Yale Global.
Since the end of the 20th century Northeast Asia has
emerged as a central force in globalization of the world. But the
specter of rising nationalism in the area now threatens to undo the
gains that global interdependence has brought to the region and to the
world.
“The most important strategic choice the Chinese made was to embrace
economic globalization rather than detach themselves from it,” wrote
leading Chinese reformer and economist Zheng Bijian in his seminal
article for Foreign Affairs, “China’s Peaceful Rise,”
in October 2005, a reference to the reform program launched in the late
1970s by Deng Xiaoping. The speed, intensity and breadth of that
embrace have transformed the planet.
The first country in Northeast Asia that recognized the imperative of “embracing globalization” was Japan in the late 19th
century. Detached in the 1930s, by the 1950s and 1960s Japan was
reengaged with the global market economy, providing low-cost,
high-quality goods and building up well-known global brands.
Then followed South Korea, which under military dictator Park
Chung-hee, 1961 to 1979, embarked on a highly successful export-driven
growth strategy. South Korea is the only sizeable developing nation to
have risen from deep poverty to first world prosperity.
Today, China, Japan and Korea, respectively the world’s second, third
and eleventh biggest economies, are significant global economic powers.
Collectively they reflect one of the profoundest changes in the 21st
century global economy: the emergence of global supply chains. The
Apple iPhone, iPod or iPad may be American designs and brands assembled
by a Taiwanese company in China, hence labeled “assembled in China,” but
the devices also contain vital parts, components and technological
knowhow from Korea, Japan and many other countries. Billions of
consumers worldwide depend on and benefit from products emanating from
the Northeast Asian–based supply-chain.
