ABSTRACT
The end of the Cold War precipitated the deepening of the US-led globalization
project and the emergence of celebratory visions of a new era of global liberal-
ism.1 Nevertheless, Japan, the Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) of South
Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, and the growing capitalist dyna-
mism of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and coastal China, were widely per-
ceived by the early 1990s as a serious challenge (or threat) to the post-Cold War
neoliberal order centered on North America and Western Europe. Much of this
concern dissipated rapidly with the onset of the Asian financial crisis (1997-8),
while 9/11 has further dramatically reoriented the global political economy.
Meanwhile, at the present juncture China is the pivot of wider politico-economic
trends in East Asia, while the earlier East Asian Miracle, centered on Japan, and
driven by the formerly authoritarian developmental states of South Korea and
Taiwan, has passed into history. In fact, it is now clear that the potential chal-
lenge that even the most successful developmental states of East Asia represented
for the US-led globalization project was always circumscribed. The power and
resilience of US hegemony in East Asia in the 1980s and 1990s was reflected in
the way in which, contrary to both a close reading of the history of capitalism
generally and the growing oligopolistic character of the global political economy
of the 1990s more specifically, the most influential analyses of what became
known as the East Asian Miracle explained the region’s capitalist transformation
after 1945 primarily in terms of a commitment to the virtues of the free market
and free enterprise (Aikman 1986: 116).
