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China, for its part, resisted the urge to devalue its currency in an export competition with the rest of the region, and its strategy has been a success. Exports have not been affected to speak of, and with its currency value remaining high, it can get full credit for its large export market. Although China may be coming to the limits of how much money it can make from cheap clothing and low-tech manufactured products, it shows few signs of slowing down in the near future. It could be that China is now where Japan was in the early 1960s. (I doubt this, though, for reasons I will explain below.)
At any rate, 1998 was the year that finally put to rest the myth of "Asia's economic miracle," indicating that even though the development of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s may have seemed miraculous, it, too, was prone to the same ills of the business cycle as other capitalist economies, even ones without "Asian values" underlying their economic development. Charles Wolf of RAND calculates that an Asian asset in June 1997 (before the crash) was only worth 25% of its value by September 1998, making the crash comparable to the Great Depression in the United States.
The year also brought a series of electoral changes to the region, as voters blamed the economic crisis on their leaders, usually correctly. Japan's Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto became so unpopular he was replaced with Keizo Obuchi, a man commonly referred to as "cold pizza." Fidel Ramos of the Philippines was replaced with Jose Estrada, a former movie star and self-professed political ignorant. In the December elections in Taiwan, the Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang, or KMT), which has dominated Taiwan since its inception in 1949, won the mayorship of Taipei and a strong majority in Parliament. This doesn't seem particularly revolutionary, but it actually stems the rising tide of the minority pro-independence Democratic People's Party (DPP), which had recently been making strong headway into Parliament, and had held the Taipei mayor post. The citizens of Taiwan may have been sending a message that they did not wish to pursue Taiwanese independence, at the expense of angering China.
Even in systems where free voting is questionable at best, landmark changes in leadership changed the face of the country. As mentioned before, Indonesia's Suharto won a (predictable) re-election in March, only to be forced out of office two months later. The
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