Abstract
The year 2008 was the 30th anniversary of the ‘opening and reform’ policies in the Chinese economy. Tentative and experimental as they have often been, these policies have transformed the size and institutional structures of the Chinese economy. They have also had an extraordinary impact on the world economy. China has converted itself from a raw-material to an industrial-goods exporter under conditions that have allowed a huge accumulation of recyclable foreign exchange reserves which have, in turn, fuelled unsustainable speculation and consumption in the US and elsewhere.
Explaining and understanding more fully the historical and institutional bases for these developments presents a major challenge to historians and social scientists, a challenge that to date they cannot be said to have met with conviction. These two books represent important contributions to the debates in this field.
Giovanni Arrighi is the author of The Long Twentieth Century, a striking analysis of capitalism and long cycles in the world economy. His new book is a detailed attempt to incorporate recent Chinese developments into this wider framework. In 1978, China was a partially planned economy with some unique Chinese characteristics. It is now undergoing a market-based transformation in which the central Party retains absolute political authority and the ‘public’ interest remains dominant in the economy. Adam Smith fits into the picture in the following way. First, Arrighi discusses modern interpretations of Smith that show him less as a theorist of laissez-faire, minimalist intervention and weak government, and more as a proponent of intervention to secure fair markets and public goods, notably education, physical infrastructure and a functioning legal system. In the long run, Smith's notion was that economic development based on increasing specialisation would tend to ‘level up’ opportunities and economic achievements, both domestically and internationally. One aspect of this argument was that specialisation would be achieved by a multiplication of small firms rather than through the growth of large-scale ones. This was a view that came to be shared by admiring analysts of the British cotton industry a hundred years later.
In the event, levelling out did not occur. By the beginning of the twentieth century world power structures had swung overwhelmingly in favour of the industrialised West. By the end of the century the world economy appeared to be controlled by increasingly concentrated industrial structures and large firms, including banks. This is where China comes in. Arrighi notes that the post-reform dynamics of China owe much to small and medium-scale firms, usually located in rural areas. This mode of development – small firms and the strong state – links to the ‘natural’ pattern of development discerned by Smith in the eighteenth century. The Smithian view of China is then reinforced by Kaoru Sugihara's conception of the ‘industrious revolution’ – a form of development that encourages intensive labour effort and household management skills, both characteristics attributed by earlier analysts to effects of the ‘rice-based’ economies. Finally, this image of China is then fitted into an updated version of Arrighi's global framework to complete his thesis.
This is not a book to be missed by any economist or economic historian interested in the long view. It remains, however, very much a work in progress. The Asian details depend heavily on secondary sources, themselves not always reliable and certainly subject to future revision. On the quantitative side the problem is that the historical record is not clear and is unlikely ever to be so. Also, the scale and geographical and historical variety of China make it possible to illustrate almost any thesis from some case study or other, and the temptation is to generalise such cases.
Turning to the more recent period, Arrighi does not really face up to the implications of China's near-total dependence on foreign technologies. At present, 40 per cent of China's exports are in the ICT sector, but up to 90 per cent of these depend on foreign technology. China shows little sign of the kind of technical and organisational breakthroughs achieved by Japan, or more recently by Taiwan and South Korea.
While Arrighi is an outsider looking in with wonder, the authors included in One China, Many Paths give us the experience and thoughts of authentic insiders. The book is a symposium of Chinese writers in the humanities and social sciences discussing issues that interest and trouble them at the turn of the century. The flood of English materials on China in recent years has turned into a veritable tsunami, but reading this book reminds us that there is simply no substitute for seeing China through Chinese eyes. In his introduction, Chaohua Wang underlines the turning point of the 1990s. In the 1980s, everything seemed possible; after Tiananmen freedoms were lost, but new lucrative career opportunities were opened up in the reform economy for those not troubled by issues of politics and conscience.
Of all the chapters, the most shattering is that by Chin Hui entitled ‘Dividing the Big Family Assets: On Liberty and Justice’. Chin has memories of the Cultural Revolution and after his faction was crushed by the military in 1969 he was sent successively to two desolate, remote villages. Amazingly, while there he was able to read books such as Naum Jasny's history of the Soviet Collectivisation. In 1978, with virtually no education, he started graduate work at Lanzhou University and went on to become an economic history teacher in Xian. After Tiananmen, he correctly saw that this heralded the beginning of a reform process to be marked by corruption and inequality – something which the Party has increasingly recognised since about 2005. The breadth and depth of these reflections reveal how alive intellectual life in China still is, despite all the barriers to it.
Christopher Howe
(University of Sheffield)
Neil Boister and Robert Cryer are quite correct when they refer to the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in the Far East as a ‘nearly forgotten trial’ (p. v). Just as the European theatre dominated Allied war planning during the Second World War, the judgements at Nuremburg have largely overshadowed both the historical and legal record of the Tokyo trials. Boister and Cryer have set out to redress the lack of attention paid to the legalistic arguments and thinking behind the Tokyo IMT.
The book is solidly grounded in the secondary literature and is impressively researched from archives in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. The work is at its finest, however, when delving into the actual transcripts and judgements of the Tokyo IMT. There are attempts to incorporate Japanese views but the book is lacking in Japanese source material and additional historical context would have broadened its appeal to a wider audience. Nonetheless, Boister and Cryer have produced a well-written legal analysis of the International Military Tribunal in the Far East, with only a minimum of jargon.
The Tokyo trial was not – and is not presented as – a paragon of international law. Mistakes were made, judgements were flawed and despite General Douglas MacArthur's intent that the trial be a ‘monument to fairness’ (p. 74) the result was essentially ‘victor's justice’. Boister and Cryer examine in detail the indictments against the accused, the conduct of the trial and, among other topics, Crimes Against Peace, the murder charges and War Crimes.
Perhaps one of the reasons for the mixed legacy of the Tokyo trials was the division that existed among the Tribunal itself. The lack of unanimity in the final judgement certainly hurt the Tribunal's credibility, and the authors do a very good job of charting the course of discord. The dissenting opinions, especially from Justice Radhabinod Pal of India, are well documented and give a clear yet nuanced view of both the legal and moral overtones involved.
While the legacy of the Tokyo IMT left the authors feeling ‘ambivalent’ (p. 330), the trial was not without worth. The relevance of the IMT – both good and bad – to modern-day trials in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia is lightly peppered throughout the text, and further research on these parallels would prove useful.
Michael Carroll
(University of Calgary)
The Yasukuni shrine continues to be a potent symbol of Japan's relationship with its Pacific War past. This being said, scholarly work on the shrine in English has been sparse and media representation one-dimensional. John Breen's edited volume is therefore a welcome attempt to provide a multidimensional approach to Yasukuni, and in this regard it is largely a success. Starting with Breen's introductory genealogy, the contributors place the shrine within a number of different frameworks – international, political, religious, ideological. However, if one thread was to be identified that ties the essays together it is Yasukuni as a symbolic, and contested, site of remembrance, and we are drawn straight into a fierce debate over the shrine's role in the construction of the historical war narrative. There is much to take in here, and due to the breadth of the arguments presented even the casual reader will find something of interest. Chapters also range in tone, from more traditionally academic arguments to scathing polemics from Doak and Nitta.
Indeed, the essays by Doak and Nitta are particularly noteworthy, as they illustrate well the emotional, and moral, significance of this particular remembrance debate. For example, Doak's religious perspective leads him to argue that retrospective judgement of the actions of the dead enshrined at Yasukuni is a meaningless enterprise, and he advocates worship as a transcendental act: ‘a genuine opening to experience the sacredness of Life’ (p. 69). Nitta, too, takes issue with remembering the dead in terms dictated by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, but also uses his essay to contest a range of other issues of war remembrance. In doing so he takes direct issue with Breen's chapter, which suggests that Yasukuni and the war museum attached to it are engaged in a process of myth production (p. 161) that subordinates the veneration of war dead to the dissemination of a set of moral and ethical values.
The scope of this volume is broad, but it feels rather slim. One markedly absent perspective is that of the Japanese people who live within these debates, and the inclusion of ethnographic research would have added further insight. Also, the international chapters are conspicuously China-centric – it would have been useful to have another case study, perhaps that of South Korea, for comparative purposes. Nonetheless, this is an excellent introduction to a sticky topic, and a good jumping-off point for further research.
Chris Perkins
(Royal Holloway, University of London)
B. N. Ghosh offers a double apology in his book, first for the marginalised discipline of political economy (as opposed to the more narrow discipline of classical economics); and second for the novel contribution of M. K. Gandhi. Gandhi is widely celebrated for his selfless devotion to non-violence, but his economic thought is usually understated by political theorists, who tend to see it as dangerously naïve. Gandhi considered capitalism and technological modernity to be both morally corrupting and harmful to the material welfare of the poor. Gandhian political economy (GPE) is, according to classical economics, pure folly – hand-spun cloth is more expensive and less profitable than mill-spun cloth – but it has the advantage of fostering greater equality, local self-reliance and the virtue of selflessness (pp. 19–20).
Ghosh works through the unsystematic Collected Works to draw out the main principles of a system. Despite periodically papering over difficult conceptual tensions in Gandhi's thought, the result is a unified doctrine that can be compared to other systems of political economy. If this entails some jargonising of Gandhi's clear prose, it will make Gandhi more respectable in circles where simple writing is taken for a mark of naïvety.
Given the gains achieved by technological capitalism throughout Asia in recent decades, few people apart from environmentalists are sympathetic to Gandhi's call for a return to village-level hand production and quasi-autarky. One of the merits of Ghosh's book is that he tests the achievements of industrialisation in some newly emerging economies (pp. 143–52), corroborating Gandhi's view that inequality rises with industrialisation. But given Ghosh's argument that Gandhi shares the Rawlsian ‘difference principle’ (p. 26, p. 127, pp. 196–7), the question is whether such inequality ultimately benefits the worst off. I suspect it does not, but Ghosh offers no conclusive evidence on this subject.
Since little capital investment is needed for Gandhi's plan of economic development, Ghosh argues that it is ‘not utopian’ (p. 29, p. 221). But if Gandhi's project requires little capital, it requires great cultivation of character. I fear that it may be less utopian to raise all nations to American levels of consumption than to raise them to the heights of Gandhian morality. It is surely for this reason that every poor country in the world has chosen some version of the technological-capitalist model rather than the ‘regime of enjoyment through renunciation’ (p. 227). Let us hope that Ghosh's important work will spawn a field of GPE dedicated to exploring practical applications of Gandhian principles.
Robert Sparling
(University of Ottawa)
At first glance, the title of this volume seems to suggest that it is only about Japanese security, but in fact this book is ‘oriented toward theory development more than toward policy formation or historical clarification’ (p. 2) and is a culmination of decades of theoretical insights, comprising a collection of Katzenstein's authored and co-authored essays on Japanese security published from 1991 onwards. The volume identifies myriad phenomena that are inexplicable in realist and/or liberal terms, re-examines some shortcomings of the two dominant paradigms in the discipline of international relations and brilliantly presents alternative explanations to these puzzles.
Rethinking Japanese Security consists of three main parts. Part I explores domestic and regional aspects of Japanese security; Part II places Japanese and Asian security in a comparative context; and Part III elaborates the notion of analytical eclecticism and its bearing on security, which Katzenstein brings to the fore in his introduction.
Katzenstein points out that different research traditions are informed by cognitive structures which shape what phenomena are deemed significant, what research questions are considered appropriate and what methods are deemed epistemologically sound. These cognitive structures make cross-paradigm dialogue extremely difficult. For Katzenstein, his primary concern is conducting empirically grounded studies that further extend the boundaries of knowledge. In light of this, he uses the term explanatory sketches to refer to ‘any interpretation of a set of observations that is intended to generate a causally significant understanding of specific empirical outcomes’ (p. 261). With this definition in place, he then tackles the internal and external dimensions of Japanese security by drawing insights from sociology and constructivism while avoiding becoming entrapped in un-falsifiable meta-theoretical postulates. Instead of privileging one research tradition and elevating it over the others, Katzenstein provides a comprehensive review of three major paradigms of IR. He clearly demonstrates in the first two main sections the advantage of crossing paradigmatic boundaries and the strength of the concept of comprehensive security. The third section places analytical eclecticism at the centre, and avoids becoming bogged down in unverifiable ontological claims by ‘detaching explanatory sketches from the competing metatheoretical systems in which they are embedded’ (p. 263). This book, which is worthy of emulation, is essential reading for IR researchers who aspire to generate theoretically informed empirical studies.
Shih-Yu Chou
(University of Sheffield)
The purpose of Perry's study is to elucidate the complicated social, political and historical events that have shaped Burma's status as a country in a developmental crisis, and he pays considerable attention to one of Burma's most influential political leaders, Ne Win. Ne Win was a Burmese statesman and commander involved in various capacities in Burma's political leadership from the 1950s to the late 1980s. In fact, Perry allocates nearly 50 pages of the book to Ne Win's role in the development, or rather underdevelopment, of Burmese society. Perry also discusses Ne Win's involvement in policy making, with regard to isolationism, authoritarianism, xenophobia, Buddhism and Marxism. As a result, Perry effectively highlights research from selected publications and studies on Burma's lack of development in order to postulate its genesis.
Part of this ‘failure of development’ stems from the rampant historical and contemporary politicisation and mismanagement of natural and agricultural resources. Interestingly, the country's rich resource base represented a highly marketable product to the neighbouring countries of Thailand, Laos, China, India and Bangladesh. Unfortunately, Burma's highly authoritarian and secretive society suppressed the trade of rice, teak and minerals for the benefit of the elite class. Corruption and crime have plagued the development of Burma at all levels of economic society, with the result that the illegal export of natural resources and rice provides a higher commercial income base than legally cultivated timber and rice or mining operations.
Perry's one failure in the organisation of the book is the way the material is presented. For example, he mentions the Green Revolution at the beginning but does not explain it until several pages later. Also, his sentence constructions are lengthy and contain too many ideas or statements that would be better arranged in short paragraphs. Another criticism relates to the proofreader, for there are numerous grammatical errors throughout the book, including missing words, misspelled words, word-order irregularities and missing punctuation.
Fortunately, Perry's incorporation of cross-references and many years of personal teaching experience provide a valuable key to the success of this book. His command of the country's troubled social history and events leading to the current state of developmental failures make this book an invaluable reference for students and researchers of global studies, Southeast Asian history, political studies and Burmese studies.
Matthew J. Forss
(Goddard College, Vermont)
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