Experts

Syaru Shirley Lin

Research Professor

Fast Facts

  • ​​​​​​Chair, Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation
  • Nonresident senior fellow, Brookings Institution
  • Adjunct professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong 
  • Former partner at Goldman Sachs
  • Founding board member of Alibaba Group and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation
  • Expertise on China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, East Asia, international political economy, international finance and banking, innovation and entrepreneurship, privatization

 

Areas Of Expertise

  • Foreign Affairs
  • Asia
  • Economic Issues
  • Finance and Banking
  • Trade

Syaru Shirley Lin, Miller Center research professor, is a nonresident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings Institution and an adjunct professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Lin chairs the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation (CAPRI), a new policy think tank conducting interdisciplinary, comparative research on innovative policies that can strengthen resilience and improve governance in the Asia Pacific. CAPRI currently acts as the Asia-Pacific Hub of the Reform for Resilience Commission and the Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience, two global initiatives that are reviewing the response to the COVID pandemic and developing proposals for better responses in the future.

Lin's research and teaching focus on cross-Strait relations, international and comparative political economy, and the challenges facing high-income societies in East Asia. She is the author of Taiwan’s China Dilemma: Contested Identities and Multiple Interests in Taiwan’s Cross-Strait Economic Policy (Stanford University Press, 2016) which was also published in Chinese in 2019. Her book highlights the linkage between Taiwan’s national identity and its foreign economic policy and analyzes the implications for Taiwan’s future relationship with China. She is now writing a book on six economies in the Asia Pacific region caught in the high-income trap, all of which are facing problems such as inequality, demographic decline, financialization, outdated education systems, increasingly polarized societies, inadequate policy and technological innovation, and climate change. Her analysis and commentary frequently appear in English and Chinese media.

Lin was the youngest woman partner as well as one of the first Asian partners of Goldman Sachs, where she led the firm’s investment efforts in Asia, managing private equity and venture capital investments in 12 countries and setting up its Tokyo operation. She spearheaded the firm’s investments in technology start-ups in Asia, making it one of the earliest and most successful investors in China. In that capacity, she led the first round of institutional investments in Alibaba and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. Prior to her work in private equity and venture capital, she specialized in the privatization of state-owned enterprises in China and Singapore.

Lin has served on the boards of numerous private and public companies and currently serves as a director of Langham Hospitality Investments, Goldman Sachs Asia Bank, TE Connectivity, and MediaTek. She is also a director of the Focused Ultrasound Foundation, which supports the development and adoption of new therapeutic medical technologies, and an advisor to the O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism and Structural Discrimination and Global Health.

A native of Taipei, Lin has been a resident of Hong Kong for three decades. Lin graduated, cum laude, from Harvard College and has also studied and worked in Tokyo and Madrid. After retiring from Goldman Sachs, she earned her masters and doctorate from the University of Hong Kong and launched a new career as a scholar, policy analyst, and corporate and non-profit director.

Featured Publications

Taiwan's China Dilemma
Taiwan's China Dilemma

Syaru Shirley Lin

title page
How Taiwan’s High-Income Trap Shapes Its Options in the U.S.-China Competition

Syaru Shirley Lin

Syaru Shirley Lin News Feed

UVA Today
Q&A: Is Covid-19 a perfect storm for U.S.-China relations?
Among its many other effects, the coronavirus pandemic has further complicated the United States’ already tense relationship with China. Syaru Shirley Lin, Compton Visiting Professor in World Politics at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, called the pandemic a “perfect storm” that has thrown tension between the two world superpowers into stark relief.
Syaru Shirley Lin UVA Today
Hong Kong
Autonomy limited: Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and the U.S.
For more than six months, widespread protests calling for greater autonomy and democracy have swept over Hong Kong. In early January, Taiwan will hold its quadrennial presidential and legislative elections. These developments reflect the emergence and consolidation of distinctive local identities in both Hong Kong and Taiwan—identities rooted not in ethnicity, since both places are predominantly Han Chinese, but in social and political values and political and economic systems that have become markedly different from those on mainland China. In light of this, China is attempting to increase its control over Hong Kong and to push for unification with Taiwan. It is claiming that its economic and governance models are just as legitimate and often more effective than those associated with the West. In response, the United States is increasing its interest in the success of Taiwan’s democratic institutions and market economy, and in the preservation of autonomy and freedom in Hong Kong, even as its own domestic institutions are coming under stress. Join us for an assessment of how these facts have become central to the growing competition.
Syaru Shirley Lin Miller Center Presents
CNBC
Taiwan heads to the polls in what is seen as a referendum on its relationship with China
“Taiwanese voters, for the first time, are voting between two candidates that have completely different visions of what Taiwan’s relationship is with China and the world,” said Shirley Lin, Compton Visiting Professor in World Politics at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia.
Syaru Shirley Lin CNBC
Los Angeles Times
Op-Ed: Will Taiwanese voters choose closer ties with China over democratic freedoms?
As Taiwanese voters prepare to go to the polls Saturday to elect their next president, they are choosing between two candidates who take fundamentally different positions on an issue whose implications go far beyond Taiwan: how to preserve a country’s democracy and freedom while maintaining economic relations with a neighboring giant that wants to subsume it.
Syaru Shirley Lin Los Angeles Times
Stimson Center
The Reality and Future of the Hong Kong Crisis
The 2019 protests in Hong Kong have riveted the world, as their focus has expanded from an extradition bill to alleged police misconduct, Hong Kong’s electoral system, and the broader relationship between Hong Kong and the government in Beijing. Understanding the history of the Sino-British negotiations, the deeper social, economic and political roots of the protests and the responses of Beijing and the Hong Kong government are of utmost importance into assess the future course for the city and proposed unification with Taiwan.
Syaru Shirley Lin The Stimson Center
China Leadership Monitor
Xi Jinping’s Taiwan Policy and Its Impact on Cross-Strait Relations
Since 2012, Xi Jinping has crafted a Taiwan policy that features two somewhat contradictory elements. On the one hand, it contains stronger measures aimed at deterring any steps toward independence, including a reduction of Taiwan’s international space, a continued military build-up, and frequent demonstrations of military force and economic coercion. On the other hand, Xi has also employed positive economic incentives, aimed largely at young people and the working class in Taiwan, to secure their support for eventual political unification with China.
Syaru Shirley Lin China Leadership Monitor