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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
I propose to examine the resurgence of East Asia in the final decades of the long twentieth century in relation to three major forces that shape the era and the region: nationalism, regionalism and globalism. I understand contemporary globalism primarily in relation to the US bid to forge a hegemonic order predicated on military and diplomatic supremacy and neoliberal economic presuppositions enshrined in international institutions. “The characteristic policy vectors of neo-liberalism,” Richard Falk comments in his critique of the economic and social dimensions of globalism, “involve such moves as liberalization, privatization, minimizing economic regulation, rolling back welfare, reducing expenditures on public goods, tightening fiscal discipline, favoring freer flows of capital, strict controls on organized labor, tax reductions, and unrestricted currency repatriation.” It is the sum total of the effects of these measures, from the perspectives of global governance, social justice, and the environment, that drove his conclusions about Predatory Globalism, a volume that appeared in the year of the Seattle anti-globalization protests and a decade before the economic meltdown of 2008.
* An earlier version of this article was presented at Symposium: From Area Studies to Transregional Studies? Contours of Globalization in Asia's Re-integration, University of Iowa May 6-7, 2010. I am grateful to the participants in that conference, particularly its organizer Sonia Ryang, Prasenjit Duara and Gavan McCormack, for stimulating my thinking on the issues. This paper has also benefited from comments by Uradyn Bulag, Heonik Kwon, Taggart Murphy and Bin Wong.
1 This approach rejects the notion that global processes are something new under the sun. Rather it seeks to set off earlier global processes, some of which are described below, in contrast to contemporary manifestations of both regional and global processes.
2 Richard Falk, Predatory Globalization: A Critique (London: Polity Press, 1999) p. 2.
3 For discussion of concepts of region, see Shintaro Hamanaka, Asian Regionalism and Japan. The politics of membership in regional diplomatic, financial and trade groups, (London: Routledge, 2009), espec. pp. 3-5.
4 Cold War Frontiers in the Asia-Pacific: divided territories in the San Francisco system (London: Routledge, 2007).
5 Quintessential works in this literature are David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus. Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) (2nd edition, 2003); W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth. A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1962).
6 China was the geopolitical center of East Asia in the 18th century, but, as during the Mongol dynasty earlier, it was ruled by a steppe people, the Manchus, who in turn drew heavily on Mongol military and administrative strengths, thereby lending a distinctive multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan character to the Qing empire and its dealings with peoples on its borders, notably the Mongols, Tibetans and Uyghurs of Central Asia, as well as the peoples of Southeast Asia as well.
7 Takeshi Hamashita, edited by Mark Selden and Linda Grove, China, East Asia and the Global Economy: Regional and historical perspectives (London: Routledge, 2008); Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita and Mark Selden, eds., The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 year perspectives, London: Routledge, 2003; R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000; Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; Gary Hamilton, Commerce and Capitalism in Chinese Societies, London: Routledge, 2006; Hidetaka Yoshimatsu, The Political Economy of Regionalism in East Asia. Integrative Explanations for Dynamics and Challenges, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; Mark Beeson, Regionalism and Globalization in East Asia: Politics, Security and Economic Development, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; Francesca Bray, The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985; Nola Cooke and Li Tana, eds., Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750-1880, Lanham MD, Rowman and Littlefield, 2004; Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680 (2 vols), New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988 and 1993. The issues have been sharply debated by historians and economists in symposia in The Journal of Asian Studies, American Historical Review, and Modern China among others. They have also been examined by a range of Japanese and Chinese scholars. See especially Sugihara Kaoru's edited collection on the links between Japanese development, intra-Asian trade, and the Asian economies, Japan, China and the Growth of the Asian International Economy, 1850-1949, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, Linda Grove and Christian Daniel, eds. State and Society in China: Japanese Perspectives on Ming-Qing Social and Economic History (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1984); and Wang Hui, The Politics of Imagining Asia: Empires, Nations, Regional and Global Orders, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 8,1, 2007, pp. 1-34.
8 Our focus in this article is on East Asia. China's tributary trade order extended, of course, beyond East Asia, notably to Inner Asia, involving for example the Mongols, Tibetans and Manchus, and beyond to Southeast Asia, particularly the Vietnamese.
9 Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680 vol.2, p. 33.
10 Chapter 4: “Silver in Regional Economies and the World Economy: East Asia in the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries.” Translation by J.P. McDermott. China, East Asia and the Global Economy. Cf. Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT, especially pp. 131-64; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, espec. pp. 159-62, 267-74.
11 See for example Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001 2nd.ed); Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, 3rd Ed. Thousand Oaks, California: Pine Forge, 2006.
12 This is not to suggest the absence of armed conflict in Asia. China achieved the peak of territorial expansion during the 18th century, extending the reach of empire north and west into Inner Asia including incorporation of Tibet, Mongolia and Xinjiang, and China's informal reach extended into Southeast Asia as well. Most of China south of the Great Wall, however, and particularly coastal China, by contrast, enjoyed protracted peace. As did large areas of East Asia.
13 Alain Gresh, “From Thermopylae to the Twin Towers: The West's Selective Reading of History,” Le Monde Diplomatique, January 2009.
14 S. Sugiyama and Linda Grove, eds., Commercial Networks in Modern Asia, Richmond Surrey: Curzon, 2001, especially chapters by Hamashita Takeshi, Furuta Kazuko, Linda Grove; A.J.H. Latham and Heita Kawakatsu, eds., Intra-Asian Trade and the World Market, London: Routledge, 2006; K N Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
15 “Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region for our Times”. Presented at the Iowa Symposium, April 6-7, 2010.
16 “Anne Booth,” Did It Really Help to be a Japanese Colony? East Asian Economic Performance in Historical Perspective, “The Asia-Pacific Journal.
17 Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics, Paris: OECD Development Centre, 2003, cited in Booth, Table 3.
18 Samuel Ho, “Colonialism and Development: Korea, Taiwan, and Kwantung” in Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, p.382; Chihming Ka, Japanese Colonialism in Taiwan. Land Tenure, Development and Dependency, Boulder: Westview, 1995; Harry J. Lamley, “Waitwan Under Japanese Rule, 1895-1945. The Vicissitudes of Colonialism,” in Marray A. Rubinstein, ed., Taiwan: A New History, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1999.
19 Booth, “Did It Really Help to be a Japanese Colony,” Table 11. Booth shows that the pattern of metropolitan domination of the trade of the colonies was not universal. While the model well fit the Philippines (United States), in the late 1930s, trade dependence on the metropolis was less than twenty percent in the case Malaya (Britain) and Indonesia (Holland).
20 Hui-yu Caroline Ts'ai, Taiwan in Japan's Empire Building. An institutional approach to colonial engineering, London, Routledge, 2009.
21 Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann, eds., Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History. Colonialism, regionalism and borders, London, Routledge, 2008).
22 I am indebted to Heonik Kwon for clarifying the centrality of the colonial experience for understanding all wars of the post- World War II epoch.
23 Asia Redux, p. 11.
24 Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden, Revolution, Resistance and Reform in Village China, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005.
25 CIA—World Factbook. In per capita terms, Japan ranked 42nd ($32,600), South Korea 49th ($28,000), and China 128th ($6,600) with Hong Kong 15th ($42,700) and Taiwan 47th (29,800) (link). IMF calculations for nominal GDP for 2008 placed Japan second, China third and South Korea 15th. (link)
26 Yu Zhou, The Inside Story of China's High-Tech Industry. Making Silicon Valley in Beijing, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
27 Michael Roberge and Youkyung Lee, “China-Taiwan Relations,” Council on Foreign Relations, 2009.
28 Yu-huay Sun and Eugene Tang, Taiwan, China Start Direct Links as Relations Improve, Bloomberg December 15, 2008.
29 Daniel H. Rosen and Zhi Wang, “Deepening China-Taiwan Relations Through the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement,” Policy Brief 10-16, Peterson Institute for Internaitonal Economics, June 2010 www.iie.com/publications/pb/pb10-16.pdf. Rosen and Wang model the significant gains that Taiwan's economy is projected to make as a result of the agreement, and the necessity for Taiwan to act in light of the 2010 China-ASEAN agreement earlier in the year, with more modest economic gains anticipated for China.
30 To be sure, progress toward rapprochement has slowed under South Korean Pres. Lee Myung-bak.
31 There is a further recycling via Japan's multibillion dollar subsidy (the so-called sympathy payments) to pay for an estimated seventy percent of the vast US military component in Japan, and especially Okinawa, and further billions to support the projected shift of most or all of the US Marine component from Okinawa to Guam. See Gavan McCormack, Ampo's Troubled 50th: Hatoyama's Abortive Rebellion, Okinawa's Mounting Resistance and the US-Japan Relationship, “three part article, The Asia-Pacific Journal, May 31, 2010.
32 US Treasury Department.
33 Mark Landler, “Dollar Shift: Chinese Pockets Filled as Americans' Emptied,” The New York Times, December 25, 2008; R. Taggart Murphy, Asia and the Meltdown of American Finance; Kosuke Takahashi and R. Taggart Murphy, The US and the Temptation of Dollar Seignorage; James Fallows, “Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money,” Atlantic Monthly, December 2008.
34 This is not to suggest that rapid economic growth can only occur in a peaceful milieu. Japan's post-WWII recovery and economic growth was in part a product of an industrialization fostered by the US as a means to support the Korean and Vietnam wars. Likewise the postwar US economic boom from 1945-1968 occurred in the midst of, and was fueled by, war and preparation for war. Both US and Japanese gains were bought at the price of devastation of Korea and Indochina. Stated differently, the US could enjoy the long “peace” of the postwar decades at home while its wars abroad in the post-colonial periphery of Asia were experienced as the extension of war and occupation that were the hallmarks of the colonial era. Heonik Kwon astutely assesses this bifurcation in a book in progress.
35 For recent discussion of the Kondratieff moment, see Immanuel Wallerstein interviewed by Jae-Jung Suh, Capitalism's Demise? The Asia-Pacific Journal; and, especially Robert Brenner interviewed by Jeong Seong-jin, Overproduction not Financial Collapse is the Heart of the Crisis: the US, East Asia, and the World, The Asia-Pacific Journal; and R. Taggart Murphy, In the Eye of the Storm: Updating the Economics of Global Turbulence, an Introduction to Robert Brenner's Update, The Asia-Pacific Journal.
36 Douglas H. Brooks and Changchun Hua, “Asian Trade and Global Linkages,” ADB Institute Working Paper No. 122, December, 2008, “Intra-regional Trade of Major Regions (1988-2007), Fig. 6, p. 10.
37 World Trade Organization, International Trade Statistics 2009. Trade by Region. Table 1.6. See also Prema-chandra Athukorala, ed. “The Rise of Asia. Trade and investment in Global Perspective,” espec. Athukorala and Hal Hill, “Asian trade and investment. Patterns and trends,” pp. 11-57.
38 Athukorala and Hill provide further data and discussion of foreign investment in China in regional and global perspective for the years 1984-2007, as well as sectoral data, pp. 37-52.
39 Other instances that merit comparative analysis are the Geneva Conference on Indochina of 1955 and the Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung in the same year, both heralding the importance of newly emerging nations in a post-colonial world.
40 See Xinjun Zhang, “China's ‘Peaceful Rise’, ‘Harmonious’ Foreign Relations, and Legal Confrontation and Lessons From the Sino-Japanese Dispute Over the East China Sea,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, April 16, 2010; Suisheng Zhao, “China's Global Search for Energy Security: cooperation and competition in the Asia-Pacific,” Journal of Contemporary China, issue 55, 2008, pp. 207-27; Michael Richardson, A Southward Thrust for China's Energy Diplomacy in the South China Sea, The Asia-Pacific Journal, and David Rosenberg, Managing the Resources of the China Seas: China's Bilateral Fisheries Agreements with Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam, The Asia-Pacific Journal.
41 Gavan McCormack, Client State: Japan in America's Embrace, London: Routledge, 2007; Gavan McCormack, Ampo's Troubled 50th: Hatoyama's Abortive Rebellion, Okinawa's Mounting Resistance and the US-Japan Relationship, The Asia-Pacific Journal, 22-3-10, May 31, 2010; Kensei Yoshida, Okinawa and Guam: In the Shadow of U.S. and Japanese “Global Defense Posture,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 26-2-10, June 28, 2010.
42 The combination of Japan's military power and the aspirations of neo-nationalist politicians suggests other possible outcomes. The MSDF presence in the Indian Ocean since 2003 tasked with refueling US and allied ships in the Afghan War, means that Japan's navy has taken up positions critical to guaranteeing its oil supplies from the Middle East. Similarly, plans are under review for an active military role in response to Somali hijacking of Japanese ships. See Michael Penn, “Somali Pirates and Political Winds Drive Japan to the Gate of Tears off Somalia,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 4-2-09, January 20, 2009.
43 “An East Asian Community and Japan-China Relations”, JISS Commentary 89, 2010.
44 Mark Beeson, “East Asian Regionalism and the Asia-Pacific: After American Hegemony,” The Asia-Pacific Journal.
45 Xetrade, “Japan, South Korea, China: trilateral ties, tensions”; Brad Setser, This Doesn't Look Good: Taiwan, Korea and China Exports Tank, The Asia-Pacific Journal.
46 Joel Rathaus, “China-Japan-Korea trilateral cooperation and the East Asian Community, East Asia Forum, June 15, 2010. The first round of research was completed in 2010 with plans to complete the study by 2012.
47 William Underwood, “Redress Crossroads in Japan: Decisive Phase in Campaigns to Compensate Korean and Chinese Wartime Forced Laborers,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 30-1-10, July 26, 2010; Ivy Lee, “Toward Reconciliation: The Nishimatsu Settlements for Chinese Forced Labor in World War Two,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, August 9, 2010; but see also the alternative perspective advanced by Kang Jian, “Rejected by All Plaintiffs: Failure of the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa “Settlement “with Chinese Forced Laborers in Wartime Japan,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, August 9, 2010.
48 David Shambaugh, “China Engages Asia: Reshaping the Regional Order,” International Security 29.3 (2004), pp. 64-99.
49 Peter J. Katzenstein, “Japan in the American Imperium: Rethinking Security,” The Asia-Pacific Journal; Richard Tanter, The Maritime Self-Defence Force Mission in the Indian Ocean: Afghanistan, NATO and Japan's Political Impasse, The Asia-Pacific Journal; Mel Gurtov, Reconciling Japan and China, The Asia-Pacific Journal; Gavan McCormack, “Conservatism” and “Nationalism”. The Japan Puzzle, The Asia-Pacific Journal.
50 South Korean navy pursues hijacked oil tanker, BBC News, April 5, 2010; Harth Pant, “China's Naval Expansion in the Indian Ocean and India-China Rivalry” The Asia-Pacific Journal May 3, 2010.
51 Dana Priest and William Arkin, three part series in The Washington Post, July 19, 20, 21, 2010 beginning with “A Hidden World Growing Beyond Control.” Privatization has proceeded rapidly since at least the George W. Bush administration. What is striking is that this has now penetrated the consciousness of the establishment as illustrated by the Washington Post series and an hour long PBS Frontline program on Top Secret America to screen in October. The Washington Post has established a special homepage and data base on the more than 45 government organizations and 1931 companies to track the story, Cf. Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008).
52 Beeson, East Asian Regionalism and the Asia-Pacific: After American Hegemony.
53 John McGlynn, Politics in Command: The “International” Investigation into the Sinking of the Cheonan and the Risk of a New Korean War, “The Asia-Pacific Journal, June 14, 2010; Seunghun Lee, J.J.Suh, “Rush to Judgment; Inconsistencies in South Korea's Cheonan Report, “The Asia-Pacific Journal July 10, 2010; Rick Rozoff, “U.S Risks Military Clash With China In Yellow Sea, “Global Research, July 16, 2010.
54 Peter J. Katzenstein, A world of regions: Asia and Europe in the American imperium (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
55 Yonson Ahn, The Contested Heritage of Koguryo/Gaogouli and China-Korea Conflict, The Asia-Pacific Journal, http://japanfocus.org/-Yonson-Ahn/2631
56 On the environmental obstacles to China's continued rise, see Paul Harris, Confronting Environmental Change in East and Southeast Asia: Eco-politics, Foreign Policy, and Sustainable Development (UN University Press, 2005).
57 John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 402. This is Mearsheimer's assumption about a China that succeeds in extending its developmental drive to become a wealthy nation. See Mark Beeson's discussion of hegemony in postwar East Asia, “Hegemonic transition in East Asia? The dynamics of Chinese and American power,” Review of International Studies (2009), 35, pp. 95–112.
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