ABSTRACT
The private car is one of the most powerful commodities to emerge from the technological progress of the last centuries. The relative freedom, comfort and convenience associated with owning a car have become central to expectations of development and modernity worldwide. The private car is, perhaps, the closest we get to a truly global ‘blueprint of modernity’, and increases in car ownership ratios are among the most predictable changes in consumption patterns resulting from economic growth and increasing affluence (see Medlock and Soligo 2002). The automobile industry has, in turn, played a central role in the history of both capitalism and (albeit to a lesser extent) socialism, and is a defining part of the regionalising and globalising production processes of contemporary capitalism. After decades of rapid economic growth in the Asian region, the car is entering Asia at full speed, rapidly displacing or replacing other modes of transportation, most notably in the large urban conglomerations. While a few East Asian countries – particularly Japan and South Korea – are long-established leading players on the global car scene, new Asian countries are joining the race for a piece of what Drucker (1946) famously labelled ‘the industry of industries’. The growing number of cars on Asian roads simultaneously indexes a newfound economic confidence, altered modes of industrial-technological production and capacity, new forms of urbanisation, and rapidly changing consumer aspirations and practices among important social strata, first and foremost the emerging middle classes. Yet in spite of these visible trends – and barring the several studies of the emergence and consolidation of the auto industry in key Asian economies (for example Doner 1991; Gallagher 2006; Wad 2009; Shimokawa 2013; Natsuda et al. 2015) – the role of the car in contemporary ‘emerging’ Asia has received little academic attention. Cars, Automobility and Development in Asia is an attempt to give the car the attention we think it deserves in Asian development, in a context in which Asia is not just home to half the global population, but also to some of the world’s largest, and fastest growing, economies. The chapters in this book, individually and collectively, seek to chart new ways in the study of automobility and development in emerging Asia through an integrated perspective that incorporates the policies, production forms, labour regimes, consumer aspirations and symbolism that are implicated
in Asian automobilities. The questions we examine are: What role does the car play in different Asian economies? How does the car industry figure in Asian economic development? Why are cars so popular, why do people buy them, and how do they drive them? What potential and actual consumer aspirations and identities do they tap into, and how do they impinge on the everyday lives of Asians in different contexts? We address these, and related, questions through a combination of comparative multi-country and in-depth single-country case studies covering India, China, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Japan, thereby engaging with both the already mature capitalist countries, as well as some of the most rapidly growing Asian economies. What these countries all have in common is that they, although to very different degrees (see Table 1.1), produce cars within their national borders. The chapters that follow take the reader through the dense traffic of Manila and Hanoi; onto the shared Japanese road; inside the Indian Tata Nano; and to Chinese auto expos and drag racing; and they analyse the car industry as a site for policy making, labour organising, industrial evolution, and nationalist aspirations. In the remainder of this introduction we contextualise these overarching questions and cases, before we present a brief overview of the book’s contents.
