> Nevertheless, to posit an "Asian development" model, or explain it in terms
> of "Asian values" or something --- à la rightist/capitalist ideologues like
> Mahathir --- is as ahistorical as positing a "western development model",
> when there are really many.
I've never ascribed East Asia's success to Lee Kuan Yew's "Asian values". But we can indeed talk about a regional or East Asian accumulation structure -- in addition to the economic muscle of the keiretsu/chaebol/Chinese biz clusters, with their networks of Asian affiliates, there's lots of central bank cooperation, new trade agreements, significant flows of goods, capital, and media culture, and of course new forms of class struggle and resistance.
> worldwide have been and are famously resistant to "reforms". And the
> ex-communists are now faced with the same dilemma that the Bolsheviks faced
> in the mid-1920s
That's a very different situation. The Chinese peasantry has been integrated into an enormous, rapidly-growing trading region; the export markets for Soviet peasants collapsed thanks to the Great Depression. There's vast corruption in the Chinese countryside, but there's also genuine (and genuinely multinational) accumulation going on.
> > The British administration ran a huge public housing program, and
> > Hong Kong's business class was largely the creation of expatriate Shanghai
> > capital/ists/ism.
>
> have no hope of buying some of the most expensive real estate on earth? I
> don't understand your point about Shanghai.
It's a delicious irony of history that Hong Kong's alleged laissez-faire economy is the unwitting product of state intervention: the Shanghai bourgeoisie fled to HK, and then the mainland allowed the city-state to flourish afterwards (mostly because it needed a deep-water port, and a way to outflank the US-imposed trade embargo).
-- DRR