A defining characteristic of all the Asian tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam) [309] has been the speed of their transformation. In 1950 they were still overwhelmingly agrarian and had barely started the process of industrialization. In 1950 79% of South Korea ’s population worked in agriculture (relatively little changed from 91% in 1920); by 1960 the figure was 61%, and today it is around 10%. In the late 1960s the farming population still comprised half of Taiwan ’s total population, whereas today it accounts for a mere 8%. [310] The figure for Indonesia in 1960 was 75% compared with 44% today, for Thailand 84% compared with 46%, and for Malaysia 63% compared with 18%. [311] Eighty-five per cent of the population of China worked in agriculture in 1950, but today that figure is hovering around 50%. A similar story can be told in terms of the shift from the countryside to the cities. In 1950 76% of Taiwanese lived in the countryside, whereas by 1989 – in a period of just thirty-nine years – that figure had been almost exactly reversed, with 74% living in cities. [312] The urban population in South Korea was 18% in 1950 and 80% in 1994; while in Malaysia, which took off later, the equivalent figures were 27% in 1970 and 53% in 1990. [313] In China the urban population represented 17% of the total population in 1975 and is projected to be 46% by 2015. [314] We could also add Japan in this context, which experienced extremely rapid growth rates following the Second World War, its GDP increasing by a factor of over fourteen between 1950 and 1990 as it recovered from the devastation of the war and completed its economic take-off with a major shift of its population from the countryside to the cities. Between 1950 and 1973, its most rapid period of growth, its GDP grew at an annual rate of 9.29%.
Compared with Europe, the speed of the shift from the countryside to the cities is exceptional. Germany’s urban population grew from 15% in 1850 to 49% in 1910 (roughly coinciding with its industrial revolution), and 53% in 1950. The equivalent figures for France were 19% in 1850 and 38% in 1910 (and 68% in 1970). England’s urban population was 23% in 1800, 45% in 1850, and 75% in 1910. In the United States, the urban population was 14% in 1850, 42% in 1910, and 57% in 1950. [315] If we take South Korea as our point of comparison (with a population broadly similar to that of Britain and France), the proportion of its population living in cities increased by 62% in 44 years, compared with 52% for England over a period of 110 years, 34% over 60 years for Germany (and 38% over 100 years), 19% over 60 years for France (and 49% over 120 years), and 28% over 60 years (and 43% over 100 years) for the United States. In other words, the rate of urbanization in South Korea was well over
The shift from the countryside to the cities, from working on the land to working in industry, is the decisive moment in the emergence of modernity. From experiencing life on the land, where little changes from one year to the next, or from one generation to another, industrialization marks a tumultuous transformation in people’s circumstances, where uncertainty replaces predictability, the future can no longer be viewed or predicted in terms of the past, and where people are required to look forwards rather than backwards. In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the shift towards modernity as an increasingly mass phenomenon was confined to a small minority of the world, namely the West and Japan, but by the early twenty-first century it had become an increasingly mass phenomenon in much of East Asia too, with the change occurring far more rapidly in East Asia than it had earlier in Europe or North America. This relative speed of change had two important implications for the nature of East Asian modernities, which distinguishes them from their European and North American counterparts.
