Ebook Under siege? Economic globalization and Chinese business in Southeast Asia
The late twentieth century has witnessed an extension of the globalization of economic activities, typically through cross-border investments and trade spear headed by transnational banks and transnational corporations (TNCs). In 1996, foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows reached US$349 billion and global inward FDI stock recorded at US$3.2 trillion (UNCTAD 1997: 4). The sales and total assets of the foreign affiliates of TNCs were valued respectively at US$6.4 trillion and US$8.3 trillion. These figures are remarkable because the sales value of TNCs' foreign production now exceeds that of world trade. In 1996, exports of goods and non-factor services were valued at US$6.1 trillion. Through this complex interpénétration of trade, finance and production on a global scale, the world economy today has become much more functionally integrated and interdependent than ever (Perraton etal. 1997; Dicken 1998; cf. Hirst and Thompson 1996).
This reality of the global economy has also led to a 'new' discourse of globalization it is now fashionable among business gurus, international economists and liberal politicians to assert that the world is 'borderless' through the convergent effects of globalization tendencies (e.g. Ohmae 1990, 1995; O'Brien 1992; Horsman and Marshall 1994; Chen and Kwan 1997; cf. Yeung 1998a). During the last two decades, these globalization tendencies have achieved a heightened intensity driven primarily by the champions of market mechanism, technological change and time-space compression. In such a 'borderless' world, it is claimed, the convergent effects of globalization and cross-border organizational learning have rapidly outpaced the divergent effects of cultures, national institutions and social systems (Mueller 1994).
The problem here does not just rest with these discourses of globalization, but also with their impact on policy making and social life. To date, these globalization rhetorics and one-off 'end-state' readings of global economic change have been deployed prescriptively by both political leaders and business strategists to legitimize a particular neoliberal ideology which has gained rapid ascendancy in many Western societies today. This neoliberal ideology is then used to justify the annihilation of localities by global forces and territorial states by capital, as evident in the call for putting the global logic of capital above local interests of real people. In this discourse of 'business civilization', business is held to perform a civilizing mission through the operation of the 'invisible hand' of market competition on a global scale and the ceaseless search for profit.
Capital, represented in institutional form by transnational capital, has potentially planetary reach and is akin to forces of nature. It is represented as beyond or above the state and forms the basic structure of an interdependent global economy. The recent and ongoing economic turmoil in Asia is perhaps a very relevant example of this interdependent and 'borderless' world. Those ultra globalists can easily offer a cursory reading of this Asian economic crisis by stating that capital has fled freely from Southeast Asian countries and the Asian economic turmoil, which, originating from the depreciation of the Thai baht in August 1997, spread virtually unabated throughout the Asian region within months.
The Asian region is therefore deemed to be subjugated to global forces of liberalization, free-market mechanisms and neoliberal political ideology. Clearly, such a 'strong globalization' reading of the Asian economic crisis has caricatured the complex and multi-dimensional nature of the relationships between globalization tendencies and national/local business systems.
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