I. A Comparative Study of Asia-Pacific Transborder Subregions

As do other mighty forces like wars, nationalist aspirations, and the natural rerouting of great rivers, globalization changes the world's borders by bending and stretching them out of shape and thus creating new transnational spaces. State borders, which on maps define political boundaries, no longer draw the line in people's lives they once did. Often, borders are still where states interdict goods, people, and information, legal or otherwise,but they are just as importantly where trade--including the exit and entrance of people, together with their skills and knowledge--is most intense. During times of war, even desolate borders, if not successfully closed, grow hyperactive with the swapping of goods, human beings, intelligence and creeds. After the 2003 the U.S.-led war against Iraq, Iraq's border with Iran, though officially closed for 20 years since the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war, was reopened to religious pilgrims from Iran. But there are also leaky gateways along the border for smugglers and militants. While former Iraqi army officers guide anti-American Afghan veterans into Iraq across the rugged dessert, militants disguised as Iranian merchants or religious pilgrims carry illicit drugs, weapons and explosives into Iraq to fuel the guerrilla campaign. Everywhere, tumultuous forces, sometimes violent, sometimes economic, sometime both, are blurring state borders, merging economies closer together and rendering them inexorably interdependent. Borders continue to contain self-described national populations and self-described national activities, but the resurgence of myriad ethnic groups and regional cultures is pushing and stretching their limits. New power centers with their own identities are springing out of once politically trivial and economically marginal landscapes. Smaller, peripheral cities and towns near newly active borders are growing into important and prosperous centers.

I have studied this new phenomenon through an integrated framework with four analytical lenses: the global-local economic nexus, the de-centering of the state, cross-border social capital, and geographic proximity/transport infrastructure. The study is based on a systematic and in-depth comparative analysis of three transborder subregions in East Asia: 1) the Greater Southeast China Subregion (China's Guangdong and Fujian provinces, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau); 2) the Bohai/Yellow Sea Subregion (China's Shandong and Liaoning provinces, Korea's west coast, Japan's Kyushu region); and 3) the Greater Tumen Subregion (China's Jilin province, the Russian Far East, and North Korea's border region). A secondary and more restricted comparison has focused on four transborder subregions in Southeast Asia including the Greater Mekong Subregion (China's Yunnan province, the border regions of Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, and Lao PDR), as well as the U.S.-Mexico border region and several European border regions. Several years of first-hand field work and secondary research on this variety of cases led to the book, As Borders Bend: Transnational Spaces on the Pacific Rim, published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers in 2005. (Click on the highlighted title of this book on the publication page of this site to see all the information on the book on the publisher's Web site.) See the book's cover and initial reviews here. Post-publication reviews have appeared in Eurasian Geography and Economics (No. 7, 2005), American Journal of Sociology (Vol. 111, 2006), Contemporary Sociology (March, 2006), Journal of Asian Studies (May, 2006), Journal of Regional Science (May, 2006), Environment and Planning A (Vol. 39, 2007), and are forthcoming in Journal of Borderlands Studies,,, Regional Studies, Urban Affairs Review, Urban Studies, and Social Transformations in Chinese Societies. I have also published a number of journal articles and book chapters from this project, which I have recently extended to South Asia with a comparative focus on the China-Indian and Indian-Bangladeshi border regions.

II. A Multi-Level Study of Shanghai as a Rising Global City and the Greater Shanghai Region

Shanghai, which became known as "the Paris of the East" in a largely impoverished China in the 1930s, began to experience an unprecedented "renaissance" around 1990 after languishing behind the booming cities in South China such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou during the 1980s. Since the early 1990s, Shanghai unquestionably has been the most dynamic and rapidly globalizing city in the world. The city has been on a building binge that shows no signs of diminishing. Rumor had it that half of the world's cranes were working in the Pudong new area of Shanghai at some point in the early and mid-1990s. While that might be a little exaggerated, the fact today is that the physical landscape of Shanghai has been completed transformed. Around 1980, the row of European-style buildings along the Bund by the Huangpu River, the only visible legacy of past Western influence, looked distinctive and tall amidst the sea of monotonous Soviet-style apartment buildings interspersed with numerous traditional houses. Today they appear to be overshadowed by over 4,000 modern high-rises, some of which exhibit post-modern features designed by American architects, that have sprung up over the last 15 years or so. Pudong, the previously agricultural district of rice paddies and farm houses, boasts the world's fasterst train today and is dotted with new semi-conductor plants and commercial skyscrapers, including the world's tallest hotel, with one of the world's tallest building going straight up.

With earlier funding from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and collaborators at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), National Chengchi University in Taiwan, and Fudan University in Shanghai, we have largely completed a three-year study of the emergence of Shanghai as a globalizing city in a comparative context of Kaohsiung and other Asian world cities. The global city literature has focused narrowly on such familiar cities as New York, London, and Tokyo in advanced industrialized countries. Using the rich and timely case of Shanghai in this project, we have attempted to address several important questions. Is Shanghai capable of becoming a global city? If yes, what kind of global city is Shanghai becoming in ways that differ from existing global cities like New York, London, or Hong Kong? What conditions, either internal or external, foster or impede the growth of Shanghai into a global city? What are socioeconomic and spatial changes and continuities in Shanghai as a result of its aggressive pursuit of global city status and functions?

First, we have worked to develop a set of indicators that not only reflect some general features of a global city but capture particular attributes of Shanghai as they are shaped by its checkered history and shifting institutional context. Secondly, we have analyzed the conditions and correlates that either facilitate or inhibit the process of Shanghai becoming a global city. This pushes us to go beyond the assumptions and predictions of the global city model to examine closely the impact of historical and institutional factors unique to Shanghai. In 2001, we conducted two surveys of residents in the Pudong New Area of Shanghai to examine their attitudinal and behavioral characteristics and tendencies as they are responding and adapting to the economic and cultural impact of globalization in the city. Using these data, a former student from UIC and now teaching at Texas A&M Uninversity-Commerce (Jiaming Sun), Professor Yuan Ren at Fudan University in Shanghai, and I are writing a series of journal articles for publication. (See the publication page of my Web site for the first few published or forthcoming articles.) The survey data also are available for other graduate students in the department to analyze for their MA or Ph.D. projects. Data from a survey of 2,000 individuals in seven cities in Guangdong province in 2000 are also available for students to use for their MA and Ph.D. projects.

Related to this project and working with scholars at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, I co-organized an international conference on Shanghai and the Asian global cities in the global economy in Shanghai in May 2002, and this was followed up by a session on "Urban Progress and Governance" at the 4th International Convention of Asian Scholars in Shanghai, August 20-24, 2005, organized by my collaborator Professor Zhenhua Zhou formerly at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Based on a number of papers presented at the 2002 conference and subsequently revised plus invited contributions, I have edited a book entitled Shanghai Rising: Global Impact, State Power, and Local Transformations in the World's Most Dynamic Mega-City (forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2008), which includes 12 chapters by urban scholars in the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, China (see the book's Table of Contents). I also have co-edited a book (in Chinese) entitled World Cities: International Lessons and Shanghai's Development published by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press in 2004. (See the publication page of my Web site for a link to the cover of this book.)

Global Value Chains, Metropolitan Extension, Institutional Governance, and Local Industrial Upgrading in the Greater Shanghai Region

The most recent phase or new direction of the Shanghai-based research is a study on how the evolving functions of Shanghai as a rising global city, the spatial organization of regionalized global-local value chains, and institutional governance mechanisms affect industrial upgrading and competitiveness in the Greater Shanghai Region (GSR). The purpose of this research is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the conditions and constraints under which industrial upgrading may or may not occur successfully in a regional context. These conditions, either structural or spatial in nature, include how globalization takes root in cities of varied scales and evolving functions, the extent and mode of metropolitan expansion, the spatial pattern and organizational structure of global-local value chains, the size and structure of spatially distinctive manufacturing clusters, and the models and mechanisms of regional and local institutional governance (see my paper in International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 2007, and a related book chapter in The Regional and Local Shaping of World Society, edited by Mark Herkenrath. Hamburg and London: LIT Verlag, 2007). A rapidly globalizing city-regional economic system, the GSR lends itself nicely to an in-depth investigation into this complex topic that spans disciplinary boundaries and straddles the theory-policy divide. With a former student now teaching at Soochow University in Taiwan and my collaborators (both faculty and graduate students) at Fudan University in Shanghai, I started the empircal stage of the research in 2006 and plan to incorporate the findings into a new book on China's urban transformation. Working with Professor Yuan Ren of Fudan University and Professor Dieter Lapple of HafenCity University Hamburg, I will be organizing a workshop comparing Asian (Shanghai/Yangtze River Delta) and European (German) city-regions to be held at Fudan University in Shanghai in May 2008.

*See an interview (in Chinese) on my reflections on this research and its broader implications for globaliztioin and urban China. The interview, which was conducted by Wang Lan (currently a Ph.D. student in Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago) in Shanghai in July 2005, appeared in the Chinese magazine Urban Planning Overseas (Vol. 20, No. 5, pp. 75-77, 2005).

III. Teamwork in U.S.-Invested Firms in China

With Dow Scott at Loyola University Chicago and James Bishop at New Mexico State University and funding from the Center for Human Resources Management at the University of Illinois, we have conducted a field study of teamwork and other aspects of organizational management in U.S.-invested companies in China. In 1998, we carried out two separate surveys of approximately 700 employees in two U.S.-invested enterprises in Guangzhou, China. Thus far, we have published two articles in International Journal of Organizational Analysis on the determinants of organizational commitment and a book chapter on the theoretical and practical aspects of teamwork in the bi-cultural organizational context of U.S.-invested companies in China. I have also co-authored an important article on the characteristics and determinants of teamwork orientation among Chinese employees in the influential magazine The China Business Review (the official publication of the U.S.-China Business Council); this article is intended for business practitioners (see the publication page of my Web site for the information on these articles). The survey data are available for graduate students in the department to analyze for their MA or Ph.D. projects.

 

 

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