How The World Works Takes Another Gander At The Asian Logistics Blog

Yesterday I did a post extolling the virtues of the Asian Logistics Wrap Blog, written by fellow Michigander, Shawn Beilfuss.  I thought it important to spread the word about a blog about Asian logistics because logistics are of critical importance to so many businesses. 

Today I saw the post I would have written if I were a professional writer.  The post is at the relatively new, but always excellent, blog called "How the World Works."  This blog is written by Andrew Leonard, a senior technology reporter for Salon.com and author of a couple of books on technology.  The blog is subtitled "a conversation on globalization" and it describes its purpose as follows: 

The sense of connection and interrelatedness that is essential to globalization is what this blog is going to be about. It's not always a positive relationship -- just ask the Midwestern auto industry workers whose pensions and wages are being slashed as a direct result of foreign competition. And it's not always an obvious connection: I am endlessly fascinated by how the digital technology advances (computers, the Internet) that push globalization are responsible both for vast intellectual property violations and the rise of the open source software movement (Linux, Firefox). They are flip sides of the same basic transformation. A core element of globalization is that information travels everywhere, more cheaply and more quickly than ever before. We've only just begun to understand the implications of this.

But most often, when we explore globalization, the details are just plain obtuse. Unfurling the complexities of such questions as how to balance free trade and domestic protectionism is hard, and I would be the first to acknowledge that I don't understand more than a fraction of the issues at stake. For example, I'm fascinated by the riddle of how U.S. interest rates, the value of the Chinese yuan, and the American real estate boom are all part of one intimate equation, but I read 10 different economists' takes on the problem, and I see 10 different predictions on how it will all play out, and I don't know who to believe.

This blog, with its hubristic title "How the World Works," is a stab in the dark at exploring the territory of globalization, at finding believable answers to complicated questions. Sometimes it might get a little bit wonky -- there's no way to understand what's going on in the world today without plunging into the arcane world of high finance, and that is a direct invitation to high-order wonkiness. Sometimes it might get a little personal -- my favorite blogs are the ones that have voice, as well as meat, and so there's always going to be space here for the occasional rant. Sometimes it might seem to be weighted a bit toward the Far East, and not just because I'm fluent in Mandarin and studied Chinese history and politics for more than a decade. You cannot write about globalization without writing about China. It is part of every story, and that truth will only become more so in the future.

But whatever the particular flavor, whether the angle is China, open source software, free trade or derivatives trading, whether we're trying to understand the plight of the American factory worker or the challenge posed by the Shanghai semiconductor manufacturer, the underlying goal is to ask questions that shed light on how it all fits together. How does the world work? Let's find out.

As you can see just from the above, the guy can flat out write.  In addition to being beautifully written, the posts are nearly always fascinating, thoughtful, and thoroughly researched.  The blog is a winner.  My only beef is that Salon.com often makes the reader view an ad before seeing the post itself.  Very frustrating. 

But back to today's That's the Way the World Work's post, "Shrinking the Neo-Orientalist Gap --Globalization's First Commandment: Thou Shalt Manage the Supply Chain," and it takes off where my post from yesterday left off.   I apologize for the perhaps overlong quote, but the writing is so good that I am loath to do much cutting. 

It is part of the wonder and glory of the global conversation taking place on the Internet that if there isn't already a blog devoted to the topic you are interested in today, then just wait until tomorrow. Someone will come along who feels obsessively compelled to devote oodles of time and brainpower to analyzing whatever it is you are curious about.

I learned about Asia Logistics Wrap today from the excellent China Law Blog run by Dan Harris. Harris intrigued me by noting that Beilfuss was working on a multipart series on Kaesong, the special economic zone in North Korea where South Korean capitalists are exploiting northern workers and which I wrote about last week. Beilfuss' avowed intent is to use supply chain management theory to analyze the impact of globalization on North Korea. Since that's the kind of stuff this blog is all over like a hungry dog gnawing on a t-bone, I scurried over. I mean, I am exactly the kind of geek for whom the question, "How is a country with a small land area, scarce resources, a 55-year-old autocratic system of government, poor infrastructure, and noncompetitive labor force going to convince supply chain professionals, who would be responsible for the assessment of North Korea as a supply chain hub or node, to include it in a regional or global network of operations?" is of unseemly interest.

Still, Asia Logistics Wrap is not for those looking for lots of chili pepper in their kimchi. Supply chain management is dry stuff, and in-depth looks at China's plans for port modernization, or air cargo hub strategy in East Asia may not be to everyone's taste. But supply chain management is also the very lifeblood of globalization. It is one of the defining characteristics of the global economy that the computer on which I am typing these words is made from many thousands of components manufactured and designed all over the globe and combined in a stream of production that is phenomenally complex and ever-changing.

To some, the unprecedented expansion of the modern industrial supply chain is a fatal weakness of globalization, comprising a fragile, overextended structure that is doomed to crack and fall asunder in the face of an unforeseen disaster or global economic downturn. But to Beilfuss, the spread of state-of-the-art supply chain management is also the spread of civilization, of connectivity, of the "Core" developed world into the periphery of the developing "Gap."

Beilfuss borrows the Core-Gap terminology, along with the associated phrase "shrinking the Gap," from Naval War College political scientist Thomas Barnett, who made some waves in 2004 with his book "The Pentagon's New Map," which lays out a manifesto for interventionist U.S. military policy in combination with nation-building efforts (that would require a lot of supply chain management). For Beilfuss, the Kaesong Industrial Park is a fascinating attempt at "shrinking the Gap" in a geopolitical region of enormous importance to the world. North Korea, writes Beilfuss, "hopes to have its own little zoo of globalization's animals, contained and controlled in cages for everyone to see but which the majority of its own people would never experience."

For Beilfuss, "shrinking the Gap" seems to be a good and desirable thing, by definition. If North Korea was more economically integrated into the Northeast Asian region, for example, that could set it on a long forestalled path to economic growth and might lead to the easing of nuclear tensions. But there's an aspect to the whole "shrinking the Gap" ideology that comes off as, well, to borrow a term from a bold critique of Western-led globalization that ran in the U.K. Guardian on Saturday, "neo-orientalist." It assumes that becoming part of a global supply chain ultimately headquartered in Tokyo and New York and London is the natural destiny of an aspiring nation. And it may skate over the more grubby reality that "shrinking the gap" often means little more than shrinking the distance from capital to the cheapest possible labor.

That is exactly what I meant to say.