Book of the Week: Edible Economics

Ha-Joon Chang on the dangers of cultural stereotyping

Many people have attributed the East Asian “economic miracle” to the region’s Confucian culture, which supposedly emphasises hard work, thrift and education. But which culture doesn’t?

For example, in trying to explain the economic divergence between South Korea and Ghana, two countries that were at similar levels of economic development in the early 1960s (Korea was in fact much poorer then – in 1961, its per capita income was $93, against Ghana’s $190), Samuel Huntington, the veteran American political scientist and author of the controversial book The Clash of Civilizations, argues: “Undoubtedly, many factors played a role, but . . . culture had to be a large part of the explanation. South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organisation, and discipline. Ghanaians had different values. In short, cultures count.”

Huntington’s description of Confucian culture is a perfect example of positive cultural stereotyping – only picking elements that suit your characterisation of a culture that you want to portray in positive light.

Confucianism is supposed to encourage hard work. Yet in the past East Asians were typically described as lazy by Western visitors. An Australian engineer who toured factories in Japan in 1915, at the request of the Japanese government, to provide advice on productivity improvement said, “to see your men at work made me feel that you are a very satisfied easy-going race who reckon time is no object. When I spoke to some managers they informed me that it was impossible to change the habits of national heritage.”

In 1912, when she toured Japan and Korea, Beatrice Webb, the English sociologist and social reformer, said that the Japanese had “objectionable notions of leisure and a quite intolerable personal independence” and described my ancestors as “twelve millions of dirty, degraded, sullen, lazy and religion-less savages who slouch about in dirty white garments of the most inept kind and who live in filthy mud huts”. That’s coming from a founder of Fabian socialism. We might imagine what typical rightwing white supremacists of the time said about people in Confucian countries.

As for the famous Confucian zeal for education, the education that was traditionally emphasised was what was needed for the civil service exam – political philosophy and poetry. These are not directly useful for economic development. Practical pursuits other than agriculture, such as making things and trading, were looked down upon.

Commentators like Huntington praise the discipline that Confucian culture instils in people (although Beatrice Webb only found ill-discipline in Japan and Korea). But that discipline is bought at the cost of conformism. Other commentators have argued that the pressure for conformity means that East Asians lack originality and entrepreneurship, although this assertion is becoming increasingly less plausible, given the amount of technological innovation, original movies, addictive drama series and creative music that the East Asians produce these days.

I could offer more deconstruction of positive stereotyping of Confucianism of the kind that Huntington represents, but you get the point. In the same way in which Islam could be typecast in entirely positive light, Confucianism can be presented in entirely negative light. Cultures have different and complex facets. The tolerant, rule-based, science-oriented and commercially minded version of Islam is as real as the other-worldly, intolerant and militaristic version. There is the hard-working, learning-oriented, thrifty and disciplined version of Confucianism, but there is also the version that is ineffectual in imposing the culture of hard work among its populace, restricts social mobility, looks down upon commerce and industry and suppresses creativity. What a society makes out of its cultural raw material is in large part a matter of choice – and thus policy action.

The right economic and social policies can promote development, equal opportunities and other positive things in any cultural context.

Japan and Korea lacked a modern industrial workforce with the habit of time-keeping and industrial discipline. This workforce was forged by concrete actions – the instillation of time-keeping habits and discipline in schools, an ideological campaign emphasising the need for hard work in a “patriotic war” to “rebuild the nation” through economic development, and having a labour law allowing long hours and harsh work practices.

This extract is from Ha-Joon Chang’s new book Edible Economics.

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