Karl Fields

Karl Fields researches and writes about the East Asian political economy, including government-business relations, economic reform, and regional integration. He regularly teaches, lectures, researches, and travels in China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan, and has also traveled in the Russian Far East, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cuba. His first book, Enterprise and the State in Korea and Taiwan(Cornell University Press, 1995), examined the role of government and big business in the economic miracles of Taiwan and South Korea. His current book project, called KMT, Inc., analyses the business empire owned and operated by Taiwan’s governing Nationalist Party. Other published work includes “All Is Not Gold That Glitters: The Growing Liability of KMT, Inc.”; “From Party-State to Market: Taiwan’s Lessons for Asia’s Transitional Economies”; “Financing the Development of Corporate Groups in China”; and "From Take-Off to Drop-Off? Korean Economic Development and Industrialization." He is working on “Cross-Strait Lessons: Party Capitalism, Economic Development and the Democratic Transition in Taiwan and China.” Fields is co-author of the textbook, Cases in Comparative Politics (Norton, 2015), now in its 5th edition. He is a near-fluent speaker of Chinese and is conversant in Japanese. Fields teaches in the areas of comparative politics, Asian politics, and Asian political economy.