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Since leaving the Foreign Service in 2002, my work with Greater China is most often associated with U.S.-China clean energy cooperation. That makes sense — that was the focus of the non-profit I founded in 2011, the book I published through the Wilson Center in 2012 and the BE Better program for low-carbon industrial park built environments which the China Partnership of Greater Philadelphia (CPGP) team and I developed through 2021.

However, the prior decade of work which I had done previously through the GC3 Strategy consultancy had a very different focus –on Taiwan as the world’s leader in advanced chip manufacturing and on the vulnerability of global supply chains due to Taiwan’s proximity to China. That earlier work became less active and visible as CPGP’s U.S.-China clean energy cooperation work earned support from Mayor Nutter (2012) and was subsequently competitively selected by the U.S. Departments of State and Energy for one of a very limited number of official U.S.-China EcoPartner awards (2014-21) in partnership with the TEDA EcoCenter in Philadelphia’s Sister City, Tianjin. But my Wikipedia profile gives equal prominence to both sets of work and noted “Cooke is known for his work on U.S.-China-Taiwan commercial interactions. As early as 2002, he was drawing attention to the issue of advanced semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan and the vulnerability of global information and communication technology (ICT) supply chains.”

In 2022, my old chip chops have acquired some new relevance in light of China’s no-holds-barred bid for technology supremacy and the passage of the Biden Administration’s CHIPS Act. Here is a dusting off of some of the accomplishments from that earlier set of work:

• Three-time Invited Congressional Commission Expert Witness at the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s Public Hearings on Global Supply Chains and Cross-Straits Security Issues (109^th, 108^th, and 107^th Sessions of the U.S. Congress)
• Director and Head of Partnership Development, Asia at the World Economic Forum  (with strategic focus on ICT, Energy, Transportation, Finance industries)
• Author of The Politics of Greater China’s Integration into the Global Info Tech Supply Chain in The Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 13, No. 40; and of Taiwan’s FTA Prospects from the Global IT Supply Chain Perspective in Economic Integration, Democratization and National Security in East Asia, edited by Peter C.Y. Chow
• Green Team Leader on Cross-Straits Economics, U.S. Dept. of Defense/Defense Intelligence Agency Strategic Coercion Wargame convened by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)
• Invited Non-Governmental Expert Participant, Asian Scenario Seminar Game at the Army War College, Carlisle, PA
• Co-organizer of The Role of Taiwan in the Post-WTO Global Supply Chain Workshop at the 19^th Modern Engineering & Technology Seminar
• Official Host (“Ambassador”) for the Taiwan Delegation at World Congress on Information Technology XV in Austin TX
• Featured Speaker & Seminar Consultant – RAND Corporation, MITRE Corporation
• Keynote/Plenary Speaker at large scale media (Forbes, BusinessWeek, Reuters, The Economist Conference Group) and investor (Berkshire-Hathaway-themed 3^rd Annual Global Investment Conference, China’s Financial Markets Conference, New York Cleantech Investors Forum, National Association of Business Economists/NABE) conferences
• Moderator at Fabless Semiconductor Association and Wharton China Business Forum annual conference events
• Advisor on Global Business Outreach, The Lauder Institute, University of Pennsylvania
• Invited Think-tank Speaker: CSIS, AEI, Heritage, Brookings, etc

Since the termination of the U.S-China EcoPartnership program in 2021 and, in particular, since China’s unilateral breaking off of all bi-national coooperation for climate change mitigation following Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, I have returned exclusively to the issues of Taiwan, microchips and vulnerable ICT supply chains in my commercial work with Greater China. Currently, I am pursuing that primarily through consultancy engagements with private companies and through introductions provided by GLG, CapVision and other expert networks.

I hope that this retrospective review will help readers keep pace with the sharp break I am taking from the past decade-plus of China-centric work supporting U.S.-China clean energy programs at the bi-national level and stepping back to Taiwan-centric advanced technology markets. This change in my personal focus entails a change in posture towards China — from cooperation to reduce green house gas emissions through a bi-national program to stark competition to help the U.S. and its allies maintain leadership in 21st c. technologies vital to national security. (More prosaically, this change also entails a change in business platforms — from the CPGP non-profit to the GC3 Strategy consultancy S-corp.). This change in focus will become increasingly apparent here in the Assessing China/TEA Collaboration blog over the months and years ahead.

A shift in gears but I hope you’ll continue to enjoy the ride.