The mistake was a fundamental one. It was to look at these societies through the lens of conventional economic rationality and to ignore the deeper qualities which gave them their growing strength in the electronic age and would enable them to recover and bounce back with extraordinary vigor. East Asian society is based on family businesses and elaborate network conglomerations - sometimes family controlled but nearly always part of web of a wider web of enterprises and interests. This is especially the case with the Chinese business networks, which dominate the region and control enormous areas of business across many sectors. Against that, the nature of family control is that it tends to be authoritarian and unresponsive.
Younger generations have to plead with their patriarchs to inject change into their businesses.
Put aside, even, the continuing miserable state of Japan's banks - again, nothing new about that. All markets and interlocking business relationships, but the globalized financial market in particular, have become networks as never before, operating with an intimacy but also a speed as never before. The rapid recovery of the Asian economies, driven by forces which are alien to economic theory and invisible to superficial analysis have largely silenced the Asia-bashers' chorus. Russell Reynolds Assoc. All content is copyright.