Sia Ek-Hong, born in Taipei County, Taiwan. He studied Political Science in National Taiwan University as an undergraduate and earned his Master Degree from National Chengchi University. His Master’s thesis, The “Asymmetric Interdependence” Production Relation between the Medium-sized Enterprise and Female Marriage Immigrants, was awarded the Best Master’s Thesis by the Taiwan Political Science Association in 2007 and is being published into a book. In his thesis, he applied a neo-Marxist theory to explain why Taiwanese small and medium enterprises remained competitive against their Chinese counterparts and to analyze the production relations between Taiwanese capitalists and female marriage immigrant workers from China, Vietnam, Thailand, and so on. For the observation of the entangled micro power relations of class, gender, and nationality, he participated in the production floor of a factory as a normal worker with those female marriage immigrant workers and interviewed managers, foremen, and female workers of different nationalities.

Two of his papers are forthcoming. One of them formulated a synthesized theory from three major neo-institutionalism to provide a complete explanation for the influential electoral reform in 2004 and will be published in Taiwan Democracy Quarterly. Another critically examined the “Exodus Metaphor” in Taiwanese nationalist theology which is developed by theologians of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, and urged a re-contextualized theory. This paper will be published in Theology and Church which is issued by Tainan Theological College and Seminary.

Another two papers are under revision. The first one demonstrated the evolution of “China as the Other” discourse framework of postwar Taiwanese nationalism and analyzed its predicaments, namely, theoretical ineffectiveness, strategic unfeasibility, and moral undesirability, in the context of globalization and the rise of China. The second one, adopting a constructivist view, argued that the closer cross-strait economic relations after 2008 would better be viewed as the competition among three “economic nationalisms” of different national projects held respectively by Chinese soft-liner and Ma administration and Democratic Progressive Party of Taiwan rather than the dilemma between political animosity and economic interests as what many realist researchers used to assume.

Bearing the concerns of “Taiwan Exodus” in mind, right now Sia is in his primary stage of Ph.D. thesis to explore the role of Taiwan in the East Asian integration and any potential ways of both theory and practice to overcome the collision between nation-building and globalization.