ABSTRACT
In the middle of 1997 East Asia was gripped by a major financial crisis that continues to affect the region. What was initially taken to be a relatively isolated shock has intensified and generated increasingly widespread economic and political effects which threaten to overturn much of the region’s established political and economic order. These events have been remarkable enough in themselves. For observers of the region there has been an additional, if rather less traumatic, consequence of the crisis: quite simply, it has forced a major reassessment of our understanding of the way political and economic activity is organised within the region, and about the place of the region in an increasingly integrated international system.
