ABSTRACT
The Crash poses an enormous challenge to East Asian governments and established political structures. For half a century, the terms of the agreement between rulers and people have usually been based on the benefits of economic growth. This has been the case even for democratically based political systems. Electoral politics and a conservative bias for the incumbent political forces have fostered stability – Japan’s LDP, Taiwan’s Kuomintang, and up until recently the politically conservative majority in South Korea could count on the voters’ gratitude for prosperity. But even the semi-authoritarian regimes of Asia, and some of the more outright dictatorships, have fostered successful developmental states that depoliticized most expressions of public opinion.
