ABSTRACT
The high romances of transnational Chinese capitalism-the triumphant narratives of the founding and growth of family business empires throughout the Asia Pacific-are compelling for many reasons, not least of which is that they register major shifts in economic dominance between regions of the global economy toward an emerging Asia Pacific capitalist center as the preexisting industrial centers of North America and Europe enter into a protracted period of decline and stagnation in the contemporary period of flexible accumulation (Harvey 1989; Nonini 1993). Stories of the dynastic histories of Liem Sioe Liong, Li Ka-Shing, Li Kung Pao, and other Asia-Pacific entrepreneurs have become emblematic of the economic success of “overseas Chinese” and the prominence of this success in the new global order (see Ong’s essay in this volume). These narratives herald in congratulatory prose the arrival of a small elite of extraordinarily wealthy Chinese transnational businessmen, casting this as the emergence of a group of new entrepreneurial heroes on the deterritorialized stage of late capitalism (see, for example, Kao 1993). In their telling, such narratives celebrate putatively primal features of Chinese culture-thrift, family, commercial acumen, networks, connections, Confucian hierarchy. They also index new cultural shifts and the emergence of “alternative modernities,” as Aihwa Ong argues in this volume.
