A tale of two industrial zones: A geopolitical economy of differential development in Ulsan, South Korea, and Kaohsiung, Taiwan
本文对比韩国蔚山和台湾高雄两个工业区在越南战争期间及之后的发展轨迹，揭示地缘政治决策如何导致差异化发展，对研究东亚经济与地缘政治关系的学者有参考价值。
Much scholarship on East Asian development has sidelined the crucial role of geopolitics by insisting that wars such as the Vietnam War had limited effects on industrial development and economic growth patterns. We find such arguments unpersuasive, and also unduly reductionist. The Vietnam War, in particular, had unambiguously powerful effects on industrial development in South Korea; but even in cases where the direct effects of war were somewhat less spectacular, such as Taiwan, the reasons for the differences were themselves deeply geopolitical and expressive of decision-making processes centered on the Vietnam War. In this paper, we explore the differential effects of such geopolitical decision-making by contrasting the development trajectories of the Ulsan and Kaohsiung industrial zones during the war period. We show, in addition, that the subsequent development of industrial projects in South Korea and Taiwan has continued to bear some of the marks of Vietnam War-era geopolitical economy.