Until the Asian economic crisis, questions of cronyism, corruption, and the politics of business were regarded by most neoliberal economists as mere sideshows in a game that would be decided by market deregulation, fiscal and monetary discipline, and privatization. Western corporate and banking interests, many of which flourished in the booming infrastructure and public utilities industries as the beneficiaries of state guarantees and other rents, accepted the blurring of private interest and public authority as just the Asian way of doing business.

As the crisis unfolded, however, all this was to change. It became increasingly clear that several Asian economies were vulnerable to the volatility of global financial markets because of the way that systems of business conglomeration had been shaped by political relationships. Within the neoliberal camp itself, a post-Washington Consensus began to form around the realization that deregulation in itself did not guarantee a working market economy. The policy emphasis began to shift toward constructing effective regulatory institutions, building the capacify of the state, and insulating it from vested interests.

It is in this context that Edmund Gomez's edited 2002 collection on business and the state, Political Business in East Asia, assumes a particular and timely importance. Gomez rejects the idea that the Asian economic crisis was simply the result of problems in the global financial architecture. Instead he argues that the very system of "political business" that dominated East Asia through the 1980s and 1990s, marked by corporate over-borrowing and overinvestment, made the region very susceptible to crisis and financial volatility. His central question is why this system of political business has been so remarkably resistant to structural change, despite the widespread unraveling of corporate and banking interests in Asia.

Post-Washington Consensus neoliberals also recognized the difficulties of transforming entrenched economic regimes. Their explanations focused on weak institutions, weak social capital, and a government captured by rentseeking coalitions. The problem becomes a technical one of constructing institutional capacity, insulation, and social capital. Gomez, however, sees it as a political problem. The old system survives because it binds together the entrenched power relationships that are the central and enduring feature in the equation.

This is an important theoretical counter-argument to neoliberal orthodoxy, although it is not as new as Gomez claims. Scholars such as Kirin Chaudhry have developed the idea that economic regimes are forged in brutal social conflicts. More specifically, Garry Rodan and his colleagues have argued precisely that the aftermath of the Asian economic crisis must be understood in the context of a struggle for the political survival of entrenched social interests. Even at the empirical level, Gomez claims to be entering uncharted territory. He argues that little is known about the links between politicians and businessmen in Asia. Yet these links have been investigated in several highly influential studies over several decades.

One of the strengths of Political Business in East Asia lies in the extensive discussions of different forms of state-business relationships in Gomez's introduction and in Andrew Wedeman's contribution, "Development and Corruption: The East Asian Paradox." Gomez and Wedeman tackle the shortcomings of models deriving from the concepts of developmental and predatory states as explanations for the East Asian cases. They develop an alternative model, which limits predatory behavior by the state and precludes state capture by business, to explain what Gomez terms political business, the uneasy balance between state and business power that is so common in East Asia.

How do these fairly coherent propositions translate into the studies? Although it is notoriously difficult to impose coherence on edited collections, this book is broadly successful. Most of the chapter authors engage with the themes of the book-the concept of political business, the struggles to preserve existing power relationships, and the problems of democracy. The chapters on Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, China, and Taiwan are full of perceptive detail about the way entrenched interests have gone about reorganizing themselves in changing circumstances to benefit from the growing privatization and concentration of wealth. In their contribution "State, Politics, and Business in Singapore," Stephen Haggard and Linda Low present a nuanced interpretation of how even this most insulated of states is developing different relations with capital. However, Haggard and Low avoid mentioning some of the most important and recent studies of this phenomenon. In contrast, Peter Wad provides lengthy analysis of the pre-crisis period in "The Political Business of Development in South Korea," but he is somewhat disappointing in his analysis of what has happened since.

A central theme of the book calls into question widely assumed relationships between democracy and markets. It develops the proposition, studied extensively elsewhere by Ben Anderson and others, that the sort of democracy emerging in much of Asia facilitates the survival of those power relationships previously existing under authoritarian rule through the rise of money politics. This is an important point and is well argued through most of the book, although Stephen Eklof in "Politics, Business, and Democratization in Indonesia" seems naively enthusiastic about the way democratic change might lead to reforms in other areas in that country. The author's optimism on this point has not been supported by past events.

However, the policy prescriptions that emerge from the dilemmas of money politics present a somewhat surprising twist to Political Business in EastAsia. Gomez suggests how legislative attempts might be made to control the way political parties are financed as well as their relations with business supporters. This is a theme taken up by many contributors to the book. Political Business in East Asia could have concentrated on power struggles and how reformist interests can be politically organized, rather than on how constitutional arrangements might hopefully constrain social interests.

Overall, Political Business in East Asia is one of the better attempts to analyze a complex problem. It is focused and coherent, offering stimulating and provocative questions to the reader. Most importantly, the book will stimulate debate on the future of East Asian business politics, giving policymakers and theorists alike something to reflect on as they try to reform business legislation in the aftermath of the Asian economic crisis.