In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I collaborated with Steve Heine at
Florida International University on a project called “Asian Globalization and
Latin America.” Funded by a U. S. Department of Education Title VI-D grant and
sponsored by FIU’s Latin American and Caribbean Center (http://lacc.fiu.edu/), our grant spawned
research in Pacific Rim studies and the forerunners of BRICS (the association
of the emerging economies of Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa). The focus
of that early research and dissemination was the multi-level relationships
between the established and emerging economies of East Asia and those of Latin
America. A large amount of our work dealt with the Japan-Brazil connections, beginning
with the arrival at the port of Santos of the Kasato Maru in 1908, and
continuing up to the so-called “return immigration” of Nikkei-Brazilian workers
to Japan in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Ironically, the beginning of
Japanese immigration into Brazil was motivated by two contrary perceptions of
Japanese racial identity: the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1907 between the U.S.
and Japan designed to curtail the immigration of Japanese manual labor into
California in part as a response to anti-Japanese public opinion, and the
re-marketing of Japanese identity as “white Asians” in order to promote
immigration as laborers for Brazil’s booming coffee plantations at the beginning
of the Twentieth Century. For a detailed discussion of Japanese immigration as
part of the “whitening” of Brazil see Jeffrey Lesser’s Negotiating National
Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil;
also see Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism
(Lesser, ed.)
At the same time that we began work on the grant, the second stage of
Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms started opening doors for foreign direct
investment in the People’s Republic of China. The Asian globalization issues
that developed from this policy revolved around the balancing of opportunities
present in the pent-up commercial demands of a country with about a billion
inhabitants, against the risks intrinsic in foreign enterprise coupled with at times
contradictory stances from a government not accustomed to free-market
practices. As we progressed into the first decade of the new millennium, the
Chinese economy loomed immense in the world commercial outlook. The economic
advantages of large numbers of very low-paid workers, and of minimal workplace
regulations in terms of working conditions and salaries, combined to enable a
flood of low-cost Chinese goods. The market realities led to China being able
to undercut similar goods from Latin American producers even as many of the
region’s economies strived to attain more stable and developed economies.
Chinese made “knock-off” goods also led to conflicts of international
intellectual property rights, a problem that had previous existed in Latin
American economies during the periods of import substitution models in the
1970s and 1980s. The 2010s have seen a new role for Chinese products: a move
toward not merely “Made in China” but rather “Created and Made in China.” As a
Brazilian engineer put it after a 2012 trade show in Europe, in the past we
would see armies of Chinese engineers roving the stands taking notes, and four
to six months later the Chinese imitation products would hit the world markets.
Now it’s the Chinese who have mounted their own stands with original products,
especially high-end, luxury designs. In other words, the Chinese have
leap-frogged over much of the Latin American industrial production while
maintaining their output of lower-end, mass productions. This is viewed by many
as an economic threat to the relative stability that the economies of Argentina,
Brazil, Chile and Mexico have experienced since the beginning of the recession
that struck the U.S. and the Euro Zone.
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