On Fri, 10 Oct 1997, Adam K. Webb wrote regarding China's possible rise to
a core economy:
> some cultural factors may particularly suit China to be the symbol of a
> redefined late-capitalist core: eg. a kinship-limited notion of social
> obligation, leading to ever more appalling amoral familism under modern
> capitalist conditions; a greater acceptance of "efficient" soft
> authoritarianism; and an intelligentsia not exactly known for critical
> opposition to the prevailing ideology. I doubt that this scenario in fact
> will materialise, but it might behoove us to prepare both analytically and
> practically for this contingency, since it would drastically complicate
> the project of antisystemic resistance.
Why can't it also enable and encourage a wide range of new Resistance(s)?
Numerous Chinese films in the Eighties and Nineties, for example,
everywhere from John Woo's export-platform shoot-em-ups to Yimou Zhang's
wondrous video panoramas in "Red Sorghum" and "Judou", are chockful of
explicitly transnational allegories: they tend to take Western or
Hollywood forms, and then give them an entirely new (and deeply
subversive) content, a content more often than not as antagonistic to
Sony Pictures and Polygram as to the CCP's palpable neo-nationalism.
There is resistance beneath the surface of all that allegedly Confucian
conformity, it's just a question of whether it turns in on itself, into a
genocidal neo-nationalism, or develops outwards, into some sort of East
Asian transnationalism.
My own feeling is that the integrationist tendencies of East Asia have
already become strong enough to put significant limits on
local neo-nationalisms. China depends heavily on foreign markets and
global trade, and has far more to gain from cooperating with Hong Kong's
financiers than by stupid and counter-productive expropriations. That
doesn't mean this can't happen, but first the global market would have to
break down on some significant level (a global credit collapse, mass
deflation etc.), and this isn't too likely, given the pro-expansionary
monetary policies and enormous Government bailouts regularly practiced
by those new creditors of the world economy, Japan Inc. and the European
Union. The IMF bailout of Thailand may be a sign that this is already
happening: a lot of the cash was put up by the Japanese, who also have the
biggest corporate investments and FDI in Thailand. The second-biggest
donor was, I believe, the Chinese/Hong Kong bloc. Might this be a
sizeable quid for a future Nippokeynesian pro quo?
-- Dennis