East Asia is a global geopolitical fault line, where historically great powers have interacted, collided, receded, and rebounded. Seen in the context of this long history, the end of World War II ushered in at least four paradigm changes of international and regional politics in Asia-Pacific.

This paper was published as part of the "America's Alliances with Japan and Korea in a Changing Northeast Asia" Research Project.

"Reprint from Educational Policy, 1995.

What can be said about the social and cultural characteristics of the Asian region as a whole? Are there, for example, traditional similarities that unify the region—something one might label “Asian culture”? Various scholars have seen an Asian-ness in such things as the way authority has been understood in the region 1 or, even more typically, they point to the Confucian heritage common to China and the nations on its periphery as a unifying characteristic. 2 At least one contemporary Asian leader, Mahathir Mohamad, prime minister of Malaysia, has argued for the legitimacy of a distinctly Asian approach to politics and society, one that is at odds with what he infers is a Western cultural hegemony in such matters. 3 Others, certainly the majority of scholars, have expressed skepticism with any interpretive framework that has attempted to embrace the entire region in cultural terms. Are there other ways to think of cultural connections that are not based in traditions or in religious, linguistic, historical, or other origins? Or is the initial question itself misplaced?

In comparison with the postwar decades from 1945 to 1990, East Asian prospects for peaceful stability and economic growth have never been better. The Cold War confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States has ended. The arms race that flooded the Pacific region with Soviet and U.S. nuclear weapons systems has been replaced by a gradual phasing out of tactical and intermediate missiles. The navies of the two superpowers are diminishing, albeit involuntary on Russia’s part. Moscow’s alliances with Pyongyang and Hanoi now exist only on paper. Washington’s bases in the Philippines were closed by mutual agreement.

In this volume of concise and informative essays, leading specialists examine the nature, impact and prospects of China's post-1978 party±market symbiosis. Criticizing the collapse thesis derived from Eastern European conditions, it argues that economic liberalization has created new forms of interdependency between the state and market in China. The corollary is that party cadres have developed a new and useful role as facilitators of market transactions.

Since China did not take the big bang route to economic liberalization, cadres retain great discretion over the fate of fledgling private enterprise. So, despite their objective economic importance, China's entrepreneurs remain politically passive (Young's chapter). Oi argues that it is naive to assume that the state merely encumbers and preys upon private enterprise. She shows how village businesses are helped by a primitive form of `administrative guidance' commonly associated with Japanese industrial policy (pp. 69±72). From the perspective of property rights and their reassignment, Walder's essay demonstrates the spatial redistribution of power favouring provincial cadres (vis-aÁ -vis Beijing) and local and enterprise level cadres. Owing to her gradual reformism, China has not suffered the scale of social dislocation witnessed in Russia's transition. Nevertheless, within the overall improvement of living standards, reform has produced social discontent from those who have lost status and income, notably public sector employees (see the essays by Ma, Unger and Kent). In playing a facilitating role for market transactions, cadres have derived considerable personal profit. This `visible hand' of the cadres has attracted much popular resentment and undermined the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) now trapped between its egalitarian roots and the international democratization wave.

While overt opposition has been effectively contained since 1989, economic liberalization has nevertheless created the potential for further social protest. Much will depend on the CCP's readiness to accommodate nascent social forces (with workers, as discussed by Chan, for example) into some meaningful channels of consultation and grievance redress, which in turn raises questions about the future shape of the regime and the role of the party within it

'Local corporatism' has been identified as a major factor in the rapid growth of the Chinese economy. The institutional environment, ownership, political and social factors operate along with economic factors in explaining local cor poratism and differences in the degree of corporatism of collective and private enterprises with local governments. The differences lead to the distinction between collective and private enterprises in terms of organizational character istics. This is confirmed by data from 132 rural enterprises in China.