Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific)
Authors: Unknown
Stanford
University Press
Stanford, California
© 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Global futures in East Asia : youth, nation, and the new economy in uncertain times / edited by Ann Anagnost, Andrea Arai, and Hai Ren.
pages cm. — (Contemporary issues in Asia and the Pacific)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-7617-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8047-7618-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8047-8468-9 (e-book)
1. Youth—Employment—East Asia—Case studies. 2. Neoliberalism—East Asia—Case studies. 3. Globalization—Economic aspects—East Asia—Case studies. 4. East Asia—Economic conditions—21st century. 5. Ethnology—East Asia—Case studies. I. Anagnost, Ann, editor of compilation. II. Arai, Andrea, 1956–editor of compilation. III. Ren, Hai, 1965–editor of compilation. IV. Series: Contemporary issues in Asia and the Pacific.
HD6276.E18G56 2012
320.51095—dc23
2012014296
Typeset by Thompson Type in 9.75/13.5 Janson
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DITED BY ANN ANAGNOST, ANDREA ARAI, AND HAI REN
Global Futures in East Asia
Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
E
AST-WEST CENTER
SERIES ON
Contemporary Issues in Asia and the Pacific
SERIES CO-EDITORS
John T. Sidel, London School of Economics Geoffrey M. White, East-West Center and University of Hawai’i
EDITORIAL BOARD
Ching Kwan Lee, University of California, Los Angeles Robert Pekkanen, University of Washington Jonathan Spencer, University of Edinburgh
A
Series Sponsored by the East-West Center
CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
John T. Sidel and Geoffrey M. White, Series Co-Editors
A collaborative effort by Stanford University Press and the East-West Center, this series focuses on issues of contemporary significance in the Asia Pacific region, most notably political, social, cultural, and economic change. The series seeks books that focus on topics of regional importance, on problems that cross disciplinary boundaries, and that have the capacity to reach academic and other interested audiences.
The East-West Center promotes better relations and understanding among the people and nations of the United States, Asia, and the Pacific through cooperative study, research, and dialogue. Established by the US Congress in 1960, the Center serves as a resource for information and analysis on critical issues of common concern, bringing people together to exchange views, build expertise, and develop policy options. The Center is an independent, public, nonprofit organization with funding from the US government, and additional support provided by private agencies, individuals, foundations, corporations, and governments in the region.
Contents
Introduction: Life-Making in Neoliberal Times
Ann Anagnost
1. The Middle-Class Norm and Responsible Consumption in China’s Risk Society
Hai Ren
2. Miraculous Rebirth: Making Global Places in Taiwan
Ching-wen Hsu
3. On the Streets of Beijing: Medical Melodrama in the Everyday
Trang X. Ta
4. On their Own: Becoming Cosmopolitan Subjects beyond College in South Korea
Nancy Abelmann, So Jin Park, and Hyunhee Kim
5. Smile Chaoyang: Education and Culture in Neoliberal Taiwan
Nickola Pazderic
YAN Hairong
7. Notes to the Heart: New Lessons in National Sentiment and Sacrifice from Recessionary Japan
Andrea G. Arai
Miyako Inoue
9. Workplace Dramas and Labor Fantasies in 1990s Japan
Gabriella Lukacs
Jesook Song
Acknowledgments
The idea for this volume first began as a panel organized by Hai Ren and Andrea Arai on neoliberal governmentality in East Asia for the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco in 2004. Due to the decision by the AAA to honor a bitterly contested hotel workers strike, the meetings were relocated to Atlanta, and many panels planned for the meetings that year ended up as miniconferences on campuses across the country.
Such was the fate of this panel. Andrea Arai took the lead in organizing, with Ann Anagnost, a small conference and public teach-in held April 22–23, 2005, on the theme “Nation, Culture, New Economy in East Asia” cosponsored by Pacific Lutheran University (Chinese Studies and Anthropology), the University of Washington Jackson School of International Studies (China Program, Center for East Asian Studies, Korea Program, Japan Program), the Simpson Center for the Humanities (Critical Asian Studies), and the Department of Anthropology. Among conference participants not represented in this volume but who contributed importantly to its intellectual formation were Tani Barlow, Brian Hammer, Lisa Hoffman, Nayna Jhaveri, Ken Kawashima, Gavin McCormack, Laura C. Nelson, and Pun Ngai. The chapters by Ching-wen Hsu, Miyako Inoue, Gabriella Lukacs, Nickola Pazderic, and Trang X. Ta were later additions.
As the volume began to take shape, so did the idea for an upper division course called Global Futures in East Asia, cotaught by Ann Anagnost and Andrea Arai and developed over a period of two years (2006–2008) with funding from the University of Washington Jackson School of International Studies (China Program, Center for East Asian Studies, Korea Program, Japan Program) and the Department of Anthropology. We express our thanks
to
Madeleine Dong, Miriam Kahn, Robert Pekkanen, Kristi Roundtree, and Clark Sorensen for their generous support of this endeavor. This teaching collaboration further developed the themes of intersecting histories and complex crossings in East Asian modernity projects that we consider as fundamental to understanding the themes of this volume. Our students, many of them originally from East Asia, brought to the course their experience of border crossing life-making projects, and this fueled our passion for understanding their complex subjectivities. The classroom became, in a very real sense, an ethnographic laboratory well suited to investigating the relationship between youth, labor, and human capital formation in tandem with students in search of critical frameworks through which to better comprehend their position in the global economy. We would like to dedicate this volume to them.
In addition, we thank the University of Washington Simpson Center for the Humanities for funding a research collaborative called Global Futures for two years (2006–2008). This research collaborative put us in dialogue with colleagues working in South Asia (Craig Jeffrey and Jane Dyson) and Africa (Danny Hoffman) around the topic of youth and globalization in relation to education, labor, and technology. The Simpson Center funding allowed us to bring Nancy Abelmann for a visit in the fall quarter of 2006, to help develop the Korea component for this volume. Other colleagues we would like to acknowledge for their input include Miyako Inoue, Karen Kelsky, Janet Poole, Stefan Tanaka, and Peter Wissoker. A special thanks goes to Stacy Wagner, our editor at Stanford University Press, for her enthusiastic embrace of this project and for her keen editorial vision in grooming it toward completion and also to Jessica Walsh for her steady support at every stage of the editorial process. We also wish to express thanks to the East-West Center for its support and for including this volume in their series Contemporary Issues in Asia and the Pacific.
Introduction
Life-Making in Neoliberal Times
ANN ANAGNOST
A Bus to Nowhere
In 2005, a television documentary followed a group of young Japanese youth in work uniforms as they climbed aboard a bus to travel to their worksite for the day.
1
Each morning these young people were taken to a new location to work in unskilled assembly jobs. “We feel like robots” was how one young woman described her experience. When this film was first screened, Japan’s economic downturn—begun in the 1990s—was well into its second decade. Recovery had proved elusive. Spiraling rates of underemployment, especially for youth, had produced a new reserve army of low-waged labor with greatly reduced life prospects. Later, when showing a still photo of the scene on the bus to a Japanese youth, my colleague Andrea Arai was asked whether it had been taken “in China.”
This misrecognition of Japan for China is telling in terms of how people are experiencing the rapid remapping of economic relations in the region. By the mid-2000s, China was beginning to be talked about in ways that echoed how Japan had once been represented in the 1980s; while Japan, in turn, was becoming unrecognizable as the miracle modernizer it was once thought to be. The reasons for this turnabout cannot be fathomed within the limits of a study of Japan. They must be put into a wider context in which these
transformations
in national economies and societies are understood as complexly related to processes occurring regionally as well as globally.
This volume gathers together ethnographic explorations of life-making in East Asia that register these regional resonances in a time of economic globalization and neoliberal restructuring.
Life-making
here refers to investments in the self to ensure one’s forward career progression as embodied human capital. In the Japanese recession, the project of building a life through education and training had become stalled with the sudden contraction of employment opportunities. China’s rise as an economic power is the other side of the story of the postindustrial transformations of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The off-shoring of industrial production from these once “miraculous” economies to China and Southeast Asia threatens the reproduction of middle-class livelihoods, raising the question: “What if economic miracles do not last forever?” In such changed circumstances, the future of youth in East Asia becomes much less certain; not only are the forms of life inhabited by their parents in terms of secure employment and benefits no longer available to them, but, more importantly, they may no longer seem desirable in the transfigured imaginings of what it means to make a life.
As we shall see in the case studies that follow, some embrace the “burden of self-development” of the enterprising subject with a gleeful optimism that they will realize their dreams more fully on a global stage. Indeed, one cannot help but wonder to what extent the new regime of capital accumulation relies on the energy of youth and its optimism and resilience in the face of life’s challenges. Others, such as the Japanese youth who boarded the bus to their assembly jobs, may feel themselves to have been stripped bare of any value with no secure passage to a future of better times. The teleological narrative of development that buoyed Japan’s postwar economic success has ended up in a most surprising place, but, instead of recognizing the political economic forces that have changed the game plan, the critique turns inward, to an implied failure of the youth themselves to reproduce the economic miracle. The increasing unevenness in the distribution of life chances in the global economy makes all the difference between success and failure, transcendence and loss.
The objectives of this volume are threefold. The first is an exploration of how “places are made through their connections with each other, not their isolation” (Tsing 2000: 330). What might it mean to talk about region as a series of intertwined histories in which ideas—civilization, modernity, development,
globalization—have traveled from one place to another and have taken local form while looking at other places as a basis for comparison? Such a project, combining deep area knowledge with regional and global perspectives, is necessarily a collaborative one that is sensitive to the resonances across time and space within East Asia. We envision this volume as a way to encourage a dialogue among scholars working in their different locations but who wish to work collaboratively to understand these complex crossings.
