CIAO DATE: 03/05/07

Pacific Affairs:
An International Review of Asia and the Pacific

 

Fall 2005 (Vol. 78 No. 3)

Articles

• "Economics is the Deciding Factor": Labour Politics in Thaksin's Thailand
  Andrew Brown and Kevin Hewison

  The landslide electoral victory of Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai (TRT) Party in February 2005 means that the most powerful elements of big domestic capital will continue to manage the affairs of the Thai state. In this article, we focus on the relationship between this capitalist state and the politics of labour, with considerable emphasis on the organized elements of the working class. We argue that the TRT, during its first term in office, pursued a clutch of labour-specific policies, with two broad objectives: first, to facilitate the creation of a more flexible and better-skilled labour force, seen as necessary for the development of a restructured, globally competitive capitalism; and second, through the construction of a new social contract, to deal with some of the inevitable tensions that have been generated by structural change and wage labour's deepening exposure to the vagaries of local, regional and global market forces. The TRT is also embarking on further reforms, the nature of which indicate that, for business and the state, labour's interests will be further subordinated to the shifting demands of capital accumulation. Now that domestic capital has mostly recovered from the economic crisis, the populism of the TRT's first electoral campaign, which appeared to reject neo-liberal reform, is being replaced by a populism that accepts neo-liberal restructuring. Most notably, privatization, which the TRT opposed when it was part of IMF-sponsored reform, is now being embraced by the party, and looms as a key area for further tension between organized labour and the government.

• The Changing Politics of Central Banking in Taiwan and Thailand
  Xiaoke Zhang

  In recent decades the central banks in Taiwan and Thailand - the Central Bank of China and the Bank of Thailand - have experienced contrasting changes in their respective status within the hierarchy of state economic institutions. While Taiwanese central bankers have been largely able to maintain their policy-making independence, their Thai counterparts have failed to do so. The major analytical objective of this article is to explain the cross-national variation in the degree of central bank independence. The central argument to be developed posits that the variation stems from institutional differences between Taiwan and Thailand in the relationship between central and private bankers, the configuration of inter-agency alliances within the macro-economic bureaucracy, and the structure of political party systems.

• Philippine Defense Policy in the 21st Century: Autonomous Defense or Back to the Alliance?
  Renato Cruz De Castro

  Using the Philippines as a case study, this article addresses two theoretically relevant questions regarding alliance durability. First, why does a state, given a choice between autonomous defense (by dipping into its own domestic resources for arms build-up) and seeking allies (to provide military resources and guarantees), opt for an alliance? And two, under what conditions will a state favour alliance over autonomous defense? After nearly three decades of security efforts directed at strengthening its alliance with the United States, the Philippines in the early 1990s decided to embark on a modernization programme to provide its armed forces with an autonomous defense capability. However, a lack of financial resources and political will have prevented the Philippine government from implementing the plan. The article maintains that the Philippine government's inability to develop an independent defense posture will bind the country to its alliance with the US, the only viable current option for ensuring its security in an evolving and uncertain international system.

• Japan's Foreign Aid Policy to Africa since the Tokyo International Conference on African Development
  Howard Lehman

  Japan has been the only developed country to consistently hold major international conferences on African development. It has held three conferences in 1993, 1998, and 2003. Given that Japan only provides about ten percent of its Official Development Assistance funds to Africa and given the severe economic pressures with which the country has been burdened, the reasons for organizing these major development conferences are not self-evident.

  This paper argues that Japan's ODA strategy seeks to create an alternative to the World Bank/Washington Consensus arguments. This article seeks to explain and understand the evolution of Japan's ODA policy towards Africa and the history of the TICAD process by asking two sets of questions. First, in what way does the TICAD agenda attempt to position Japan's ODA strategy and policy as separate and unique from the Western ODA efforts? Second, what did the government hope to gain from financing and organizing these conferences? Why did the government not only put on one meeting but a series of international meetings?

  The article concludes by examining how Japan has moved to counter the neo-liberal policy emphasis on structural adjustment with a more nuanced approach emphasizing self-help policies, loans, and poverty reduction through industrial development. Japan itself draws extensively from its perceived model of national and regional economic development as it hopes to influence non-Asian societies as in Africa.

• As China meets the Southern Sea Frontier: Ocean Identity in the Making, 1902-1937
  Ulises Granados

  A study of China's defense of its "maritime frontier" in the period from 1902 to 1937, including the establishment of self-recognized sovereignty rights over the South China Sea archipelagos, provides a good illustration of how the country has dealt with relevant issues of international politics during the twentieth century.

  The article intends to show that throughout the period between the fall of the Qing dynasty, the consolidation of power of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government, and up to just before the Pacific War, the idea of a maritime frontier, as applied to the South China Sea, was deeply subordinated to the political needs arising from the power struggle within China and to the precarious position of the country vis-à-vis world powers. Therefore, the protection of rights over the Spratly and Paracel Islands was not a priority of the Chinese government's foreign policy agenda during the first three decades of the republic. However, in contrast to the probable involvement of Sun Yat-sen in a scheme with Japanese nationals in the early 1920s, intended to yield rights for economic exploitation in the Southern China littorals and islands, the Nanjing government's defense of the maritime frontier in Guangdong province since 1928 marked the first precedent in China's self-definition as a modern oceanic nation-state pursuing her own maritime-territorial rights against world powers that had interests in the region.

Books Reviewed In This Issue

Asia General

• The Challenge of Change: East Asia in the New Millennium. Edited by David Arase.
  Reviewed by Hyung Gu Lynn

• Healthy Democracies: Welfare Politics in Taiwan and South Korea. By Joseph Wong.
  Reviewed by Soonman Kwon

• Other Immigrants: The Global Origins of the American People. By David M. Reimers.
  Reviewed by Mark Ellis

China and Inner Asia

• China's Environment and the Challenge of Sustainable Development. Edited by Kristen A. Day.
  Reviewed by Jack Patrick Hayes

• Labor Dispute Resolutions In China: Implications for Labor Rights and Legal Reform. By Virginia Harper Ho.
  Reviewed by Margaret Y.K. Woo

• The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change. By Morris L. Bian.
  Reviewed by Jacob Eyferth

• Sparrows, Bedbugs, and Body Shadows: A Memoir. By Sheldon Lou.
  Reviewed by Richard King

• Dangerous Strait: The US-Taiwan-China Crisis. Edited by Nancy Bernkopf Tucker.
  Reviewed by Wei-chin Lee

• Re-understanding Japan: Chinese Perspectives, 1895-1945. By Lu Yan.
  Reviewed by Timothy B. Weston

• Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China. By Myron L. Cohen.
  Reviewed by Guo Xiaolin

Northeast Asia

• Unequal Allies?: United States Security and Alliance Policy Toward Japan, 1945-1960. By John Swenson-Wright.
  Reviewed by Masaru Tamamoto

• Island of Eight Million Smiles: Idol Performance and Symbolic Production in Contemporary Japan. By Hiroshi Aoyagi.
  Reviewed by Michael K. Bourdaghs

• Japan's China Policy: A Relational Power Analysis. By Linus Hagström.
  Reviewed by David A. Baldwin

• New Times in Modern Japan. By Stefan Tanaka.
  Reviewed by Mark A. Jones

• Machiavelli's Children: Leaders and their Legacies in Italy and Japan. By Richard J. Samuels.
  Reviewed by Yves Tiberghien

• Making Pilgrimages: Meaning and Practice in Shikoku. By Ian Reader.
  Reviewed by Steve McCarty

• TSUKIJI: The Fish Market at the Center of the World. By Theodore C. Bestor.
  Reviewed by Ronald Dore

• Sources of Japanese Tradition, 1600 To 2000: Volume Two (Second Edition). Compiled by W.M. Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck and Arthur E. Tiedemann.
  Reviewed by Nam-lin Hur

• Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. By Eiko Ikegami.
  Reviewed by Julia Adeney Thomas

• Reading Zen in the Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden. By François Berthier, translated and with a philosophical essay by Graham Parkes.
  Reviewed by Tsuneharu Gonnami

• Developing Zeami: The Noh Actor's Attunement in Practice. By Shelley Fenno Quinn.
  Reviewed by Monika Dix

• Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation. By Roland Bleiker.
  Reviewed by Geir Helgesen

• Korean Attitudes Toward the United States: Changing Dynamics. Edited by David I. Steinberg.
  Reviewed by James I. Matray

• Reshaping Rogue States: Preemption, Regime Change,and U.S. Policy Toward Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Edited by Alexander T.J. Lennon and Camille Eiss.
  Reviewed by Nicholas Guyatt

• North Korea: Another Country. By Bruce Cumings.
  Reviewed by J.J. Suh

• Target North Korea: Pushing North Korea to the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe. By Gavan McCormack.
  Reviewed by Mark E. Caprio

• Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies. By Victor D. Cha and David C. Kang.
  Reviewed by Ruediger Frank

South Asia

• South Asia in World Politics. Edited by Devin T. Hagerty.
  Reviewed by Thomas P. Thornton

• Security Beyond Survival: Essays for K. Subrahmanyam. Edited by P.R. Kumaraswamy.
  Reviewed by Dinshaw Mistry

• Countering Gender Violence: Initiatives Towards Collective Action in Rajasthan. By Kanchan Mathur.
  Reviewed by Vibhuti Patel

Southeast Asia

• Facing Death in Cambodia. By Peter Maguire.
  Reviewed by D. Gordon Longmuir

• Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War. By Karen J. Coates.
  Reviewed by D. Gordon Longmuir

• Becoming the Buddha: The Ritual of Image Consecration in Thailand. By Donald K. Swearer.
  Reviewed by Jim Placzek

• Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750-1880. Edited by Nola Cooke and Li Tana.
  Reviewed by Hue-Tam Ho Tai

• Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Markets. By Richard Robison and Vedi R. Hadiz.
  Reviewed by Benjamin Smith

• Securing a Place: Small-Scale Artisans in Modern Indonesia. By Elizabeth Morrell.
  Reviewed by Sarah Turner

Australasia and the Pacific Region

• Re-Orienting Australia-China Relations: 1972 to the Present. Edited by Nicholas Thomas.
  Reviewed by Carlyle A. Thayer

• Tattoo: Bodies, Art, and Exchange in the Pacific and the West. Edited by Nicholas Thomas, Anna Cole and Bronwen Douglas.
  Reviewed by Haidy Geismar

• The Archaeology of Micronesia. By Paul Rainbird.
  Reviewed by Donald H. Rubinstein

• Pacific Tapa. By Roger Neich and Mick Pendergrast.
  Reviewed by Barbara Lawson

• The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies. Edited by Tim Murray.
  Reviewed by James Flexner

• Hawaiian Quilts: Tradition and Transition. By Reiko Mochinaga Brandon and Loretta G.H. Woodward.
  Reviewed by Anne E. Guernsey Allen