Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (2 page)

The second objective is to demonstrate the power of anthropology to trace out the connections between people’s lived experience with larger processes working at the global scale. Ethnography provides us with detailed descriptions of how people in different locations in East Asia experience their everyday realities in the midst of the new possibilities and constraints that the global economy is producing for their lives. Engagement with these transformations at the level of the everyday beyond our national borders also makes us attentive to the changing experiences of our students in U.S.-based academic settings as well. Embodying the realities of global flows of information and capital, they also bear the burden of neoliberalism’s “freedoms” and self-responsibility. We have found that tracing out the connections in this new era and the histories on which they are based fosters in our students a sense of recognition (rather than competition) with youth located elsewhere of their shared experience of both the promise and uncertainty they confront as they enter the global economy as embodied human capital. We see cultivating this recognition as a political act that contributes to the formation of a very different kind of global project, one that transcends national identity formations to resist the segregations between high- and low-value subjects imposed by neoliberal globalization (Dyer-Witheford 2002).

A third objective is to illuminate the changing calculus of human worth in the production of subjects as both workers and consumers. A number of the chapters in this volume look at the contingent production of emergent “forms of being” in relation to national projects of “human engineering.” In phrasing it this way, we hope to draw attention both to the intentional activities of agents of change (including individuals working on themselves) and the imaginaries of development that they inhabit along with the indeterminacy of outcomes. Amid the promises of globalization to equalize and “flatten” the world, anthropologists confront the way in which the utopian visions of this era, often invested with ideas of freedom and the promise of
self-fulfillment,
are also laden with the costs of greater vulnerability and uncertainty. In this respect, universalizing invocations of freedom may be understood very differently in different contexts, and the promises they offer may come with very different costs.

Living in Conditions of Neoliberal Globalization

Neoliberal globalization is a complex mix of technological and economic innovations alongside changing conceptions of human worth and philosophies of government.
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The theoretical approach of this volume is to bring into dialogue political economic approaches to the study of neoliberal globalization as a “spatiotemporal fix” for the contradictions of late capitalism with biopolitical analyses of neoliberal projects of government as addressing the problem of how to govern free subjects in liberal societies.
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However, neoliberalism as a strategy of governing at a distance is not limited to liberal democracies. Aspects of neoliberal governmentality have been adopted by illiberal regimes in the guise of market reforms. Historically, implementations of neoliberal thought in government, in particular the strain that focuses on the extension of free market principles into areas of social policy, have developed alongside and even facilitated economic globalization. However, the link between them must be understood not just at the level of political strategy but also as a pervasive ethos that deeply informs the subjective formation of ordinary individuals living in conditions of neoliberal globalization but in ways that may be very differently situated.

As an approach to government that emerged in the early postwar period, neoliberal thinking did not gain significant political traction until the end of the 1970s. The dismantling of the welfare state reworked the social contract between state and citizen. Michel Foucault has suggested that the Beveridge Plan, which popularized Keynesian policies in the United Kingdom during World War II, set up the exchange of patriotic self-sacrifice in a time of war in exchange for job security and universal health care. He phrased its appeal as follows: “Now we are asking you to get yourselves killed, but we promise you that when you have done this, you will keep your jobs until the end of your lives” (2008: 216). The postwar social contract took a different form in Japan, which had been shorn of its military powers after World War II. Instead, one could say that it took the form of an intensification of labor
productivity
(Dohse, Ulrich, and Nialsch 1985) to ensure Japan’s economic success in exchange for life-long employment security. Andrea Arai (
Chapter Seven
in this volume), addresses how the economic recession has changed the terms of the social contract between state and citizen in conditions of high unemployment in which “the securing of the national future, it appears, no longer guarantees that all will participate in the ongoing prosperity of the national community.”

These shifts in the strategies of government were deeply engaged with the crisis of capitalism beginning in the 1970s by opening national borders to flows of capital and labor worldwide. China’s shift to market socialism in the late 1970s provided a timely entry into the global market as a place where foreign investment could go in search of cheaper labor, turning the challenge that Chinese socialism posed to capitalist hegemony into a new frontier for capital accumulation. Following the end of the Cold War in 1989, a transformed geopolitical order accelerated these shifts, and the technological innovations of information technologies and containerization facilitated the globalization of production chains. The “law of comparative advantage” (that is, organizing national economies around what they produce most efficiently) often meant not just a changing division of labor in global markets but also the rolling back of government responsibilities for social welfare provision in the name of remaining “competitive.” Pressures to reduce the social wage meant that provision for health care, job security, and retirement benefits became expendable entitlements in the new “global arbitrage of labor” (Ross 2006). Neoliberal reforms to encourage citizens to assume responsibility for their fates in an increasingly precarious labor market promised to reduce the costs of government in a time of high unemployment. These reductions in social spending were certainly not met without contestation, as illustrated by a number of the chapters in this volume, in ways that illuminate the uncertain trajectory of neoliberal projects as they move from place to place.

Of course, not all citizens shared equally in the forms of social insurance and job security of the postwar welfare state. Later in
Chapter Eight
of this book, Miyako Inoue foregrounds this issue in her discussion of the situation of women workers in Japanese corporations during the high-growth era as anticipating a more precarious relationship to employment that later became more generalized. Inoue’s examination of how women were required to take responsibility for their own self-development in the early 1990s ushers in a new way of relating to one’s work that later becomes glamorized in the
workplace
teledramas explored by Gabriela Lukacs (see
Chapter Nine
). In the context of Chinese socialism, many of the guarantees of urban workers were not extended to rural people during the Maoist era, setting up conditions of inequality that became the conditions of possibility for the rural to urban migration instigated by the economic reforms. In
Chapter Six
, Yan Hairong shows us how the awakening of the “weaker groups” (
ruoshi qunti
) to the imperative of taking charge of their own self-development was used to capture the labor of rural women for domestic work in Beijing. Even the belated establishment of a welfare system following on South Korea’s democratization in the 1990s takes a neoliberal spin, as argued by Jesook Song in
Chapter Ten
. The state’s response to the increase in homelessness in the wake of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis of 1997 demarcated a divide between the deserving and undeserving in terms of the allocation of welfare benefits.

The ethnographic essays collected here have been written with an awareness of the history of this capital movement and, along with it, the making and breaking of economies and the social orders they supported. Although the end of the Cold War seemed to promise a New World Order of unlimited economic possibility in a borderless world, this triumphal scenario was haunted almost from the very beginning with the specter of failure: first the bursting of the Japanese bubble in 1991; then the Asian Economic Crisis of 1997; and, a decade later, the global financial crisis of 2008. The economic crisis in 2008 was fueled in good part by speculative trading in futures and derivatives markets in which transactions of value increasingly took on more and more ephemeral forms that were traded globally. The Japanese recession of the early 1990s, triggered by a collapse in the real estate market, appears in retrospect as an eerie anticipation for the later economic troubles, often referenced as “the Japanese disease,” in the global financial crisis of 2008.

The question is still open as to whether this most recent crisis marks an endpoint to an optimistic belief in the promises of economic globalization or whether it provides renewed impetus for further neoliberal reform in austerity measures. The economic crisis of 2008 revealed the hidden instabilities of an economy built on speculative futures while at the same time providing a crisis narrative for the survival of global capitalism by shoring up the banking institutions that created the problems in the first place, often at the expense of further cuts to social spending. As of this writing, crises of mounting debt are playing out worldwide, raising the specter of systemic collapse.
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These
recurring crises are forceful reminders of the increasing integration of the global economy. The implications of these economic perturbations for those whose lives have been disrupted by them figure importantly in the chapters of this volume.

The Future as a Critical Category

In using
global futures
as a conceptual frame, the chapters of this volume attempt to capture both the global scope of imagining life trajectories by individuals as well as the restless movement of capital in search of the next frontiers of accumulation. Speculative futures conjure new horizons for investment in the hopeful projection of new knowledge economies as the promise of a postindustrial transition. The irony is, of course, that the miracle must be continually produced anew. This imperative demands an orientation to a future that is, in effect, unknowable. It requires a futurology, an ability to conceptualize a future that has not only not yet appeared but that, once conceptualized, must be performed into being. The vision of the “information society” was the product of just such a futurology in the 1980s as a calculated strategy to recharge Japan’s flagging high-growth economy around the development of new information technologies, and now a similar formulation of the “knowledge society” has spread worldwide as the future dynamic of the global economy.
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Therefore, envisioning the future becomes a performative process that powerfully shapes the present as well as the future. The study of such futurologies is a necessary step in understanding that neither globalization nor neoliberalism is a force that is exogenous to human imagination and agency; they are, rather, both dialectically produced in relation to disparate social forces that come together to mobilize in pursuit of or to resist this demand. The chapters of this volume cannot offer a prognostication of the future, but they do make important contributions to our understanding of the extent to which “the global” and “the future” have framed projects of life-making in East Asian places in this period of restructuring.

Anna Tsing has reminded us that the future orientation of globalization talk is undoubtedly connected with the promissory nature of finance capital. The verb that Tsing (2000) uses to convey the performative power of these representations of futurity is
to conjure
. She suggests that we think of “the global” in terms of projects rather than thinking of it as descriptive of something that
already
exists or that will, in time, be inevitable. Her suggestion derives its inspiration from recent critiques of the modernization projects of the postwar era. She asks that we view our present from a perspective of the future anterior tense: “how we will have” understood it in an imagined retrospective future of failed promise (now perhaps a moment that has already arrived). A project is by definition anticipatory. It casts its vision into the future, but in pursuit of this object it encounters material and social forces that mutate and transform its initial promise. In this sense, we can view the discourses and practice of various globalisms and neoliberalisms as projects of human engineering and in this sense not unlike the modernization projects of the postwar period and the modernity projects of national becoming that preceded them.

Human engineering
refers here to projects to create new kinds of subjects for political and economic transformation. In Europe, the ideals of the Enlightenment promised the emancipation of individuals from the hierarchical orders of the past. Modern secular education provided the “enlightenment” of a national citizenry through science and reason. However, the rise of capitalism also spurred the development of “more instrumental notions of human transformation [through which] the rational perfection of an individual could be engineered by another, armed with a knowledge of scientific law, and employing modern techniques of social management” (Ewen 1988: 194). The dialectic of the Enlightenment lies precisely in this twining together of the liberation of the free individual from the oppressive hierarchies of the past with engineering new forms of being through technical reason. Projections of the knowledge society as the shape of labor to come are today intrinsically related to neoliberal conceptions of human capital and embodied value that profoundly shape how individuals calculate their life chances.