Longing for an economic past? Political economic nostalgia in East Asian societies

This project explores whether frustration with capitalist modernity leads East Asians to express discontent with economic development and to seek alternative futures. East Asian societies have experienced accelerated modernisation, but citizens in late-industrialised economies today reject hypercompetitive and unequal societies. In parallel, nostalgia has emerged as a major trend in consumer practices and cultural productions in the region. It is mostly contemplated as a cultural phenomenon. But when nostalgia expresses longing towards a pre-developmental past, it also belongs to the field of discontent with economic development and can shape citizens’ political economic mobilisation. The PENEA project therefore explores if East Asians long for their pre-developmental past, and if they mobilise for political economic change on this nostalgic basis? Combining sociology and political economy, it achieves three objectives: 1. documenting the expressions of nostalgia among East Asian citizens; 2. conceptualising these forms of nostalgia; 3. analysing if and how nostalgia is a source of mobilisation in East Asia. In East Asian societies that are post-developmental or developmental, expressions of longing for a recent economic past can be expected, and this longing can motivate actors to undertake individual or collective actions that produce political economic change. The PENEA project will test these hypotheses in high income, late-industrialisers (Japan, South Korea), middle-income Communist states (China, Vietnam) and fast-growing lower middle-income states (Philippines, Cambodia), through an innovative combination of traditional and social media analysis, surveys, interviews, participant observations and discourse analysis on textual and visual documents. The PENEA project is the first systematic, interdisciplinary and comparative study to identify political economic nostalgia in East Asian societies today, and to analyse how East Asians react to rapid development.