ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses how globalization is conceived of among East Asians. We are interested in how East Asian people imagine and evaluate global interdependence and linkages across countries. One prevailing viewpoint about the influence of globalization contends that the gradual disappearance of national boundaries supports true free trade and free capital mobility in modern societies. The freedoms to move, invest, and compete allow people non-local alternative opportunities to create prosperity. From this perspective, globalization represents increased economic openness across the world and provides a setting that unleashes individual creativity and accelerates productivity; it also enhances the well-being of the human majority because technical innovation, new investment, and free competition between geographically distant firms stimulates entrepreneurship, creates new jobs, and boosts economic growth. In societies with limited openness, such as in a command economy or a centralized government, entrepreneurship is suffocated and growth stunted. As Norberg notes, ‘the poor and powerless find their well-being vastly improved when inexpensive goods are no longer excluded by tariff barriers and when foreign investments offer employment and streamline production’ (2007:265). From this perspective, globalization becomes justifiable because it can be positioned as a system in which the human capacity for achieving better living conditions results from interaction, exchanges, and co-operation across borders. In a typical neoliberal tone, Norberg (2007:267) contends that free trade means ‘the right to live according to one’s own values.’
