ABSTRACT
In their elegiac reproach of the discursive fantasy of the ‘Asian Pacific region’, Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik write, ‘[i]f such a region did not exist, it would have to be invented by policy planners and social scientists along the East-West axis to figure forth an integrated source of boundless markets, wondrous raw materials, and ever-expanding investments’. Talking about the vast Asia-Pacific as a single fixed geographical entity, they warn, not only belittles the region’s ‘staggering complexity, discrepant hybridity, and nomadic flux’, but also sidesteps the questions: ‘Whose “Asia-Pacific” are we talking about, whose interests are being served?’1 Answers to these questions punctuate the complex entanglement of both the ‘East’ and ‘West’ in the making of the ‘Asia-Pacific’ discourse. The ‘Asia-Pacific’ is anything to anyone. For if the regionespecially fast-growing East Asia-is the West’s new-found land of expanding markets and disciplined but still relatively cheap labour, and if the discourse about the region fuels Asia’s imagining of its rise in the globalized world, then ‘Asia-Pacific’ is no longer a purely geographical entity. It is a global space in which nations and political leaders have invested their dreams and wishes. In these imaginings, ‘Asia-Pacific’ becomes an object which would rescue the West from its current economic woes, on the one hand; and affirm (East) Asian states’ emerging political and cultural confidence in the world, on the other. The agendas unite for a moment ‘East’ and ‘West’ in a common discursive enterprise. And the enterprise takes place even in the midst of heated contestations over the issues of human rights, information flow, environmental priorities and the impending ‘clash of civilizations’ predicted by the apocalyptic vision of Samuel Huntington.2 What emerges is a reinventing of ‘Asia’, through an anxious rewriting of the texts about the place and its people. We see this in the remarkable East Asian discourse sponsored by Singapore and China which singles out the common Confucian heritage in the East Asian countries-China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Singapore-as the reason for their
spectacular economic performance.3 In the West, a seductively figured text like Joel Kotkin’s Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy serves to assuage nostalgic regret for the loss of Calvinistic ideals which authorial fantasy miraculously rediscovers in the work ethics and commercial instincts of Asian-and other-‘global tribes’.4
