Treading Different Paths: Informatization in Asian Nations, edited by Georgette Wang. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corp. 1994. xv+268pp.

This book contains edited versions of papers presented at a 1989 symposium on informatization held in Taipei. Thus the material is already somewhat passe in the mid-1990s, even though the editor claims that "most authors went through at least two rounds of updating" (p. ix). A check of references, however, indicates only a handful of references beyond 1990. Thus, during a decade when technological advances have leaped up geometrically, the old data presented in this book are relatively uninviting except as historical references for the present actuality.

Fourteen of the 15 authors are of Asian origin, with at least 12 of them claiming a North American educational background. Of the 15 chapters, three are Japan related and two Korea related. China, India, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Taiwan each has a chapter. With one exception, the authors of the country chapters are nationals of that particular country.

The subtitle of the book should have been "Informatization in Nine Asian Nations." Even that would be slightly inaccurate as the Sri Lanka chapter deals only with abstracting and indexing services. The editor says that "in this book Asia will refer to the land area stretching from Pakistan to Japan, excluding Australia and New Zealand ... " (p. 8) -- a loose operational definition indeed. Thus when she refers to Asia in a table on export market share for automatic data processing equipment (p. 12), the reader will have to guess the countries included. Further confusion arises when she uses the 1969 Asia Handbook to state: "With 55 percent of the world's population, Asians generated only 12% of the world's income" (p. 9). The reader would have appreciated a footnote clarifying the composition of Asia for that calculation.

Wang says that the purpose of the book "is to provide some of the missing links ... in our knowledge of th(e) purportedly global trend of informatization" with reference to Asian nations by "looking beyond statistics" (p. 14). She describes the book as "a major effort to look beyond the experience of a few developed nations while trying to grasp the essence of informatization" (p. 15). It appears that she is using the term "statistics" in a non-mathematical sense to refer to numerical data. The authors certainly provide useful information on informatization in their respective countries even though one may legitimately quibble about the disappointing lack of comparability in their approaches. It seems that the authors have gone on their separate ways depending on what they could gather relating to the components of informatization. A book made out of conference papers was bound to suffer from this deficiency.

Wang justifies the old data in the book by saying that "it is almost an impossible task to keep up with" the rapid development of information technology. The intention of the book, she says, is to analyze "government responses to the IT challenge, the efforts and resources devoted to informatization, and implications for the future" (p. ix). The authors have attempted to do so with different degrees of success. The quality of the chapters varies from excellent to poor on the basis of research and scholarship.

Wang's introductory chapter justifying the focus on Asia points out the big economic leaps of Japan and the Asian dragon-and tiger nations. She refers to the "signs of IT growth ... almost everywhere on the Asian continent" (p. 11). Even though she builds up a convincing argument, one can be somewhat disappointed with the lack of consistency between the written text and the tabular material. For instance, while the text speaks of "Japan's 7.1 computers per 100 people" for 1987, the relevant table shows the same 7.1 as the per 1,000 rate (p. 13). That confusion is not confined to Japan alone.

Youichi Ito has written two of the three Japan-related chapters. The first is a theoretical examination of the question: Why information now? He examines the issue within the frameworks of technology-push theories, which are better at explaining the early stage of technological innovation, and of demand-pull theories, which explain the mature stage better. He brings in the views of Japanese scholars like Kohyama, Masuda, Sanuki and Umesao on informatization (johoka) -- a distinct service for Western scholars. In both his chapters, Ito makes extensive references to his own work -- five in the first chapter and 19 in the second. While this may establish him as a johoka specialist, it may present a nightmare to scholars who have to blind referee his scholarly work before publication.

Ito's 30-page second chapter is a thorough look at how Japan achieved postinformational status within a quarter-century, a process that took the United States more than a century. First, he looks at informatization in the public sector with particular reference to the competitive informatization policies of two key ministries: international trade and industry (MITI) and posts and telecommunications (MPT). Second, he examines informatization in the private sector focusing on the telecommunications industry. Finally, he analyzes the impact of johoka in two ways: the impact of industrialization of information; and the impact of informatization in a narrow sense, meaning rapid increase of information flow and stock. A weakness in this otherwise excellent chapter is the lack of attention given to the emergence of pioneering virtual communities in Japan such as TWICS in Tokyo and COARA in Oita, a facet that Rheingold (1993) traces with admirable finesse. In the mid-1990s, global virtual communities have emerged encompassing almost all the countries analyzed in this book, yet none of the authors has looked at this phenomenon and its impact on society. In fact, the information superhighway has eluded the authors featured in this book. With regard to HDTV, Ito says: "Europe is following Japan, but the United States seems far behind Japan and Europe" (p. 87). Perhaps Ito could have updated his research to recognize "the unexpected leap of the United States into global leadership of HDTV technology" when in 1993 both Japan and the EC announced that "they would cooperate in developing the new U.S. standard than continuing work on their own systems" (Stevenson 1994: 329). Hajimi Oniki, the author of the third Japan-related chapter, looks at the impact of informatization on economic growth. He uses what is called interindustry analysis -- a method that explains a broad variety of economic activities by looking at the flow of goods and services among different sectors of the whole economy (p. 175). The outcome of this complex calculation has shown that the advancement of new information technology accounted for 15 percent of the annual growth in the Japanese economy from 1975 to 1985. Oniki's explanation of the calculation, however, can be well beyond those who have no grasp of econometrics.

Sang-Chul Lee, who claims to read about 130 books a year (p. 110), has written the first Korea related chapter. However, his excessive reliance on newspapers and magazines for data relating to aspects of informatization diminishes the value of his chapter as a scholarly piece of research. The author of the second Korea-related chapter is Deanna C. Robinson, the only non-Asian appearing in this volume. She has advanced the thesis that the U.S. pressure on Korea to open up the latter's market for U.S. competition actually spurred Korea toward rapid informatization thereby refuting "both the modernization and dependency perspectives" (p. 227). Robinson too is highly dependent on newspapers for back-up information.

China and India, the two population giants on earth, have received very different treatments from the chapter authors -- Paul Siu-Nam Lee and Vijay Menon respectively. Lee says, "China does not have a specific strategy to promote informatization per se" (p. 32). He presents five tables of data on informatization coming from the State Statistical Bureau and other authoritative sources. He illustrates the structure of the scientific and technical information systems of China with great clarity. He mentions the lack of coordinating administrative services, of financial resources, of trained personnel, and of information consciousness as the major obstacles to China's informatization. And he points out the need for a "demand-pull" dynamic.

In contrast to Lee's scholarly chapter on China, Menon presents a journalistic overview of informatization in India. His references are confined to one newspaper, two newsmagazines, and four telematics-and computer-related magazines dating from 1984 to 1990. One of the two tables comes from Telecom Mission Draft Report of the Department of Telecommunications.

Vincent Lowe, in his chapter on Malaysia, laments that "up-to-date statistics are not easily available" (p. 127). Thus the data in his only table, which shows the revenues from telephone, telex and telegraph, stop at 1984. While he attempts to describe the policy formulation on informatization undertaken by the "purely bureaucratic" Manpower and Modernization Unit and the "quasigovernmental" Institute of Strategic and International Studies, he backs out of elaborating on the latter's substantive proposals because "it would not be proper to comment" on them while "the discussions and the process of drawing up an action plan ... are still continuing" (p. 115). He does not make clear the time frame to which "still" refers. Perhaps because he "is currently preparing to qualify as a barrister" (p. xii), he provides a six-page overview of the legal infrastructure, meaning the new Copyright Act, in addition to a somewhat shorter overview of the physical infrastructure. Three of his six references are newspaper articles.

In contrast to the highly complex measures of informatization that Japanese scholars have adopted, Eddie Kuo uses a "much more modest" approach to measuring Singapore's level of informatization (p. 143). He looks at three dimensions: people, infrastructure and economic. He measures the people dimension through the indicators of general literacy rate and level of education; the infrastructure dimension through the indicators of mass media usage, telecommunications usage and computerization; and the economic dimension through two indicators: the share of primary information sector in the total economy, and the percentage of information workers in the total labor force. Had other authors followed a similar framework for country analyses, better comparability would have emerged.

The two chapters on Philippines and Taiwan are relatively short. Epictetus Patalinghug briefly examines the Philippines' structure and growth of telecommunications services, as well as policy and regulations relating to them Thereafter, he briefly looks at computerization and mass communication. The team of Chung, Cheng and Tseng examines Taiwan in relation to the information infrastructure, informatization and computers, and information workers. Their attempt (p. 167) to compare Taiwan's 1988 percentage share of routine and skilled information workers in the total workforce with figures relating to the United States (1980), the United Kingdom (1981), Japan (1975) and France (1975) is questionable because of the gap in the years selected.

Meheroo Jussawalla, an authority on transborder data flow, provides a theoretical and conceptual framework of information trade and access, and discusses information trade in a North-South context including the protectionist policies of some Asia-Pacific countries. However, her advice for the Uruguay Round of GATT in relation to information trade serves very little purpose in a book published in 1994 just at the creation of the World Trade Organization. Relevant updating should have occurred before publication. In this regard, Drake's (1993) discussion on transborder data flow and national sovereignty appears much more refreshing.

In the concluding chapter, Wang says that the country cases presented in the book make it clear "that nations do not always have the luxury of setting their own pace and direction of development," and that "they are rushed into ... changes and challenges ... for three major reasons: international competition on the world market, the desire to accelerate growth, and the disappearing national boundaries for IT" (pp. 247-248). She says that China and India "offer proof that developing nations do not necessarily need to wait until the right 'stage' to arrive to begin informatization" (p. 257).

The book is clearly a mixed bag. The material in the book should have been more thoroughly updated to reflect the advances upto 1994, its year of publication. That it totally ignored the worldwide information superhighway and its potential impact on global society is inexcusable. However, despite its clear deficits, this book has pioneered the recording of informatization in a significant part of Asia. Other Asian scholars should take up the challenge to update the material and expand the research to cover the whole of the big geographical blob we call Asia.

References:

Drake, William J. Territoriality and Intangibility: Transborder Data Flows and National Sovereignty. In Beyond National Sovereignty: International Communication in the 1990s, edited by Kaarle Nordenstreng and Herbert I. Schiller. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corp. 1993.

Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. 1993.

Stevenson, Robert L. Global Communication in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Longman. 1994.