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Theorizing Economic Geographies of Asia

Henry Wai-chung YeungDepartment of Geography, National University of Singapore,

1 Arts Link, Singapore [email protected]

George C. S. LinDepartment of Geography, University of Hong Kong,

Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong [email protected]

Abstract: Economic geographies of Asia are highly fascinating, not the least becauseAsia has increasingly emerged as a significant economic player in all spheres of globalcompetition: production, consumption, and circulation. This dynamic mosaic ofeconomic landscapes in Asia was further complicated during the 1997–1998 economiccrisis and thereafter. While some aspects of these economic geographies of Asia havealready received research attention, many complex economic geographic processesin Asia have been undertheorized in the literature. This agenda-setting article makestwo critical observations. First, the theorization of dynamic economic changes inAsia needs to be more critical of economic geography theories developed elsewherein the Anglo-American context. The Asian case may significantly challenge existingtheories in economic geography. Second, certain geographic processes in Asia requirefundamentally new approaches to theorization that may contribute to the develop-ment of broader theories in economic geography. The economic dynamism of Asiahas provided a useful site for the development of theory and empirical understandingin contemporary economic geography. To support our arguments and observa-tions, we discuss the situatedness and specificity of influential theories ofeconomic geography and offer some constructive suggestions for an intellectualagenda for developing new theories in economic geography.

Key words: economic geography, Asia, theory, epistemology, intellectual agenda.

#9702—ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY—VOL. 79 NO. 2—79201-yeung

Economic Geography 79(2): 107–128, 2003.© 2003 Clark University. http://www.clarku.edu/econgeography

The articles in this special issue originated in a special session held at the 98th annual meeting of theAssociation of American Geographers, Los Angeles, 19–23 March 2002. We thank Fulong Wu for co-organizing the session and all presenters for their participation. The submitted papers went through arigorous review process and different rounds of revisions. We are grateful to the authors, numerousreviewers, and editorial board members for their cooperation and hard work in putting this issue together.An earlier version of this introductory article was presented as a keynote address at the annualmeeting of the Canadian Association of Geographers, Toronto, Canada, 29 May–1 June 2002. HenryYeung thanks Philip Kelly and Glen Norcliffe for their kind invitation to attend this conference andthe CAG Study Group on Social and Economic Change for funding his travel. David Edgington, thepaper’s discussant, provided useful comments. We also received helpful comments from David Angel,Tim Bunnell, and Adrian Smith. This article was subsequently presented to various audiences in theUnited Kingdom and we owe a great deal to insightful comments from the participants: Raymond Bryant,David Demeritt, Chris Hamnett, Keith Hoggart, and Geoff Wilson, of King’s College London; AshAmin, Emma Mawdsley, Joe Painter, and Janet Townsend, of the University of Durham; and CliveBarnett, Keith Bassett, Tony Hoare, Simon Naylor, Nigel Thrift, and Adam Tickell, of the Universityof Bristol. While we have incorporated their comments as much as possible into this version, none ofthese institutions and individuals should be responsible for any shortcomings of this article.

108 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY APRIL 2003

For a long time economic geographershave almost taken for granted that theoriesemerging from geographic studies of SiliconValley or the City of London have been natu-ralized unequivocally as what may be termed“mainstream economic geography”—theinfluential core of Anglo-American economicgeography.1 One needs only to glancethrough recent major collections ofeconomic geography published in English(e.g., Bryson, Henry, Keeble, and Martin1999; Clark, Feldman, and Gertler 2000;Sheppard and Barnes 2000) to reinforce thepoint that an overwhelming majority of thechapters tend to address theoretical andempirical issues specific to only a handful ofadvanced industrialized economies (seeYeung 2002a). This heavy concentration ofeconomic geography theories in relation totheir sites of production and disseminationhas certainly shaped the directions ofresearch in economic geography in manyother countries and/or regions, albeit eachat a different pace of diffusion and adoption.Studies of economic geography of otherlocalities have not only tended to followthe “templates” that have been institution-alized and legitimized by this mainstreameconomic geography, but also have earnedthe strange title as some kind of “regionalgeography.” In this vein, geographic researchon industrial locations in China and export-

processing zones in Malaysia is often labeledas “Asian geography”; studies of the informalsector in Africa, as “African geography”; andinvestigations of gender relations in LatinAmerican labor markets, as “Latin Americangeography.” Potter (2001, 423; originalitalics) vividly described this bias in economicgeography as follows:

Those who work outside the Euro-NorthAmerican orbit are excluded, or at best margin-alized, from the specialisms which see them-selves making up the core of the discipline ofGeography. Quite simply, they are regardedas “ists” of the Latin American, Caribbean,African or Asian variety. If they endeavour tobe comprehensive in their consideration ofother regions of the globe, then they mayqualify as the ultimate “ists”: as full-blown“developmentalists”!

Such geographic specificity inconstructing both leading theories ineconomic geography and the “other geogra-phies” or “distant geographies” perhapsshould not be surprising in light of the insti-tutionalization of geography as an academicdiscipline (see Johnston 1997; Barnes 2000;Scott 2000). Few economic geographershave attempted to contextualize this speci-ficity in the epistemology of economic geog-raphy and to offer suggestions for whatmay be done to redress it (see Yeung 2001a;Olds and Poon 2002; Smith 2002). In thisarticle, we focus on a particular historical-geographic moment—the rise of Asia—andoutline our vision for the development oftheory in economic geography emanatingfrom a rapidly growing number of geogra-phers working on the dynamic economictransformations of Asia. We term this effort“theorizing economic geographies of Asia.”The plurality of the term represents a delib-erate attempt to theorize the diverse expe-riences and trajectories of economic trans-formations in Asia. There is thus no singulareconomic geography of Asia but, rather,multiple pathways and diversities. By thesame token, there should be many modelsand theories of these transformations ineconomic geography.


1 We use the term economic geography to referto a discipline that deals with “the nature of worldareas in their direct influence upon the produc-tion of commodities and the movement of goods”(Gotz, quoted in Barnes 2001c, 531) or what Scott(2000, 484) described as “the spatial and loca-tional foundations of economic life.” Economicgeography supposedly has a wide spectrum ofsubjects, ranging from agrarian and pastoraleconomies to resource utilization and changes inland use. However, we have observed that majortheoretical advancements in economic geographyin recent decades have been overwhelminglyfocused on the transformation of industrialeconomies in North America and WesternEurope. We propose that economic geographersneed to move forward along the lines of recon-structing a kind of global economic geographiesthat are broader in perspective and more inclu-sive in both sectoral and geographic terms.

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This article has two interrelated aims.First, we offer a brief critique of leadingtheoretical perspectives in Anglo-Americaneconomic geography. We identify theirinherent limits in relation to their analyt-ical focus on historically and geographi-cally specific industrial transformations.Second, we outline our advocacy for moretheorization in future research on economicgeographies of Asia. In steering the direc-tion and content of this special issue, wewere particularly driven by two concurrenttrends—one intellectual and another empir-ical—that we believe will powerfully shapethe future of economic geography. On theintellectual front, our efforts and that of thecontributors to this special issue echo therecent institutional turn in economic geog-raphy from nationalistic economic geographyto global economic geographies. Traditionaleconomic geography has been concernedmainly with explaining patterns andprocesses within national space-economies.When such work is done within the Anglo-American countries, the subsequent modelsand theories are deemed universally trueand applicable. More recently, however,an increasing number of economic geogra-phers have begun to question seriously thesituatedness of theories and knowledge ofthe global economy. This new kind ofeconomic geography has become muchmore inclusive and open to ideas and opin-ions conceived outside a few dominant cores.This turn clearly supports Taylor’s (1996)broader call for abandoning the “embeddedstatism” in the social sciences to open upto the new intellectual spaces of globaleconomic geographies. It is interesting tonote that this opening up in geography hasbeen well recognized by scholars from othersocial scientific disciplines. For example,political theorist Martin Shaw (2000, 73–74;original italics) argued, in the context ofgeography’s role in globalization debates,that

[t]he disciplines of anthropology, geographyand international relations have shown greateropenness to global understanding thaneconomics, politics and sociology, the histor-

ically defining fields of social science.Interestingly, the former are all fields in whichhistorically the national-international nexuswas formerly not just a methodological bias,but more or less explicitly constitutive. Theopenness of both social anthropology and geog-raphy to globalization debates follows theirabandonment of nineteenth- and early twen-tieth-century nationalist and imperialistconstructions of their subjects. These subjectsunderwent theoretical and ideological trans-formations earlier in the post-war period,which have prepared the way for the recog-nition of globalization.

In redressing the thematic (industrial) andgeographic (Anglo-American) specificity inmainstream theories of economic geography,we aim to develop what Slater (1999, 67)called “reverse discourses” in order for non-Western work to “theorize back” at the West.These discourses should constitute “coun-terposed imaginations and visions emanatingfrom different sites of experience and subjec-tivity.” Similarly, Appadurai (1999, 237)argued for a conversation about and an imag-ination of research “to which scholars fromother societies and traditions of inquiry couldbring their own ideas about what counts asnew knowledge and about what communi-ties of judgment and accountability theymight judge to be central in the pursuit ofsuch knowledge.”

This last point relates to the secondconcurrent trend in the empirical realm thathas made the economic geographies ofAsia highly fascinating. Asia has increasinglyemerged as a significant economic player indifferent spheres of global competition:production, consumption, and circulation.This dynamic mosaic of economic landscapesin Asia was further complicated during the1997–1998 economic crisis and afterward.Although some aspects of these economicgeographies of Asia have already receivedresearch attention, many complex economicgeographic processes in Asia have beenundertheorized in the geographic literature,which leads to two important possibilitiesfor future research. First, the theorizationof dynamic economic changes in Asia needsto be more critical in adopting economic



geography theories developed elsewherein the Anglo-American context. As shown inthe four articles in this special issue, the“Asian” case can significantly challengeexisting theories in mainstream economicgeography. Second, the economic dynamismand geographic processes in Asia require afundamentally new approach to theorizationthat may contribute to the development ofbroader theories in economic geography.Through this process, we may witness theemergence of new kinds of theories that canaccount for differences and differentiationin global economic geographies—the distin-guishing theme of economic geographyreemphasized by Clark, Feldman, andGertler (2000).

In the remainder of this article, we discussthe situatedness of mainstream theories ofeconomic geography and show how Asia hasbeen theorized in mainstream economicgeography. We then examine how economicgeographers may move from straightforwardapplications of “Western” theories in main-stream economic geography to the criticalinterrogation of these theories and the devel-opment of new theories through carefullygrounded empirical research. We alsooffer some constructive suggestions for anintellectual agenda for developing new theo-ries in economic geography.

Geographies of EconomicGeography: The Situatedness ofTheories

We have now been well told by historiansof economic geography that dominant theo-ries have always emerged from particularhistorical and geographic contexts (seeBarnes 1996; Scott 2000). From locationalmodels to spatial divisions of labor and fromflexible specialization to local embedded-ness, leading theories of economic geographyhave their peculiar histories and geographies.Their histories are very much outcomes ofthe conscious efforts of individual economicgeographers in the context of creativetensions among different “paradigms” (seeBarnes and Curry 1983; Sidaway 1997; Thrift

and Walling 2000; Barnes 2001b). In thisand the next sections, we attempt to answertwo related questions to explore furtherthe situatedness of dominant theories ineconomic geography. First, why areeconomic geography theories, from thequantitative revolution and Marxism to flex-ible specialization and the recent “culturalturn,” so dominant as if they were universaltheories capable of explaining diverseeconomic geographic processes? Yet, whyare they so little used in the economicgeographic studies of other regions? Second,why have theoretical insights that haveemerged from area studies and regionalgeography failed so far to capture theimaginations of mainstream economic geog-raphers?

There is a noticeable gap between theobsession of some mainstream economicgeographers with the universalization oftheir Western-based theories and the preoc-cupation of regional geographers with thetask of meticulously sorting out thegeographic specificities of particular coun-tries or regions. We argue that this gap hasbeen the consequence of historically specificcircumstances, including the legacy of earliercolonialism, or what Hudson (1977, 12)referred to as the interests of European andAmerican imperialism in world commerceand territorial acquisition (see also Barnes2001c, 530); provincialism during and afterthe Vietnam War; linguistic and culturalbarriers; and an intellectual environmentthat was dominated, until recently, by theEnlightenment and modernization school ofthought. The persistence of this bifurca-tion in epistemology and methodology hasled to the phenomenon of “the tragedy ofthe commons” in economic geography—theories that are derived from specific histor-ical geographies become universalizedamong the former group of economic geog-raphers, and descriptive specificities ofregional geographies have little generality tooffer to geographic studies in other coun-tries and/or regions. We believe that such atragedy of the commons has severelyhindered the growth of a new kind ofeconomic geography, known as global



economic geographies, that must be built oncomparative understandings of economicgeographic processes emerging from andinterconnecting different regions of theglobal economy.

In Table 1, we summarize several leadingtheoretical perspectives in mainstreameconomic geography that rose to promi-nence during the past two decades or so.

In constructing this table, we did not intendto “fit” different economic geography theo-ries (and their proponents) into specificboxes. Rather, the table should be read asa heuristic device for the purpose of thisarticle. Furthermore, we did not intendthe table or the finality and “paradigmatic”nature of these theoretical themes to becomplete and all-inclusive. We regret that


Table 1

Leading Theoretical Perspectives in Economic Geographyand Their Historical Geographies

Geographic SpecificitiesTheoretical Perspectives Period of Prominence Key Authors of Research

1. Location theory and thebehavioral location model

2. Spatial divisions of labor

3. Flexible specialization andnew industrial spaces

4. Networks and embedded-ness

5. Regional agglomerationsand clusters

6. Regulation theory andgovernance

7. Cultural economies

1960s–1970s Brian Berry United StatesPeter Haggett United KingdomPeter DickenF. E. I. Hamilton

1980s Doreen Massey United KingdomGordon Clark United States

1980s–1990s Allen Scott United StatesMichael Storper ItalyDavid Harvey GermanyRichard FloridaMeric GertlerAndrew Sayer

1990s Nigel Thrift United KingdomPeter Dicken EuropeGernot GrabherPhilip CookeAsh Amin

mid-1990s Michael Storper United StatesAllen Scott United KingdomPhilip Cooke EuropeKevin MorganAnders MalmbergPeter MaskellRay HudsonJohn Lovering

mid-1990s Jamie Peck FranceAdam Tickell United KingdomErik Swyngedouw Europe

mid-1990s Nigel Thrift United KingdomAsh Amin United StatesErica Schoenberger and CanadaLinda McDowell (to a lesser extent)Trevor BarnesJ.-K. Gibson-GrahamRoger LeeJane Wills


certain key histories of (mainstream)economic geography have not been includedin this table and the text. For example, onemay notice that most theoretical perspec-tives in Table 1 deal with industries, ratherthan rural economies, natural resources andland use, financial markets, developmentprocesses, and so on. Yet largely for reasonssuggested later, these theoretical perspec-tives are the most influential in contempo-rary economic geography as if they consti-tute the core of economic geography.Although a full critique of this industrial biasin contemporary economic geography isbeyond the scope of this article, it is clearthat even within Anglo-American economicgeography, there is a significant marginal-ization of research into spheres of economicactivities other than industries. This obser-vation, we believe, has a lot to do with thehistorical and geographic specificity of thesetheoretical perspectives.

Bearing in mind these caveats, we pointout that none of the major proponents ofthese theories of economic geography orig-inated from outside the Anglo-Americancountries. Neither do most of them conducttheir empirical research outside theseadvanced industrialized economies. Thissweeping generalization points to thegeographic specificities of these leading ordominant theories—they have been reallyleading and dominant among English-speaking economic geographers (see alsoOlds and Poon 2002). Location theory, forexample, originates from what Barnes(2001a, 546) termed “epistemologicaltheorizing,” which assumes “that spatialeconomic phenomena could be expressedin an explicitly abstract, formal, and ratio-nalist vocabulary and directly connected tothe empirical world.” This assumption allowsfor location theory to be universally gener-alizable from one geographic site to another.We should therefore expect it to be wellapplied in research on the economic geog-raphy of Asia. The reality, however, seemsto work on the contrary. With the exceptionof G. William Skinner’s (1964) influentialwork on marketing and social structure inrural China (see Cartier 2001 for a critique),

much of the research in economic geographyin Asia during the 1960s and the 1970sremained descriptive and aligned with areastudies and regional geography (Spencer1954; Spate and Learmonth 1967; Ginsburgand Brush 1958; McGee 1967; Wheatley1971; Murphey 1953; McGee and Yeung1977).

Subsequent critiques of location theoryand its variant in the behavioral locationalmodel by such radical economic geographersas Massey (1973, 1984) and Walker andStorper (1981) led to the development ofalternative theories on how to explain spatialeconomic phenomena. On the basis of theirempirical studies of (de)industrialization inthe United Kingdom and the United States,Clark (1981), Massey (1984), and Storperand Walker (1989) arrived at their respec-tive theories of spatial divisions of labor andspatial switching by capital (see Table 1).These theories attempted to explain why(de)industrialization occurred in some butnot all regions in the United Kingdom andthe United States. The objective of theproject was to specify the interdependentlinks between social processes of capitalistproduction and the spatial structures anddistribution of industry, work, and classes.Although these theoretical perspectives onspatial divisions of labor generated muchheated and exciting debates in subsequentstudies of industrial restructuring andspecific localities, most of these studiesremained grounded in the industrial land-scapes of the Anglo-American countries.Given their prominence in the mainstreameconomic geography of the 1980s, we wouldexpect these perspectives to be universallyapplied to other research and empiricalcontexts. To the best of our knowledge,however, there has not been a significantdiffusion of these theories of economic geog-raphy to geographic studies of other regionsand countries that are concurrently experi-encing dramatic processes of industrializa-tion, economic restructuring, and ruraldevelopment. This observation is certainlyapplicable to studies of the economicgeography of Asia, although it is equallyinteresting to note that some Asian



economies experienced unprecedentedprocesses of industrialization during exactlythe same periods—the 1970s and the 1980s.Mainstream economic geography thus failsto extend its analytical lens to examinegeographic industrialization—let alone otheraspects of economic transformations (e.g.,rural changes and deprivation)—in otherdeveloping regions of the world economy.In the next section we outline what theo-retical insights emerged from other socialscientific studies of industrialization in Asiaduring these two decades.

Into the 1990s, mainstream economicgeography certainly experienced a kind ofintellectual renaissance through which aplethora of complementary theoreticalperspectives were proposed—flexiblespecialization, networks and embeddedness,agglomerations and clusters, and regulationand governance. As is summarized inTable 1, these perspectives were concernedwith why certain territorial ensembles—whether regions or new industrial spaces—emerged as the motors of growth in a partic-ular country. It is no historical coincidencethat during the late 1980s and the 1990s,several regions in the United States andsome European economies became theleading engines of growth in the globaleconomy. These theories vividly mirroredthe historical and geographic specificities ofthe global space-economy. On the basis ofhis empirical analysis of the growth ofhigh-tech industries in California, Italy, andFrance, Scott (1988) argued that a majorshift was under way in contemporary capi-talist industries—from mass production ofthe Fordist kind toward a post-Fordist formof flexible specialization and customizationof production. These highly geographicallyspecific observations led Scott (1988, 4; origi-nal italics) to conclude that “a series of newindustrial spaces had come into existenceand were beginning to form important alter-native centers of capitalist accumulationbased on a strong social division of labor,proliferations of small to medium-sizedindustrial establishments, and the markedreagglomeration of production.” AlthoughScott’s conclusions were not entirely new

vis-á-vis Piore and Sabel’s (1984) earlierstudy of the Second Industrial Divide, hisarguments for the rise of new industrialspaces did make a major impact on researchin economic geography up to the mid-1990s(see a review in Yeung 1994).

New theoretical insights were alsorequired to explain the geographic organi-zation of production through firms andnetworks in these so-called new industrialspaces. Geographic agglomeration, prox-imity, processes of tacit knowledge andlearning, and cooperative networks wereconceptual categories proposed within thisgenre of theoretical and empirical researchthat has come to dominate much of Anglo-American economic geography since the late1980s. More recent theoretical work on“relational assets,” agglomeration economies,and institutional governance in the UnitedKingdom and the United States has rein-forced the resurgence of the “regional world”of production as the dominant researchtheme in mainstream economic geography(see Yeung 2000). This resurgence, however,must again be situated in its peculiar histor-ical and geographic contexts. Flexibleproduction methods and agglomerationeconomies have been in existence forcenturies, as found in craft industries and soon. The rise of these production methodsand geographic economies to intellectualprominence within Anglo-Americaneconomic geography must have somethingto do with the “crisis of Fordism” duringwhich an earlier wave of methods of massproduction and economies of scale could nolonger maintain a competitive edge withincumbent firms and corporations inadvanced industrialized economies. Thiscrisis, nevertheless, can also be understoodfrom the historical perspective of theimmense Japanese challenge to Anglo-American industrial might during the late1970s and the 1980s (see the next section).These new theories of economic geog-raphy thus emerged as an unintendedresponse to historical urgency—to explainthe downfall of Fordist firms and indus-tries and the rise of new propulsive indus-tries (e.g., in Silicon Valley and elsewhere).



An important question remains: why did notthese important and innovative theories ineconomic geography emerge from researchon Fordism’s competitors—Japan and thenewly industrialized economies (NIEs) inAsia? Why did we not have economicgeography theories that examined thecrisis of Fordism and the rise of newindustrial spaces in relation to the growingeconomic might of Japan and the NIEs? Wereturn to this question in the next section.

The geographic context of these theoriesin economic geography is equally intriguing.Two observations are critical here. First,most theoretical work was based on empir-ical studies of a few selected regions inadvanced industrialized economies in theUnited States (e.g., Silicon Valley and Route128) and Europe (e.g., the M4 corridorand Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, theThird Italy, Baden-Württemberg inGermany, and the Scientific City in France).This spatial selectivity of empirical casesplaces an upper limit on the applicabilityof these theories even to different regionsof the same country, let alone countries withcontrasting forms of capitalism (Clegg andRedding 1990; Whitley 1999; Stark andBruszt 2001). The geographic specificity ofthese theories explains why certain (propul-sive) industries are privileged in theirexplanatory matrixes and why other impor-tant issues in economic geography aresidestepped. While flexible specializationmay be crucial to understanding theeconomic transformation of the UnitedStates during the 1980s, one may surelyargue that the transformation of agrarianeconomies under the auspices of neolib-eral economic policies may be equally signif-icant to the economic geographic under-standing of many developing economies. Wedo not deny that a less-visible community ofeconomic geographers, or those who havebeen branded as “development geographers”by the mainstream, have been studying thelatter phenomenon. But their influence ineconomic geography remains limitedprecisely because mainstream economicgeographers during the past two decadeswere narrowly focusing on a few industries

and regions in a handful of advancedeconomies. Second and relatedly, mostleading proponents of these theories comefrom a few prestigious research departmentsin the United States and the UnitedKingdom. This geographic situatedness ofauthorship does not automatically invalidatethe general applicability of their theories.But it does explain why certain theoriesemerge and become influential throughmore intensive interactions among like-minded scholars and research activities inthese institutions. Their applicability to othergeographic contexts needs to be interrogatedand validated through carefully designedempirical research (see the articles in thisspecial issue).

The situatedness of theories of economicgeography is perhaps best illustrated bythe recent “cultural turn” in economic geog-raphy toward a kind of “new economicgeographies” that is much more reflexiveand open in its nature and subject matter(Thrift and Olds 1996; Lee and Wills 1997;Yeung forthcoming). Indeed, Thrift and Olds(1996, 313) argued that we need to “makea space for new kinds of economic geographythat can supplement or even replace theolder forms of economic geography.” In thisprocess, Wills and Lee (1997, xvii) stated,we must appreciate how to “contextualizerather than to undermine the economic, bylocating it within the cultural, social andpolitical relations through which it takes onmeaning and direction.” According to Barnes(2001a, 551), this mode of “hermeneutictheorizing” differs significantly from the“epistemological theorizing” manifested inthe quantitative revolution because it “[1]rejects fixed and final foundations . . . [2]promotes experimentation and engagementwith radically different vocabularies, pressingthem as far as they will go . . . [3] cultivatescritical self-awareness of social and histor-ical location and recognizes its influenceon knowledge . . . [and] [4] is interested inkeeping the conversation going.” Preciselybecause of the inherent reflexivity and open-ness in the new economic geographies, it isvery difficult to summarize diverse strandsof theories and empirical findings. At the



least, new economic geographers have refig-ured the economic through an excursion intothe cultural and the political. As Barnes(1999, 17) noted, the basic explanatory cate-gories become “social power, culturalidentity and institutional situatedness ratherthan economic ownership, universal defin-itions and individual agency.” Severalfeatures of the new economic geographiesinclude understanding the social embed-dedness of economic action, mappingshifting identities of economic actors, andexploring the role of context in explainingeconomic behavior (see a review in Barnes2001a; Yeung 2001b; forthcoming).

To sum up our sympathetic critique,mainstream economic geography, which wasdeveloped in the Anglo-American countries,has experienced tremendous internal trans-formations and metamorphism during thepast four decades. Its theoretical core hasmoved from universalizing location theoryduring the quantitative revolution togeographically specific theories of territorialdevelopment during the 1980s and the 1990sand, recently, to the more reflexive culturalturn that champions heightened sensitivityto the positionality of knowledge and theo-ries and the context in which these theo-ries emerge. This unprecedented intellec-tual movement in the epistemology ofeconomic geography provides an excitingand important opportunity for us to recon-sider what theories of economic geographymay be if we situate these theories in specificregions beyond the Anglo-American coun-tries (see the articles in this issue). Moresignificant, we may have arrived at a timewhen new kinds of theories of economicgeography are needed to account for thediversity of experience and transformationsin the global economy. In this way, we maybe able to construct genuine global economicgeographies that are attuned to the histor-ical and geographic specificities of our theo-ries and yet are capable of producing a muchbroader and comparative understanding ofdramatic economic transformations in thenew millennium. Before we theorize theeconomic geographies of Asia, it is impor-

tant for us to situate the region in theemerging global economic geographies.

Situating Asia in GlobalEconomic Geographies

As a prelude to our advocacy, we arguethat if we look seriously beyond NorthAmerica and Western Europe, we canundoubtedly find innovative theoreticalinsights from social science studies ofother regions. Although these theoreticalinsights are no less historically and geograph-ically specific than those championed inmainstream economic geography, few havereally originated from the work of economicgeographers or human geographers ingeneral. Instead, these theoretical insightshave emerged mostly from developmentalstudies, anthropology and sociology, andpolitical economy. The situated nature oftheoretical insights gathered from intensivestudies of specific countries and/or regionsshould not be surprising if we take theoriesas hermeneutics or discursive formationsthat must be firmly grounded in materialrealities. These realities, however, differfrom one historical moment to another andfrom one geographic setting to another. Forexample, whereas studies of Latin Americahave given rise to dependency theory, socialscience studies of Asia have similarly gener-ated many important theoretical insights,some of which have been followed up in therecent literature on economic geography:(1) the flying geese hypothesis (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett 1998; Edgington andHayter 2000); (2) the new international divi-sion of labor (Frobel, Heinrichs, andKreye 1980; Henderson 1989); (3) the devel-opmental state (Douglass 1994; Clark andKim 1995; Brohman 1996; B.-G. Park 1998;Yeung 1999; Hsu and Cheng 2002); (4) socialcapital (Leung 1993; Hsing 1998; Yeung1998c; Olds 2001a); and, more recently,(5) transnationalism (Mitchell 1995; Oldsand Yeung 1999; Ley 1999; Hsu andSaxenian 2000; Yeoh and Chang 2001; Zhouand Tseng 2001; G. C. S. Lin 2002a; Ma andCartier 2003).



It is important to note, however, that instark contrast to such theories as spatial divi-sions of labor and flexible specialization,these theoretical interrogations that aregrounded in Asia have not yet made a signif-icant impact on the development of main-stream economic geography described in theprevious section. Instead, mainstreameconomic geography produces the “right”kind of theories, emanating from specificcases in the Anglo-American countries thatremain to be tested as universal principlesthat are equally applicable to other, moremarginal, regions of the global economy.Economic geographers fail to heedAppadurai’s (1999, 230) telling warning, inthe context of area studies, that “the moremarginal regions of the world are not simplyproducers of data for the theory mills ofthe North.” How, then, has this highlyunequal division of labor in research oneconomic geography emerged? We analyzethis phenomenon in relation to three groupsof geographers: (1) those who have engagedin mainstream enquiry, (2) those who haveengaged in area studies, and (3) those whohave interrogated mainstream theories onthe basis of the Asian experience.

Historically, Asia—just like Africa, Russia,and Eastern Europe—has never reallyattracted serious attention in mainstreameconomic geography, despite the discipline’scelebrated interest in spatial differentia-tion and uneven development. Even if it did,Asia was treated as “the others” in “the FarEast,” previously a market to be opened upby colonialism and now posing a challengeto the industrial might in Europe and NorthAmerica (see Amsden 2001). This tendencytoward what Said (1978) termed“Orientalism” is no less significant ineconomic geography than in the humanitiesand the other social sciences. The real differ-ence, however, rests with the fact thatAsia, along with Africa and Latin America,has been well studied by developmentspecialists outside mainstream economicgeography. Development is clearly centralto the studies of economic geography andhas always been one of the most excitingtopics to university students of economic

geography in North America and WesternEurope. Ironically, development geographyhas been largely constituted outside main-stream economic geography, in which over-whelming attention was devoted to indus-trial transformation in a few advancedeconomies and/or regions. This tensionbetween development geography andeconomic geography has effectively margin-alized, if not excluded, Asia on the researchagenda of economic geography.

Meanwhile, the empirical landscape ofAsia has undergone dramatic transforma-tions since the 1970s, when Japan began toemerge as the leading competitor and alter-native to the Anglo-American model ofindustrial capitalism. Ezra Vogel’s (1979)influential book Japan as Number One waswidely circulated in major intellectual andpolicy circles (that are often based inWashington, D.C., or the two Cambridges—one in England and the other in NewEngland). Coupled with the emergence ofAsian NIEs and the 1973 oil crisis, the riseof Japan triggered what was later concep-tualized as flexibility, post-Fordism, andglobalization. It is interesting that thesocial scientists who first realized the indis-pensable role of Japan and Asia in their theo-rization of global economic change camelargely from area studies (Vogel 1989; Frank1998), political science (Johnson 1982;Amsden 1989; Wade 1990), and economicsociology (Hamilton and Biggart 1988;Redding 1990).

More specifically, Japan was signifi-cantly featured in Piore and Sabel’s (1984)The Second Industrial Divide and Womack,Jones, and Roos’s (1990) The Machines ThatChanged the World. Both MIT (Cambridge,Mass.) products have fundamentally shapedthe subsequent debates about America’s and,by extension, the world’s industrial future.During the same period (the 1980s and early1990s), flexible specialization attractedsubstantial attention from economic geog-raphers (see Table 1). As we noted earlier,much of this work was inspired by empiricalstudies in California, the Third Italy, andother European regions, with limited applic-ability to the Asian context (see Patchell



1993a, 1993b; Eng 1997). In comparisonwith other major social sciences and with afew exceptions (e.g., Dicken 2003; Floridaand Kenney 1990; Angel 1994), mainstreameconomic geography has certainly missedthe boat in exerting its intellectual influenceon major policy debates in the United Statesand Europe about the imminent economicchallenge from Asia and elsewhere (cf. Reich1991; Tyson 1993; World Bank 1993).

Vogel’s influential warning in Japan asNumber One, nevertheless, was shortlived. With the downturn of the Japaneseeconomy since the early 1990s and the Asianfinancial crisis during 1997–1998, few peoplenow take seriously “the Asian miracles”and the dawn of “the Asian century.” Indeconstructing “the myth of the Asian mira-cles” and the recent Asian economic crisis,mainstream economic geographers onceagain have failed to assume intellectual lead-ership in the broader social sciences.Curiously, it is the economists and theirpolitical science counterparts who havespearheaded the debates about the down-fall of Japan, the Asian economic crisis(Krugman 1994, 1998; Radelet and Sachs1998; Wade and Veneroso 1998), and thealleged rise of China as a threat (Vogel 1989;Goodhart and Xu 1996; Gertz 2000). Asking“Where have all the geographers gone?,”Kelly, Olds, and Yeung (2001, x–xi) notedthe absence of economic geographers indebates on the origins and impact of theAsian economic crisis. This lacuna is unfor-tunate because the crisis has much to offerto our understanding of the destabilizationof a global financial architecture that isessentially built on the Bretton Woods insti-tutions. The sheer scale and scope of thecrisis also provided a unique case forreworking the fundamental nature andfuture of global capitalism and its powerfulinstitutions (see Stiglitz and Yusuf 2001;Wade 2002).

If mainstream economic geographycannot contribute much to our under-standing of the complex economic land-scapes of Asia (other than making availablesituated theories for superficial testing andstraightforward applications elsewhere), can

we turn to area studies specialists (oftenknown as development geographers), whomay offer such an understanding from amore grounded perspective? Asia has longbeen studied by human and economic geog-raphers who are interested in what culturalanthropologist Geertz (1973) termed a “thickdescription” of the land and the peopleoutside Europe and North America. Thesegeographers include indigenous scholarsliving in the regions and Western scholarswho are interested in Asia. The former grouphas as sizable a population as their coun-terpart in Western Europe and NorthAmerica. For instance, in the 1970s, over6,000 professional geographers were workingand teaching in socialist China, a size similarto if not greater than that in the UnitedStates (Pannell 1980, 176). Today, theseChinese professional geographers are all full-time researchers or university professors onthe payroll of the state. Unfortunately,indigenous geographers in Asian countrieshave never been able to make any signifi-cant impact on mainstream enquiry ineconomic geography, largely because of thelinguistic and cultural barriers as well as theirdifferent methodological traditions that haveseverely hindered meaningful scholarlyexchanges with mainstream economic geog-raphers. On the other hand, Westernscholars who are interested in Asia have beenin the minority, preoccupied with sortingout the facts about a mysterious region inthe “Far East” for the occasional curiosityof Western academics and continuousstrategic and economic interests.

With the exception of perhaps the flyinggeese model, studies of the economicgeography of Japan have never occupied anyprime position equivalent to the global signif-icance of its national economy—not even inthe flexible-specialization debate of thelate 1980s and early 1990s.2 Geographicstudies of China and India, whose combined


2 We regret that no article on Japan is includedin this special issue, primarily because of insuf-ficient submissions. See recent work by Peck andMiyamachi (1994), Aoyama (2000), and Patchell(2002).


population constitutes nearly half the peopleof the world, have not generated researchpublished in English-language media that isanywhere near the global significance oftheir population (see also Potter 2001). Asystematic search of articles published in thetop 10 international journals in human geog-raphy from 1971 to 2000 found that only66 articles, less than 1 percent of the total,dealt with the geography of China (G. C. S.Lin 2002b, 1813). Most of these studies wereempirical and “had shallow roots, receivedlittle nourishment and predictably bore fewand unappetizing fruits” (Leeming 1980,218). It has only been recently that geogra-phers who are interested in China haveventured to formulate some contextuallysensitive theories (Fan, Ma, Pannell, andTan forthcoming). The article by Yu Zhouand Tong Xin in this special issue thus signif-icantly contributes to the critique of the liter-ature on innovative regions that has primarilyfocused on localized endogenous factors insustaining innovation and regional develop-ment. Through their intensive research ina high-tech cluster in Beijing, Zhou and Xinfound important interactive and interde-pendent relations between local Chinesefirms and global corporations in the jointdevelopment and commercialization of newinformation technologies. Their workcomplements the growing literature ineconomic geography on the critical impor-tance of nonlocal and decentralized learningand innovations for understanding regionaldevelopment (e.g., Bunnell and Coe 2001;MacKinnon, Cumbers, and Chapman 2002).

A relatively small group of geographershave managed to develop original theoret-ical insights from their grounded studies ofthe Asian experience. Through their work,some grounded theories have emerged thathave proved to be influential in certainsubfields of human geography and, to alesser extent, economic geography. A promi-nent example of such grounded theories isTerry McGee’s (1967, 1971) model of theSoutheast Asian city (see also Armstrong andMcGee 1985). In this morphological modelof the internal structure of the city, McGeeargued that different urban-economic activ-

ities have different spatial requirements andlocational characteristics. For example, theinformal sector tends to be located in theinner ring of the city. McGee’s model hassubsequently been well applied to thegeographic study of other Third World cities.More crucially, it originated from empir-ical studies of such cities; it was not devel-oped from studying the internal structuresof advanced industrialized countries andthen applied universally to Third Worldcities (akin to “epistemological theorizing”described earlier). Despite its generality instudies of urbanization and urban economicactivities, McGee’s model regrettably hadonly a limited impact on mainstreameconomic geography of the 1970s and 1980s,which was preoccupied with radical Marxismand post-Fordism.

More recently, geographic studies oftransnational business activities and transna-tionalism represent a significant attempt tobring grounded theories of economic geogra-phies of Asia back into mainstream economicgeography (Leung 1993; Mitchell 1995;Yeung 1997; Zhou 1998; Hsu and Saxenian2000; Olds 2001a). In particular, this bodyof literature on economic geography hasmanaged to blend into its theoretical frame-work two important ingredients—a specialblend that is well grounded in the Asiancontext. First, it has brought to its analyticalforefront the conceptual lenses of networksand embeddedness. Although these concep-tual categories did not originate fromeconomic geographic studies of Asia, it isequally important to note that mainstreameconomic geographers did not develop themeither. Indeed, these conceptual categorieswere first proposed by economic sociologists(Polanyi 1944; Granovetter 1985) and subse-quently introduced into and appropriatedby mainstream economic geography duringthe debate on flexible specialization (seeDicken and Thrift 1992). It is true that main-stream economic geography has furtherenhanced the theoretical sophistication ofboth conceptual categories through majordebates on industrial districts (Asheim 2000),the spatial transfer of technologies (Gertler2001), organizational change (Yeung 1994,



1998a; Schoenberger 1997), and institu-tionalism in urban and regional development(Amin 1999). But then it must be equallyvalid to argue that economic geographicstudies of Asia during the 1990s significantlyadvanced the spatialization of these concep-tual categories by theorizing the complexinteractions among business networks,ethnicity/culture, embeddedness, and histor-ical specificity. This effort to theorize thespatial rudiments of networks and embed-dedness is no less significant than that ofdebates on industrial districts and so on (seeTable 1).

Second, economic geographic studies ofAsian diasporas and their worldwide websin Europe and North America have madesignificant inroads into the debate on glob-alization. In many ways, this body of litera-ture has contributed to enhancing economicgeography’s growing visibility in social scien-tific debates on globalization. Once again,geographers have not been well representedamong leading scholars of globalization: onecan literally think of only two works by geog-raphers—Peter Dicken’s (2003) Global Shiftand David Harvey’s (1989) The Conditionof Postmodernity—that have representeddifferent kinds of geographic takes onglobalization and thereby have attracteddifferent sorts of audiences. Economic geog-raphers, however, have something signifi-cant to say about the geographic specifici-ties of globalization in relation to the origins,processes, and outcomes of globalization (seeAmin 1997; Yeung 1998b, 2002b; Kelly 1999;Peck and Yeung 2003).3 Put in this perspec-tive, economic geography research on Asiandiasporas and their global networks

augments well the key mission of main-stream economic geography to ground glob-alization processes in specific territorialensembles and formations. It helps not onlyto demystify the “faceless” representationsof globalization by its ultra-supporters (e.g.,Ohmae 1990), but also to make economicgeographers aware of the highly unevengeographic outcomes of processes associ-ated with globalization. To us, thisgeographic research on the globalization ofAsia is worth as much intellectual capital asis other equally worthy research on global-ization in economic geography on changingurban and regional governance (Brenner1999) and the organizations of economicactivities (Dicken, Kelly, Olds, and Yeung2001).

Theories Wanted! AnIntellectual Agenda forEconomic Geographies of Asia

We are at a critical juncture in economicgeography. There are unprecedented oppor-tunities for mainstream economic geogra-phers to give up our long-standing Euro-American-centric bias and develop theoriesthat account for differences and differenti-ation in an era of accelerated globalization(cf. McGee 1991; Olds 2001b; Yeung 2001a).Although concerns about national securityremain large, especially after the September11, 2001, tragedy, earlier warped provin-cialism can no longer inhibit economic geog-raphers who actively study the rapid trans-formation of regional economies in Asia.Major funding agencies, such as the NationalScience Foundation in the United States,the Economic and Social Research Councilin the United Kingdom, and the SocialSciences and Humanities Research Councilin Canada, have recently supported agrowing number of research projects onAsia. Many leading universities in Anglo-America have actively recruited geographersto work on Asia. On the other side of thePacific, most of the Asian economies haverearticulated themselves actively and openlyto take part in the theater of global capital


3 The recent special issue of EconomicGeography (2002) on geographies of globaleconomic change represents an important mile-stone in this endeavor to put geographers backon the intellectual table of globalization studies.The special issue originated from the 2001 Leirconference (http://www.clarku.edu/leir/index.shtml) funded by the U.S. National ScienceFoundation, to rethink how to build theories ofgeographies of global economic change and tounveil the theoretical and methodologicalobstacles to the process of theory building.


accumulation. Indigenous geographers inAsia have made special attempts to over-come linguistic and cultural barriers as theyforge bilateral scholarly linkages andresearch collaborations with geographers inthe English-speaking world. Intellectually,universalism as one of the defining featuresof the Enlightenment and modernizationschool of thought has given way to a moreopen-ended, plural, and contextually sensi-tive perspective on changing geographies indifferent world regions. Overall, the insti-tutional setting that previously separated theregional geography of Asia from mainstreameconomic geography in the Anglo-Americancountries has undergone a profound trans-formation in a direction favorable to thedevelopment of global economic geogra-phies.

Indeed, we are beginning to witness sucha change in the direction of mainstreameconomic geography—more inclusive qualitycontrol in the academic production of knowl-edge and more intellectual activities orga-nized outside the Anglo-American centers(see Barkema, 2001 for managementstudies). It is now incumbent on economicgeographers who are interested in Asia tomove from area studies to engage moreactively with mainstream theoretical(re)constructions and interrogations. In thissense, there is a need for two intellectualmovements. First, we must avoid uncriticalapplications of “Western” theories in main-stream economic geography as if these theo-ries were universally true. We need to inter-rogate these theories critically through ourdetailed research on economic geogra-phies of Asia. Through this process of crit-ical engagement with mainstream theories,we will be able not only to contribute toeconomic geography through our refinementand reconstruction of these theories, but alsoto understand the economic landscapes ofAsia from a grounded perspective. Second,we must turn away from doing what maybe termed “Asian economic geography”because such a parochial approach toeconomic geographies of Asia will providefew significant theoretical insights thatmay be useful in other geographic contexts.

Rather, we must endeavor to develop newtheories, grounded in Asia, that might betterinform our understanding of the “economic”in economic geography at large.Commenting on management studies,Barkema (2001, 616) noted that “[i]fdifferent management concepts, theories,and practices apply in different cultural andinstitutional settings, international researchmight lead to novel theory and evidenceshowing how.” In this sense, there shouldnot be a “mainstream” economic geographyon the basis of geographic divides (theAnglo-American centers versus the rest ofthe world) or thematic divides (industrialgeography versus rural or development geog-raphy).

Why is such an intellectual turn towardmore-inclusive global economic geographiesnecessary? As outlined briefly in the intro-duction, we believe that two importantconcurrent trends warrant this turn. The firsttrend is inevitably related to the globaliza-tion of knowledge and theories. Economicgeographers from major Anglo-Americancenters are increasingly reaching out to Asiaso that Asia can be integrated into their theo-ries and comparative analyses. As we arguelater in the empirical realm, Asia is becomingtoo important to be ignored by economicgeographers; it is, of course, also too impor-tant to be left to economic geographers only.This interest in Asia is exemplified by therecent work on flexibility, globalization, socialcapital, the cultural turn, the institutionalturn, and the relational turn in economicgeography. There is a growing interestamong economic geographers in investi-gating territorial formations outside theAnglo-American contexts not as an anomalyor “other economic geography” from theperspective of Anglo-American economicgeography, but instead as an original subjectof inquiry in its own right. In this specialissue, Smart and Lee critically engage onemajor theoretical strand in recent work ineconomic geography—regulation theory (seeTable 1). Analyzing the vital role of realestate and property assets in Hong Kong’sregime of accumulation and economic devel-opment during the past two decades, Smart



and Lee argue that the Hong Kong caseshould not be interpreted as an anomaly thatdeviates from the developmental trajectoryof Anglo-American capitalism (see also Kerr2002 for an analysis of Japan). The distinc-tive features of Hong Kong’s regime of accu-mulation mean that it is indeed possible to“examine them as forerunners of a possiblefuture property-based mode of regulationthat might emerge in the West, and thus todiagnose the potential problems and oppor-tunities of such a path” (Smart and Lee 2003,153; our emphasis). This “theorizing back”does not entail an unproblematical applica-tion of Western-centric theories per se.Instead, it uses conceptual apparatuses inthese theories and empirical evidence in Asiato open up new directions for understandingthe future of a variety of capitalisms that, nodoubt, include the dominant Anglo-American genre.

This trend toward reaching out to Asiaclearly does not represent a one-way flow inthe globalization of knowledge and theories.Today, more economic geographers who areinterested in Asia are themselves Asians whohave received their academic training in theAnglo-American centers (e.g., both authorsof this article and most contributors to thisspecial issue). This two-way intellectualfertilization allows them to benefit from thebest of both worlds, so to speak. On theone hand, their particular backgroundsand origins in Asia enable their work to befirmly grounded in the material realities ofAsia. Their emic understanding of Asia isdifficult to emulate by geographers fromother regional origins. On the other hand,these geographers are well equipped withsophisticated theoretical ideas and rigorousmethodological procedures to enhance theirresearch on economic geographies of Asia.They are certainly capable of growing out ofAsia in their theoretical work to make majorcontributions to global economic geogra-phies. The articles in this special issue clearlyexemplify this theoretical sophistication andmethodological rigor among economic geog-raphers with Asian origins. For example, inexplaining the recent liberalization and glob-alization of the South Korean automobile

industry, Park not only draws on theoreticalideas from the debate on the multiscalarprocesses of globalization, but makes an orig-inal contribution to the literature by high-lighting the interscalar contestation betweenthe national state and the local communityin shaping the globalization processes of theindustry. Although this national-local tensionhas been analyzed in the regional governanceliterature in economic geography (see Table1), it has been mostly ignored in thegeographic studies of the impact of global-ization that have focused primarily on global-local tensions. Similarly, Poon andThompson examine rigorously the conceptof embeddedness in explaining the parent-subsidiary relationship in global corpora-tions. By unpacking the nature of theembeddedness of subsidiaries in the globalnetworks of their parent companies, theydraw our attention away from localizedembeddedness that has been well docu-mented in the “new regionalism” literature(see Table 1) and contribute to our under-standing of the spatial organization ofeconomic activities among global corpora-tions.

What in Asia attracts these economicgeographers such that Asia becomes theirkey subject of inquiry? Our answer lies withthe empirical trend toward the rapid anddramatic transformations in the economiclandscapes of Asia in more recent decades.Asia has become a new site for theory devel-opment and empirical analysis in economicgeography, as amply shown by the four excel-lent articles in this special issue. The impor-tance of this new site does not merely restwith its internal transformations. Morecrucially, Asia’s importance for economicgeography is predicated on its potential tofacilitate the production of new theoreticalinsights and, in Slater’s (1999) words,“counter discourses” that allow economicgeographers to “theorize back” at our situ-ated knowledge emanating from Europe andNorth America (e.g., Park, Smart and Lee,and Zhou and Tong in this issue). As wenoted earlier, Japan came to the forefrontof social scientific inquiry during the 1980sbecause of its technological and economic



prowess. Together with insights from othernewly industrialized economies (exceptHong Kong), research on Japan’s rapidpost–World War II economic developmentpoints to the role of the developmental state.From an economic geography perspective,this theorization allows economic geographyto reconsider location theory and the devel-opment of industrial districts in novel waysthat otherwise are unlikely to be achievedsingle-handedly through research on theAnglo-American countries (see Markusenand Park 1993; Park and Markusen 1995).It allows for the attainment of the“translocal” understanding and developmentadvocated by Smith (2002). This movementin theorization entails more than just usingdifferent empirical contexts for theorization.Rather, it produces a new kind of theory thatchallenges, for example, the market-statedualism that is so ingrained in Anglo-American economic thinking, particularlyamong the neoliberals and “deregulation-ists” as labeled by Storper and Salais (1997,246).

The rise of China since the late 1970srepresents another critical juncture in thehistoriography of economic geography.For decades, the transformation of theChinese space-economy under socialistauthoritarianism has often been consid-ered to be too unique or peculiar and thusincompatible with the international normsand theoretical templates. The peculiarityof the Chinese experience, plus the lack ofnecessary information for meaningfulstudies, had made it extremely difficult foreconomic geography theorists and Chinageographers to have fruitful communication(see also Liu and Lu 2002). In recentyears, however, the Chinese space-economyhas undergone profound structural andspatial transformations as the post-Maoregime changed its approach from rigidutopian socialism to market-oriented prag-matism and from self-isolation to activeparticipation in globalization. A fascinatingmosaic of plan and market, state and privatesectors, central authoritarianism, and localcorporatism has emerged to recontour theeconomic landscape (G. C. S. Lin 1997;

Marton 2000; Wei 2000). Given the funda-mental importance of both the Chineseculture and its restructured socialist insti-tutional setting to the transformation ofthe Chinese space-economy, incorporatingthe Chinese case into the development oftheory in mainstream economic geographyseems to be timely and appropriate (e.g.,Zhou and Tong in this issue).

Recent institutional and economicprocesses in China have not only invalidatedour received wisdom of the geography ofindustrialization and economic transition,but also present themselves as fertilegrounds for the development of new theo-ries. First, economic geographers have beenaccustomed to industrialization occurringvirtually hand in hand with rapid urbaniza-tion and industrial activities located withinurban areas. The core geographic argumentfor this trend toward urban-biased industri-alization is related to the Marshallian notionof agglomeration economies and, morerecently, to increasing returns to scale, asdemonstrated in the endogenous growthmodels (Martin and Sunley 1998). Thisabstract theorization of industrialization andregional growth, however, ignores historicalspecificity and institutional rigidities thatcontinue to exert strong effects in the caseof China. A process of rural industrializa-tion has come to characterize the postreformpattern of industrialization in China throughwhich the labor force is expected to stay inrural areas and industrial activities arebrought to their doorsteps (Marton 2000).The enormous contributions of township andvillage enterprises (TVEs) to China’s grossdomestic products (GDP) and employmentare one such indicator of the pervasive extentof rural industrialization. Widely scatteredall over the vast countryside, the TVEsgenerated over 30 percent of China’s GDPand provided employment opportunities to27 percent of the total rural labor force bythe year 2000 (Editorial Board 2001, 4–5).This finding, of course, does not mean thaturban-centered industrialization does nottake place in China. But it does call for areconceptualization of industrializationand urban-regional development in China



not as a special case of geographic industri-alization, but as an original subject of inquirythat may yield new theoretical insights intourbanization, industrialization, rural devel-opment, and agrarian change.

Second, China’s transitional economyallows for new theories of economic transi-tion and organizational change that are justmaking significant inroads into the majorsocial sciences, such as sociology andeconomics. Sociologists like Victor Nee(1989), Andrew Walder (1995), Nan Lin(1995; N. Lin and Bian 1991), and DougGuthrie (1997) have worked on China’spostreform development and collectivelydeveloped what may be termed the market-transition theory (see Stark 1996 and Picklesand Smith 1998 for the case of EasternEurope). This theory has certainly reinvig-orated sociological studies of changing socialstructures and economic organization intransitional economies. In economics, BarryNaughton (1991), Thomas Rawski (1994),Alwyn Young (2000), and others have shownhow conventional neoclassical economics hasfailed to provide a valid theoretical modelfor explaining China’s economic develop-ment (see also Amsden 1991; Young 1995).Alternative economic models are thereforecalled for that account for China’s unprece-dented economic transformations. Althoughwe have not yet observed a similar theoret-ical development and disciplinary impact ofresearch on Asia in economic geography, wehave certainly noticed some novel concep-tualizations arising from recent work onChina (Hsing 1998; Olds 2001a; Fan 2002;Zhou and Tong in this issue) and othereconomies in East and Southeast Asia (Kelly2001a, 2001b; Hsu and Saxenian 2000;Coe and Kelly 2002; Park in this issue).

To conclude this extended introductionto the special issue, we believe that theo-rizing economic geographies of Asia is clearlyan unfinished intellectual project. In fact,we go so far as to suggest that it simply marksthe beginning of a new intellectual era foreconomic geography toward the develop-ment of global economic geographies.Economic geographies of Asia must not bea subject of theorization from the perspec-

tives of mainstream Anglo-Americaneconomic geography. But equally, they aretoo important to be left to Asian economicgeographers alone. Building on a growingbody of economic geography research onAsia, what we aim to achieve through thisspecial issue is a further and, we hope, signif-icant step toward more genuine theoreticaldialogues among economic geographers withdifferent regional interests. This bold aimcannot be achieved without more theoret-ical work that is grounded in the materialrealities of Asia but that speaks to an audi-ence that is well tuned into the transmissionfrequency of global economic geographies.The future of economic geography mustbe bright and exciting. In this sense, we fullyconcur with Barnes and Sheppard’s (2000,6; our emphasis) assessment: “There is aChinese saying: ‘May you live in inter-esting times.’ Our argument is that theyare here now in economic geography.”Obviously, we—both ethnic Chinesewriters—cannot agree more.

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