Dynamics of Change in East Asia

Historical Trajectories and Contemporary Development

P.W. Preston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351854795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over the past forty years, East Asia has been radically transformed from a war-damaged sub-continent to a region of global pre-eminence. With new, highly developed scientific resources, great economic strengths, significant global trading links and equally powerful financial resources, East Asia is now one of the most dynamic regions in the global system.

This book illuminates the historical development trajectory and contemporary circumstances of the countries of the region. Embracing a cross-disciplinary perspective, it summarises the history of the region and goes on to focus upon the rise of East Asia since the ruins of the Pacific War. Analysing the region's basic strengths and the distinctive elite development strategies across the various countries, it also examines areas of domestic, intra-regional and international conflict. It covers the basic ground of political economy, society, culture and politics, whilst also taking care to locate the contemporary region in its own history and asking, what further change can be expected in the future?

Providing an excellent introduction to the study of the region, this book is an important read for students and scholars of East Asian politics, history and development.

PART I

Complex change and the logics of forms of life

The classical European tradition of social theory is concerned with the analysis of complex change in the unfolding shift to the modern world. This intellectual tradition, which has its roots in the period of the Enlightenment, offers political analysts, and members of wider European societies, an elaborate repertoire of concepts: science, progress, development, industry, democracy and so on. It is a long-established and very rich tradition. In Part I of this book the nature, status and utility of these materials will be considered; the manner in which they might be deployed in respect of other cultures will be noted; and, thereafter, these resources will be turned to the interpretive and critical analysis of the historical trajectories and contemporary logics of the many discrete forms of life that together constitute modern East Asia.¹

Note

1 I have written about these issues elsewhere and references are given in the bibliography and further reading section.

1

ARGUMENT MAKING IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

As the world of religion-informed agrarian society gave way to natural science-based industrial society, a process dramatic in its practical and philosophical impacts, commentators dealing with the sphere of the social looked to the natural sciences for lessons. As natural science was so successful in respect of its claims to knowledge, it made sense to see if its assumptions and procedures could be shifted to the sphere of the social, a sphere, moreover, that was now in process of sweeping change. This argument by analogy, that is, borrowing the assumptions and procedures of the natural sciences and deploying them in the sphere of the social, has been pursued and debated for at least three centuries. In a recognizably modern form, it reaches back to Thomas Hobbes and his contemporaries writing in seventeenth-century England, and it has been presented in various combinations down all the subsequent years. It has been strongly criticized; some have looked to language-carried human understanding, whilst others have looked to the political nature of human social life. This chapter on argument making notes these debates and indicates that this particular text is constructed within and with reference to the classical European tradition of social theorizing, which in form is taken to be interpretive and critical and which can be deployed in a dialogic form when addressing other cultures.

The shift to the modern world

The shift to the modern world took its earliest form in Europe, from (roughly) the seventeenth through to the late nineteenth centuries, and it encompassed the shift from an agrarian feudalism informed by the rhythms of the natural world (seasons), and grasped in its totality by religious schemes that identified the pervasive presences of gods, through to an industrial capitalism that fused reason-centred natural science with a competitive, market-oriented approach to the provision of the means to human livelihood.

The shift to the modern world began in Europe but it was the product of a series of accidents, including the tentative rise of natural science, the emergence of trading cities, the creation of restrictions on the absolute power of monarchs, and agricultural improvements, which, along with imported food, raised the levels of living of whole populations (less subsistence, more production). As these changes ran through northwestern Europe, attended by multiple conflicts, domestic and international, they began to be exported, at first in the guise of what Europeans remember as voyages of discovery, then later as the trading voyages that created the long-distance links that served to facilitate later colonial expansion. In sum, the shift to the modern world involved great changes in culture (sets of ideas) and social practice (the ways in which people lived), and the modern world turned out to be very dynamic with intensification, as it increased its demands on its local population (ever greater ‘efficiency’), and expansion, as it sought wider areas of activity, overseas trade, later colonies (and much later still, tales of globalization).

This complex process was not planned, rather it unfolded over several generations and it enfolded the social worlds that it successively remade. The patterns of life of the people within these territories were changed. The shift to the modern world was not something that happened off to one side of the social world. It remade existing social worlds. It made new social worlds. And the growth of the intellectual and practical power of natural science underscored the novelty of the unfolding changes. Unsurprisingly, making sense of these sweeping changes came to be a key concern for social commentary; in England this began with Thomas Hobbes and his contemporaries, and was picked up in the Scottish Enlightenment, and thereafter the French and German Enlightenments. Overall these changes amounted to a novel celebration of the power of human reason.

All this work is the root of contemporary European social science, and it inaugurated a rich tradition: the ideas presented by seventeenth-century English thinkers and by later French and German Enlightenment scholars have been picked up and advanced by later generations across Europe. These communities of scholars have often been bounded by nations and so national traditions emerged; matters shaped by accidents of intellectual inheritance, local social circumstances and the business of institutionalization. For Europeans these traditions have subsequently been overlain by external influences: during the Cold War, with the competing claims of the USA and USSR; and, more recently, with the development of the European Union. Here, this has involved, in particular, the high public politics of reaffirming Europe, the corporate world’s contribution via trade and the cultural consequences of widespread popular movement for work, or pleasure or lifestyle, thus the creation of a somewhat scattered European reading public and thus a sense of collective belonging. All these shifting, overlapping processes feed into contemporary social science disciplines. And all this means that the substantive claims of the various social science disciplines are rooted in complex sets of assumptions about the nature and possibilities of knowledge of the social world.

In this chapter, with some simplifications (thus it offers a general overview, not a country by country or decade by decade survey, coupled to a notion of a ‘classical European tradition of social theorizing’), these deep-seated assumptions are made clear. Thus there are three broad strategies of grasping the nature of the social sciences and each has been adopted at various times and in various ways:

• arguments from natural science – here the received model of the natural sciences is invoked in order to cast the social sciences in an analogous form, both procedures of enquiry and utility of knowledge outputs, hence the output of technical knowledge of the social system able to inform expert intervention and planning;

• arguments from human understanding – here the resources of the humanities are invoked in order to establish that human beings are inhabitants of structured webs of meaning, which might be unpacked using strategies of enquiry from history, language and ordinary social practice, hence enquiry serves greater self-understanding, individual and collective;

• arguments from human political organization – here the resources of humanities and social sciences are turned to issue of pursuit of self-understandings within structurally unequal social worlds and the strategy of critique addresses such inequalities – hence an orientation towards the pursuit of the active utopia of a social environment where all can flourish, that is, unpack and put to use both inherent and acquired skills.

Arguments from natural science

The social sciences lodged within the European tradition grew and took shape during the early phases of the shift to the modern world and during this early phase around the seventeenth century a number of key shifts in thinking took place. The old intellectual and practical world dominated by religious schemes gave way to a novel intellectual and practical world shaped by material forces.

One complex package of ideas and practice was replaced by another. The process was difficult, contested and slow. The shift in thinking can be summarized in this way:

• ontological – the nature of the world changes, from theism (gods/spirits) to materialism (matter/causes);

• epistemological – the nature of knowledge changes, from submissive reflection upon the word of god (medieval religious teaching) to the active use of human reason to understand the ordinary material world;

• methodological – the getting of knowledge changes, from systematic reflection on the timeless truths of sacred texts (theology) to the accumulation of the mundane details of the material world (empiricism);

• ethical – the ends of human life change, from the search for final perfection to the accumulation of piecemeal advance, progress;

• pragmatic – the nature of practical activity changes, from acquiescence in the given to a concern for what can be crafted as reason informs mundane practice and human progress.

The evident success of the natural sciences invited an obvious intellectual movement; if the intellectual strategies of the natural sciences can produce such dazzling results why should they not be transferred to the social sphere in the expectation of similarly outstanding results?

The idea has been pursued down the generations and a long list of great names could be assembled, starting with the theorists of the retrospectively identified British Enlightenment and moving on to the theorists of the Scottish and French Enlightenments before adding in figures from the later German Enlightenment. And thereafter, debate typically moves to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theorists associated with the notion of positivism.

The equation of reliable knowledge with the products of the natural sciences reached its apogee in the work of the logical positivists of the early part of the twentieth century, the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and Bertrand Russell’s Cambridge. These essentially philosophical discussions have run on: into post-empiricism, into social constructivist models of the assumptions, work and claims of the community of natural scientists, and into pragmatist informed characterizations of natural science.

The notion of positivism embraces a spread of ideas and a clutch of theorists could be mentioned, and they have it in common that they look to the model of the natural sciences as exemplars of the getting of knowledge. The character of the debate changes over time. Early enthusiasts for natural science presented the activity as essentially context-free, natural science was a matter of turning human reason to the task of deciphering the processes of the natural world. Later theorists noted that the community of natural scientists was embedded within their own social communities, that is, the pursuit of natural science was not context-free, it was one more social activity (and thus shaped in part by the influence of funding agencies, institutional power structures and the vagaries of political or public attitudes).

A number of key figures could be mentioned, together covering the spread of debates:

• Vienna Circle’s logical positivism;

• Karl Popper’s critical rationalism;

• Thomas Kuhn’s post-empiricist discussions of paradigms.

Vienna and the programme of logical positivism

Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century was home to a number of intellectuals and artists and they constituted a distinctive grouping, which turned its attention to life in the modern world, to questions of the nature of urban life, mass production and the longer-term implications of the rise of science. They were critical of the form of life of turn-of-the-century Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire, which they viewed as decadent, a failing empire ruled by an intellectually and morally bankrupt elite. These critics sought an intellectual and moral clarity in their work. This was also a central theme in modernism, the art world’s response to the rise of the modern world. This search for clarity was picked up by the philosophers of the Vienna Circle and they turned their attention to clarity in language itself, for this was understood to be the basis of all other social activities, including science.

The philosophical theorists of the Vienna Circle extended late nineteenth-century ideas about scientific enquiry: first, they picked up on the idea that the natural world was in principle available to unbiased enquiry using unclouded human senses, and that facts could be described, accumulated and made the basis for reliable generalizations or more reliably, universal laws, and endeavoured to make these claimed procedures clearer; second, they picked up late nineteenth-century ideas about formal logic, new ways of thinking about formal logic, and they endeavoured to make the logic of scientific argument clearer; finally, they also embraced a concern for the nature of language and sought to make the language of science clearer. The three themes ran together: thus the logical positivists sought to elucidate the language of natural science, the better to understand it and maybe to inform its work.

There were key differences between proponents of positivism and logical positivism: the former took the business of the description of facts to be essentially unproblematic – a matter of careful procedures of enquiry, whereas the latter granted that any and all claims about the natural world had to be made using language and that being so it was important to be clear just how language grasped the world, both in general, the matter of relationship of words and things, and also, more particularly, the relationship between the language of natural science and the natural world.

Detailed philosophical debates ensued about language, the nature of science and the status of the work of the logical positivists themselves. The logical positivists came up with a number of attempts to answer these questions. Centrally, they claimed that for a sentence to be meaningful it had to be analysable down to empirical claims, that is, words had sense because they were underpinned by reality. The principle of verification showed how scientific sentences could have meaning: any sentence could in principle be analysed down to claims about facts, the way it was verified. A number of other claims were made: thus a distinction between formal and substantive claims (as clearly mathematics and logic were not empirically verifiable, but were equally clearly crucial to science); and a distinction between claims that could be reduced to facts (meaningful) and claims that could not (meaningless). This last noted distinction had the effect of ruling out large areas of human reflection such as the humanities, ethics, politics and the like, where many sentences were found that did not state facts and so these sentences were strictly speaking meaningless; all they did was express simple subjective approval or disapproval.

The school comprised a number of members and they looked in particular to the work of a Viennese intellectual, Ludwig Wittgenstein. In an early published work he offered an elaborate theory of the relation of atomic facts to atomic propositions; language had meaning because it was underpinned by reality and so far as he was concerned he had demonstrated how language at base was simple, thus contributing to the modernist drive for simplicity and clarity.

Karl Popper’s objections and counter proposal

The logical positivist approach to the analysis of the fundamental nature of natural science was criticized by another pre-war Viennese scholar, Karl Popper, who took the view that empirical reduction was impossible; it was not what natural scientists actually did and it also meant that the procedure of verification could not work either, so the core of the logical positivist programme failed. Popper, however, remained a great enthusiast for natural science, and with good reason, for in the early years of the twentieth century scientists made great strides in chemistry and physics. Popper was also a social reformer and worked for a while with the psychologist Alfred Adler, a student of Freud. Yet Popper became increasingly disenchanted with psychology and with then fashionable Marxism; he compared both unfavourably to the work of contemporary physicists.

In this way the distinction that the logical positivists had made between natural science and everything else was sustained. However, Popper offers an alternative view of the logic of natural scientific argument by first returning to an issue long debated by philosophers, the idea of inductive reasoning; the process whereby the accumulation of particular observations of facts will permit an intellectual act of generalization. Popper argues that this process – a shift from particulars to the general – doe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and maps
• List of tables
• Maps of East Asia
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Complex change and the logics of forms of life
• PART II The shift to the modern world in East Asia
• PART III Successor elites and the pursuit of national development
• PART IV East Asia in the changing global system
• PART V East Asia: success and its costs
• Afterword
• Annex 1: Population, GDP and Gini coefficient
• Annex 2: Health and education
• Annex 3: Rural and urban employment
• Annex 4: Military expenditures
• Annex 5: China’s twentieth century in twelve films
• Annex 6: East Asia’s twentieth century in twenty films
• Bibliography and further reading
• Index