Kinship, Business Elite and the Market in Contemporary Taiwan

Co-sponsored with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

In the fields of history and anthropology, kinship has long been regarded as a crucial factor in shaping the economic organization, political authority, and social mobility of East Asian societies. Yet, due to the limitations of available data, relatively little research has examined its influence on contemporary capitalist economies. The questions of whether, and to what extent, traditional kinship continues to shape and constrain the organization of modern markets remain unclear. In this lecture, I introduce several ongoing empirical studies of family businesses and elite families in Taiwan, with the aim of illustrating how kinship structures—and the family networks, status dynamics, and related mechanisms derived from them—affect contemporary corporate activities and the power relations of business elites. This interdisciplinary research not only offers new perspectives on the relevance of kinship studies for understanding contemporary societies, but also provides new insights on class formation and market operations in postwar East Asia.