Transforming Gender and Development in East Asia

Esther Ngan-ling Chow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317795193
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Transforming Gender and Development in East Asia brings together a collection of original essays from top scholars in the United States and Asia to explore the centrality of gender in the process of economic development in East Asia. Contributors demonstrate through ethnography, personal narratives, field observation, and in-depth interviews the essential parts women have played in the national growth, economic restructuring, and industrialization of East Asian countries, including South Korea, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and China.

Part I

EnGendering East Asian Development

Chapter 1

Globalization, East Asian Development, and Gender

A Historical Overview

Esther Ngan-ling Chow

The dynamism and complexity of East Asian development as it relates to industrialization, economic restructuring, and migration require some historical background to fully understand current situations and future prospects. This chapter offers a historical overview with some national comparisons to comprehend the intricate and ever-changing relationships between globalization and development in the region. When development is interrogated through a gender lens, the phenomenal growth of the region is seen to be beleaguered with inequality, heterogeneity, struggles, and contradictions derived from different hierarchies and the structural transformation of societies.

Globalization and East Asian Development in Historical Context

Globalization refers to the compression of the world in spatial and temporal terms, describing the ever-changing and intensifying networks of cross-border consciousness, human interaction, system interdependence, and transformation on a world scale (Chow 1997b). Anthony Giddens (1990) explains that globalization is the intensification of worldwide social relations through time/space distantiation. In a capitalist economy, for instance, the distance and time needed to produce goods and transport commodities from the product’s origin to its destination are compressed via technology, telecommunications, and transportation. Globalization has been underway, with continuities and discontinuities, throughout human history, impacting unevenly on different world regions. The process is neither ubiquitously uniform nor linear but rather is construed as a partially integrated, sometimes disjointed, and even contradictory process. Globalization is a multifaceted concept that encompasses a variety of meanings and dimensions. Arjun Appadurai (1990) suggests that current global flows occur in and through the growing integration and disjuncture of different landscapes—finanscapes (e.g., money and trade), technoscapes (e.g., technology and information), ethnoscapes (e.g., people through international migration and travel), media-scapes (e.g., mass media and communication) and ideoscapes (e.g., ideas, images, and ideology). This book focuses primarily on socioeconomic aspects of globalization as they relate to gender.

The global economy refers to the increasingly interdependent system of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption in which flows of capital, labor, raw materials, goods, technology, information, markets, trade, and finance are processed via telecommunication, and transportation across national borders and regions. This economy has accelerated rapidly since the 1950s and early 1960s, when, in the face of international competition, the industrialized countries of the First World sought to expand through economic restructuring and offshore production in order to achieve maximum profit levels and the accumulation of capital.¹ This global force provided an impetus for the socioeconomic development of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Following is a historical overview of the three fundamental macrolevel changes brought by globalization—industrialization, economic restructuring, and migration—and their gender implications in the East Asian region. I first describe historical and empirical patterns of development in East Asia; then highlight gender-specific aspects of industrialization, restructuring, and migration; and finally explicate any specific East Asian characteristics or anomalies in light of general theories.

Industrialization

Industrialization is commonly known as a complex process involving the transformation from an agricultural society to an industrial one by expanding capital and the labor market, applying innovations in energy and technology, mechanizing production, and augmenting industrial organization with trade and societal infrastructures. Industrialization in East Asia was primarily driven by capitalist expansion, global economic restructuring, and an international division of labor facilitated by a strong state, transnational corporations (TNCs), trade, and financial institutions. As identified by Michael Hsiao (1997), the Asia-Pacific region, including East Asia, has undergone four major waves of development since the end of World War II: the first two relating to industrialization and are discussed in this section while the last two concern economic restructuring with a focus on regional industrial reorganization and integration and are discused in the next section. The first wave of industrialization started with Japan’s continued effort to modernize, beginning in the mid-1950s. Fueled by an abundant labor supply, foreign capital investment, foreign aid, and political stability, the country launched its industrialization and achieved economic recovery from World War II. In the twenty years that followed, Japan sustained a high level of economic growth, surpassing that of major European countries such as Italy and the United Kingdom by 1973. In recognition of its development, Japan has been considered a First World country, or a core member of the world economy, since the late 1960s.

The second wave of industrialization is the “economic miracle” experienced by the four “Asian dragons”—South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Because the former two are nation-states and the latter two are city-states, their pathways of industrialization diverged somewhat. Both South Korea and Taiwan have undergone four stages of development as identified by Gary Gereffi (1990), beginning with the commodity export stage that concentrated on the extraction and export of unrefined or semiprocessed raw materials.² During Japan’s colonial occupation of Taiwan (1895–1945) and South Korea (1910–1945), their industry, commerce, and production of food were developed to supply the Japanese domestic market. After the defeat of Japan in 1945, Korea was divided into two military zones straddling the 38th parallel. The north, under the control of the former USSR, became a communist state, while the south was initially occupied by the United States but proclaimed its independence in 1948. Taiwan became a province of the Republic of China after World War II and was ruled by Chiang Kai-shek and his party from 1949 until recent years.

The second stage began in the 1950s, when Taiwan and South Korea instigated a somewhat successful land reform policy. In response to global economic restructuring, both countries, which were governed by strong authoritarian states, adopted an inward-looking strategy primarily of import-substitution industrialization (ISI) that entailed a shift from importing to locally manufacturing basic consumer goods. In the third stage, which lasted from the 1960s to 1972, both countries altered their development strategies from ISI to export-oriented industrialization (EOI), which stressed exporting textiles, apparel, electronics, and plastics from their labor-intensive manufacturing sectors. In the mid-1960s, Taiwan was the first country to succeed in establishing export processing zones (EPZs), where a significant number of young, single women workers were employed—a model later adopted in many other Third World countries. After the oil crises of 1973, both countries embarked on their most recent stage and pursued a diversified export promotion and secondary ISI to advance their capital- and technology-intensive industries (i.e. heavy, chemical, and high-tech). By the mid 1980s, they had emerged as newly industrialized economies (NIEs) and were elevated to a semiperipheral position in the world system. Since then, they have experienced sustainable development. Foreign investment, trade liberalization, strong states with political stability, class formation, and local entrepreneurial initiatives and geopolitical factors were the determining forces that propelled the industrialization of these countries (Amsden 1989; Deyo 1987; Gereffi 1990; Gold 1986; Haggard 1990; Islam and Chowdhury 1997; Wade 1990).

However, Tun-jen Cheng (1990) found that South Korea and Taiwan diverged in their approaches to the implementation of development strategies: South Korea followed the classic “rent-seeking” approach that is centralized, hierarchical, unbalanced, and command-oriented, while Taiwan used a “surplus-generating” approach that was decentralized, balanced, and incentive-oriented. State-owned enterprises played a more important role in Taiwan than in South Korea (Gereffi 1990; Koo 1987), although Taiwan has begun to privatize in recent years. In contrast to the preponderance of small- and medium-sized enterprises in Taiwan’s industrial sector, South Korea’s is characterized by giant, vertically integrated industrial conglomerates (chaebols). Labor unionization, though repressed in both countries, has been more active in South Korea than in Taiwan (Frenkel 1993). Finally, Taiwan’s economic growth was assisted by its geopolitical alliance with the United States and other Western countries during the Cold War era, which brought foreign aid with relatively low international debt and encouraged Taiwan’s active, though unequal, external trading.

Under colonialism, Hong Kong and Singapore were created by the British as entrepot trading posts and shipbuilding and ship repairing bases during the second half of the nineteenth century.³ Hong Kong is the gateway to trade between China and other parts of the world, whereas Singapore is the hub for commodity exports in the southeast region. Thus international trade has played a pivotal role in their development. In the post–World War II era, the British had a hand in laying the infrastructure for commerce and finance as both countries recovered economically.⁴ As small city-states limited in natural resources and agricultural production, Hong Kong and Singapore depend heavily on migrant laborers, trade, foreign investment, and the transfer of technology. Hong Kong began to industrialize in the early 1950s, transforming itself from a free port to a modernized state. Ten years later, a similar process of industrialization took place in Singapore, especially after it attained self-rule in 1959. The economic growth of both countries can be attributed to export-led industrialization that peaked in the 1960s to 1970s, reaching 9 to 10 percent per annum increases in gross domestic product (GDP). Both city-states have sustained themselves economically ever since.

In spite of their similarities, there are some fundamental differences in the development processes of Hong Kong and Singapore. Hong Kong had been subjected to colonial rule by the British, enjoying some political stability but unable to control long-term economic policies and planning. The colonial government of Hong Kong pursued a laissez-faire policy of minimal intervention by putting few restrictions on private ownership, free trade, and currency control (Chiu 1994). Its export-led industrialization process was predominantly focused on local entrepreneurship, a product of grassroots capitalism based on human capabilities (Athukorala and Manning 1999). In contrast, Singapore had the fortune of gaining self-rule in 1959, though it was temporarily merged with the Federation of Malaysia and did not achieve political independence until 1965. Led by the People’s Action Party, the government sought nation-building, political stability, and activist policies as foci of its long-term development plan (Quah 1998). Exercising strong state control, the Singapore government launched its industrialization program to attract foreign investment, impose import restrictions protecting infant industries, undertake export drives, and encourage private enterprises. Unlike Hong Kong’s reliance on local enterprises, TNCs have largely dominated the export of manufactured goods and are responsible for Singapore’s extensive chemical and petroleum industries.⁵

Both globalization and industrialization are neither gender-neutral nor gender-blind. On the one hand, as a country industrializes, globalization undoubtedly creates more consumer goods and job opportunities for many and increased economic growth and wealth for the nation. In studying the impact of industrialization on women in seven Asian countries, Susan Horton (1996) reported that (1) women’s participation in the labor force of urban market economies had increased; (2) employment patterns had shifted by industry (from agriculture to manufacturing, commerce, and services), by occupation (e.g., clerical work and some professions), and from unpaid family work to paid employment; and (3) the earnings gap of women relative to men had narrowed as women’s education and labor experience increased. Horton found that East Asian countries exhibited some differences from other Asian countries because of their relatively higher women’s labor force participation rate and the greater concentration of women in manufacturing and agriculture. Several contributions to this volume (see chapters by Ping, Kim, Gong, Chow and Hsung, Leung, and Lee) provide in-depth analysis of how women’s employment and earnings in the market economy are intricately related to their work, family, and personal wellbeing—providing qualitative additions to Horton’s investigation.

On the other hand, globalization-driven industrialization also produces some adverse consequences that are accentuated by macro forces and that may be potentially antithetical to the process of socioeconomic development. Gender is implicated in globalization when consumption by the developed world is built on the cheap labor and and exploitation of workers, particularly through the subordination of women, in developing countries striving to industrialize. As the four “Asian dragons” transitioned from agrarian, subsistence-based, and low-income countries to industrializing, wage-generating, and high-middle-income countries, their process of “export-led” industrialization was, in fact, “female-led.” Globalization has meant that waves of women (as well as men) workers have migrated from villages to the slums of global cities and across national borders to work as exploited laborers. Some of them are employed as domestic workers who care for the families belonging to women of a particular class, caste, race, ethnicity, and/or nationality, thus enabling those privileged women to develop their jobs and advance in their careers. Globalization is signaled by the privatization of industries and the state’s gradual loss of control over enterprises as the state is forced to concede tax and tariff benefits, by a growth in corporate rights and control over labor by a fragmentation of labor and production, by the suppression of union organization, and by the degradation of the environment. The process allows TNCs and runaway shops (such as sweatshops) to take flight when they recognize the “comparative disadvantages” of remaining in terms of cheap labor costs and larger profit margins that present in other developing nations. Globalization also means a liberalization of trade subsidized by workers’ depressed wages, so that their countries can compete economically in international markets. All these issues, though still subject to debate for those who assume business as usual, may potentially become social problems that are in need of solutions and show how globalization has exacerbated rather than amended the adverse effects of industrialization in developing regions like East Asia.

In sum, globalization has fundamentally challenged the notion that East Asian states have omnipotent power and autonomy in orchestrating economic development without external influence. No nation is an island by itself; it is intricately embedded in a web of global links. Several studies in this volume review how global capitalism has unleashed the mobility of capital and labor across national boundaries, how family forms and strategies vary in different nations, and how consciousness has become globalized. Analytical attention is thus redirected toward transnational societal responses, global players like TNCs, crossnational labor markets, transmigrants, and international media. The weakening impact of the state is apparent in the case of socialist China undergoing market reform, as research in this collection demonstrates. Thus, regional economic restructuring has become a testing ground on which many East Asian states are seeking to demonstrate their abilities to achieve sustainable development.

Economic Restructuring

Similar to industrialization, economic restructuring is a regional and local response to globalization and sparked the third and fourth waves in the unprecedented transformation of the Asia-Pacific region. Hsiao (1997) points out that these two waves began in the 1980s with the rising economic growth of China and Southeast Asia and the emergence of various regional growth triangles and regional integration. Economic restructuring refers to the fundamental reorganization of production and economic activities that take place at the global, national, and local levels. Global restructuring means “the emergence of the global assembly line in which research and management are controlled by the core or developed countries while assembly line work is relegated to semiperiphery or periphery nations that occupy less privileged positions in the global economy,” resulting in what has been termed the new international division of labor (Ward 1990:2). Fröbel, Heinrichs, and Kreye (1980) point out that capitalist development tends to position developing countries as “industrial enclaves” that supply extremely cheap labor and export manufactured goods for consumption in the developed world. This restructuring propelled industrialization in the developing world, including East Asia, but triggered de-industrialization (e.g., massive plant closings and working-class unemployment) in the developed, modernized West, as the United States experienced in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s gave rise to a new urge to seek rapid economic growth, accentuating the trend toward free trade and open market economies and continuing the process of global restructuring.

Similar processes of economic restructuring took place in East Asia regionally, nationally, and locally in interaction with global restructuring. Four major factors contributed to this regional restructuring. First, socialist China promulgated the “one party, two systems” policy in 1978, which commenced its transforma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. EnGendering East Asian Development
• Part II. The Process of Industrialization: Institutional Embeddedness, Control, and Resistance
• Part III. The Impact of Economic Restructuring on Employment and Family
• Part IV. Migration, Household, and Gender Strategies
• References
• Contributors
• Index