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East Asia

East Asia

The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

East Asia

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Introduction

The West’s perception of China as a historical entity has evolved over the centuries. China has gone from a country of miracles and marvels in the medieval world and a refined and erudite culture in early modern Europe, to become a nation without history or progress since the Enlightenment of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The first historians of China were, in fact, representatives of the great Western empires at the end of the 19th century and their work perceives China from epistemological positions that clearly form part of the Orientalist and colonial thought that was characteristic of the period.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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Introduction

History written throughout the 20th century, despite the efforts made to overcome the prejudices of the past, was unable to distance itself completely from some of the resources used in representation or the stereotypes that the Western world had come to accept about China and East Asia since the Enlightenment.

Only in recent decades has a critical historiography appeared to denounce the problems inherent in the discourse produced on China, and even this has failed to address them fully.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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Introduction

What is Orientalism?

Orientalism is a term that is used by art historians, literary and cultural studies scholars for the imitation or depiction of aspects in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East Asian cultures (Eastern cultures).

These depictions are usually done by writers, designers and artists from the West. In particular, Orientalist painting, depicting more specifically "the Middle East", was one of the many specialisms of 19th-century Academic art, and the literature of Western countries took a similar interest in Oriental themes.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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Introduction

What is Orientalism?

Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, much academic discourse has begun to use the term "Orientalism" to refer to a general patronizing Western attitude towards Middle Eastern, Asian and North African societies.

In Said's analysis, the West essentializes these societies as static and undeveloped—thereby fabricating a view of Oriental culture that can be studied, depicted, and reproduced.

Implicit in this fabrication, writes Said, is the idea that Western society is developed, rational, flexible, and superior.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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Introduction

What is Culturalism?

Culturalism is a concept in philosophy and sociology originally developed by the Polish-American philosopher and sociologist, Florian Znaniecki to describe the central importance of culture as an organizing force in human affairs.

The term was introduced in his book Cultural Reality (1919) in English and later translated into Polish as kulturalizm.

Znaniecki had introduced a similar concept in earlier Polish language publications, which he described as humanism (humanizm). The same concept is also occasionally referred to as new humanism or Znaniecki's humanism.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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Introduction

What is Culturalism?

Znaniecki's culturalism was based on philosophies and theories of Matthew Arnold (Culture and Anarchy), Friedrich Nietzsche (voluntarism), Henri Bergson (creative evolutionism), Wilhelm Dilthey (philosophy of life), William James, John Dewey (pragmatism) and Ferdinand C. Schiller (humanism).

Znaniecki was critical of a number of then-prevalent philosophical viewpoints: intellectualism, idealism realism naturalism and rationalism. He was also critical of irrationalism and intuitionism.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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Introduction

What is Historiography?

Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches.

Scholars discuss historiography by topic – such as the "historiography of the United Kingdom", the "historiography of Canada", "historiography of the British Empire", the "historiography of early Islam", the "historiography of China" – and different approaches and genres, such as political history and social history.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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Introduction

What is Historiography?

Beginning in the nineteenth century, with the ascent of academic history, there developed a body of historiographic literature.

The extent to which historians are influenced by their own groups and loyalties – such as to their nation state – is a debated question.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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Introduction

As with other leading intellectuals of the 1920s, Russell was invited to Peking University to give a series of courses about what in China was perceived as “Western knowledge”, around the time of the 1919.

In The Problem of China, Russell offers a very critical look at the actions of the Western powers in China and tries to distance himself from the ethnocentric perspective which at the time characterized the majority of publications about Asian countries reaching the European public.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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Introduction

Russell is particularly critical of some of the more fundamental principles of Western modernity, such as the idea of progress, which is viewed from the prism of the disastrous events that had gripped Europe in the preceding years. In 1916, this critical attitude towards the West had led him to be imprisoned for six months; the result of his anti-war stance.

the ideas referred to by Russell (tradition, a lack of progress, the stability of the Chinese world) became –by taking them on, justifying them or reinterpreting them– the intellectual scaffold with which the majority of Western analysts and historians from the late 18th century to the 20th century have tackled the Chinese world.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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The Formation of a Historical Discourse on China

Catholic missions acted as the utmost exponent of the relations between the Chinese Empire and Europe.

they offered China the friendlier face of the European world, that of the arts and sciences, which they used as an advertisement to spread Christian doctrine among Chinese intellectuals, at the same time conveying to the West a benevolent and friendly view of the Chinese world, interested in justifying their mission and their method.

Consequently, they abandoned their religious habits to adopt the ceremonial robes of the Chinese officials, they learned cultured language, they studied Chinese history and they analyzed and translated the Confucian classics.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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The Formation of a Historical Discourse on China

Confucianism, for example, reached Europe as a moral philosophy that predated the values of Christianity, an idea that was very well received among some 17th-century intellectuals who began to preach the need for a natural religion outside the domain of the Church and who saw in Chinese thought a source of inspiration.

China became a country governed by a philosopher king with the assistance of literati who are selected by taking into consideration nothing more than their intellectual and moral standing.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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The Formation of a Historical Discourse on China

Chinese culture was strongly criticized by the other orders, giving rise to the so-called Rites Controversy: the Society of Jesus ended up being dissolved by the Papacy, and the less tolerant Catholic orders expelled by the Chinese emperor.

Hegel feels that China represents the starting point of the history of humanity, in a formulation that we can consider one of the intellectual bases of the Orientalist representation of Asia: “The History of the World travels from East to West; for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia is the beginning”

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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The Formation of a Historical Discourse on China

All the texts which, from the second half of the 19th century, attempt to analyze the modern history of China share this epistemological paradigm, which turned China into an apprentice of the civilizing lessons of Western countries.

It is a history that is clearly centered on the actions of the Western countries in the Chinese world, which are interpreted, albeit often critically, as the unleashing that allowed the Chinese to enter modernity, admitting the technological and scientific superiority of the West, which emerges as a civilizing model and pedagogue.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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The Sociocultural Approach

After the Second World War, a new generation of completely professional historians began to emerge, who had studied at the modern universities of the United States and Europe, with a much more solid and attentive training in the discipline, and this led to the modern development of the history of China and East Asia.

With this approach, the cultural, intellectual and even psychological aspects of the Chinese world are of such specific importance that, all too often, they sideline the political or economic factors (which are the foundations of historical research with regards to Western countries).

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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The Sociocultural Approach

Orientalisation of the Asian cultures discussed by Said: China is different per se, an ontologically different entity, by non-Western definition, and therefore the categories with which the Chinese world should be analyzed and understood are specific and inherent to it, radically different from those applied to other historical realities.

One of the most visible and well-known examples is the so-called Asian Values Debate, which attempts to recognise and, indeed, demand the validity of cultural values common to the countries of the Asian continent that can be compared with “Western values”.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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Criticism and post-paradigmatisation

However, criticism of imperialist apologetics and the sociocultural approach, or recognition of the diversity of China, geographically and historically, is one thing and it is quite another to overcome the problematicity of the historical discussion about the Chinese world.

China, particularly over the last five centuries, has not only participated in, but has also contributed to the development of some of humanity’s great historical processes.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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Criticism and post-paradigmatisation

Some historians paying greater attention to the methodological contributions of other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, literary studies, political science, etc. Without a doubt, the development of the ideas of postcolonialism, postmodernity and cultural studies has been a key factor in this trend, which has not always been sufficiently balanced.

According to Dirlik, the disturbing influence of Eurocentrism cannot ever be completely overcome unless the very idea of “development” is challenged at root. It is not a question of rejecting modernity per se, an attitude that would lead us to a certain self-Orientalisation, but, while recognizing it, creating alternative modernities that overcome the narratives of the Enlightenment that still dominate historians daily activities.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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Conclusion

The strength of a paradigm is not limited to a culture or borders. It sets what is true and scientific, has a universal nature, such that everything with pretensions of science must meet its specifications if it does not want to be excluded.

The historical paradigms that have dominated the Western intellectual tradition have ended up being imposed on China as though it were another form of imperialism.

China historians have an educational responsibility with a social aspect that reaches far beyond their research tasks.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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Conclusion

This is why education is required: not only does the historian, or the specialist in East Asian art, literature or economics, have to try and convey knowledge, but they also have to denounce explicitly the discursive anomalies that have traditionally determined our way of representing the reality of East Asian countries.

East Asia The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism, Culturalism and Historiographical Criticism

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Thinking Ahead: Reproducing The Asian Miracle

East Asia

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Thinking Ahead: Reproducing The Asian Miracle

East Asia

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Introduction

Prior to the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the growth of the Four Asian Tiger economies (commonly referred to as "the Asian Miracle") has been attributed to export oriented policies and strong development policies. Unique to these economies were the sustained rapid growth and high levels of equal income distribution.

A World Bank report suggests two development policies among others as sources for the Asian miracle: factor accumulation and macroeconomic management.

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

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Introduction

For 30 years, East Asia has been the world's fastest-growing region, with most of the growth occurring in eight countries: Japan; the Tiger economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore; and more recently Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Since 1960, these eight countries have grown twice as fast as the rest of East Asia, three times as fast as Latin America and South Asia, and five times as fast as sub-Saharan Africa.

In fact, the bank says, if this goes on, East Asia and the Pacific could within a generation become the first developing region to overcome poverty.

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

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What Went On In East Asia: From Miracle to Meltdown

  • From the perspective of international economics and business, the defining event of the l990s decade has been the miracle and meltdown of East Asian growth, just like the Latin American debt crisis was in the l980s and the oil shock in the l970s

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

Traditional View of Growth Process

Industry/manufacturing sector grows, creates employment, offers higher wages, and draws labour from agriculture and low-productivity jobs in rural areas

share of employment in agriculture 

share of manufacturing and related services

Productivity and farm size in agriculture 

Larger rural market expands demand for industrial products.

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

Economic Growth and Development

  • What is the difference?
  • development includes improvements across several dimensions
  • ‘quality of life’: health, education, ‘human rights’ and political rights
  • income distribution

  • Development and freedom to exercise choices:
  • Per capita income growth necessary but not sufficient

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

  • Why do we emphasise per capita output/income?

  • If no technical progress, per capita output will grow only if:

Increase in per capita availability of factors of production

  • If capital stock per capita , output per capita , but we have the ‘law of diminishing returns’

  • Thus, as capital stock per capita , rate of growth of per capita output falls

Economists Look at Growth in Per Capita Output

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

The Virtuous Circles of Economic Growth

  • Decline in Population Growth

  • Turn to Export Manufactures

  • High Saving and Investment

  • Declining Resource Costs

  • Increases in Scale of Production

  • Introduction of Technology

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

Sources of Growth

  • Investment using domestic savings
  • labour released from agriculture provides workers for industry/manufacturing
  • technical progress, rely primarily on domestic innovations and ‘purchased’ foreign technology

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

Import Substitution

  • Development of domestic industry to substitute for imports

  • Trade barriers, subsidies, and exchange controls necessary to protect domestic producers: state intervention replaces market prices

  • Benefits: short-cut, coordination, synergies

  • Problems: low level of competition, “inappropriate” factor inputs, administrative costs, current account deficits, interest groups

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

Trade policy is Critical: Why?

  • Export growth  funds to purchase foreign made capital goods and ‘embodied’ technology and other needed inputs

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

Export Orientation

  • Development based on exploitation of comparative advantages

  • Gradual diffusion of wealth to other sectors

  • Benefits: foreign exchange, competition, technology transfer

  • Problems: information, incomplete markets, market access, diffusion of benefits

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

  • The four tigers: Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan
  • 1970 - 1997 growth rates of 8%
  • Hong Kong and Singapore per capita output about equal to U.S.
  • Remaining Asian countries
  • High growth rates 1970 - 1997
  • Per capita output was low but rising rapidly

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

Asian Miracle

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East Asia: The Miracle

  • The East Asian Economic Miracle
  • Until 1997 the countries of East Asia had very high growth rates.

  • What were the ingredients for the success of the East Asian Miracle? (General Consensus)
  • High saving and investment rates
  • Strong emphasis on education
  • Stable macroeconomic environment
  • Free from high inflation or major economic slumps
  • High share of trade in GDP

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

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Roots of East Asian Development: States or Markets?

  • Increasing consensus that growth has largely been export-led (although several countries exhibit periods of import substitution)

  • Disagreement about the relative role of state intervention and market signals.

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

The Economic Environment (Development)

  • Much of the East Asian success started from export-oriented strategies, benefiting from growth in the international economy since the 1950s.

  • Wave of FDI in Asia (“Flying Geese Pattern”)
  • As each wave of development ensued it displaced exports of prior wave, compelling restructuring.
  • Internal causes: exchange rate appreciation, wage increases, …
  • Restructuring: labor intensive  capital intensive  knowledge.

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

“Asian Dynamism”

  • Geographic diffusion of industrialization

  • Within each country, industrialization proceeds from low-tech to high-tech

  • Clear order and structure (with a possibility of re-formation)

  • Specialization on comparative advantage

  • Requires successive stages of comparative advantage

  • Supported by export subsidies which are only given temporarily

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

Successive Stages of Comparative Advantage in East-Asian Trade Structure

Primary import-substitution: replace labour intensive manufacturing imports with domestically produced goods

2) Primary export-“substitution”: replace agricultural exports by labour-intensive manufacturing exports

3) Secondary import-substitution: production of intermediate and capital goods for domestic market

4) Secondary export-“substitution”: shift from labour-intensive to capital- and knowledge intensive production

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

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Fundamentalists and Assimilations

Economists attempting to understand the sources of East Asia’s growth tend to fall in 2 camps: Fundamentalists and Assimilationists.

  • Fundamentalists (e.g. Paul Krugman): Growth was mainly input driven. The efficient allocation of resources played a big part in the success story. Input driven growth is not sustainable because there are limits to efficient resource allocation and because incremental growth in inputs is subject to diminishing returns.

  • Assimilationists (e.g. Paul Romer): Growth was mainly driven by the acquisition and mastery of technology and the capacity to put ideas into practice.

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

Paul Krugman’s Classic Article on Asia

Summary: Pundits point to the awesome growth of East Asia's economies and fret that the West cannot compete. But there is nothing miraculous about the successes of Asia's "tigers."

Their rise was fueled by mobilizing resources - increasing inputs of machinery, infrastructure, and education - just like that of the now-derided Soviet economy. Indeed, Singapore's boom is the virtual economic twin of Stalin's U.S.S.R.

The growth rates of the newly industrialized countries of East Asia will also slow down. The lesson here for Western policymakers is that sustained growth requires efficiency gains, which come from making painful choices.

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

Causes of the Miracle: Public Policy (World Bank Report)

  • Rapid Accumulation (of human & physical capital)
  • Developing human capital
  • Primary and secondary education was emphasized
  • Tertiary education funds mostly for hard sciences
  • Female literacy more workers, lower fertility rates

  • Creating effective and secure financial systems
  • Increased savings: (including “forced” savings)
  • promoted by the integrity and accessibility of postal banks
  • Increased investment:
  • investment-friendly environment; creating infrastructure
  • easy credit through “financial repression”

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

  • Efficient Allocation of capital
  • Letting markets work: flexible labour markets
  • governments less responsive to organized labour
  • Productivity-driven wage rises, even downward
  • No minimum wage
  • emphasis on creating jobs; high employment levels
  • Assisting the market: credit for priority areas
  • Industrial policies: targeting winners
  • criteria: growth, productivity, spillover
  • Credit directed against strict performance criteria
  • “contests”, thru deliberative councils
  • Most subsidy small, but a signal to capital markets.

Causes of the Miracle: Public Policy (World Bank Report)

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

  • Technology catch-up and high productivity
  • actively seeking foreign technology
  • industrial policy promoted high-tech sectors
  • encouraging exports

  • other special features of East Asian growth
  • the principle of shared growth
  • macroeconomic stability
  • cooperative competition (led by technocratic elite)
  • business-friendly environment, led by private investment
  • state interventions addressed market failures
  • allocated by “contests”

Causes of the Miracle: Public Policy (World Bank Report)

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

The Role of Policy

  • Macro Policies For Stability
  • Basic Government Services
  • Infrastructure investment
  • Education and technology
  • Environmental Policies
  • Legal Structure and Property Rights
  • Supervision of Banking System
  • Selective Industrial Policies

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

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The Role of Government

East Asian countries adopted sound fundamental policies.

  • Control inflation

  • Manage internal and external debts

  • Resolve macroeconomic crises quickly

  • Invest in education

  • Maintain stable and secure financial systems

  • Limit price distortions

  • Open up to foreign trade and investment

  • Promote exports

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

The Role of Openness

An outward-oriented policy has long been seen as a centrepiece of East Asia’s economic success.

  • Integration into the world economy provides firms to access to a large variety of goods and services which embody new technologies.

  • It enables a country to adopt or adjust foreign technologies for domestic uses. By doing so, a country's productivity in imitation and innovation will be enhanced.

  • Exposure to international competition may bring about higher-quality products and alleviate duplication of R&D efforts.

  • More open economies can take advantage of larger markets, increasing their degree of efficiency (economies of scale) and their rates of growth.

Reproducing The Asian Miracle

Was Government Policy Responsible for the East Asian Miracle?

World Bank

  • “Fundamentally sound development policy was a major ingredient in achieving rapid growth: Macro management, saving promotion policies, education, agricultural productivity, .. But these do not tell the whole story. Government intervened targeting selected industries, promoting exports, low interest rates, protecting certain industries,.. ..rapid growth has at times benefited from careful policy intervention

  • ..the promotion of specific industries generally did not work…. The fact that interventions were an element of some East Asian economies’ success does not mean that they should be attempted everywhere.”

Reproducing The Asian Miracle