Researching Hybridity in Social and Economic ... - NUS Home

eaders in business and government to support their view of “crony capitalism” in East and
Southeast Asia.
After this series of media exposures, it was clear that I needed to question my own
positionality in this project on Chinese capitalism. This was partly because of my reading into
poststructuralist work in human geography published at around the same time (Gibson-
Graham, 1996; Thrift, 1996; Rose, 1997) and partly because of my increasing awareness of
the potential “global” reach and impact of my research work. I came to realize how my own
positionality might have shaped my research agenda and the unintended ways through which I
communicated my research findings to the wider audience (e.g. media and professional
publications). 3 I thought that as an ethnic Chinese researcher speaking on the perils of
“Chinese capitalism”, my words might be construed and received rather differently (and
positively?) than those from such “essential outsiders” as Anglo-American scholars. I
wondered whether I became part of the alleged “Western conspiracy” that, according to the
former Prime Minister of Malaysia – Dr Mahathir Mohamed, brought the crisis to Asia. I
began to question my own ethnic and cultural identity as an “Overseas Chinese” – overseas to
where and what? Am I a believer in Confucianism and guanxi capitalism? Do I know and
practice guanxi as all ethnic Chinese are allegedly expected to do? What about the Italians and
the Jews or Anglos, doesn’t their form of economic activity rest on embedded relations even
though it is not called “guanxi”? So the story and its mischief in justifying the allegation of
“crony capitalism” in Asia goes on and on in these cultural essentialist writings. I began to
lose faith in the culturalist perspective and went on to search for an alternative approach to
study Chinese capitalism.
Why was there a u-turn in my approach to Chinese capitalism? During the course of
this decade-long research into Chinese capitalism, what has apparently changed in me is not
the subject of my intellectual pursuit (although how I see that subject has changed), but rather
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