Abstract Japanese overseas development assistance intersected with sericulture in Southeast Asia especially during the 1970s and 1980s. Piecing together disparate entomological engagements as reported by Japan International Cooperation Agency and its precursor shows how Japanese developmentalists viewed silk production as a critical strategy for engaging with emergent national economies and cultivating potential global trade partners, especially in Thailand. Additionally, JICA scientists engaged in various kinds of research ranging from pest control to more ecological research assessing biodiversity. This patchwork of entomological activities resulted from the technocratic legacies and vestiges of Japanese visions of technological modernism. Consequently, technical aid designed to understand or control insects as objects of cultivation to multiply or as bodies to minimize can be analyzed to better comprehend the less visible or obvious agendas and systems that contribute to technological infrastructures.
Abstract This essay discusses Asia-to-Asia technical aid—the subject that Aaron S. Moore explored through Japan's dam constructions and Nippon Kōei—by intersecting its historical trajectory with the evolution of South-South Corporation, which was once a crucially important political tool of the Global South. I take a critical look at the 1970s when Asian nations emerged as newly industrializing countries and left the Global South. Using Cold War Asia as a method, I call for a deeper historicization of Cold War Asia to resist a simple model searching and such developmentalist discourses as the “from receiver to donor” narrative espoused by Asia's so-called miracle economies.
Abstract China's local governments were saddled with unprecedented levels of debt after the collapse of the real estate sector. Recent economic data indicates that the outlook for China's growth is gloomy, as multiple provinces missed their GDP targets last year. Yet, despite this downturn and debt, some provinces maintained high rates of growth. What explains their success? Based on recent fieldwork in China, this study presents new findings and raises questions about strategies, both domestic and international, that Chinese counties and cities are employing after the breakdown of land finance. Localities are building integrated production parks to promote new industries. Some used the Belt and Road initiative to obtain funds and approval to build the parks. Most unexpected is that local government financing vehicles have been transformed into VCs that provide “patient capital” to fund startups in the integrated production parks. What do these findings imply about the evolution of China's development model? Local state corporatism has been used to describe the behavior of local governments acting as entrepreneurs to spearhead local state development. What is the fate of the new local state development? What incentives shape cadre behavior as the upper levels push the development of new productive forces but localities face ever greater challenges, amid shifting domestic and international contexts?
