the Dragon: China – 1,000 Years of Bloodshed
By Erik Durschmied
Andre Deutsch £18.99, 336 pages
FT bookshop price: £15.19
The Next American Century: How the US Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise
By Nina Hachigian and Mona Sutphen
Simon & Schuster $26, 368 pages
The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East
By Kishore Mahbubani
Public Affairs $26, 336 pages
Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade
By Bill Emmott
Allen Lane £20, 336 pages
FT bookshop price: £16
The debate about whether Asia will once again dominate the global economy – as it did for two millennia before the industrial revolution in 18th-century Britain and the rise of the US – is over. The 21st century will be the age of Asia's return to economic pre-eminence.
Do not be distracted by the current turbulence in financial markets, however tempting it is to see the collapse of the dollar and the travails of investment banks as signs of US decadence. Asia's rise began decades ago, seeded by western investment and training and nourished by expanding international trade after the second world war, first in Japan, then in China and now in India. Asian growth, starting in the north-east and spreading west and south through half the world's population, has begun to feed on its own success.
The effects are startling, especially in China, whose huge economy has been doubling in size roughly every seven years. Each year it has been building enough new power stations to provide electricity to the whole of the UK. It is consuming so much oil, timber, iron, copper and food to supply its factories and its 1.3 billion people that commodity prices have risen to record levels and aid agencies are struggling to feed the world's poor. China has put a man in space and proved it can shoot down an orbiting satellite with a ballistic missile. It is responsible for up to a quarter of the particles in Los Angeles's air pollution on the other side of the Pacific ocean.
Asia is becoming richer and stronger, but is it therefore more threatening? An earlier wave of non-fiction books breathlessly analysed the business opportunities arising from Asia's economic resurgence. The authors of the books in this most recent cascade ask, with varying degrees of nervousness, what Asia's rise will mean for the rest of the world. Will it enhance or endanger global security? Could Asia convert its economic muscle into military strength? Might China stand in for the Soviet Union as the west's opponent in a new cold war?
The consensus is one of cautious optimism. Although the admonitory title and scarlet cover of Erik Durschmied's Beware the Dragon is designed to chill the blood of pusillanimous Europeans and Americans already anxious about the rise of China, the book itself is a war correspondent's take on the past, not the future. Hooves thunder across the steppes, blood flows and slaughters multiply as Mongol horsemen and Maoist revolutionaries take their turns to rule the Middle Kingdom. Durschmied is fun to read on military tactics, and his liberal rewriting of history makes us spectators of the great battles that created the China of today. But he makes only a feeble stab, in the closing pages, at guessing what happens next.
Nina Hachigian and Mona Sutphen, who worked long hours in a converted White House broom cupboard at the US National Security Council during the Clinton administration, approach the challenge of Asia's rise from an unashamedly American (and Clinton-Democrat) perspective. The Next American Century explains to its target US audience the rise of the “pivotal powers” – China, Europe, India, Japan and Russia – and argues passionately that the US should adopt a policy of “strategic collaboration” rather than confrontation with these other powers. Non-Americans might think this obvious, but Hachigian and Sutphen have watched with horror the chaos of US foreign policy under President George W. Bush. They want to avert the return of trade protectionism and China-bashing under the next US administration.
Where Hachigian and Sutphen see the world through American eyes, Kishore Mahbubani, a former Singapore diplomat and proponent of authoritarian “Asian values”, takes what he believes is a resolutely Asian view of the world in The New Asian Hemisphere. Asia's rise, he declares, will make the world more peaceful and stable. He claims that the west, having triggered Asia's modernisation, is now perversely reacting with dread and foreboding to the inevitable increase in Asian power. Asia and the west need to reach some kind of common understanding as we enter “one of the most plastic moments in world history”. Mahbubani's criticisms of the west are often trenchant and valid. His weakness is that he rarely turns his critical faculties inward towards Asia, which leaves him with a falsely binary view of the world: Asia is pragmatic, flexible and visionary; the west is sluggish, complacent and hypocritical. For all the weaknesses of the European Union, it is hard to take seriously his scorn for EU diplomacy and his suggestion that the Association of South East Asian Nations (an ineffective group which failed to tackle crises in countries such as Burma and East Timor) is a diplomatic “superpower”.
Bill Emmott, a former editor of The Economist, is one step ahead of his fellow authors. True, he says, “Asia is a dangerous place”. The menace, however, is not so much that Asia will confront the west, but that the three big Asian powers – Japan, China and India – may confront each other. He does not present a large amount of new information, but Rivals is remarkable for the clarity of its economic and historical analysis and the cogency of its arguments. It is by far the best work of the four reviewed here.
Emmott
says continued economic growth and integration in Asia would be the “single biggest and most beneficial economic development of the 21st century”. But he notes that the world economy has grown robustly in the past few years, largely because political turmoil has been concentrated in parts of the world (such as the Middle East) far from the great powers and from the main arenas of growth, trade and investment. That may change as China, India and Japan compete for influence. “The thing you have to understand is that both of us [India and China] think that the future belongs to us”, he is told by a senior Indian official. “We can't both be right.” This is not necessarily true (as Emmott points out), but it does hint at the rivalry to come.
Hachigian and Sutphen also allude to the dangers of intra-Asian conflicts and how they might be exploited by outside forces; one Asia expert is quoted on India's fear of a situation where “the US will fight China to the last Indian”. Emmott does not come at the problem from an overtly western or Asian angle and his essentially neutral standpoint gives him several advantages. He delves deeper into the developing US-India relationship, harking back to the US-China detente of the 1970s and describing Mr Bush's realisation of India's importance as his “Richard Nixon moment”. He appreciates the often underestimated importance of Japan, still the world's second largest economy, and casts doubt on the “Asian values” explanation of east Asian success; such success, after all, has now spread deep and wide into non-Confucian cultures.
One reason to agree with the cautious optimism that prevails in the literature on the rise of Asia is that “globalisation” is now an everyday reality, not merely a slogan. Barack Obama is an American whose father came from one foreign country (Kenya) and who spent part of his childhood in another (Indonesia). This may be unusual for a US presidential candidate but it is by no means unique: millions of people around the world have similarly mixed origins and upbringings.
Globalisation applies to culture and politics but its origins are economic. For all the outrage in the US over dangerous toys imported from China, economic interdependence is a fact of life. Like it or not, China already dominates many of the links in manufacturers' supply chains. There was the usual outcry over Chinese safety standards when Americans were told last year that most of the toys recalled in the US for safety shortcomings were made in China, but this fact is unremarkable when you consider that 60 per cent of all the world's toys, and nearly 90 per cent of those imported into the US, are Chinese made; Chinese toys, in fact, were generally less dangerous than those of other importers, and many of the flaws turned out to be the fault of the US designers.
Even terrorism and the spread of disease – Hachigian and Sutphen call them “the rotten fruit of globalisation” – force the great powers to acknowledge their common interests and collaborate. The two authors' solution to the rise of powers that rival the US is not for the US to confront them but to improve itself because “that's our new world. The domestic is international, the international is domestic.”
What emerges most clearly from the noisy debate on Asia's rise is that there is no battle of ideas, at least not one that pitches a united Asia against a united west. Mahbubani may disagree, but the language of “us and them” is tiresome, outdated and almost wholly irrelevant to international and even Asian politics.
Yes, the peoples of the world – in Tibet, Malaysia, Zimbabwe or Kosovo – rise up from time to time to demand freedom, justice or independence, but they do so because such aspirations are human and universal, not because the protesters are slaves to western ideology. Even Mahbubani acknowledges the “massive democratisation of the human spirit that is taking place in China” as a result of economic growth. Torture and detention without trial are outrageous abuses of human rights and proof of hypocrisy when practised by the US, but they are just as outrageous when they occur in Asia and right-thinking people in both continents condemn them. The process of economic growth itself forces nations to change in ways that make them more like the western industrial democracies. The point about the developed world, in other words, is not that it is western but that it is developed.
When it comes to the almost obligatory list of bullet-point answers to the world's problems in the final chapters of these books, there is again consensus: the world's great powers should talk to each other, and the rising – or newly risen – powers should be given a seat at the table of global institutions.
For Mahbubani, that means, inter alia, restructuring the permanent membership of the UN Security Council, skewed in favour of Europe, and reforming the leadership of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. For Hachigian and Sutphen, it means creating a “Core Six” or C6 group of the US and the pivotal powers variously excluded from the Security Council, the G8, Nato and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. For Emmott, it means having the US publicly embrace the East Asian Summit as an inclusive forum for Asia's interests, much as the US supported the European Union project from the 1950s onwards.
These are surely the right kind of diplomatic solutions to manage an epochal changing of the guard among the great powers. The alternatives, including the rivers of blood evoked in Durschmied's Beware the Dragon, are too grim to contemplate.
Victor Mallet is the FT's Asia editor
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