirations of modernity came to constitute one of the key drivers of societal change within the countries of the Rest, explaining the emergence of the post-colonial national will to catch up. The rise of the ‘Rest’, as Amsden (2001) calls it, became one of the phenomenal changes in the last half of the 20th century. It was so special because it was the first time in history in which so-called ‘backward’ countries industrialized without proprietary innovations. To estab- lish its modern industries, the ‘Rest’ was initially totally dependent on the commercialized activi- ties of the West, making it a process of ‘pure learning’. Hence, the desire for development in the latecomers (the ‘Rest’) was shaped through imitating or learning from advanced Western countries’ technology, knowledge, values and institutions. Consequently, in many ways latecomer countries engaged in policies and institutional transfers to ‘modernize’ and comply with ‘international’ standards (Peck and Theodore, 2015). Few of the imported policies and technologies could be implemented wholesale, though. Instead, they often had to be adjusted to fit local contexts. At best, they were hybridized, highlighting the superiority of the ‘original’ devices and ideas while also demonstrating that they possessed flexible enough capabilities to solve local issues. Sometimes, though, transferred/imported things became white elephants and led to waste and even disaster for the localities.

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