The Future Is Asian Read online

  China has a first-mover advantage in such places where other Asian and Western investors have hesitated to go. But no states are more keenly aware of the potential disadvantages of Chinese neomercantilism than postcolonial nations such as Pakistan and post-Soviet republics such as Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. They don’t need shrill warnings in Western media to remind them of their immediate history. One by one, many countries are pushing back and renegotiating Chinese projects and debts. Here, then, is a more likely scenario: China’s forays actually modernize and elevate these countries, helping them gain the confidence to resist future encroachment. Furthermore, China’s moves have inspired an infrastructural “arms race,” with India, Japan, Turkey, South Korea, and others also making major investments that will enable weaker Asian nations to better connect to one another and counter Chinese maneuvers. Ultimately, China’s position will be not of an Asian or global hegemon but rather of the eastern anchor of the Asian—and Eurasian—megasystem.

  The farther one looks into the future, therefore, the more clearly Asia appears to be—as has been the norm for most of its history—a multipolar region with numerous confident civilizations evolving largely independent of Western policies but constructively coexisting with one another. A reawakening of Western confidence and vitality would be very welcome, but it would not blunt Asia’s resurrection. Asia’s rise is structural, not cyclical. There remain pockets of haughty ignorance centered around London and Washington that persist in the belief that Asia will come undone as China’s economy slows or will implode under the strain of nationalist rivalries. These opinions about Asia are irrelevant and inaccurate in equal measure. As Asian countries emulate one another’s successes, they leverage their growing wealth and confidence to extend their influence to all corners of the planet. The Asianization of Asia is just the first step in the Asianization of the world.

  The Asianization of the World

  The legacy of the nineteenth-century Europeanization and twentieth-century Americanization of the world is that most nations have been shaped by the West in some significant way: European colonial borders and administration, US invasions or military assistance, a currency pegged to the US dollar, American software and social media, and so forth. Billions of people have acquired personal and psychological connections to the West. They have English or French as a first or second language, have relatives in America, Canada, or Great Britain, cheer for an English Premier League football team, never miss films starring their favorite Hollywood actor or actress, and follow the ins and outs of US presidential politics.

  In the twenty-first century, Asianization is emerging as the newest sedimentary layer in the geology of global civilization. As with its predecessors, Asianization takes many forms but is universally palpable: selling commodities to China, recruiting software engineers from India, buying oil from Saudi Arabia, taking vacations in Japan or Indonesia, recruiting nurses from the Philippines, hosting construction crews from Korea, doing apprenticeships in the UAE, and other relationships. Asian businesspeople strut around the world as their passports gain more visa-free privileges. Singapore and Japan have overtaken Germany in Henley & Partners’ “most powerful passports” index, South Korea also ranks ahead of most European nations, and Malaysia has nudged ahead of many European passports as well. A new layer of Asian-ness is creeping into people’s identity and daily life as well. Around the world, students are learning Chinese and Japanese, entrepreneurs are launching businesses in Asian metropolises, travelers are flocking to beaches from Oman to the Philippines, intermarriage is rising among Indians and Thais, youths are converting to Islam, movie theaters are showing Bollywood movies, and more.

  The Asian way of doing things is spreading. Governments are taking a stronger hand in steering economic priorities. Democratic impulses are being balanced with technocratic guidance. Social discourse in the West not only boasts of rights but speaks of responsibilities. Western officials, businesspeople, journalists, scholars, and students are touring Asia to observe how to build large-scale, world-class infrastructure and futuristic cities, study how governments use scenarios and data to align industries and universities, and examine social policies that promote national solidarity. In many ways, rather than “them” aspiring to be like “us,” we now aspire to be like them. The name of the flagship publication of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy aptly captures the transition to this new paradigm: Global-is-Asian.

  At the same time, becoming more Asian does not necessarily mean becoming less American or European. Asianization is like an additional layer of paint on an already colorful canvas; it adds texture and hues. As the great British historian Arnold Toynbee documented, civilizations do not merely displace each other, discarding rivals’ ideas and substituting their own fully formed ideologies. In this spirit, Asianization borrows much from the past even as it inserts its principles into the world as it already is. Nineteenth-century Europeanization brought with it colonial inclusion in a world economy, modern forms of government administration, and exposure to liberal Enlightenment philosophies. These in turn gave rise to nationalism as colonies sought to become independent nations—an idea strongly supported by the United States as it became the world’s leading power. Twentieth-century Americanization ratified democratic self-determination through formal multilateral organizations such as the United Nations, promoted the spread of capitalism and industrialization through global trade and investment treaties, and inspired an appreciation for the great potential of unencumbered freedom. Asianization absorbs but also challenges aspects of these earlier eras. Asians practice neomercantile industrial policy rather than free-market capitalism, with government and business colluding to gain the biggest share of commercial arrangements. Asia is also highly bureaucratized and multilateral, but via new Asian-driven institutions that both complement and compete with incumbent Western ones. Many Asian countries have inherited Western parliamentary systems, but have grafted on more technocratic mechanisms in pursuit of societal welfare. Asianization, then, is not about replacing the past wholesale but about modifying it.

  Historical eras are accumulating in ways that do not allow for one model to fully impose itself on the others. Instead, as Asian institutions and norms take their place alongside those of the West, they synthesize into a fusion that itself becomes the global norm. Some aspects of global Westernization will remain central to global life, especially the English language, capitalism, and the pursuit of scientific excellence and technological disruption. But over time, others will fade, such as the appeal of American-style democracy and unsustainable consumerism. The question is not which order will prevail, but rather in which ways is Asia shaping a new global order that encompasses all of us?

  We are only in the early phases of Asia penetrating all other civilizations as the West did over the course of centuries. Much as one could not have foreseen the impact of European commercial exploration in Asia or across the Atlantic nor the United States’ entry into World War I, the outcome of this process is uncertain. As with previous centuries of Europeanization and Americanization, Asianization is a double-edged sword. You may or may not like some (or many) aspects of global Asianization—the same has certainly been true for the billions of people worldwide on the receiving end of Americanization. Nonetheless, it is widely observed that the United States managed to remake the world in its image. Asia is now doing the same. Everyone can articulate how “American” or “European” he or she is. Now we are learning to grasp how “Asian” we are as well. How Asian are you?

  For the past four decades, I’ve had a front-row seat to the beginnings of global Asianization. I was born in India. My family migrated to the UAE in the 1970s, as did countless other Indians and Pakistanis supporting the Arab oil boom. Then over the course of a decade in New York, my family went from being one of the only to one of dozens of Indian American families in just one small town. Each year of college I saw ever more Asian students major in Asian studies or express their cultur
al pride in student festivals. Then, in the narrow world of Washington think tanks and foreign policy, I saw growing numbers of Asians take mainstream roles. During my stints in Berlin, Geneva, and London, the rising presence of Asians in academic and daily life was palpable. Now I reside in Singapore, the unofficial capital of Asia, a melting pot that embodies Asia’s potential to make the most of the Europeanization and Americanization of the past and, most important, the Asianization of today and tomorrow.

  I have also witnessed just how urgently the world needs a better understanding of Asia. From Syria and Iran to China and North Korea, Asia occupies Western headlines while policy makers and the public lack a contextual knowledge of Asia’s history. Asian economic policies have been reshaping US industry for decades, yet even as they take center stage in US politics, leaders fail to fully grasp the dynamic feedback loops between the US and Asian economic systems. US and European companies have prioritized China but have little appreciation for its citizens’ tastes—and know even less about those of the other 3.5 billion Asians whose markets are their newest growth frontier. Asians, too, have major gaps in knowledge to fill. Chinese are spending hundreds of billions of dollars in new investments across Asia, buying influence in some places and stoking backlash in others, unsure which will happen and where. Indians, Arabs, Turks, and Persians are crisscrossing Asia as well, confronting unfamiliar political and social systems. How much we have forgotten! For many centuries, Asians understood one another through their constant interactions along the Silk Roads, while the West discovered and absorbed Asia through colonialism. Before exploring our Asian future, then, let us refresh our memories about Asia’s past.

  1

  A History of the World: An Asian View

  A typical history textbook in the Western world begins with the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, followed by chapters on the Greeks and Romans, the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Columbus and Copernicus, Napoleon and Enlightenment, British colonialism and American independence, concluding with the two world wars. As students advance through the years, the curriculum revisits the ancient, medieval, and modern eras in more detail and with more dramatis personae: Caesar and Cleopatra, the Holy Roman Empire and Black Death, Martin Luther and Louis XIV, the slave trade and Industrial Revolution, the Congress of Vienna and Crimean War, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin . . . and then the baton is passed to social studies.

  Generally speaking, non-Western societies are brought into the picture to the extent that they had contact with the West. After all, the Mongols did reach the gates of Vienna in 1241. But the life and times of the Buddha and Confucius, the legacies of the Mughal Empire, the oceanic ventures of China’s Ming Dynasty, and many other foundations of Asia’s heritage might draw blank stares even after a university-level history course. Europeans, because they colonized the world between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, tend to know quite a bit more than Americans about foreign regions. But as much as colonialism enriched the West, it still doesn’t feature much in the Western teaching of the past. Asian textbooks, of course, also focus on their own national and civilizational histories, generally at the expense of the Egyptians and Greeks. Furthermore, Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans are just as willing as Europeans are to whitewash—or omit—their subjugation of, or crimes against, one another. Because of colonialism, however, Asian history cannot wash out the West the way Western teaching does to Asia.

  The deep linkages between West and East underscore the need for a more balanced account of global history. However, as Sebastian Conrad persuasively argued in his What Is Global History?, the discipline still suffers from Eurocentrism and a nation-state centered lens, diminishing the role of non-European civilizations as well as global processes such as capitalism that sustained linkages across regions.1 The essence of global history, by contrast, is to recount the coevolution of diverse cultures and appreciate their mutual influence. Remember that both the history of today and the rules for tomorrow are written by the winners—and Asia is gaining ground. As Asia’s ascendancy continues, the biggest gap in Western historical knowledge will be filled by Asians in their own words. What does history look like from an Asian point of view?

  Ancient Asia: The Dawn of Civilization

  The birth of human civilization as we know it today began in West Asia. In Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (Anatolia), the advent of basic farming tools during the Neolithic Revolution enabled humans to evolve from hunter-gatherer tribes into more settled agricultural communities that domesticated animals such as horses and dogs. The Natufian people of the eastern Levantine region were hunter-gatherers who began to grind and bake wheat into bread nearly 15,000 years ago. Fortifications found in Byblos, Aleppo, and Jericho indicate settlements dating to 7000 BC, making these the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities. Archaeological excavations at Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük in modern-day Turkey have uncovered patterned pottery, uniform brick housing, and even religious icons. By 3800 BC, the great Sumerian city-states of Ur, Kish, and Babylon thrived near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

  Prehistoric civilizations also flourished in East Asia. Agriculture became widespread in peninsular Southeast Asia by 6000 BC, in Japan during its Jōmon period around 5000 BC, and in China around 4000 BC. By 3500 BC, during the early Bronze Age, the largest centers of the ancient world were Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley (today’s Pakistan), which featured wide streets, bathing platforms, drainage, and reservoirs. The Indus peoples worshipped a range of deities, including terra-cotta statues of the female goddess Shakti. With the migration of Aryan (“noble”) peoples from Central Asia around 1800 BC, Indo-Aryan civilization expanded southward into the Ganges plain, where its pastoral traditions and social structures were captured in the Sanskrit-language hymns of the world’s oldest religious texts, the Vedas, which formed the basis of Hinduism.

  During the middle Bronze Age, around 2300 BC, Sumerian city-states gave way to the powerful Akkadian Empire and its successor, the Assyrians, who ruled over ever larger expanses as they subdued their Anatolian neighbors the Hittites, who had developed iron smelting for tools and weapons. Assyrians and Babylonians (especially under King Hammurabi) developed complex legal codes governing social life and a sophisticated division of labor among the working classes. They also engaged in diplomacy and trade with Egypt, selling it olive oil, wine, cedar wood, and the resin used for mummification. By 667 BC, Assyria had vanquished Egypt, putting an end to its age of pyramids.

  Asia’s civilizations spread their advances in all directions. By 1500 BC, the seafaring Phoenicians of the Levant devised an alphabet system that was documented on Egyptian papyrus and adopted by the Greeks, a major Mediterranean trading partner. Inland, in the Caspian region, the nomadic Scythians mastered mounted warfare, occupied the Central Asian steppe region, and raided settled civilizations such as the Median people (in present-day Iran) while presiding over a vast trading network linking Greeks, Persians, and Indians that flourished from the eighth century BC onward.

  These overland routes of commerce and culture reached as far as China, which by the first millennium BC had consolidated its administrative power in the Yangtze River valley. The procession of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties expanded the area of Chinese civilization through alliances and conquest, assimilating the Rong barbarians on their western frontier. At the same time, the Zhou engaged in sporadic trade with the various nomadic peoples of southern Siberia and the more sedentary peoples of Bactria, who made wide use of single-axle chariots. This Western Zhou Dynasty first articulated the notion of a Zhongguo (“Middle Kingdom”) to differentiate their imperial state from those of their vassals and the powerful fiefdoms of the northern plains. The Zhou also produced the cosmological I Ching, a text that sought to align human behavior with the cyclical patterns of nature.2

  Three thousand years ago, the forces of commerce, conflict, and culture ebbed and flowed across the vast expanse from the Mediterranean to China i
n increasingly intense patterns of exchange. Around 550 BC, the nomadic Achaemenid people pushed aside the Scythians as they settled in the Persian region and built an empire that stretched from the Balkans to the Indus valley, the largest empire of the ancient world. Cyrus the Great’s Royal Road stretched 1,700 miles from Susa to Saris in western Anatolia, with horse-mounted couriers covering the distance in only seven days, making them the fastest postal service of antiquity. Cyrus and Darius I established opulent cities such as Persepolis, their administrative authority becoming the envy of Mediterranean peoples. (For the Greek historian Herodotus, Persia represented most of what was known of Asia.) The Achaemenids shared a linguistic kinship with the Sanskrit speakers of South Asia as well as a social stratification of priests, rulers, warriors, and farmers. Their faith, known as Zoroastrianism, was a philosophical monotheism that influenced local religions such as that of the Judaic peoples located on the eastern Mediterranean shores between Mesopotamia and the Nile River.