Sowing Dragons

[Stephen E Philion]

> On Fri, 7 Apr 2000, Jonathan Lassen wrote:
> 
> > I don't know about the other NICs, but here in Taiwan there is no clash
> > between the "developmentalists" and the "neoliberals." No one challenges the
> > market, and there's little left of the developmental state.
> 
On Fri, 7 Apr 2000, Dennis R Redmond wrote:
> Not within the semi-peripheries themselves, I'm talking about the
> neoliberals on Wall Street vs. the East Asian developmental states. The
> Taiwanese state is no friend of the market; the credit and finance system
> is heavily state-controlled, the Yuan passed a bunch of measures to deal
> with the SE Asian crash, science and tech are heavily subsidized, and
> imports are carefully screened and exports no less carefully pushed. The
> socialisms of the future could learn a lot from this.

Steve writes:

A while back Jonathan, some friends, and I were discussing recent trends
in Taiwan, his comments then would indicate that  while the above is true,
to a certain extent, it characterizes more a sub-trend in the face of a
dominant trend...Thus, again, whether we're talking about China, Taiwan,
or the US, it's ill advised to take either Policy measures or statistics
at face value..

Quote from Jonathan a while back, 
But the labor movement in Taiwan right now is foundering, to be frank.
No one has any real clue what's going on, and what to do about it.
Unemployment has hit (officially) 2.6%, which means that the number of
officially unemployed is about the same number as the no. of foreign
workers in Taiwan. All of a sudden the government is concerned about the
unemployed aboriginal workers, and labor groups have taken the bait.
Kind of sad, when there's *so much* that's going on right now in Taiwan.
Foreign stock ownership has been increased from 15% to 50% just
recently, and this no includes futures trading.  The legal limit to
foreign bank ownership has also been boosted to 50%. Tariffs, already
very low, were further lowered last week to an incredible 4.7%, the most
controversial cuts in sectors like rice and sugar. The number of people
working in direct sales is estimated to be about 1 million. Everything
is being privatized. You know the rest.

The scaffolding for Taiwan's meteroic rise to NICdom is being wrenched
from underneath it. What will be left is 12" wafer plants, a huge
informal sector, a ruined environment, and lots of Karoke.

We need more serious Marxist analysis of the kind that people like
Jonathan offer on political economy of East Asia/China instead of taking
policy makers' claims or poorly compiled statistics at face value if we
wanna uncover the reality of that not too insignificant region..
Dennis had written:
> Plus, it's always nice to see one-party states get trounced at the
> polls. I just wish the US could be so lucky.
> 

Taiwan hasn't been a one party state for quite a while...even the
Republicans long ago gave up on the KMT...so now the KMT is replaced by a
party that is in many senses more pro-privatization than the KMT under Lee
Denghui...Hurrah?

Steve


> -- Dennis
> 
> 
>