TV REVIEW : ‘Mini-Dragons’ Fails to Capture Fire of Far East

It’s a fine idea to tell the story of Asia’s robust economies--the “mini-dragons” of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong--through personal portraits of local people. Too often in Western coverage of Asia, people are treated as undistinguished faces.

But “Mini-Dragons,” the joint international production that will be shown over four Monday evenings beginning tonight at 9 p.m. on PBS Channels 28 and 15, too often chooses the wrong people or asks the wrong questions. As a result, the series never quite delivers what could have been an invaluable lesson in the dynamics that created the dragons and the forces now threatening to slay them.

Can South Korea, often called the next Japan, recharge its sputtering economic engine by switching from cheap knock-offs to high-tech products? We never find out. Certainly, we spend considerable time with Kim Suk Won, head of Ssangyong, Korea’s sixth-largest chaebol, or conglomerate. But it would have been more instructive to visit his research facilities than watch him ski or bowl.

Can Taiwan’s thousands of small entrepreneurs ever develop the long-term thinking and technological sophistication needed to carry it over the current turbulence of high wages, growing environmentalism and other social demands? No answer is pinpointed, as the segment distractedly flips between an actress-gone-political-activist and a tennis racquet maker intent on pleasing his Japanese buyers.

The series goes from bad to worse with the Singapore segment. It comes off as a government commercial about government commercials. In lieu of their own reporting, the producers heavily relied on government TV ads promoting everything from national unity to childbirth.

That in itself is instructive, for it illustrates what undoubtedly were severe restrictions by the autocratic regime on the production. But what can viewers learn about the nation’s economic future by following around a patriotic jingle-writer and three “Singapore Girls” from the government-subsidized airlines?

The segment on Hong Kong offers a few revealing moments. A Hong Kong businessman discloses that millions of dollars in promised investment for his superhighway to South China suddenly dried up after the Tien An Men Square massacre. A Swiss investor bluntly tells a government official that China will surely impose extra taxes after 1997.

Such moments underscore the acute business uncertainty surrounding the future of this rambunctious haven of capitalism. The biggest omission was not profiling one of the residents who have lost hope and are fleeing the colony by the thousands.

The U.S., Australian and Japanese producers deliberately decided to forgo interviews with “experts” and focus instead on ordinary people. It shows. A subject as complex and important as this one could have used a great deal more sophistication and expertise.