Barbie's Taiwanese homecoming: a plastic, fantastic tale of globalization.

• Author: Dmitri, Holiday

Ku TSUEI-EH, who doesn't speak a lick of English, calls the plastic pop princess by her given Chinese name: Bahbi wa wa. The prim 49-year-old founder of Taiwan's recently opened Taishan Doll Museum gushes girlishly about the "product of her youth"--the Barbie dolls she used to dress during the 1980s as a contractor for the toy maker Mattel.

Barbie is revered like a messiah in Taishan, a municipality nine miles southwest of Taipei that the blonde doll transformed from an agricultural village of 5,000 to a manufacturing center nearly the size of Boston. When Mattel first broke ground here in 1967, Taiwan was still considered an underdeveloped country. But the Barbie factory, which was quickly followed by three others on the island, helped unleash an astonishing, foreign investment-led economic miracle. The island nation's economy grew by an annual average rate of 9-5 percent from 1960 to 1989, and by 6.4 percent from 1990 to 1995, shifting from subsistence farming to industry and services.

By the late 1980s, however, Barbie had moved on to cheaper labor markets such as Indonesia and China, leading Taiwanese workers to complain, just as Americans have in recent years, that their jobs had been "lost," "stolen," or "outsourced" to low-cost Third World labor. But the impact that Mattel left on the town, and the country, was indelible. Barbie generated enough momentum for Taishan to continue to thrive long after she left.

"Taiwan presents a textbook case of the economic and political merits arising from globalization," says Christopher Lingle, an economist at Francisco Marroquin University in Guatemala and the author of The Rise and Decline of the Asian Century. "Its linkage to the global trading system brought enormous riches that have been widely shared. These material improvements provided the national self-confidence that transformed Taiwan from a dictatorial, one-party political regime to one of the most vibrant democracies in Asia." The island, which is approximately the size of West Virginia, is the fifth largest economy in Asia, among the top 25 economies on the planet, and America's eighth biggest trading partner.

"At one point, more than half of the Barbie dolls worldwide were made in Taiwan," says Ku, who chairs the Taishan Township Office and Community Rebuilding Team, the group that spearheaded the creation of the Taishan Doll Museum, which opened on April 24, 2004. "Barbie shaped the lives of many Taishan residents. Now we're using...