Monthly Archives: February 2004

by Joel | 3 February 2004 · 11:17 pm

Cultural vs. Situational Factors in East Asian Industrialization

In 1991, Ezra Vogel published a slim volume that attempted to analyze for lay audiences some of the reasons why certain East Asian nations achieved notable success in industrializing. He compared Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, which he labelled the “Four Little Dragons.” Here are some highlights, from a book review published in 1994.

British and American advocates of minimal government interference in the marketplace will be countered not just by how different the role of Hong Kong’s government has been from the other little dragons, but by the historical perspective offered in the introductory chapter, where Vogel notes that only the earliest wave of industrialization, in England and later the United States, had the luxury of a rather leisurely pace of industrialization with relatively little government direction. The later waves in continental Europe and then East Asia had to rely much more heavily on government to secure the ever larger amounts of capital, complex technology, and skilled labor needed to leap the ever-widening gap between preindustrial and industrial society. Each new entrant in the race to industrialize had a clearer view of the finish line and ran down a better-trodden path to get there.

East Asian nationalists who, like European and American imperialists before them, tend to credit their success primarily to their own harder work and superior cultural heritage, will be forced to consider Vogel’s lists of the many situational factors that aided their efforts. And anti-American nationalists will object to the prominent position of U.S. aid on those lists. Vogel enumerates new global opportunities offered by the postwar world: (1) The United States, supremely self-confident and fervently anticommunist, was willing to open its markets and universities and share industrial technology with its allies to an unprecedented degree. (2) Thanks to the demise of colonialism and to bitter lessons learned during the prewar depression, international trade was far less restricted than before. (3) The growth of mass consumption enabled smaller countries to achieve manufacturing economies of scale that their domestic markets could not have supported. (4) Large Western corporations acquired a multinational outlook that placed loyalty to profits above loyalty to country of origin, making them willing, for profit, “to buy, sell, and lend anywhere in the world” (p. 11).

Vogel also lists more particular situational advantages East Asia enjoyed during the postwar period: (1) The U.S. poured in massive amounts of aid to build a bulwark against communism. Just as the Japanese economy benefited from U.S. procurement during the Korean War, the other regional economies benefited during the Vietnam War. (2) Confucian conservatives were discredited and large landowners were dispossessed. The postwar governments were not beholden to the traditional elite, so they were free to concentrate on production of new goods, not control of existing assets. (3) A keen awareness of external military threats and of inadequate land and natural resources lent an urgency that made leaders more willing to cooperate and citizens more willing to sacrifice for the common good. (4) Each country had large numbers of refugees and displaced people who comprised an “eager and plentiful labor force” (p. 88) dependent on their labor, not their land, for income. (5) Japan’s pioneering effort provided the little dragons with a goal, a way to get there, and the confidence that they could succeed in their drive to industrialize. As wages rose in Japan, corporations there were willing to transfer limited technology and manufacturing capacity to the other East Asian countries. However, some of those countries, most notably South Korea, succeeded in transferring more technology than Japan intended.

Did particular cultural traditions shared by East Asian societies confer any advantages? Vogel begins his chapter on explanations by downplaying the role of Confucianism in the spread of industrialization. He asks whether the ongoing industrial transformations of Islamic Malaysia and Turkey, Buddhist Thailand, and Roman Catholic Brazil and Mexico will not utterly invalidate cultural tradition as an explanatory factor. He further notes that Confucianism was blamed just as frequently during the 1940s and 1950s for retarding modernization, and asks why China, the heartland of Confucianism, has been slower to industrialize than the periphery, even before the socialist era. In answer, Vogel offers a tantalizing suggestion:

“If anything, just as Max Weber found that the greatest drive to industrialize in his time came in areas located far from Catholic orthodoxy, so in East Asia industrialization prospered in areas far from the centers of traditional Confucian orthodoxy, where trade and commerce were most highly developed. And successes occurred not under the old Confucian-style governments but in societies that had cast them aside for new governments, with very different political systems.” (p. 84) …

It is long past time to lay aside such vague, chauvinist notions as the Protestant ethic, the Confucian ethic, or the samurai spirit, and examine instead the more specific cultural traditions that aided industrialization. Vogel identifies four such traditions shared by Japan and the little dragons: (1) a “meritocratically selected bureaucracy” (p. 93) that not only implemented policy decisions, but formulated them; (2) an entrance examination system that afforded the means to overcome feudal favoritism and channel the most talented people into key leadership positions; (3) an emphasis on group loyalty and subordination of individual to group demands that well suited the level of centralized coordination needed to effect a modern industrial transformation; and (4) a tradition of lifelong self-cultivation.

Of course, the challenge today is not just to find a way for all nations to climb onto an industrial plateau, but to find ways to keep scaling new heights of innovation and growth in a postindustrial world. Orthodoxies of all kinds still seem to be among the primary obstacles.

SOURCE: Review of The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia, by Ezra F. Vogel (Harvard U. Press, 1991).

Samoan Slavery Sentencing Stalls

The end of the biggest human trafficking case in U.S. history seemed imminent, with Attorney General John Ashcroft calling a news conference to proclaim victory over “an assault on the nation’s core beliefs.”

Ashcroft announced Thursday that the South Korean owner of an American Samoa factory engaged in modern-day slavery would learn his fate in hours — and the sentence of seven Texas men who repeatedly raped women smuggled into the country had already been decided.

“Today, Kil Soo Lee faces the laws — and the justice — of the United States,” Ashcroft said of the former owner of the Daewoosa Samoa Ltd. Factory in American Samoa.

Yet in federal court in Honolulu, some 4,800 miles away from Washington, Lee’s sentencing, already delayed seven months, was put off for nearly four more months.

The U.S. Dept. of Justice press release from February 2003 reports the convictions, and The Guardian spells out more of the appalling details.

A Female Empress in Japan? Why Not?

The Japanese Diet appears to be moving ahead at its normal, glacial pace to provide for the possibility of a female empress. The Guardian reported the story soon after Princess Aiko’s second birthday in December.

Japan is preparing to revise its succession law to allow women to ascend the 2,600-year-old Chrysanthemum Throne for the first time in more than two centuries.

The change could see Princess Aiko, the two-year-old daughter of the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Naruhito, become only the ninth female to head the world’s oldest monarchy.

“We are planning to accept a reigning empress in our final report,” Taro Nakayama, who chairs a parliamentary committee on constitutional issues, said in an interview published yesterday in the Sankei Shimbun newspaper.

Mr Nakayama said the revision could be made as early as next year. “Since Japan had eight reigning empresses in history, succession by a new empress would not be strange,” he said.

Now the Associated Press has gotten around to reporting the same story. Perhaps we’re just seeing a slow release of trial balloons.

Torajan Carvers in Exotic England

Anthropologist Nigel Barley invited a team of Indonesian woodcarvers from Torajaland to build an exhibit at the British Museum. They found the British to be an exotic people.

The first shock for them was that all British were not white. West Indians look to them like Irian Jayans, the Indonesian half of New Guinea, so they tended to expect them to talk Indonesian. Chinatown did not surprise them. ‘Chinese are good at business. They get everywhere.’ Indians they would assume to be Arabs. The most mortifying experience was to discover that there was no slot ‘Indonesian’ in English folk categories and that they themselves would be regarded as Chinese.

A second shock was that all Europeans were not rich. Admittedly, they had seen young puttypersons [i.e., orang putih ‘white person’, like orang utan ‘inland person’] in Torajaland playing at being poor, but everyone knew they would be carrying larger sums of money than a Torajan farmer would see in a lifetime. Why did I have no servants, no car, and no chauffeur? They were distressed by the drunks who roam the streets of London, being unused to situations where you pretend that people shouting at you are not there. That people should have no work and receive money from the government staggered them like right-wing Tories. Surely they had misunderstood. Were these people not pensioners? Had they not at some time been in the army and were receiving money for their wounds?

They arrived at a moment of high political activity, just days before a General Election, and were amazed at the lack of respect we show politicians. ‘We would go to jail for that!’ was their constant cry. Yet it should not be assumed that they envied us our freedom. To them, it appeared more as lack of order, as messy and reprehensible ill-management. Johannis summed it up swiftly, ‘I see that England is a place where no one respects anyone.’

The position of the Queen puzzled them too. Like many foreigners they found it hard to imagine the relationship between a female prime minister and a female sovereign and drew the inevitable conclusion that only women are eligible for positions of power in this strange land. ‘It is like the Minang people of Sumatera,’ they opined with appropriate ethnographic example. ‘There it is the women who own everything and the poor men are sent abroad to work for them. You are just like them. We feel sorry for you.’

SOURCE: Nigel Barley, Not a Hazardous Sport (Henry Holt, 1988), pp. 182-183.

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by Joel | 1 February 2004 · 8:08 pm

The German Pacific "Gutpela Taim Bipo"

Germany acquired its colonial empire in the Pacific beginning in the 1880s and lost it abruptly in 1914. Conventional wisdom usually assumes that one colonial administration was as bad as another and that colonial transitions usually made little difference to the indigenous population. However, the new military administrators who took over from the Germans in Micronesia, Samoa, and New Guinea ran so roughshod over their new territories that the inhabitants of all three regions soon began to look back on German times as the good old days–at least according to a meticulously researched revisionist history of that transition entitled The Neglected War: The German South Pacific and the Influence of World War I, by Hermann Joseph Hiery (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1995).

While Germany’s African colonies were governed by aristocrats, often with the aid of sizable contingents of Schutztruppe (colonial troops), the farflung Pacific colonies were governed by administrators drawn from the middle class, with the aid of tiny police forces.

In New Guinea they replaced the “Perpetuum Bellum Melanesicum” with a Pax Germanica, which attracted more and more unpacified Melanesians. But they also generally let Melanesian villagers settle their own disputes in traditional ways, often by compensation for damages rather than by the trial and conviction of offenders before German courts. This was in marked contrast to the later Australian administration, under whom flogging, the pillory (“Field Punishment No. 1”), and public executions became not only far more common, but far more arbitrarily applied. The Australians also began to dispossess indigenous plantation owners and to impose new restrictions on native dress and education. (For instance, New Guineans were prohibited from speaking proper English and from wearing nonnative garments on the upper half of their bodies.)

In Micronesia, the laissez-faire attitude of the German administration gave way to the much more hands-on approach of the Japanese, who modernized the island economies with unprecedented force and speed. By 1921, the value of exports from Micronesia had already exceeded the value of imports. (And by 1940, the population of Micronesia was over 50% of foreign origin.) The islanders were forced to assimilate to Japanese norms in every respect.

Perhaps the most incompetent new administrator, however, was Col. Robert Logan, New Zealand’s military governor of German Samoa. Whereas Wilhelmine Germany and oligarchical Samoa had shared basic values about social hierarchies and ritual forms of behavior, “the Samoans perceived the ‘democratically’ undifferentiated behavior of New Zealanders as an insult and expression of open disregard for Samoan mores” (p. 250). During the war years, New Zealand bled dry the Samoan treasury, and the fiercely anti-Chinese and anti-American Logan also issued discriminatory edicts against their representatives in Samoa. Worst of all, Logan allowed an influenza-infected ship from New Zealand, the Talune, to dock in 1918, then stubbornly refused either to implement strict quarantines, as the American administrator had done in eastern Samoa, or to accept American medical aid. “Rarely would anti-American prejudice have more disastrous consequences than in Samoa under New Zealand occupation” (p. 174). As a result, about 20% of the population of western Samoa died, while eastern (American) Samoa escaped virtually unscathed. (New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark issued an apology to Samoa in 2002.)

Among the many other gems Hiery’s archival research unearths is a dispirited quote from Woodrow Wilson recorded in the minutes of a meeting at Versailles on 28 January 1919: “the question of deciding the disposal of the German colonies was not vital to the world in any respect.” He seems to have anticipated by exactly half a century Henry Kissinger’s alleged comment about Micronesia in 1969: “There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?”

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Filed under Germany, Japan, Micronesia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Polynesia