EAST ASIAN CITIES AND GLOBALISATION

An interview with Dr Christian Hess, Global History and Culture Centre

With the rapid growth in East Asia showing little sign of slowing down, what new challenges have researchers had to overcome in their work? Dr Christian Hess from the Global History and Culture Centre has conducted research that has led to a collaborative project aiming to aid understanding of the globalisation of East Asia. What do you think? Let us know in the comments box.

The current fascination with East Asia, and with China in particular, shows little signs of abating as cities such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seoul, Taipei and Beijing continue to experience rapid growth, emerging as important centres of global trade, finance and manufacturing. But the rapid globalisation that some East Asian cities have experienced recently has presented academics with new challenges. Dr Christian Hess, from the Global History and Culture Centre, is a specialist in modern East Asian history, and his research into the city of Dalian in Northeast China has led to a collaborative project that aims to build a framework for understanding globalisation in East Asia.

A lot of companies were opening call centres, so they called it the Bangalore of China.

‘I was trained primarily as a modern China specialist and I am studying a city that had been a Japanese colony for 40 years,’ he explains. ‘[My research is] a regional history about East Asia but for many years now Dalian has been an outsourcing base, particularly for Japanese companies, because there’s such a high level of Japanese language competency among graduates there. A lot of companies were opening call centres, so they called it the Bangalore of China. And there are other comparisons – it’s been called the Hong Kong of north China, and I’d talk to people working in Latin America who would tell me: “Well, it sounds like you’re describing the rise of Buenos Aires” and I thought “How am I going to make sense of this?”’

For one thing, late-industrialising nations in East Asia don’t always follow the same developmental patterns as North American and European nations. A look into the history of places such as Shanghai reveal a complex picture, with the city becoming globalised at the start of the 20th century, losing that status in the 1980s, then rising again as a ‘re-globalised’ metropolis in the 21st century. Before Dr Hess could start to answer broad questions about the role of globalisation in Dalian, he needed to take a more detailed look at the relationships between East Asian cities on a regional level, asking what the term globalisation really means within different academic disciplines and whether scholars might develop a shared methodology.

‘In a narrowly defined way I’m an urban historian working on the city of Dalian and a lot of that work is tied into a narrative about China and about Japan and about how this city, which was built by Japan, suddenly becomes a Chinese space,’ he explains, ‘so it’s kind of a classic colonial-to-nation-state way of looking at this city. But that’s a really narrow story and when I came [to Warwick] and I started to talk to colleagues who were interested in globalising their own historical narratives, I thought about that more and more for my own work. I thought that there was a bigger story to tell about this city - to what extent is it a more recent story or even a global story?’

With funding from ESRC and Warwick Institute of Advanced Study, Dr Hess has drawn together a diverse network of scholars under the banner of the East Asian Cities and Globalisation project. There have been several events so far, both held at Warwick this July. The first was a conference entitled East Asian Cities and Globalisation: The Past in the Present, and the second, a summer school called East Asian Cities and Globalisation, New Challenges, New Approaches.

In a narrowly defined way I’m an urban historian working on the city of Dalian.

‘It’s an international networking grant, so they give you the money to bring people from all over the place,’ says Dr Hess. ‘I had people [visit] from Singapore, Korea, Mainland China, Taiwan, United States, Canada, the UK and Germany... One of the nice things about the first event was we had full Professors right down to people writing their PhDs, so it was interdisciplinary and all ranks. It was a really good dynamic. The workshop was specifically for postgraduates and I wanted them to present on their ongoing work, again with an interdisciplinary approach, because I think that in particular with East Asian History, it’s quite broad, and often these people’s career trajectory will involve them having to be quite broad in what they do – can they teach global history? Can they do global culture? - so if they’re going to have to be doing that anyway, they might as well start thinking about it as an intellectual agenda as well, which a lot of them are.’

Dr Hess hopes that through the network, academics working on East Asia can lay the groundwork for doing more solid global comparisons with cities across the world. ‘This network was step one. If it works – and it seems like it will continue to exist – then we can start working on future events where we do start to do that,’ he adds.

Dr Christian Hess specialises in modern Chinese history, with particular interests in urban history, Japanese imperialism and colonialism in China, and the regional history of Northeast China under Chinese, Japanese, and Russian regimes. He is currently working on a book project that examines the history of the port of Dalian: one of the largest and most modern in Northeast Asia, and a crucial part of a contested region fought for by Russian, Japanese and Chinese powers from 1895 to 1950.

By Dr Annette Rubery