Jini Kim Watson

In a nutshell

This book takes a fresh look at the so-called “Asian Tiger” success stories of South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. While these countries have been much lauded for their incredible postwar growth rates—and are now widely viewed as the economic model for industrializing China and India—The New Asian City tells quite a different story through the dual lenses of urban development and fictional narratives.

By examining “new” spatial technologies such as the department store, the high-rise apartment block, the expressway, and the factory, The New Asian City uniquely combines a spatial history of three East Asian sites with the perspectives that literature, poetry and film offer. In this sense, the book rereads the development of certain “model” Third World countries through narratives which depict the transformation of the built environment as a variously contested and creative encounter.

The analysis takes the reader from the colonial period of the early twentieth century, when Korea and Taiwan were part of the Japanese Empire and Singapore was a British trading post, up to the end of the 1980s and the boom years of these “Asian Miracles.” The book is structured into three sections: the first dealing with the colonial city and its role in creating and maintaining imperial spaces, the second with postwar urban renewal and its effects, and the third with rural-to-urban migration and broader national landscapes.

Centrally, I argue that the economic and historical dimensions of these success stories must be supplemented by looking at the narratives that responded to dramatic changes in the urban environment.

For example, how was the mass participation of women in the new manufacturing industries, along with profound changes in domestic living spaces, portrayed in women’s writing across the three sites? Why did authoritarian leaders, from South Korea’s Park Chung Hee to Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, rely so heavily on urban renewal schemes in their visions of a modern society? And how was the process of urban renewal perceived by workers who both helped construct such spaces, and witnessed the loss of their former home environments? In other words, the book traces the way that certain spatial realities, taken up into narrative form, reveal the conflicts and struggles behind larger social, political and economic processes.

The book’s method of moving between urban history and fictional works thus makes an argument for the imaginative function of built form. Ideally, however, The New Asian City can be read along both of its two axes: by people interested in the nuts and bolts of Asian urban forms and political-economic development, and by people interested in this powerful body of fictional work, which includes proletarian writing, women’s novellas, city poetry, and auteur films.

A close-up

The final three chapters of The New Asian City each examine in detail one national site and one aesthetic form: Singaporean city poetry, Taiwanese New Cinema, and Korean minjung (people’s or popular) literature.

Chapter Five’s analysis of Singapore’s long-time leader Lee Kuan Yew (in power from 1959-1990), and the poets Edwin Thumboo and Arthur Yap, is a good example of the way the last section of the book works. Here, I examine the way writings and speeches by each political leader invoke the newly built infrastructure of the country in order to narrate a national future, while literary and cinematic movements complicate this vision.

Lee Kuan Yew explicitly equates the modernism of the government’s urban renewal program and the cleanliness of the streets with Singapore’s ability to attract foreign investment and build national prosperity. In contrast, the Singaporean poet Arthur Yap writes about such physical changes in a fundamentally different way, revealing the absurdity of a developmental logic that overemphasizes productivity and applies too neatly to every housing block or reclaimed seashore.

Most interesting here is the way one can see the battle over the symbolic meaning of urban form, that is, how two different perspectives—the political-developmental and the poetic—each vie to incorporate developmental landscapes into a particular vision of the nation.

Lastly

A broader aim of this book is to provide a counter-narrative to simplistic accounts of East Asian economic development, especially ones that rely on wrong-headed notions like “Confucian Capitalism” or the “natural” efficiency of the Asian worker.

Rather, what was taking place was a very singular arrangement of forces involving the political and urban legacies of colonialism, Cold War-backed authoritarian governments, the advent of export-led development, and changing relationships between country and city. The complexity—and brutality—of that story needs to be understood so that we can properly understand how this region differentiated itself from the rest of the developing world under conditions that could not, and perhaps should not, always be repeated.

In a related sense, the book also functions as a pre-history to our current moment of globalization in which all nations and economies are imagined to be intimately linked as never before, albeit on very uneven terms. What we forget is how these differing terrains—the First World, the different tiers of the developing world—were actively produced and created, largely through the mechanisms of colonialism and in the decades of decolonization following World War II.

The New Asian City is the story of how one region of the world developed from a subordinate position vis-à-vis the West, but it is not the only story possible or available. Only by understanding the complex ways that these three sites modernized and reconceptualized their urban fabric can we understand their remarkable development from colonial territories to Asian “miracles.”

Finally, one further goal of this book is to open up new analytic pathways with which to study those latest of Asian miracles, China and India. As I hope The New Asian City demonstrates, the narratives of those megastates—the ongoing battles between city and country, local forms of settlement and migration, and their emerging global and regional roles—must also be excavated and retold in “three-dimensional” form.