Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

60 CONSUMPTION AND SELF-DEFINITION
disproportionate and seemingly problematic ‘Chineseness’ of the bourgeoisies in
most countries, and the high proportion of people of Chinese descent among the
middle classes more broadly. The third is the striking newness of the new rich.
The extent and social consequences of industrialisation vary
considerably among the countries under consideration, with Singapore lying at one
end of the spectrum, and Indonesia at the other. Nevertheless, the experience of
wealth, rapid social mobility and urbanisation (not Singapore) barely spans two
generations for large numbers of these people. The more recent waves of middleclass
expansion have been in the private sector and have opened up careers for
skilled workers, well-educated professionals, managers, knowledge workers in
more advanced, higher value-added sectors, and growing numbers of groups that
command high wages internationally (the people Robert Reich (1992) calls
‘symbolic analysts’), with Indonesia still lagging in the earlier stages of labourintensive
industrialisation.
Historically, the state and large corporations have played major roles in the
modernisation of society and economy in these countries. This has had obvious
and important effects on the growth of domestic bourgeoisies, and on their values.
It produced, at first, broader middle classes whose composition and social
orientations correspond to this pattern of economic development. They have been,
for example, far less independent of state patronage than ‘typical’ Western middle
classes (Young 1990). In every case the intervention of the state has been crucial.
However, the influence of the state, and the importance of careers as state
functionaries, gave way to accelerated integration into the global economy, backed
by vast flows of foreign investment, and the pre-eminence of the private sector in
export-led growth. For Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, this started in about the
1980s; for Singapore, much earlier. The size and composition of today’s new rich
is directly linked to the shifts in economic policy and the nature of the mix of
government and private sector development. The history of these economic
changes is dealt with elsewhere (Robison and Goodman 1996; Higgott and
Robison 1985; Hewison et al. 1993; Kahn and Loh 1992). It is sufficient to note
that the national experiences were different, and led to differently composed elites
of wealth in each country, as well as to considerable heterogeneity within each of
them.
Many of these new elites are people who have achieved far higher levels of
education than their parents and grandparents. They have had to adapt to the
many-faceted pressures of modernisation in little more than a generation. But
alongside the very recent development of these middle-class groups, it is important
to stress the marked shift towards wealth and influence generated in the private
sector, and the shifts in outlook and identity that go with that change. The new rich
are bearers of ‘new forms of wealth generated through new systems of
accumulation’, so that:
the explosion of an elite culture of materialism, individualism and
conspicuous consumption based on growth of private disposable wealth is in