Techno-Nationalism versus Techno-Globalism

Abstract

Up until the 1960s, the techno-nationalistic mode prevailed in the Cold War environment. Since the 1960s, however, the techno-globalistic mode emerged in Asian newly industrializing economies (NIEs) and was eventually adopted by China. This new trend reversed the technology gap, negating the veracity of dependency theory. This tendency will continue until eventually equality is attained, provided that techno-nationalism never regains its formerly overwhelming power.

Keywords:

• Techno-nationalism
• techno-globalism
• technology transfer
• dependency theory
• Asian mode of production

Notes

¹ The standard slogan is kagaku gijutsu rikkoku 科学技術立国 (literally, “nation-building by science and technology”), with some variations. Here, for the sake of brevity, I use gijutsu rikkoku, which has nearly the same meaning as the standard.

² The controversy over Japan's proposed FSX jet fighter speaks volumes about the difficulty the U.S. government has had in sorting out economic and military national interests. The FSX would be built jointly by US and Japanese manufacturers, using F-16 technology developed by General Dynamics and paid for by American taxpayers.

³ He seems to have used the English version of my writing (Nakayama 1991: 200) rather than the original Japanese.

⁴ One of the recent such works is Corning 2004.

⁵ Our Japanese group had a year-long intersector assessment of academic, public, and private laboratory chiefs in the 1980s, with which the MITI laboratory was most frustrated. Their purpose was not clear, and they could not compete with private laboratories in achieving a meaningful outcome. The private laboratories consulted not with public laboratories but only with individual university researchers who had made unique achievements.