Northeast Asia, where the interests of three major nuclear powers and the world's two largest economies mingle around the unstable pivot of the Korean Peninsula, is a region rife with political and economic uncertainties. It is arguably one of the most dangerous areas in the world, plagued by security problems of global importance, including nuclear and missile proliferation. It has, to be sure, been widely touted as a region of economic promise. Yet despite Northeast Asia's demonstrable economic success at the macro level, and a panoply of highly regarded individual economic managers at the micro level, its collective economic management has nevertheless been disappointing.

Thanks to supercharged economic growth, coupled with abundant physical and human capital, as well as political clout as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, China is a rising great power on the world stage. Whereas the former China under its closed, mysterious, and communist ideology was characterized as a threat to Asian and world peace during the Cold War years, today, ironically, a more open and internationally engaged China again triggers the “China threat” rhetoric. Despite China's constant assurance of peaceable foreign policy intentions and claims that it will “never seek hegemony,” skeptics rebuke these as a mere smokescreen that covers an enormous forward thrust, evidenced, for example, by the expansionist moves toward islets in the South China Sea. On the one hand, whether aggressive moves qualified China as a threat is still debated. On the other hand, whether provocative actions would escalate into large-scale militarized conflicts that jeopardize regional stability constitutes the immediate concern.

In the pantheon of new security concepts debated in East Asia in the past decade, human security is perhaps the most controversial. It is based on the idea that the individual or community must be at least one of the referent points in answering the eternal questions of security for whom, from what, and by what means.

Despite its embedded ambiguity, conventional wisdom tends to prevail over time. This may be because old adages recurrently embrace some ingredients of truth. As James A. Mathisen highlights, conventional wisdom plays a significant role in constituting knowledge as a starting point. For many people, numerous adages (the rich get richer while the poor get poorer; birds of a feather flock together) are most commonly perceived as true. More interestingly, the accuracy of the two folk wisdoms appears to be more salient in culture-producing industries, including the motion picture industry. Concomitantly, the two adages have long been connected to diverse societal phenomena and sociological knowledge.

The literature on East Asia's political economies identifies cohesive state bureaucracy and its effective intervention in the market as the key factors that have enabled the East Asian economic miracle and that differentiate the success of East Asian newly industrializing countries (NICs) from the failure of other developing countries. However, the sharply diverging growth trajectories of the Taiwanese semiconductor and wireless communications industries show that cohesive state bureaucracy and its effective intervention are not the generic trait of the Taiwanese developmental state, repeatedly found across industries and through time. On the contrary, the scope, depth, and coherence of state intervention are a variable rather than a constant. The semiconductor industry had an activist state promoting its growth from its very inception, whereas the wireless communications industry has failed to acquire consistent state support. Explaining the variation of state intervention requires not only an analysis of the state apparatus but also a study of its institutional links to the industry. This article develops an institutional explanation of the Taiwanese state's differing roles in promoting the semiconductor and wireless communications industries, but it differentiates itself from the existing literature of the developmental state and network theories by privileging the role of overseas technologists in influencing the scope, depth, and coherence of state intervention in two industries.