Review of Four Little Dragons by Ezra Vogel
How Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan Industrialized
Harvard sociologist Ezra Vogel is a prolific author of scholarly works on China, some of which have attracted a popular following. One is an acclaimed 1990 study of the economic transformation in Guangdong Province, One Step Ahead in China.
Less known, or often simplified, are stories of how Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan—still desperately poor in the early 1960s—beat the odds and then some. Although published in 1991, Vogel’s The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia is a succinct introduction to their swift, steep climb from squalor to industrialization and prosperity. It's a brisk 138 pages, including notes, based on a series of public lectures Vogel delivered at Harvard.
Experts on the individual economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea or Taiwan will grouse that it doesn’t delve deeply enough. Yet by focusing on the social institutions that fostered rapid industrialization, Vogel highlights how different the four paths have been. The book never resembles an unsubstantiated editorial rant.
Singapore Courts Multinationals
The variety of policies pursued by the four governments will distress planners searching for a one-stop guide. Korea gambled and won by entering into heavy industries, such as steel, shipbuilding and motor vehicles. The other three concentrated on light industry. After Singapore and Malaysia severed ties in 1965 (having achieved independence together in 1963), Singapore aggressively sought investment from multinational corporations.
Taiwan didn't do so until the 1970s and then principally to shore up its international political standing as China moved to center stage. Hong Kong maintained a neutral stance, welcoming foreign investors but not offering them any special incentives. Korea shunned foreign investment, most especially from Japan, its hated former colonial master.
Corruption in Korea
Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan strove to quash corruption; at the time this book was published, the stink still hung over Korea and only began to dispel in the late 1990s. The leaders of the two city-states and Korea saw export orientation as their only option from the start. An unusual case, Taiwan first industrialized rapidly with import substitution.
Import substitution is a policy of self-sufficiency that discourages imports of finished goods. The conventional wisdom today is that it hasn't and can't work for any developing country.
Singapore’s Socialist Side
Then there's another bit of current wisdom--socialism is dead--that doesn't account for Singapore. In perhaps no other capitalist country is the government so intimately involved in funding, managing and starting up commercial enterprises. Singapore has no plans to phase out the practice since well-compensated bureaucrats continue to produce healthy profits.
For the sake of both city-states, it's disappointing that they share a single chapter in this book. Although its colonial rulers promoted Hong Kong’s image as the ultimate laissez-faire colony, they in fact created industrial estates for the nascent garment industry in the 1950s and civil servants guided industrial diversification from textiles to electronics in the 1970s and 1980s.
Hong Kong’s Lousy Schools
Perhaps there wasn't enough space to note that the British colony, without an elected government until the end, had the most skewed income distribution-on par with many a Third World country. It still does. It also still has the most elitist educational system of the four. To have any chance of success or entry into university, a child must attend a private school from the start. And there was no compulsory schooling at all until 1973.
The failure to examine education in Hong Kong is important because Vogel argues persuasively that the authoritarian governments in Korea, Singapore and Taiwan acquired legitimacy and staved off dissent by delivering equitable income distribution and educational opportunity.
Coordinated Government Policies
If the four economies share a common thread, it's that their rapid development resulted from closely coordinated government action. Unlike earlier eras, making the leap to an industrial society in the 20th century wasn't possible if left to chance or market forces, Vogel concludes.
The four dragons were also reacting to circumstances the world may never see again. They may well be the chief beneficiaries of the Cold War. Korea and Taiwan received massive amounts of U.S. aid of all kinds; Hong Kong and Singapore (and Japan) benefited as suppliers during the Vietnam War. Probably most important, all four perceived a threat of annihilation which fueled the will to transform their economies.
For Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea, the communists were neighbors who seemed capable of invading on the slightest pretext. Singapore feared both domestic communists and the designs of Malaysia and Indonesia. Wars (and for Singapore, independence), conveniently provided the four economies with huge numbers of refugees desperate for work.
Confucian Contempt for Commerce
Ever the careful academic, Vogel describes some Confucian "habits of the heart" that probably contributed to development.
But a much more critical prerequisite--courtesy of wars, colonial occupation and independence--was the destruction of the old Confucian-based order, Vogel argues persuasively. Only then was a new political and economic order possible. Confucianism, after all, was characterized by contempt for physical labor and commerce. It was the mandarins' job to restrain merchants. And the rural elites in China and Korea, the traditional base of Confucian support, had always resisted land reform and newer ways of thinking.
(Confucian virtue, along with so-called Asian values seem to have been buzz terms of the late 1980s and early 1990s that gradually disappeared after Singaporean strong man Lee Kuan Yew finally gave up his prime ministerial pulpit in 1990. “Dragons” hasn’t yet quite gone the way of another acronym of the era: “NICS”—-short for “newly industrialized countries.”)
Along with Lynne Pan’s Sons of the Yellow Emperor, perhaps it was this little book that dispelled the myth of a Confucian work ethic.
Four Little Dragons
|
What do you think about this article?
More in Politics & Society
Latest Articles