East Asian Development

One of the characteristics of human cognition is the tendency to attempt to place things in categories or to create models to cover many different kinds of situations. Rather than deal with each experience or situation as an individual and unique occurrence, the human brain works to simplify the world by reducing the number of events that it has to analyze or deal with.

Sometimes this is appropriate and helpful. In other instances, the tendency to categorize can become nonproductive stereotyping or a false association of situations that are unlike. In this paper, the intent is to look at whether or not there is an appropriate model that fits most of the instances of East Asian development and how that model might be described.

To narrow the scope of this exploration, the focus in this paper is on the early development experiences in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. There are some immediate, and obvious, differences in the postWorld War II situation in these countries. Japan was the conquered and subdued power that had been overwhelmed at the end of the war by the atomic bomb. Korea had been liberated from Japanese occupation. Taiwan was still in the throes of the conflict in mainland China. So, these were very different situations at the end of World War II. The timeline for development in the countries was, therefore, quite different also.

In looking at Korea, for example, economic development proceeded at two diffe

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close to the Japanese model of development with open economies, which are exportoriented, and not consumptionbased. He noted that both also have cultures that favor thrift, austerity, equitable income distribution, and social cohesion and conformity. The significant difference has been in political culture, with both Taiwan and South Korea more authoritarian and dominated by their conflicts with Communism. This has not been the case with Japan. Although Japan has clearly been aligned with the U.S., too, it has not had as emotionally charged a relationship with Communist China as Taiwan and South Korea. For South Korea, the Communists stole half their country. For Taiwan, communism essentially stole the whole of mainland China from those who believe that they are its rightful rulers. The development of Taiwan is unique because of the base from which it began. As Cheng (1993) noted, the KMT, or ruling party of Taiwan, was essentially a corporatist state that grew out of a political movement that had its base in the 1.5 million people who fled mainland China in 1949. These people formed the basis of a bureaucracy. As in Korea, land reforms were instituted during this period, and the authoritarian regime ruled for over thre

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