The future of East Asian management

It is both exciting and intimidating to speculate on the future of East Asian management. It is ‘exciting’ because it presents a wonderful opportunity for me, as one of the first Western management scholars of Chinese descent to undertake systematic research on China and Japan, to set forth my perspectives on the way that things might be in the future. It is also ‘intimidating’ – since forecasting is always daunting particularly in times of very rapid and dramatic changes. Perhaps the best example of a seismic change that has occurred in the last quarter of the twentieth century is the meteoric rise of China, the world’s most populated nation. In the late 1970s, China was one of the poorest countries on earth; yet within the course of three short decades, it has become the most ‘cash-rich’ nation and has assumed the status of the world’s banker. The fact that European leaders turned to China for assistance in solving the EU sovereign debt crisis is a clear sign that that country has already become ‘a dominant global power’ whose scope and magnitude of influence is ‘far greater … than anyone imagines’ (Alderman and Barboza, 2011).