This dissertation project revisits the widely-acclaimed East Asian miracle from a political economy perspective focusing on class dynamics and profit regimes. After reviewing the historically comparative context of East Asian development, and the economic literature before and after the 1997 crisis, I provide an alternative analytical framework to the dominant market-oriented versus state-interventionist approaches in exploring the long-term trajectories of transformation in the East Asian regimes of capital accumulation. More specifically, my dissertation focuses on two analytical questions in the East Asian development context: the transformation of labor regimes and the evolving class dynamics, and the dynamics of profit rates and its underlying implication on the income distribution between profit and wages. It provides a basis for a re-examination of the conventional wisdom about the East Asian exceptionalism. This study of class dynamics and economic (in)stability in the East Asian society also has policy implications for developing countries in the pursuit of their economic and social agendas.