East Asian Development Reconsidered: A Civilizational Perspective

【摘要】：East Asia has shown remarkable developmental dynamism, as compared to Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa. In fact, any region would be hard-pressed to match East Asia in economic growth and structural change. East Asia has grown in population, production and trade to become the world's biggest regional economy. This noticeable development has led some scholars to consider East Asia as entering modernity, following the Western prototype. Yet it is important to point out that the experiences of East Asian countries have been too different to categorize into a single model of development. East Asia is a compact region that nonetheless contains considerable diversity. If East Asia has any unifying trait that sets it apart from the outside world, it is this cultural and institutional interconnection that defines East Asia as a distinct region. The present paper attempts to explore the underlying nature of East Asian development from a civilizational perspective. In particular, I will, first, deal with some of the major issues surrounding the underlying nature of East Asian development, and, then, find out the convergences and divergences between the East Asian and Western development from a civilizational perspective.