Economic Geography

Henry Wai-Chung Yeung
the early 1990s. Two significant publications by sociologists Peter Berger 
and Michael Hsiao (1988) and Gordon Redding (1990) have established firmly
the ‘culturalist explanation’ of capitalist economic development in Asia. To put
it in brief, the Confucian ethic of hard work and the cooperative relations in a
family-centric form of economic organization have allegedly made it possible for
these Asian economies to experience rapid industrialization and economic devel-
opment. Rapid economic development has occurred in many Asian economies,
despite the existence of authoritarian states in most of them. This culturalist-
inspired explanation of the Asian ‘miracle economies’ not only fits well into
World Bank’s (1993) own triumphant assessment, but also perpetuates the myth
that these cultural imprints of work ethics and family values are unique to Asian
business systems – a gross generalization reinforced strongly in Whitley’s (1992)
approach.
The key problem in this argument for Asian exceptionalism is its serious 
confusion of different spatial scales of representation. The critical question is not
so much about the existence of national cultures, but rather their spatial bound-
edness. While it perhaps makes good sense to talk about how economic life is
bounded by culture in traditional societies relatively closed to the outside world,
globalization – be it political, economic, and cultural – has clearly diminished the
possibility of using the national scale as a bounded space to analyse economic
processes, let alone their dynamic and transformative nature. This is particularly
so if these economic processes are transcending and transversing different spaces
that range from global and regional to local economies. The culturalist argument
for Asian exceptionalism thus falls short of accounting for dynamic transforma-
tions brought about by globalization tendencies precisely because of its ‘over-
socialized’ analytical framing, to borrow from Granovetter (1985), and its
‘under-spatialized’ worldview.
By adopting differential spatial scales in our analysis of Asian capitalism,
economic geographers are able to connect changes at the level of elite business
actors who are often both global in their outlooks and orientation and local in
their cultural predisposition and at the level of structural systems that are commonly
national in their nature and organization (e.g. Hsu and Saxenian 2001; Olds 2001;
Olds and Yeung 1999; Zhou and Tseng 2001). Revisiting the problem of culture,
the literature on East Asian capitalism, particularly one that is associated with
ethnic Chinese, is often replete with cultural essentialism. The role of guanxi or
relationships in Chinese culture, for example, has been unproblematically treated
as an exogenous and independent variable in explaining business behaviour of
ethnic Chinese actors. This conflation of national culture emanating from main-
land China and the everyday economic practice of ethnic Chinese in East and
Southeast Asia has led to many serious misconceptions of the so-called ‘guanxi
capitalism’ (e.g. Redding 1990; cf. Hsu and Saxenian 2001). Ethnic Chinese
actors in Asia have been seen as inward-looking and engaging in highly person-
alized transactions that undermine the market mechanism and open competition.
When we focus our analytical perspective on elite Chinese business actors,
however, we can identify a whole array of their everyday economic practice 

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ranging from corruptive activities of personalism to highly professional conduct
of contracts and requisite legal processes. In other words, ethnic Chinese 
business elites in Asia are both local and traditional in their cultural norms and
globalizing in their approach to business. In performing their capitalist organi-
zations simultaneously at both global and local scales, these actors contribute 
to a dynamic process of Chinese capitalism morphing into a form of what Yeung
(2004) calls hybrid capitalism. In this hybrid capitalism, there are both elements
of culturally specific imprints (e.g. employment relations) and globalizing 
norms (e.g. international standards of corporate governance). Informed by Peter
Dicken’s (2003) work on major transformations in the global economy and
Nigel Thrift’s (2000) micro-examination of how culture is performed in capital-
ist firms, this concept of hybrid capitalism can capture adequately the complex
duality of geographical flows (e.g. FDI) and economic landscapes in contemporary
Asian economies.