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Kwoh Ting-Li

Kwoh-Ting Li (traditional Chinese: 李國鼎; simplified Chinese: 李国鼎; pinyin: Lǐ Guódǐng; 28 January 1910 – 31 May 2001) was a Chinese economist and politician best known as the "Father of Taiwan's Economic Miracle" for his work in transforming Taiwan's economy from an agrarian-based system into one of the world's leading producers of information and telecommunications technology. He is renowned as the "Godfather of Technology" in Taiwan.

Biography

Li was born in Nanjing, Republican China, on January 28 1910 and died in Taipei, Taiwan on May 31, 2001.

He graduated from National Central University (Nanjing University) in 1930 and studied physics at Cambridge University in 1934. He returned to Mainland China and spent many years in politics and economics before he fled from the Chinese Communist Party to Taiwan in July 1948 with the Nationalist Party. He became the president of the Taiwan Shipbuilding Corporation in 1951 and was appointed as a member of the Industrial Development Commission responsible for the planning and economic and development of Taiwan in 1953. In 1959 he became the head of the Industrial Development and Investment Center under the Council for United States Aid.

He held a number of leadership positions in industry and government in Taiwan, including that of economic minister from 1965 to 1969 and finance minister from 1969 to 1976. After 1976 he was appointed "Minister without portfolio" and promoted science and technology in Taiwan. In 1968, he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service. He created a policy that helped attract entrepreneurs in the tech industry and helped fund Taiwan's electronics companies, which led to Taiwan's primacy as a producer of computer parts. Li also helped build an industrial park in the port of Hsinchu, which later became known as Taiwan's "Silicon Valley." He was also a senior adviser to the former President of Taiwan, Chen Shui-Bian.

His residence in Taipei is now a museum. In 2011, an asteroid (239611 Likwohting) was named after Li.

Four professorships at Stanford University are named for Dr. Li in the fields of economic development, engineering, medicine and Chinese culture. As of 2014, the holders in each field are: economic development (Xueguang Zhou), engineering (Yinyu Ye), medicine (Stanley N. Cohen) and Chinese culture (Mark Edward Lewis).

Economic Policy

In sum total Li was a government official for 40 years, 10 of which he spent in Mainland China before the Chinese Communist Party won the civil war. Tony Fu-Lai Yu speculates that the time Li spent in Mainland China, as well as his science-based university education, greatly influenced his policy-making in Taiwan. Li had no formal training in economics, thus most of his knowledge of economic management was gained from practical experience and working with other economists. Thus, as Yu claims, his policy was insulated from popular economic ideology and instead was driven by pragmatism. Li himself also claims that the purpose of his writings is to reveal his policy-making experiences for the future reference of other developing countries, and did not engage in writing about economic, administrative, or political science theory.

Yu argues that Li's policy-making can be explained by evolutionary economics. Two Yale economists, Gustav Ranis and John C.H. Fei, wrote the introductory essays to Li's 1995 book The Evolution of Policy Behind Taiwan's Development Success. Thus it can be interpreted that Ranis and Fei's views on economic policy are representative of Li's.

Fei claims that two main types of forces govern policy evolution: objective and subjective. Objective forces are predetermined conditions, encompassing physical environments, external economic conditions, etc. Subjective forces include personal beliefs, economic knowledge, memories, experiences, and "common sense." Fei believes that political beliefs and ideology are the strongest factor in shaping economic policy-making, and thus is an ongoing process. In following with the concept of evolutionary economics, Fei believes that economic policy must change to suit new and ever-changing situations. Thus policy should not be static when created and instead evolve and be improved on to adapt to new situations. Li himself claims that the liberalization of the Taiwanese economy was a gradual process rather than an abrupt one following the international fad of free market ideology in the 1960s and 1970s.