I am Professor of Political Science, Asian Studies and Science, Technology & Society at Union College in New York, and I was the Director of Asian Studies (2019-22). You can connect with me on LinkedIn.
From 2024 to 2026, I am on leave, serving as a Senior Advisor at the U.S Department of Commerce, working in the Bureau of Industry & Security, International Policy Office on China policy, export controls and technology policy (Disclaimer: All information and opinions on this site are purely my own as a private citizen, and they do not necessarily represent the opinion or positions of the U.S. Department of Commerce)
In 2023-34, I was a Wilson Center China Fellow, working on research about the effects of US export controls on China’s emerging technologies, the broader industrial ecosystems, and their effectiveness in achieving American policy goals and the transformations in US export controls from the Cold War, post-Cold War and current eras.
In 2021-22, I was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow for Tenured International Relations Scholars (IAF-TIRS), through which I worked at the World Bank in the Trade & International Integration Research Group.
In 2019, I was the Hallsworth Visiting Professor at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester, working on research on power in global value chains.
In 2016-17, I was a visiting scholar at the Strategic Management and Public Policy Department at the School of Business, George Washington University.
And in 2013-14, I was the An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. I’ve also been a visiting scholar at the School of Government at Peking University and the Shandong Institute of East Asian Studies in Jinan, China.
My research has been funded by Fulbright fellowships, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Lemelson Technology Grants, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, the National Security Education Program, the Blakemore Foundation, among many other smaller grants. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and my BA from Princeton University in Philosophy, summa cum laude.
Focusing on China, my current research straddles four disciplines: geopolitics, industrial organization, technological innovation and the political economy of development. All four fields overlap in new and surprising ways, such that one cannot understand one field, without a deep understanding of the others. As my Research page shows, I have published in leading peer-reviewed journals in all four fields of study. The common thread among them is Global Value Chains (GVCs), which have created functional interdependence between countries and between firms through decades of production fragmentation, creating a highly articulated global division of labor. While this functional integration traditionally was studied through the lens of development and efficiencies, since around 2017, the world learned about its risks, vulnerabilities and weaponization, due to COVID-19, US-China trade and technology tensions and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
For a few videos which summarize my research, you can read and watch my Congressional testimony before the US-China Economic & Security Review Commission on “US-China Competition in Global Supply Chains”. And I delivered the Kaplan Lecture at Brandeis University in 2022 on “The Return of Geopolitics: Global Value Chains, Emerging Technologies & US-China Relations.” I also moderated an interview with Peter Cleveland (TSMC) and Brittany Masalosalo (3M) on supply chains for the National Committee for US-China Relations. See my Media for other media appearances. For more in-depth and theoretical treatments, please see my research publications. A more macro perspective is a World Bank study on “Massive Modularity: Understanding Industry Organization in the Digital Age” with my co-authors, Eric Thun (@Oxford), Daria Taglioni (@World Bank) and Timothy Sturgeon (@MIT).
I’ve been involved in policy-oriented discussion on the geopolitics of technology in US-China relations with CSIS-Chey Institute (on semiconductor export controls, supply chains and modularity), National Bureau of Asian Research and Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania, among others.
I’m also involved with the Templeton Institute of Engineering and Computer Science at Union College, which combines engineering and CS with liberal arts. I served on the Planning Committee and am a member of the Steering Committee, along with the Artificial Intelligence Presidential Working Group. I also teach a Templeton course, called Artificial Intelligence: Technology, Organization, Governance and Visions of the Future.
My current research and teaching focus on the intersection of China, global value chains, and emerging and foundational technologies, especially in information-communication technologies (5G mobile telecommunications, software, semiconductors and digital infrastructure), Chinese industrial and technology policies, and US-China relations. Several of my current projects (with many fabulous co-authors) examines the ‘stack’ of modular technologies across many ICT sectors. We are developing new concepts in organizational theory and strategic management — Massive Modular Ecosystems — which we believe best characterizes unique organizational features of all digital technologies. MMEs exhibit emergent organizational evolution with implications for Chinese development and national security, export controls, industrial policy, antitrust and other regulatory areas for all countries. Among other topics, we are examining: the deepening of country-level and firm-level technological specialization and integration; the changing roles of Chinese firms and their inter-firm linkages in this ecosystem; the redundancies, substitutability, vulnerabilities and chokepoints in GVCs for the US, China and other countries; the implications for industrial and technology policies and for decoupling as a rules-based globalization is up-ended. My research projects are spread over several distinct but overlapping areas, which will be integrated in my book project. I start by summarizing my industrial organization and technology research topics, because these create the “structural” background conditions that shape Chinese political economy, policymaking and geopolitics.
1) Research on “Massive Modular Ecosystems” which is an emergent and complex macro-organizational structure that formed through digital technologies and modularity. With my brilliant co-authors (Daria Taglioni @World Bank, Tim Sturgeon @MIT, Eric Thun @Oxford), we inductively ‘discovered’ it through 600+ mobile handset teardown reports (from 2004-2021) which contain data on every component in each phone, along with a trove of other equally detailed data sources. We have two very short World Bank blogs that summarize some of our ideas here and here, and a VoxEU piece. Our full World Bank working paper is entitled Massive Modularity: Understanding Industry Organization in the Digital Age . However, this framework has subsequently been updated in a new manuscript, currently Revise & Resubmit (Research Policy), and also branching into other papers. Please email me for the latest version.
2) Research on how industrial organization distorts policy, including export control policies and military technology roadmaps. Although preliminary, during my Wilson Center China Fellowship, I created a new framework to understand the ‘effectiveness’ and ‘effects’ of export controls on Chinese firms. While most researchers believe Chinese policymakers and firms have reacted to export controls through ‘workarounds’ and ‘catching up,’ my Wilson Center paper shows many other potential pathways that are a function of industrial organization that allows substantial innovative flexibility.
In a second paper, I show how industrial organization (‘Massive Modularity’) allowed commercial semiconductor firms to surpass military standards, thus reversing a decades-long trend, in which military technologies pushed forward the cutting edge, which were later spun-off into commercial applications.
3) some studies of open source contributions to Android Operating System using a dataset of millions of software contributions (with Jimmy Shiu @National Chengkung University).
We have a couple Working Paper:
“Generational technological change on the Android platform: Adaptive conformity and its effects on product distinctiveness” (with Jing-Ming Shiu and Liang-Chun Chen)
“Varieties of generational technology transitions: The Android platform, complementors and sequential ambidexterity in organizational learning” (with Jing-Ming Shiu and Zih-Rong Wang)
4) several studies on the telecom standard-setting process in 3GPP, on open innovation, interfirm collaboration networks, social capital and network theory (with Jimmy Shiu @National Chengkung University).
Three papers are now published:
A friend of a friend? Social capital and networks in telecommunications standard-setting organizations in Technological Forecasting & Social Change(with Jing-Ming Shiu and Hui-Hsuan Huang)
Power in consensus: Legitimacy, global value chains and inequality in telecommunications standard-setting in Global Networks (with Jing-Ming Shiu)
Collaboration and Social Capital in Meta-Organizations: Bonding or Bridging? (with Jing-Ming Shiu and Po-Hsun Lin)
We also have two other Working Papers:
“The Formation and Effects of Social Capital in Telecommunications Standard-setting Organizations” (with Jing-Ming Shiu and Hui-Hsuan Huang)
and
“The paradox of ‘institutionalizing dynamism’: Stability and change in high-tech standard-setting” (with Jing-Ming Shiu and Yu-Lan Chen)
US-China tensions over technology: With industrial organization as background, another set of projects examine the dynamic evolution since the early 2000s of Chinese industrial and technology policies, and US reactions, including economic coercion.
5) Chinese perceptions of American economic coercion:
With Abe Newman @Georgetown, Yeling Tan @Oxford and Henry Farrell @SAIS, we have published a forthcoming article in ISQ on Chinese bureaucratic perceptions of interdependence and technological vulnerability, using a large Chinese newspaper dataset with over 500,000 articles from 2005-2020. We are examining the impact of US export controls (and other policies), and the Snowden revelations on Chinese reactions as reflected in Chinese newspapers (and Chinese policies) in terms of the relative salience of “security” and “development.”
Other research areas and datasets concerning US-China relations that I’m working on:
6) China’s new export control and sanctioning regimes. This research compares China’s policy evolution in export controls, which in recent years has shifted from one that shadowed multilateral export control regimes into one that focuses on China’s unique national interests. While part of this is to retaliate tit-for-tat against American actions, the industrial structures of the industries that each side is weaponizing are very different, creating an asymmetry beyond the control of policymakers.
7) Applications of US sanctions legislation, including export controls and tariffs and other forms of economic coercion. I am examining the implications of industrial organization on the capacity of Chinese firms and government policy to react effectively to US ‘weaponization’ of supply chains. I am using a comprehensive dataset of all Chinese firms on BIS’s Entity List, which codes each BIS Federal Register Notice, along with many of the datasets mentioned earlier.
Other exciting projects include:
8) a study on the role of mobile OS platforms on the distribution of power in mobile app GVCs (with Umair Choksy @ U Stirling and Matt Alford @U Manchester).
We have one paper that is R&R (Journal of Economic Geography):
“Power and governance in the mobile app global value chain: The case of Pakistan” (with Umair Choksy and Matthew Alford)
9) research on Brazilian development in GVCs (with Tim Sturgeon @MIT)
China Transactional Trade and Investment Data Project
A longer-term project examines Global Value Chains through the lens of complexity theory and emergence in China and the East Asian region with the intersection of “big data” and qualitative research methods (concept formation, categorization and measurement). In 2013, I initiated a large and on-going project called the China Transactional Trade and Investment Data Project. An important component of CTTID is a unique database on Chinese trade. Together with colleagues in Computer Science, Economics and Statistics, we have acquired and installed a large-scale database which records every import and export transaction conducted by Chinese firms (a few hundred million transactions in all). In addition, I have collected other large data sets, which I use to observe in detail the organization of Chinese, East Asian and trans-regional trade, FDI and production networks, all with an eye for better understanding both the organization of the international economy, as well as China’s integration with it and the policy implications of fragmented production for China and developing countries. This is a project with which many students have also been involved. The large-scale size of the databases mean that analysis is extraordinarily time consuming and ripe for collaboration.
Using these data along with materials from extensive fieldwork in China, I am writing a book entitled Fragmented Development: China, East Asia and Emergent Global Production, which details the fragmentation of global production and trade, the effects on and adaptations of Beijing policymakers, local governments and producer groups, the role of industrial and other policies, and regional development. I also have many articles and book chapters on these topics, which can be found under my research.
Please feel free to contact me (dallasm@union.edu) and let me know your interests if you would like to collaborate.
