Reading Report Sample 1

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Stockton University *

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History

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Oct 30, 2023

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Perkins Chapter 1 Reading Response Perkin begins his book by summarizing a brief overview of the history regarding the governance and colonization of different territories of East Asia. Perkins uses this first chapter to lay the groundwork for understanding the rest of the book by going over the historical foundations of East Asian development. Under the subheading Experience with Self-Governance Perkins discusses the way that different areas were divided and whether the people indigenous to those areas had their own form of governing or other peoples and countries subjugated them, both other asian countries and western imperialists in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Perkins contends that the unification and division we see today in modern nation-states is for the most part a resul t of borders being drawn based on what he refers to as “a common cultural heritage” and “a common linguistic heritage” (19), Perkins then goes on to discuss the governance and development in East Asia largely referring to the way differing East Asian countries responded to western imperialism, whether their governments remained independent, and the systems of government left behind by western imperialists following revolutionary movements made by the indigenous populations. While the west was betting on China to develop quickly their lack of economic understanding allowed Japan, who was careful to pick their battles with the western invaders, to use their history and penchant for innovation to guide them into becoming a modern economic power by the 1950s. Western history bows mostly to Judeo-Christian traditions but East Asia has a number of different religious and philosophical traditions. Confucian values in particular have strong influence on East Asia in general but Perkins argues that those values encouraged basic education particularly in China and Northeast Asia. The issue of literacy however is not one easily addressed in places like China and Japan where Chinese characters are required to be

learned. Southeast Asian countries had lower school enrollment and literacy rates particularly among poor and rural communities. However following their communist revolution China was able to greatly improve literacy and education by instituting the very public schools which provided the foundation for which modern China educates a huge nation with very high enrollment rates. There are of course other foundational factors and differences that affect East Asia. One big one the text skirts around before this point is WWII and Japan’s annexation of Korea which prevented most Koreans from gaining the practical experience necessary to run their own country following the end of WWII, Hong Kong’s continuous occupation by British forces following the pull out or defeat of most colonizers in East Asia, etc. Perkins argues that Northeast and Southeast Asia have a difference in per capita GDP that is attributable to Southeast Asia residing in a tropical area compared to the Northeast’s temperate zone. While there is a general correlation between tropical areas and lower GDPs the author says it is unclear as to why but in my personal experience people from tropical areas tend to cite different cultural values than the strict industrialized nature of their temperate counterparts. The author makes several references to Japan as being unique in comparison to the other countries of East Asia but uses nowhere near the same level of fanfare when discussing achievements of other countries, such as Korea’s high rates of literacy due to their phonetic writing system (Perkins 34). While I don’t disagree with Perkins’ assessment of Japan and their unique handling of globalization, the paragraphs dedicated to praising Japan may have been better used to describe conditions of Malaya, Indonesia, or Thailand, which had been mentioned so sparingly I had to go back and make sure Thailand was actually considered East Asia.

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