> I've never ascribed East Asia's success to Lee Kuan Yew's "Asian values".
Lee generally spoke of Confucian/Chinese values, not about "Asian values", which _was_ Mahathir's phrase (and pretty much his alone).
> But we can indeed talk about a regional or East Asian accumulation
structure
Yes -- it's called capitalism. Apart from that, all generalised models break down.
> -- in addition to the economic muscle of the keiretsu/chaebol/Chinese biz
> clusters, with their networks of Asian affiliates,
Which have absolutely nothing in common with the huge trading houses, cartels and ethnic networks found in early European capitalism?
> 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.
Which is absolutely identical to the arrival of the modern age in Europe.
> 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.
The similarity I was alluding to is --- in both cases --- huge proportions of the population being involved in "unproductive" labour and the barrier this forms to further development.
> It's a delicious irony of history that Hong Kong's alleged laissez-faire
> economy is the unwitting product of state intervention:
Well, yeah. All supposedly laissez faire regimes are the result of state intervention. That's the point.
> 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).
Hong Kong was founded a long time before 1949.