Leveraging Coordination Capacity: Medical Resource Mobilization in Asia’s Developmental States During COVID-19

Speaker: Wei-Ting Yen, Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Moderator: Qin Gao, Maurice V. Russell Professor of Social Policy and Social Work Practice, Associate Dean for Doctoral Education, Director of China Center for Social Policy, Columbia School of Social Work

Wei-Ting Yen examines how South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, three developmental states, adopted distinct medical resource strategies during the early phase of COVID-19. She argues that differences in pre-crisis industrial coordination capacity shaped whether and how states prioritized test kits, masks, or vaccines. Her talk draws on comparative cases and process tracing to highlight domestic production capacity as a key institutional driver of rapid crisis.

Speaker’s Bio:
Dr. Wei-Ting Yen is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica. Previously, she was an assistant professor of the Government Department at Franklin and Marshall College and was recognized as a Mellon High Impact Emerging Scholar. Dr. Yen studies democratic governance, comparative political economy, and the welfare state in Asia. Her work explores how economic insecurity shapes welfare development. She also studies the politics of COVID-19 in comparative angle.

This event is part of the 2025-2026 lecture series “COVID-19 Governance and Impacts: China from Comparative Perspectives.” The series will be part of the China COVID Project, a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary research initiative funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. It aims to spotlight new empirical and theoretical research that interrogates China’s post-COVID standing through social, economic, political, and gender-based lenses. It features scholars working on governance, public health, digital statecraft, labor, gender, and civil society responses in China and Asia. The series will foster public dialogue and contribute to documentation and analysis of the pandemic’s legacy.

This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and cosponsored by the Columbia China Center for Social Policy and the Andrew J. Nathan Taiwan Lecture Series.

Registration:

• To attend this event in-person, please register HERE.
• To attend this event online, please register HERE.