I arrived in Taipei in early September 2025 as a Fulbright Senior Scholar, returning to Taiwan for the first time since a brief visit in 2010 as part of an academic delegation. Well before 2010, I lived in Taipei as a graduate student in the early 1990s, where I took intensive Chinese instruction at the National Taiwan University (NTU) campus, at what is now known as the International Chinese Language Program (ICLP). In a span of more than three decades between long-term residency in Taipei, upon my arrival in 2025 I found myself reciting the line from the English novelist L. P. Hartley, to the effect that “the past is a foreign country.” The Taipei of the early 1990s was in many ways foreign to the Taipei of the mid-2020s. The Taipei I now encountered was both familiar and transformed. I remembered the layout of major roads and some of the neighborhoods near where I had lived and studied in the 1990s. I found the lane north of the NTU campus where I had shared so many lunches with classmates, including my favorite dumpling stand. The most transformative experience was in getting around the city. In the 1990s the only public transport was crowded city buses, for which riders paid cash or tokens. The Taipei Metro (MRT) was but a gleam in the eye of urban planners in the 1990s, with tunnels being laid down under Roosevelt Road and other arteries. On my first day, with my new EasyCard in hand, I was getting around by MRT and bus with ease I had never expected, and with far greater convenience than what I’m used to on New York City subways.
As a political scientist, the other great transformation from my graduate student days was in Taiwan’s political landscape. The early 1990s were a time of vibrant discussion on constitutional questions for how Taiwan’s nascent democracy would operate in terms of voting, representation, rights protections, and much else. The 2020s were contentious in a different way, with Taiwan’s mature democracy reflecting a global trend in deep partisan division and political polarization. And more directly relevant to my 2025 Fulbright research, the transformation of Taiwan’s society was apparent in the aging of its population. The politics of population aging was the focus of my 2025 Fulbright research project, and I was especially interested in conducting interviews about the National Pension Reform Commission of 2016 and debates over pension reform that had taken place in the first year of President Tsai Ing-wen’s administration (2016-7). As I soon learned after I arrived in fall 2025, representatives in the Legislative Yuan were hotly debating measures to roll back or suspend the pension reforms that had been passed in 2017.
During an earlier Fulbright fellowship in China in 2004–05, I had conducted research on the complicated and contentious rollout of public pensions in China in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That research produced my 2010 book, Socialist Insecurity: Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China. More recently, I have an article forthcoming in China Quarterly on the 2024 law raising retirement ages in China, which examines how the Chinese Communist Party navigated a long-deferred, politically sensitive reform. The Fulbright project in 2025 extended this line of inquiry for understanding why pension are so complicated and relatively ignored by the public until reforms are introduced to curtail benefits and raise costs, including by making changes to retirement ages. Using the Taiwan case as an example of pension reforms under democratic institutions, the central question was simple: How do democratic institutions, electoral incentives, and partisan competition shape the politics of pension reform compared to authoritarian institutions like those found in China?
At first glance, one might expect authoritarian regimes such as China’s to face fewer obstacles in implementing pension reforms. With no elections to worry about, politicians are insulated from an electoral backlash over unpopular cuts in pensions. Democratically elected governments, by contrast, must contend with opposition parties, organized interests, and public opinion. Yet the reality I encountered was far more complex. Both systems face formidable resistance when attempting to impose benefit cuts or raise retirement ages.
Taiwan offered a compelling case. In 2017, the government under the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) successfully enacted significant cuts to pension benefits for public sector employees, including civil servants and teachers—groups that remained politically influential and aligned with the Nationalist Party (KMT). This reform was achieved through a combination of legislative strategy and partisan alignment, targeting programs whose beneficiaries were disproportionately associated with the KMT. In contrast, China’s 2015 reform of pensions for public sector employees proceeded without raising retirement ages, a change that only came nearly a decade later in 2024. The contrast suggested that the key variable was not simply regime type, but the partisan composition of pension beneficiaries and the political coalitions underpinning different programs.
My research was hosted by the Graduate Institute of National Development at National Taiwan University, where had so many rewarding interactions with faculty colleagues and graduate students. I guest lectured in several classes at NTU, as well as Soochow University. Over my five month stay, I first lived near campus in the Gongguan area, then a short-term rental in Xinyi district. I relied heavily on YouBike, Taiwan’s ubiquitous bike-sharing system, which was terrific for getting around the NTU campus and the city itself. Gongguan offered a wonderful entry point for dining out in Taipei, from night market stalls to small restaurants on the lanes. I also spent time at the Treasure Hill Artist Village, an urban arts community that preserved fragments of an old Taipei hillside neighborhood by converting dwellings into affordable spaces for artists and other creative types.
A central component of my fieldwork involved conducting expert interviews with policymakers, academics, and practitioners involved in pension reform and population aging. Having secured Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval prior to departure, I approached recruitment with some uncertainty. To my surprise, the response rate to my outreach was remarkably high. In most cases, potential interviewees were not only willing but eager to participate. This openness reflected a vibrant intellectual climate and a broader culture of accessibility within policymaking circles: by comparison with doing similar research in China–well, there was no comparison.
The interviews themselves were conducted primarily in Chinese, and I found that recording conversations was widely accepted, a notable shift from earlier experiences in other contexts. Each interview generated new insights, and often redirecting my thinking in unexpected ways. These conversations helped answer questions I had prepared, and also opened up new areas for research.
One particularly revealing line of discussion concerned the operation of funded pension systems. In principle, such systems are designed to accumulate reserves over time, which are then invested in capital markets to generate returns through compounding. This model raises a series of governance questions: who decides how these funds are allocated? Which asset managers are selected? And how are risks managed when public funds are entrusted to private entities? These questions quickly led me into the terrain of financialization. The outsourcing of pension fund management to private asset managers is often described as a form of privatization, but this characterization is imprecise. Pension privatization usually implies a clear transfer of ownership from public to private management, whereas financialization reflects a more ambiguous kind of “leasing” of publicly held pension assets. The pension funds remain publicly owned, yet their management and investment strategies are decided by private financial market players, who are contracted to perform at a certain expected rate of return that would be higher than what a government agency would attain. While Taiwan’s outsourced funds from its “Labor Insurance” pension fund have made impressive gains in recent years, the boundaries between public pension management by private firms raises questions concerns about accountability, risk exposure, and political influence.
Beyond my research agenda, the Fulbright fellowship over my five months in Taipei also offered opportunities for personal reconnection and intellectual exchange. I was able to reconnect with a former graduate student, now working at a major think-tank and foundation, who provided invaluable introductions to key figures in Taiwan’s policymaking community. Even more unexpectedly, I reconnected with a former classmate from my own graduate school days in the 1990s. We spent time together exploring the city, sharing meals, hiking, and attending baseball games.
Toward the end of my stay, I traveled to Tainan, Taiwan’s historic southern city, known for its rich cultural and urban. I visited the historic Fort Zeelandia (Anping Gubao) and enjoyed the delicious offerings from the food stalls of Tainan. Walking through its streets, visiting temples, and observing the preservation of older neighborhoods, I was reminded of the ways in which Taiwanese cities have retained their past by undertaking urban development at a welcomingly more modest and less break-neck speed than cities in China. The latter are completely unrecognizable for the most part, even if they now have “urban heritage streets” for tourists. I also had the chance to make visits to Taichung, Hualien, and briefly to Hsinchu. But a longer time outside Taipei is certainly warranted for my next visit!
The Fulbright fellowship reaffirmed the importance of intellectual and personal connections in sustaining academic work. I had wonderful interactions with my fellow Fulbright cohort of faculty and students, including the Orientation sessions, Mid-year conference, and a delightful Thanksgiving banquet. I also had the opportunity to reconnect with former students and colleagues, and to build new relationships with faculty and researchers on social policy in East Asia.
