The objective of this article is to survey the abundance of primary source electronic data, and appropriate methods, which could be used to advance the study of elite politics in Taiwan. Research on public attitudes and voting behaviour has benefited enormously from open scholarly access to systematically collected, reliable data resources. Research on elite political behaviour in Taiwan could similarly benefit from the creation of supplementary datasets derived from electronic primary sources. I argue that the primary resources and methods needed are already in place, for instance, to produce quantitative estimates of the policy preferences and ideological positions of parties and individual political actors over time. A variety of political texts created by political actors at all levels of office (and indeed, in opposition) are readily accessible online. With a small degree of processing, these electronic texts can easily be rendered in machine-readable format for analysis by means of computer-assisted content analysis software. Despite successes in other contexts, these data and methods are currently underutilized in studies of elite political behaviour in Taiwan.

On October 15, 1957, Communist China and the Soviet Union signed an agreement on new defence technology according to which the Soviet Union would supply China with technical data for manufacturing nuclear weapons. In May 1958 Foreign Minister Ch'en Yi told German correspondents in Peking that China would make atomic bombs. On June 20, 1959, the Soviet Union, according to China, unilaterally abrogated the 1957 agreements on weapons development. On July 31, 1963, China issued a statement denouncing the Moscow Partial Test Ban Treaty as “a big fraud to fool the people of the world.” On October 16, 1964, China announced that an atomic device had been exploded in western China and proposed that “a summit conference of all the countries of the world be convened to discuss the question of the complete prohibition and thorough destruction of nuclear weapons.”

This paper seeks to provide an original examination of the nature of the proliferation of sensitive materials and technologies by Chinese entities. A number of publications have attempted to understand the issue of proliferation stemming from businesses based in China, with many having commented on the efforts undertaken both by international actors and by the Chinese government to prevent it. However, relatively few scholars have sought, in any systematic and sustained way, to understand the types of Chinese companies involved in proliferation and the evolution of their behaviour. This paper seeks to argue and account for the declining role of, and concern regarding, Chinese state-owned enterprise in the global proliferation problem. Different accounts for this change, and the relating proliferation challenge posed by China, are examined.

In the areas controlled by the Central Government, the Chinese student movement between 1945 and 1949 was essentially an anti-war movement. As the Civil War progressed during those years, the student protests became one of the Government's major political problems, referred to by Mao himself as the “second front” in the struggle against the Chiang Kai-shek Government. As such, the student anti-war movement assumed its place within the twentieth-century tradition of Chinese student activism.

Over the last two decades, there has been a rapid expansion in the number of Taiwan programmes at universities in America and Europe; however, few of these Taiwan programmes have attempted to develop teaching courses. Where Taiwan courses have been introduced, they have tended to be in isolation and not well integrated into existing academic programmes. Among the universities with Taiwan programmes, only two have attempted to create comprehensive teaching programmes through which students can graduate with a degree in Taiwan studies: SOAS University of London and the University of Texas at Austin. The purpose of this paper is to compare the experiences of these two institutions in developing such niche teaching programmes. It begins with a discussion of how these two programmes first emerged and then goes on to review their distinct development trajectories and key features. The paper offers an analysis of how these two programmes were able not only to survive but also to expand their offerings and thrive in an academic environment that should be hostile to such niche programmes. It concludes with a review of the remaining challenges facing these teaching programmes.

One of the institutional innovations in China's reform and open-door era is the establishment of economic and technological development zones, export processing zones, science and technology parks, and other “zones” or “parks” at geographically diverse regions. This book represents an effort to investigate some of the science and technology industrial parks (STIPs). For the geographer Walcott, such parks are oriented to multinational development, multinational learning, and local innovation learning, based on “the type of activity contained and the type of company profiled” (p. 13). In particular, she shows that multinational corporations (MNCs) have become the growth engines for China's leapfrog into the 21st century with their contributions to China's exports, high tech as well as low tech, and the creation of new jobs. Therefore, in cities like Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Suzhou, MNCs have mainly processed and assembled products using foreign-imported critical parts plus locally-made components with the help of cheap labor and easy access to major ports such as Hong Kong and Shanghai. On the other hand, in Shanghai, the best example of a multinational learning zone capable of providing a wide range of skills, goods and services, MNCs are engaged in manufacturing activities in proximity to Chinese firms, research and development entities, both within and outside designated STIPs. Finally, Beijing, Shenzhen (again), and Xi'an, according to Walcott, have represented another model where the proximity of domestic firms to institutions of learning has facilitated knowledge transfer.