Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization available in Paperback, eBook
Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization
- ISBN-10:
- 0822346761
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822346760
- Pub. Date:
- 04/16/2010
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0822346761
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822346760
- Pub. Date:
- 04/16/2010
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization
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Overview
Centering his analysis in the dynamic forces of modern East Asian history, Kuan-Hsing Chen recasts cultural studies as a politically urgent global endeavor. He argues that the intellectual and subjective work of decolonization begun across East Asia after the Second World War was stalled by the cold war. At the same time, the work of deimperialization became impossible to imagine in imperial centers such as Japan and the United States. Chen contends that it is now necessary to resume those tasks, and that decolonization, deimperialization, and an intellectual undoing of the cold war must proceed simultaneously. Combining postcolonial studies, globalization studies, and the emerging field of “Asian studies in Asia, ” he insists that those on both sides of the imperial divide must assess the conduct, motives, and consequences of imperial histories.
Chen is one of the most important intellectuals working in East Asia today; his writing has been influential in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and mainland China for the past fifteen years. As a founding member of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society and its journal, he has helped to initiate change in the dynamics and intellectual orientation of the region, building a network that has facilitated inter-Asian connections. Asia as Method encapsulates Chen's vision and activities within the increasingly “inter-referencing” East Asian intellectual community.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822346760 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/16/2010 |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Sales rank: | 341,302 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Kuan-Hsing Chen is a professor in the Institute for Social Research and Cultural Studies at Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. He has written and edited many books in Chinese. He is co-executive editor of the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.
Read an Excerpt
ASIA as METHOD
Toward DeimperializationBy Kuan-Hsing Chen
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2010 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4676-0
Chapter One
THE IMPERIALIST EYEThe Discourse of the Southward Advance and the Subimperial Imaginary
I look hard for The origin of my blood. Some say I'm from the Malay archipelago, On the southwest border of China ... But my parents said: We are all children of the sun, The eggs of the snake, The race nurtured by the earth ... No clear answer after all. But retracing assures me, That I now understand (we are) the real master of the beautiful island, And page after page of broken history. MONANEN MALIALIAVES, "BURNING"
In early 1994, the government of Taiwan announced a policy called "moving southward" (nánxiàng). The policy encouraged Taiwanese companies to invest in Southeast Asia, and it was applauded by business executives, scholars, and politicians as an important counterbalance to the existing overinvestment in mainland China. The opposition party-the Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP-endorsed the policy, which received a flood of enthusiastic responses in the media. The few dissenting voices noted the unsatisfactory investment conditions in Southeast Asian countries: political instability, backward infrastructures, inefficient government administration, skyrocketing real-estate prices, and rising salaries. The arguments of both sides, however, were framed by the same narrative, which effectively silenced critical reflection on the underlying structure of the southward advance. Not a single voice was raised to challenge the fact that advancing toward the South (or the West or the North, for that matter) was a projection of the same expansionist ambitions that we recognize from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A Taiwanese imperial desire was being formed.
To be more precise, an inchoate Ideological desire for a Taiwanese subempire was emerging out of this project initiated by the state. Under the neocolonial structure, Taiwan's economy, international politics, and culture have been subordinated to those of the United States and Japan. As a result, Taiwan's targets for expansion were not in the more solidly established capitalist zones, already also dominated by the United States and Japan, but in less politically and economically advantaged areas, where Taiwan's economic interests could be exploited with less competition. I use the word "subempire" to refer to a lower-level empire that is dependent on an empire at a higher level in the imperialist hierarchy. Neocolonial imperialism here refers to a form of structural domination in which a country with more global power uses political and economic interventions in other countries to influence policy and exercise control over markets. Unlike the earlier colonial imperialism, which depended on invasion, occupation, and usurpation of sovereignty to further economic interests, neocolonial imperialism uses military force as a support mechanism and employs it only as a last resort. The history of the third world has proven that many colonies have won independence only to become subcolonies, falling prey to their former colonizers once again because of their economic, cultural, and political dependency on the new imperial (formerly colonial) power. The stratified hierarchical construction of neocolonial imperialism is the present phase of global capitalism.
Taiwanese subimperial practices began in the 1980s with westward (toward mainland China) and southward (toward Southeast Asia) flows of capital, but these were mostly uncoordinated investments made by small- and medium-size businesses seeking access to cheap labor. Not until the creation of state-led expansionist projects-such as Taiwan's "fourth" Export Processing Zone in the Philippines, the Taiwan Industrial Area in Vietnam, and the Taiwan Development Project in Indonesia-did Taiwan finally express its true subimperialist nature. The establishment of these physical zones is reminiscent of the classical imperialist practice (itself closely associated with traditional territorial colonialism) of building bases in overseas territories from which to organize exploitative activities. As businesses in Taiwan closed factories there and moved their operations to mainland China and Southeast Asia in the late 1980s, cases of unsafe working conditions and worker abuse began to multiply. In Thailand, workers died in a fire at a Taiwanese-owned toy factory. In the Philippines, women workers went on strike to protest Taiwanese factory owners' militaristic management style and physical abuse. Women in mainland China were subjected to brutal physical mistreatment in the workplace as well as exploitative personal relationships with Taiwanese businessmen. Meanwhile, the flow of capital continued apace. In 1988, Taiwan's investment in Thailand amounted to 10 percent of foreign investment in that country and was second only to Japan's. In 1989,Taiwan's share of foreign investment in Malaysia was 24.7 percent, again second only to Japan's. In 1990, Taiwan's investment in China's Fujian Province amounted to one-third of foreign investment. In the same year, Taiwan's investment in the neighboring Guangdong Province was second only to Japan's. In short, Taiwan's capital expansion was well under way in Southeast Asia and mainland China by the end of the 1980s (Tan 1993, 63, 65). In the context of our analysis, the implication of this is clear. Taiwanese capital was already in Southeast Asia long before 1994, when the government announced its policy of a southward advance. The policy was ideological maneuvering, the result of political anxiety brought about by stronger economic ties with China. Taiwan has sought to influence other countries' trade and diplomatic policies. The government negotiated with Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam to set a ceiling on the number of laborers from those countries allowed to work in Taiwan, and it pressed the government of Indonesia to suppress workers' protests in that country against Taiwanese capital. Interventions like these display the logic of dominance characteristic of neocolonialism.
Could the alliance of state and capital in Taiwan succeed in building a subempire? Should the state intervene to control the flow of capital? Where and in what situations is capital investment justified? These are not the questions I am concerned with. What is truly at issue here is imperialist desire. The imperialist expansionist mentality not only justifies exploitation of all kinds, but it also generates hardships and long-term resentment among other peoples which may become the seeds of future regional conflicts.
Taiwan itself experienced numerous waves of colonization, starting with the Dutch in the seventeenth century, and followed by the Han Chinese during the Ming and Qing Dynasties and the Japanese during the first part of the twentieth century. The process of decolonization began in Taiwan after its liberation from fifty years of Japanese occupation, but was interrupted by the KMT's colonization and U.S. military and economic subjugation after the Second World War, during which Taiwan was gradually subsumed into the U.S. neocolonial agenda. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Taiwan was integrated into the global capitalist system, primarily through the severe exploitation of its laborers, which produced the so-called Taiwan economic miracle and enriched today's bourgeois state. Unfortunately, capital recognizes no national boundaries. When business owners closed their factories in Taiwan and moved overseas in the 1980s and 1990s, they left behind their own families and the laborers who had made them rich.
The state-capital alliance is the engine for the formation of Taiwanese subimperialism. The emergence of the southward-advance discourse in the 1990s demonstrated that capital accumulation in Taiwan had accelerated to the extent that within fifty years, the island had metamorphosed from a colony into a quasi-empire, no longer occupying a marginal position on the map of global capitalism. Constricted economically by a mega-empire, it joined the game of imperialist competition by investing downward in order to seize markets, resources, and labor in less developed countries. Taking into consideration the three-worlds theory put forward at the 1955 Bandung Conference, we may ask if this means that some third-world areas-such as the so-called Four Little Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) or other newly industrialized countries-have acquired the strength to expand abroad and have thereby redrawn the world map. Or do we need to produce a layered analysis to chart the political meanings of the emerging internal differences within the third world?
The Problematic of Third-World Cultural Studies
In Taiwan, the third world never became a critical-analytic or political category. Politicians, intellectuals, and business people have always identified themselves with advanced, first-world countries and felt it shameful to be put into the category of the third world. The absence of a third-world consciousness has been a basic condition of intellectual life in Taiwan, including among left-leaning circles. This absence, I wish to argue, was a necessary condition for the formation of the southward-advance discourse.
In the field of cultural studies, the third world as an analytical category has also been ignored. Although, since the 1990s, this field has been going through a process of internationalization, the third world has not been taken up as a coordinating concept around which to organize dialogue. This has immense methodological and political consequences. First, if historical materialism is the assumed methodology of cultural studies, and industrial capitalism its assumed reference system of practices, then what sort of analytical machinery can be developed to engage with agricultural societies in third-world spaces, where peasants are still the dominant group in the population? Second, without a category such as the third world, local analysis is shaped by concept of the nation-state, which explains the emergence of British, American, Canadian, Australian, and other "national" cultural studies. Third, questions of colonialism and imperialism have been pushed to the side in former imperial centers. For instance, British colonialism and U.S. imperialism have not been central to cultural studies as it is practiced in the United Kingdom and the United States. Instead, the work of posing these questions has fallen to critics who reside in places where historical colonialism remains an inescapable problem, and where neoimperialism continues to exercise its power. Finally, with the rejection of the third world as an outdated category, globalization has become an alibi that is used to erase history and politics. One overt example of this is John Tomlinson's Cultural Imperialism (1991). The concluding chapter, "From Imperialism to Globalization," exemplifies the strategy of replacing the pejorative "imperialism" with the neutral "globalization." According to Tomlinson, imperialism implies a strong desire to impose one system on the whole world, whereas globalization is less overbearing and implies an international interdependence and conditions more favorable to addressing common human problems resulting from modernity, which is seen as the predestined fate of the human race. In his argument, globalization involves no unequal distribution of resources and power. The structural differences between oppressor and oppressed, first and third worlds, capital and labor, and state and social subject are all dissolved under the banner of globalization.
The rapid disintegration of the socialist second world, the internal colonization within the third world, and the transformation of the world's political power structure have made it necessary to challenge and revise the three-worlds theory (Pletsch 1981; Ahmad 1992, 287-318). But to deny the importance of colonialism and imperialism is to ignore the history of the third world, and this is theoretically and politically unacceptable.
The particular forms and practices of neocolonial imperialism began to take shape in the wake of the decolonization movements of the first half of the twentieth century and continued to evolve throughout the second half, changing most dramatically during the 1970s and 1980s. By September 11, 2001, it is fair to say that territorial conquest, military oppression, and the direct usurpation of political sovereignty had been largely displaced by the operating logic of hegemony. Transnational companies and superstate organizations have become the new agents of imperialism. Backed by strong capital, mighty military power, and the dominant position in the structure of international politics, contemporary neocolonial imperialism is producing a new form of political and economic dependency. Nevertheless, the critical conditions and constitutive effects of imperialism have not changed and may have intensified: (1) the corporate monopoly system persists in core metropolitan centers; (2) the continuous expansion of economic power in the center intensifies its ambition to control resources and markets elsewhere; (3) the international division of labor continues to enrich the advanced capitalist zones; (4) powerful industrialized countries continue to increase their exports and investments abroad; (5) the exploitation of labor deepens; (6) the gap between the rich and the poor grows around the world; and (7) the environment in colonized areas continues to deteriorate. As Herbert Schiller (1991) has argued, the postimperialist era has not yet arrived.
Masao Miyoshi (1993) has argued that colonialism becomes even more dynamic when driven by global capitalism. According to Miyoshi, with the transition from colonialism to global capitalism, the nation-state gradually gives way to transnational companies as the primary agent of history. This observation may well be true for advanced capitalist countries, but for those living in third-world locations such as South Korea, Taiwan, mainland China, India, and Sri Lanka, the nation-state and nationalism are playing an increasingly important role. While we must acknowledge the strength of global capitalism, we should also recognize that the role of the nation-state is not really in decline; instead, it is in transition. The formation of superstate organizations-such as the European Union, the NAFTA Free Trade Commission, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations-results when states in these regions cut up territory, divide markets, and achieve the restructuring and redivision of labor required by international capitalism. Viewed in this light, it is incumbent on us to not only differentiate the powerful from the weak and the central from the peripheral, but also to avoid idealizing the states of the third world and making the nation-state our primary locus of identification.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Preface vii
Introduction Globalization and Deimperialization 1
Chapter 1 The Imperialist Eye: The Discourse of the Southward Advance and the Subimperial Imaginary 17
Chapter 2 Decolonization: A Geocolonial Historical Materialism 65
Chapter 3 De-Cold War: The lm/possibility of “Great Reconciliation” 115
Chapter 4 Deimperialization: Club 51 and the Imperialist Assumption of Democracy 161
Chapter 5 Asia as Method: Overcoming the Present Conditions of Knowledge Production 211
Epilogue The Imperial Order of Things, or Notes on Han Chinese Racism 257
Notes 269
Special Terms 287
Bibliography 291
Index 305