2008年4月27日 星期日

THE REBALANCE OF POWER

THE REBALANCE OF POWER


By Victor Mallet
Monday, April 28, 2008

Beware

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




亚洲崛起的世纪(上)


作者:英国《金融时报》维克托•马莱(Victor Mallet)
2008年4月28日 星期一

谨防中国龙:1000年来的流血史》(Beware the Dragon: China – 1,000 Years of Bloodshed)

埃里克•迪施米德(Erik Durschmied)著,Andre Deutsch出版社,18.99英镑,336页,FT书店价格:15.19英镑

《下一个美国世纪:美国如何在其他大国崛起的时代里欣欣向荣》(The Next American Century: How the US Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise)


尼娜•哈奇格恩(Nina HACHIGIAN)与莫娜•萨特芬(Mona Sutphen)合著,西蒙-舒斯特出版公司(Simon & Schuster),26美元,368页

《新亚洲半球:不可阻挡的全球权力东移》(The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East)

基肖尔•马布巴尼(Kishore Mahbubani)著,Public Affairs出版社,26美元,336页

《对手:中印日之间的权力斗争将如何塑造今后的十年》(Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade)

比尔•埃莫特(Bill Emmott)著,Allen Lane出版社,20英镑,336页,FT书店价格:16英镑

亚洲是否会再次主导全球经济——如同18世纪英国工业革命和美国崛起之前的两千年里那样?这场辩论目前已告结束。21世纪将会成为亚洲重掌全球经济主导地位的年代。

切 莫被金融市场当前的动荡扰乱视线,美元的崩溃和投行的阵痛很容易被人视为美国衰败的迹象。但是,亚洲的崛起在数十年前就已开始。来自西方的投资和培训播下 了种子,二战后不断扩大的国际贸易又提供了进一步的滋养。首先是在日本,然后是中国,现在则是印度。亚洲的增长始于东北亚地区,之后向西向南扩展。它涵盖 了占全球半数的人口,并且已开始依靠自身的成功来维持发展。

其效果令人震撼,在中国尤其如此。这个庞大经济体的规模每7年左右增长一倍。它 每年都要新建许多的电站,其新增电力可以满足整个英国的需求。为了“喂饱”它的工厂和13亿人民,中国正在消费如此之多的石油、木材、钢铁、铜以及粮食, 不仅推动大宗商品价格升至创纪录水平,也制约了各援助机构向世界穷人提供食品的能力。中国人已经步入了太空,并证明自己有能力用弹道导弹击落在轨的人造卫 星。在太平洋彼岸的洛杉矶,空气污染物里1/4的悬浮颗粒源自中国。

亚洲正在变得更富有、更强大,但它会因此而更具威胁性吗?在早先的一批 非虚构书籍当中,一些作者兴奋地分析了亚洲经济复苏所产生的商业机会。在最近一大批类似的书籍里,作者们以不同程度的紧张态度在询问:对于世界其它国家而 言,亚洲的崛起意味着什么?它是会增强还是会威胁到全球的安全?亚洲会不会将其经济实力转化为军事力量?中国会不会取代苏联在新的冷战中成为西方的对手?

《谨防中国龙:1000年来的流血史》

这 些书籍的共识,是一种谨慎的乐观。埃里克•迪施米德(Erik Durschmied)的《谨防中国龙》带有告诫性的书名和鲜红的封面,这种设计是为了让那些本已对中国崛起感到焦虑的欧美人胆寒。尽管如此,这本书本身 却只是一位战地记者对于历史而非未来的感怀。在蒙古骑兵和毛泽东领导的革命者分别统治这个中央帝国之际,铁蹄踏过茫茫草原,流血遍地,杀戮无数。迪施米德 对军事战术的解读饶有趣味,他对于历史的创造性重写,仿佛让我们亲历那些塑造今日中国的历次重大战役。但对于今后将会发生的事情,他仅在篇尾的数页作出了 一些苍白的猜测。

《下一个美国世纪:美国如何在其他大国崛起的时代里欣欣向荣》

在克林顿政府期间,尼娜•哈奇 格恩(Nina Hachigian)和莫娜•萨特芬(Mona Sutphen)曾在美国国家安全委员会(US National Security Council)工作多年。她们无羞耻感地从美国人(尤其是克林顿式民主党人)的视角来分析亚洲崛起所带来的挑战。《下一个美国世纪》以美国的读者为目 标,书中解释了“关键大国”——中国、欧洲、印度、日本和俄罗斯的崛起,并动情地主张美国应采取一种“战略合作”的政策,而不是与别的大国进行冲突。对于 美国以外的人来说,这也许显而易见,不过哈奇格恩和萨特芬以恐惧的心情见证了乔治•布什(George W. Bush)任内美国外交政策的混乱。她们希望下一届美国政府防止贸易保护主义和“敲打中国”卷土重来。

《新亚洲半球:不可阻挡的全球权力东移》

哈 奇格恩和萨特芬通过美国人的眼光来看世界,而新加坡前外交官、威权式“亚洲价值观”支持者基肖尔•马布巴尼(Kishore Mahbubani)则在《新亚洲半球》中提出了另一种观点——他认为这是一种彻底的亚洲式世界观。他宣称,亚洲的崛起将会使得世界更加和平、稳定。他认 为,西方自己引发了亚洲的现代化,但现在却以一种头疼和畏惧的病态反应,来对待亚洲实力势不可挡的崛起。在我们步入“世界历史上最具可塑性的时期”之际, 亚洲与西方需要达成某种共识。马布巴尼对西方的批评往往是犀利、正确的。但他的弱点在于:他很少把自己的批判才能用在对亚洲的分析上。这就使得他带有一种 错误的双重世界观:亚洲是务实、灵活和前瞻的;而西方是怠惰、自满和虚伪的。尽管欧盟(EU)存在着种种弱点,但马布巴尼对欧盟外交的嘲讽,以及他认为东 盟(ASEAN)在外交上是“超级大国”(尽管它连缅甸和东帝汶这些国家的危机都处理不了),很难让人苟同。

《对手:中印日之间的权力斗争将如何塑造今后的十年》

《经 济学人》(The Economist)杂志前任主编比尔•埃莫特(Bill Emmott)比其他作者超前一步。他表示,没错,“亚洲是一个危险的地方”,但与其说这种威胁在于亚洲将要挑战西方,不如说亚洲的三大强国——日本、中 国和印度之间会相互对抗。埃莫特并没有提供出大量的新信息,但《对手》一书的出众之处在于其经济与历史分析的明晰,以及各个论点都有说服力。在我评述的这 四部著作当中,这本书绝对胜出。


莫特表示,亚洲持续的经济增长和整合,将是“21世纪最 重大、最有益的经济发展。”但他提到,全球经济在过去数年中强劲增长,很大程度上是因为政治动荡一直集中在中东等远离世界强国、远离经济增长、贸易和投资 主舞台的地区。当中国、印度与日本开始争夺影响力的时候,情况将会出现变化。一位印度高官告诉他:“你必须理解的是,我们(印度与中国)都认为未来属于自 己。总有一方说的不对。”正如埃莫特所指出的那样,这种看法不见得正确,但它确实寓示着两国有可能成为对手。

哈奇格恩和萨特芬也暗示了亚洲 内部发生冲突的危险,以及这一冲突被外部势力利用的可能性;她们的著作引用了一位亚洲专家的话,表明印度担心出现“美国让印度同中国战斗到底”的局面。埃 莫特没有从明显的西方或亚洲角度来看待这个问题,这种基本上中立的态度给了他诸多优势。埃莫特深入研究了发展中的印-美关系,联想到上世纪70年代美中关 系的缓和,将布什对印度重要性的认识比喻为他的“尼克松(Richard Nixon)时刻”。他也认可日本的重要性。日本现在仍是全球第二大的经济体,它的重要性常常被低估。埃莫特对东亚的成功缘于“亚洲价值观”的解释表示怀 疑;毕竟,这一类的成功现已深入广泛地扩展到一些非儒教文化当中。

“全球化”已是日常现实

在有关亚洲崛起的著述当中,谨慎乐观的态度甚为普遍。赞同这种谨慎乐观的理由是:“全球化”现在已是大家每天要面对的现实,而不仅是一句口号。对于 美国人巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)来说,他的父亲来自外国(肯尼亚),他童年的一段时期是在另一个国家度过(印尼)。这对于美国总统竞选人来说也许非同寻常,但本身绝非独特: 世界上有数以百万计的人们具有类似的混合血统和成长经历。

全球化的影响波及到文化与政治领域,但它的根源却是经济因素。尽管美国人对那些从 中国进口的危险玩具感到愤慨,但经济上的相互依存已成为生活现实。不管你喜不喜欢,中国已经在许多制造商供应链中占据了主导地位。美国人在去年得知,在美 国因安全缺陷而被召回的玩具多数是在中国生产,他们自然对中国安全标准表达抗议。不过,当你意识到全世界有60%的玩具、全美90%的进口玩具都是由中国 制造,上述情况就不足为怪了。实际上,中国玩具的危险性通常低于从其它地区进口的玩具,而中国玩具的许多瑕疵后来也证明是美国设计者的失误。

甚 至就连恐怖主义和疾病的传播(哈奇格恩和萨特芬称之为“全球化的腐烂果实”),也在迫使各个大国承认相互之间的共同利益,并展开合作。两位作者认为,面对 其它大国崛起为美国对手,解决方法并非美国与之对抗,而是美国致力于自我完善,因为“这就是我们的新世界。国内事务就是国际事务,国际事务就是国内事 务。”

围绕亚洲崛起而出现的吵闹争辩当中,最清晰的一点是:没有意识形态斗争,至少没有那种亚洲联盟对抗西方联盟的观念冲突。马布巴尼也许不赞同这一点,但那种“我们对他们”式的语言已显得乏味、过时,并且几乎已与国际政治、甚至是与亚洲政治彻底失去了关联。

“发达”的涵义不限于“西方”

是 的,世界各地——西藏、马来西亚、津巴布韦或科索沃——的人民会时不时地站出来要求自由、正义或独立。但他们之所以这样做,是因为这些诉求具有人性与普遍 的意义,而不是因为这些抗议者已沦为西方意识形态的奴隶。就连马布巴尼也承认,由于经济的增长,“中国正在发生人性精神的大规模民主化进程”。当美国动用 刑讯或不经审判便拘禁疑犯时,这是对人权的野蛮侵犯,是伪善的证据。但当这些事情发生在亚洲时,也同样是对人权的野蛮侵犯。思维正确的美国人和亚洲人都会 对此予以谴责。经济增长进程本身正迫使一些国家进行某些变化,使得它们更像西方的工业化民主国家。换句话说,发达国家的意义并不在于它们是西方国家,而是 在于它们是“发达”的。

在这类书籍的结尾章节里,都包括一份针对全球问题的简要回答清单。各位作者在此又一次具有共识:全球大国之间应相互对话,而那些正在崛起——或是刚刚崛起的大国,应该在全球机构的会议桌上得到一席之地。

对 于马布巴尼来说,这意味着进行相关改革,其中包括重新调整联合国安理会(UN Security Council)常任理事国,改变其偏重欧洲的局面;改革国际货币基金组织(IMF)以及世界银行(World Bank)的领导权。对于哈奇格恩和萨特芬来说,这意味着要创立一个“核心六国”(Core Six, C6)集团,成员包括美国,以及那些分别被安理会、八国集团(G8)、北约(NATO)抑或经合组织(OECD)排除在外的关键大国。对于埃莫特来说,这 意味着要让美国公开支持东亚峰会(East Asian Summit),认可它是一个代表亚洲利益的包容论坛,就像美国从上世纪50年代以来支持欧盟计划一样。

针对大国之间划时代的角色变化,这些建议当然是正确的外交解决方法。其它途径,包括迪施米德在《谨防中国龙》一书中描述的“血流成河”,想起来都令人生畏。

维克托•马莱是英国《金融时报》亚洲版主编

译者/李晖

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