12 - Australia and the Four Asian Dragons: Beyond the Economic Agenda?

Summary

There is an extensive literature devoted to analysing the common features of the Four Dragons – Singapore, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. It is generally acknowledged that all emerged under authoritarian tutelage, although all are now experiencing pressures for democratisation; all prospered in a regional economic and security order underwritten by the United States, although one in which increasingly the United States is being displaced by Japan; all were the beneficiaries (although to an uneven degree and with uneven results) of a Confucian social inheritance. The approach taken by Australian policy makers to the Dragons is to a great extent a consequence of their rapid rise as major economic entities in the Western Pacific within the United States-dominated Pacific economy and security complex. Relations with the Dragons are relations with what, for Australians, is the vibrant Asia of rapid economic modernisation, as opposed to the timeless Asia of subsistence agriculture. The fact that these systems have ascended so rapidly is a particular test of each country’s capacity to engage with the region, given their relative lack of significance before the later 1980s.