Chang Kyung-Sup – författare

This book offers the very first collaborative analysis of various conditions and aspects of developmental citizenship in China and its practical and ideological implications for Chinese post-socialism.

Development in post-socialist China – much like development in China’s industrialized capitalist neighbors – is a collective political economic project which simultaneously involves political, social, as well as economic dimensions of public governance. In such a historical context, developmental citizenship is a generic category of citizenship in practice, not reducible to separate civil, political, or social rights. Improving people’s material livelihood through augmented jobs and incomes has become the raison d’etre of post-socialist dictatorial politics in China (and a host of other post-socialist nations). A careful and comprehensive observation of post-Mao China in citizenship perspective reveals the practical centrality of developmental citizenship in post-socialist social governance. If China is compared with its industrialized capitalist neighbors such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan as to their common sociopolitical order of national developmentalism, the pervasive scope and systemic varieties of developmental citizenship-in-practice are easily discovered.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Citizenship Studies.

This book offers the very first collaborative analysis of various conditions and aspects of developmental citizenship in China and its practical and ideological implications for Chinese post-socialism.

Development in post-socialist China – much like development in China’s industrialized capitalist neighbors – is a collective political economic project which simultaneously involves political, social, as well as economic dimensions of public governance. In such a historical context, developmental citizenship is a generic category of citizenship in practice, not reducible to separate civil, political, or social rights. Improving people’s material livelihood through augmented jobs and incomes has become the raison d’etre of post-socialist dictatorial politics in China (and a host of other post-socialist nations). A careful and comprehensive observation of post-Mao China in citizenship perspective reveals the practical centrality of developmental citizenship in post-socialist social governance. If China is compared with its industrialized capitalist neighbors such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan as to their common sociopolitical order of national developmentalism, the pervasive scope and systemic varieties of developmental citizenship-in-practice are easily discovered.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Citizenship Studies.

This book explores the Asianization of contemporary Asia, a trend that through neoliberal economic globalism has diluted the political effect of the EuroAmerican-dictated segmentation of Asia and instead facilitated and accelerated socioeconomic exchanges and collaborations among Asian nations themselves.

It comprehensively analyzes and interprets Asia’s Asianization in terms of intensification of intra-Asian interactions and flows in industrial, educational, sociopolitical and ecological spheres. Through such explorations, the book successfully reveals that Asia’s Asianization is particularly reflected in the major dimensions of regional industrial integration, transnational class relations, labor market regionalization, international educational mobility, regionalization of media and pop culture, transnational social movements and activisms, regionalized social governance for development cooperation and developmental mobilization of diasporic socioeconomic resources.

In particular, as an interdisciplinary study of Asia''s industrial, social and cultural integration within and across Asian societies in both outbound and inbound directions, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Asian politics, development and sociology.

This book explores the Asianization of contemporary Asia, a trend that through neoliberal economic globalism has diluted the political effect of the EuroAmerican-dictated segmentation of Asia and instead facilitated and accelerated socioeconomic exchanges and collaborations among Asian nations themselves.

It comprehensively analyzes and interprets Asia’s Asianization in terms of intensification of intra-Asian interactions and flows in industrial, educational, sociopolitical and ecological spheres. Through such explorations, the book successfully reveals that Asia’s Asianization is particularly reflected in the major dimensions of regional industrial integration, transnational class relations, labor market regionalization, international educational mobility, regionalization of media and pop culture, transnational social movements and activisms, regionalized social governance for development cooperation and developmental mobilization of diasporic socioeconomic resources.

In particular, as an interdisciplinary study of Asia''s industrial, social and cultural integration within and across Asian societies in both outbound and inbound directions, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Asian politics, development and sociology.

Most theories of modernity are based, explicitly or implicitly, on the development of Western societies since the late medieval period, but these theories are of limited value for understanding the development of societies in Asia and other parts of the world, where the process of modernization took place under different circumstances and often in a rapid and highly compressed fashion – not over centuries but in decades.  Asian societies have been propelled into modernity too, but theirs is a compressed modernity, which displays very different traits.

In this important book, Chang Kyung-Sup provides a systematic account of this compressed modernity and uses it to analyse the extreme social changes, complexities and imbalances found in South Korea and other East Asian societies. While these changes enabled South Korea to modernize very quickly and achieve high levels of economic growth, they also created a society that is haunted by various developmental and civilizational costs, such as endemic generational conflicts, overloaded family responsibilities and exceptionally high suicide rates. As with other societies that have experienced compressed modernity, the South Korean “miracle” is replete with extreme and contradictory social traits.

This pioneering work of the nature and consequences of compressed modernity will be of great interest to students and scholars of sociology, politics and development studies, as well as anyone interested in South Korea, Asia and postcolonial societies.

In many Asian societies, the process of modernization often took place in a rapid and highly compressed fashion – not over centuries, as had happened in most Western societies, but in several decades. This enabled Asian societies to achieve high levels of economic growth very quickly, but it also harbored unexpected risks and costs that threatened further development. The very mechanisms and strategies that made their explosive modernization possible tended to produce existentially hazardous consequences in virtually all areas of public and private life, and seemingly insurmountable obstacles to sustained advances in the future.

Focusing on South Korea and other Asian countries, this book presents a critical account of compressed modernity and its key structural risks. These include endemic political crises, distorted industrial governance, widespread labor displacement, worsening intellectual and cultural dependency, rampant environmental and physical hazards, and even abrupt demographic meltdown. However, these risks and contradictions have also stimulated structural reforms and adaptations, opening up the possibility for the kind of radical change that Ulrich Beck described as “the metamorphosis of the world.”

In many Asian societies, the process of modernization often took place in a rapid and highly compressed fashion – not over centuries, as had happened in most Western societies, but in several decades. This enabled Asian societies to achieve high levels of economic growth very quickly, but it also harbored unexpected risks and costs that threatened further development. The very mechanisms and strategies that made their explosive modernization possible tended to produce existentially hazardous consequences in virtually all areas of public and private life, and seemingly insurmountable obstacles to sustained advances in the future.

Focusing on South Korea and other Asian countries, this book presents a critical account of compressed modernity and its key structural risks. These include endemic political crises, distorted industrial governance, widespread labor displacement, worsening intellectual and cultural dependency, rampant environmental and physical hazards, and even abrupt demographic meltdown. However, these risks and contradictions have also stimulated structural reforms and adaptations, opening up the possibility for the kind of radical change that Ulrich Beck described as “the metamorphosis of the world.”

South Korea’s postcolonial history has been replete with dramatic societal transformations through which it has emerged with a fully blown modernity, or compressed modernity. There have arisen the transformation-oriented state, society, and citizenry for which each transformation becomes an ultimate purpose in itself, its processes and means constitute the main sociopolitical order, and the transformation-embedded interests form the core social identity. A distinct mode of citizenship has thereby arisen as transformative contributory rights, namely, effective or legitimate claims to national and social resources, opportunities, and respects that accrue to each citizen’s contributions to the nation’s or society’s collective transformative goals. South Koreans have been exhorted or have exhorted themselves to intensely engage in such collective transformations, so that their citizenship is framed and substantiated by the conditions, processes, and outcomes of such transformative engagements. This book concretely and systematically analyzes how this transformative dynamic has shaped South Koreans’ developmental, social, educational, reproductive, and cultural citizenship.