Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Japan or China is the 'grand event', the meaning and content of the Rim are
measured squarely in units of economic exchange.
Alexander Woodside (1998) makes this point incisively in his chapter
when he observes that the Pacific Rim is organized for production, not as a
transnational civil society. He astutely identifies the current putative region
as an up-scaled version of a predecessor, the colonial societies of Southeast
Asia. Their theorist, the colonial administrator J. S. Furnivall, famously
interpreted such social formations as 'plural societies', comprising disparate
ethnic groups who lived separate social and cultural lives and came together
solely for market exchange. For, 'In the plural society the highest common
factor is the economic factor, and the only test that all apply in common is
the test of cheapness' (Furnivall 1956: 310). Consequently, 'In a plural soci-
ety… the community tends to be organized for production rather than for
social life' (Furnivall 1939: 459). Woodside latches onto this thesis, writing
that Asia Pacific 'is a factory-like “plural society” of the Furnivallian sort
writ large' (1998: 46). Its member states have serious internal class,
ethnic and gender divisions, the exploited subaltern groups noted by
Woodside and Ong (2006), as well as potentially de-stabilizing regional
rivalries and unfinished geopolitical business. But what holds them together
are market relations, a lowest common denominator familiar to neo-liberal
administrations in North America.
From the perspective of a Japanese or Chinese hegemony in Asia Pacific,
Furnivall's heuristic has much to commend it, for the lifeblood of the region
is indeed measurable by flows of commodities, capital, labour and products.
Canada conceived of the Pacific Rim the same way, as a fully economistic
entity. We have seen the reporting in the
Globe and Mail
, invariably in the
business pages, invariably with transparent story lines about economic
opportunities, and, less commonly, economic achievements. This is the lan-
guage too of Canadian boosters, like Michael Goldberg whose 1985 topic,
The Chinese Connection: Getting Plugged in to Pacific Rim Real Estate, Trade
and Capital Markets
, achieved wide circulation as a motivational guide to
business and government. Finally, economism has been the trope of govern-
ment missions to East Asia, whether the modest excursions of the social
democratic Mayor of Vancouver, Michael Harcourt, or the more exagger-
ated performances of the colourful troupe who accompanied Prime Minister
Chrétien on his Team Canada voyages in search of El Dorado.
This calculating mentality is some distance from the wide-eyed innocents
who had peered into Red China in 1959. It is an
idée fixe
that we will see
shortly also describes Canada's view of East Asian immigration and particu-
larly trans-Pacific business immigrants, as the singular abstraction of
homo
economicus
. But before discussing the response in immigration policy to trans-
Pacific economic opportunities, we first need to understand further the
broader historic contexts that encouraged such one-dimensional thinking.
