Andre Gunder Frank

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economy, permits those at angular systemic locations of privilege to exact tribute or rent from the system as a whole and in particular from those in the under-privileged positions. For the role of the latter it is to produce and transfer wealth and income to the privileged ones through the structure and operation of this multilateral/angular system. In the nineteenth century, Great Britain came to occupy this position of privilege; and THAT is what made it GREAT-- much more so than any qualities or productive or other capacities of its own. Since then, The United States has replaced Britain in this position of greatest privilege; and THAT rather than its productive capacity accounts for most of its wealth and income.

So world economic development is a global game in which the players scuttle around and some manage to change positions when the cyclical music stops. Moreover, the PLACE that each player has in the game is probably the most determinant factor in the players = wealth and income and their opportunities of placement for and in the next round. Any players location also determines his ability or not to pass his entropy off, not just to his neighbor in the circle, but to one or many on any of many possible chairs around or across the circle. And they in turn are more often than not obliged to absorb this entropy to their own cost. And all that and even more is so, as Hildgerdt explained in the epigraph above, because we are living in a "world economy which functions through a system of multilateral trade of a specific pattern that embraces the whole world...[and its] much less adequately understood system of multilateral settlements of all classes of international accounts." Moreover, this round world of ours is anything but a 'level playing field'. The 'specific pattern' and one's all determinant place in the 'less adequately understood system', translated into understandable plain English, is LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION.

Historically and analytically we can view this process as beginning with the Baltic trade between developing Western and underdeveloping Eastern Europe in the seventeenth century and then the well known TRIANGULAR TRADE across the Atlantic Ocean in the eighteenth century. Beginning in the late eighteenth and flourishing in the nineteenth century was the OPIUM TRIANGLE between China, India and Britain, which financed the latter. It was soon joined by another triangle between China, America - including Mexican silver- and Britain. Throughout the nineteenth century, more and more triangles joined the therefore ever more multi-angular- lateral and complex NETWORK OF WORLD TRADE and its division of labor and spoils. Britain remained at the apex at which all these triangles joined, until it began to be joined by the United States as well. The stages of development through the addition of more and more triangles to what then became a complex system of multi-angular and multi-lateral trade and payments IMbalances will be e examined chronologically until World War I, which destroyed it after it had achieved its most developed form.

ENTROPY GENERATION AND DISSIPATION

The third factor is entropy.

Dissipative structures...this term, coined by Ilya Priogine, refers to the ability of complex systems to transfer their entropic costs to other parts [of the system].... [We] lose sight of the fact that every system in the social order must be paid for by someone, somewhere, sometime. This essential reality is hidden from our view because human beings are very skillful at exporting the costs of their own behavior to others via Dissipative structures...[through which] dissipation of entropy occurs when one system has the will and the ability to force others to absorb the costs of its own growth and prosperity...[which] is one of the defining characteristics of colonial systems, which suggests that the absorption of entropic costs is one of the functions a colony performs for its metropole... [but also] through impersonal market mechanisms so the victims on the periphery are not aware of what is being done to them.
THE GLOBAL IMPERATIVE Robert P. Clark [1997:5,10]

As per the quotation above, much of the order can continue or even be constructed among those who have it if they can dissipate and transfer the disorder that they generate to others who are obliged to absorb and thereby themselves become less orderly than they were. This process of dissipation occurs along lines that are both more and less easily visible. The more visible ones are unidirectional along a single vector from A to B. A glaring but illustrative example [and this has happened!] is the export of the nuclear waste sub products from the nuclear power stations of A in Europe and Japan, which therefore and otherwise have relatively much power, to B in Africa who have little power [in more than one sense of the word] and are paid a pittance [for the North but not for the South] to absorb this entropy from the North.

Other perhaps less obvious but more frequent examples are how the consequences and costs of global warming and depletion of the ozone layer generated by A's burning of coal and oil [much of it now imported from B] are in turn [re] exported to B. There they cause flooding, soon perhaps also to sink low level areas into the rising sea, and massive destruction of virgin rain forests to maintain industries and consumption in A. These examples become even more glaring of course if part of the higher income in A is the result of prior or present transfers of income from B to A.

However, dissipation of entropy and the transfer of income from A to B also occurs along multilateral paths and networks. These may be less obvious or even invisible, but they are even more used and important. Regarding world trade [incorrectly often still called 'international' trade], in the second epigraph above Folke Hildgerdt observes that "cases of triangular or multilateral [not to mention bilateral] settlement within small groups of countries were relatively unimportant and ... almost all balances belonged to a single world-wide system which also provided the transfer, along round about routes." The same can go for the dissipation and transfer of entropy from A to B, but via C, D, E and so on. As Hildgerdt put it, "the development of the system of multilateral trade...was similar to the unfolding of a fan: more and more countries became involved, and their insertion took place in a given order, each country being farther way from the United Kingdom on the transfer routes to that country from its debtors." I would add that countries need not have been inserted one by one into the charmed circle for Britain. They also entered as participants of already previously existing bi- or tri- or other multi-lateral systems that were incorporated into the world-wide web.

The growth of those in positions of advantage generates entropy or disorder, which compromises the continuance of such growth - unless that entropy can be and is dissipated or exported to cities, hinterlands, or other regions who are obliged to absorb this entropy and generate disorder due to their unfavorable position in the system as a whole. For instance, no large city could survive nor maintain mutually beneficial relations with others like it except for its ability to dissipate its own entropy to its immediate hinterland and/or to somewhere else half way around the globe. The economic and demographic growth in and of the industrialized cities would not have been possible without the dissipation of their entropy to other parts of the world who are obliged to absorb the ecological costs of a world development that did and continues to benefit the few at the expense of the many. Translated into plain English: “on a world-wide scale, we see technical progress combined with social regress. The intrinsic laws of technical progress do not explain this paradox; it requires their interaction” [xx]

Thus, capital accumulation, technological development, and economic growth here arealso forms of generation and dissipation of entropy that is “ organically linked to underdevelopment and environmental deterioration in others [which are] the flip side of another country’s growth” [Hornborg 2001:33]. Therefore, Hornborg argues, GNP here is really a measure of its terms of trade with there and “reflects a country’s position in socially negotiated global exchange relations” [ ibid.32].

So that is where three major analytical categories and procedures connect in the present book: [1] the global economy and market, [2] its multi-angular and multi-lateral structure and organization whereby benefits and the lack thereof are unevenly distributed around the globe, and [3] the entropy costs that are generated by those most favorably placed in the “center” and dissipated out to the “periphery” that is obliged to bear the costs of absorbing that entropy.

A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY EPILOGUE

I here skip over much of the twentieth century other than to observe that economic growth in East Asia, though starting at a much lower level exceeded that of the West over the century as a whole. Moreover, the ¨Great Depression” that ravaged much of the West was rapidly overcome in Japan and China and had relatively little impact on India. During the past half-century since liberation and independence, the rate of economic growth in East Asia was double that of the West.

Recent decades’ developments in the world economy, and then especially the post 1997 financial and economic crisis in parts of East Asia, have shaped and re-shaped but also misled perceptions of this world historical process and the place of this or that region within it. First, Japan demonstrated its economic, technological and competitive capacity and in many respects became a to be regarded by many as part of the „West,” and Japanese were accorded the status of „honorary whites“ in Apartheid South Africa. Some Americans tried to explain Japanese success by a Japanese equivalent of what this century’s most important sociologist, Max Weber, had called the „Protestant Ethic;“ while Chinese and others in East Asia were regarded as incompetent due to their age old Confucianism. This alleged „explanation“ was abandoned when the „Four Tigers“ or „Little Dragons” of South Korea, Singapore [which is half Chinese], Taiwan Province, and Hong Kong also made themselves felt on the world market. Then came the next tigers in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, and looming behind them the Big Dragon of China itself, which began really to threaten Western confidence and dominance. So Confucianism or „Asian values“ now ceased to be the insuperable obstacle to „progress“ and instead became the supposed engine and equally false ideological explanation of success instead. Books began to appear in the West that refer to the return of Confucian East Asia onto the world stage, but after a presumed interval of a whole millennium of alleged Western dominance, and without ever noting that in reality Asia and China had ceded that place for only about 150 years, or some six generations. Moreover, two and a half millennia of Confucian values can hardly account for or explain up and down changes in economic success or failure from one year, or decade or even century to the next.

The latest notable change is the financial and economic crisis that erupted in East Asia in 1997 and which brought evident relief to many observers in the West. As a result and mis-led by day-to-day press media reports and short term business and government analysis and policy, even “informed” public opinion in the West changed again. Now the “East Asian Miracle” is said to have been no more than a mirage, a dream for some and a nightmare for others. The previously supposed “explanations” and sure-fire strategies of success are being abandoned again as quickly as they had come into fashion. We hear less about “Asian values” or guarantees from “the magic of the market,” and no more security from state capitalism. So much the better I would say, since these supposed “explanations” and “correct policies” were never more than ideological shams anyway.

The historical evidence presented in this book shows that no one particular institutional form or political economic policy offers or accounts for success [nor failure!] in the competitive and ever changing world market. The contemporary evidence shows the same. In that respect, Deng Xiaoping’s famous aphorism is correct. The question is not whether cats are institutionally, let alone ideologically, black or white; the real world issue is whether or not they catch economic mice in competition with others in the world market. And that depends much less on the institutional color of the cat than it does on its opportune position in the world economy at each particular place and time. And since the obstacles and opportunities in the competitive world market change over time and in place, to succeed the economic cat, no matter what its color, must adapt to these changes or fail to catch any mice at all. Among these different institutional forms including relations among state-finance- productive and sales organizations, perhaps the most attention and positive evaluation has been devoted abroad to those of Korea and then of Japan but also of “Greater China” including its vast network of overseas Chinese. But the very fact that they differ, and in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere as well, should already forewarn us against privileging one institutional form over all others. At best and that is already very much, the evidence is that none of these institutional forms is necessarily an impediment or unsurmountable obstacle to success on the domestic, regional and world market. Most noteworthy perhaps in view of the widespread Western propaganda about its own alleged virtues is the demonstrated fact that no “Western mode”” need or should be followed by Asians in Asia or even elsewhere.

The significance of position and flexible response in the world economy is particularly important during periods of economic crisis B that is in Chinese of [negative] danger and [positive] opportunity. In the present economic crisis so far, the focus has been far too predominantly on its undoubtedly serious negative consequences. But the opportunities it poses have received insufficient attention, except perhaps in the United States and China, both of which are seeking to reap competitive advantages from the political economic problems and alleged “meltdown” of Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia.

But the dismissal of East Asian and particularly Chinese economic strengths and prospects may be premature and certainly is based on a shortsighted neglect of the historical evidence as presented in this book and on a serious misreading of the contemporary evidence. I believe that this latest quick dismissal of Asia is mistaken for the following reasons among others:

1] Since Asia and especially China was economically powerful in the world until relatively recently, it is quite possible that it soon be so again. Contrary to the Western mythology of the past century, Asian dominance in the world has so far been interrupted by an only relatively short period of only a century or a century and a half.

2] Chinese and other Asian economic success in the past were not based on Western ways; and much recent Asian economic success was not based on the Western model. Therefore, there is also no good reason why Japanese or other Asians need or should copy any Western or other “model” You can manage your own ways and have no good reason to now replace them by Western ones as the alleged only way to get out of the present economic crisis. On the contrary, Korean and other Asian reliance on other ways are strength and not a weakness.

3] The fact that the present crisis visibly spread from the financial sector to the productive one does not mean that the latter is fundamentally weak. On the contrary, the present crisis of overproduction and excess capacity is evidence of the underlying strength of the productive sector, which can recover. Indeed, it was excess capacity and productivity leading to over-production for the world market that initiated the financial crisis to begin with when Asian foreign exchange earnings on commercial account were no longer able to finance its service of the speculative short run debt.

4] Not that economic recessions will or can be prevented in the future B they never have been in the past even under state “planning” in China or the Soviet Union. More significant is that this is the first time in over a century that a world recession did not started in the West and then moved eastward but that instead it started in the East and then moved around the world from there. And that was precisely because as per # 3 East Asian and particularly Korean productive and export capacity had grown so MUCH. This recession can therefore be read as evidence not so much of the temporary weakness as of the growing basic economic strength of East Asia to which the center of gravity of the world economy is now shifting back to where it had been before the Rise of the West.

5] The recession in the productive sector was short, especially in Korea. But it was also severe, especially in Indonesia. And the shock-waves from the financial sector to the productive, consumer and political ones were visibly - and to all but the totally blind, intentionally - exacerbated by the economic shock policies imposed on Asian governments by the IMF as usual following the dictates of the U.S. Treasury, which systematically represents American financial interests at the expense of popular ones elsewhere around the world. That also permitted Western interests to take advantage of declines in productive and financial strength in Korea and elsewhere to buy up assets at bargain-basement fire-sale prices. Even so the underlying strength of the Korean economy was such that the foreigners were even then unable to alter the financial, productive, ownership and state structure significantly to their favor. The Korean productive and financial machine soon recovered again to forge ahead B but now with a costly lesson well learned. The lesson must have been learned elsewhere as well by comparing how relatively unscathed China and Malaysia [and as already mentioned for different reasons Korea] emerged from the financial crisis by maintaining controls over capital exports, compared to those countries that succumbed to the IMF and its lethal medicine by permitting a speculative capital outflow that also destroyed their productive apparatus and multiplied unemployment into an unbearable economic, social, and political problem, especially in Indonesia.

6] That underlying political economic strength also puts East Asia, and especially China, Japan and Korea in a much more favorable position than the rest of the “Third World” and even Russia and Eastern Europe to resist Western blackmail as it is now exercised by the U.S. Treasury Department through the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, Wall Street and other instruments.

7] The very act and cost of East Asian concessions to this Western pressure during the past recession makes it politically more likely, since it is economically possible, that East Asia will take measures, including especially a new financial bloc and banking institutions, that can prevent a recurrence of the present situation in the future by escaping from the strangle-hold of Western controlled capital markets. The recent Nobel Prize laureate in Economics and dissenting former World Bank official, Joseph Stiglitz observes such efforts already in his recent private discussions with Asian officials as reported in his 2002 book GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS.

8]. Indeed, one of the present battles, first by the Japanese and now also by the Chinese, is to remodel the world financial and trade institutions that were designed by the United States to work in its favor. Thus, Japan wanted to establish an Asian monetary fund to prevent the East Asian recession from deepening as it has thanks to the International Monetary Fund based in and subservient to Washington. And China wishes to join the World Trade Organization but also seeks to have this Western dominated institution reformed to its advantage.

9] A related political economic struggle is the competition between the United States and China to displace Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia in the market by taking advantage of their bankruptcies. American capital is buying up some East Asian productive facilities at bargain basement prices, while China is waiting for them either to be squeezed out of the competitive market altogether, and if not to engage in joint operations. Indeed it had been the devaluation of the Chinese currency before 1997 that reduced the world market share of other Asian economies and helped generate the financial crisis itself. Only time will tell which strategy will be more successful, but the Chinese and perhaps also some Southeast Asians seem like the better bet over the long term. Moreover, no matter how deep the recession in Japan; it is not for that eliminated as an economic power, especially in Asia.

10] Equally significant is that India and to recently to a lesser extent China have remained substantially immune from the present recession, thanks in part to the inconvertibility of their remin ribao and rupee currencies and the valve in their capital markets that permits the inflow but controls the outflow of capital. The currency devaluations of China’s competitors elsewhere in East Asia and the reduced inflow into China of Overseas Chinese and Japanese capital that is negatively affected by the recession in East Asia may oblige China to devalue again as well to remain competitive. Nonetheless and despite their serious economic problems, the Chinese and Japanese economies appear already to have and to continue to be able to become sufficiently productively and competitively strong to resist and overcome these problems. In Southeast Asia, Malaysia has successfully followed the Chinese model of opening its capital market to inflows but restricting especially speculative capital outflows from the same. Korea did not need such emergency measures, since it had received relatively little foreign capital to begin with.

11] It is noteworthy that the economically most dynamic regions of East Asia today are also still or again exactly the same ones as before 1800:

1. In the South, Lingnan centered on the Hong Kong B Guangzhou corridor, 2. Fujian, still centered on Amoy/Xiamen and focusing on the Taiwan straits and all of Southeast Asia in the South China Sea; and between them, 3. The Yangtze Valley, centered on Shanghai and trade with Japan that is already taking the lead away again from the southern and northern regions. 4. But already then there was also a fourth economic region around the North China Sea, the quadrangular trade relations among Manchuria and elsewhere in Northeast China, Siberia/ Russian Far East, [northern?] Japan, and Korea, but also including Mongolia. Although the first three above-named regions are already again undergoing tremendous economic growth [and political power?] in the absolute sense, the fourth one around Korea seems to enjoy the greatest relative boom, and within it that of Korean capital as well. It is helping to develop resources in the Russian Far East and as far west as Central Asian Khazhakstan. The Chinese population on the Russian side of the Amur River has been estimated already to exceed 5 million people as a pool of cheap labor. Probable political change in the DRNK may well add a new source of cheap labor for this growing pool of labor in the Northeast Asian Region and for its Far East Russian also cheap base of ample metallurgical, forestry, agricultural and even petroleum resources. Korean and Japanese capital could make that a very attractive regional growth pole in itself and a highly competitive region on the world market.

In conclusion and looking at the longer term past, present and future, as already observed the rate of economic growth in Asia, albeit starting from a much lower level, has exceeded that in the West over the entire twentieth century; and since liberation and independence has been double that of the West during the past half century . All of these regions and especially the afore mentioned four macro-regions, in turn were and still or again increasingly are important segments of world trade and of the global economy. Parts of them are now being called the "Greater China," including Taiwan and the large overseas Chinese population, which are responsible for a major share of investment on the Chinese mainland. This ''region" does not usually, but perhaps should, include the already 5 million and still growing migrant Chinese population north of the frontier with Russia.

Regarding the mainland Chinese economy, the President of the Chinese Society of World Economy, Pu Shan, observed already the in the mid 1990s:

Results of the economic reform are remarkable. Real gross national product in 1995 increased 4 times that of 1980, with an average annual growth rate close to 10% during that period. Real income peer capita more than trippled. Exports and imports of merchandize trade in 1995 increased more than 7 times that of 1980 in terms of U.S. dollars, while China's share in world trade more than tripled And China became the largest recipient lf foreign direct investment among developing countries. It is also noteworthy that the large scale transfer of agricultural labor to industry has been accomplished amid unprecedented prosperity in the rural economy, unlike many other countries that went through the painful process of widespread bankruptcy of farmers (Pu 2004: 174].

In the decade since then, most of these trends have still continued, though the rural economy and agricultural income have lagged. In particular however, the ten percent annual growth rate has still been maintained, which means doubling in size in six years, soon to become the world's second largest after that of the United States. But China now also holds the greatest single share of the huge and ever growing American foreign debt, although it is doubtful that anyone will ever be able to collect on any substantial part of it. Nor does this mean that China's growth does not also pose immense problems, from gaping inequality between the coast and the interior or urban and rural, or its growing demand and import of raw materials and especially oil and soon of foodstuffs, and the menacing shortage of water. Japan's major fiscal and economic crisis of the 1990s has abated and economic performance and prospects have improved again despite the continuing debt overlag. As to India, although its growth has been lagging behind, it has recently increased and shows promise or at least possibility of further acceleration: from 1.5 percent annually during the three decades following independence to 5.5 percent over all and 3.5 percent per capita in the 1980s, and 6 and 4 percent respectively in the 1990s. For the next half decade, projections range from 5 to 7.5 percent annually. That is still less than for East Asia, but sufficient to double in a decade or so. All of these Asian medium term growth rates exceed by far those ever previously achieved anywhere in the West.

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