East Asia's Tumbling Dominoes: Financial Crises and the Myth of the Regional Model

Abstract

In this essay I will explore the contradictions of East Asian capitalist development by treating it dialectically and locating the recent 'crisis' in its larger context. I will ask three inter-related questions: How should we best theorize dependent capitalist development in the region? What were the contradictions that precipitated the crisis? And to what extent does this moment of crisis represent a discontinuity? Posing these questions in this way implies rejecting the more conventional readings of the financial crisis of 1997-8 as representing either the end of a golden age of 'growth' or economic miracle, or merely a 'financial' crisis amenable to correction through a painful but short-lived implementation of 'structural adjustment' that will return the region to the status quo ante once its financial structures are modernized. While the events of 1997-8 represent both a financial crisis and a structural disjuncture, the question is not just whether or not economic growth resumes, but what kinds of political economies will emerge out of the restructuring, including the pattern of state-society relations, the nature of class power and the way globalisation and the rights of investors that it promotes coexist with 'democracy'.