3.3 The Post-war Industrialization and the Developmental State
3.3.1 Open Regionalism Under the Developmental State
The government in the inter-state system, which attempts to maximize the interest of its people, could act against the principle of free trade, which seeks mutual gain.
In post-war Asia, there was a greater sense of tension between the need for political and economic independence and intra-regional trade than pre-war. On the one hand, independence meant gaining a political and economic autonomy, especially in rela- tion to the former colonial power, and more generally to advanced Western countries.
At the same time, the pre-war path dependency suggested that there was room for newly independent countries to take advantage of regional commercial networks,
especially through the entrepots of Hong Kong and Singapore. In this section, we discuss how the states reacted to the issue of economic integration through trade, and eventually most of them came to engage in intra-regional trade and competitive regional industrialization.
The strategy for the ‘import substitution industrialization’, strictly interpreted, meant the building of a full industrial structure equivalent to that in developed coun- tries, by imposing very high tariff against imports of industrial goods from the West.
This strategy seemed politically viable in many countries, including India and China, though it turned out to be relatively short-lived. In India, by the Third Five Year Plan period, it became clear that benefits of heavy industrialization (modelled largely on the Soviet experience) were not being ‘trickled down’, resulting in ‘disguised unemployment’ in the rural area and the growth of the urban ‘informal sector’. In communist China (during the Mao period), human development indicators (such as education and health) improved faster than in the more democratic India, but the country also struggled to develop competitive heavy industries (also originally influ- enced by the Soviet experience) in the absence of technological transfer from the more developed countries, especially from the West.
By contrast, some East and Southeast Asian countries, such as Japan, NIEs (Newly Developing Economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, which had relatively high initial conditions of various kinds) and ASEAN 4 (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, which pursued the export-oriented path to industrialization) successively experienced relatively high rates of growth, by taking advantage of the gains from trade more than India and China.
South Korea and Taiwan were among the first that captured the concept of export- orientation in industrialization, partly because they were too small a country for developing a comprehensive industrial structure, and partly because they lacked the natural resources (especially mineral and energy) needed for economic growth in much the same way as Japan did. In both cases political autonomy was complicated as much by territorial relations (with North Korea and China) as by dependence on exports, while Japan’s was conditioned by the defeat of the war. It was important that these countries nevertheless pursued a policy for export promotion and were able to link it to both resource imports and employment creation.
ASEAN 4 started a developmental policy under the authoritarian regime around 1965. They gradually turned to the export-oriented strategy, coined by Hla Myint in an ADB-sponsored conference in 1970, and proceeded with a full route to industri- alization in the 1980s (This can be seen in the radical change in their commodity composition of trade). In spite of the criticism of ‘shallowness’ of industrialization (Singh1979) and the lack of initial conditions (such as the land reform) taken for granted in East Asia (Lee1979), they pursued the export-oriented industrialization strategy with varying degrees of success. It became a mainstay of growth Asia’s eco- nomic policy. Neither the U.S., the key provider of political and military support, nor former colonial powers (European states and Japan), has been primarily responsible for the diffusion of this strategy. If anything, it grew out of what was happening on the ground, rather than as a result of economic principles or policy directives from above. Even so, it was vital for some ideas and policies to be articulated and pursued.
The ‘open regionalism’, which does not discriminate against countries outside the region when regional integration takes place and tariff rates are reduced inside the region (that is, this strategy proposes to reduce tariff rates against outside one–sid- edly), derives from a special type of economic nationalism, which is different from both the hegemonic regime of free trade (as per Britain and the U.S.A.) and Conti- nental European style regime of free trade through treaty networks (Sugihara2015).
Historically, the region was used to low tariff level exposure to the international econ- omy, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under the regime of ‘forced free trade’. It was natural for these Asian countries to engage in trade between neighbouring countries with similar economic structure and to compete for similar markets, in order to seek complementarity for small gains from trade and exploit regional potentialities for growth. Trade was seen, not just as a policy tool for economic growth or industrialization, but as a prime mover in itself. India and China, which had been an agrarian empire in the early modern period and opted for strict import-substitution industrialization in the post-war period, were slow to join this regional dynamics. Nevertheless, their long-term trajectories were not necessarily of agrarian origin. Both countries had long traditions of engaging in regional trade.
After the policy changes in 1979 and in 1991, China and India joined the net- work of trade and economic growth, and in many ways led the dynamism. China retained a high rate of growth for more than three decades, only with minor down- turns, and increasingly traded with other Asian countries. Although the impact of foreign investment in China (from U.S., E.U. and Japan as well as from overseas Chinese capital) was significant as a vehicle of technology transfer and the training of labour, the increased significance of intra-Asian trade cannot be accounted for by such investment flows alone. Along with the growth of production networks initiated by multinational companies spanning greater Asian regions, the amount of smaller, local and regional transactions between China and Southeast Asia and other neigh- bouring countries increased in parallel to them. As a result, Asia’s share in Chinese trade continued to grow. It was China that sustained the growth of commercial link- ages among Asian countries in the more recent years, in many ways replacing the role Japan (and NIEs) had played earlier.
By 2000 India was trading eastwards (mainly with growth Asia and the U.S.) more than westwards (mainly with E.U., Russia and the Middle East). In 2015 she became the fastest growing country among the main emerging states, rapidly becoming part of Asia’s regional growth. It is clear by now that ‘growth Asia’ began to include the
‘hinterland’, as well as smaller countries of Asia. By making a vast rural population closer to trade-inspired industrialization, the policy changes in China and India had a major impact on the rise of emerging economies in particular and global economic development in general.
China today is trying to distance itself from the norms and institutions that have governed the original Asia-Pacific economy, which was created in the 1950s to the 1970s by the United States, Japan, ASEAN and Australia. They include U.S.
hegemony in military and international relations, as well as rules of international trade and monetary systems. The crucial question, however, is whether these moves
will affect the forces promoting intra-regional trade. So far China appears to want to use them, so long as they do not contradict with its political and territorial interests.