The Historical Development Experience of East Asia: Growth, Regional Networks and the Developmental State

Abstract

The collapse of the system of foreign-controlled state-empires in East Asia saw a spread of local elites taking their chance, advancing claims to territory, creating states, building nations and thereafter pursuing various projects, each a local mix constructed from elite plans, subaltern expectations and the shifting demands of circumstances. A number of lines of intellectual commentary and policy advice emerged. Outsiders looked to the recapitulation of the models with which they were familiar. Europeans looked to Keynesian informed growth theory whilst Americans looked to modernization, later globalization, whilst, running in parallel, free market theorists simply celebrated the power of the competitive marketplace to maximize all human benefits. However, the replacement elites had their own concerns, and these ran with outside expectations only fortuitously because replacement elites sought their own embedding within regional and global networks, and what they came up with has subsequently been tagged the developmental state. It is, so to say, available in varieties; Japan gave the lead, the Asian Tigers followed, and later the strategy was picked up in Southeast Asia and finally in the historical core of the region, China. It can be understood as a distinctive way of reading the history, circumstances and available futures of the countries of East Asia.

This is derived from the original English-language text of a chapter that appeared in the Chinese-language edition of my book Development Theory (2011, Beijing, Social Science Publishing Press) entitled (in English) ‘The Development Experience of East Asia: Growth, Regional Networks and the Debate about the Developmental State’. It was originally published by Blackwell in 1996; it has not been previously published in this form; it has been amended and re-titled in order to amplify certain aspects of the argument.