Ya-Wen Lei
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Ya-Wen Lei is a Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and a former Junior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows. She is affiliated with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and serves as a Senior Scholar in the Weatherhead Center’s Academy Scholars Program. Her research examines political and socioeconomic transformation, with a focus on technology, society, and political economy.
She is the author of The Contentious Public Sphere (Princeton, 2018) and The Gilded Cage (Princeton, 2023). Her work has appeared in leading journals, including Annual Review of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and American Journal of Sociology, and has received multiple awards from major scholarly associations.
In Septembre 2026, Ya-Wen Lei joins the Paris IAS for a ten-month research stay.
Research topics
Political economy; political sociology; sociology of media and information technologies; sociology of work and labor; economic sociology; law and society; sociology of development; science and technology studies; Chinese studies.
Geopolitical Transplants: States, Firms, and the New Global Struggle for Technology
Amid intensifying geopolitical rivalry and mounting concerns over supply-chain vulnerability, advanced economies are reconfiguring the foundations of global production. This project examines “geopolitical transplantation,” a new form of cross-border industrial relocation driven not by market efficiency but by national security and technological self-sufficiency. Focusing on semiconductor manufacturing and the global dominance of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the study analyzes how the United States, Japan, and Germany seek to construct domestic chip-making capacity despite lacking the institutional, labor, and social foundations that enabled the industry’s rise in East Asia.
Unlike earlier waves of globalization, which were propelled largely by cost reduction and market expansion, contemporary transplants are state-driven and security-oriented. They unfold under conditions of geopolitical tension, strategic competition, and “weaponized interdependence.” These relocations generate profound structural mismatches. Host countries pursue advanced manufacturing to rebuild industrial capacity and reduce external dependence, yet they often lack the coordinated state–business relations, labor regimes, and gendered divisions of social reproduction that underpin semiconductor production in Taiwan. At the same time, the Taiwanese developmental state and its flagship firms face a strategic dilemma: complying with pressure from powerful allies while safeguarding national leverage and long-term industrial advantage.
The project investigates this phenomenon across three interconnected levels. At the macro level, it analyzes how states design and implement industrial policies under geopolitical pressure and how institutional configurations shape outcomes. At the meso level, it examines how transplanted firms adapt organizational practices, labor management strategies, and production routines in environments marked by different regulatory systems, labor markets, and cultural expectations. At the micro level, it explores how workers—engineers, technicians, managers, and their spouses—experience and negotiate transplanted production models, particularly in a sector structured by long hours, intense performance demands, and a gendered division between paid production and unpaid reproductive labor.
Key publications
Lei, Ya-Wen, The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023.
DOI: 10.1177/20594364241254616
Lei, Ya-Wen, "Delivering Solidarity: Platform Architecture and Collective Contention in China's Platform Economy.", American Sociological Review, 86(2):279-309, 2021.
DOI: 10.1177/0003122420979980
Lei, Ya-Wen,The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.
DOI: 10.1017/S030574101800098X
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