Introduction

In the past scholarship of the West, East Asian societies were often subjected to Orientalist appraisals that described them as ‘static, despotic, and reclusive’ entities. From the 1980s, however, the overall tenet of Westerners’ view of East Asia began to shift diametrically. In response, East Asians themselves have increasingly extolled themselves as political economic or civilizational rivals to the West. Nowadays East Asia even serves as a fertile ground for imagining or advocating paradigmatic alternatives to so-called Western modernity. The conceptual alternatives include among others ‘the developmental state’ (Wade 1990; Amsden 1992, 1994), politics with ‘Asian values’ (Kim 1994; Zakaria and Lee 1994), paternalistic management and team production (Dore 1973; Ohno 1988), family-controlled business and society (Carney and Gadajlovic 2003; Kang 1996; Chang 2010a), corporatized or company-dependent labor (Jacoby 2004; Lee 1999), family-centered and/or ‘developmental’ welfare regimes (Goodman et al. 1998; Peng et al. 2010; Chang 2012), ‘education zeal’ as developmental impetus (Seth 2002), and so forth. The scholarly appeal of these arguments has oscillated with fluctuations in the practical performance and stability of East Asia’s economies, polities, industries, labor systems, welfare regimes, and educational systems. ¹ Most recently, the gradual, yet seemingly irreversible, degeneration of Western economic, political, corporate, and social systems has increasingly led numerous Western observers to tout ‘East Asian alternatives’ as possible universal prescriptions for new directions in social change.