Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Taiwanese firms, most importantly into mainland China. This trend seems likely
to continue or even accelerate, with the construction of science parks and office
development in big towns.
Indonesia: following the leaders?
A brief survey of this country casts further light on the overall process in east
Asia. It might be thought that Indonesia presents a case challenging the model of
resource scarcity, concentrated development in the absence of regional problems,
and rapid economic expansion. Here there is a country of a different scale and
great diversity. Its area is some 2 million km
2
, stretched over 5000 km and
broken into over 6000 inhabited islands, poorly linked to one another. The five
main territories are Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi
(Celebes) and Irian Jaya (western New Guinea). It has substantial natural
resources of oil and other minerals and of forests, and a large agricultural output.
It has great ethnic diversity, with over 300 ethnic groups speaking different
languages, and political problems with some of the minorities inhabiting some
islands. Despite these features, it has achieved rapid national economic
development in recent times, including the opening up to a modern economy of
some of the outer provinces where there had previously been a traditional
subsistence economy.
Indonesia's history since independence in 1945 is conveniently divided into
two periods. In the first, up to 1966, there was strong nationalism under the
presidency of Sukarno. This included a separation of the country from Western
influences and from most developmental impulses, through hostility to the main
Western countries and withdrawal from the United Nations. What little industry
arose was protected production of consumer goods in and around the capital
Jakarta. Most of the country was either occupied only by shifting agriculturalists
(swidden farmers) or, in Java, by rice farmers, an intensive farming system but
not one leading to development. Instead, to accommodate more families on the
same land and under the same technology, there was the process of agricultural
involution, classically described by Clifford Geertz (1963). Rather than
producing more, the small farmers shared their work in the rice fields amongst
more and more members of the family, and also shared the product amongst the
family so as to cover even the poorest and those least able to manage. Involution,
in this sense, meant an increasing complication of division of labour, of work
responsibilities, and of rights to the produce of the land, with an inexorably
growing populace.
After 1966, there were major changes; under a new president, Soeharto,
agriculture was modernized to increase food production to self-sufficiency levels
by the mid-1980s, using high-yield crop varieties on medium-sized farms. In the
industrial sphere, private expansion of conglomerates like the Korean
chaebol
(family-owned and diversified in products), rather than small firms like those of
Taiwan, was rapid and continuous. Industrial expansion to produce for exports,
