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The Rise and Decline of the Asian Century: False Starts on the Path to the Global Millennium. By CHRISTOPHER LINGLE. Seattle: University of Washington Press, revised third edition 1998; first edition Editions Sirocco, Barcelona, 1997; revised second edition Asia 2000, Hong Kong, 1997. xxii, 316 pp. $18.95.
This is Christopher Lingle's second book on East Asia. In 1996 he published Singapore's Authoritarian Capitalism: Asian Values, Free Market Illusions, and Political Dependency. In his first book Lingle's main concern was to develop a critique of "authoritarian capitalism" in East Asia by focusing on Singapore. In The Rise and Decline of the Asian Century, however, his subject is the East Asian region and the international economy of the late twentieth century as a whole. Like its predecessor, however, this latest offering combines a simplistic, and now familiar, critique of "authoritarian capitalism" and "Confucian corporatism" in East Asia (pp. 152-57, 246-47) with an uncritical, and even more familiar, celebration of Anglo-American liberalism (neoliberalism) as a panacea for both the region and the rest of the world. In the relentless pursuit of his central theme Lingle reduces the complex history of East Asia to a homogenous and ahistorical East Asian model which, although an economic success in the short term, was doomed to failure because of "systematic inflexibility arising" from a "tradition-bound culture that is resistant to political modernization" (p. 284). He argues that a "new consensus is forming that much of the suffering in East Asia stems from flaws in economic and political institutions that...