Japan and China in the World Political Economy

Japan and China in the World Political Economy, edited by Saadia M. Pekkanen and Kellee S. Tsai. Foreword by Ezra F. Vogel. London: Routledge, 2005. xxii + 245 pp. £65.00 (hardcover). The premise of this collection, which draws together a percipient group of Japan and China scholars, is that there is analytic leverage to be gained from comparing "late liberalization" processes in Japan and China. As Ezra Vogel's foreword points out, this premise is by no means self-evident. Both the starting points and the political and economic forces at work in the two countries are quite different. Saadia Pekkanen and Kellee S. Tsai justify the exercise by noting the common external pressures pushing toward liberalization and at least some similarities in the growth models pursued across the two countries. In admittedly different ways, both countries have histories of highly interventionist states that are unlikely simply to wither away. The editors do not offer a single theory for observed parallels and differences; they attempt to situate the book between the older theoretical traditions of dependency thinking and the developmental state. They organize the empirical analysis around five discrete areas-development strategies more generally, trade, investment, finance and technology-that permit somewhat focused comparisons and conclusions. T. J. Pempel and Tsai and Sarah Cook have the hardest task: providing overviews of the development strategies pursued by the two countries. Pempel outlines the Japanese model and its successes, but focuses attention on the way in which changes in the overall strategic as well as economic environment constituted an important source of pressure for a new course. Most notably, he underlines declining US tolerance of Japanese insularity. Tsai and Cook try to situate China among the region's developmental states, and raise the question of whether China could be considered a developmental state or is converging towards such a model in the post-reform period. They close with the observation that the developmentalist features of the other high-growth East Asian countries did not prove to be in equilibrium, and that even if China increasingly looks like a reincarnation of its neighbors such a model may well prove transitional. The paired comparisons of particular policies raise a number of interesting puzzles that would not have arisen in a single-country collection. Pekkanen's tightly crafted overview of Japanese trade policy draws on four mini-cases of WTO disputes. She underlines the difficulties which external actors have faced in forcing liberalization where domestic forces, and particularly bureaucratic ones, are aligned against it. Margaret Pearson's review of Chinese trade policy also notes the increasing pluralization of trade policy in the run-up toward WTO accession, and lingering problems of implementation since 1999. But she further underlines the surprising scope of the country's opening, a fact often forgotten amidst current controversies over the exchange rate and current account imbalances. She also shows how authoritarian leadership and the capacity to link issues played a role in overcoming resistance. Somewhat different institutional differences surface in the discussions of foreign investment and finance. Miraya Solis' review of the highly restrictive nature of Japanese policy toward FDI and the prolonged process of liberalization in Japan also stresses MITI and MOF efforts to exercise control. …