2018, Vol.7, No.2

Asia Review 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.86

pISSN : 2234-0386
https://journal.kci.go.kr/asiareview

Asia is on the rise. It has shown remarkable developmental dynamism compared to Europe and North America. Despite being one of the late or late-late-developers in terms of industrialization and democratization, some of Asian countries now spearhead the world’s most rapid transformation into the 21st capitalism. I believe that there may be an ideal type of capitalism, but I must admit that there is a variety of capitalism existing in different national forms. Capitalism can take dissimilar forms nationally and regionally, depending on development strategy, state-society relations, class coalition, business-government nexus, labour market structure, industrial relations, corporate governance system, innovative system, and so on. This paper deals with how to study capitalism in Asia from a theoretical and methodological point of view. I propose to approach capitalism as plural forms. I argue that there are some distinct features of capitalism in Asia. Historical perspectives do not tally with the idea of Asian capitalism as being extensions of Western dynamics. It is my contention that Asian capitalism is not homogeneous in that state-interventionist Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Malaysia are dissimilar with free market-oriented Singapore and Hong Kong. China is also a special challenge from a comparative capitalism perspective. I also propose to analyse Asian capitalism from a comparative perspective. Comparative analysis of capitalist development will be useful in finding out the similarities and differences across countries in Asia.

This paper aims to examine the cultural contradiction of state neoliberalism in China. First it discusses the concept of cultural contradiction as formulated by Daniel Bell (1976), and then it examines the making of cultural contradiction in post-socialist China since 1978. After that, it studies the linkages between cultural contradiction and the moral crisis in Chinese society. At the end, it argues that moral crisis in contemporary Chinese society is a product of the cultural contradiction of state neoliberalism.

How can we understand the emergence of the ‘able’ developmental state in Korea and its transformation to the ‘less capable’ types of the state, such as predatory and Sisyphean? To what extent and in what specific way does the culture matter in this dynamic process of the state building and change? From the historical institutional perspective, we clarified the critical juncture of the emergence of the developmental state as an institutional innovation and its transformation to the predatory and Sisyphean as symptoms of post-developmental state. We also identified the ways in which cultural hybridity work in setting the economic growth path as well as in sustaining the path-dependency that now undercut the strength of the state. Finally, we speculated the 3 logical possibilities that the current Korean state would likely to have.