I have put together a panel for the Association of Asian Studies Conference in
Hawaii in April 1996. Our application has already gone in, but we need to give
the organizers the name of a discussant for the panel by 10 of September. If any
of you are going to the Conference and are interested in my panel (I have
included the abstract of the panel and abstracts of all the papers below) and
would like to be a discussant please contact me by private e-mail message on
m_berger@central.murdoch.edu.au

Panel--

Panel Organizer: Dr. Mark T. Berger
Asian Studies and Development Studies
and the Centre for Research in Culture and Communication School of Humanities
Murdoch University, Murdoch W.A. Australia

Panel Chair: Dr. Ien Ang
Centre for Research in Culture and Communication School of Humanities Murdoch
University, Murdoch W.A. Australia

The Politics of the East-Asian Model: Culture and Capitalism in the Asia-Pacific

PANEL ABSTRACT

The coming of the Pacific Century has been increasingly proclaimed over the past
decade. The dynamic economic growth of East Asia (particularly Japan, South
Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) was already setting the region apart
from the rest of the world by the 1970s. By the 1980s the trend was seen to have
spread southward to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, while China's coastal
provinces had also become integral to the wider regional economic boom. Now the
governments of the Philippines, Vietnam and even India are attempting to follow
East Asia, while the people of Australia and the US, and a growing number of
other countries in the Americas and beyond, are also being exhorted to meet the
challenge of the rise of East Asia. The world is clearly in the midst of an
important shift in regional and global power relations with immense cultural
significance. Against the backdrop of the gradual alteration of an international
socio-cultural hierarchy which conferred particular privileges on and assigned
particular agency to 'occidentals', the discursive power of the East-Asian model
of capitalist development continues to grow. This is the main point of departure
for this panel. All of the papers in this panel seek to engage with the dominant
visions of the Pacific Century and the debate over the East-Asian model of
capitalist development by looking at specific themes and/or particular sites in
the Asia-Pacific. PAPER ABSTRACTS

1)

Gerard Greenfield
Asian Studies
School of Humanities Murdoch University, Murdoch W.A. Australia

"Fragmented Visions of Asia's Next Tiger: Vietnam in the Pacific Century"

After a decade of `renovation', a renewed optimism pervades commentaries on
Vietnam. Now its future has become tied to the shift in the locus of global
economic power to the Asia-Pacific that signifies the beginning of the so-called
`Pacific Century'. Within this vision of Vietnam as `Asia's next tiger' there is
an easy convergence of political commitments. The rationalist teleology of
modernization in Anglo-American narratives on Vietnam's market transition once
more promises economic development, while East Asian triumphalists welcome yet
another member to the East Asian club. It is this latter paradigm of the `East
Asian model' which now defines the modern imaginings of Vietnam's elites as they
remake themselves into an authoritarian regime presiding over capitalist
industrialization. In this paper it is argued that the vision articulated by
Vietnam's political and economic elites is due as much to their nationalist
aspirations and an ongoing nation-building project as it is to the fact that
they, more than anyone else, are benefiting from linkages to transnational
capital and a resurgent indigenous capitalist class, and the looting of state
assets under economic liberalization. However, the growing `social disorder'
among the subaltern classes has challenged not only the prospects of such a
vision being realized, but the very process by which it is manufactured and
maintained. This dominant vision is contested not at the national level but at
localized sites. It is places such as the mining areas of Quang Ninh where the
roots of fragmentation can be found.

2)

Mark T. Berger
Asian Studies and Development Studies
and the Centre for Research in Culture and Communication School of Humanities
Murdoch University, Murdoch W.A. Australia

"Yellow Mythologies: The East-Asia Model and Post-Cold War Capitalism"

Since the end of the Cold War, the dominant Anglo-American readings of the rise
of East Asia have been increasingly challenged by East Asian-based
cultural/racial narratives on the triumph of the 'East'. This paper will chart
the contours of the new East Asian triumphalism in relation to the continued
power of Anglo-American discourses on the Asia-Pacific and in the context of the
wider (re)turn to racism in North America and beyond. It will be emphasized that
the dominant East Asian visions are directly connected to the efforts of
Northeast Asian and Southeast Asian elites to maintain hegemony within, or gain
hegemony beyond, existing territorial boundaries and regional demarcations. At
the same time, the celebratory perspectives of East Asian elites (and the fears
of conservative commentators in the 'West') that the end of the Cold War will
produce a new global hegemonic configuration centered on East Asia are directly
challenged by the transnational processes of integration and differentiation
(globalization) characteristic of the late twentieth century. Furthermore, a
critical approach to globalization also undermines the utopian Anglo-American
vision of an ever more integrated regional and international system of
prosperous sovereign 'free-trading' nation-states, anticipated by supporters of
organizations such as the nascent Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum
(APEC). It will be argued that we have entered an era of post-Cold War
capitalist dystopia characterized by racialist politics, uneven capitalist
development and growing social inequality refracted through globalized processes
of cultural integration and fragmentation.

3)

Gregory Teal
Department of Organizational Behavior
National University of Singapore
10 Kent Ridge Crescent
Singapore 0511

"The Family, Private Property and the State: The Culturalist Ideology of East
Asian Development"

A diverse literature has emerged since the 1980s contending that the family and
familism in East and Southeast Asia is the key to the region's dynamic economic
growth. This paper first presents a critical reflection on the broad outlines of
the model as it is applied to the analysis of industrialization, industrial
organization, management and work. Second, I examine the empirical weaknesses of
the model. Third, I outline the ideological premises and the context behind much
of the current popular and intellectual representations of the model. The
familism model has a certain attraction, in that it appears to present an
alternative to the claims of neo-liberal economics of one universalistic model
of capitalist development. It also responds to the inadequacies of a purely
economic analysis of East Asian economic dynamism. The familism explanation has
an appeal to cultural theory, and it ties in with the current popularity of the
notion of the embeddedness of economic action. However, much of this writing
(including that along the lines of embeddedness) on the role of the family is
essentialist and ahistorical. It often shares with neo-liberal economic models
an amnesia with regards to the role of the state and the relations between
economic and political actors. It glosses over the ideological framework and
context, the role of culture in the legitimation of elite status and action, and
the cultural insecurity of economic and intellectual elites in the West due to
economic crises and the shift of gravity to the East.

4)

Yao Souchou
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
Heng Mui Keng Terrace
Pasir Panjang, Singapore 0511

"The Romance of Asian Capitalism: Geography, Desire, and the Chinese Traders in
Belaga, Sarawak, East Malaysia"

The current academic interest in 'Asian business' - particularly what Gordon
Redding calls 'The rise of Chinese capitalism' - can be seen as another round of
Western othering of the East. The discourse 'imagines' a perfection in the Asian
ways of doing business as dramatically different from the Western impersonal
corporatized organization. This paper is based on anthropological fieldwork
among Chinese traders in the town of Belaga, East Malaysia. It examines the
tension and processes of a business world in which family ownership and cultural
idioms like guan xi (relationship) and jen qing (sentiment) are still being
deployed. Kinship and family, so often argued to be the 'cause' of the success
of Chinese business, are shown to be at once an advantage and a burden on these
men in the conduct of their personal and economic life. The burden produces a
significant 'ideological text' which (over)emphasizes the marginality of the
outpost town in the jungle. The geography of Belaga becomes a site of physic
transaction which circulates the desire of the Chinese traders: a desire which
harbours all the cultural investment and practical imperfections of 'Chinese way
of doing business'.

_________________________________________________________________

DR. MARK T. BERGER
Asian Studies and Development Studies
and the Centre for Research in Culture and Communication SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES
MURDOCH UNIVERSITY
MURDOCH WA 6150 AUSTRALIA

fax # 09 310 6285 main phone # 09 360 2482 office # 09 360 2951
_________________________________________________________________ e-mail
m_berger[atx]central.murdoch.edu.au