Extended state infrastructure power in an age of networked competition: The cases of Thailand and Taiwan

Abstract

Scholars have highlighted the emergence of infrastructure as a key domain in the struggle over network centrality in what some call the ‘Second Cold War’ between the U.S. and China. We qualify this ‘infrastructural turn’ by drawing attention to the contingent nature of state infrastructural power as depending on key domestic firms that often serve as intermediaries between domestic infrastructure and global supply chains or international partners. Utilising empirical case studies based on field research conducted between 2021 and 2023 in Thailand and Taiwan, we analyse the ways in which state infrastructure power is exercised through strategic negotiation between national politics of the state and territorial investment decisions of multinational and major domestic firms within global supply chains. The study highlights how outcomes of state projects to foster connectivity or centrality in networks are shaped by contingent and sometimes ad-hoc coalitions between state agencies and domestic and multinational companies with their own interests and agency. In the case of Taiwan, the centrality of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to global supply chains makes it an important player amidst continued U.S.-China tension. In Thailand, CP Group’s connections to China have afforded it a role as an interlocutor between Thailand and China, allowing it to obtain state infrastructure contracts. Through comparative case studies the paper complicates both ‘globalist’ and methodologically nationalist perspectives on the ‘infrastructural turn’, and introduces the concept of ‘extended state infrastructural power’ to account for this complex, networked exercise of state authority.