For decades, Anglo-American liberalism has provided the dominant interpretations of the post-1945 history of capitalism in Northeast and Southeast Asia. According to influential Anglo-American perspectives, East Asia is, or at least ought to be, moving in the general direction of a romanticized version of the path taken earlier by North America and Western Europe (especially the United States and Great Britain). And, following the Asian crisis (1997–98), laissez-faire economics and bourgeois democracy continue more than ever to be seen as crucial and inter-connected elements in this idealized and universalized vision of the path to prosperity.

For example, the speech by former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore to the annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum, in Kuala Lumpur in November 1998, sought to make a direct connection between liberal economics, democratic politics, and the successful management of the economic crisis then sweeping the region. Gore argued (as had Bill Clinton) that “democracies have done better in coping with economic crises than nations where freedom is suppressed”. He noted further that even in “nations suffering economic crises, we continue to hear calls for democracy and reform in many languages” (cited in Gittings 1998, p. 5).

The wider significance of this speech and the class-bound and culture-bound character of the neo-liberal understanding of the crisis in Asia (and of Asian capitalism more generally) is nicely captured by a well-known quotation from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Over a hundred years ago, these pioneering historians of capitalism argued that the rising bourgeoisie of North America and Western Europe were bringing “civilization” to “even the most barbarian” parts of the world, battering down the “Chinese walls” and compelling “all nations” to embrace the “bourgeois mode of production” in order to create “a world after its own image” (1986, p. 84). The metaphoric and literal strands of this formulation are echoed in the post–Cold War era by the way in which the Chinese state is perceived by U.S. strategic planners as the major “threat” to U.S. hegemony in the Asia-Pacific, at the same time as China is also perceived as the possible inheritor of the mantle of the developmental state exemplified by Japan and South Korea in the Cold War era.