Discussion with Ya-Wen Lei, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University.
Thursday, April 9, 2026
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Haines 279
Please email Sam to request a copy of Prof. Lei's paper before attending the discussion.
How are intensive production and social reproduction linked in advanced semiconductor manufacturing, and how is this linkage reconfigured through transnational industrial transplantation? This article examines TSMC’s relocation of leading-edge chipmaking from Taiwan to the United States amid geopolitically driven reindustrialization. Drawing on ethnographic research and 86 interviews with engineers and spouses, I argue intensive semiconductor production depends on a gendered labor regime assemblage linking production to infrastructures and norms of social reproduction. While fabrication processes are transplantable, this assemblage cannot be coherently reassembled cross-border. Institutional destabilization occurs as expatriate families lose Taiwan’s reproductive infrastructures, undermining a previously consented gendered bargain sustaining overwork. Normative destabilization arises among local hires: Taiwanese immigrants recruited as cultural brokers experience eroding consent as U.S. embeddedness conflicts with transplanted expectations, while non-Taiwanese engineers more openly resist these demands. These dynamics show how industrial transplantation falters when transplanted production regimes become misaligned with locally embedded reproductive arrangements.
Ya-Wen Lei is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. She is also affiliated with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. Trained in both law and sociology, she holds a LL.M. and a J.S.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan.
Sam Robbins samrobbins97@g.ucla.edu
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies, Department of Sociology