HISTORY - ASIAN STUDIES

History - Asian Studies

History - Asian Studies

Introduction

The lights of downtown Nanjing are beautiful at night. The pollution that hangs over the city has a way of giving an other-worldly quality to the neon. The Taiwanese owned Golden Eagle department store and hotel is like a space ship hovering in the distance, ready to take-off, a monument to the occasional eccentricity of builders in a city that, like most Chinese cities, is usually content to simply put up rectangular concrete, steel, and glass boxes. (Swanson, 2009: 235) And until the Asian economic crisis hit in 1997, these boxes were going up with extraordinary rapidity. Since that time the so-called spidermen, rural migrant construction workers who brave these structures to earn a meager living to support family members still in the countryside, have not found as much work and the pace of building has slowed markedly. (Tucker, 2007: 120) There are lots of idle cranes hanging in the Nanjing air. Nevertheless, this relative calm can be misleading. In the factories, offices, and other buildings of Nanjing and other Chinese cities there is a technological transformation taking place with increasing speed. Computer based technology is being innovated throughout Chinese society. The internet is becoming pervasive, and, despite public proclamations to the contrary, the ability of Chinese citizens to gain access to knowledge from beyond China's boundaries is relatively unfettered. (Ramzy, 2009: 288)

History - Asian Studies

The computers and the internet cafes sprouting up all over the place, as well as any number of other quite visible changes in social life in China, are partly the outputs of a process of a relatively unbroken period of economic re-formation that began at the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in December of 1978 and was reaffirmed at both the 3rd Plenary Session of the 12th Central Committee of the CPC in October of 1984 and the 14th National Congress of the CPC in October of 1992. (Hederman, 2010: 108) It was at these meetings that the predominance of the pragmatic modernists within the Party was clearly demonstrated in the adoption, clarification, and reaffirmation of a new economic development strategy based upon decentralization of control over the state owned enterprise sector, expanded market transactions to replace command and control allocation, dismantling of the rural commune system (completed in 1985), increased use of material incentives in workplaces, and ultimately, the "modernization" of the Chinese economic infrastructure (as well as the military infrastructure). This last aspect of their strategy represents more than a mere objective. "Modernization" represents the mission of the modernists. Deng Xiaoping rejected the Maoist (romanticist) tendency to forswear the technological trappings of the so-called West (including "soft technology" in the form of social relationships) and embraced the idea that "modernity" required copying many of the traits of the Western capitalist nations.[1] This was precisely the approach that the Maoist Left described as "pulling the cart without watching the road," implying that while such a strategy ...