The Jackson School's Academic Workshop Series will host a presentation from Yale College student Ethan Chiu, "The Radio Corporation of America and the Making of Taiwan’s Assembly, Testing, and Packaging Labor Regimes, 1960-1980." The Student Academic Workshop Series at the Jackson School of Global Affairs is a bi-weekly forum in which advanced undergraduate and graduate students can present their research projects and receive constructive feedback from their peers.

This analysis re-centers labor and governance, rather than frontier innovation alone, in the making of Taiwan’s semiconductor assembly, testing, and packaging (ATP) sector between 1960 and 1980. It argues that the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and Taiwan’s authoritarian Kuomintang (KMT) developmental state co-produced a distinctive ATP labor regime whose exploitative features cannot be explained by corporate cost and yield imperatives alone. Under martial law and export-processing zone (EPZ) administration, the state supplied infrastructural incentives and coercive industrial relations controls that enabled feminized, piece-rate shop floors and tightly supervised dormitory living arrangements that constrained worker agency, especially for young rural women. Using developmental state theory, global value chain/network analysis, labor process theory, and feminist political economy, the study traces how RCA’s factory standards aligned with KMT governance to institutionalize discipline while accelerating export-oriented industrialization and technology transfer. Drawing on archival records (training manuals, factory rules, inspection files) and worker interviews, the presentation by Ethan Chiu also emphasizes continuity: mechanisms refined under RCA-era authoritarianism echo in how today’s Southeast Asian migrant ATP workers are treated, even after democratization and RCA’s demise.

Ethan Chiu is a senior majoring in global affairs and history. Ethan currently interns for Rush Doshi, director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ China Strategy Initiative, and for the executive office of Brookings’ AI and Emerging Technology Initiative. He is also a student fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, a director’s fellow at the Digital Ethics Center, and a 2023-24 Kerry Fellow. Extracurricularly, he is the co-president of the Alexander Hamilton Society, a co-organizer for the Geopolitics of Technology Initiative, former president and co-founder of the Yale Foreign Policy Initiative, and a former executive board member of the Yale College Council. Ethan has previously held internships at the Department of Defense, the American Enterprise Institute, and the American Red Cross. He is interested in creating more equitable top-down industrial policy and bottom-up social movement approaches to labor, especially for migrant workers within the technology sector.