Engineers do politics even when they avoid partisan politics. They do it through material commitment. This book, an experiment in critical participation, shows how. Local engineers and would-be engineers in Taiwan had found ways of climbing hierarchical infrastructures established by Japanese colonialists and then an arriving Kuomintang government by founding small companies. Islander engineers continued this practice into the 1970s, complementing the work of mainlander engineers in large, state-supported companies to produce an electronics industry structured differently than those in Japan and Korea. The Abnormal Club was a small group of mainlander and islander graduate students who stayed in Taiwan for graduate school and work in electronics rather than go to the United States. Their collaboration in learning despite different geographical identities became a metaphor for the greater cooperation in industry that effectively disrupted the hierarchy of mainlanders over islanders in Taiwan and laid the material groundwork for democratization in the 1980s and beyond. Yet the land of Taiwan they helped to animate was actually two different Taiwans, one linked to the Republic of China and the other a thing unto itself. The separation between mainlander and islander engineers re-emerged when both crossed the Strait of Taiwan, which also raised the specter of a third Taiwan. The abnormal club was gone but the privileges engineers had earned in the process assigned them responsibilities in the present. A commitment to provide material benefits for all can now be a strategic goal rather than a naïve one.
"What a book. Engineers and the Two Taiwans traces how engineers creatively crafted professional identities and pathways in the cracks of multiple, shifting empires – and in so doing helped create Taiwan as a thing-unto-itself. In showing how engineers shaped and were shaped by geopolitics and the birth of a new electronics industry, the book opens up fresh perspectives on longstanding questions about who engineers are, how they are trained, where they ought to work, and ultimately what engineering is for. These engineers did politics through their material commitments even as they avoided partisan politics."
Jessica M. Smith, Editor-in-chief, Engineering Studies, Professor, Engineering, Design, and Society Department, Colorado School of Mines
