WHILE THE CASE FOR STUDYING Asia and Asian languages should not rest on a purely economic foundation, as some have argued (Garnaut 1989: chapter 15; East Asia Analytical Unit 1992), there are persuasive economic reasons for taking an interest in East and Southeast Asia, particularly from an Australian perspective. Australia's resource-based economy has considerable complementarity with the manufacturing economies of the region, and a close economic relationship has consequently been established, one that has brought both economic benefit and risk. Australia is both a buyer and seller in the markets of East and Southeast Asia. An increasing number of Australians either work in the region or do work in Australia that has a significant Asian content. The context within which Australian commerce and industry take place has increasingly become an Asian context. As Mark McGillivray pointed out more than a decade ago, ‘Australia on average more heavily depends on, and is more integrated economically (in so far as trade is concerned) with Asia than the rest of the world’ (1997: 63). It is, therefore, very important to know something about the economies of East and Southeast Asia, and how their prosperity has affected and influenced the Australian economy.

Japan's economic performance from the 1950s to the late 1980s demonstrated that an economy devastated by war and with few natural resources could achieve rapid economic growth. Its performance during the 1950s and 1960s was so impressive that some commentators described it as an economic ‘miracle’. But could this enviable economic growth be repeated elsewhere? Was there a latent dynamism in the other economies of East and Southeast Asia that could give rise to economic growth as spectacular as Japan's? From the mid-1960s, several economies in the region did in fact achieve impressive economic growth, actually surpassing Japan during the 1980s. These are described as the Newly Industrialising Economies (NIEs) (or Newly Industrialising Countries, NICs). The most successful of these NIEs – South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore – have also been described as the ‘four little dragons’ (Vogel 1991), the ‘four tigers’ (World Bank 1993), and Asia's ‘miracle economies’ (Bello and Rosenfeld 1992; Woronoff 1986).

IN HIS FOURTEEN POINTS speech to the US Congress on 8 January 1918, US President Woodrow Wilson argued that the nations of post-war Europe should enjoy ‘self-government’, and that it was the absence of democratic accountability among the European states that had led to the outbreak of World War I. The impact of Wilson's call for democratic self-government had little impact on the colonial powers’ attitudes towards their colonies, but emerging nationalist movements in Asia interpreted it as a powerful ideological justification for independence and self-determination. Indeed, the colonial powers regarded self-government as an issue relevant only to European states and societies, and remained unwilling to divest themselves of the economic and political benefits that possession of colonies had brought. If anything, the behaviour of some colonial powers – particularly France, Britain and the Netherlands – became even more intransigent towards their colonies in the face of nationalist demands for political autonomy. They responded brutally towards colonial subjects who dared articulate demands for independence and an end to colonialism.

Suppression of nationalist movements in the colonies of East and Southeast Asia was successful prior to the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific (1941–45). On the eve of the Pacific War there was, with the exception of the American colony of the Philippines, little indication that the colonies of the region would ever be granted independence. But the onset of the Pacific War had a decisive influence on the fortunes of nationalist leaders and movements, and was truly a watershed in the history of East and Southeast Asia. Japanese imperialism had the extremely important effect of destroying or undermining colonial administrations in the colonies of Southeast Asia (Hong Kong, Indochina, Burma, Singapore, Malaya, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies). It also significantly weakened the Nationalist Government of China and strengthened the hand of the Chinese Communists. The destruction of the power of colonial administrations was accompanied by the destruction of their authority and legitimacy, since they were unable to defend their colonies against the Japanese. They were not omnipotent, and their fallibility had been truly and in some cases fatally exposed by the Japanese advance into East and Southeast Asia (Frey 2003).

The late imperial social order anchored married men and women in stable family relationships, organized around the principle of separation of the sexes. But what happened to men or women who abandoned the family, or were forced out of the family, or were denied a family? When things fell apart, as they did in Ning Lao T’ai-t’ai's world at the end of the Qing dynasty, wives were rented, daughters were sold, and unattached men at the bottom of the social hierarchy banded together to survive. In other times of stress, such as the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century, parents put female infants to death so they could count on rearing a son who would carry on the patriline. Social disorder, then, was always encoded with sexual and gendered conflicts and tensions, ranging from female infanticide and suicide to rebellion and the collapse of dynasties.

Maintaining social order was the charge of the emperor, who, by wise governance, ensured that heaven, human society, and earth remained in harmonious accord. The ruler received a “mandate” from heaven to assume this weighty responsibility. Chaos in society and in the natural world (drought, flood, earthquake, or rebellion) signaled that heaven's mandate had been withdrawn. Free-floating sexuality not only threatened the social order; it also endangered the emperor's hold on the Mandate of Heaven. Some of this danger lurked close to the throne, as the early philosopher Han Fei Zi warned:

Historical views of the body in Chinese medicine and art prefigure the complex bodily images that confounded early Western observers of Chinese culture, challenged the aspirations of modern reformers, and inspire contemporary artists. On the one hand, the decoupling of sexual bodies and sin in China's classical tradition made the unclothed physical body inconsequential, even trivial, as a site of virtue, morality, or beauty. Ideas about sinful bodies – particularly notions of homophobia and heteronormativity – that informed modern sexological discourses raised confusing questions for China's twentieth-century youth. Was it modern to wear shorts to play basketball? Was it modern to scorn homoerotic theater culture? Was it modern to hire nude models in art academies? Embroidered shoes were enticingly beautiful, even elegant, but not so the stunted bare foot. Tight-fitting qipao dresses were supposed to be quintessentially Chinese, but did they have to be slit thigh-high? Settling these confusing questions about the body entailed conflict, but also a good deal of wit and humor, precisely (or, if only) because it was difficult to take nude bodies that seriously. They were not all that important.

As the prospect of Deng Xiaoping's passing loomed in 1995, there were considerable grounds for skepticism that the pace and scale of change that China had witnessed since he launched the reform era in 1978 would continue. In China's still partially reformed economy, Beijing had yet to transform the sagging state-owned industries – a project begun in 1984 – nor had it secured the legal foundations of the fast-growing private sector in its broader political economy. The PRC was emerging as a major player in world trade, yet it remained outside the newly established World Trade Organization (WTO) system, despite a major push by Beijing to join in 1994.

Introduction

By the time the Twelfth Party Congress met in September 1982, China's new leaders had done much to overcome the post-Mao crisis of confidence. They had repudiated Mao's Cultural Revolution, renounced his economic theories, and reinstated his purged opponents. But acknowledging past mistakes was one thing; charting a viable course for the future was quite another. Although members of the reform coalition forged by Deng Xiaoping could agree among themselves, in principle, on the need for economic reform and opening up to the outside world, they differed over just how far and how fast to move toward revamping the basic ideology and institutions of Chinese socialism. Most important, they differed over precisely how much “bourgeois liberalization,” if any, could be countenanced in a society that continued to call itself Marxist–Leninist.