Transatlantic Environment and Energy Politics: Comparative and International Perspectives – Edited by Miranda A. Schreurs, Henrik Selin, and Stacy D. VanDeveer

tance of national security imperatives in shaping S&T initiatives.One important episode was in 1965 following the PRC's detonation of its first atomic bomb.Greene does devote a few pages to examining the event, which she says is a turning point in the KMT's approach to S&T development, especially the emergence of a coordinated state effort to conduct nuclear-related S&T work.But there is only passing mention of the Chungshan Institute of S&T, one of the ROC's premier R&D facilities belonging to the Defense Ministry, and a major source of technological and industrial innovation in an otherwise barren landscape.Another surprising weakness is that the study ends in the early 1980s when Taiwan's S&T efforts begin to assume growing momentum and success.Although Greene does provide a concise summary of Taiwan's technological achievements in the 1980s and 1990s in the concluding chapter, it is an anticlimax compared with the careful and detailed examination in the preceding chapters of the previous 50 years of KMT approaches to S&T development.In the concluding chapter, Greene compares Taiwan's experience with the PRC's approach to S&T development in the post-1978 era.She declares that the PRC authorities are "following a very similar approach to what we have seen in the ROC" (p.163), pointing to the emphasis on science planning, science education, and state and private sector coordination of R&D.While Greene rightly points out that a scientific renaissance is currently under way in the PRC, she argues with little conviction that policy makers in Beijing had much to learn from their Taiwanese counterparts.In fact, the PRC has looked to the experiences of Japan, South Korea, Europe, and the United States for more relevant insights than Taiwan.This is because the huge size and organizational structure of the Chinese economy and its S&T establishment is very different from its much smaller Taiwanese counterpart.While Taiwan may have some useful lessons in S&T development to offer, especially its horizontal linkages with the global technology order, they are likely to be of limited value for the PRC.Despite these limitations, this book overall helps to provide new insights into understanding the critical factors required for latecomer developmental states to successfully utilize S&T policy in their modernization efforts.

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