East Asian Developmental State Research Articles

Who drives the green shift? EV and battery policymaking and systemic marginalisation of auto suppliers in South Korea

The swift global transition to electric vehicles (EV) and batteries in the automotive industry highlights the nature of governments’ efforts towards a green economy, marking a transition from environmental regulations to industrial policies. This shift has led to renewed interest in industrial policies, especially in East Asian developmental states, like South Korea. The EV and battery industries in South Korea have grown rapidly along with the government's efforts to mobilise the entire economy through aggressive green industrial policy, particularly during the Lee Myung-bak administration (2008–2012). Big Korean automobile and electronics manufacturers have participated directly in setting the country's industrial agenda, leading the green industrial policy with their business interests. However, the process of EV and battery policymaking also marginalized auto suppliers in the existing manufacturing sector from agenda setting. Focusing on business’ structural power, this paper explains how big business elites systematically alienate small and medium-sized suppliers from the new growth policy thanks to their strong information monopoly in the hierarchical structure of production in the automobile industry and EV policies in South Korea.

From Laissez Faire to a Market Mechanism: the Formation of Housing Finance in Taiwan

Abstract The literature on East Asian developmental states has mostly focused on economic policies; few studies have investigated how developmentalism affects urbanisation. This study addresses this gap by analysing the formation of a housing system by the developmental state and the role of the housing sector in the transition from an economic miracle in the 1960s to stagnation after the 1990s. Wang, Lee, and Chen (2017) argued that Taiwan’s state bureaucrats played a gradually diminishing role in directing the market. This article takes a different approach by arguing that the government’s interventions on housing intensified after the 1990s; housing finance sectors were formalised, squatters were removed, and interventions based on market mechanisms were employed to stimulate the housing market. However, the lack of an effective state intervention on housing made speculation difficult to control and created an obstacle to economic development. Such housing speculation increased social inequality.

Performative legitimation of waste-to-energy infrastructure: incineration politics in Guangzhou low-carbon transition

Cities are emerging as the frontiers of low-carbon transition. The emergence of low-carbon cities in East Asian developmental states is often seen as serving nation-state-led transformative development and economic restructuring. But how are specific low-carbon infrastructures socially produced at the city level, especially in the context of social protests? What is the role of the local state? This paper addresses these questions through the case of Guangzhou’s waste-to-energy incineration, an infrastructure that was selected as a national low-carbon technology in China in 2014. The paper proposes a conceptual framework of “performative legitimation of infrastructure” and, drawing from the empirical work, identifies five performative governance tools – (re)conceptualization, reterritorialization, bureaucratization, culturalization and codification – which respond to evolving social demands, consolidate the legitimacy of incineration and regulate state–society relations in different contexts. The production of urban low-carbon infrastructure is presented as a material-discursive process that supports the legitimation of the local state.

China, colonialism, neocolonialism and globalised modes of accumulation

ABSTRACT The idea that China is the supreme overseas capital accumulator is part of a discourse of China as colonialist or neocolonialist. The discourse exists not because Chinese behaviour aligns with scholarly understandings of colonialism or neocolonialism, but as a rhetorical device to discredit China as the US’s ‘strategic rival’. In this paper we show that China does not practice colonialism or neocolonialism and examine the question of how China’s activities fit into modes of globalised capital accumulation abroad. We argue that China’s mode overlaps, but is also distinct from, the East Asian developmental states’ approach. It is even more dissimilar to the US’s archetypal neoliberalism. Two areas in which China most diverges are its deployment of state-owned enterprises and Communist Party of China leadership, and the concomitant alignment of Chinese firms overseas with home and host-state policies. In analysing Chinese capital accumulation abroad, we adumbrate a Chinese mode that reflects ‘two semis’: China’s semi-peripheral status and its semi-neoliberalism.

Exploring the geographies of transnational higher education in China

AbstractThis paper contributes to debates about the globalisation of higher education by providing a pioneering geographical exploration of Chinese–foreign cooperation in running transnational higher education, or TNHE, programs. Departing from widespread neoliberal and postcolonial critiques of TNHE, which tend to emphasise liberal market forces and Anglo‐American hegemony in the circulation of academic knowledge, our study examines how the Chinese state’s developmental targets, strategic policies, and political–ideological considerations have shaped the evolutionary trajectory, geographical distribution, and cross‐border connections of China’s TNHE programs. We demonstrate that the place‐based development of TNHE is mediated by governments’ interventionist policies and embedded in existing higher education regimes, especially in the context of East Asian developmental states. By maintaining a higher education system dominated by public universities and by being the ultimate examination and approval authority, the Chinese government both determines the status of TNHE in the national higher education system, constrains the typologies and sources of knowledge flows, and shapes the national landscape of TNHE development. The territorial geographies of TNHE thus reflect complicated interactions between the state and the market, the global and the local, and economic and political/cultural forces.

Urban entrepreneurialism 3.0 and the export of urban expertise: The case of South Korea’s international information and telecommunication technology program

Several modes of urban entrepreneurialism, variously composed of central-local, state-market, state-civil society, and domestic-international relations, have been apparent since the 1970s. Drawing inspiration from East Asian developmental states, we argue that it is under the most recent mode of urban entrepreneurialism 3.0 that the urban sources of exports and national economic development have been most fully mobilised by states. We illustrate this export of urban expertise with the case of South Korea’s International Information and Telecommunication Technology Program (ITTP), offered by Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), which trains future ICT and city leaders from developing countries. We trace the history and effects of the ITTP through original empirical research involving interviews and a survey of graduates from the program. The ITTP is revealing of state intrapreneurialism in the export of sector-specific urban expertise with effects on national brands, new markets and the formation of new institutions. The case of the ITTP is one among a variety of means by which East Asian states in particular have projected urban expertise internationally. It also points to these states’ struggle to coordinate institutions involved in, and generate consensus around, national models of urban expertise to be exported.

Towards a South African developmental state: The Electricity Supply Commission (Eskom) – victor or villain in this endeavour?

Under the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Government has long mooted the notion of becoming a developmental state in response to rising unemployment, inequality and poverty. This idea was moulded along the folds of the rise of economic growth and industrialisation, as experienced by East Asian developmental states such as Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong. There would be an attempt to channel the state’s administrative capacities, policies and resources towards attaining national development goals. A developmental state plays an active role in guiding economic development and using the country's resources to meet the needs of the people. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) such as the Electricity Supply Commission (Eskom) were meant to be the catalyst in the National Development Plan’s (NDP) bid to reignite the country’s stagnant economy. However, the country's state institutions, administrative capacities and resources have been challenged by the state capture debacle that shed light on the corrupt relationship between the political and business elite. As a lack of effective leadership, mismanagement and a complex regulatory framework appear to be at the core of the crisis at Eskom in particular, the main objective of this paper was to determine to what extent the aforementioned constructs perpetuated the energy crisis at Eskom and in turn, negatively impacted the socio-economic aims of the NDP and South Africa’s endeavour to become a developmental state. To achieve this objective, the paper pursued a qualitative research approach where secondary information about the crisis at Eskom, and South Africa’s goal to become a developmental state, were perused. One of the article’s recommendations was that Eskom's grip on the regional power economy must end and that independent power plants must be enabled.

Growth and Development of China: A Developmental State ‘With Chinese Characteristics’

The aim of the paper is twofold: 1. to examine the identities and differences of the Chinese model of the developmental and entrepreneurial state ‘with Chinese characteristics’ with the general East Asian developmental state model, and 2. to derive some perspectives for the future of the particular Chinese model of the developmental state. The paper is structured as follows. The first main section briefly discusses China’s growth performance and policies since World War II with respect to the country’s development efforts. Subsequent sections analyse aspects of the particular economic development framework of China, based on an interventionist heterodox developmental state argument, and describe some critical development policy areas that emanate from such an argument placing great emphasis on industrial targeting while taking the country’s sociocultural and politico-institutional traits into consideration. Some conclusions end the paper.

The multi‐scalar embeddedness of support policies for migrant entrepreneurship in Japan

AbstractContextual entrepreneurship and mixed embeddedness approach alike emphasize the importance of the political‐institutional embeddedness next to social embeddedness along with further contexts for migrant entrepreneurship, yet the aspect of international migration policies as an important institutional framework has been somewhat neglected. This paper introduces the case of political‐institutional embeddedness of migrant entrepreneurship in Japan from an international migration policy perspective, discussing embeddedness of migrant entrepreneurs and their support institutions from a multi‐scalar perspective. By analysing the migration policy context of migrant entrepreneurship at different policy levels, that is, national, regional and urban scales, it demonstrates the analytical value of differentiating policies along these scales and also their inter‐connectedness, conceptually proposing the inter‐ and trans‐scalarity of these policy contexts. By bringing issues of migration regimes and particularly the East Asian developmental state as a lens to analyse migrant entrepreneurship, it brings further approaches in comparatively analysing different entrepreneurial contexts for future research.

The third way of inclusive growth in China

In much of the 20th century, the welfare state was regarded as the fundamental means for Western countries to embrace economic liberalization through domestic social contracts, whereas the developmental state was credited for East Asian economies’ growth with equality. However, economic globalization and technological changes have posed serious challenges for both models with respect to containing increasing inequality and achieving inclusive growth. China’s performance in inclusive growth has demonstrated distinct features that differ from the approaches of Western welfare states and East Asian developmental states. China has relied less on conventional means of redistribution, such as taxes and transfers. Instead, it has combined growth-oriented industrial policies, public infrastructure investment, and state-mediated poverty alleviation programs. China’s development strategy reflects a “third way” perspective on inclusive growth that might be instructive for latecomer economies.

State–Business Relations in Flux: Capturing the Structural Power of Business in South Korea’s Green Industrial Policy

ABSTRACT Getting state–business relations “right” is considered to have been at the heart of the East Asian developmental states and their industrial success in the twentieth century. Given that the “right” state–business relations are an historically contingent outcome that emerges under a particular political and economic order, this article asks what is the emerging nature of their state–business relations in the twenty-first century? And, how is this relationship shaping their industrial competitiveness? These questions are explored by reconceptualising both the state and business to interrogate the nexus between the “competition state” and the “structural power” of business. Through a fine-grained investigation of green industrial policy-making in South Korea, it is shown how a state that is evolving into a competition state is made vulnerable to the structural power of business, challenging the widely held view that the right state–business relations are being maintained. The contribution made lies in identifying and tracing structural power, which remains under-examined in the state–business relations scholarship due to the difficulties associated with capturing quiet politics at work. This contribution invites further discussion on how state–business relations can be recalibrated to advance industrialisation in East Asia and beyond.

Between the developmental state and popular nationalism: the pure Hangul movement in the early history of the Korean internet

Many Western social scientists have believed that South Korea, as one of the typical East Asian developmental states, was greatly influenced by state-led IT development, at least in its early technological development. However, both the 80s and the 90s were autonomous and exceptional periods for computer geek communities and start-ups, which were relatively free from developmental state initiatives. The present study calls attention to the little-known and undervalued historical phase of grassroots computing culture in the early history of the Korean Internet, which can be characterized as a pure Hangul (Korean) movement, even under the dominant paradigm of the developmental state. By investigating the socio-cultural history of that period, the present study aims to articulate the double-sided national motive of compromising the developmental desires of the state and the grassroots practices of the early computing culture in the midst of IT development in Korea. In doing so, the present study delineates how the early computer amateurs and tech-savvies were highly distinctive in localising non-commercial and reciprocal IT drives, and how their PC culture became a historical prelude to the civic hacking culture.

Capturing South Africa's developmental state: State‐society relations and responses to state capture

AbstractUnder the leadership of the governing African National Congress, the South African government has long touted the idea of becoming a developmental state as the country's ultimate response to rising unemployment, poverty and inequality. This idea aligns with the rapid economic growth and industrialization experienced by the East Asian developmental states through directing the state's administrative capacities, resources and policies towards attaining national developmental goals. Similarly, the National Development Plan pins South Africa's developmental state ambition on creating a capable developmental state and the formation of dynamic institutions capable of utilizing the state's administrative powers, resources and policies to pursue developmental goals. However, the country's state institutions, administrative capacities and resources have been challenged by the state capture debacle that shed light on the corrupt relationship between the political elite and the business elite. This article explores civil society's response to state capture and analyzes the impact of civil society's responses on South Africa's developmental state ambition. The article reveals that the state‐society relations had a significant effect on fighting the state‐business corrupt arrangement by mobilizing nationwide protests that solidified South Africa's emerging democratic developmental state framework embedded in state‐society relations.

Rethinking Campaigns, Bureaucracy, and Rural Development in East Asia and Beyond

Rethinking Campaigns, Bureaucracy, and Rural Development in East Asia and Beyond Julia C. Strauss (bio) Kristen Looney's Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia is a wonderful book that engages simultaneously on at least three fronts. It chooses an important but overlooked phenomenon that intersects with sub-literatures concerned with the East Asian developmental state, rural development, and campaigns. Adding to this already significant set of ambitions, Looney engages in what one might call three and a half comparisons: Taiwan, South Korea, and China, with Japan being the extra half. Japan is never fully elaborated as a case study, but, as Looney recognizes, the country looms large in the background for both Taiwan and South Korea, and therefore at one remove for China as well. And if all this were not enough, Mobilizing for Development also ranges across two asynchronous time periods: the 1950s to 1970s, but focusing on the 1970s, for Taiwan and South Korea; and the 1980s to the 2000s for China, centering heavily on the Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao years of 2003–13. The sub-literatures incorporated, the time periods traversed, and the difficulties of working on and in such different places as Taiwan, Korea, and China with both historical and contemporary materials, to mention nothing of the obvious importance of the questions addressed, all make Mobilizing for Development an exemplary piece of comparative case study and historical sociological research. It makes me, for one, want to stand up and salute this achievement, right before assigning the book to every postgraduate class I have ever taught or have yet to teach in Chinese politics or comparative development and handing it out as a "how to do it" model to every prospective PhD student contemplating comparative and historical research. Looney's particular gift for this research lies in her consistent ability to steer between the Scylla of unnecessary detail and the Charybdis of undue violence to her case study material. What emerges is a clear and convincing argument that is well supported by evidence. Given that literature on the East Asian developmental state consistently overlooks the rural sector after land reform, her focus on the countryside reveals a pattern [End Page 141] equally overlooked: that the East Asian developmental states implemented campaigns rather than straight-up technocracies to bring development to rural areas. After this significant corrective to this literature, Looney then lays out the very different ways in which campaigns of rural development played out in these three locales with a spectrum of results ranging from highly effective (Taiwan) to mixed (South Korea) to ineffective (China). In analyzing the factors behind these different campaign outcomes, the book argues—to my mind, quite convincingly—that the effectiveness of rural development campaigns was in turn a function of whether intermediary rural organizations, particularly farmers' organizations, were linked to higher levels of the state while being simultaneously autonomous from the state. High levels of farmer participation and financial and managerial independence in turn gave these organizations a certain degree of voice and influence over rural policy (p. 39). Measured against these two variables, farmers' organizations in Taiwan possessed both; South Korea's had linkages to higher levels of the state, but not autonomy from it; and those in China had neither linkages nor autonomy. The book's argument is so neat, the questions raised so compelling, and the execution of the comparative and empirical work so exemplary that it seems almost churlish to query some of its analytical premises. But reviews being what they are, some degree of quibble is de rigueur. Mine is less a quibble than a sense that, fantastic as this monograph is, there are a number of important conceptual opportunities lost. This is particularly true with respect to the notion of "campaign" and how campaigns in turn relate to institutions, most notably the bureaucratic institutions of the state. But to simply define a state campaign as "policies that demand high levels of mobilization to achieve dramatic change" (p. 27) and rural modernization campaigns as "policies that aim to transform the countryside through bureaucratic and popular mobilization" (p. 29) is to define them as blunt analytical constructs. Because campaigns are by definition "extraordinary...

Growth and Development of China: A Developmental State ‘With Chinese Characteristics’

The aim of the paper is twofold: 1. to examine the identities and differences of the Chinese model of the developmental and entrepreneurial state ‘with Chinese characteristics’ with the general East Asian developmental state model, and 2. to derive some perspectives for the future of the particular Chinese model of the developmental state. The paper is structured as follows. The first main section briefly discusses China’s growth performance and policies since World War II with respect to the country’s development efforts. Subsequent sections analyse aspects of the particular economic development framework of China, based on an interventionist heterodox developmental state argument, and describe some critical development policy areas that emanate from such an argument—placing great emphasis on industrial targeting—while taking the country’s socio-cultural and politico-institutional traits into consideration. Some conclusions end the paper.

Building a Democratic Developmental State in Post-Colonial Africa: South Africa at the Glance

Abstract Failures of neo-liberalism in Africa through Structural Adjustment Program in the 1980s and 1990s compelled many post-colonial African states to seek alternative growth models to transform and grow their economies. Inspired by the economic success of Asian region, South Africa seeks to replicate the Asian developmental model to transform and industrialise its economy. Reviewing only the literature, the paper found that despite displaying so many similarities with East and South Asian developmental states, the rhetoric for the replication of the Asian developmental state model in South Africa works like a pendulum thus adopting a topsy-turvy approach. The notion of a developmental state is elevated through policy pronouncement and government commitments through the medium term and long-term strategic frameworks for the country. Despite displaying so many similarities with Asian developmental states, affixing the label of a developmental state onto the country by South Africans themselves is not going to make it one.

“Housing Prices Never Fall”: The Development of Housing Finance in Taiwan

ABSTRACT This article deals with the path-dependent features of financialization of housing in Taiwan, an East Asian developmental state. The levels of foreign capital and securitization in Taiwan’s housing market remain relatively low, meaning domestic capital, of which there is an abundance, is the major financial source of such speculation. The process does not include the retrenchment of the welfare state, because Taiwan has been a homeowner society. After financial liberalization in the 1980s, Taiwan’s state intervention in the housing and financial sectors has actually intensified via the enactment of more regulations to decrease the role of the informal financial and housing sectors. As a result of neoliberalization giving precedence to market mechanisms, various low-interest mortgage programs in the 1990s, all subsidized by public funding, have increased the rate of homeownership and sustained housing prices. Even though this varied the development of housing financialization, housing in Taiwan has largely become a tool of speculation, and housing affordability has become a serious problem.

Transforming the East Asian developmental state: Democratic mobilisation and the role of the middle class

Many studies have noted the reduction in the effectiveness of the East Asian developmental state in formulating growth-promoting policy in South Korea and Taiwan. Current literature attributes the transformation of the developmental state model to the rise of business elites and organised labour. This article argues that another type of social actor – the middle class – also contributed to the state’s reduced capability in directing economic development. Unlike business elites and organised labour who directly challenge the state’s policy decision, the middle class forces East Asian ruling elites to democratise the political system of a country. The democratic transition pushed by the middle class consequently facilitates the emergence of policy constraints on the state’s economic decision-making process. I elaborate this argument in the two divergent cases: the transformation of the developmental state in South Korea and the non-transformation of the developmental state in Singapore.

Social Protection for All: The Next Step for the Malaysian Welfare

This report aims to support policymakers, program designers, and evaluators to develop a comprehensive social protection mechanism. The past decade has seen a marked spike in policy momentum around the importance of social protection policies and programs yet there has been very little attention to social protection’s role in tackling experiences of poverty and vulnerability. Social protection is recognized as a key policy tool to help achieve the Malaysia Development Goals; as a policy approach underpinned by rigorous evaluation evidence; as a critical mechanism to cushion the poor and newly poor from the worst effects of the global recession; and as a core human right. At the same time, the 2010s have seen a renewed interest in the role that addressing gender inequalities can play in achieving broader development objectives. The post-2015 Malaysia development agenda requires a new approach to national development, taking the multiple interlinked domestic and global challenges that exist even more into account. It is therefore of paramount importance that, in view of the multiple roles that social protection can play in social and economic development, the post-2015 Malaysia development agenda will acknowledge the critical role extending adequate social protection plays in furthering key outcomes, ensuring the inclusion of all groups in development and society as a means to combat inequality, vulnerability, and poverty. The post-2015 debate needs a renewed and comprehensive focus on poverty, inequality, income distribution, and social inclusion. Fiscally sustainable social protection programs based on strong legal and regulatory frameworks should be an integral component of national development strategies to achieve inclusive, equitable sustainable development. In setting out its point of departure for the study of poverty reduction, the Proposal makes the following significant observations: • It is crucial to develop a coherent and consistent framework for connecting discussions of poverty and its reduction to strategic links among different dimensions of development, including governance, economic growth, stabilization, and security. • Policy recommendations should draw substantially from the ideas, theories, and experiences available from more successful records of poverty reduction, notably those attained by the Nordic late industrializers and the East Asian developmental states. • It is necessary to go beyond measuring things that people lack without understanding why by investigating such aspects of poverty as self-reinforcing vertical and horizontal inequalities, and the impact of orthodox macroeconomic policies and the disproportionate tendencies of market forces on these inequalities. • Equity being an integral component of poverty reduction, it is necessary not to isolate social policy from economic policy, but to analyze the macroeconomic policy and growth strategy that should be pursued in tandem with ‘poverty alleviation’ social policy. • The notion of participation in current poverty reduction strategies, stresses process rather than substance. By restricting the agenda of participation to empowerment at the micro-level without tackling dis-empowerment or exclusion at the macro level, the notion ignores the dilemma that poverty is lived at the micro level but its reproduction, intensification or amelioration depend crucially on macro-level policies.

Does history repeat itself? Economic development and policy convergence in Vietnam and South Korea

With one of the world's fastest rates of economic growth since the 1990s, Vietnam could be seen as Asia's next tiger economy. This study examines whether there has been policy convergence between the older East Asian developmental state model of economic development and that adopted by Vietnam. The economic development trajectories of South Korea and Vietnam are compared to identify similarities and differences. It was found that while policy convergence is evident there is also some divergence between the two countries.