The myth that it was impossible for latecomers to break into the club of advanced nations has been exploded. The Asian tigers have instead demonstrated that latecomers can enjoy major advantages: they can learn from the experience of others, draw on and apply existing technologies, leapfrog old technologies, use the latest know-how and play catch-up to great effect. Their economic approach, furthermore, has largely been homespun, owing relatively little to neo-liberalism or the Washington Consensus — the dominant Western ideology from the late seventies until the financial meltdown in 2008. [306] Nor is their novelty confined to the economic sphere. The Asian tigers have given birth to a new kind of political governance, namely the developmental state, whose popular legitimacy rests not on democratic elections but the ability of the state to deliver continued economic growth. [307] The rise of the Asian tigers, however, has an altogether more fundamental import. Hitherto, with the exception of Japan, modernity has been a Western monopoly. This monopoly has now been decisively broken. Modernization theory, which was very influential in American scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s, held, like Karl Marx, that the developing countries would increasingly come to resemble the developed world. [308] We can now test this proposition by reference to the East Asian experience.

SPEED OF TRANSITION

A defining characteristic of all the Asian tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam) [309] has been the speed of their transformation. In 1950 they were still overwhelmingly agrarian and had barely started the process of industrialization. In 1950 79 % of South Korea ’s population worked in agriculture (relatively little changed from 91 % in 1920); by 1960 the figure was 61 %, and today it is around 10 %. In the late 1960s the farming population still comprised half of Taiwan ’s total population, whereas today it accounts for a mere 8 %. [310] The figure for Indonesia in 1960 was 75 % compared with 44 % today, for Thailand 84 % compared with 46 %, and for Malaysia 63 % compared with 18 %. [311] Eighty-five per cent of the population of China worked in agriculture in 1950, but today that figure is hovering around 50 %. A similar story can be told in terms of the shift from the countryside to the cities. In 1950 76 % of Taiwanese lived in the countryside, whereas by 1989 — in a period of just thirty-nine years — that figure had been almost exactly reversed, with 74 % living in cities. [312] The urban population in South Korea was 18 % in 1950 and 80 % in 1994; while in Malaysia, which took off later, the equivalent figures were 27 % in 1970 and 53 % in 1990. [313] In China the urban population represented 17 % of the total population in 1975 and is projected to be 46 % by 2015. [314] We could also add Japan in this context, which experienced extremely rapid growth rates following the Second World War, its GDP increasing by a factor of over fourteen between 1950 and 1990 as it recovered from the devastation of the war and completed its economic take-off with a major shift of its population from the countryside to the cities. Between 1950 and 1973, its most rapid period of growth, its GDP grew at an annual rate of 9.29 %.

Compared with Europe, the speed of the shift from the countryside to the cities is exceptional. Germany’s urban population grew from 15 % in 1850 to 49 % in 1910 (roughly coinciding with its industrial revolution), and 53 % in 1950. The equivalent figures for France were 19 % in 1850 and 38 % in 1910 (and 68 % in 1970). England’s urban population was 23 % in 1800, 45 % in 1850, and 75 % in 1910. In the United States, the urban population was 14 % in 1850, 42 % in 1910, and 57 % in 1950. [315] If we take South Korea as our point of comparison (with a population broadly similar to that of Britain and France), the proportion of its population living in cities increased by 62 % in 44 years, compared with 52 % for England over a period of 110 years, 34 % over 60 years for Germany (and 38 % over 100 years), 19 % over 60 years for France (and 49 % over 120 years), and 28 % over 60 years (and 43 % over 100 years) for the United States. In other words, the rate of urbanization in South Korea was well over twice that of Germany’s — the fastest of these European examples — and was achieved in approximately two-thirds of the time; it was three times quicker than France’s, taking roughly two-thirds of the time, and twice as quick as that of the United States in two-thirds of the time.

The shift from the countryside to the cities, from working on the land to working in industry, is the decisive moment in the emergence of modernity. From experiencing life on the land, where little changes from one year to the next, or from one generation to another, industrialization marks a tumultuous transformation in people’s circumstances, where uncertainty replaces predictability, the future can no longer be viewed or predicted in terms of the past, and where people are required to look forwards rather than backwards. In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the shift towards modernity as an increasingly mass phenomenon was confined to a small minority of the world, namely the West and Japan, but by the early twenty-first century it had become an increasingly mass phenomenon in much of East Asia too, with the change occurring far more rapidly in East Asia than it had earlier in Europe or North America. This relative speed of change had two important implications for the nature of East Asian modernities, which distinguishes them from their European and North American counterparts.

1. The Proximity of the Past

The fact that large-scale agrarian employment has been such a recent experience for the Asian tigers means that the past is heavily imprinted on the present and the legacy of tradition remains a living force in the era of mass modernity. Let me put this point in more human terms. In South Korea and Taiwan, the great majority of grandparents, around half of parents over fifty, and significant numbers of those over forty, will all have spent at least some of their lives working on the land. In China, where half the population still works on the land, that rural imprint is commensurately larger: not only will the great majority of grandparents have worked on the land, but so will the great majority of those over forty. As one would expect, this has a profound influence on the way in which people think and behave. Almost three-quarters of the inhabitants of Taipei, for instance, regard themselves as migrants: every Chinese New Year, the trains are booked for weeks in advance and Taiwan’s north-south expressway is clogged for hours on end as the vast bulk of the capital’s inhabitants make the journey south to celebrate the festival back in what they still regard as their ancestral homes. The same kind of phenomenon is repeated throughout East Asia. Shanghai is a huge metropolis of 20 million people, plus more than 3 million who move in and out of the city every day seeking work of one kind or another, including many farmers who occupy numerous pavements trying to sell their fruit and vegetables. Shanghai, like many cities in the region, encapsulates a remarkable juxtaposition of the present and the past, of modernity and tradition existing cheek by jowl, as was once the case in European cities. The difference is that because East Asia is changing so quickly, the contrast between the past and the present is much more visible and far more pronounced than it was in nineteenth-century European cities.