Dragons in Distress (was Re: Sowing Dragons)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri Apr 7 20:27:00 PDT 2000


Steve wrote:


>In the very early 90's it was easy to be swayed by the DPP leaders, they
>frequently were putting their careers and even lives at risk to challenge
>the KMT one party rule and the like (one of my favorite moments in Taiwan
>was watching a DPP legislator confront the then powerful hardliner
>premier Hao Bocun to 'fuck your mother' in Taiwanese, which Hao could not
>speak being from mainland China)...However, but 1992-3 it was quite clear
>that this party was for even more privatization than the KMT...and eager
>to convince American companies/politicians that only it had the will to
>break apart state monopolies and open up new markets to foreign
>investors..

I entirely agree with you on the problem of dependency theory, the nature of cross-class alliance that the theory tends to facilitate, etc. With some exceptions (like Chile, where neoliberalism was introduced under the Pinochet dictatorship), the advent of neoliberalism often coincided with political liberalization (often called "democratization" -- a misnomer). The former Eastern bloc, South Korea, many Latin American states, etc. fall into this pattern. Everywhere, the absence of an independent working-class politics with a clear socialist alternative (even in countries with militant trade unions like South Korea) poised to seize hegemony.

Yoshie



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