The Rise of East Asia and East Asian Social Science ’ s Quest for Self-Identity

The once highly lauded ‘East Asian Miracle’ turned sour after some East Asian economies, together with Southeast Asian countries, suffered from currency and fi nancial crisis in 1997. It triggered a great deal of discussion of what both local and foreign analysts called ‘Asian crisis’. It generated numerous questions and issues that troubled not only policy-makers but also the social science community. The discussion continues even today and perhaps will continue forever without any defi nitive conclusion. While the general tone of analyses and discussion by Western scholars tended to be cynical, emphasizing corruption and crony capitalism, the local social science community regarded this incident as a ‘crash’ of social science. The incident represented the failure of two main attributes of social science, economics in particular—i.e. explanation of economic realities and predictions for their future. In the case of Korea, the near default of its economy in December 1997 disclosed an irrevocable blunder of the social scientists, who rightfully received criticism and responsibility. In a sense, the Asian crisis represented an opportunity to slow down the ‘rush to development’ (Hart-Landsberg 1993) and to collectively refl ect


INTRODUCTION
The once highly lauded 'East Asian Miracle' turned sour after some East Asian economies, together with Southeast Asian countries, suffered from currency and fi nancial crisis in 1997.It triggered a great deal of discussion of what both local and foreign analysts called ' Asian crisis'.It generated numerous questions and issues that troubled not only policy-makers but also the social science community.The discussion continues even today and perhaps will continue forever without any defi nitive conclusion.
While the general tone of analyses and discussion by Western scholars tended to be cynical, emphasizing corruption and crony capitalism, the local social science community regarded this incident as a ' crash' of social science.The incident represented the failure of two main attributes of social science, economics in particular-i.e.explanation of economic realities and predictions for their future.In the case of Korea, the near default of its economy in December 1997 disclosed an irrevocable blunder of the social scientists, who rightfully received criticism and responsibility.
In a sense, the Asian crisis represented an opportunity to slow down the 'rush to development' (Hart-Landsberg 1993) and to collectively refl ect Su-Hoon Lee 769 The Rise of East Asia 770

THE ORIGINAL SIN: IMPLANTATION OF WESTERN SOCIAL SCIENCE IN EAST ASIA
The intellectual tradition of East Asia is known to have been very rich in the areas of humanities and social and political thought.Neo-Confucianism, which today is much lauded as the prime cultural source of the "East Asian miracle" by both Western analysts and local scholars, represents simply one stream of East Asian traditional thought.There are many other streams of thought and ideas as well.Because of the actual abundance of social knowledge and a long tradition of social respect for scholarship, East Asia has been very capable of developing its own system of social knowledge.
The critical blow to the indigenous formation of social science in East Asia was the seventeenth century scientifi c revolution in Western Europe and its infl uence on the emergence of "social science" in Europe.The application of "science" to study "social" issues had enormous and far-reaching consequences (Wallerstein 1991).More than anything else, what Europeans did in the name of social science gained unquestionable status in the scholarly world.Almost simultaneously, all other forms of social knowledge in non-Western societies were downgraded as "non-scientifi c" and thereby something to be eliminated as soon and as totally as possible.Most non-Western forms of social knowledge were devalorized or demoralized.Suddenly, the rich and abundant social knowledge of East Asia which had existed for centuries was relegated to a category of thought which should be discarded or replaced by "social science."Needless to say, at the center of this entire process lay the dominance of Europe in the capitalist worldeconomy.
Indeed, Western social sciences were introduced or implanted in East Asian societies like most other Third World societies.This process of introduction or implantation of social sciences including sociology was by no means a smooth process.East Asians took an ambivalent posture toward what the Europeans represented.Of course, the three East Asian countries were not exactly the same in terms of their postures or their attitudes toward accepting ideas from outside.The basic view on European (including North American) civilization held by the East Asians was that it represented advanced technology symbolized by gunboats.The East Asians upon the developmental path that Asian states chose to take.Because of their economic achievements, Asians began to show signs of arrogance and self-complacence.They failed to take the time to refl ect honestly on what they had achieved.
For the social science community, the crisis could be a blessing in the sense that they, like their fellow citizens, were lacking a moment at which they could accurately and constructively contemplate what they had done in the name of social science.This is not to say that Asian social scientists lacked critical thinking or self-refl ection in the past.On the contrary, the very success of the East Asian economies provided a fertile milieu in which many scholars refl ected on what social science should be like in East Asia.Therefore, we argue that the rise of East Asia provided East Asian social scientists with an initial moment at which they could look back upon their activities since the mid-1970s, and that the current troubles of those economies represented an extra stimulus.
Since social science became institutionalized while Europe dominated the world-system, it has been very Eurocentric.Eurocentrism became more consolidated during the period of U.S. world hegemony in the post World War Two era.During the past several decades, world economic power has shifted notably to East Asia.The more recent discourse on "East Asia" in academic communities in at least three countries ( Japan, South Korea, and China) appeared to have a lot to do with the accumulation of wealth in the region.In particular, issues such as the questioning of the validity of Western social science in explaining East Asian realities, the call for indigenization of social science, and fi nally the quest for an East Asian scholarly identity, are both understandable and justifi able in this context (Lee 1998a).
Of course, the discourse on academic dependency and indigenization is by no means new.A body of literature on those issues already exists (Alatas 1972;Alatas 1993Alatas , 1996;;Altbach 1977;Kim 1996).What seems noteworthy is the fact that the discourse on these issues in East Asian countries has recently unfolded rather intensively.Now with the onset of the fi nancial crisis, a renewed wave of questioning the validity of Western social science and searching for more relevant social science really picked up intensity and sincerity.

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The Rise of East Asia 772 believed in their superiority in the sphere of scholarship (or in their own words, "spirit").In so far as they believed in their spiritual superiority, the compromise, which once again was no smooth process, with European civilization (represented by technology or "utility" and "tools" in Asians' terminology) was not a painfully ashamed solution.The fallacy of the Asians was that through gunboats they saw only Western technology but not Western social science.Perhaps they did not want to recognize the latter because such recognition would have made their inevitable compromise very difficult.After all, the asymmetrical meeting of the East Asians with Europeans during the last decades of the nineteenth century ended with a practical and political compromise termed "Eastern Way and Western Technology" or "Chinese Body and Western Utility."It may be noted that among the three nations in East Asia, China and Japan both demonstrated a more fl exible and pragmatic attitude towards what Europe represented, while Korea was more reluctant to compromise with the West.It is widely recognized that China, historically the central country in the region, has always been fl exible.This fl exibility was exercised to a degree that helped it to gain selfasserted centrality.This fl exibility and pragmatism has once again been demonstrated by Deng Xiaoping' s "Socialist Body and Capitalist Utility" to invent and justify the unfriendly hybrid phrase "socialist market economy."Why and how Japan showed a similar attitude is another subject to be studied.The successful Meiji Revolution (1868) might be a factor.In any case, Japan went to extremes in dealing with Western civilization.Unlike China and Chosun (today' s Korea), Japan swiftly transformed its policy position "Away from Asia and Toward Europe."The Meiji Restoration and this speedy switch enabled Japan to take an ultra-nationalist and militarist path later, and eventually become a non-Western colonial power, the consequences of which were disastrous for the neighboring Asians as well as the majority of Japanese people.Some analysts trace the economic success of Japan today back to the Meiji period, paying particular attention to how Japan responded to the European capitalist civilization.The relevance of this remains open to question but the path that the Japanese elites took to construct a complex regional structure was full of contradictions and subsequently did irrevocable psychological damage to the Asian peoples.

ISSUES OF IRRELEVANCE/RELEVANCE
The fact that social science emerged in Europe and that it was implanted in East Asia presented many problems and raised a number of issues.One of the key issues we like to discuss is the question of irrelevance.Implanted social science inevitably raises the issue of irrelevance as a consequence of the encounter between Western theories and East Asian realities.The epistemology of the "invaders" is something to be questioned in terms of its applicability, pertinence and attunement to East Asian political and cultural contexts.The issue of irrelevance concerns not simply the discordance between implanted social science and local/national/regional realities, but also the chronic lack of creativity and originality in social science in East Asia.To overcome the lack of creativity and originality is an enormous task.More than anything else, it presupposes the construction of a relevant social science.Before we move on to specifi c ways to construct a relevant social science, it is imperative to discuss this issue (Alatas 1996) in the context of East Asia.
In the case of sociology, it has to be responsive to the social reality and history of East Asia (Park 1983).History in this context is not necessarily temporal.Thus, it does not have to be limited to the past.History in this context becomes synonymous with social reality.Even if one studies a contemporary social phenomenon, if he/she puts it into the pressing historical context, we can say the study is responsive to historical and social reality.For example, if sociology in Korea were not responsive to historical social realities, it should be regarded as "irrelevant."When it lost its relevance to historical social realities, it was questioned and pressed for transformation.
In essence, sociology is about social change.To say that social change is eternal and normal is a cliche.We all recognize the constancy and normality of social change.What this implies in terms of our practice as sociologists is that we ought to capture changing social realities with our epistemology.Social change precedes our ability to decipher and place it in a systematic mode which makes sense.The gap or lag is almost inevitable.The question is how wide or narrow the gap is in reality.The wider it is, the greater the extent to which social science departs from (historical) reality.When the gap is somehow bridged, we may say that we are practicing a history-relevant sociology.

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The Rise of East Asia 774 As a subfi eld of social science, sociology in East Asia also aspired to become a science, although it never succeeded in coming close to being "scientifi c." Science means different things to different scholars.But in general, science has often been interpreted as meaning construction of law-like theories.Theory-building, many argue, requires elegance and parsimony.Detailed descriptions are detrimental to theory-building.In-depth research, which in reality is actually very rare, is encouraged, but the way in which such research is presented ought to be concise.Data should be "processed" as much as possible, which after all represents a reduction of materials.Richness must be sacrifi ced for the sake of a succinct explanation.
One of the negative outcomes of the emphasis on theory-building is that in East Asian sociology, history has never been a serious matter of concern or interest in spite of the fact that East Asia has a long and rich history which has been relatively well-documented.History presents an excellent opportunity to sociologists whose main interest is social change.This is not to assert that history has been entirely outside the realm of sociological research.Indeed, some Korean sociologists, for instance, albeit few in number, have used history as their object of research.In the 1980s, Korea saw a surge in the sociologists of social history.Nevertheless, legitimate historical sociology is a very diffi cult subfi eld to practice.One has to have a special skill, e.g., the ability to decipher Chinese, which requires an enormous input on the part of sociologists.Contemporary Chinese sociologists are no exception.
History which was used in sociological analysis in the case of Korea is limited to the past.This means they use historical materials as their primary sources of analysis.In a sense, time is not at the center of sociological analysis.Time has not been treated as "highly fl uid social creations…critical to the understanding of social structure and historical transformation."(Wallerstein 1991:3) Time is an entity of multiplicity.Some historians deal with the future (Wagar 1992).The present is one such multiplicity too.Sociologists tend to pay attention to the present.Afterall, this tendency has been one of the key factors causing us to divert attention from history.But if we look at the present from a slightly different angle, it has a lot to do with history.History-relevant sociology is more than taking the past as our subject of research.Ultimately, it concerns a historically conscientious understanding of social reality.
It is important to note that East Asian countries are deeply integrated into the world market.Japan and South Korea are frequently referred to as trading states.Since 1978, China has been rapidly incorporated into the world market through its neo-mercantilist policies.As such, they are vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the world market.The vulnerability is quite visible in our everyday life.Let us take South Korea for example.In 1996, the Koreans vividly experienced how deeply Korea (North as well as South) has been dependent upon the capitalist world-market.In early summer, journalists and economic commentators (including some academics) expressed their worry about the Korean economy, highlighting the rapidly increasing trade defi cit.Soon this worry expanded and leveled out to become a discourse on "economic crisis," the meaning of which is always ambiguous.The trade defi cit was due to a sizeable price fall in one single commodity, semiconductor chips in the world commodity market (Lee 1998b).This is a critical feature of the "miraculous" Korean economy.In the following year, Korea had to go to the IMF for a rescue fund.
The point is that without relevance to the world-system, Korean social science can be relegated to a narrow epistemology, lacking pertinence to the holistic reality.Korea has been deeply placed in the capitalist world-system, both in economic and in political terms.This will continue to be so.In this regard, Japan is no different from South Korea.And now China appears to follow the footsteps of her neighbors.Thus, in East Asia as a whole, social science should be sensitive to the dynamics of the world-system.

THE RISE OF THE INDIGENIZATION DISCOURSE
Relevance is closely interconnected with indigenization.When we speak of relevant social science in East Asia, another critical issue to be discussed is that of "East Asian" (indigenous) social science.One can easily discard this issue because what East Asian social scientists do as scholars is automatically East Asian and because East Asian social science is and should be East Asian.Note that this is already a sort of tautology.Discussion of the issue can be endless and thereby takes us nowhere.But it is not that simple.
More than anything else, the question of what we mean by the phrase, "East Asian," arises.It does not refer to a combination of the characteristics of the three societies.It should be used to refer to some unique identity which is very fl uid and ever transformative.In East Asia, identity seems to be very elusive.When someone claims to have captured the "East Asian" Su-Hoon Lee 775 The Rise of East Asia 776 identity, they have generally left out many important elements of East Asia.This has a lot to do with the nature of the East Asian regional structure which is very complex because of the contradictory nature of its history.Of course, no region in the world has a simple structure, but we believe that in East Asia the regional structure is much more complex than the case of Africa or Latin America.
In East Asia, nationalistic sentiment is very strong and it stands against the search for an East Asian identity.The critical blow to the East Asian Sinitic world order came around the seventeenth century with the two major wars waged on the Korean peninsula, fi rst the Japanese invasion (1592) and second the "Manchu Invasion" (1636).Following these wars, there were great changes in the East Asian regional order (Choi 1996:198).In Japan, the Tokugawa Shogunate rose and in China the Ch'ing dynasty replaced the Ming.But the Chosun dynasty on the Korean peninsula stood fi rm without any signifi cant change.The ruling elites in Chosun were successful in keeping the emerging democratic energy under control.In any event, the two wars did irrevocable psychological damage to the Korean people.In addition, Japanese colonial rule during the fi rst half of this century humiliated the Korean people once more.The scar left in the Korean psyche by these humiliations cannot be easily masked.It is not surprising that nationalism is very strong in Korea.
Interestingly, in China and Japan, nationalism is very strong too.China always claims its centrality in the world.A continental center' s nationalism is unwarranted.As an interesting aside, the Chinese centrism now seems to have been groundless with the recent archeological fi ndings in East Asia revealing the fact that the construction of the Chinese civilization was the collective outcome of very diverse "groups" who resided in the territory.The thesis arguing the Chinese origins of the East Asian civilization is now seriously questioned.Nationalism in China stems from both western intrusion, Japanese invasion and domination over some parts of the Chinese territory in this century.How then can we explain Japanese nationalism?Is nationalism not an ideology of the oppressed?How should one explain the strong nationalism of invaders and oppressors?Are they not supposed to be more benign towards the neighboring victims of their aggression in the past?Japan once tried to sever its membership in the Asian region altogether and to join the European imperialist circle.In fact, Japan is the only non-West-ern colonial power to dominate its neighbors and attempt to reconstruct East Asia under its hegemonic leadership.Should Japanese nationalism be explained by the forced opening at the gunpoint of Commodore Perry in 1854, and/or by their emperor' s humiliation in front of General MacArthur in the summer of 1945?
The collision between the expanding European world-economy and the East Asian regional system involved fi erce resistance and violence.The treaties Japan and China had to sign with the Europeans were all unequal.But Korea vehemently sustained its closed-door policy and resisted incorporation into the capitalist world-economy.A squadron of three ships from the French naval fl eet based in the Pacifi c was defeated by the Koreans in 1866.Koreans burned down the American-armed commercial ship "General Sherman" and fought against American troops in 1871.Oddly, it was Japan that forced Korea to open up its port in 1876.How was it that the same Korea that was so fi rm in its policy towards the Europeans and actually defeated French and American forces knelt down to "barbaric" Japan so easily?Perhaps some of the reformist Korean elites saw Japan as a possible model to be emulated, that is, the Japan that absorbed the European shock while making signifi cant domestic reform (Choi 1996:192).Of course, this turned out to be a misperception.Japan was not at all different from the other foreign powers.What course of action Japan took in the ensuing years needs not to be repeated.
We believe that at this moment it is naive to conceptualize an "East Asian" social science, for there is not any kind of regional identity which we can defi ne as "East Asian."Today' s regional geopolitical and geoeconomic situation very much resembles the situation a century or so ago.All that exists, now and in the foreseeable future, are national social sciences.
This grim diagnosis should not keep us from seeking East Asian social science.Because of the lack of a regional identity, there is ample opportunity to pursue a collective identity and build a collective social epistemology.Here we are not talking about parochialism.Quite the contrary.The call for an "East Asian" social science goes beyond constructing a narrow and parochial knowledge.There may be elements of nationalism/regionalism and "self-centrism" imbued in the call.But who can blame us for that?
With that premise in mind, let us discuss the rise of the indigenization discourse in East Asia.As we analyzed earlier, there is no such thing as "East Su-Hoon Lee 777 The Rise of East Asia 778 Asian social science."Therefore the indigenization discourse should not be discussed in a unitary way.In this article, we focus on the case of Korea and limit ourselves to the discipline of sociology to illustrate the rise of indigenization discourse in the region.Among the community of Korean sociologists, the word "Korean" denotes tension and perhaps animosity in the community.It is a complex, which some Korean sociologists have attempted to disentangle and others have tried to ignore.A struggle among Korean sociologists has been waged, in a few isolated instances explicitly but in other instances silently, over the prevailing epistemology (once again we are not arguing this has been unitary) of Korean sociology.Obviously, power and control have been placed at the bottom of this struggle.Perhaps a more important element involved in the struggle was the struggle against Korean sociologists themselves.In a way, it was a collective refl ection or self-criticism on what they did and should do.They constantly rethought what they had done in the name of sociology.Both the struggle between different epistemologies and the inner struggle were most acute in the 1980s in Korea.
The essence of this issue is about indigenization, or more accurately, about decolonization (this latter term was not used prior to the 1990s).Note that the issue of indigenization is very closely related to the issues of relevance-relevance to social reality and relevance to history-which we have already discussed at some length.
In the Korean sociological community, the issue of indigenization has long received certain attention.For instance, as early as the 1972 Korean Sociological Association annual meeting, the issue of indigenization was a focal theme.The consensus reportedly drawn from the meeting was that a "methodological and epistemological transformation" was necessary for the indigenization of Korean sociology.In the 1970s the epistemological dependence of Korean sociology on Western (more often than not equivalent to American) sociology began to be seriously questioned.Since then, the issue of indigenization has persisted as one of the most critical issues in the Korean sociological community.
In a way, social science in East Asia is analogous to a child born without labor.It never underwent the painful process of endogenous development.There were no battles over the institutionalization of social science in East Asia.It was an entity introduced from the outside as we emphasized earlier.Precisely because of the nature of its birth, social science in East Asia was bound to be distant, and neither indigenous nor endogenous.Inevitably, social science in East Asia had to imitate foreign social science, be it European or American.Imitating the social science of others per se represents no major problem.After all, knowledge is accumulated through learning.Learning is basically imitating.Creative minds can be cultivated by imitation.So why does imitating Western/American social science represent a major block to the advance of indigenous social science?
Once again in the case of Korea, those who raised questions about the wholesale uncritical adoption of Western ideas and methods (in sum, American sociology) were concerned with "copying" it.Copying leaves no space or opportunity for thinking and refl ection.Copying does not allow the development of a "creative mind."It only permits the reproduction of a "captive mind" (Alatas 1972).Worse, it prevents creative minds from emerging and asserting their presence.The problem of copying is the production of a captive mind or, in other words, the eradication of creative minds and the destruction of the potentials for originality.Some obviously consider the call for indigenization to be marginal and unimportant.They quest for decolonization.To them, the Third World is an academic colony where Western social science is practiced.Colonial social science is a crucial cultural instrument for facilitating colonialism.The quest for decolonization is thereby the quest for liberating Third World social science from imperial domination.Areas including metatheory, methodology, theory building, empirical research, interpretation, writing, and policy formulation, etc. ought to be liberated.
In addition to dependence on ideas and theories that are derived from the West, academic dependency has a lot to do with the lack of material wealth and political power.Why social science emerged in Western Europe in the 19th century, why it consolidated itself in the United States after World War Two.And why social science in East Asian societies has been inundated with Western (American) discourse can not be appropriately understood unless we take into account the historical evolution of the world-system and the way in which East Asia has been incorporated into it.This is not the place for a thorough discussion of this issue.At least, we would like to point out that social science in East Asia has never taken a serious posture or taken concrete steps toward bringing this issue to the Su-Hoon Lee 779 The Rise of East Asia 780 center of our analysis.In recent years, there have been a few analysts who took the world-systemic factor into account.But it was always treated as an external factor which somehow had some impact on the internal processes in question.Dependency reversal is not an easy task for East Asian social scientists.They still tend to utilize ideas and theories which originated from the European countries or the United States.Technological dimensions of academic dependency should not be ignored.Japan may be an exception in this regard, but in the cases of Korea and China, there is little innovation in the development of curricula and instructional materials.Decent textbooks that are locally developed are diffi cult to fi nd.Investment in higher education is incomparable to the situation in Europe and North America.The research environment in East Asian universities is dismal compared to that of American and European universities.A few Japanese universities may enjoy an advanced level in terms of research and teaching.It is no surprise therefore that the production of ideas and theoretical models continues to be the activities of social scientists working at research and teaching institutions located in the core of the world-system and that social scientists in East Asia continue to be importers of them.As Alatas aptly states, there is "a coreperiphery relationship in world social science" (Alatas 1996:12).

THE QUEST FOR AN EAST ASIAN IDENTITY
History tells us that the great economic powers are also the great social science powers.In the modern world, European (including North American) societies have been the centers of social science.In our introductory remarks, we noted the rise of East Asia in the capitalist world-economy since the 1970s.East Asia as a whole has already entered the semiperipheral zone of the capitalist world-economy.Some argue that at the turn of the century the region will move up to the core of the world-economy.The acquisition of a new status on the ladder of world economic power by East Asian states has many implications, one of which concerns the quest for an East Asian identity.Let us not lose our focus on social knowledge, in particular, social science.
The poor fi t between Western theory and East Asian realities is a consequence of implantation of Western social science in East Asian societies.Thereafter social science in East Asia has unfolded in the form and content of irrelevance and academic dependency.Irrelevant social science keeps East Asian social scientists from developing ideas and theories that fi t local/ national/regional realities.Academic dependency forces East Asian sociologists to rely upon ideas that are produced in the Western world.
The contemporary call for indigenization in East Asia is a call to overcome irrelevance and to reverse academic dependency.The call is to decolonize the much Westernized social science discourse in the region and subsequently to practice relevant social science.The call for indigenization is a call for creativity and originality.
More than anything else, the call involves the collective quest for an East Asian academic identity.The quest seems to be the outcome of self-refl ection rather than self-confi dence.Initially, self-refl ection was possible because of the economic achievements of East Asia.Now the economic troubles that some of the countries undergo appear to be an additional input to selfrefl ection and identity search.
There appears to be one strategy (or academic practice) that emerges among the proponents of East Asian academic identity construction.It is that of revisiting or reinterpreting East Asian tradition and culture.Proponents of this strategy try to pinpoint useful traits and attributes in traditional Asian concepts and ideas and to reinterpret them.They argue that East Asian indigenous concepts and ideas can be sources of modern theory development (Kim 1996).Their call is not a call for a return to tradition.Rather, they emphasize the critical accommodation of East Asian tradition to enrich the contemporary social and human sciences, and examine ways to tie East Asian cultural elements to the modern social world.The increasingly popular neo-Confucianist discourse in the West and in East Asia is a case in point.
The quest for an East Asian intellectual identity involves a complex task because what we mean by "East Asian" is never straightforward.As much as East Asia as a region is a complex historical construct, the concept "East Asian" cannot be single-handedly defi ned.So social scientists in East Asia who advocate the call to indigenization and relevant social science should always be alert to these issues in their academic activities.They should be constantly aware of the pitfalls that the very concept of indigenization contains.They should realize that indigenization is ultimately about the universalization of social science.We know that the universalization of social science in the past meant the universalization of European social science.

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The Rise of East Asia 782 Universalism has been Eurocentric.Social scientists in East Asia can make a contribution to universalize social science only by being indigenous.Indigenization does not collide with the universalization of social science.They are one and the same project.What is required on the part of practitioners of social science is "openness" (Wallerstein, et al. 1996).
Even though the future has never been entirely alien to social science, it has generally eluded serious social science research throughout much of the history of the discipline.Nevertheless, concern with the future is very close to the heart of many people in East Asia, including social scientists.In fact, the hopes and fears of the people in East Asia hinge so much upon the prospects of the coming century that the students of social science in this region may well share this concern.The pride that East Asians take in their economic and political achievements should be respected.But the East Asians must guard themselves against becoming arrogant and complacent.The emerging discourse on "Asianism" should be very carefully approached in order not to repeat the catastrophic path that Japan has taken.The specter of early twentieth century Asianism, advocated by Japanese elites, is very alive in the consciousness of contemporary Asians.We must be aware that Asianism has many pitfalls.The return to Asia should not be confused with an expanded view of nationalism.We must guard ourselves against any vision and idea, suggested by the Asians, that has even a remote chance of turning itself into an expansionist, hegemonic, or supremacy-seeking project.Before social scientists in East Asia embark on any academic or practical project now and in the next century, they must fi rst maintain an attitude of humility (the age-old virtue of East Asian scholars) and self-refl ection.With this in mind, social scientists in East Asia ought to critically and objectively assess the past achievements of the East Asian countries and to realize the potentialities and limitations of East Asia in constructing a humane and prosperous world order.
The so-called ' Asian crisis' is hitting East Asian societies very hard.It causes dangerous social impacts-unprecedented rates of unemployment, the collapse of the middle class, worsened income distribution, family disruption, increased crime, leaving the vast majority of population in the region with anger and frustration.
However, there is another meaning of ' crisis,' i.e., the opportunity.What opportunity?We would like to emphasize a critical moment for collective self-refl ection.On the part of social scientists, it is a moment to rethink our primary mode of academic and intellectual activities and to construct our academic practice of socio-political relevance.