Chapter 2: Literature Review
2.2 Techno-nationalism in East Asia
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Germany, and Japan – resulted from their ability to take advantage of the first and second Industrial Revolutions.”37
2.2 Techno-nationalism in East Asia
As Samuels describes the Japanese context: “for more than a century, the struggle to be equal with and independent from the West has animated Japanese technology and security thinking, thinking that posits Japan in a hostile, Hobbesian world in which interdependence inevitably leads to dependence, and dependence eventually results in domination.”38 If techno-nationalism is largely derivative of state perceptions of vulnerability in the face of external threats, the key question becomes one of finding the optimal strategy for achieving technological primacy and autonomy as a means of bettering the prospects for national survival.
Crisis and the specter of external threat were essential causal factors explaining the overall approach taken by Korea, Taiwan and Japan regarding their economic development strategies. Meredith Woo-Cummings writes that the regional experience of colonization, war, and foreign exploitation played an important role in explaining national development strategies geared toward the end goals of both overall growth and
technological self-sufficiency.39 The need to build up substantial war-fighting capacity against the tense backdrop of the Cold War security system blended with the domestic imperative of national development in driving all the major state actors in the region toward developmental state models predicated in large part on techno-nationalist principals.
The relationship between nationalism and state security emerges as a recurring theme in examining the governing ideologies taken by East Asian regimes in the aftermath of the Second World War. According to Ming Wan, “the rise of East Asian nationalism was in part a direct response to Western imperialism” wherein
37 Robert Gilpin, Global Political Economy, 2001.
38 Samuels, “Rich Nation, Strong Army,” 43.
39 Meredith Woo-Cummings. “Back to Basics: Ideology, Nationalism, and Asian Values in East Asia.” Economic Nationalism in a Globalizing World. 2005.
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“the early modernization drive in East Asia had a clear nationalist basis. Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans recognized the technological superiority of the West, and all sought to borrow Western technologies while maintaining traditional values.”40 In this sense, East Asian states internalized the lesson that nation-states compete with one another in the international arena and only through technological mastery could a state best ensure development and preserve its sovereignty and security. In this regard, the ideas of Friedrich List – not Adam Smith – were widely embraced throughout East Asia.41
Richard Stubbs further reinforces this linkage between external threat and nationalistic state interventionism, arguing that the Cold War security dynamic engendered high levels of regime insecurity, which, in turn, prompted the development of strong state capacity and mass-scale capital mobilization in a manner
conducive to rapid industrialization. Stubbs writes that “economic growth was not seen as an end in itself but rather as a means of building the state and increasing the security of the community.”42 This cultural and historical context accounts for what some see as a fundamental differences between the Anglo-Saxon and East Asia view of economic activity. James Fallows, writing in Looking at the Sun, summarizes these differences as such:
In the Anglo-American model, the basic reason to have an economy is to raise the individual consumer’s standard of living. In the Asian model, it is to increase the collective national strength.
Ideally, the goal is to make the nation independent and self-sufficient, so it does not rely on outsiders for its survival. The Anglo-American goal is basically materialistic; the Asian-style goal is basically political, and it comes from the long experience of being oppressed by people with stronger economies and technologies.43
Fallows follows up this insight with several other observations regarding the Asian approach to economic activity. According to him, in pursuing purposeful development strategies, the Asian approach is more
40 Ming Wan, The Political Economy of East Asia: Striving for Wealth and Power, 2008.
41 Evidence of this can be found in James Fallows, Looking at the Sun, 1994 and in Joe Studwell, How Asia Works, 2013
42 Richard Stubbs. Rethinking Asia’s Economic Miracle, 2005.
43 James Fallows, Looking at the Sun, 1994.
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comfortable with hierarchy and the concentration of power in the hands of the government than in the Anglo model. In this worldview, government sets the overall direction of the economy and mediates between different stakeholders. Asian states, while more trusting of government power than their Western counterparts, tend to also be more skeptical of market forces; seeing the role of the state as crucial to reigning in excesses and correcting market failures.44 The neoliberal assumption that the market “knows best” is not a commonly held view in East Asia. Rather, East Asian governments hew closely to the idea of purposeful state action as a catalyst for technological change and national development.45
Finally, the Asian model of economics places an “enduring emphasis on national borders” wherein there is a clear-cut conception of a “national” economic interest transcending the individual citizenry.46 The
heightened salience of national boundaries holds within it a competitive conception of economic activity:
nation-states compete with one another for wealth and power. As Fallows describes it:
Anglo-American theory instructs Westerners that economics is by nature a “positive-sum game” from which all can emerge winners. Asian history instructs many Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, and others that economic competition is a form of war in which some win and others lose. To be strong is much better than to be weak; to give orders is better than to take them. By this logic, the way to be strong, to give
orders, to have independence and control, is to keep in mind the differences between “us” and “them.”47
To that end, empowered national development bureaucracies carried out activist intervention in the domestic economy, often taking what Wan categorizes as a “paternalistic” approach toward the management and regulation of private enterprise. Nationalist driven ideologies, emerging largely in response to historical legacies of external predation, permeated throughout East Asia, shaping attitudes toward technology and national development. Within this framework of conceptualizing development, security, and state
competition, the role of “national” high-technology features prominently.
44 Ibid
45 Ibid
46 Ibid
47 James Fallows, Looking at the Sun, 231.
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The reasoning for this is fairly straightforward: development is essential to national strength and survival and technology is integral to national development. As James M. Cypher and James Dietz put it, “it can be
said that economic development is indistinguishable from the ongoing application of technological
knowledge to production.”48 Accordingly, change in technology flows from a combination of importation, innovation and discovery processes which can then be applied to systems of production. As they see it:
The successful introduction of technology into the domestic production process in any country, what we call domestic innovation, requires a domestic scientific establishment capable, first, of understanding, processing, adopting, and adapting foreign produced technological knowledge, including machines and tools, to local conditions and, later, of conducting its own research, designing its own experiments, and recognizing the potential, and sometimes, dangers of its own discoveries when applied to the domestic economy.49
Building off of List, East Asian states subscribed to the idea that the not all forms of economic activity were equal: some industries were more valuable and/or “strategic” than others for reasons of overall national development and/or national security. Such industries were, from the standpoint of the state, inherently more worthy of targeted interventions. According to Mark Beeson, this led to the conclusion that, “some forms of economic activity are intrinsically more valuable” and that “governments have an interest seeing them occur within their national jurisdictions. The key question then becomes one of whether such activities occur
‘naturally’ as a consequence of market forces, or whether they can be actively encouraged through government incentives or policies.”50
Realizing the development, adaptation, usage and dissemination of productivity-enhancing technology was key to long term development and comprehensive industrialization, Japanese planners, as Beeson puts it,
48 James Cypher and James Dietz. The Process of Economic Development, 380.
49 Ibid, 380
50 Mark Beeson, Regionalism and Globalism in East Asia: Politics, Security and Economic Development, 146
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“set out to create a comparative advantage in industrial production in defiance of Western economic ‘laws’
and orthodoxy.”51 The imperative placed on doing so was a matter of virtually existential importance, where
“a failure to industrialize and adopt productivity-enhancing technology threatened an equally path-dependent vicious circle of declining returns and living standards.”52 In this sense, Japan rejected the concept that development and convergence were pre-ordained through free-markets; governments must instead create or
“construct” the conditions necessary for modernization through the development of an indigenous innovation and production capacity.
In this regard, the various states of East Asia set about attempting to modernize their economies and
safeguard their security through strategies geared toward the achievement of “technological autonomy.” The achievement of such autonomy, according to Cypher and Dietz, required first the development of an
“independent technological learning capacity” (ITLC) and, eventually the development of an “independent technology creating capacity” (ITCC).53 According to them: “Creating an ITLC and achieving technological autonomy is the first step toward greater self-sufficiency, a higher level of domestic efficiency and the creation of an internal dynamic for the economy. It is an ITLC that undergirded the Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese development successes.”54
Samuels, writing on the interplay between the desire for technological autonomy, national security and development in modern Japan, states, “technology, then, was a matter of national security, and a bundle of beliefs and practices that constitute this view can be called “techno-nationalism.””55 In spite of drastically overhauling its structure of governance in the wake of defeat during World War II, many of the techno-nationalist assumptions from the previous era perpetuated themselves in the post-war period. For Japanese state planners both before and after World War II, technological self-reliance represented the preferred means of mitigating against an array of external security concerns. Specifically, in order to meet the overarching
51 Ibid, 147
52 Ibid
53 Cypher and Dietz, 380
54 Ibid
55 Samuels, “Rich Nation, Strong Army,” 33.
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