Chapter 7
East Asian Capitalisms and Economic Geographies
Introduction
Since the early 1980s, the core capitalist economies of North America and Western Europe have undergone fundamental transformations in their political-economic constitution and sociospatial organization. In economic geography, these massive transformations have been described variously through such concepts as the “new industrial divide/space,” “cultural/symbolic economy,” “regional innovation systems/clusters,” and, more recently, “neoliberalization/financialization.” While the causal origins of these four significant capitalist transformations are interrelated, economic geographers have pointed to the crisis of Fordism – previously the hegemonic form of capitalist industrial organization – and the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of international financial management since the early 1970s as the main forces shaping the globalization of the world economy. The breakdown of Fordist mass production has dramatically reduced the economic might of older industrial areas and contributed to the emergence of flexible production systems in new industrial districts/spaces. It has also facilitated the search for new growth and capital accumulation in non-manufacturing sectors, particularly those economic activities associated with the creation of symbolic values and new knowledge. After almost two decades of intense industrial restructuring and territorial shifts, by the late 1990s, these new processes of value creation and capture had left their spatial imprints in dominant creative innovation clusters in high growth cities and regions throughout North America and Western Europe. Meanwhile, the changing international financial system during the post-Bretton Woods era created enormous opportunities for capital accumulation, culminating in the rapid rise of global finance. Financialization has blurred and, increasingly, morphed the Fordist distinction between productive assets and financial capital. This ongoing process and its crisis tendencies have profound implications for understanding the new economic geographies of the 2010s.
At the risk of caricaturing a far more complex mosaic of major economic-geographical transformations, the above canvas offers a quick and sweeping representation of the main drivers of capitalist dynamics in the “industrial core” of North America and Western Europe during the past three decades. Where does East Asia fit in to this picture of capitalist dynamics and trajectories? Does it merely follow the same logic of capitalist development of the industrial core, as commonly argued in modernization theories? Are there other possible pathways to capitalism(s) in East Asia? If so, how do these alternative capitalist trajectories produce distinctive economic geographies? How might alternative readings of East Asian capitalisms and economic geographies advance our common subject matter? In this chapter, I examine the complementary contributions of recent economic-geographical studies in understanding the changing dynamics of capitalisms in East Asia during the past three decades. As East Asia has undergone tremendous transformations during this period, we witness diverse capitalist developments, unfolding initially in Japan, and then in different waves in the Asian newly industrialized/industrializing economies and, recently, China. These divergent transformations across East Asia are producing distinctive economic geographies that have been increasingly documented in empirically grounded geographical studies. To reflect on the changing field of economic geography, I engage with the different epistemological and theoretical framings in these geographical studies of East Asian capitalisms, considering the possibilities of using conceptual ideas emerging from these studies to “theorize back” at dominant concepts and ideas developed in North America and Western Europe. This approach enables us to appreciate the possibilities of remaking economic geography as a field of intellectual inquiry in light of recent development in East Asia (Yeung and Lin 2003; Yeung 2007).
One of the most visible differences in capitalist trajectories between advanced industrialized economies and East Asian economies is related to the extent of endogeneity – defined as the degree to which the processes causally responsible for economic change in regions and countries can be adequately conceptualized as emanating from within those places. Within North America and Western Europe, the post-Fordist transformations sketched above are clearly situated in a context of global economic change. Nevertheless, those four key concepts and their variants are primarily endogenous in their explanatory framing; they are defined and explained mostly by dynamic processes within these capitalist economies. For example, triggered by the crisis of accumulation within Fordism, it is argued that the rise of new industrial spaces and the national drive for knowledge-based economies leads to the institutionalization of innovation systems and, in their spatial forms, creative clusters in specific city-regions. The post-Fordist growth of interfirm networks also gives rise to flexible production systems and learning regions, even though these network dynamics are endogenously driven by changing industrial organization. In East Asia, however, such endogenously specified concepts, including interfirm networks, are perhaps less useful in accounting for the dynamic growth and development of diverse economies since the 1980s. Rather, these diverse East Asian capitalisms are more appropriately characterized by significant exogeneity in their developmental trajectories.
This exogeneity is expressed in East Asian capitalism’s earlier preoccupation with export-oriented industrialization, as well as their more recent concern with grounding translocal flows and networks. Instead of looking mostly endogenously, to their domestic economies, for new growth dynamics, East Asian economies are continuously searching for new ways of articulating themselves with the global economy. In this sense, I argue that “flows” and “networks” of global and translocal scope serve as better metaphors for understanding changing East Asian capitalisms since the 1980s. Unlike Fordist or even post-Fordist modes of developmental trajectories, these exogenous flows of goods and services and networks of capital, people, and knowledge/technologies are fundamental to the dynamics of East Asian capitalisms. Networks and flows help us avoid the analytical problem of place-based “Asian exceptionalism” (i.e. Asia is different because it is Asia), common in area studies and international relations, as they highlight the exogenous connections shaping East Asian growth dynamics. They also enable us to look forward to the next big issue – the differentiated ways in which East Asian economies play a more significant role in shaping future global economic geographies.
Changing Dynamics of Capitalist Economic Geographies in East Asia: How Flows and Networks Matter
With hindsight, the dramatic economic-geographical transformations in North America and Western Europe also did not occur without exogenous influences. Global-scale flows (e.g. manufactured exports from Japan and the Asian newly industrialized economies (NIEs)) and networks (e.g. global shifts in corporate organization) were as important as endogenous processes in restructuring the industrial core. With some recent exceptions (e.g. Coe et al. 2004), these flows and networks are often treated as, and combined into, territorialized social relations in the economic geography literature, such as localized trust and associational economies in the “new regionalism” approach. By contrast, flows and networks in East Asia are viewed as translocal processes shaping capitalist trajectories. During the 1970s, as Fordism entered into crisis in North America and Western Europe, Japan was rapidly emerging as a formidable industrial power capable of competing against industrial leaders in several globalizing sectors such as chemicals, automobiles, and electronics (Dicken 2010). Japan’s meteoric rise as a global industrial powerhouse set off a whole series of important questions and agendas for economic geographers, particularly those who were preoccupied with explaining, endogenously, the decline of older industrial regions and the rise of new production spaces in advanced industrialized economies. It is important to note, though, that geographical studies of Japan in the global economy have been few and far between by comparison to the dominant “new regionalism” literature.
The first wave of geographical studies of “flows” and “networks” was tied to Japan’s relentless pursuit of export-oriented industrialization in the post-War era. These studies shed light on the important role of trade and investment flows in enacting the changing nature of capitalist development in Japan, pointing to the initial role of trade in sustaining Japan’s export-oriented industrialization during the 1950s and 1960s. They represented an important correction to the dominant explanation of the Japanese challenge to Fordism as being based in trade (exports). Investment flows were as important in accounting for the rising interdependency of the global economy in the post-Fordist era (Dicken 2010; Yeung 2009a). The successful penetration of Japanese investment into North America and Western Europe from the 1980s to the early 1990s vindicated not only Japan’s developmental strategy of export-oriented industrialization (later well emulated by other East Asian economies) but also its unique variety of capitalism dominated by closely knit state-business and intra-business group relations. Indeed, this latter attribute of intra-keiretsu or financial conglomerates behavior has been partially examined by economic geographers. Key geographical issues are related to the extent to which Japanese automobile firms were unwilling to localize their supplier networks and thus preferred to bring with them, often in a wholesale manner, “transplant organizations” into the US and Western Europe (Mair, Florida, and Kenny 1988). This “clash” of business organization and variety of capitalisms was shown to have significant geographical ramifications in terms of highly selective location of Japanese investment sites, changing employment relations in these sites (often non-unionized), lack of localization of R&D activities, and regional dependency effects.
Whilst some of its most powerful keiretsu groups were venturing into North America and Western Europe during the 1970s and the 1980s, Japan was embracing other East Asian economies on the basis of its now much discredited idea of the “flying geese” model of East Asian development. In this model, Japan serves the technological leader and provides both capital and technologies to promote industrialization in other East Asian economies, first the four “Tiger” or NIEs of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea, and later Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and finally China. Economic geographers have contributed to debates about this flawed “ladder climbing” conception of East Asian industrialization (see Hart-Landsberg and Burkett 1998), arguing that the role of Japan in providing capital and technology to fuel East Asian industrialization has been overstated. Instead, these East Asian economies have industrialized their economies by building on a whole range of exogenous flows and networks beyond Japanese investment.
Interestingly, virtually no economic-geographical studies have examined the changing political economy and industrial organization of the Japanese capitalism itself (except Peck and Miyamachi 1994) and its associated industrial organization (except Patchell 1996), preferring to concentrate on the international participation and outward orientation of the Japanese economy. This was partly a reflection of these economic geographers viewing the rise of Japan from the spatial perspectives of North America and Western Europe. The former question, however important, has been left to political science and area studies (for example Japanese studies), which catalyzed the successful developmental state theory to describe Japan’s distinctive political economy. With varying degrees of success, this endogenous theory of state-driven development was later applied to the cases of South Korea, Taiwan, India, Brazil, and, to a certain extent, Singapore.
A second wave of economic-geographical studies of “flows” and “networks” in East Asian capitalisms beyond Japan focused on the role of translocal ethnic-based networks in spearheading rapid industrialization and economic development. These networks shape the emergence of cross-border direct investment, transnational technical and knowledge communities, and the spatial divisions of migrant labor (for example into export processing zones and industrial estates; Ong 2000). Since the early 1990s, economic geographers have extended their research into these translocal flows and networks to Southeast Asia (for example Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam) and China. The first major strand of this burgeoning literature was associated with the study of how cross-border business activity is embedded in ethnic ties, with particular reference to the role of ethnic Chinese business networks in the Asia Pacific. Several empirical studies found these ethnic ties to be important in enhancing the success of cross-border investment in China and Southeast Asia by ethnic Chinese capitalists from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore (Leung 1993; Hsing 1996; Yeung 1997; 2004). Through their family and friendship ties with other ethnic Chinese in the host economies, investors from Hong Kong and Taiwan were better able to navigate opaque host government regulatory systems to take advantage of strategic business opportunities in these not-so-open business environments, and to gain access to capital and information from co-ethnic host business partners. Couched in geographical terms, these studies demonstrated why ethnic Chinese investors from Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan (and Indonesia and Malaysia) tended to invest in certain host regions and provinces in China, particularly in the earlier period of China’s post-1978 “Open Door” policy. Their ethnic embeddedness also has profound implications for understanding their exclusionary business and employment practices and local development in China, Indonesia, and, more generally, Southeast Asia (Eng 1997; Turner 2007).
These ethnic-based economic geographies of transnational capital flows are not merely spatial outcomes of the rapid industrialization and development of protagonists’ home economies; more importantly, they are crucial mechanisms of change and transformation in the capitalist economic organization of their home economies. In other words, transnational capital flows provide a critical impetus and “feedback” to the emergence of new kinds of capitalism in East Asian economies. Unlike earlier studies of Japanese trade and investment flows, second wave studies placed significant emphasis on the changing political-economic organization of home economies. Transnational investment in China by ethnic Chinese from the three East Asian NIEs (i.e. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan) has been associated with a unique form of guanxi or relationship-based capitalism based on family and kinship ties (e.g. Yeung and Olds 2000). Guanxi capitalism is largely embedded in the dominant role of family in ethnic Chinese culture and thus the recurring presence of family business and kinship ties in this form of capitalist economic organization. Over time, however, transnational capital flows emanating from this form of capitalism, predominant in the three NIEs and other Southeast Asian countries, have rapidly transformed some of guanxi capitalism’s central tenets through the diffusion of international business knowledge and practices, the infusion of non-Chinese business actors (e.g. media, credit rating agencies, and global finance), and regulatory pressures from international organizations such as the World Bank, IMF, and WTO. Chinese business networks are thus being reshaped to incorporate non-Chinese actors and practices, catalyzing a form of hybrid capitalism in East Asia. This hybrid combines the advantages of family-based guanxi capitalism with the professionalization and bureaucratization associated with the Weberian spirit of modern capitalism, without being reducible to either (Olds and Yeung 1999; Yeung 2004).
This professionalization and hybridization of East Asian capitalisms is marked by the rapid emergence of a transnational knowledge and technical community, the study of which is a hallmark of this second wave. Challenging earlier ethnic-based explanations of the East Asian “miracle,” Hsu and Saxenian (2000) argued that guanxi capitalism has its own limits. When it comes to technological innovation and economic development driven by high-tech industries, ethnic-based guanxi relationships throughout East Asia can only facilitate business transactions and enable better decisions in an environment of opaque regulatory frameworks and information asymmetry. However, these socially embedded networks are less useful for promoting the development of cutting-edge technologies that require intense collaboration among spatially dispersed technical communities, often comprising different nationalities and ethnicities. The successful development of these technologies is also predicated on a highly spatialized transfer of tacit knowledges that exceeds ethnic-based relationships. Their path-breaking study of transnational collaboration in technological innovation between firms in Taiwan’s Hsinchu high-tech science park and Silicon Valley in the US clearly demonstrates how this has been important in supporting high-tech industries and economic development (see also Saxenian and Sabel 2008).
This explicit recognition of the importance of transnational knowledge networks provides a very useful counterbalance to the endogenous view of regional innovation systems prevalent in the economic-geographical studies of high-tech regions in advanced industrialized economies. In the East Asian context, such studies acknowledge different spatial scales at which innovation and knowledge transfer can take place. The experience of Taiwan’s high-tech community has been further extended to other East Asian NIEs and, more recently, China. Similar to Taiwan and South Korea, indigenous high-tech development in China is conditional on the continuous flow of transnational knowledge workers who shuttle between different continents. Some have chosen to settle down in their homeland and contribute to high-tech development in China, described by Zhou (2008) as “making Silicon Valley in Beijing.” A massive return of transnational knowledge workers to China complements successive waves of foreign investment into China, some of which has been in high-tech industries, well-documented in economic-geographical studies (Leung 1993; Liu and Dicken 2006; Tacconelli and Wrigley 2009; Zhou et al. 2011). Some of these studies also focus on the role of foreign investment in developing China’s R&D capabilities, establishing R&D labs, training local personnel, gradually transferring technical know-how and research practices, localizing new product and process technologies, and so on.
A final dimension of building translocal networks in East Asian capitalisms is linked to the complicated and yet massive spatial divisions of migrant labor. Undeniably, this geographical phenomenon has certain time-space specific resonances in advanced industrialized economies (for example guestworker programs and intra-European migrant workers). But its sheer size (over 200 million in China alone) and non-permanent nature (for example migration durations of less than five years) are characteristic features of migrant labor, particularly in East Asia. Economic geographers have shown that these spatial divisions occur both at the inter-regional scale within East Asian economies and at the inter-national scale between these economies. At the inter-regional scale, the work by Fan (2002) and Chan and Buckingham (2008) on migrant workers in China provides much needed evidence of how migrant workers from inner and less accessible provinces are critical to the successful strategy of labor-intensive industrialization in many coastal provinces, particularly those in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta. Other geographers have found the cross-border flows of these migrant workers to be highly important to spatially selective industrial development in Southeast Asian economies (for example Penang, Malaysia and Singapore). This phenomenon of massive flows of migrant workers tells us quite a lot about the state of economic development in these Southeast Asian capitalisms (see Kelly 2001). Not surprisingly, migrant workers from other provinces or countries are often subject to punitive labor control regimes. Four spatial scales of control regimes have been identified by Kelly (2002): national regulatory spaces, industrial estates in which factories are located, work sites/factories, and workers’ bodies (see also Glassman 2007).
A third wave of geographical studies of East Asian capitalisms has recently focused on the grounding of transnational “flows” and “networks” of capital and people, increasingly connecting the analytical concerns of economic geographies in East Asia with those in North America and Western Europe. Specifically, these recent studies deal with the territorialization of knowledge networks, commodity chains, and production networks in specific East Asian economies. They offer distinctively geographical perspectives on the transnational flows and networks that constitute the rapid industrialization and economic development of East Asian economies. One important strand of this literature focuses on how specific regions and territorial ensembles in East Asian economies are articulated into global networks of knowledge flows (Yeung 2009b). In China, for example, several important studies showcase how foreign firms and local companies interact intensively in innovative clusters and regions in order to benefit from different configurations of these global-local relations (Zhou and Tong 2003; Yang, Hsu, and Ching 2009; Zhou et al. 2011). Even in Chinese regions exhibiting more endogenous growth dynamics (for example Sunan), this tendency towards globalizing business and knowledge links is evident (Wei, Lu, and Chen 2009). This strategic coupling of global interests, represented in China by transnational corporations and their R&D activity, and territorialized local assets, is greatly facilitated by the existence of a transnational technical community and favorable institutional environment and government policies. Other geographers have identified significant management challenges when investors from contrasting capitalist systems bring their business practices to China (Depner and Bathelt 2005; Yang 2007). Overall, these findings indicate that East Asian capitalisms are indeed highly heterogeneous and differentiated both internally and in their external dimensions.
In Southeast Asia, the grounding of transnational flows and networks seems to take on more institutionalized organizational forms that evolve from informal and personalized networks to state-sanctioned global production networks. Unlike the transitional nature of socialist market-economy in China, Southeast Asian economies have been better articulated into global capitalism since the colonial era via British, Dutch, and French trading systems. The historical existence of ethnic Chinese as compradors and merchants throughout Southeast Asian economies, sanctioned by then colonial rulers, has enabled current global-local connections to be more systematically and formally organized. In Indonesia and Thailand, for example, formalized business networks, often organized on the basis of ethnic Chinese ties, are critical to the insertion of local manufacturers into global commodity chains in such industries as automobiles, clothing, and commodities (Dicken and Hassler 2000; Neilson 2007; Hassler 2009). In the electronics industry, Southeast Asia benefits enormously from excellent transport and logistics service providers, with certain hubs such as Malaysia’s Penang, Thailand’s eastern seaboard, and Singapore emerging as major nodes in global electronics (Bowen and Leinbach 2006). Some of these electronics hubs are well connected to industrial estates invested and managed by Singaporean firms that have ownership links with the Singapore government. This is a case of the Singapore state building extra-territoriality through encouraging its labor-intensive manufacturing activity to be relocated to such offshore Singapore-sponsored industrial estates in order to participate in the grounding of transnational flows in neighboring East and Southeast Asian economies – extending Singapore’s economic territoriality into neighboring countries (Phelps 2007). Similarly, other Southeast Asian states such as Malaysia and Vietnam are actively engaged in the construction of spatially exclusive clusters in order to ground global flows of capital and talents – both indigenous and foreign. This spatial strategy of building what Ferguson (1994) terms “anti-politics machines” enables the ethnocentric Malaysian state to steer the debates about special spatial zones/clusters, such as its much-celebrated Multimedia Super Corridor, away from ethnic politics. Instead, the development discourse of such clusters is intimated with the necessity for capital accumulation in order to depoliticize such a contestable “zoning” of sovereignty within its national boundary (Bunnell 2002; Lepawsky 2009). This closer analytical connection associated with the third wave greatly facilitates the remaking of global economic geographies.
Remaking Global Economic Geographies: Theorizing Back
The most important lesson from the preceding brief synopsis of how different translocal “flows” and “networks” of capital, people, and knowledge/technologies matter in the changing dynamics of capitalist economic geographies in East Asia is an appreciation of exogenous influences on capitalist transformations in these national economies. It helps us better appreciate the critical importance of economic-geographical studies of chains and networks that tie together different territorial ensembles, be they regions, countries, or even macro-regions (Dicken et al. 2001; Coe et al. 2004; Yeung 2009b). In this section, I use these analytical insights to reflect on the new kind of global economic geographies from which exciting research directions and novel analytical responses might spring. This reflexive process, known as “theorizing back,” represents a theoretical move through which heterogeneous insights from non-core regions and countries (for example East Asia) are deployed to interrogate dominant concepts and ideas in theorizing the economic geography of core advanced industrialized economies in North America and Western Europe (see also Yeung and Lin 2003). Three such insights from existing studies of East Asian capitalisms are particularly useful for this purpose: the strategic coupling of global-local relations, the cultural embeddedness of transnationalism, and the divergent development of hybrid capitalisms.
Judging from the prevalent temper of economic-geographical research into East Asian capitalisms during the last decade, the idea of global-local coupling has clearly emerged as one key frontier that can yield significant and enduring breakthroughs. While this theoretical emphasis on the interface of non-territorialized flows and networks with territorialized institutions and structures comes as no surprise to geographers familiar with East Asian developmental dynamics, it does pose a significant conceptual challenge to preexisting analytical approaches to uneven regional development in North America and Western Europe. As noted in the introduction, there is a tendency, here, towards overemphasizing the endogenous evolution of localized and territorialized dynamics such as agglomeration economies, learning and innovative capacities, institutional building, and distinctive socio-cultural practices. These endogenous approaches to spatial dynamics and uneven development are perhaps more appropriate to the study of advanced industrialized economies, where most regions and territories have established substantial territorialized assets in the forms of immense social capital, pro-growth institutions, absorptive capacities, and so on. When applied uncritically to the East Asian context, however, they tend to exceed their contextual specificity and become too myopic in their analytical foci.
As argued above, East Asian capitalisms are significantly co-constituted through flows and networks that serve as exogenous influences on their developmental dynamics. There seems to be a case for asking whether these exogenous factors and coupling mechanisms, relatively well illustrated in East Asia, can be applied back to economic-geographical studies of North America and Western Europe. In the economic geography literature, two interrelated analytical approaches have taken to task this important role of global networks and local coupling – the global commodity/value chain and the global production networks perspectives (Coe et al. 2004; Yeung 2005; 2009b). These theoretical approaches have received substantial attention among geographers studying East Asian capitalisms, but their influences in the dominant economic geography literature remains limited. There are many geographical studies of how East Asian regions and economics are differentially plugged into global production networks and how these processes of articulation have impacted on their developmental dynamics. By contrast, many fewer studies examine how leading regions in North America and Western Europe are articulated into global production networks and what that might mean for their own uneven developmental trajectories. Instead, it is the geographical studies of global circulations, flows, and practices that take on board the key conceptual idea of coupling mechanisms in global production networks.
Arising from this “theorizing back,” one possible way forward is for economic geography to reconceptualize capitalist territorial development as a contested outcome of dynamic forces necessarily operating at different spatial scales. Similar to key ideas in the global production networks approach, this conceptualization eschews the dualism between endogeneity and exogeneity in the study of territorial development in economic geography. Taking cues from Lee, Tee, and Kim’s (2010) comparative study of biotechnology clusters in South Korea and Singapore, I suggest that refocusing on the coupling mechanisms through which global (exogenous) forces intersect with local (endogenous) processes will improve our appreciation of why today’s important economic-geographical shifts underway in North America and Western Europe are ever more closely interconnected with the changing dynamics of capitalisms in East Asia (and elsewhere in the global South).
As noted in the introduction, studies of new industrial spaces and cultural economies in advanced industrialized economies and regions operated as if the rest of the world did not matter. To offer just one example, if these earlier geographical analyses had paid more serious consideration to Japan’s emerging challenge by the late 1970s, we might not only have a better geographical explanation of the emergence of flexible production systems in the late 1980s (in comparison to dominant transaction costs-inspired theories), but we might also have better anticipated the incessant drive towards cultural and knowledge-based economies since the 1990s, in response to the massive global shift in production towards East Asia. By explicitly linking industrial restructuring and structural transformation in advanced industrialized economies to the nascent, but rapid, industrialization of many East Asian economies, we might also better predict and explain the (re)emergence of East Asia as a major economic force in the twenty-first century. Whether in resource extraction, manufacturing activity, knowledge and innovation, financialization or global logistics, it has now become increasingly difficult, if not futile, to look for adequate and useful answers on the basis of events and activities within North America and Western Europe. In this sense, the study of East Asian capitalisms and their global connections has provided a strong theoretical basis for economic geography to venture into the future research terrain characterized by greater uncertainty and global challenges.
A second key theoretical frontier is inadvertently related to the role of culture and embeddedness in global circulation. Given the advanced state of the “cultural turn” in economic geography and the role of embeddedness as a central tenet in this literature (see Yeung 2005; Jones 2008), one may wonder what else we might learn from the experience of East Asia. While I concur that the “cultural turn” in human geography and, in particular, economic geography has put “culture” – broadly conceived as representations, identities, discourses, practices, and performativities – in the forefront of geographical analysis, the turn has now somewhat reached its inherent limits to addressing major geographical issues of our century – economic globalization, environmental challenge, and increasing poverty and uneven development. Its protagonists (myself included) may have suffered from an excessive emphasis on the micro: the mundane and everyday aspects of contemporary capitalisms. When broader generalizations about capitalisms are made from these cultural turn-inspired geographical studies, they tend to be ad hoc and haphazard rather than systemic and structural. There is a sense that the cultural trumps all dimensions of socioeconomic life, leading to a missed opportunity in tackling major real-world questions of our era. Even when (cultural) politics is explicitly recognized, power relations are relegated to the discursive realm; the world of material transformations in production and consumption, which matters a lot to millions of people in East Asia, does not seem to carry much weight in these deliberations.
Dissatisfied by the cultural turn’s false promises over the past decade, some geographers and their allies in sociology have recently called for a “cultural political economy” approach to the study of urban and regional economic change (Jessop, Brenner, and Jones 2008). While I sympathize with this critical semiotic stance towards the broader question of political-economic power relations unfolding in today’s global economy, in my view culture remains too much of a discursive construction in this approach. This is where geographical studies of East Asian capitalisms may play a role in (re)inserting culture, in both its discursive and material forms, into geographical research on economic change. These studies have pointed to the role of culture in shaping regional developmental trajectories (Aoyama 2009) and even trans-regional and transnational flows and networks of capital and people. Few studies in the core economic geography literature directly take on this structural and institutionalized dimension of culture, preferring instead to focus on its “softer” side of discursive politics. I am not advocating an either/or choice of these approaches to culture and its constituting effects on economic change. Rather, the theoretical insights gleaned from East Asian capitalisms and their cultural foundations point to the necessity of an analytical procedure that takes into account both in order to better appreciate the pressing research issues of global significance. This Take II of the “theorizing back” act compels us to go beyond the discursive and semiotic construction of the global-local coupling of flows and networks in different territorial ensembles. It is at least as important to pay attention to the material processes through which cultural norms and practices matter in the construction of global production networks and in their heterogeneous and uneven articulation with specific places and localities. Through this broader conceptualization of culture and embeddedness, we might have a better prospect of understanding and remaking global economic geographies.
The third key research frontier involves the conception of the divergent development of hybrid capitalisms in East Asia. Contra the dominant “varieties of capitalism” literature in comparative and international political economy, the East Asian experience tells us more not just about varieties in the sense of diversity and differences but also about the evolving and dynamic nature of capitalisms. The East Asian portfolio of capitalisms comprises Hong Kong’s classical laissez-faire style, Japan’s developmental state capitalism, subsequently emulated by Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, Southeast Asia’s “ersatz” approach, and China’s and Vietnam’s relatively recent experimentation with socialist market capitalism. In this kaleidoscope, we encounter more than just varieties of capitalisms. Rather, we may be witnessing the emergence of what Peck and Theodore (2007: 733) called “variegated capitalism,” an economic-geographical conception that allows us to “shift away from the varieties-style reification and classification of economic-geographical difference, in favor of a more expansive concern with the combined and uneven development of ‘always embedded’ capitalism, and the polymorphic interdependence of its constitutive regimes” (see also Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010). Their work has clearly demonstrated economic geographers’ lack of engagement with and voice in this important literature, despite the earlier significant influence of Marxist geography’s analysis of uneven development in global capitalism. Still, their work is premised essentially on variegations within capitalist core economies in the North, leaving aside the possibilities of capitalist formations in the global South to break away from the conventional bi-polar model of market-vs.-planned capitalisms.
The role of flows and networks in East Asian capitalisms may indeed be instructional here, for they showcase not only the transnational and territorially unbounded nature of capitalism in the case of ethnic Chinese capitalism throughout Southeast Asia but also the evolving and transformational character of capitalist experiments in the cases of China and Vietnam (and, to a certain extent, Cambodia). These are not just variants of the Anglo-American/Japanese models of capitalisms; they are more likely new models of capitalisms premised on multiscalar territorial formations (Yeung 2009a). The case of “theorizing back” rests not so much in the usefulness of these East Asian examples in informing the dwindling theoretical work in economic geography on capitalism in North America and Western Europe. The lack of interest among economic geographers in addressing such major issues in advanced industrialized economies simply does not provide the necessary theoretical space for a “theorizing back” that would entail developing a new generation of theoretical ideas and toolkits for analyzing the dynamic transformation of capitalisms in East Asia in relation to related capitalist processes in North America and Western Europe. Here, the critical role of flows and networks in hybridizing East Asian capitalisms provides a conceptual lead in helping us make sense of the complex interaction between global capitalism and global economic geographies.
Conclusion
This chapter reflects my personal journey of geographical inquiry into East Asian capitalisms and economic geographies. As an economic geographer living in and studying East Asia, I am forever mindful of my intellectual roots in Anglo-American economic geography (trained in the Manchester school!) and yet my aspiration and mission is to bring something back to the dinner table. Always mindful of the danger of overstating the case, I have discussed several possibilities of how economic-geographical studies of East Asian economies might differ from those in advanced industrialized economies and how these different approaches and ideas, particularly those with much greater emphasis on “flows” and “networks” in understanding capitalist dynamics and change, might help us theorize back at dominant conceptual approaches and frameworks in economic geography (see also Yeung and Lin 2003). The various geographical studies, conducted in East Asia, of how business activity is embedded in ethnic ties, how the emergence of transnational knowledge and technical community matters for regional development, and how rapid industrialization is engendered by complex spatial divisions of migrant workers, collectively point to the critical importance of improving our understanding of translocal flows and networks and their implications.
Looking forward, I believe that the East Asian experience with capitalisms can be a driving force in pushing us towards what economic geography might become and where it might reach – addressing the critical question of how globally shifting economic geographies bring together different macro-regions in interdependent and mutually constitutive ways. This is one possible avenue for developing new research questions, analytical directions, and disciplinary challenges for economic geography. First, there is some urgency to develop better theoretical specification and empirical evidence for understanding how global networks are strategically coupled with territorialized relations constituted through institutionalized structures. Second, we need a more materialist conception of culture and its consequences for capitalism in order to complement our existing and well-developed understanding of the discursive effects of culture in contemporary sociospatial life. Third, a better appreciation of flows, networks, and culture in economic geography is useful insofar as we are willing to take on the more pressing challenge of analyzing the divergent and convergent dynamics of global capitalism. In today’s globalizing world economy, a singular and reified conception of capitalism à la Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or Max Weber can no longer satisfactorily account for at times almost incredible geographical differences in economic shifts and outcomes, at all spatial scales. The East Asian experience with capitalisms might be telling in its own right. But projecting it to the wider global arena will require much more concerted efforts among economic geographers and their allies in other social sciences.
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