the whole Chinese economy was dependent on the big foreign banks in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Qingdao, and Wuhan, and on powerful [foreign] companies… The customs, the administration of the salt tax, and the postal service were run by foreigners, who kept all the profits. Western and Japanese warships and merchant shipping were everywhere — in the ports, on the coast, and on the Yangzi River network. Apart from a few Chinese firms… the whole modern sector of industry (cloth mills, tobacco factories, railways, shipping, cement works, soap factories, flour mills and, in the towns, the distribution of gas, water and electricity, and public transport) was under the control of foreign companies. [292]
China’s plight during this period is illustrated by the fact that in 1820 its per capita GDP was $600, in 1850 it was still $600, by 1870 it had fallen to $530, in 1890 it was $540, rising very slightly to $552 in 1913 — still well below its level in 1820, almost a century earlier. By 1950 it had fallen to a mere $439, just over 73 per cent of its 1820 level, and lower than in 1850. [293] These figures reveal the disastrous performance of the Chinese economy over a period of 120 years, with foreign intervention and occupation being the single most important reason. It is hardly surprising that China now refers to the period 1850–1950 as the ‘century of humiliation’. Over eighty years after the Meiji Restoration — and well over a century and a half since the commencement of Britain ’s Industrial Revolution — China had barely begun its economic take-off.
Apart from restoring the country’s unity, the central task facing the PRC was industrialization. To this end, it engaged in a huge project of land redistribution and the creation of large communes, from which it extracted considerable agricultural surpluses in the form of peasant taxes, which it then used to invest in the construction of a heavy industry sector. Its economic policy marked a major break with past practice, eschewing the use of the market and relying instead on the state and central planning in the manner of the Soviet Union. Despite the wild vicissitudes of Mao’s rule, China achieved an impressive annual growth rate of 4.4 per cent between 1950 and 1980, [294] more than quadrupling the country’s GDP [295] and more than doubling its per capita GDP. [296] This compared favourably with India, which only managed to increase its GDP by less than three times during the same period and its per capita GDP by around 50 per cent. [297] China ’s social performance was even more impressive. It enhanced its Human Development Index (a measure of a country’s development using a range of yardsticks including per capita GDP, living standards, education and health) [298] by four and a half times (in contrast to India’s increase of three and a half times) as a result of placing a huge emphasis on education, tackling illiteracy, promoting equality (including gender) and improving healthcare. [299] This strategy also enabled China to avoid some of the problems that plagued many other Asian, African and Latin American countries, such as widespread poverty in rural areas, huge disparities of wealth between rich and poor, major discrepancies in the opportunities for men and women, large shanty towns of unemployed urban dwellers, and poor educational and health provision. [300] The price paid for these advances, in terms of the absence or loss of personal freedoms and the death and destruction which resulted from some of Mao’s policies, was great, but they undoubtedly helped to sustain popular support for the government.
The first phase of Communist government marked a huge turnaround in China ’s fortunes. During these years, the groundwork was laid for industrialization and modernization, the failure of which had haunted the previous century of Chinese history. The first phase of the PRC, from 1949 to 1978, reversed a century of growing failure, restored unity and stability to the country, and secured the kind of economic take-off that had evaded previous regimes. Despite the disastrous violations and excesses of Mao, the foundations of China ’s extraordinary transformation were laid during the Maoist era. The 1949 Revolution proved, unlike that of 1911, to be one of China ’s most important historical turning points.
5. Contested Modernity
Since we got there first, we think we have the inside track on the modern condition,
and our natural tendency is to universalize from our own experience. In fact, how
ever, our taste of the modern world has been highly distinctive, so much so that John
Schrecker has seen fit to characterize the West as ‘the most provincial of all great
contemporary civilizations’… Never have Westerners had to take other peoples’
views of us really seriously. Nor, like the representatives of all other great cultures,
have we been compelled to take fundamental stock of our own culture, deliberately
dismantle large portions of it, and put it back together again in order to survive.
This circumstance has engendered what may be the ultimate paradox, namely that
Westerners, who have done more than any other people to create the modern world,
are in certain respects the least capable of comprehending it.
Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China
When a Western tourist first sets foot in Shanghai, Tokyo or Kuala Lumpur, peers up at the shiny high-rise buildings, casts an eye over the streets teeming with cars, walks around the shopping malls filled with the latest, and often familiar, goodies, his reaction is frequently: ‘It’s so modern!’, and then, with barely a pause for breath, ‘It’s so Western.’ And so, at one level, it is. These are countries in which living standards have been transformed — in a few cases, they are now on a par with those in the West. It is hardly surprising then that they share with the West much of the furniture and fittings of modernity. There is a natural tendency in all of us — an iron law perhaps — to measure the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar: we are all relativists at heart. As we see objects and modes of behaviour that we are accustomed to, so we think of them as being the same as ours. When we recognize signs of modernization and progress, we regard them as evidence that the society or culture is headed in the same direction as ours, albeit some way behind. As yet one more McDonald’s opens in China, it is seen as proof positive that China is getting more Western, that it is becoming ever more like us.
Of course these impressions are accentuated by the places frequented by Westerners. Businessmen land at an international airport, travel by taxi to an international hotel, go to meetings in the financial district and then return home. This is the ultimate homogenizing experience. Modern airports are designed to look the same wherever they may be, so give or take an abundance of Chinese eateries, Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok Airport could be Paris, Munich or Montreal. International hotels are similarly place-less, designed to meet an international formula rather than to convey any local flavour: in the lobby of an international hotel, one could be forgiven for thinking that most men on the planet wear suits, speak English and read the International Herald Tribune.
One might think that the experience of the expatriate who chooses to live in East Asia for a period is more illuminating. And sometimes it is. But all too often they inhabit something akin to a Western cocoon. A significant proportion of Westerners who live in East Asia are based in Singapore or Hong Kong, city-states which have gone out of their way to make themselves attractive to Western expats. Hong Kong, as a British colony for nearly a century and a half, still bears the colonial imprint, while Singapore, more than any other place in the region, has sought to make itself into the Asian home of Western multinationals, a kind of Little West in the heart of Asia. It is hardly surprising then that precious few expats in these city-states make any attempt to learn Mandarin or Cantonese: they feel there is no need. The great majority live in a handful of salubrious, Western-style residential ‘colonies’, enjoying a life of some privilege, such that for the most part they are thoroughly insulated from the host community: living in the Mid-Levels area on Hong Kong Island or Discovery Bay is a very different experience from Shatin in the New Territories.
The net result is that most Westerners, be they tourists, businessmen or expats, sp
end most of their time in a familiar, sanitized, Western-style environment, making the occasional foray into the host culture rather than actually living in it: they see these countries through a Western distorting mirror. It would be wrong to suggest that we can understand nothing from observing the hardware of modernity — the buildings, malls, consumer products and entertainment complexes: they tell us about levels of development, priorities, and sometimes cultural difference too. However, the key to understanding Asian modernity, like Western modernity, lies not in the hardware but in the software — the ways of relating, the values and beliefs, the customs, the institutions, the language, the rituals and festivals, the role of the family. This is far more difficult to penetrate, and even more difficult to make sense of.
THE RISE OF EAST ASIAN MODERNITY
For the first half of the twentieth century the cluster of countries that had experienced economic take-off in the nineteenth century continued to dominate the elite club of industrialized nations, with virtually no additions or alternations. It was as if the pattern of the pre-1914 world had frozen, with no means of entry for those who had missed the window of economic opportunity afforded during the previous century. [301] In the 1950s the school of ‘dependency theory’ generalized this state of affairs into the proposition that it was now impossible for other countries to break into the ranks of the more advanced nations. But there were good reasons why the economic ground froze over. While large parts of the world had remained colonized the possibilities of economic growth and take-off were extremely limited. Futhermore, two world wars sapped the energies not only of the main combatants but of much of the rest of the world as well.
From the late 1950s onwards, there appeared the first stirrings of profound change in East Asia. Japan was recovering from the ravages of war at great speed — but as a fully paid-up member of the pre- 1914 club of industrialized countries, its economic prowess was hardly new. Rather, what caught the eye was the rapid economic growth of the first group of Asian tigers — South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. They were small in number and even smaller in size — a medium-sized nation, a small country and two tiny city-states, all newly independent, apart from Hong Kong, which was still a colony. They had, in varying degrees, been debilitated by the war, in Korea ’s case also by the Korean War, and were bereft of natural resources, [302] but they began to grow at breakneck speed, with Taiwan and South Korea often recording annual growth rates of close to double-digit figures in the following three decades. [303] By the late 1970s they had been joined by Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Some of the later Asian tigers — China being the outstanding example — achieved, if anything, even faster rates of growth than the early ones. The world had never before witnessed such rapid growth. (Britain’s GDP expanded at a shade over 2 per cent and the United States at slightly over 4.2 per cent per annum between 1820 and 1870, their fastest period of growth in the nineteenth century.) [304] The result has been the rapid and progressive transformation of a region with a population of around 2 billion people, with poverty levels falling to less than a quarter by 2007 (compared with 29.5 per cent in 2006 and 69 per cent in 1990). [305]
The myth that it was impossible for latecomers to break into the club of advanced nations has been exploded. The Asian tigers have instead demonstrated that latecomers can enjoy major advantages: they can learn from the experience of others, draw on and apply existing technologies, leapfrog old technologies, use the latest know-how and play catch-up to great effect. Their economic approach, furthermore, has largely been homespun, owing relatively little to neo-liberalism or the Washington Consensus — the dominant Western ideology from the late seventies until the financial meltdown in 2008. [306] Nor is their novelty confined to the economic sphere. The Asian tigers have given birth to a new kind of political governance, namely the developmental state, whose popular legitimacy rests not on democratic elections but the ability of the state to deliver continued economic growth. [307] The rise of the Asian tigers, however, has an altogether more fundamental import. Hitherto, with the exception of Japan, modernity has been a Western monopoly. This monopoly has now been decisively broken. Modernization theory, which was very influential in American scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s, held, like Karl Marx, that the developing countries would increasingly come to resemble the developed world. [308] We can now test this proposition by reference to the East Asian experience.
SPEED OF TRANSITION
A defining characteristic of all the Asian tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam) [309] has been the speed of their transformation. In 1950 they were still overwhelmingly agrarian and had barely started the process of industrialization. In 1950 79 % of South Korea ’s population worked in agriculture (relatively little changed from 91 % in 1920); by 1960 the figure was 61 %, and today it is around 10 %. In the late 1960s the farming population still comprised half of Taiwan ’s total population, whereas today it accounts for a mere 8 %. [310] The figure for Indonesia in 1960 was 75 % compared with 44 % today, for Thailand 84 % compared with 46 %, and for Malaysia 63 % compared with 18 %. [311] Eighty-five per cent of the population of China worked in agriculture in 1950, but today that figure is hovering around 50 %. A similar story can be told in terms of the shift from the countryside to the cities. In 1950 76 % of Taiwanese lived in the countryside, whereas by 1989 — in a period of just thirty-nine years — that figure had been almost exactly reversed, with 74 % living in cities. [312] The urban population in South Korea was 18 % in 1950 and 80 % in 1994; while in Malaysia, which took off later, the equivalent figures were 27 % in 1970 and 53 % in 1990. [313] In China the urban population represented 17 % of the total population in 1975 and is projected to be 46 % by 2015. [314] We could also add Japan in this context, which experienced extremely rapid growth rates following the Second World War, its GDP increasing by a factor of over fourteen between 1950 and 1990 as it recovered from the devastation of the war and completed its economic take-off with a major shift of its population from the countryside to the cities. Between 1950 and 1973, its most rapid period of growth, its GDP grew at an annual rate of 9.29 %.
Compared with Europe, the speed of the shift from the countryside to the cities is exceptional. Germany’s urban population grew from 15 % in 1850 to 49 % in 1910 (roughly coinciding with its industrial revolution), and 53 % in 1950. The equivalent figures for France were 19 % in 1850 and 38 % in 1910 (and 68 % in 1970). England’s urban population was 23 % in 1800, 45 % in 1850, and 75 % in 1910. In the United States, the urban population was 14 % in 1850, 42 % in 1910, and 57 % in 1950. [315] If we take South Korea as our point of comparison (with a population broadly similar to that of Britain and France), the proportion of its population living in cities increased by 62 % in 44 years, compared with 52 % for England over a period of 110 years, 34 % over 60 years for Germany (and 38 % over 100 years), 19 % over 60 years for France (and 49 % over 120 years), and 28 % over 60 years (and 43 % over 100 years) for the United States. In other words, the rate of urbanization in South Korea was well over twice that of Germany’s — the fastest of these European examples — and was achieved in approximately two-thirds of the time; it was three times quicker than France’s, taking roughly two-thirds of the time, and twice as quick as that of the United States in two-thirds of the time.
The shift from the countryside to the cities, from working on the land to working in industry, is the decisive moment in the emergence of modernity. From experiencing life on the land, where little changes from one year to the next, or from one generation to another, industrialization marks a tumultuous transformation in people’s circumstances, where uncertainty replaces predictability, the future can no longer be viewed or predicted in terms of the past, and where people are required to look forwards rather than backwards. In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the shift towards modernity as an increasingly mass phenomenon was confined to a small minority of the world, namely the West and Jap
an, but by the early twenty-first century it had become an increasingly mass phenomenon in much of East Asia too, with the change occurring far more rapidly in East Asia than it had earlier in Europe or North America. This relative speed of change had two important implications for the nature of East Asian modernities, which distinguishes them from their European and North American counterparts.
1. The Proximity of the Past
The fact that large-scale agrarian employment has been such a recent experience for the Asian tigers means that the past is heavily imprinted on the present and the legacy of tradition remains a living force in the era of mass modernity. Let me put this point in more human terms. In South Korea and Taiwan, the great majority of grandparents, around half of parents over fifty, and significant numbers of those over forty, will all have spent at least some of their lives working on the land. In China, where half the population still works on the land, that rural imprint is commensurately larger: not only will the great majority of grandparents have worked on the land, but so will the great majority of those over forty. As one would expect, this has a profound influence on the way in which people think and behave. Almost three-quarters of the inhabitants of Taipei, for instance, regard themselves as migrants: every Chinese New Year, the trains are booked for weeks in advance and Taiwan’s north-south expressway is clogged for hours on end as the vast bulk of the capital’s inhabitants make the journey south to celebrate the festival back in what they still regard as their ancestral homes. The same kind of phenomenon is repeated throughout East Asia. Shanghai is a huge metropolis of 20 million people, plus more than 3 million who move in and out of the city every day seeking work of one kind or another, including many farmers who occupy numerous pavements trying to sell their fruit and vegetables. [316] Shanghai, like many cities in the region, encapsulates a remarkable juxtaposition of the present and the past, of modernity and tradition existing cheek by jowl, as was once the case in European cities. The difference is that because East Asia is changing so quickly, the contrast between the past and the present is much more visible and far more pronounced than it was in nineteenth-century European cities.
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