Bruce Cumings 73 - end [Joa]
Much of what I have here is excerpted directly from areas of the text I thought should be highlighted.
Chapter 3: Colonial Formations and Deformations: Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam
- there has been an emerging debate about the sources of economic growth in South Korea and Taiwan: Did it begin around 1960, when both had miniscule per capita incomes but somehow launched themselves onto a trajectory of export-led growth, or do the origins of growth go back further, into legacies of colonial rule?
- Cumings argues several things:
1. differing colonial experiences of Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam made a big difference in their postwar development
2. the “East Asian model” of capitalism has deep historical roots and cannot be understood merely as an outcome of salutary policy packaged that encouraged “export-led development”
3. it is in many ways an East Asian adaptation of the nineteenth-century European conception of the state and its relation to the national industrial economy
The Modern and the Colonial
[see Fanny’s section above]
Japan’s Most Important and Most Recalcitrant Colony: Korea
- major difference between Korea and Taiwan with regards to colonization: Korea has millennium-long history of continuous, independent existence within well-recognized territorial boundaries, ethnic homogeneity and great ethnic, linguistic and cultural difference from its neighbors
- in general, after WWI, Japan had less repressive colonial policies in both Korea and Japan
- Japanese viewed Korean industry as integral to overall planning done in Tokyo, one that needed protection
- More heavy industry in Korea than in Taiwan
- Korean industrial boom during last fifteen years of Japanese rule; development oriented toward needs of empire
- Postwar South Korea not an anti-colonial entity in that it contained virtual replicas of Japanese forms in industry, state policies (economic), education, police, military affairs
- North Korea, on the other hand, was anti-colonial: in denial of everything Japanese, however, it created mirror-image institutions
Japan in its Model Colony, Taiwan
- Taiwan (unlike Korea) was a less intrusive state, more light industry, more small-business and family enterprises, continuous export-led development, more egalitarian distribution, less nationalism, less hatred of the Japanese
- Taiwan’s dispersed and rural character seen as key reason for its quick growth
- Good example of an export-led industrialization after 1960 as well as during colonial period
- Japan taught colonies how to export while protecting domestic market
- Taiwan industrialized through peasant labor
- Financing of industrialization mimicked Japan and Korea: emphasis on state’s financing and harnessing of investment for industrial boom
- Hardly any nationalism and resistance to Japanese in Taiwan
- Taiwan gets same ubiquitous national police system that Korea got: colonizer as rigorous administrator rather than conqueror: police became backbone of regional administration- Taiwan’s Chinese settlers appreciate reforms
- Ultimately, colonial Taiwan seen as project that American academics could applaud in heyday of modernization theory
- In many ways, Taiwan still a colony after mainlander debauch in late 1940’s
- Nationalists monopolize government and political positions and take over many state-owned enterprises
Vietnam: Colonization without Development or Modernity
- French take a long time to colonize Vietnam
- French colonization incidental to their desire for a southern point of entry to China
- French encourage extractive economic activity
- Vietnam’s extensive riverine landscape made canal building and dredging much more cost-effective than networks Japanese built in Korean and Taiwan
- French policies introduced money economy without much else
- Small colonial government obsessed with cost-effective administration leaves villages mostly self-sufficient and autonomous, unlike with Japan
- French maintain rural order with periodic punitive military campaigns, unlike Japan, which had constant military presence
- Instead of central colonial budget, French had local budgets and state’s revenues extraction much lower than in Korea or Taiwan
- French emphasis on monopoly control and coercion without corresponding investment in human capital; many public works project
- Uneducated and unskilled labor force in Vietnam
- One period of real development in Vietnam: “roaring ‘20s” when French piled capital into Indochina
- French do not see colonial state as very important, more like appendage of metropolitan French interests
- In 1930’s, Vietnamese communist and nationalist organizers gain popularity
- French paid little attention to education in Vietnam, unlike Japanese
- French colonialism tends to preserve hierarchy of social relationships rather than foster development and differentiation of Vietnamese society
- French inhibit small business, unlike what is seen in Taiwan
- Peasant revolution promoted because of political economy in Vietnam
- Vietnam faced “colonial nonindustrialization” in complete contrast to way Japanese used its colonies to industrialize itself out of depression
Northeast Asia’s Modern/Colonial/Developmental Project
- high rate of growth in Taiwan possibly due to wide backlog of unexploited new production opportunities
- What is the East Asian “developmental model”? Consider that postwar economic successes in northeast Asia have roots going back before “take-off” in early 1960s. Sketch of regional bureaucratic-authoritarian industrializing regime:
1. A bureaucratic state
2. Education of the masses
3. Effective surveillance of those same masses by every means necessary
4. Metaphysical ideology of national essence
5. Political economy of administrative guidance and neo-mercantilism
6. Involvement in closely linked regional political economy
Conclusion: Staatswissenschaften, or Sate Science of Late Industrialization
- Central experience of northeast Asia this century has not been independence wherein reigns autonomy and equality, but enmeshment in another web: the hegemonic web.
Offspring of an Empire 1 - 20 [Betty]
The Rise of Korean Capitalism
In the seventy years between the opening of Korea’s ports and Liberation, Korea had witnessed the birth and growth of a bourgeoisie.
· Many South Koreans find this difficult to accept because it indicates that capitalism and modernization traced their roots to Japanese occupation.
· Scholarship in both North and South Korea try to demonstrate capitalistic growth in the Yi Dynasty.
o The growth of monetization
o Rise of a new group of merchants
o Beginning of a free wage labor force
· However, Yi Dynasty was still controlled by a small aristocracy, and economic growth during this era was not accompanied by industrialization.
It is the period of imperialism and colonialism that many historians discuss in terms of socioeconomic development.
· Great extent of industrial growth during colonial period
· Colonialism did not prevent many Koreans from partaking in this industrial growth
Merchants and Landlords
The impact of imperialism drew Korea into an international market dominated by great capitalist powers, creating impetus for the accumulation of capital by certain social groups such as merchants and landlords.
· In the Yi Dynasty, aristocrats had control over the land, and there was no prerequisite for substantial accumulation of capital by other members of society.
· The dynasty also forbade private foreign trade, thus both internal and external market opportunities were limited in Yi Korea.
· The Kangwha Treaty of 1876 ended Korea’s isolation from the rest of the world. It became an export market for foreign-manufactured goods and an exporter of grains to Japan.
· Private Japanese business interests began to take note of the Korean market, and Japanese commercial establishments spread throughout the country.
· Korea’s merchants did not adjust well to the incorporation into the world economy. Those who prospered were closely connected to international trade in rice and manufactured goods (these merchants are termed kaekchu). Some poor peasants, like Pak Sungjik, were able to become wealthy merchants from acting as middlemen in international trades.
o The kaekchu invested their money in other enterprises such as modern banking.
o Faced with competition from Japanese businessmen, the kaekchu formed cooperative associations.
· Many of Korea’s entrepreneurs came from landlord families. Even more than the kaekchu, it was the landlords who reaped the benefits from the new international economy.
o The land acquired by the Japanese often came from peasants or owner-tenants, not the rich landlords.
o The Japanese tariff on foreign rice lead to a period of unprecedented prosperity for the landlords.
o Some initially less affluent landowning families, such as the Koch’ang Kims, were able to accumulate substantial capital from their eminence as industrial entrepreneurs.
Offspring of an Empire 20 - 40 [Angela]
Offspring of an Empire 40 - end [Cher]
Leo Ching 15 - 34 [Jennifer]
Taiwan is first Japanese colony.
Important to remember:
Getting Taiwan was not central objective of the Japanese imperial power
*Japanese aggression was about gaining power vis-à-vis the Chinese in Korea and southern Manchuria, no battle fought in Japan or Taiwan
*annexation of Taiwan is during period of imperialism by Western powers
Taiwan was not seen as economic boon for Japan---the war was expensive (China has to deal with this expense through reparations afterwards), and Japan spent a lot to control the colony, instead Taiwan is important more for its “effect on the perception of the Japanese nation as capable of undertaking the “great and glorious work” of colonialism, a task and responsibility previously belonging solely to the Western nations”
Ching emphasizes that although there are a lot of “historical and philosophical differences in methods of colonization,” “we must acknowledge that most forms of modern colonialism share a certain generality…the rule of force of a people by an external power.
His two main arguments:
(1) Japanese colonialism is interrelated and interdependent with the global phenomenon of capitalist colonialism
(2) The lack of the decolonization process in the break-up with of the Japanese Empire has prevented both Taiwan and Japan from addressing the colonial relationship. (In Taiwan the sudden void left by the Japanese was filled by the Chinese National Army…the graft and the corruption of the takeover Chinese has led the Taiwanese to reimagine their colonial relationship with the Japanese because of their anger with the mainlanders.---this point is not covered in depth in this section of the summary)
Argument 1 (really just counterarguments against 2 commonly held beliefs)
(1) People have argued that Japan doesn’t have “normal” colonialism according Lenin’s theory of imperialism (imperialism as the political superstructure of a specific age of capitalism in which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital has established itsef).
Ching counter-argues----In fact, most Western imperialism does not work within Lenin’s model. Imperialism has not been a coming into being of particular nation-states in developing stages of capitalism, but rather about nation-states being rivals of each other. In other words, the economics of being an imperial power has had less to do with a nation-state acquiring a colony on which to force monopolies and their over-production of goods, and more to do with different nation-states competing with each other to make colonies out of the “open” territories of the world.
Argument 2
(2) People have argued that a difference between Japanese colonialism and Western colonialism is that Western imperialists were of a different race and had a different cultural heritage than the people in their colonies, while the Japanese shared a race and cultural heritage with the Taiwanese.
Ching counter-argues---Though Westerners may have seen the Taiwanese and Japanese as sharing race and cultural heritage, the colonial regime differentiated the Japanese people racially and culturally from the rest of Asia, and claimed the superiority of the Japanese people.
Ching then makes a separate and important point, that Taiwanese intellectuals tended to equate modernization with colonialization, since Japan was their one window to a modern nation. He points out that this is a similarity between Japanese imperialism and Western imperialism.
Ching has thus far argued that the practice of imperialism by the Japanese was in fact very similar to the practice of imperialism by the West…he points out that a difference is the way it has been studied since, practically ignored by the numerous studies that have focused on colonialism and post-colonialism. He points out that this may be because of a Euro-centric view, because of the short duration of Japanese imperialism (relative to Britain for example), and because of the Japanese post-colonial identification as “victim” from the A-bombings and as a self-contained homogenous island nation.
Leo Ching 57 - 76 [Kareem]
Leo Ching 76 - end [Yifan] 
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}