ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL VISIONS OF THE PACIFIC CENTURY
The coming of the Pacific Century has been proclaimed ever more frequently since the mid-1980s.1 The rapid economic growth of East Asia (particularly Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) was already setting the region apart from the rest of the world by the 1970s.2 By the 1980s the trend was seen to have spread southward to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, while China’s coastal provinces had also become integral to the regional economic boom. Now the governments of the Philippines, Vietnam and even India are attempting to follow East Asia, while the people of Australia and the USA, and a growing number of other countries in the Americas and beyond, are being exhorted to meet the challenge of the rise of East Asia. From one influential point of view, a growing number of countries in East Asia have ‘gone from being dominoes to dynamos’. This was the expression used by US President Bill Clinton in a speech he gave at the November 1993 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) meeting in Seattle. First set up in 1989, APEC reflects the effort to manage the transition from the Cold War to the post-Cold War era. It is also an organizational manifestation of post-Cold War attempts to shift the focus of international relations from geo-politics to geo-economics, and it is seen in some circles as a possible new force for global liberalization.3
