Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (3 page)

Complex Crossings in East Asian Modernities

Incorporating a regional and global frame of analysis requires deep area knowledge of a specific national context while also being in dialogue with scholars working elsewhere in East Asia. Moreover, it requires awareness that these complex border crossings are not just characteristic of neoliberal globalization but have a much deeper history that continues to shape the present. Modernity projects in East Asia have long been pursued with an awareness of the pressures nations exert on each other in response to the challenges of
uneven
development. In examining the impact of economic globalization and the spread of neoliberal ideologies—which are not just restructuring economies but sociopolitical relations and conceptions of citizenship—we need to comprehend how these ideas and forces touch down on deeply layered histories that subtly mutate and sometimes redirect logics that have come from somewhere else. When we talk about region we are referring to a set of intertwined histories through which an object known as East Asia is named and continually redefined. Moreover, these are ideologically diverse spaces in which state governments and other kinds of institutional contexts are themselves riven with difference, contestation, and debate. These logics (globalization, economic restructuring) open new spaces and create new kinds of actors who are often multiply located in competing regimes of value and whose daily practices are caught up in negotiating the ruptures between them. The chapters in this volume are experiments in ethnographic writing attuned to these regional interactions, layered histories, and complicated subjectivities.

A deeper sense of the intertwined histories of national modernity projects in East Asia entails the questioning of what we ordinarily understand by the terms
nation
and
modernity
. If globalization is an imagination of scale, modernity is no less an imagination of temporality. In this sense,
modernity
refers to a subjective awareness on the part of individuals of their positioning in a movement out of backwardness, ignorance, or tradition, on the one hand, and toward progress, enlightenment, and civilization on the other. What we mean by “the nation-form” is closely allied with a concept of modernity as a moment of rupture from the past.
6

Therefore, nationalist imaginings on the part of modernizing elites in different contexts position themselves in relation to other nations as both mirror and measure of their own progress to something called “the modern.” In the process they embark on projects of human engineering premised on new models for ideal citizenship as imperative for the nation’s ability to progress. In this introduction, I note three particular moments of modern East Asian histories in which these human engineering projects take shape in relation to larger geopolitical processes: the colonial modernity projects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the modernization projects of the period following World War II, and the neoliberal restructuring of national economies in the context of economic globalization following the end of the Cold War.

The
modernity projects in East Asia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were mobilizations by modernizing elites in search of national sovereignty. The ability to cohere together as a “strong nation” had become the new imperative to stave off the colonial ambitions of other nations. This pursuit of wealth and power superseded the aspirations of the Enlightenment to become aspirations for becoming, in the case of Japan, a colonial power. These histories of national becoming are important in understanding the continuing salience of “the nation” as a category of political belonging in a time of globalization, in particular with the rise of sentiments of “hypernationalism” expressed through the desire for economic and military power.

Hence, we wish to note here at the very beginning the importance of comprehending both the terms
nation
and
modernity
as structures of comparison. Benedict Anderson argues that the nation concept constitutes an unbounded seriality, an open-to-the-world plurality, in which one nation is set alongside others as counterposable units in “a world understood as one” (1998: 32). He poses seriality, rather than mimicry, as the underlying grammar of a national order of things. Most importantly, the “remarkable planetary spread” of nationalism accompanied the dissemination of a “profoundly standardized conception of politics” (1998: 29) requiring an entirely new vocabulary that marked a departure from a prior cosmological order. Therefore, each national context is “haunted” (Cheah 1999: 10) by its relation to other similar national bodies, all of which possess leaders, nationalists, citizens, ethnicities, populations, religions, and so forth. These categories achieve the status of “quotidian universals” through media technologies such as newspapers, in which one views these things “simultaneously close up and from afar” as categories of intelligibility present in one’s own nation as well as in others (Anderson 1998: 33, 2). The history of East Asian nation-building projects can be tracked as these new conceptual frameworks for constructing modern identities—ideas such as “individual,” “society,” “Enlightenment”—circulated, touched down, and developed in place in ways that reflected a local politics of meaning.
7

This underlying grammar makes it possible even now to compare, for example, Chinese children with Japanese children or, for that matter, American children, in terms of their training for success (Anagnost 2008b, Arai 2005).
8
It also sets up the possibility, to return to our opening example, for misrecognizing Japan for China. Comparison therefore becomes the “midwife
of national consciousness” in terms of placing the nation into a teleological narrative from backwardness to modernity but always in relation to certain others.
9
National awakening is an awareness that derives from the “disquieting knowledge of material forces at work in the wider world . . . a form of inhuman automatism conjured by capitalism’s eternal restlessness” (Cheah 1999: 11–12).

In the postwar period, the Enlightenment ideals of the modernity project were once again superseded by the more technical solutions of modernization theory. Japan became the American “Island of Dr. Moreau” (Harootunian 2004: 81), a scientific experiment to demonstrate the truth of modernization theory through the achievement of “essential characteristics.”
10
The history of postwar economic development in East Asia has been envisioned in terms of miracles and moments of “takeoff,” animated in the figures of “little tigers” or “flocks of geese” (played off, of course, against the “sleeping dragon” of socialist China) as if all nations everywhere, given the proper incentives and know-how, might expect the same progression through the sequential stages of rural to urban transition, industrial development, middle-class formation, and consumer utopia (Bernard 1996). What tends to be forgotten in these stories of miracle economies is not only the geopolitical processes shaping them but also how they are themselves animated by the restless movement of capital as the conditions of uneven development shift. What does it mean to be living in postmiracle times?

Therefore, the studies in this volume argue for the importance of understanding how these projects of life-making in different national contexts are connected. We are by now well into what has been designated as the Asian Century, in which the dynamism of the global economy is said to be shifting away from Europe and North America to a region of emerging economies. The rise of China, in particular, figures centrally in visions of a future world order in ways that are reminiscent of Japan’s rise to economic preeminence in the 1980s. Japan’s prior economic success was in no small part due to its Cold War–era role as a model modernizer. China’s post–Cold War rise is in no small part due to its ability to offer foreign capital (including from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) an apparently inexhaustible well of cheap rural labor as the historical product of its socialist-era development. However, even this promise has begun to unravel as wages in China rise, due in no small part to worker protests over abysmal labor conditions, leading to capital flight deeper into the Chinese hinterland or to Southeast Asia.

This
focus on region is not meant to naturalize the idea of East Asia as a region but to draw from a history of complex crossings that have linked modernity projects across national boundaries. It also explores the value of a more integrated area studies for global studies as well as the reverse, to recognize the importance of incorporating global perspectives in our understandings of regional and national contexts. All too often, the fields of study identified with specific nation states (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan) remain insular and fail to address the ways in which constructions of place are bound up with their relationships to other places. Likewise, a newly constituted “global studies” tends to gloss over the deeply stratified histories that continue to shape the present and future. The chapters in this volume adopt an ethnographic approach that combines a historical depth of field with regional and global perspectives in the study of East Asian places.

Neoliberalism as Ethos

The opportunities and terrors of this new time, shaped by global forces in labor markets, frame the life prospects for youth. Defined by calculations of risk and calibrations of human capital, these conditions of existence have resulted in new forms of embodied value and self-enterprising subjects. This volume explores detailed case studies of how workers are produced for new conditions of labor in a global marketplace, how new forms of consumption appear to promise a future for capital accumulation, and how individuals may or may not embrace risk as a marker of their “freedom” within a cultural ethos that we identify as “neoliberal.”

In referring to a neoliberal ethos, we reference the capillary spread of values that define self-enterprising subjects (Hoffman, DeHart, and Collier 2006: 9–10). The question of whether we can apply the term
neoliberal
to transformations of economy and society in East Asia should not be premised on the presence of a particular political form but on whether there is a prevailing ethos of “empowering” individuals as risk-bearing subjects and of unleashing the power of the markets to order human affairs in areas where market agency is deemed superior to governmental control and regulation. However, in each of these specific national contexts, neoliberal logics must confront locally specific histories and the problems of government that influence how these logics are adapted, contested, and shaped. Both South Korea
and
Taiwan experienced long struggles for democratization from a military dictatorship and an authoritarian ruling party; Japan’s attainment of rapid economic growth in the postwar period as a client state of the United States was purchased at the cost of democratic debate; China’s postsocialist government allowed for the liberalization of the economy while retaining a tight hold on political control. In each case, the term
neoliberalism
references a “new freedom” that negates the value of what came before. This means that what this new freedom may mean in the context of different national histories may be in fact quite variable.

All of the societies represented in this volume are in their different ways under pressure from the global economy to produce enterprising selves able to navigate successfully the booms and busts of an increasingly volatile economy by encouraging individuals to regard themselves as a portfolio of human capital assets that they can manage and develop.
11
In illiberal political formations, as is the case elsewhere, incitements to neoliberal subjectivity come not only in the form of more overt pedagogies but also through media portrayals of desired subjectivities. In places where liberal models of governing “at a distance” coexist with more authoritarian forms of power, these modes of representation carve out areas of “microfreedoms” that encourage the development of “self-governing subjects” that will not challenge the limits set by the state (Zhang and Ong 2008).

We are perhaps only beginning to understand how neoliberal values spread globally, touching down in disparate places with complexly layered histories, and how these ideas develop locally with an awareness of the competitive pressures that come from other places. Zhang Li and Aihwa Ong have suggested the concept of assemblage as a useful tool of analysis. “An assemblage is not framed by preconceived political or social terrains, but is configured through the intersection of global forms and situated politics and cultures. . . . [D]isparate global and situated elements co-produce a particular space, and this interplay crystallizes conditions of possibility and outcomes” (2008: 10). This framing works well for the regional approach we propose here. It helps us to capture the awareness of individual subjects of being situated within a global condition that enables a young man from Taiwan, for example, to envision building his hip-hop empire in China (Hsu,
Chapter Two
) or an elite student from South Korea to anticipate a global scope for her ambitions as an events manager (Abelmann, Park, and Kim,
Chapter Four
). However, the scale of such ambitions expands and contracts
with
the growth and decline of national labor markets. Bookshops in Japan now feature literature for parents wishing to prevent their children from becoming
freeters
(Arai,
Chapter Seven
), while in China they feature advice on how to get one’s child into Harvard.

These examples suggest that although neoliberalism as an ethos may traverse uneven terrain, it has, nonetheless, “pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the commonsense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world” (Harvey 2005: 3). However, “the actual process by which it became hegemonic, to the point of becoming common sense, is not examined” (Read 2009: 25). The hegemonic force of this new ethos is “generated not from the state, or from a dominant class, but from the quotidian experience of buying and selling commodities from the market, which is then extended across other social spaces, ‘the marketplace of ideas,’ to become an image of society” (2009: 26). In other words, the neoliberal ethos is a “real abstraction.” Although it exists only within the human mind, it does not originate there. “It is not people who originate these abstractions [in their minds] but their actions. ‘They do this without being aware of it’
” (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 20; embedded quote is from Marx 1976: 166). Or, to reprise Pheng Cheah, they arise from “the disquieting knowledge of material forces at work in the wider world . . . a form of inhuman automatism conjured by capitalism’s eternal restlessness” (1999: 11–12).