The East Asian Miracle Developmental State Asian Values Notes

The East Asian Miracle, Developmental State & Asian Values

INTRODUCTION

What was the ‘East Asian Miracle’?

• Signifies the rapid industrialization and unparalleled growth (in excess of 7% per year) of 23 economies across East Asia from 1965-90.

• Japan, the ‘Four Tigers’ – Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan – and the ‘newly industrializing economies’ (NIEs) of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.

• Managed to avoid the fiscal deficits and balance of payments difficulties that so-often plagued developing economies, e.g. Latin America.

• For many, interest in the ‘East Asian Miracle’ is fear-driven: Does East Asia’s economic triumph signal the decline of Anglo-American neoliberal hegemony and the ‘Washington Consensus’*? Others have responded by ‘looking East’ in a ‘grail-like quest for what Woo-Cumings called the ‘regional solipsism’ of an ‘Asian developmental model’.

• These debates have been as much ideological as methodological or epistemological.

Scope

This essay assesses the viability of ‘Asian values’ in explaining the ‘East Asian Miracle’. I argue that East Asia’s economic boom is a temporal phenomenon with limited transferability beyond its specific context. It is not a product of idiosyncratic Confucian ethics – for such claims are essentialist and ideologically charged – but rather, the ‘virtuous interplay’ of other factors, such as the ‘developmental state’ (focusing on Japan and South Korea) and international geopolitical posture of affairs.

THE ‘ASIAN VALUES’ (CULTURALIST) DEBATE

The ‘Asian values’ discourse emerged in 1979 with the publications Herman Kahn’s The Japanese Challenge, Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One: Lessons for America and Roy Hofheinz’ The Eastasia Edge.

Unlike the 1950s-60s where development experts saw forces of tradition and modernity as conflicting; culturalist scholars hold that certain values intrinsic to Asian/Confucian culture have fashioned a distinctive (and arguably ‘superior’) politico-economic system.

So-called ‘Asian values’ include:

8. The nature of man ‘is expressed not through particular desires or acts of will, but through social interaction and bonds of responsibility/obligation’.

• Kahn proposes a ‘Confucian ethic’ whose communitarian spirit contrasts the individualism of Max Weber’s ‘Protestant ethic’ such that it is ‘more adept at industrialization than the West’.

• ‘Asian values’, for Kahn, were uniquely conducive to ‘the creation of dedicated, motivated, responsible and educated individuals’, as well as ‘the enhanced sense of commitment, organizational identity and loyalty to various institutions’ that underpinned East Asia’s unprecedented growth.

Critique

• Amartya Sen and Amitav Acharya: ‘Takes Asia as a cultural monolith’ and overstates regional homogeneity* (e.g. Islamic underpinnings of Malaysia and Indonesia)

• Asian Barometer Survey (ABS): popular attachment to Confucian civic norms across 5 countries was ‘miles wide but only inches deep’, with attachment levels being significantly higher in the 3 non-democracies of China, Vietnam and Singapore.

• Norms of frugality, hierarchical relations and hard-work among others are not confined to Asia but visible, for instance, in start-up organizational structures worldwide.

• Culture becomes a reified and unchanging normative system that shapes social behaviour, as opposed to ‘a ‘signifying system’ through which changing material reality is interpreted reproduced, experienced and explored’ [Jayasuriya, 1998]

• Orientalism

Conveying ‘Asian’ and ‘Western’ values as binary opposites prevents mutual learning, and fosters ‘Orientalist’ thinking among Western intellectuals/policymakers.

• Successful EA economies are modern fulfilments of the Orientalist project – conceived and executed, this time by Orientals themselves…

• Reverse Orientalism (instrumentalism)

Appropriated by Asian leaders like Lee Kuan Yew, Mahathir Mohammed and Suharto in a nation-building process that sought to promote East Asian exceptionalism, instil collective social discipline and ‘inoculate’ their populations against corrosive ‘Western’ norms like hedonism, crime, divorce and drug-abuse.

• Leveraged to produce a nationalistic rallying point that ‘secures elite power by appealing to emotive symbols of legitimacy’ [Jayasuriya, 1998].

• Cult of personality – Lee Kuan Yew portrayed as a ‘quintessential Confucian leader’: austere, remote, authoritarian, and intensely concerned with national welfare.

• Lee promoted bilingualism as a way of nurturing ‘cultural ballast’ – ‘the supposedly innate strength that comes from identification with one’s cultural heritage’ [Lee, 1991] – in Singaporean youth.

• In the absence of an independent sphere of civil society, pluralist politics (i.e. democracy) is...

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