Showing papers in "Critical Asian Studies in 2005"

Finding a place: Negotiations of modernization and globalization among rural women in Beijing

Abstract: This article examines the ways in which modernization and globalization are experienced, negotiated, and understood by women in rural-to-urban migration in contemporary China In the last two decades, labor mobility in China has increased dramatically, with millions of people leaving the countryside for the promise of money and a modern life in the coastal special economic zones such as Shenzhen and in the global cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou This article discusses the narratives of rural migrant women working in the city of Beijing A striking feature of these narratives is the variety of conflicting evaluations of place presented, not just by different women, but also by the same individuals For example, the stated wish to stay in the city as long as possible often conflicts with complaints about the hardships faced there Conversely, it is very common for women to describe their home in the village with fondness and nostalgia, but to say that they never want to go back The author of thi

Struggles for land and livelihood

Abstract: Scholars, policy practitioners, and political activists alike have had difficulty grappling with the complex dynamics that have unfolded over the past decade and a half in Philippine banana plantations in the context of the 1988 agrarian reform law. While some focus their attention exclusively on land redistribution issues, others concentrate on the modalities of contract farming and still others emphasize trade union issues — all to the neglect of underlying agrarian dynamics. Relatively few have attempted a more integrated examination of developments in this sector of the Philippine economy. The still-limited availability of studies of land-reform-related experiences in agribusiness plantations outside the Philippines further constrains our understanding of the issues arising in Philippine plantations. This article tries to build on and deepen previous attempts at understanding the complex and confusing dynamics involving the banana elite, the state, and various segments of organized farmworker...

Post-authoritarian Indonesia: A comparative Southeast Asian perspective

Abstract: The article assesses the post-authoritarian situation in Indonesia in the light of experiences of Thailand and the Philippines, two societies in which the unraveling of authoritarianism has been followed by the rise of formal electoral politics. The authors suggest that the demise of authoritarian regimes in all three cases, born of the cold war, has more fundamentally seen the reconfiguration of politics in which dispersed, predatory, and frequently antidemocratic forces have appropriated the institutions and discourses of democracy. They also suggest that the Indonesian case has been less conducive to the emergence of effective pro-democracy, civil society-based movements in the wake of authoritarianism. This, they explain, is largely the consequence of the 1965 anticommunist massacres in Indonesia, which has no equivalence in the other two countries, and the resultant highly centralized authoritarianism that was more successful in disorganizing social and political opposition for three decades.

Hegemony and the politics of culture and identity in Thailand.

Abstract: This article argues that the establishment of the Ministry of Culture in Thailand needs to be understood in a broadly historical perspective that relates to the role of culture in hegemonic strategies of the state. It presents an overview of broadly defined culture policy in Thailand from the 1930s before moving to a more detailed discussion of the period from the 1980s to the present. The principle contention, developed in the second half of the article, is that the current policies of Thailand's Ministry of Culture, and its role in hegemonic identity production, can only be understood by taking account of the variety of factors that shaped the Ministry's emergence. These factors include the influence of international development agencies, strategies of appropriation by the Thai state, and the role of progressive forces within Thailand that seek political and cultural reform. The circumstances under which the Ministry was formed have made it a site of contestation between conservative royalist-n...

Circles of esteem, standard works, and Euphoric couplets: Dynamics of academic life in Indonesian studies

Abstract: Indonesian Studies as a field is strongly influenced by its own social character as a community of competing and cooperating scholars. Outside individual universities, the dominant social form is not the powerful professor, but rather the “circle of esteem,” a cluster of scholars who respect each other, cite each other's work, push each other's ideas into the academic marketplace, and, occasionally, rise to each other's defense. Circles of esteem arise because academic work has less to do with the industrial production of knowledge than with a constant search for novelty, which may arise from new sources or new uses of sources. Although novelty is prized, the value of new work is hard to judge, and it will be more easily accepted when backed by a circle of esteem. There are two effective ways to gain academic prestige outside a circle of esteem. The first is to write a standard work, a conservative strategy to create a work that will become citation fodder for others. The second way is to coin a ...

The left, elections, and the political party system in the Philippines

Abstract: Elections in the Philippines have long been the turf of trapos — traditional politicians identified with the country's oligarchic elite. At the same time, elections have been one of the weakest spots on the left. This is so not only because the trapos have always seen to it that there is no level playing field, but also because for some time, a large section of the left rejected elections as “bourgeois” exercises and chose to boycott them and fight in other arenas. This article examines the electoral challenge of the left — communists and the Communist Party-aligned “national democrats,” as well as social democrats and independent socialists — to the trapos and traditional parties in the Philippines. The author argues that the left has not made much progress in breaking trapo domination over the post-Marcos political party and electoral systems not so much because of its long-held aversion to electoral politics, as some scholars contend, but more because of the persistence of an instrumental view of democ...

Singapore's cultural policy and its consequences

Abstract: This article explores the effects of Singapore's Global City for the Arts project on the local theater industry It begins by describing the character of the Singapore state and its ability to meet the challenges of globalization It then shows that while historically global in orientation, the city-state's early cultural policies were resolutely local and insular prior to the economic recession in 1985 From that year on, local arts and culture was driven by an economic rationale — eventually culminating in the birth of a globally oriented national cultural policy: the Global City for the Arts project The author contends that the Global City for the Arts project has pressured the Singapore state into shedding some of its authoritarian practices in order to conform to international norms However, the author also illustrates how certain theater companies with the requisite cultural capital for the Global City for the Arts project have benefited from the country's cultural policies while others t

A study in social change -- The domestic violence prevention movement in Taiwan

Abstract: Taiwan has dramatically improved its response to domestic violence within the last fifteen years, becoming the first East Asian country to pass major legislation criminalizing domestic violence. Ethnographic research on the origins, development, and operations of the domestic violence prevention movement shows how individuals from diverse backgrounds acted collectively to achieve this social reversal. Activists have profited from feminist social networks, the growing economic and political power of women, domestic violence models from other countries, a unified vision of creating new legislation, and an atmosphere open to change. Their efforts were catalyzed by three widely publicized cases regarding violence against women and culminated in the passage of the Domestic Violence Prevention and Treatment Act in 1998. The domestic violence prevention movement in Taiwan provides a valuable case study of social change and a model for other East Asian countries interested in passing similar legislation.

Bringing class back in: China re-stratified

Abstract: Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett have made a forceful critique of current development in China, warning that the so-called reforms of market socialism will only bring about a “full-fledged capitalist restoration.” They have unpacked the structural and institutional logics that are pushing China farther down of the road toward marketization, privatization, and the restoration of capitalism, with growing inequalities in almost all aspects of social life. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” and the self-congratulatory cautious approach to the launching of gradual reforms (including the establishment of special economic zones for confining the negative impacts of opening the door to the capitalist world) since the late 1970s — as Hart-Landsberg and Burkett argue succinctly in their analysis of the self-reinforcing capitalization of China’s economy, with one phase of loosening the grip on socialism leading to the deepening of capitalist development in another phase — all turned out to be using “socialism to build capitalism.” This change in the direction of China’s development does give rise to serious social consequences. Almost all China observers acknowledge growing socioeconomic inequalities and regional imbalances, emerging social polarization, and rising resistance from the grassroots in China today. Hart-Landsberg and Burkett call attention to these domestic contradictions of China’s transformation. And China’s “success” in opening its economy to multinational capitals, they point out, has generated domestic as well as regional and global tensions and contradictions by worsening the “danger of Critical Asian Studies 37:3 (2005), 473-480

Beyond the logic of capital and the polarization model: The state, market reforms, and the plurality of class conflict in China

Abstract: (2005). Beyond the logic of capital and the polarization model. Critical Asian Studies: Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 481-494.

Globalization, education, and the politics of identity in the Asia-Pacific

Abstract: This essay examines a resurgent interest in “regionness” as a response to globalization, and it looks at how governments and citizens have participated in the discourse on forging a new Asia-Pacific community that has developed over the past fifteen years. Part one distinguishes between “regionalization” and “regionalism” as competing visions for the construction of a future Asia-Pacific community. Regionalization, the dominant paradigm during the postcolonial period, centers on interstate forums dominated by officially recognized political and economic elites who seek interstate cooperation in order to protect state interests, state power, and national identity from foreign as well as domestic challenges. Regionalism, as an alternative paradigm, envisions the creation of transnational networks inclusive of nonofficial actors, whose identification with a particular state and set of national interests does not preclude the creation of a regional identity (or identities) and support for regional in...

Growing rice after the bomb

Abstract: Agriculture, once the mainstay of Balinese economy and culture, has been marginalized during the era of tourism-driven development. The decline in tourism since the bombing in Kuta in 2002 has revealed the vulnerability of an economy narrowly based on tourism and has led to rethinkings of future economic development in which agriculture plays a more important role. These rethinkings take two main forms. One is a top-down model of export-oriented production of cash crops and economies of scale — an international model of agro-industry/business. The other consists of a diversity of small-scale local initiatives for sustainable and/or organic production for local markets. This article examines these alternative visions in terms first of their links to international political economic movements and second of their conceptual and moral bases. It argues that this period is, like the Green Revolution, a critical turning point that will determine the future of the economy and culture of Bali.

Dehistoricizing History: The ethical dilemma of “East Asian bioethics“

Abstract: Abstract This article traces the unsettling history behind the concept of “East Asian bioethics,” a term coined in the mid 1990s, and raises questions about processes of history-making (and -unmaking) in bioethical debates. A barometer of sociopolitical attitudes and orientations, bioethics poses reflexive questions about cultural, national, and global identity. The century-old janusian relationship between eugenics and bioethics continues to inform the popular perception of the nature and future of postmodern Japan, which since the mid 1990s has been shaped by an asymmetrical and ahistorical celebration of pan-Asianism. The bioethical dilemma posed and produced by a politics of renewal and strategic “dehistoricization,” together with “reasianization,” is introduced and analyzed.

Between exception and rule

Abstract: This article challenges the all-too-common assumption in the literature on Vietnam that Ho Chi Minh City's political economy has evolved differently from the rest of the country since the economic reforms of the late 1980s. Questioning the association of Ho Chi Minh City with reform, the article charts the rise of new state business interests and the growth of the “gatekeeping” state in the city during the 1990s, as party-state institutions moved to exploit new opportunities that emerged with the dismantling of the central plan and the growth of the market economy. In light of this characterization, the article argues that rather than seeing the city as set apart from the rest of Vietnam we can speak of a “common reform political economy.” If correct, this position casts doubt on existing literature, which commonly explains Ho Chi Minh City's supposedly distinctive evolution under reform with reference to its unique pre-1975 history, especially the period from 1954 to 1975 when the country was di...

The political economy of China's economic reform

Abstract: In China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle, Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett present a withering critique of China's market reforms and development strategy. To assess their critique, I believe it is essential to provide a somewhat fuller discussion of the context within which China's reform strategy emerged than appears in the work of Hart-Landsberg and Burkett. My discussion of this context appears after a brief discussion of their main points, and is followed in turn by a more detailed evaluation of the specific assertions they make. Although I am sympathetic to the spirit of their critique, I believe that in the last analysis they are unable to offer any genuine alternative to the development strategy China has pursued and that their analysis of the consequences of that strategy is in many respects deeply flawed.

Kamikazefication and Japan's wartime ideology

Abstract: A number of recent works have focused on the personal experiences of kamikaze pilots, but very little has been published in English on the Japanese government's effort to “kamikazefy” the civilian population in the final year of the Asian PacificWar (1937-45). To illustrate this effort, this article employs images taken from the author's personal collection of over 2,500 Japanese wartime publications (predominantly periodicals). In early 1945, the Japanese government announced a “fight to the death for the home islands,” in which civilian “home-front warriors” would fight alongside troops in the event of an Allied invasion. Civilian combatants were expected to follow the “no surrender” policy hammered into Japanese servicemen and to emulate the kamikaze pilots' spirit of supreme sacrifice. The article begins with a brief discussion of the ideology behind kamikazefication, inviting comparisons with suicide missions in other times and places. Historical context is further established by an overview...

Thinking about China

Abstract: From the editors: The July-August 2004 issue of Monthly Review (vol. 56, no. 3) was given entirely to a book-length article entitled China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle, written by Martin Hart-Landsberg (a coeditor of Critical Asian Studies) and Paul Burkett. We invited the editors of Critical Asian Studies to participate in a roundtable discussion of the issues that Hart-Landsberg and Burkett have raised. Responses from CAS editors Victor Lippit, Gene Cooper, Alvin So, Mobo C.F. Gao, and Tai-lok Lui appear in this issue. A rejoinder by Hart-Landsberg and Burkett will be published in our December 2005 issue. The article below is a synopsis of the arguments that Hart-Landsberg and Burkett advance in Monthly Review and in the book of the same title (see http://www.monthlyreview.org/chinaand socialism. htm for details). This article appeared originally in New Socialist 51, May- June 2005 (http://www.newsocialist.org). We are grateful for permission to reproduce the article as an introducti...

China and Capitalism: If Market Capitalism Is Good for the West, Why Is Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics Bad?

Abstract: This largely reflective piece poses some hypoethetical and rhetoric questions aiming at questioning the widely accepted but hardly ever questions wisdoms or truth such as economic growth is good, employment is necessary for a good life and the competion among the nations.

The United States and East Asia in an Age of Financialization

Abstract: This article starts from Peter Gowan's notion of a Dollar-Wall Street Regime (DWSR) characterized by financial deregulation, the dollar as the world's currency, large international capital flows, and frequent financial crises. The author argues that the DWSR has relied on a special economic relationship between the United States and East Asia, characterized by large East Asian trade and current account surpluses with the United States and the investment of East Asian dollar holdings in U.S. capital markets. For some time both parties benefited from this relationship, but eventually it gave rise to financial crises in East Asia. Thus, Japan's financial crisis around 1990 and the 1997/98 East Asian financial crisis are both related to economic over-accumulation caused by the buildup of currency reserves through trade with the United States. Attempts at East Asian monetary integration since 1997 are viewed as a potential challenge to the DWSR. These attempts have however been blocked or rendered harmless by ...

On new rules for destroying old countries

Abstract: The attacks on 11 September 2001 were not a major security threat to the United States, but they did create the political conditions for the implementation of an aggressive agenda by the Bush administration to assert U.S. dominance over the global control of oil and to establish an arc of military bases to contain China. Responding to Gowan, this article suggests that bid is unlikely to succeed because the concentration of military strength in the United States is paralleled by a concentration of financial strength in East and Southeast Asia. Though its Asian allies have been more supportive of the U.S. invasion of Iraq than their European counterparts, growing economic integration along Asia's Pacific coasts is likely to lead to a reduction in capital inflows to the United States and thereby aggravate the consequences of its high current accounts deficits and its low rates of domestic savings. The Bush administration's conservative social policies and anti-foreigner zeitgeist is also sapping the competit...

The state of Malaysian studies

Abstract: In the 1980s political theorist Quentin Skinner noted that the empiricist and positivist turn in the social sciences, which had driven the study of politics and society in the three preceding decades, was under challenge by “hermeneuticists, structuralists, post-empiricists, deconstructionists, and other invading hordes.” The general skepticism about positivist social science was a reaction, noted Skinner, “against the assumption that the natural sciences offer an adequate or even a relevant model for the practice of the social disciplines.” Anti-positivist critics advocated instead uncovering or recovering meaning, explaining the contingent and the unpredictable and contextualizing inquiry. The turn toward history, a form of “grounded” knowledge, and an awareness of the normative and ideological bases of inquiry and the uses to which knowledge may be put signified an important shift in the social sciences and was critical in the evolution of “area studies.” The impact of the positivist movement on the study of politics and society in Malaysia during the same period and for some time afterward has been profound. It shaped Malaysian studies in much the same way it impacted the inception of area studies — it underscored positivism’s central tenets about an objective universe that could be rationally apprehended and scientifically known. Linear notions of political and social development dominated the scholarly literature, one largely influenced by U.S. social scientific thinking about “modernization,” political systems, and the societies these embraced. Modernization’s claims, which relied on assumptions about objective knowledge, and specifically the relationship between political development and ecoCritical Asian Studies 37:1 (2005), 161-175

Post-pol pot Cambodia

Abstract: Since the 1980s, scholarship on Cambodia has been dominated by the attempt to come to terms with the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) period, which still looms in international consciousness of what Cambodia represents as a nation. The period represents a sequence of events of great import for the history of the twentieth century: as genocide, as postcolonial socialist experiment, as strange permutation of modernity, as a working out of the power play of the great powers, as conflict between socialist countries. A critical scholarly perspective on Cambodia begins with trying to understand the configuration of power, culture, and historical contingency that made the DK (or Khmer Rouge) period possible. At the same time, the gut-wrenching horror of the period has made it hard to examine it with any objectivity; scholarly disputes in the 1980s reflected the sharp political divisions between the Phnom Penh government and the resistance movements on the border. These same divisions fractured Cambodian overseas communities. The Khmer Rouge period still overshadows discussions about Cambodia, especially outside of Cambodia itself, and acrid factional divisions among scholars still surface with surprising force at odd moments; however, with half of the population of Cambodia born after 1979, one can begin to view the Pol Pot period from a greater distance — perhaps distinguishing it more dispassionately as part of larger historical and political processes. In the 1990s, scholarly access to Cambodia became much easier, and a new generation of academics began looking at Cambodian politics and culture. Some tended to ignore the Pol Pot period (as though the only Cambodian culture worth noting could be seen as an unbroken continuum from the 1970s to the present); some unrealistically saw the 1993 UN-sponsored elections as the dawn of a new era. More “everyday” issues — of democratization, civil society, patron-clientism, and aid dependency — came to dominate the discussion. Critical Asian Studies 37:3 (2005), 501-516

Engaging the issues

Abstract: From the editors: In 2005 Monthly Review Press (New York) published a book entitled China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle, written by Martin Hart-Landsberg (a coeditor of Critical Asian Studies) and Paul Burkett. (The content of the book had appeared earlier, in the July-August 2004 issue of Monthly Review [vol. 56, no. 3].) We invited the editors of Critical Asian Studies to participate in a roundtable discussion of the issues that Hart-Landsberg and Burkett have raised. Responses from CAS editors Victor Lippit, Gene Cooper, Alvin So, Mobo C.F. Gao, and Tai-lok Lui appear in the September 2005 issue of the journal (vol. 37, no. 3). A rejoinder by Hart-Landsberg and Burkett is presented here.

America, capitalism, and the interstate system

Abstract: Peter Gowan responds to published criticisms of his article “Triumphing toward International Disaster: The Impasse in American Grand Strategy” (Critical Asian Studies 36, no. 1 [March 2004]: 3-36) by Kristen Nordhaug, Ravi Arvind Palat, Vijay Prashad, Marika Vicziany, Mark T. Berger, and Heloise Weber (see Critical Asian Studies 37, no. 1 [March 2005]: 75-140).

American grand strategy and the assassination of the third world

Abstract: Peter Gowan's brilliant analysis of U.S. primacy provokes this discussion on the role of the Third World since the 1940s. One cannot think of the cold war epoch without the constant pressure from the Third World on the two major camps, and one cannot conceive of the post-cold war alignment by sections of the Third World without a class assessment of the regimes and programs in the darker nations. This essay attempts to supplement Gowan's framework with the addition of the Third World, at the same time as it offers a synoptic study of India's relationship with the United States as an example.

Peter Gowan's "American Grand Strategy": an Asian regional perspective

Abstract: While this article broadly agrees with Peter Gowan's concern about the new militarism of the United States and the appalling consequences that have emerged as a result of U.S. preemption in Iraq, it questions the extent to which his portrait of U.S. hegemony addresses all the relevant issues as they affect the Asian region. Given the numerical dominance of Asia in world population and the rising power of China and India, how Gowan's “American Grand Strategy” applies to this part of the world is of fundamental importance to the relevance and sustainability of his argument. Part 1 on U.S. economic hegemony argues that U.S. capital has not been an unmitigated evil for India and where U.S. interests have been damaging they are not uniquely so: the European Union's economic policies have also been deeply damaging even though Europe is not a hegemon. Part 2 on U.S. political hegemony argues that bringing Pakistan and India into the U.S. alliance system has been beneficial for regional security and domestic poli...

Beyond US grand strategy?: Critical analysis and world politics

Abstract: Despite its importance and timeliness Peter Gowan's article “Triumphing toward International Disaster” falls short insofar as it fails to locate “American Grand Strategy” in the context of the global social relations of the capitalist order; particularly problematic is the way that he takes for granted the constitution of “global politics” as a system of nation-states. In our response we try to draw out some of the inconsistencies in Gowan's analysis by engaging the state-centeredness of his argument and discussing some of the implications of this for critical engagement with the changing world order and the current global crisis.