Shelley Rigger

like electronics, you know, a transistor radio, and actually the whole transistor radio could be made in Taiwan by 1980, maybe even before, but lots of little connectors and wire specialized components for electronic devices,

Things like Christmas decorations, you know, all of those kind of high-volume, low-tech consumer goods.

Production shifted from Japan to Taiwan and Korea, especially in the 70s and 80s as Japan is upgrading into auto manufacturing and a lot more heavy industry and high-value equipment.

So the U.S., for its part, is happy to get all this stuff because after World War II, the U.S.

wanted industrial upgrading.

We don't want to be making cheap junk in the U.S.

We want to be making expensive things that have a high profit margin.

So we threw open our market to these Northeast Asian markets.

manufacturing partners so that they would do the low end and our consumers would benefit from low prices and our manufacturers would be sort of driven up the value chain.

So that's what Taiwan was doing.

And that was a very...

sort of democratic economic pattern, because they weren't forming huge companies.

Most of Taiwan's export-oriented manufacturers were and continue to be quite small by global standards.

and very nimble and flexible so you know if we're no longer making skipper we're making ken this year all those barbie villages where they literally made all the barbies and all their clothes and they put it all in packages and all their shoes and pocketbooks and everything you know we just get new molds from mattel and we immediately shift production from one thing to another got it so that

enriched most Taiwanese.

So if you think about Taiwan in the post-war period, what people saw was their standard of living steadily rising and the quality of life going from being a pretty rugged agricultural society to by the 1990s, they're beginning to be post-industrial.

Right, right.

1987 was a big year in Taiwan.

The president was Chiang Kai-shek's son, Chiang Ching-kuo, and he made a couple of super consequential decisions.

On the political side, he decided to lift martial law, which was a major obstacle to democratization.