Full bibliography

Two of the most salient aspects of the recent shift towards financialisation and neoliberal restructuring since the 1970s have been the restructuring of global production towards China, and the growing threat to workers’ livelihoods posed by increased capital mobility. Both of these trends can be seen as capital’s response to the crisis of profitability that has arisen from the unsustainable global social accord between workers and capital that was inherent in post-War US hegemony. Transnational manufacturing capital sought ever cheaper sites of cheaper and non-unionised labour, whilst there was at the same time a tendency for capital to withdraw from productive investment altogether and enter the financial market. This paper will seek to explore the implications of these developments for the working classes of East Asia as a region, and will take examine the present transformations from the perspective of Polanyi's depiction of social responses to earlier periods of financialisation. The emergence of China as the 'workshop of the world' has had profound effects on working classes in the rest of East Asia, and have changed the parameters within which political challenges can be mobilized. Similarly, the viability of the recent restructuring of the East Asian regional political economy is highly contingent upon how working class movements develop in China, and whether China can continue to act as a "spatial fix". Through an examination of the empirical evidence on what kind of strategies are being adopted by labour movements within the East Asian countries, the paper will attempt to adopt an explicitly regional view of the transformations of regional capitalism which overcomes the limitations of national-level analyses. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript