Personal experience inspires finalist for SUNY’s Distinguished PhD Graduate Dissertation Award

Taiwan has a strong economic connection to China. Why hasn’t this led to political cooperation?

This question has long haunted Huei-Jyun Ye, PhD ’23, first emerging after protests against the Taiwanese government for negotiating free trade with China. She turned it over in her head while working at the Chung-Hua Institution, a major economic think tank in Taiwan. When she came to Binghamton University, she made it the focus of her doctoral dissertation — a finalist for the State University of New York’s Distinguished PhD Graduate Dissertation Award.

In “Deals to be Determined: Domestic Political Uncertainties and Trade Negotiations,” Ye investigates trade negotiations between countries and how domestic political conditions can drive international economic cooperation — or not. Having participated in real negotiations, she knows firsthand that not every negotiation ends in successful trade agreements.

“It’s obvious to people when I point out that trade negotiations can fail, but no one ever thinks of it when analyzing international economic cooperation,” she said.

During her master’s program at National Taiwan University, Ye first focused on how European countries were able to coordinate and establish the European Union for economic and political cooperation. Her focus shifted to the Asian-Pacific region with her study of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Through her comparison of the two organizations, Ye became interested in the success of each and found her academic interest in economic and political integration.

New to the United States, Ye was drawn to Binghamton by the strength of its faculty and its academic program. The department’s support and encouragement helped keep her on track, especially her advisor, Associate Professor Katja Kleinberg. Plus, the seminars she took on international relations, foreign policy analysis and the international political economy laid the foundation for her dissertation research, she said.

“The methodology training opened my eyes and enhanced my analytical skills, and I realized the question that had been puzzling me for a long time wasn’t answered in any of the studies that we read,” she said.

Now a professor of political science at Wabash College in Indiana, Ye was surprised and thrilled that the question that occupied her mind for so long enabled her to find and fill a gap in the existing literature. The answers included other surprising revelations.

“You would think that some countries are cooperative because of their positions as world leaders, like the United States, but the United States happened to be a noncooperative actor in terms of trade cooperation,” she explained. “A lot of small countries are more active and collaborative than many so-called big economies in the world.”