Another way to skin a cat: the spirit of capitalism and the Confucian ethic.

• Author: Goodell, Grace

ONE MORNING WHEN I was last in Hong Kong I asked my friend Miss Lim, who always cleans my room at the University's guest house, what she did with the money she earned as a Hong Kong chambermaid. "Have you ever been to Petra?" she replied. Having arrived in the colony penniless twenty-three years ago, she had just returned from a tour of the Nabatean, Roman, and Greek ruins of the eastern Mediterranean.

In 1960 Hong Kong was just above Malta in per capita GNP; today it has overtaken Israel, and is soon expected to surpass the United Kingdom. At the close of the Korean War, 75 percent of Korea's adults were illiterate; now a teenager there has a greater chance of going to university than his counterpart in Japan.

A 1960 World Bank study proclaimed Singapore "unviable" as a country, should it separate from Malaysia. Thereupon the city-state began a period in which it sustained for over three decades the fastest growth rate die world has ever seen. This former "opium den" and "basket case" now has the world's busiest container port, the third largest oil refining facility, and the second highest per capita GNP in Asia, second only to Japan.

Thirty years ago Brazil's per capita GNP was double that of Taiwan; today Taiwan's is six times Brazil's. Indeed, the combined merchandise exports of East Asia's four Little Dragons -- South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore -- are twice the total of the entire Latin American continent, which has six times their population and sits on the doorstep of the world's richest and most open market. Astonishingly too, in transforming themselves at this Astounding rate, all four dragons have avoided a severe income gap between rich citizens and poor.

In 1988 I began to examine the non-economic factors that have contributed to the Little Dragons' remarkable achievements. Of the many journalistic pieces their success, few have been written by cultural anthropologists and virtually none has considered all four side by side. I have focused mainly on businessmen, government officials, and factory workers who were active players during the decisive years from the early 1950s, up to 1980. Prominent public figures such as Lee Kuan Yew and Dr. Goh Keng Swee in Singapore, and K.T. Lee in Taiwan, were among the eight hundred who participated in the research, as were the CEOs of various large East Asian firms and of Japanese and Western multinationals' regional headquarters. Contrary to the warnings I received from U.S. businessmen, most of their Little Dragon counterparts seemed delighted to discuss the questions that interested me: What is the meaning of life? Where are the ancestors? Can you explain the concept of "China" or "Korea" to me? Who should rule? Many of them considered such questions more pertinent to their societies' economic success than those usually posed by Western interviewers concerning production and sales statistics, export figures, labor costs, and die like.

One evening I was sitting with one of Korea's industrial magnates in a restaurant overlooking Seoul's $800 million Lotte shopping mall, a structure larger than the Houston Astrodome. The complex houses several athletic clubs, eight wedding halls, several hundred boutiques, as well as an Old Cornish Tea Room, a Wild West bar, a North African casbah, a medieval French castle, and a roller coaster along a facsimile Great Wall of China. My host brought me to the window and pointed to the mall's glittering entrance:

I grew up right there...in a bamboo hut, no

electricity, no toilet, no road. This vast

commercial world you look down upon was built by the

boys who tended oxen in that swampland. And

who is spending all that money? Their chums who

sloshed around in the paddy mud with me, collecting

half a bucket of snails for family dinner. Our

kids now come here to eat steaks from Omaha and

Haagen Dazs ice cream.

So, how did the Little Dragons pull off -- in less than one generation -- the transformation that Europe, the United States, and Japan required one hundred and fifty years to achieve? One thing is certain: They did it their way.

While many aspects of these societies superficially look like our own, beneath the surface the Dragons defy virtually all the basic Western theories about how capitalist development takes place, and what its requirements are. Indeed, my research indicates that an integral set of cultural factors -- ones that Max Weber, perhaps our leading theorist of capitalist development, pinpointed as preventing capitalism from taking root -- in fact substantially accounts for its rapid burgeoning in the Little Dragons.

Even at first glance these societies present our theories of development with difficulties. Two of them -- Hong Kong and Singapore -- are not even countries, and both are so poor in resources that they have to import their water. Nor could development spring from natural resources in any of the four, for such resources were, and are, few. Again, contrary to the 1994 Cairo Population Conference claims, these, the only four societies to launch...