PSC 246 - Asian Development: Industrialization Beyond the West

Course Units: 1

How did some Asian countries become the first non-Western countries to achieve high-income status, near elimination of poverty, a highly educated and healthy population, leading edge technology and in some cases robust democracies and even admirably equal distributions of wealth? And how did they come to compete with the West, often on terms set by Western countries, despite the West’s much earlier industrialization, and the vast geographic and cultural distances? Are answers to be found in politics and institutions? Culture? Resources and demography? Historical effects of imperialism? Regionalism? After a brief comparison of pre-modern China and Europe, the course focuses on the ‘miracle’ of Japanese industrialization from the late 19th to early 20th century, as well as Japan’s combination of industrialization and militarization on the road to World War Two. This is followed by post-World War Two Japan and the four Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore), before focusing on the return of China since the 1980s, and Southeast Asia within the Asian region. This is a reading intensive course, though no background in Asia, political science or economics is required