The shift from the countryside to the cities, from working on the land to working in industry, is the decisive moment in the emergence of modernity. From experiencing life on the land, where little changes from one year to the next, or from one generation to another, industrialization marks a tumultuous transformation in people’s circumstances, where uncertainty replaces predictability, the future can no longer be viewed or predicted in terms of the past, and where people are required to look forwards rather than backwards. In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the shift towards modernity as an increasingly mass phenomenon was confined to a small minority of the world, namely the West and Japan, but by the early twenty-first century it had become an increasingly mass phenomenon in much of East Asia too, with the change occurring far more rapidly in East Asia than it had earlier in Europe or North America. This relative speed of change had two important implications for the nature of East Asian modernities, which distinguishes them from their European and North American counterparts.
1. The Proximity of the Past
The fact that large-scale agrarian employment has been such a recent experience for the Asian tigers means that the past is heavily imprinted on the present and the legacy of tradition remains a living force in the era of mass modernity. Let me put this point in more human terms. In South Korea and Taiwan, the great majority of grandparents, around half of parents over fifty, and significant numbers of those over forty, will all have spent at least some of their lives working on the land. In China, where half the population still works on the land, that rural imprint is commensurately larger: not only will the great majority of grandparents have worked on the land, but so will the great majority of those over forty. As one would expect, this has a profound influence on the way in which people think and behave. Almost three-quarters of the inhabitants of Taipei, for instance, regard themselves as migrants: every Chinese New Year, the trains are booked for weeks in advance and Taiwan’s north-south expressway is clogged for hours on end as the vast bulk of the capital’s inhabitants make the journey south to celebrate the festival back in what they still regard as their ancestral homes. The same kind of phenomenon is repeated throughout East Asia. Shanghai is a huge metropolis of 20 million people, plus more than 3 million who move in and out of the city every day seeking work of one kind or another, including many farmers who occupy numerous pavements trying to sell their fruit and vegetables. [316] Shanghai, like many cities in the region, encapsulates a remarkable juxtaposition of the present and the past, of modernity and tradition existing cheek by jowl, as was once the case in European cities. The difference is that because East Asia is changing so quickly, the contrast between the past and the present is much more visible and far more pronounced than it was in nineteenth-century European cities.
Another expression of the imminence of the past can be found in people’s attitudes and belief-systems. On the 1st and 15th of every month, it is common for the Chinese to burn incense and worship their ancestral spirits. Walk through the streets of Taipei, or any Chinese city, on those dates and it won’t be long before you see people burning fake money as an offering to their ancestors. [317] At the Qing Ming Festival at the beginning of April, people return to their villages in huge numbers and spend the day at their ancestral graves. By Western standards, Chinese societies are not very religious, but they are extremely superstitious. Every day many Taiwanese newspapers carry tips prominently displayed on their front pages about what to do and what not to do according to the old lunar calendar. Before any important event or decision — not least, a good night’s gambling — many Chinese will visit the temple and pray to one of the deities. Even otherwise highly rational academics will have their superstitious customs. Many, for example, practise feng shui, even if they don’t particularly believe in it, because it might just make a difference. In Hong Kong, no building is finalized until a feng shui expert has been consulted about its suitability and alterations duly made. In state-of-the-art computer companies in Taiwan ’s Hsinchu Science Park, the guy with the American doctorate hotfoot from working for years in Silicon Valley will set up a table with food and fruits, burn incense and worship the spirits for good fortune. These examples cannot be explained solely in terms of the immediate proximity of the past, since they are also clearly a function of underlying cultural difference. Whatever the reason, the persistence of pre-modern ways of thinking is a striking characteristic of many East Asian cultures.
2. The Future in the Present
As discussed earlier in the prologue to Part I, modernity is the embrace of the future as opposed to a present dominated by tradition: eyes and minds are directed forwards in time rather than backwards as previously. But the extent of the phenomenon varies. It was, and remains, more marked in the United States than in Europe, partly because the American transformation was faster than its European equivalents and partly because the United States, unencumbered by any kind of pre-capitalist tradition, is not weighed down by its past in the same way. But this orientation towards the future is even truer of East Asia than the United States, not because it is unencumbered by the past — on the contrary, the past looms very large indeed both in its proximity and the richness and longevity of the region’s history — but because the speed of transformation has generated a completely different experience and expectation of change. In contrast to Europe and the United States, these countries are characterized by a form of hyper-modernity: an addiction to change, an infatuation with technology, enormous flexibility, and a huge capacity for adaptation.
Thus, if the imminence of the past is one aspect of Asian modernization, another, paradoxically, is its polar opposite, the embrace of the future and a powerful orientation towards change. This is not surprising. If an economy is growing at around 10 per cent a year — or doubling in size every seven years or so — then people’s experiences and expectations are quite different from those in a Western economy expanding at 2 per cent a year. These are not just abstract macro figures: assuming that income distribution is reasonably egalitarian, which it has been in much of East Asia [318] (though no longer in China), then turbocharged growth means a continuing revolution in the living standards of most of society, huge shifts in employment patterns, rapid urbanization, sweeping changes in the urban landscape and accelerated access to a growing range of consumer products, all within less than a generation. These are growth rates that no society has previously experienced, that transform institutions like the family, that offer enormous opportunities but also place new and immense strains on the social fabric. For Britain that kind of shift took the best part of two centuries; for the early Asian tigers it has taken less than forty years. To deal with such change requires a psychology and a mindset, both on the part of the individual and society, which is quite different from the European or North American experience. As Hung Tze Jan, a successful writer who has since become one of Taiwan ’s leading cyber entrepreneurs, philosophically remarked: ‘We have had to change our value system so many times in such a short space of time.’ [319] The result, not surprisingly, is a highly developed pragmatism and flexibility; otherwise it would be quite impossible to cope with such rapid change.
[316] ‘ Shanghai Tops 20m’,
[317] This practice first appeared during the Song dynasty (AD 960-1279), shortly after the spread of paper money for commercial purposes; Kenneth Dean, ‘Despotic Empire/Nation-State: Local Responses to Chinese Nationalism in an Age of Global Capitalism’, in Chen Kuan-Hsing, ed.,