Learning a lesson from Taiwan? A comparison of changes and continuity of labour policies in Taiwan and China

This paper argues that the comparison of labour policies in Taiwan and China has an important bearing on the interaction between state and society. The fact that labour policies have changed over time illustrates a process of bargaining between the state and society. The core question of this paper is whether the development of labour policies in Taiwan can provide China a good example to learn from. In order to answer this question more systematically, the first part of this paper provides theoretical reviews of the state–society relationship, while the second part aims to verify whether those labour-favouring policies in Taiwan have changed under a different party’s governance. The third part of the paper further investigates labour policy in China; this section mainly focuses on the historical background to the new labour contract law. Based on the preceding two sections’ literature review of the changing path of labour policies, the fourth section scrutinises fundamental issues reflected in the development of Taiwan’s labour policies, then compares how those issues are reflected in the case of China. The conclusion of this paper is that although Taiwan, like China, formerly had a one-party system, the changes in Taiwan’s labour policies are not completely comparable to China, though both societies had some similarities

When business met politics: the case of Want Want, a different type of media capital in Taiwan

Since 2008, the Taiwanese business group Want Want, having made a fortune in China, has returned to Taiwan to buy a major media group and attempt to exert political influence on Taiwanese society. This paper analyses the rise and rationale of this new type of media investor in the light of the business/government relationship under China’s model of state capitalism. According to the analysis developed in this paper, when China needed foreign investment in the early 1990s, Taiwanese investors were warmly welcomed by the Chinese government, which provided Taiwanese businesses with tax incentives at that time. After 2000, however, when not only domestic Chinese entrepreneurs emerged but also more non-Chinese investors entered the Chinese markets, Taiwanese businesses realised that the investment environment had become much more competitive, so they had to work hard on building ties with Chinese officials. Under these circumstances, Want Want bought into media in Taiwan as an asset to be used in order to build social ties with the Chinese government, but in doing so, Want Want has also triggered resistance from Taiwanese civil society. Future researchers and regulators can continue to watch and define this new type of investment, which has become increasingly significant in this region

When Business Met Politics

Since 2008, the Taiwanese business group Want Want, having made a fortune in China, has returned to Taiwan to buy a major media group and attempt to exert political influence on Taiwanese society. This paper analyses the rise and rationale of this new type of media investor in the light of the business-government relationship under China’s model of state capitalism. According to the analysis developed in this paper, when China needed foreign investment in the early 1990s, Taiwanese investors were warmly welcomed by the Chinese government, which provided Taiwanese businesses with tax incentives at that time. After 2000, however, when not only domestic Chinese entrepreneurs emerged but also more non-Chinese investors entered the Chinese markets, Taiwanese businesses realised that the investment environment had become much more competitive, so they had to work hard on building ties with Chinese officials. Under these circumstances, Want Want bought into media in Taiwan as an asset to be used in order to build social ties with the Chinese government, but in doing so, Want Want has also triggered resistance from Taiwanese civil society. Future researchers and regulators can continue to watch and define this new type of investment, which has become increasingly significant in this region

Chinese investment in Taiwan: challenge or opportunity for Taiwan’s high-technology industrial development?

Cross-Strait economic activities are no longer one-directional. The Taiwanese government opened the doors to Chinese investment in 2009. The aim of this paper is to address the crucial question: What are the impacts of Chinese investment on Taiwan’s high-technology industrial development? Two further questions immediately follow: Will Chinese investment put Taiwanese industrial development at risk? Will an influx of Chinese investment provide a turning point for Taiwanese industry? The paper starts with a review of Chinese investment in Taiwan under the framework of the ECFA and then explains the justification for focusing on high-technology industry in Taiwan. It then outlines the main elements of Chinese outwards foreign direct investment (OFDI) before seeing to answer the above research questions. Fieldwork for this paper was conducted from December 2014 to March 2016. Interviewees include Chinese investors from Beijing, Shanghai and Kunshan, and consultants from a Taiwanese institute created to promote industrial development

Chinese investment in Taiwan: challenge or opportunity for Taiwan’s high-technology industrial development?

Cross-Strait economic activities are no longer one-directional. The Taiwanese government opened the doors to Chinese investment in 2009. The aim of this paper is to address the crucial question: What are the impacts of Chinese investment on Taiwan’s high-technology industrial development? Two further questions immediately follow: Will Chinese investment put Taiwanese industrial development at risk? Will an influx of Chinese investment provide a turning point for Taiwanese industry? The paper starts with a review of Chinese investment in Taiwan under the framework of the ECFA and then explains the justification for focusing on high-technology industry in Taiwan. It then outlines the main elements of Chinese outwards foreign direct investment (OFDI) before seeing to answer the above research questions. Fieldwork for this paper was conducted from December 2014 to March 2016. Interviewees include Chinese investors from Beijing, Shanghai and Kunshan, and consultants from a Taiwanese institute created to promote industrial development

Flow-based Intrinsic Curiosity Module

In this paper, we focus on a prediction-based novelty estimation strategy upon the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, and present a flow-based intrinsic curiosity module (FICM) to exploit the prediction errors from optical flow estimation as exploration bonuses. We propose the concept of leveraging motion features captured between consecutive observations to evaluate the novelty of observations in an environment. FICM encourages a DRL agent to explore observations with unfamiliar motion features, and requires only two consecutive frames to obtain sufficient information when estimating the novelty. We evaluate our method and compare it with a number of existing methods on multiple benchmark environments, including Atari games, Super Mario Bros., and ViZDoom. We demonstrate that FICM is favorable to tasks or environments featuring moving objects, which allow FICM to utilize the motion features between consecutive observations. We further ablatively analyze the encoding efficiency of FICM, and discuss its applicable domains comprehensively.Comment: The SOLE copyright holder is IJCAI (International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence), all rights reserved. The link is provided as follows: https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/2020/28