Abstract
Public administration and public management, as a field of study, has always been informed by the practice of governance and public administration in the Western world, especially the Anglo-American family of countries. In recent years, there have been more comparative studies of administrative and governance reforms (e.g OECD, 1995; Pollitt and Bouchaert, 2000), though such studies are mostly construed within the context of global reform movements and paradigms originating from the Western developed nations. Globalization should not be a one-way street; it should be a process of recognizing cross-border, cross-cultural and cross-institutional experiences, from the East as much as from the West, from the South as much as from the North, and from the developing world as much as from the developed. Writing from East Asia, the authors in this special issue consider it long overdue that the Asian public administration experience should be more systematically understood, conceptualized and presented in the international literature. East Asian public administration reforms represent efforts at continuity and change – both connected to past traditions and domestic administrative and political trajectories, as well as linking up to the current global movement of administrative reform, displaying features of ‘Asian-ness’, which can be distinguished from the hitherto mostly Euro-American dominated paradigms of public administration.
Why is East Asian public administration significant?
The twenty-first century is often dubbed as the ‘Century of Asia’ because of the rapid economic growth of East Asia, China and India. Asian public administration, as part of the larger Asian experience, is beginning to gain wider interest internationally. Asia is, however, a huge and diverse region, with a wide array of administrative traditions and systems, and varying paces of economic and social development across its sub-regions. East Asian countries arguably constitute the most developed part of Asia. China, though still a developing country, is generally acclaimed as a key locomotive of growth in the twenty-first century. They also share a long history of Oriental civilization rooted in Confucianism, despite modern-day differentiation as nation-states. East Asia is fast becoming a major bloc internationally, as underscored by the talk about building an ‘East Asian Community’ (advocated by the former prime ministers of Australia and Japan, Kevin Rudd and Yukio Hatoyama, in 2009). The region is economically and politically too important to ignore. As Kim Jun-seok (2010: 7) points out: ‘East Asia’s growing prosperity is much more than the accumulation of economic wealth: prosperity also generates values.’ East Asian identity is still in the early stage of formation, and should not be taken for granted, but it would be useful to review and reflect on its institutional experiences and practices within a growingly pluralistic world.
Since the 1980s–90s, East Asian jurisdictions have been increasingly riding on the global movement of public sector reforms. Hong Kong and Singapore are among the earlier pioneers, followed by Taiwan and Korea in the latter part of the 1990s especially after democratic regime change. Japan has caught up with bolder administrative reforms in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98. China, on the other hand, has embarked on economic and administrative transformations as part of its journey of systemic reform and ideological reversal from the 1980s with the end of the Cultural Revolution. The Asian crisis, which caused doubt to be cast on the previous ‘East Asian miracle’ thesis (World Bank, 1993), triggered calls for extensive institutional reforms across developed and developing economies in Asia in accordance with ‘best practice’ benchmarks propagated by international organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, in what was depicted as the ‘Washington Consensus’ (first coined by Williamson, 1990). Two dominant paradigms have exerted the most impact on Asian institutional reforms at large – namely ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) (OECD, 1995, Lane, 2000, McLaughlin et al., 2002) and ‘Good Governance’ (IMF, 2005; UNESCAP, 2006) – in much the same way as over developing and transitional states (Batley and Larbi, 2004; McCourt and Minogue, 2001). However, all this had not occurred in an historical vacuum. The East Asian reform experiences and trajectories seem to have defied some of the perceived international wisdom.
East Asian legacies and trajectories
‘History matters’, as path dependence theorists would say (Arrow, 2000). International ideas, good practices and lesson-drawing aside, East Asian administrative reforms are as much influenced by the regional and national institutional logic shaped by local history, culture, context and administrative thought, and motivated by domestic political changes arising from decolonization, nation-building and democratization in the contemporary period. Behind trendy rhetoric and superficial appearance lies a diversity of evolutionary tracks and reform pathways. East Asian states are among the enthusiasts for NPM-like reforms in Asia, yet their trajectories are so different from NPM pioneers in Western Europe, North America, or Australia, whose experiences have largely defined the rationale and substance of the global NPM agenda and theory, thus setting the prescriptions for good governance. What appears to be similar may well be ‘fundamentally alike in all unimportant aspects’, as Wallace Sayre said (quoted in Allison, 1986).
This special issue is the result of a regional symposium hosted by the Centre for Governance and Citizenship of the Hong Kong Institute of Education in July 2010, to explore lessons that could be learnt from East Asian public administration reforms. It features five East Asian societies, namely Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, China and Taiwan. In terms of administrative reforms, Hong Kong along with Singapore, are successful city states inheriting a British colonial legacy and taking up Anglo-American-inspired NPM reforms quite early on. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have only become enthusiasts of public sector reforms in the past decade or so. China represents a major ‘transition’ state with strong traditional and communist legacies, but pursuing a market economy and administrative transformation with the dual logic of change and preservation. Both its reform motives and its agenda differ from others in the region.
All five societies share a common Confucian heritage of administrative culture, where the ‘Mandarins’ tradition – supplemented by an English institution of meritocracy embedded in an elitist bureaucracy in the case of Hong Kong – has sustained a paternalist form of pro-state or even ‘statist’ practice, supported by politics–administration fusion with the bureaucratic elites playing a key policymaking role, quite distinct from the modern liberal democratic practice of politics–administration separation. State–market relations are also less dichotomous. Whereas public sector reforms in the West were originally driven by a distrust of the state and its bureaucracy, seeing government as the ‘problem’ (inefficiency, crowding out the market, etc.) and seeking to install market supremacy, government in East Asia is arguably still held as the solution to problems, where people expect a competent and selfless bureaucracy to help drive social progress and economic prosperity; this resonates the centuries-old Confucian tradition of harmonious governance recently resurrected by China (Tao et al., 2010). Apart from some present-day similarities in administrative modernization in the face of globalization, the five polities share some historical commonalities of political economy and even political culture. With the exception of Hong Kong, all belong to the family of so-called ‘developmental states’ (Johnson, 1982), where the state has had strong or even dominant influence over the economy, directing development under what Wade (1990) described as a ‘governed market’ model. Even Hong Kong was never a pure classical form of laissez-faire capitalism as Friedman (1981) would have us believe; despite the official doctrine of ‘positive non-interventionism’, the city state under British rule had already begun strategic interventions in support of economic growth (Schiffer, 1983), which intensified after reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, evolving into a form of soft developmentalism (Cheung, 2000, 2010).
Developmentalism in terms of the fusion of state and market, coupled with a Confucian culture of paternalistic governance, could thus be construed as somewhat of a common denominator in the practice of public administration among East Asian states, though the degree of such fusion varies among them. Japan, Korea and Taiwan, and to some extent Hong Kong, will continue to have constitutional separation of politics and market, in contrast to mainland China where a fused model is part of the state policy design. Granted, a key question is: Have East Asian states been really building a business-like and entrepreneurial ‘small government’, as championed by NPM advocates, or have they just been deploying NPM methods and tools to serve a home-grown agenda of reinvigoration of the state? As Cheung (this issue) points out, endogenous factors (including past legacies) are the motivating factors of reform, as opposed to exogenous factors which provide the instrumental factors. The complexities of public administration trajectories in East Asia need to be more diligently explored. The five society-specific studies of administrative reforms covered by this special issue collectively present a very interesting narrative of the region. The different country narratives do not provide a uniform picture of public administration development. What ties them together is a concern as to how far the Western and recent NPM-driven public administration paradigm is relevant to and can fully address the needs of governance faced in their own context and how their own administrative system has evolved over time as conditioned and shaped by both external and internal factors.
Akira Nakamura reflects on Japan’s post-war experience where the administration-centred growth strategy was held to be effective until the 1980s–90s when it was challenged and discredited by the onslaught of neoliberalism, privatization and NPM, and the country was forced to shift to a market-centred model. Yet, attempts at deregulation and de-bureaucratization have seen mixed results, and have also led to new structural problems. Repeated efforts since the 1990s – under both the reformist Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) governments – to restrain bureaucratic power and expand central political executive control had not been successful. In the end, in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake crisis, the present Noda Yoshihiko government seems to have reverted to the traditional political style of LDP, recognizing the importance of the bureaucracy in central agencies. Nakamura argued for re-examining (and a return to?) the ‘developmental model of government’ in this region where the Mandarin tradition of bureaucracy has remained strong.
Reviewing the historical development of Korea’s public administration, Pan Suk Kim identifies both Western (American) influence and Oriental, namely Chinese and Korean-adapted Confucian (‘Sil-hak’), traditions, as well as the colonial legacy of Japanese political and legal systems. Such diversity and the exposure to global public administration theory and practice notwithstanding, there have recently been calls for the indigenization of Korean public administration. It is acknowledged that the country had been under strong US influence in the post-Korean War decades which also saw the ascendancy of a centralized state that put the economy first. With the rise of Korea in the international arena, the previous periods of imitation, growth, and readjustment had since been replaced by a new era of maturation seeking to synthesize foreign ideas and domestic wisdom in order to find Korea’s own identity and not merely return to old Confucian values.
China’s reform trajectory and experience is somewhat unique as public administration reform is part of a mammoth systemic process of economic and social transformation. Lan Xue examines the driving forces that have shaped the process of reform, using a 2 × 2 matrix analytical framework, incorporating territorial (domestic-reform/international-integration) and policy (supply side/demand side) factors. The analysis suggests that recent reforms over the past decade have underscored the intention to shift from an economics-centred state towards a people-oriented one, though with mixed results and still many unresolved issues. While learning from developed countries and integrating into the global economic system have been pertinent objectives, there are doubts as to whether the multifarious problems and structural paradoxes confronted by China could be readily tackled by transplanting Western concepts and practices. Incoherence and inconsistencies remain both vertically among different levels of government and horizontally among different government agencies, leading to ambiguous roles and jurisdictional gaps and contradictions.
Writing from Hong Kong, Anthony B.L. Cheung reviews and compares the administrative reform trajectories of China and Hong Kong within the notion of ‘administrative modernization under authoritarianism’. While their respective trajectories have run in arguably different political contexts, their experiences provide good lessons for the understanding of reforms in a path-dependent context of pursuing administrative reforms in an authoritarian setting embracing a strong agenda of substituting political reforms. Both have made significant changes but continue to operate within systematic and institutional constraints; their path and logic of reform have never been entirely straightforward, displaying compromises and uneasy hybrids (more so in mainland China). Though exceptions to a typical Western politics-administration dichotomy, and being confronted with growing political challenges to governance, both can be seen as ‘success’ types in their own right, helping to enrich the empirical appreciation of public management and administrative reforms in diverse settings.
In Taiwan, Mei-Chiang Shih, Milan Tung-Wen Sun and Guang-Xu Wang observe that government restructuring has been continuously discussed and debated for over three decades, and that Taiwan’s restructuring reform has been an interplay of three factors – the search for legitimacy, Western and mainly American influence, and the reflection on local administrative experiences. There had been a strong dose of US influence due to the post-World War II geopolitical situation. Although under the impact of global NPM and government reinvention, it is suggested that Taiwan’s reform experience, not dissimilar to some other Asian countries, has seen both exogenous and endogenous factors at work, involving the transformation of the role of the state, political manipulation, the demand to revitalize the civil service system, and the desire for an indigenous reform strategy. Lately, there has been a new round of struggles around the bureaucrats–politicians and state–market dichotomies for this still developmental and regulatory state.
These accounts, taken together, present a new point of departure in the public administration literature and invite greater attention to the region as a ‘living administrative system’ on its own merit, instead of just being analysed according to any singular ‘global’ model that can easily paper over distinctness in cultures, traditions and nation-building goals which are often found to be prominent in Asian modernization and development. In this globalized world of policy learning and transfers, experience does not need to flow only in one direction – i.e. from the West to the East, or from the North to the South. Indeed, the East Asian experience, in the logic of globalization, should be regarded as integral to the overall global experience, that may also inspire the West and other parts of the world.
Lessons from East Asian experience in a post-NPM era
Whether the East Asian experiences could be elevated to the level of offering East Asian lessons or even an East Asian paradigm or model of public administration can be debated. Even if they could, it does not necessarily mean that such a model would fit a different culture or system. They just point to the presence of divergent paths of development and governance, which the notion of a grand global paradigm does not give justice to. In the twenty-first century, internationalization has to be genuinely international in recognition of the globalized world – i.e. bringing together cross-national and cross-cultural experiences and identities, and appreciating diversity and plurality. In his book The New Asia Hemisphere, Kishore Mahbubani argues at the outset that: ‘The rise of the West transformed the world. The rise of Asia will bring about an equally significant transformation’ (Mahbubani, 2008: 1). Until the early nineteenth century, the two largest economies of the world were China and India, and the world is now seeing the resurgence of these two giants in the twenty-first century (Smith, 2007). Thus one can no longer ignore the importance of Asia and the Asian civilizations in the new century when the advent of an Asian modernity would help shape the world and its future.
The outbreak of the current global financial crisis has somewhat shattered faith in Anglo-American capitalism. The globalization discourse previously dominated by neoliberalism is being challenged on two fronts – by the emerging post-neoliberal debates (Brand and Sekler, 2009), and by the critics of the Washington Consensus championing, for example, an alternative ‘Beijing Consensus’ based the Chinese path of pragmatic developmentalism (Ramo, 2004). NPM – rooted in the neoliberal pro-market ideology – similarly faces a legitimacy crisis of its own as many nations, especially developing countries, begin to look for lessons from alternative developmental models. ‘Friedman is out, Keynes is in, and the activist state is back’, observes Levy (2010). Critiques and reflections have only just begun, both in government thinking and intellectual and academic discourse. A common thread among major East Asian systems is that the state is as important as the market (or the private sector) in shaping public management and governance reforms. The rising challenge to the market paradigm will likely see a growing interest in ‘East Asian public administration’ which can be viewed as a hybrid of Western and Eastern traditions, combining state-led development strategies and the instrumentalities of public administration.
Developmentalism remains the foundation of public governance in East Asia, where policymaking has always been dominated by a developmentalist bureaucracy keen on state-building. Whether it be social development, public policy, or public administration at large, the agenda is determined neither by economics nor politics alone, but also by the bureaucracy-mediated goals of the political economy embracing both economic (productivist) and political (social stability, distributive and redistributive) features. Such an alternative narrative of public administration should provide food for thought for the reflections on public administration in the post-NPM era. In the past there was a suggestion that Hong Kong was an exception to such a developmentalist norm. However, into the twenty-first century, in the aftermath of both the 1998 Asian financial crisis and the 2008–09 global financial tsunami, even Hong Kong has embarked steadily on a semi-developmentalist path with no return (Cheung, 2000, 2010)