Taiwan — Research Sabbatical 2026

Two decades-long friends made the week — Professors Tse-Kang Leng (Academia Sinica / NCCU) and Phil Hsu (NTU), who folded me into their wider circle of colleagues, students, friends and family. I gave three talks across the city:

• NCCU — "China's Rise: Four Scenarios in Search of Evidence," with Tse-Kang's graduate students at Chung Chi College
• NTU — "Sufficiency for All: Small-Scale, Low-Tech, Pro-Poor Initiatives," with Phil Hsu
• Academia Sinica (IPSAS) — "The Allure of Modernization: Guizhou's Shift from Inclusive Development to Indebted Growth"

Between sessions, the conversations that stay with me: a long talk with Dr Michelle Hsieh (Academia Sinica) about her cutting-edge work on the resilience of Taiwan's SMEs — the manufacturing base that economists said globalisation would hollow out, and didn't — and where our research might join up. Beer and research ideas with Professor Yen Wei-Ting, a political economist working on informality and insecurity. Dinner with an old classmate, Dr Yisuo Tzeng, picking up midsentence after years. And coffee with Dana — an unplanned hour that turned an acquaintance into a friend.

The lightest moment: cheering the Dragons past the Lions at the ballpark, with first-time baseball-goer Phil at my side.

My host was Professor Wan-Yu Liu of NCHU, who arranged a talk and a banquet that put me across the table from a roomful of Taiwan's rural-development experts. The day ranged from a tea-garden visit to student presentations to dinner — one of the sabbatical's high points, and the start of a network that opened doors all the way down the east coast.

We visited an organic tea producer where the "six-industry" idea (六級產業化 — growing, processing and selling under one roof, so value stays in the community) stopped being a slide and became something I could walk through. And I spent two hours at Principal Chien's agricultural vocational college (founded 1937, now affiliated with NCHU) — a living case in human-scale workforce development: farm management, forestry, appropriate-technology machinery, a 100-hectare practice forest, and a frank conversation about the slow fade of the co-op programs that once tied schools like his to local industry.

Along the way: coffee at Yourmind Coffee in the South District — one barista, every brewing instrument known to humanity, two cats, a harpsichord upstairs, fifteen minutes to brew and describe a single cup; ice cream and a converted-bank atmosphere at the 4th Credit Cooperative, part of the Miyahara group's adaptive reuse of a 1966 bank building; and an end-of-day IPA at Taihu Brewing while waiting for the train south — Taiwan's craft-beer scene as another register of the small-scale, quality-over-volume argument.

From Chiayi I rode the Alishan Forest Railway up to the sunrise — narrow-gauge, built 1906, an appropriate-technology marvel scaled to terrain too steep for anything grander. It survived precisely because it was built to fit the mountain rather than conquer it. I also visited Hinoki Village, a preserved Japanese-era wooden district reworked as small-scale, inclusive tourism, and wandered the Chiayi Cultural and Creative Industries Park, a converted 1916 brewery — another adaptive reuse of colonial-era industrial heritage.

Kaohsiung was the rum chapter. I explored Taiwan's young craft-rum revival with Mickey Liang, and made the acquaintance of Renaissance Distillery's Linya Chiou and Olivier Caen — who don't just use Taiwan's sugarcane but grow their own to make the rum, a terroir-first, small-batch story that rhymes directly with the Barbados cases in Small Steps. I wandered the Pier-2 arts district, and tried (and failed) to catch a second ballgame — rained out.

The east coast was the research heart of the trip: slower, less developed, more Indigenous, and closest to what Small Steps is about.

At the Bunun Tribal Farm — a Presbyterian-rooted Indigenous cooperative — and in Dulan's Amis arts community, I saw two working models of inclusive tourism. The Bunun farm also handed me the trip's hardest truth, by way of its own staff: others copy the model, but not the spirit, and so they fall short. A recipe travels; conviction doesn't.

The person I keep thinking about is Mr Shi of Libra Ice Cream, who came home to Dulan to make ice cream from his neighbours' fruit — small, rooted, and exactly the point. Professor Liu's network also introduced me to NTTU's President Cheng and Professor Yeh, my door-openers in the south-east. I also walked Beinan Cultural Park, the late-Neolithic site on the way.

Chishang is the East Rift Valley's success story: an active, well-run Farmers' Association turned a place-name into a quality-certified, price-premium brand that keeps value local — and the tour buses arrive wave after wave. I bicycled the paddy terraces along the valley floor and had lunch in the cooperative.

A short way north, Yuli tells the quieter half of the story. I toured the Longfeng-jia rice cooperative with Director Yeh, tasted its distinctive rice varieties and inventive products (a pork-and-coffee line among them), and walked past the Yucheng rice mill and the farmers' association. Yuli's rice is every bit as fine as Chishang's — but much of it sells under someone else's name. Same paddy, same river, different command of the brand. The contrast is the lesson.

Hualien deepened the Indigenous thread. From Kui Kasirisir I learned to hear poverty as a question of dignity rather than money, and through him, three styles of Indigenous cooperative — Dai Yuqin's care co-op, Lin Chia-hao's IT co-op, and Huang Ying-hao's community work — each meeting needs that formal state programs reach past. At the county Farmers' Association hall, a staff member offered a candid theory for Hualien's thinner agri-tourism: earthquakes and typhoons have left tourists wary. (I'm not sure I buy it — Chishang sits under the same skies and thrives — but it was an honest answer, and the difference may be organisation more than weather.)

I'd planned a full day in Taroko Gorge. The rain had other ideas, and much of the gorge remains closed for landslide repair after recent quakes — a reminder that the east coast lives close to the geology. It waits for a return.

I also continued my rum fieldwork at Rumway, an inventive Hualien rum bar — and found, in how it talks about local versus imported spirits, a glimpse of the demand-side puzzle I'll come back to.

A few threads pulled tight over three weeks:

• Taiwan's small-scale manufacturing didn't hollow out the way the textbooks predicted — tacit knowledge, flexible batch production and industry-association self-organisation held the clusters together. Michelle Hsieh's work is the key.
• Vocational education was the hidden infrastructure of that small-scale economy — and its slow decline, as university aspiration crowded out vocational identity, is a cautionary tale.
• Six-industry integration (六級產業化) is the policy language for keeping rural value in rural hands — and Chishang, Yuli and the Taitung communities show what it looks like when it works, and when it doesn't.
• Indigenous community economics runs on cooperatives, traditional land stewardship and church networks as much as on state welfare — and the gap between official policy and lived reality is wide. Smangus (司馬庫斯), the Atayal income-sharing cooperative, is the case I most regret not reaching this time. Next trip.

A gallery to come — Alishan sunrise, Chishang paddies, the east coast — once I gather the images from phone and laptop.