Can Asians Think? 4th Edition PDF

KISHORE MAHBUBANI Can Asians Think fourth edition “... a collection of absolutely Årst-rate essays, elegantly written and intellectually provocative.” Samuel P. Huntington KISHORE MAHBUBANI Can Asians Think fourth edition The views expressed in this book are the personal views of Kishore Mahbubani and do not in any way represent the views of the Singapore government. The author would like to thank The National Interest, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Survival and Peter Van Ness for permission to reprint the articles in this volume. © 2009 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196 First published in 1998 by Times Media Private Limited. Reprinted 1998, 1999 (three times), 2000. Second edition published in 2002. Third edition published in 2004. Reprinted 2005, 2007 This fourth edition printed 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Request for permission should be addressed to the Publisher, Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited, 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196. Tel: (65) 6213 9300. Fax: (65) 6285 4871. E-mail: [email protected] Online Bookstore: http://www.marshallcavendish.com/genref The publisher makes no representation or warranties with respect to the contents of this book, and speciﬁcally disclaims any implied warranties or merchantability or ﬁtness for any particular purpose, and shall in no events be liable for any loss of proﬁt or any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Other Marshall Cavendish Ofﬁces Marshall Cavendish Ltd. 32–38 Saffron Hill, London EC1N 8FH, UK Marshall Cavendish Corporation. 99 White Plains Road, Tarrytown NY 10591-9001, USA Marshall Cavendish International (Thailand) Co Ltd. 253 Asoke, 12th Flr, Sukhumvit 21 Road, Klongtoey Nua, Wattana, Bangkok 10110, Thailand Marshall Cavendish (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Times Subang, Lot 46, Subang Hi- Tech Industrial Park, Batu Tiga, 40000 Shah Alam, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia Marshall Cavendish is a trademark of Times Publishing Limited National Library Board (Singapore) Cataloguing in Publication Data Mahbubani, Kishore. Can Asians think? / Kishore Mahbubani. – 4th ed. – Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, c2009. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN-13 : 978-981-4276-01-6 1. East and West. 2. Values – Asia. 3. Asia – Civilization – 20th century. 4. Asia – Civilization – 21st century. I. Title. DS12 306.095 – dc22 OCN369052493 Printed in Singapore by Fabulous Printers Pte Ltd IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER, JANKI MAHBUBANI Contents Preface to the Fourth Edition 6 Preface to the Third Edition 8 Preface to the Second Edition 10 Preface to the First Edition 13 PART 1: THE RETURN OF ASIA Can Asians Think? 22 Asia’s Lost Millennium 40 The Making of Modern Asia 46 PART 2: THE WEST AND THE REST The West and the Rest 54 An Asian Perspective on Human Rights and Freedom of the Press 74 The Dangers of Decadence: What the Rest Can Teach the West 97 The Rest of the West? 105 Europe’s Destiny 122 Be Quick Europe, or Miss Out on the Asian Century 124 Europe is a Geopolitical Dwarf 129 PART 3: THE ASIA-PACIFIC AND SOUTHEAST ASIA Japan Adrift 134 “The Paciﬁc Impulse” 154 Seven Paradoxes on Asia-Paciﬁc Security 177 Pol Pot: The Paradox of Moral Correctness 184 Smart Power, Chinese Style 199 PART 4: GLOBAL CONCERNS The UN and the US: An Indispensable Partnership 218 Power without Responsibility, Responsibility without Power: The Permanent and Elected Members of the UN Security Council 242 Bridging the Divide: The Singapore Experience 261 The Ten Commandments for Developing Countries in the Nineties 268 Wanted: New Thinking, Not Tinkering 270 Index 274 About the Author 284 PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION More than a decade has passed since this book was ﬁrst published in mid-1998. The publisher’s decision to release a new and revised edition in 2009 conﬁrms that this volume of essays continues to strike responsive chords, both in the Asian and Western imaginations. Many reasons could explain the enduring interest in these essays. But one explanation may trump the rest. The world is increasingly aware that we are about to enter a new historical era when Asian societies will resume the centre stage which they occupied for millennia. One reason why this is happening now is that Asian minds have re-awakened. And they are asking many new questions. If you would like a glimpse of the new questions surfacing in Asia, please read these essays. A careful reader will discover that this volume of essays rests on a different world view from the still globally dominant Western Weltanschauung. The biggest conceit that enveloped the minds of many Western intellectuals was the belief that as other societies modernised, they would inevitably become intellectual and moral clones of the West. It is evident this will not happen. Indeed, I have written two other books, Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust between America and the World and The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, which document how the gap is widening between the West and Asia. Preface to the Fourth Edition 7 These two books were also written as sharply as some of the essays in this volume. Many of my writings have stirred some controversy. As a writer I have discovered that while a book full of patient explanations can put forward an alternative point of view, a short and sharply written essay can provoke and shock more effectively. It can also lead to new thinking. This is why there is an enduring interest in a volume of essays like this. In this new and revised volume, I have decided to add an essay or two to each section. The ﬁrst section broadly discusses Asia’s past, present and future. Here I have added an essay which I wrote for TIME Magazine on “The Making of Modern Asia” in August 2005. It generated considerable interest and comment when it appeared. For the second section, which I have now re-titled as “The West and the Rest”, I have added two essays on Europe. Europe used to dominate world history in the 18th and 19th centuries and for much of the 20th century. But it has lost its way geopolitically and is adrift as the 21st century unfolds. These two new essays try to provide Europe with a valuable wake-up call. While Europe has been drifting, China has been rising. Earlier editions of this volume had no single essay dedicated to China. In this volume I have tried to ﬁll this lacuna with an essay I published in The American Interest in March/April 2008 on “Smart Power, Chinese Style”. Finally, together with the rise of Asia, a new global order is being born. Hence, in the ﬁnal section on “Global Concerns”, I have added a short essay on the need to develop new forms of global governance. Its time has come. We must prepare for it. I hope that this new and revised edition will also remain in print for another decade. We can expect many great changes in the coming years but several of them were anticipated in these essays. Hence, I hope that the reader will ﬁnd the new edition to be useful and relevant as he or she tries to understand Asia better. Singapore, July 2009 Preface to The Third Edition When this volume was ﬁrst published in mid-1998, neither the publisher nor I expected it to ﬂy far. To our surprise, this volume has since been republished in both Canada and the United States of America. A Spanish edition appeared in Mexico in early 2003 while an Indian edition will be published by Penguin India in 2004. Ideas have wings, they say. I am therefore pleased that the ideas contained in this volume have travelled far and wide. I wonder why. Perhaps it is because many of the thoughts expressed here, which were heretical in the mid-1990s, continue to remain heretical in the ﬁrst decade of the 21st century. The 21st century may have actually begun on 11 September 2001. These terrorist attacks, which have continued, demonstrate vividly that we are moving into a dangerous century. Many structural contradictions are emerging globally. Globalisation is putting all of us on the same boat. Yet our prevailing governance structures lead us to take care only of our own cabins on the boat. Hence, global challenges are ignored. At the same time, globalisation is also throwing different cultures and civilisations into closer proximity. This inevitably creates some friction, giving some resonance to Samuel Huntington’s famous thesis of “The Clash of Civilizations”. The real danger that the 21st century faces is that we will sail into it with 19th-century mental maps. To prepare for the new world, we will have to discard conventional wisdom, break up old thought Preface to the Third Edition 9 patterns and begin thinking along new mental corridors. This volume of essays does not attempt to provide the answers. Instead it forces readers to challenge old assumptions. Perhaps this is why new editions continue to appear, both in Singapore and elsewhere. New York, January 2004 Preface to The Second Edition One Sunday morning in August 2000, I was very excited to read a news report in the New York Times stating that Dr Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, had discovered through laboratory studies that the Asians in the study “tended to be more ‘holistic’, showing greater attention to context, a tolerance for contradiction and less dependence on logic. Westerners were more ‘analytic’, avoiding contradiction, focusing on objects removed from their context, and more reliant on logic.”1 I have not seen Dr Nisbett’s study, and it may be too early to jump to any deﬁnite conclusions. But these ﬁndings do seem to conﬁrm an intuition I have had from my life experience: Asians and Westerners do think differently on some issues. Mathematical truths cannot be varied in cultures; moral truths can. So too some values. Looking back at my life after having completed half a century, I realise that I have had the good fortune of travelling through many different cultures and times. As a child, I was part of a Hindu Indian (“Sindhi”) immigrant family in Singapore. My neighbours were Muslim Malay families. The society was predominantly Chinese. I was born a British subject, became a Malaysian citizen, and two years later, in 1965, assumed a Singaporean identity. My education was always in English. Hence, all through my life I have travelled simultaneously through the East and West. It is this life experience which informs the thoughts expressed in these essays. The title chosen for this volume of essays—“Can Asians Preface to the Second Edition 11 Think?”—is not accidental. It represents essentially two questions folded into one. The ﬁrst, addressed to my fellow Asians, reads as “Can you think? If you can, why have Asian societies lost a thousand years and slipped far behind the European societies that they were far ahead of at the turn of the last millennium?” This is the harsh question that the ﬁrst two essays try to answer. The second question, addressed primarily to my friends in the West, is “Can Asians think for themselves?” We live in an essentially unbalanced world. The ﬂow of ideas, reﬂecting 500 years of Western domination of the globe, remains a one-way street—from the West to the East. Most Westerners cannot see that they have arrogated to themselves the moral high ground from which they lecture the world. The rest of the world can see this. Similarly, Western intellectuals are convinced that their minds and cultures are open, self-critical and—in contrast to ossiﬁed Asian minds and cultures—have no “sacred cows”. The most shocking discovery of my adult life was the realisation that “sacred cows” also exist in the Western mind. During the period of Western triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War, a huge bubble of moral pretentiousness enveloped the Western intellectual universe. Even though some of the contents of these essays (especially the statistics) may appear a little dated, the arguments remain, I believe, valid. They provide one of the few antidotes to the sweet, syrupy sense of self-congratulation that ﬂows through Western writing on contemporary issues. Several American professors have told me that these essays fill a void and provide a counter-balance to prevailing assumptions. If my intuition is proven right, we will begin to see, for the ﬁrst time in 500 years, a two-way ﬂow in the passage of ideas between the East and the West early this century. The world will be a much richer place when Western minds stop assuming that Western civilisation represents the only universal civilisation. The only way that the Western mind can break out of its mental box is to ﬁrst conceive of this possibility that the Western mind may also be limited in its own way. 12 CAN ASIANS THINK? In this second edition, I have added three new essays: “Asia’s Lost Millennium”, “The Rest of the West?” and “UN: Sunrise or Sunset Organisation in the 21st Century?” I have also taken out three essays: “The End of an Epoch”, “An Asia-Paciﬁc Consensus” and “The ASEAN ‘Magic’ ”. In addition, I have written a brief introductory note for each of the older essays in an effort to relate them to recent developments. After some reﬂection, I decided not to revise these essays to update them. They have to retain their contextual consistency. It is the arguments, not the statistics, that have to stand the test of time. Finally, I wish to emphasise that the views contained in this volume are my personal views. By no means should they be taken as a reﬂection of the Singapore government’s views. New York, 2002 1. “Tomayto, Tomahto, Potayto …”, “This Week in Review”, New York Times, 13 August 2000, p. 2. Preface to The ﬁrst Edition Can Asians think? Judging from the record of Asian societies over the past few centuries, the answer should be “no”—or, at best, not very well. Several centuries after Portugal burst out of its tiny seams to create colonies all around the world, from Brazil to Angola, from Mozambique to Goa, from Malacca to Macau, Asian societies continued to remain in stupor or stagnation, unaware that European civilisations—which had developed more or less on a par with Asian civilisations until the 15th century or so—had made a great leap forward. Societies that take centuries to wake up cannot be said to think very well. It would be foolish for any Asian to deny this painful historical fact. By the end of the 20th century (500 years after Portugal made its great leap outwards), it appeared that a few other East Asian societies would follow Japan’s lead and become as developed as contemporary Western societies. Then, in a painful repetition of Asian history, they stumbled once again. In early 1998 (when this preface is being written) it is a little too early to tell how serious this stumble is. But having stumbled so often in their efforts to catch up with the West, Asians have an obligation to think—and think very deeply—about their prospects in the coming century and the new millennium. One key purpose of these essays is to stimulate Asian minds to address questions about their future. The lead essay, from which this volume takes its title, is intended for Asian minds. Its key message to Asians is simple: do not think that you have arrived. 14 CAN ASIANS THINK? The rapid economic advances enjoyed by several East Asian societies may, in retrospect, have been the easy part. Retooling the social, political and philosophical dimensions of their societies will be a tougher challenge. This challenge has arrived. The other essays in this volume are intended for a larger audience. Almost immediately after the end of the Cold War, a mood of triumphalism engulfed Western capitals. Communism had failed. The West had won. Mankind had realised “the end of history”. Henceforth, all societies all around the globe, whatever their stage of social and economic development, would become replicas of liberal democratic societies found in the West. The export of democracy from the West to the Rest was seen as an unmitigated good. However, as Robert Kaplan noted in The Atlantic Monthly (December 1997), the results of this global export of democracy have been less than ideal: The demise of the Soviet Union was no reason for us to pressure Rwanda and other countries to form political parties—though that is what our post-Cold War foreign policy has been largely about, even in parts of the world that the Cold War barely touched. The Eastern European countries liberated in 1989 already had, in varying degrees, the historical and social preconditions for both democracy and advanced industrial life: bourgeois traditions, exposure to the Western Enlightenment, high literacy rates, low birth rates, and so on. The post-Cold War effort to bring democracy to those countries has been reasonable. What is less reasonable is to put a gun to the head of the peoples of the developing world and say, in effect, “Behave as if you had experienced the Western Enlightenment to the degree that Poland and the Czech Republic did. Behave as if 95 percent of your population were literate. Behave as if you had no bloody ethnic or regional disputes.” By late 1997 (eight years after the end of the Cold War), when the hubris arising from the triumph over the Soviet Union had died out, it became possible for some brave souls, such as Robert Kaplan and Fareed Zakaria,1 to question the value and outcome of the immediate post-Cold War effort to export democracy. In the early Preface to the First Edition 15 1990s, however, when some of these essays were written, there was no space in the Western intellectual ﬁrmament for fundamental questions to be raised about the export of democracy. I can make this point with some conviction because of several personal encounters I had with Western intellectuals in that period, from Williamsburg to Brussels, from Harvard to Ditchley. In many of these encounters, I was put in the difﬁcult position of being the sole dissenting voice to challenge the conventional wisdom of Western liberals in their moment of triumph. My experience was not unique. Several of my Asian friends conﬁrmed similar experiences. The paradox here was that Western liberal orthodoxy claimed that it celebrated dissenting voices. My personal experience suggested that such tolerance of dissent did not easily extend to challenges of the key intellectual assumptions of this liberal orthodoxy. These personal encounters convinced me that there was a need to articulate an alternative point of view. My ﬁrst printed response to the post-Cold War Western hubris was published in The National Interest in summer 1992 in an essay entitled “The West and the Rest” (and here I must record my indebtedness to the magazine’s editor, Owen Harries, for suggesting this catchy title). This essay was followed by “Go East, Young Man”, published in The Washington Quarterly in spring 1994. It gained equal notoriety as “The West and the Rest”. “Go East, Young Man” was adapted from a paper entitled “Perspectives on Political Development and the Nature of the Democratic Process: Human Rights and Freedom of the Press”, which I delivered at the Asia Society’s conference on “Asian and American Perspectives on Capitalism and Democracy” in January 1993.2 This paper probably contains my sharpest critique of liberal orthodoxy. I have, therefore, decided to republish the full version here. “Go East, Young Man” was followed by “Pol Pot: The Paradox of Moral Correctness” and “The Dangers of Decadence: What the Rest Can Teach the West”, which was a response to the famous essay “The Clash of Civilizations” by Samuel Huntington. It was my good fortune that Huntington decided to publish his essay in summer 1993. My responses to his essay seemed to travel almost as widely 16 CAN ASIANS THINK? as his original essay. In the world of writing and publishing, it helps to be read and noticed. These essays that I published in the early 1990s, together with essays in a similar vein published by other Asians, helped to open a small new chapter in intellectual history. This chapter became known in popular parlance as the “Asian values debate”. The term in itself showed a major misperception in Western minds of the message that Asian voices were putting across in the early 1990s. Many in the West assumed that those who challenged the then contemporary Western ideas in social and political theory were advocating the superiority of Asian values. Actually, the only point that most Asians were trying to make was that Asian values were not inferior. They were trying to say that there was a need for a level playing ﬁeld in the new intellectual debate of the 1990s. With the advantage of historical hindsight, we can now look at those years and see that Asians were not marching out in that period to proselytise to the West. They were only reacting to Western proselytisation. One of the key ﬂaws of the campaign to export Western values at the end of the Cold War was the assumption that the good intentions of the West in doing so would lead to good results. This is why in my essay on Pol Pot, I quoted Max Weber as saying: “it is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who says this is, indeed, a political infant.”3 The moral complexity of transporting values from one society or civilisation to another had been lost in the moral certitudes of Western intellectuals at the end of the Cold War. But this moral complexity had been recognised by earlier generations of Western intellectuals. As Reinhold Niebuhr said: The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also … brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire. We cannot simply have our way, not even when we believe our way to have the “happiness of mankind” as its promise. Preface to the First Edition 17 As we approach the end of the 1990s, it is clear that the Asian values debate has subsided. Both sides have retreated from the debate with a sense of embarrassment that each side may have overstated its case. On the Asian side, after the spectacular stumble of several hitherto dynamic East Asian economies, there is a genuine hint of regret at having spoken so conﬁdently of the rise of Asia. Hence, I was not surprised that many of my close friends tried to discourage me from republishing this collection of essays at this unfortunate juncture. The timing did not seem particularly propitious. But these essays are not intended for any short-term ends. It is only a matter of time (i.e., when, not if) until Asian civilisations reach the same level of development as Western civilisations. The major new reality in East Asia is the genuine conviction and conﬁdence among new Asian minds that their day is coming, even if they have to stumble once or twice more before they make it. Many Asian minds have now been exposed to the highest levels of Western civilisation, in the ﬁelds of science and technology, business and administration, arts and literature. Most have clearly thrived at these levels. The Asian mind, having been awakened, cannot be put to sleep in the near future. A new discourse will begin between East and West when Asian societies start to successfully develop again. When this discourse begins, they will look back at the Asian values debate of the 1990s as only the initial round of a discourse that will last for several centuries. At various points in the history of the past few centuries, when the West experienced its many ascendant moments—either during the peak of the colonial era or in the post-Cold War period—there developed a conceit that eventually all of mankind would be absorbed into the fabric of Western civilisation. V.S. Naipaul, an Asian child of the West, captured this spirit forcefully when he spoke of Western civilisation as being the only universal civilisation. Indeed, for most of the past few centuries, any other prospect seemed literally inconceivable. The main historical contribution of the ineptly named Asian values debate may have been to call attention to the possibility that other civilisations may yet make equal contributions as Western civilisation to the development and growth of mankind. 18 CAN ASIANS THINK? This is one key reason why this volume of essays is being printed. To ensure an accurate historical record, all the essays are reprinted in full. Thus, the reader may encounter repetitions of certain key arguments. Having been born a British subject in Singapore and having saluted the British ﬂag as a child, I have had the good fortune of personally experiencing a ﬂow of history that clearly demonstrated that all nations have their ebb and ﬂow. History never stops (or ends). In this shrinking globe of ours, as East and West come closer together, many ancient civilisations will rub together in a direct fashion never seen before in the history of man. It would be foolish to forecast the outcome of this close rubbing of civilisations. Huntington’s vision of a clash of civilisations, frightening though it sounds, needs to be taken seriously. But again, as someone who has had the good fortune to experience the rise of the Asia-Paciﬁc era, I remain absolutely convinced that the future lies in the fusion of civilisations. This is the vision I tried to portray in a lecture I delivered at the IISS (International Institute of Strategic Studies) annual meeting in Vancouver in September 1994. Survival, the IISS journal, printed an edited version of this lecture in an article entitled “The Paciﬁc Impulse”, which is republished here. Over the course of the past few years, I have also published essays on various other topics. Some of these are republished in this volume. Given my conviction that the centre of gravity of the world’s economy will rest ﬁrmly in the Asia-Paciﬁc region, I have written several essays on various aspects of the region. Hence, I am also reprinting “Japan Adrift” (written in Harvard), “An Asia-Paciﬁc Consensus” and “Seven Paradoxes on Asia-Paciﬁc Security”. I published my ﬁrst essay in Foreign Affairs 15 years ago on the Cambodian question. I am not republishing it here as that particular chapter of Cambodian history has closed. In the course of the decade-long debate on Cambodia, which became a modern metaphor for tragedy during Pol Pot’s rule, I encountered another unusual strand in the Western mind: the desire to believe that there were black and white solutions for complex moral issues. It was Preface to the First Edition 19 in response to this that I wrote the essay “Pol Pot: The Paradox of Moral Correctness”. I have also been a student of Southeast Asia. It has been a miracle of history that this region (which has greater diversity of race, language, religion, culture, etc., than the Balkans of Europe) has emerged as one of the most peaceful and prosperous corners of the world. This modern miracle is little understood. To explain it to the Japanese audience, I wrote an essay entitled “The ASEAN ‘Magic’ ”, which was published in the ofﬁcial journal of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Since I am a Singaporean, this volume would be incomplete if I did not include an essay on my own country. I have had the good fortune of being a citizen of one of the most successful developing countries of the world. Despite Singapore’s success, it has had the occasional misfortune of suffering bad press that gives no due recognition to the very special achievements the country has had in economic and social development. Hence, when the UNDP asked me to write a short essay on Singapore’s developmental experience, I was happy to do so. Finally, in keeping with the spirit of many of these essays, I have decided to end on a provocative note by republishing “The Ten Commandments for Developing Countries in the Nineties”. These 10 commandments were written for a UNDP conference on development, but they were reprinted and republished in English, French and German. Brevity, I have learnt, is universally appreciated. Hence, I will end my preface here and let the essays tell the rest of the story. Singapore, August 1998 1. Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy”, Foreign Affairs, November/ December 1997. 2. James Fallows was my fellow panelist at this seminar and, judging from his response, it would be fair to say that he was shocked by this essay. 3. Max Weber, Politics As a Vocation, Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1965, p. 49. p a r t 1 T H E R E T U R N O F A S I A Can Asians Think? The National Interest. No. 52, Summer 1998 The 7th International Conference on Thinking was held in Singapore in June 1997. It needed some Asian voices. When I was asked to speak, one question immediately popped into my mind: “Can Asians think as well as others?” The issue, I discovered, was a complex one. This lecture represents my ﬁrst stab at answering the question. Its key aim is to launch a debate among Asian minds. But people from other continents may wish to ask similar questions, such as “Can Europeans think?” or “Can Americans think?”. This is an updated version of this lecture, published in the form of an essay in The National Interest in summer 1998. My main disappointment with this essay is that it has not yet triggered a discussion among Asians on how and why their societies and civilisations fell several centuries behind European civilisations. There are many possible explanations. My own belief is that the time for this has not yet come. Most Asian societies (with the exception of Japan and the “Four Tigers”) have not reached comfortable levels of development. When they do, this question will inevitably surface. I am surprised, however, by the negative Western reactions to the title. Perhaps this is because the question is politically incorrect. But could it not also be a result of the fact that some in the West would prefer Asians not to ask fundamental questions about Can Asians Think? 23 themselves or their future? For if they did so, it is conceivable that some Asian societies might eventually become as successful as those in the West. Any suggestion that some in the West would prefer Asian societies to remain backward would be dismissed as ludicrous by most Western intellectuals. But it would not be dismissed by Asian intellectuals. This East-West difference suggests that there is still a deep intellectual division in the world that remains to be bridged. …….……. 24 CAN ASIANS THINK? CAN ASIANS THINK? This is obviously a sensitive question. In this age of political correctness that we live in, just imagine the uproar that could be caused if I went to Europe or Africa and posed the question “Can Europeans think?” or “Can Africans think?”. You have to be Asian to ask the question “Can Asians think?” Given its sensitivity, let me explain both the reasons why and the context in which I am posing the question. First, if you had to ask one single, key question that could determine the future of the globe, it may well be “Can Asians think?”. In 1996 Asians already made up 3.5 billion out of a global population of over 5 billion (or about 70 per cent of the world population). By conservative projections, the Asian portion of the world population will increase to 5.7 billion in 2050 out of a global population of 9.87 billion, while the populations of North America and Europe will remain relatively constant at 374 million and 721 million respectively. Clearly, in the past few centuries Europe and, more recently, North America have carried the larger share of the global burden in advancing human civilisation. By 2050, when Europeans and North Americans make up one-tenth instead of one-sixth of the world’s population, would it be fair for the remaining 90 per cent of mankind to expect this 10 per cent to continue to bear this burden? Realistically, can the rest of the world continue to rest on the shoulders of the West? If Asians double in population in the next 50 years, will they be able to carry their fair share of this burden? Second, I am not asking this question about individual Asians in terms of limited thinking abilities. Clearly, Asians can master alphabets, add two plus two to make four, and play chess. However, throughout history, there have been examples of societies that have produced brilliant individuals yet experienced a lot of grief collectively. The classic example of this is the Jewish society. Per capita, Jews have contributed more brilliant minds, from Einstein to Wittgenstein, from Disraeli to Kissinger, than any other society. Yet, as a society they have suffered greatly, especially in the past century or so. Let me stress that I am not speaking about the travails of Israel in modern times. I am speaking of the period from AD 135, when the Jews were forced to leave Palestine, to 1948, when Israel was born. Can Asians Think? 25 Will a similar fate befall Asian societies, or will Asians be able to think well and ensure a better future for themselves? Third, the time scale in which I am posing this question is not in terms of days, weeks, months, years or even decades. I am looking at the question from the time scale of centuries, especially since we stand two years away from the new millennium. Arguably, the future course of world history in the next few centuries, as I will explain later, will depend on how Asian societies think and perform. Back to the question “Can Asians think?”. In a multiple-choice examination format, there would be three possible answers to the question: “Yes”, “No” or “Maybe”. Before we decide which choice to tick, let me make a case for each answer. NO, THEY CANNOT THINK I will start with the reasons for the “No” answer, if only to refute any critics who may suggest that the question itself is manifestly absurd. If one looks at the record of the past thousand years, one can make a very persuasive case that Asians, Asian societies that is, cannot think. Let us look at where Asian societies were a thousand years ago, say in the year 997. Then, the Chinese and the Arabs (i.e., Confucian and Islamic civilisations) led the way in science and technology, medicine and astronomy. The Arabs adopted both the decimal system and the numbers 0 to 9 from India, and they learnt how to make paper from the Chinese. The world’s ﬁrst university was founded just over a thousand years ago, in the year 971, in Cairo. By contrast, Europe was then still in what has been described as the “Dark Ages”, which had begun when the Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century. As Will Durant puts it in The Age of Faith: Western Europe in the sixth century was a chaos of conquest, disintegration, and rebarbarization. Much of the classic culture survived, for the most part silent and hidden in a few monasteries and families. But the physical and psychological foundations of social order had been so disturbed that centuries would be needed to restore them. Love of letters, devotion to art, the unity 26 CAN ASIANS THINK? and continuity of culture, the cross-fertilization of communicating minds, fell before the convulsions of war, the perils of transport, the economies of poverty, the rise of vernaculars, the disappearance of Latin from the East and of Greek from the West.1 Against this backdrop, it would have been sheer folly to predict at the time that in the second millennium Chinese, Indian and Islamic civilisations would slip into the backwaters of history while Europe would rise to be the ﬁrst civilisation ever to dominate the entire globe. But that, of course, is precisely what happened. It did not come about suddenly. Until about the 16th century, the more advanced societies of Asia, while they had lost their primacy, were still on a par with those of Europe and there was no deﬁnite indication that Europe would leap far ahead. At that time, Europe’s relative weaknesses were more apparent than its strengths. It was not the most fertile area of the world, nor was it particularly populous—important criteria by the measure of the day, when the soil was the source of most wealth, and human and animal muscle of most power. Europe exhibited no pronounced advantages in the ﬁelds of culture, mathematics, or engineering, navigation or other technologies. It was also a deeply fragmented continent, consisting of a hodgepodge of petty kingdoms, principalities and city-states. Further, at the end of the 15th century, Europe was in the throes of a bloody conﬂict with the mighty Ottoman Empire, which was pushing its way, inexorably it seemed, towards the gates of Vienna. So perduring was this threat that German princes hundreds of kilometres from the front lines had got into the custom of sending tribute—Turkenverehrung—to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul. Asian cultures, on the other hand, appeared to be thriving in the 15th century. China, for example, had a highly developed and vibrant culture. Its uniﬁed, hierarchic administration was run by well-educated Confucian bureaucrats who had given a coherence and sophistication to Chinese society that was unparalleled. China’s technological prowess was also formidable. Printing by movable type had already appeared in the 11th century. Paper money had expedited the ﬂow of commerce and growth of markets. China’s Can Asians Think? 27 gargantuan iron industry, coupled with the invention of gunpowder, gave it immense military strength. However, almost amazingly, it was Europe that leapt ahead. Something almost magical happened to European minds, and this was followed by wave after wave of progress and advance of civilisations, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, from the scientiﬁc revolution to the industrial revolution. While Asian societies degenerated into backwardness and ossiﬁcation, European societies, propelled forward by new forms of economic organisation, military-technical dynamism, political pluralism within the continent as a whole (if not within all individual countries), and the uneven beginnings of intellectual liberty, notably in Italy, Britain and Holland, produced what would have been called at the time the “European miracle”—had there been an observing, superior civilisation to mark the event. Because that mix of critical ingredients did not exist in any of the Asian societies, they appeared to stand still while Europe advanced to the centre of the world stage. Colonisation, which began in the 16th century, and the industrial revolution in the 19th century, augmented and entrenched Europe’s dominant position. To me, coming from Singapore, with a population of 3 million, it is a source of great wonder that a small state like Portugal, also with a population of a few million, could carve out territories like Goa, Macau and Malacca from larger and more ancient civilisations. It was an amazing feat. But what is more amazing is that it was done in the 1500s. The Portuguese colonisers were followed by the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, then the British. Throughout this period, for almost three centuries or more, Asian societies lay prostrate and allowed themselves to be surpassed and colonised by far smaller societies. The most painful thing that happened to Asia was not the physical but the mental colonisation. Many Asians (including, I fear, many of my ancestors from South Asia) began to believe that Asians were inferior beings to the Europeans. Only this could explain how a few thousand British could control a few hundred million people in South Asia. If I am allowed to make a controversial point here, I would add that this mental colonisation has not been completely 28 CAN ASIANS THINK? eradicated in Asia, and many Asian societies are still struggling to break free. It is truly astonishing that even today, as we stand on the eve of the 21st century, 500 years after the arrival of the ﬁrst Portuguese colonisers in Asia, only one—I repeat, one—Asian society has reached, in a comprehensive sense, the level of development that prevails generally in Europe and North America today. The Japanese mind was the ﬁrst to be awakened in Asia, beginning with the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s. Japan was ﬁrst considered developed and more or less accepted as an equal by 1902, when it signed the Anglo-Japanese alliance. If Asian minds can think, why is there today only one Asian society able to catch up with the West? I rest my case for the negative answer to our question. Those of you who want to tick “No” to the question “Can Asians think?” can proceed to do so. YES, THEY CAN Let me now try to draw out the arguments why we might answer “Yes” to the question “Can Asians think?”. The ﬁrst, and the most obvious one, is the incredible economic performance of East Asian societies in the past few decades. Japan’s success, while it has not been fully replicated in the rest of Asia, has set off ripples that now (current problems notwithstanding) have the potential to become tidal waves. Japan’s economic success was ﬁrst followed by the emergence of the “Four Tigers”—South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. But the success of these four tigers convinced other Southeast Asian countries, especially Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, that they could do the same. Lately they have been followed by China, which now has the potential to overtake the United States and become the world’s largest economy by 2020. What is amazing is the pace of economic development. It took the British 58 years (from 1780), America 47 years (from 1839) and Japan 33 years (from the 1880s) to double their economic output. On the other hand, it took Indonesia 17 years, South Korea 11 years and China 10 years to do the same. As a whole, the East Asian miracle economies grew more rapidly and more consistently Can Asians Think? 29 than any other group of economies in the world from 1960 to 1990. They averaged 5.5 per cent annual per capita real income growth, outperforming every economy in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa and even the OECD economies, which averaged only 2.5 per cent growth in that period. You cannot get good grades in an examination by luck. It requires intelligence and hard work. Similarly, you cannot get good economic performance, especially of the scale seen in Asia, simply by luck. It reﬂects both intelligence and hard work. And it is vital to stress here that the pace and scale of the economic explosion seen in Asia is unprecedented in the history of man. The chief economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, captured this reality well in his article in The Asian Wall Street Journal: The East Asian ‘miracle’ was real. Its economic transformation of East Asia has been one of the most remarkable accomplishments in history. The dramatic surge in gross domestic product which it brought about is reﬂected in higher standards of living for hundreds of millions of Asians, including longer life expectancy, better health and education, and millions of others have rescued themselves from poverty, and now lead more hopeful lives. These achievements are real, and will be far more permanent than the present turmoil.2 The conﬁdence of East Asians has been further boosted by the numerous studies that demonstrate the impressive academic performance of East Asians, both in leading Western universities and at home. Today many of the top students produced by American universities are of Asian origin. Educational excellence is an essential prerequisite for cultural conﬁdence. To put it baldly, many Asians are pleased to wake up to the new realisation that their minds are not inferior. Most Westerners cannot appreciate the change because they can never directly feel the sense of inferiority many Asians experienced until recently. The second reason why we might answer “Yes” to the question “Can Asians think?” is that a vital switch is taking place in many Asian minds. For centuries, Asians believed that the only way to 30 CAN ASIANS THINK? progress was through emulation of the West. Yukichi Fukuzawa, a leading Meiji reformer, epitomised this attitude when he said in the late 19th century that for Japan to progress, it had to learn from the West. The other leading modernisers in Asia, whether they be Sun Yat-sen or Jawaharlal Nehru, shared this fundamental attitude. The mental switch that is taking place in Asian minds today is that they no longer believe that the only way to progress is through copying; they now believe they can work out their own solutions. This switch in Asian minds has taken place slowly and imperceptibly. Until a few decades ago, Western societies beckoned as beacons on the hill: living models of the most successful form of human societies—economically prosperous, politically stable, socially just and harmonious, ethically clean, and, all in all, providing environments that had the best possible conditions for their citizens to grow and thrive as individuals. These societies were not perfect, but they were clearly superior, in all senses of the word, to any society outside. Until recently it would have been folly, and indeed inconceivable, for any Asian intellectual to suggest, “This may not be the path we want to take”. Today this is what many Asians are thinking, privately if not publicly. However, overall, there is no question that Western societies remain more successful than their East Asian counterparts. And they retain ﬁelds of excellence in areas that no other society comes close to, in their universities, think tanks, and certainly in cultural realms. No Asian orchestra comes close in performance to the leading Western orchestras, even though the musical world in the West has been enriched by many brilliant Asian musicians. But Asians are shocked by the scale and depth of social and economic problems that have afﬂicted many Western societies. In North America, societies are troubled by the relative breakdown of the family as an institution, the plague of drug addiction and its attendant problems, including crime, the persistence of ghettos and the perception that there has been a decline in ethical standards. This is exempliﬁed by statistics provided by the US government that reﬂect social trends for the period 1960–90. During that 30-year period, the rate of violent crime quadrupled, single-parent families Can Asians Think? 31 almost tripled, and the number of US state and federal prisoners tripled. Asians are also troubled by the addiction of Europeans to their social security nets despite the clear evidence that these nets now hold down their societies and have created a sense of gloom about long-term economic prospects. In previous decades, when East Asians visited North America and Western Europe, they envied the high standards of living and better quality of life in those societies. Today, though the high standards of living remain in the West, Asians no longer consider these societies as their role models. They are beginning to believe that they can attempt something different. A simple metaphor may explain what Western minds would see if they could peer into Asian minds. Until recently, most of those minds shared the general assumption that the developmental path of all societies culminated in the plateau on which most Western societies now rest. Hence, all societies, with minor variations, would end up creating liberal, democratic societies, giving emphasis to individual freedoms, as they moved up the socio-economic ladder. Today Asians can still see the plateau of contentment that most Western societies rest on, but they can also see, beyond the plateau, alternative peaks to which they can take their societies. Instead of seeing the plateau as the natural end destination, they now have a desire to bypass it (for they do not wish to be afﬂicted by some of the social and cultural ills that afﬂict Western societies) and to search for alternative peaks beyond. This kind of mental horizon never existed in Asian minds until recently. It reveals the new conﬁdence of Asians in themselves. The third reason why we might answer “Yes” to the question “Can Asians think?” is that today is not the only period when Asian minds have begun to stir. As more and more Asians lift their lives from levels of survival, they have the economic freedom to think, reﬂect, and rediscover their cultural heritage. There is a growing consciousness that their societies, like those in the West, have a rich social, cultural and philosophical legacy that they can resuscitate and use to evolve their own modern and advanced societies. The richness and depth of Indian and Chinese civilisations, to name just 32 CAN ASIANS THINK? two, have been acknowledged by Western scholars. Indeed, for the past few centuries, it was Western scholarship and endeavour that preserved the fruits of Asian civilisation, just as the Arabs preserved and passed on the Greek and Roman civilisations in the darkest days of Europe. For example, while Asian cultures deteriorated, museums and universities in the West preserved and even cherished the best that Asian art and culture had produced. As Asians delve deeper into their own cultural heritage, they ﬁnd their minds nourished. For the ﬁrst time in centuries, an Asian renaissance is under way. Visitors to Asian cities—from Teheran to Calcutta, from Bombay to Shanghai, from Singapore to Hong Kong—now see both a newfound conﬁdence as well as an interest in traditional language and culture. As their economies grow and as they have more disposable income, Asians spend it increasingly on reviving traditional dance or theatre. What we are witnessing today are only the bare beginnings of a major cultural rediscovery. The pride that Asians are taking in their culture is clear and palpable. In short, Asians who would like to rush and answer “Yes” to the question have more than ample justiﬁcation for doing so. But before they do so, I would advise them to pause and reﬂect on the reasons for the “Maybe” answer before arriving at a ﬁnal judgement. THE “MAYBE” RESPONSE Despite the travails sparked by the ﬁnancial crisis in late 1997, most Asians continue to be optimistic about their future. Such optimism is healthy. Yet it may be useful for Asians to learn a small lesson in history from the experience of Europeans exactly a century ago, when Europe was full of optimism. In his book Out of Control, Zbigniew Brzezinski describes how the world looked then: The twentieth century was born in hope. It dawned in a relatively benign setting. The principal powers of the world had enjoyed, broadly speaking, a relatively prolonged spell of peace … The dominant mood in the major capitals as of January 1, 1900, was generally one of optimism. The structure of global power seemed stable. Existing empires appeared to be increasingly enlightened as well as secure.3 Can Asians Think? 33 Despite this great hope, the 20th century became, in Brzezinski’s words: … mankind’s most bloody and hateful century, a century of hallucinating politics and of monstrous killings. Cruelty was institutionalized to an unprecedented degree, lethality was organized on a mass production basis. The contrast between the scientiﬁc potential for good and the political evil that was actually unleashed is shocking. Never before in history was killing so globally pervasive, never before did it consume so many lives, never before was human annihilation pursued with such concentration of sustained effort on behalf of such arrogantly irrational goals.4 One of the most important questions that an Asian has to ask himself today is a simple one: How many Asian societies, with the exception of Japan (which is an accepted member of the Western club), can be absolutely conﬁdent that they can succeed and do as well in a comprehensive sense as contemporary advanced societies in North America and Western Europe? If the answer is none, or even a few, then the case for the “Maybe” response becomes stronger. There are still many great challenges that Asian societies have to overcome before they can reach the comprehensive level of achievement enjoyed by Western societies. The ﬁrst challenge in the development of any society is economic. Until the middle of 1997, most East Asian societies believed that they had mastered the basic rules of modern economics. They liberalised their economies, encouraged foreign investment ﬂows and practised thrifty ﬁscal policies. The high level of domestic savings gave them a comfortable economic buffer. After enjoying continuous economic growth rates of 7 per cent or more per annum for decades, it was natural for societies like South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia to assume that they had discovered the magical elixir of economic development. The events following the devaluation of the Thai baht on 2 July 1997 demonstrated that they had not. The remarkable thing about this ﬁnancial crisis was that no economist anticipated its depth or scale. Economists and analysts are still divided on its fundamental 34 CAN ASIANS THINK? causes. As the crisis is still unfolding as this essay is being written, it is too early to provide deﬁnitive judgements on the fundamental causes. But a few suggestions are worth making. On the economic front, many mistakes were made. In Thailand, for example, the decision to sustain ﬁxed exchange rates between the baht and the dollar, despite the disparity in interest rates, allowed Thai businessmen to borrow cheap in US dollars and earn high interest rates in Thai baht. This also led to overinvestments in Thailand, in the property and share markets. All this was clearly unsustainable. The IMF provided some discreet warnings. However, the relatively weak coalition governments then prevailing in Thailand were unable to administer the bitter medicine required to remedy the situation because some of it had to be administered to their ﬁnancial backers. Domestically, it was a combination of economic and political factors that precipitated and prolonged the ﬁnancial crisis. There was also a huge new factor that complicated the story: the force of globalisation. The key lesson that all East Asian economic managers have learnt from the 1997–98 crisis is that they are accountable not only to domestic actors but to the international ﬁnancial markets and their key players. The East Asians should not have been surprised. It was a logical consequence of liberalisation and integration with the global economy. Integration has brought both beneﬁts (in terms of signiﬁcant increases in standard of living) and costs (such as loss of autonomy in economic management). But there was a clear reluctance to acknowledge and accept the loss of autonomy. This was demonstrated by the state of denial that characterised the initial East Asian response to this crisis. The denial clearly showed the psychological time lag in East Asian minds in facing up to new realities. Signiﬁcantly, the two East Asian economies that have (after the initial bouts of denial) swallowed most fully the bitter medicine administered by the IMF have been the two societies that have progressed fastest in developing middle classes that have integrated themselves into the world view of the new interconnected global universe of modern economics. South Korea and Thailand, although they continue to face serious economic challenges at the time of Can Asians Think? 35 writing, have clearly demonstrated that their elites are now well plugged in to the new ﬁnancial networks. The new ﬁnance minister of Thailand, Tarrin Nimmanhaeminda, walks and talks with ease in any key ﬁnancial capital. His performance is one indicator of the new globalised Asian mind that is emerging. The 1997–98 ﬁnancial crisis also demonstrated the wisdom of the Chinese in translating the English word “crisis” as a combination of two Chinese characters, “danger” and “opportunity”. Clearly, East Asian societies have experienced many dangerous moments. But if they emerge from the 1997–98 ﬁnancial crisis with restructured and reinvigorated economic and administrative systems of management, they may yet be among the ﬁrst societies in the world to develop strong immune systems to handle present and future challenges springing from globalisation. It is too early to tell whether this is true. And this in turn reinforces the point that on the economic front, one should perhaps give the “Maybe” answer to the question “Can Asians think?”. Second, on the political front, most Asian societies, including East Asian societies, have a long way to go before they can reach Western levels of political stability and harmony. There is little danger of a coup d’état or real civil war in most contemporary Western societies (with the possible exception, still, of Northern Ireland). Western societies have adopted political variations of the liberal democratic model, even though the presidential systems of the United States and France differ signiﬁcantly from the Westminster models of the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. These political forms are not perfect. They contain many features that inhibit social progress, from vested interest lobby groups to pork-barrel politics. Indeed, it would be fair to say that political development in most Western societies has atrophied. But it has atrophied at comfortable levels. Most of their citizens live in domestic security, fear no oppression, and are content with their political frameworks. How many Asian societies can claim to share this benign state of affairs? The answer is clearly very few. And if it is equally clear that they are not going to enjoy this in the very near future, then this again militates in favour of the “Maybe” answer. 36 CAN ASIANS THINK? Third, in the security realm, the one great advantage Western societies have over the rest of the world is that war among them has become a thing of the past. The reason for this is complex. It includes an awareness of ethnic afﬁnity among Western tribes who feel outnumbered by the rest of the world’s population and also a sense of belonging to a common civilisation. It may also reﬂect the exhaustion of having fought too many wars in the past. Nevertheless, it is truly remarkable, when we count the number of wars—and truly big wars—that the English, French and Germans have fought with each other (including two in this century), that there is today almost a zero chance of war between the United Kingdom, France and Germany. This is a remarkably civilised thing to have achieved, reﬂecting a considerable step forward in the history of human civilisation. When will India and Pakistan, or North and South Korea, achieve this same zero prospect of war? And if the answer is not in the near future, is it reasonable to suggest that perhaps Asian minds (or the minds of Asian societies) have not reached the same level as the West? Fourth, Asians face serious challenges in the social realm. While it is true that it took the social dislocations caused by the industrial revolution to eradicate the feudal traces of European cultures (social freedom followed economic freedom), it is still unclear whether similar economic revolutions in East Asia will have the same liberating social effects on Asian societies. Unfortunately, many feudal traces, especially those of clannishness and nepotism, continue to prevent Asian societies from becoming truly meritocratic ones, where individual citizens are able to grow and thrive on the basis of their abilities and not on the basis of their birth or connections or ethnic background. Fifth and ﬁnally, and perhaps most fundamentally, the key question remains whether Asian minds will be able to develop the right blend of values that will both preserve some of the traditional strengths of Asian values (e.g., attachment to the family as an institution, deference to societal interests, thrift, conservatism in social mores, respect for authority) as well as absorb the strengths of Western values (the emphasis on individual achievement, political Can Asians Think? 37 and economic freedom, respect for the rule of law as well as for key national institutions). This will be a complex challenge. One of the early (and perhaps inevitable) reactions by some Western commentators to the 1997–98 ﬁnancial crisis was to suggest that it fundamentally reﬂected the failure of Asian values. If nothing else, this quick reaction suggested that the “Asian values debate” of the early 1990s had touched some sensitive nerves in the Western mind and soul. The desire to bury Asian values revealed the real pain that had been inﬂicted during that debate. The true test of the viability and validity of values is shown not in theory but in practice. Those who try to draw a direct link of causality between adherence to Asian values and ﬁnancial disaster have a tough empirical case to make because of the varied reactions of East Asian societies to the ﬁnancial crisis. South Korea and Thailand, two of the three countries that were most deeply affected by the crisis (i.e., those who had to turn to the IMF for assistance), had been given the highest marks in Western minds for their moves towards democratisation. The three open economies that were least affected by the ﬁnancial crisis were Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, and the three had very different political systems. In short, there was no clear correlation between political systems and ﬁnancial vulnerability. The only correlation that is clear so far is that between good governance and resilience in the ﬁnancial crisis. Good governance is not associated with any single political system or ideology. It is associated with the willingness and ability of the government to develop economic, social and administrative systems that are resilient enough to handle the challenges brought about in the new economic era we are moving into. China provides a good living example of this. Its leaders are not looking for the perfect political system in theory. They are searching daily for pragmatic solutions to keep their society moving forward. The population support this pragmatism, for they too feel that it is time for China to catch up. Traditionally, the Chinese have looked for good government, not minimal government. They can recognise good governance when they experience it. The fact that Japan—which is in Western eyes 38 CAN ASIANS THINK? the most liberal and democratic East Asian society—has had great difﬁculties adapting to the new economic environment demonstrates that political openness is not the key variable to look at. It is vital for Western minds to understand that the efforts by Asians to rediscover Asian values are not only, or even primarily, a search for political values. Instead, they represent a complex set of motives and aspirations in Asian minds: a desire to reconnect with their historical past after this connection had been ruptured both by colonial rule and by the subsequent domination of the globe by a Western Weltanschauung; an effort to ﬁnd the right balance in bringing up their young so that they are open to the new technologically interconnected global universe and yet rooted in and conscious of the cultures of their ancestors; an effort to deﬁne their own personal, social and national identities in a way that enhances their sense of self-esteem in a world where their immediate ancestors had subconsciously accepted that they were lesser beings in a Western universe. In short, the reassertion of Asian values in the 1990s represents a complex process of regeneration and rediscovery that is an inevitable aspect of the rebirth of societies. Here again, it is far too early to tell whether Asian societies can successfully both integrate themselves into the modern world and reconnect with their past. Both are mammoth challenges. Western minds have a clear advantage over Asian minds, as they are convinced that their successful leap into modernity was to a large extent a result of the compatibility of their value systems with the modern universe. Indeed, many Western minds believe (either consciously or subconsciously) that without Western value systems no society can truly enter the modern universe. Only time will tell whether Asian societies can enter the modern universe as Asian societies rather than Western replicas. Since it is far too early to pass judgement on whether they will succeed in this effort, it is perhaps fair to suggest that this too is another argument in favour of the “Maybe” answer to the question “Can Asians think?”. Can Asians Think? 39 CONCLUSION Clearly, the 21st century and the next millennium will prove to be very challenging for Asian societies. For most of the past 500 years, they have fallen behind European societies in many different ways. There is a strong desire to catch up. The real answer to the question “Can Asians think?” will be provided if they do so. Until then, Asians will do themselves a big favour by constantly reminding themselves why this question remains a valid one for them to pose to themselves. And only they can answer it. No one else can. 1. Will Durant, The Age of Faith, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1950, p. 450. 2. Joseph Stiglitz, The Asian Wall Street Journal, 2 February 1998. 3. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993, p. 3. 4. Ibid, p. 4–5. Asia’s Lost Millennium Asiaweek. Special Millennium Edition 2000 The Millennium is a European event. It marks a signiﬁcant turn in European, not Asian, calendars. At the last turn of the millennium, in the year 999, European societies were languishing in the Dark Ages, with little promise of shooting ahead. But shoot ahead they did, carrying human civilisation to new heights of scientific and technological advancement as well as economic, social and political development. If Europe had not shot ahead, most of mankind, including Asia, would still have been languishing in the feudal era. The millennium that has just ended should be called the European Millennium. And Europeans have every reason to celebrate this historic moment. For Asians, this should be a moment of reﬂection. A thousand years ago, things had looked more promising for Asian societies. China was enjoying the glories of the Song Dynasty. One of the largest and busiest cities in the world was emerging in Southeast Asia, in Angkor Wat. Despite these promising environments, Asian societies slipped. They lost an entire millennium. Even now, only one Asian society—Japan—has fully caught up with Europe. One of the key goals of my writings is to alert Asians that they have had no better historical moment than the current one to develop their true potential and, at the same time, prod them to be bolder in their ambitions and aspirations. If they get their act Asia’s Lost Millennium 41 together, Asian societies could once again out-perform other societies. But it will not be easy to walk out of a thousand years of stupor. Asians need to ask themselves hard questions. One of the key purposes of this essay is to look at some questions that Asians should ask themselves at this turn of the millennium. How did they come to lose a millennium? Will they lose the next one too? What challenges do they have to overcome to succeed in this new millennium? This essay, written for the special millennium edition of Asiaweek, attempts to spell out at least three key challenges that Asian societies face. ………… 42 CAN ASIANS THINK? At this historic moment—when the ascendency of Europe is so rapidly coming to an end, when Asia is swelling with resurrected life, and the theme of the 20th century seems destined to be an all-embracing conﬂict between the East and the West—… the future faces into the Paciﬁc, and understanding must follow it there.1 ASIAN TRIUMPHALISM, circa 1995? No. For US historian Will Durant in 1935, Asia had clearly been a land of promise. Yet it lost most of the 20th century—even much of the second millennium, while Europe and later America shot ahead in human achievements, colonised the globe and took control of the world economy. The picture had looked very different at the turn of the last millennium. China was reaching towards new heights under the Song Dynasty. One of the busiest cities of the world was emerging in Southeast Asia, in Angkor Wat. Indian and Arab societies were ahead of Europe in learning. And Asia’s advance continued for several centuries. Then, for most of the past 500 years, Asians stopped learning. To avoid losing the next century, Asians must resume the learning process they had aborted for centuries. They have to ruthlessly analyse their past. They have to understand, for example, why so many Asians allowed themselves to be colonised by so few Europeans. What went wrong? They must further determine what went right in the West. Many would want to credit Europe’s success to purely material factors: its domination of science and technology in the past ﬁve centuries. Superior European weapons subdued large Asian masses. But to look at the “hardware” alone, while ignoring the “software” advantages of European societies, would be a mistake. Distilling the wrong lessons may be even worse for Asia than distilling no lessons at all. And learning the right lessons is becoming more crucial as history fast-forwards into the next millennium. The velocity of change is accelerating. Societies with the right competitive advantages will leap ahead even faster. Those without will fall further behind. Finding the right software should be easy. Successful societies exist. Best practices are visible. Why not copy? After all, Asia has Asia’s Lost Millennium 43 copied and even improved hardware. But even successful societies may not understand the real software fuelling their success. The advice they give to developing countries, often with good intentions, has been simple. The key ingredients for success are democracy and free markets. Yet, some societies, including major nations, that tried instant transformations to democracy have come to grief. So too those societies that tried free market economies without the right institutional frameworks in place. Deeper principles explain the success of the developed societies. A short essay like this cannot provide all the answers. But let me suggest three key principles that may be found in the software of success. The ﬁrst is “meritocracy”. When capitalism destroyed feudalism in Europe in the 19th century, it moved away from aristocracy towards meritocracy. Capitalism, with its essential ingredient of “creative destruction”, generated new elites. Democracy provided another institutional process for ﬂushing out old elites and churning out new ones. Both capitalism and democracy were therefore not purely ends in themselves (even though they are ideologically worshipped in many Western minds). They were also functional instruments that enabled—most times—new talent to emerge while simultaneously preventing the encrustation of old elites (which has been one key reason for Asia’s failure). If each Asian society allows its best minds to emerge, ﬂourish and provide leadership, Asia could well take off. But conservative social and political forces resist change. And a great deal of Asian talent is wasted. Globalisation may succeed where domestic forces have failed. New economic forces are plowing through Asia, turning up talent. More than half of the 500,000 foreign students in the United States come from Asia. The American university system is the most meritocratic educational system anywhere. Asian successes there demonstrate that Asia has potentially the largest pool of talent to share with the world. Ostensibly this is a loss for Asia. Most will not return immediately. But many eventually do. Taiwan’s economic miracle was helped by returning students. India’s explosive growth in the computer software industry has also been helped by its returning “brain drain”. 44 CAN ASIANS THINK? Multinational businesses—from banks and consulting ﬁrms to the dynamic new companies in information technology—are also tapping and training Asian talent. They could well be the yeast to revive long moribund Asian societies. The second principle is “peace”. Peace, of course, was in short supply during much of Europe’s growth. It took two debilitating world wars, where many of the best European minds were lost in mindless battles, for that continent to give up centuries of antagonism. One simple explanation for these two wars could be the time lag between changes in mental and physical environments. In the ﬁrst half of the 20th century, vestiges of a feudal mindset—which saw war as a legitimate instrument for expanding power—persisted in Europe, even though the instruments of war had increased dramatically in their power of destruction. Nuclear weapons, paradoxically, may have ﬁnally removed this time lag. Some Asian minds, including those of key policymakers, still linger in the feudal era. They see international relations as a zero-sum game. They have yet to learn from the lesson Japan and Germany absorbed after World War II: power and prosperity can be acquired peacefully. The political dynamic of West Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia would become more comfortable if their leaders realised that peace is an essential condition for growth and prosperity in the modern world. Wars drive out investment dollars and kill (literally) talent. Peace does the opposite. Just one major war in Asia—between any two major Asian powers—could propel Asia back into the 19th century. Asians should learn from the wisdom of Deng Xiaoping when he said that future generations should be asked to solve today’s territorial problems. The third principle is “honesty”. This sounds trite, but it is a polite way of drawing attention to one of Asia’s most shameful aspects: corruption. Successful societies have functional elites. They add more value to their societies than they take from it. Unsuccessful societies have corrupt elites. As a result of feudal attitudes, they become easily entrenched, even though they survive as parasites. Corruption exists in both the democratic and non- democratic societies of Asia (and indeed in other parts of the world). Asia’s Lost Millennium 45 To successfully root it out, the rule of law has to be more ﬁrmly embedded in Asian societies. Corruption is a particularly pernicious problem because it is so difﬁcult to document, except in the most egregious cases such as that of Ferdinand Marcos. It thrives at all levels. And the costs are not purely economic. They are also social and spiritual. They breed cynicism and disenchantment, sustaining a vicious cycle that has held Asian societies down: When there is no hope for change, why try? And this points to the most dreadful truth that Asians have to come to terms with. Asian societies have not been held back due to colonialism. Nor have they been held back by inequitable international economic forces. The external causes are all peripheral (and often benign). The real reason that Asian societies have fallen behind European societies in the past 500 years is a simple one: Asians have held Asia back. But I do not want to end on a pessimistic note. There is hope for change. Globalisation will generate new elites in Asia. So too will the increasing velocity of change. Huge numbers of Asians are being educated, at home and abroad. New global ﬂows of information are opening the eyes of Asians. The “veil of ignorance” is being lifted. A new process of learning has begun. All these forces will generate new opportunities for Asian societies. But the ﬁrst lesson that Asian societies must learn is how to develop, implement and maintain the right software: meritocracy, peace and honesty (MPH—perhaps a good acronym to remember in times of rapid change). 1. Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1935. the making of modern asia TIME Magazine. 7 August 2005 When I published my latest book, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, the former Treasury Secretary and current Director of the US National Economic Council, Larry Summers gave me a wonderful blurb which said, inter alia, “the rise of Asia and all that follows it will be the dominant story in history books written 300 years from now with the Cold War and rise of Islam as secondary stories.” Today there is virtually no doubt that the 21st century will be the Asian century. The reason why this is inevitable is because we are returning to the historical norm. From the year 1 to the year 1820, China and India were consistently the two world’s largest economies. Goldman Sachs has predicted that we will return to this norm by 2050 with the four largest economies being China, India, USA and Japan (and in this respective order). Yet, even though many accept the reality of the rise of Asia, there is still very little consensus on how and why this is happening now. Hence, when TIME Magazine invited me to write an essay explaining the rise of Asia in 2005, I was happy to do so. This short discussion should be seen as a delightful appetiser for those interested in beginning their journey on the understanding of the new Asia. ………… The Making of Modern Asia 47 THE 21ST CENTURY has opened and will close with two puzzles about the rise of Asia. Today, the puzzle is why Asian societies, long in the doldrums, are now successful. At the century’s close, by contrast, historians will want to know why Asian societies succeeded so late, taking centuries to catch up with a Europe that they had outperformed for millenniums. Neither puzzle is—or will be—easy to solve. As a child of a poor Indian immigrant family growing up in the 1950s in the British colony of Singapore, neither I nor my classmates could have even conceived the notion that an Asian century would begin in our lifetimes. We believed that London was the centre of the universe; one friend used to tell me that the streets there were paved with gold. Both India and China seemed doomed to eternal poverty. Today, it is clear that the Asian century has begun. What remains unclear, however, are the factors that caused this enormous change. There was, for example, the exhaustion of the European colonial powers after two destructive World Wars, and the consolidation of nationalist sentiments, forged in the anti-colonial struggles. There was the rise of the US as the most benign power in human history, creating a new world order that allowed potential rivals to emerge. There were the pressures of Cold War competition, which forced the US to encourage the economic success of its allies, especially Japan and the four Asian tigers. Then there were accidents with profound, if unanticipated, consequences, like the Sino-Soviet split, which drove China into the US camp and facilitated Deng Xiaoping’s fateful decision to explain why China needed the “Four Modernisations”, and ﬁnancial accidents, like the Plaza Accord of 1985, which caused a rush of Japanese investments into East Asia. There was the cultural attraction of the US, which lured hundreds of thousands of young Asians to study there; when they returned home, these Asians provided the yeast for a new cultural conﬁdence in their own societies. Finally, there was globalisation, which provided a tremendous boost to Asian economies, especially to China’s and India’s. All of these forces for change can be thought of as benign. Yet in paradoxical ways, tragedies, too, contributed to Asia’s rise. The 48 CAN ASIANS THINK? Korean War was painful and destructive. But it led to a strategic American decision to encourage the rebuilding of Japan’s economy and society—although this sadly swept under the carpet the dreadful record of Japan’s actions in World War II. Japan’s economic success in turn inspired the four tigers. The Vietnam War was equally painful. But the US decision to hold the line in Indochina allowed Southeast Asian countries to become dynamos, rather than dominoes. The historical verdict on US involvement in Vietnam is unfair: despite the ignominious retreat by the US from Saigon, Vietnam ultimately applied to join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The Vietnamese decision to invade Cambodia in December 1978 also triggered some happy, if unintended, consequences. Apart from ending the genocide of Pol Pot, it solidiﬁed the Sino- American relationship and gave ASEAN new political resolve. One of the least appreciated contributions to the rise of Asia has been the magic provided by ASEAN in delivering political stability and harmony to Southeast Asia. Despite having greater ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural diversity than Southeast Europe, the region remained an oasis of peace in the 1990s while the Balkans erupted into a frenzy of ethnic and religious killings. ASEAN saved Southeast Asia, especially during the 1997 Asian ﬁnancial crisis, which could have led to political havoc in the region. And it is at the heart of the alphabet soup of regional processes that have provided the foundations for even wider regional cooperation. The ﬁrst-ever Asia-wide summit will be held in Kuala Lumpur in December this year, bringing together the 10 ASEAN leaders with those of China, India, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia. It will be a truly historic meeting. ASEAN made it possible. Of course, other regions in the world beneﬁted from propitious external developments. The US supported allies in other areas of the developing world; for example, Egypt received as much aid as South Korea. But nowhere else has seen the scale of success in Asia. Why is that? Here, the missing piece of the puzzle has to be the cultural fabric of Asian societies. Cultural conﬁdence is a necessary but not sufﬁcient condition for The Making of Modern Asia 49 development. Centuries of European colonial rule had progressively reduced Asian self-conﬁdence. Future generations of Indian citizens will be wondering how 300 million Indians—including my own ancestors—allowed themselves to be passively ruled by fewer than 100,000 Britons. Those as yet unborn will not understand how deeply the myth of European cultural superiority had been embedded into the Indian psyche. Jawaharlal Nehru, the ﬁrst Indian Prime Minister, once said the defeat of Russia in 1905 by Japan ﬁrst triggered the idea of independence for India in his mind. That was a remarkable admission; it implied that intelligent Indians could not conceive of governing themselves before Japan, an Asian power, defeated a European one. Japan’s record in World War II was disastrous. But if Japan had not succeeded early in the 20th century, Asia’s development would have come much later. Japan inspired the rise of Asia. Even South Korea, which suffered from brutal Japanese colonial rule, could not have taken off so fast without having Japan as a role model. Asia needs to send Japan a big thank-you note. The tragedy, of course, is that such words of gratitude will not be delivered while Japan remains ambivalent about its own identity, torn between Asia and the West. Even the Chinese should thank Japan. Tokyo’s continuous denials of its army’s atrocities in World War II will always complicate relations with Beijing. But China would not be where it is today if Deng had not made that fateful decision to move from communist central planning to a free-market system. Deng took this incredibly bold leap because he had seen how well the Overseas Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong and even Singapore had done. Those three tigers—and the fourth, South Korea—were inspired by Japan. The stone that Japan threw into Asia-Paciﬁc waters created ripples that eventually beneﬁted China, too. What makes Asia’s rise so irreversible is the simultaneous success of both China and India. Their political paths could not be more different: India is a democracy, while China retains Communist Party rule. The acceptance of free-market disciplines, however, provides a common economic platform. China and India 50 CAN ASIANS THINK? today are united in their cultural conﬁdence, especially among their youth. Both countries have the most optimistic generation of young people they have seen in centuries. Nothing can hold back the dynamism and vigour they will bring to their societies, and to the whole world. The West got the ﬁrst whiff of this cultural conﬁdence at the end of the Cold War. Basking in ideological triumph, the West prescribed that all societies should immediately become replicas of Western liberal democracies. Many happily followed this prescription. Few succeeded. Some came to grief. The Asian states, especially China, resisted copying the West. This is how the famous “Asian values debate” was sparked. In refusing Western prescriptions, Asians were perceived to be promoting the superiority of their own values. In fact, they were merely arguing that they should be free to choose their own political paths. Lest there be any misunderstanding, Asian intellectuals—including those from China—agree that the ultimate political destination of all societies is democracy. The destination is not in question, only the route and the timing are. September 11, 2001, removed all traces of political smugness in Western minds and all claims to Western ideological superiority. It made the West aware that the new ideological challenge from Islam was far bigger than the communist one, which future historians will see as a passing shower. Islam has been around for over 1,300 years, penetrating deeply into the souls of 1.2 billion people. Most Islamic societies have yet to ﬁnd the right balance between modernisation and their religious roots. The success of East Asia, especially its Muslim societies, could eventually trigger the modernisation of the Islamic world. Yet questions remain about the sustainability of Asia’s success. Asian countries will continue to stumble from time to time. They cannot rely solely on favourable external developments or on Western ideas, though it is these, not Asian ones, that have driven Asia’s growth. The economic principles of Asia’s rise come from a Scot, Adam Smith. The political ideologies come from Western thinkers, from John Locke to Karl Marx. The international multilateral grid that has served Asia well—including the UN, WTO, The Making of Modern Asia 51 IMF and World Bank—is essentially a Western creation. Asians have beneﬁted enormously from being passengers on the Western globalisation bus. Soon, they will help drive it. Asians cannot be free riders forever. Yet few Asians have given thought to how they will reshape the world order. The world is keen to learn what new responsibilities Asia will take on. So far, the region has remained silent. On the cultural front, too, Asian passivity is surprising. Bollywood, the sole major exception, is growing in strength. But in virtually every other ﬁeld, Asians have been consumers of Western cultural products, especially American ones. The Asian economies now produce almost 40 per cent of global GDP, but they have only a minority stake in the world’s cultural industries, from ﬁlm to TV, from books to print media. No Asian TV channel currently can match CNN or the BBC. This distorts global perspectives. The world sees Asia through Western eyes. Asians have yet to explain themselves in their own terms to the rest of the world. But history teaches us that economic growth eventually generates a cultural renaissance. It would be strange for Asian societies, from Iran to South Korea, from China to India, not to rediscover their rich cultural heritage. The high price paid for Asian antiques in Western auction houses is, perhaps, a ﬁrst hint of this new cultural pride. But a cultural renaissance cannot just rediscover old glories. It has to provide directions for the future. Just as Asian economies have succeeded by drawing on the best practices of East and West, the Asian cultural renaissance (or renaissances) will also see a fusion of Eastern and Western civilisations, allowing the West to feel included in, not excluded from, Asia’s rise. When Asia’s growth achieves a certain momentum by the end of the 21st century, Asian minds will inevitably come up with new conundrums. Why did their ancestors take so long to succeed and modernise? Why did Europe and not Asia trigger the Industrial Revolution? How could a few key capitals in Europe and America make decisions that determined Asian destinies? How could London ever have been more important than Bombay, or Paris more important than Beijing? These questions too will come. p a r t 2 T H E w e s t a n d t h e r e s t The West and the Rest The National Interest. No. 28, Summer 1992 My year at Harvard, from September 1991 to June 1992, opened my eyes in many ways. One key insight I gained was that those who live and think in the West are not aware of how much impact they have on the rest of the world, or what the Rest thinks of the West. The Western mind believes that it understands all worlds, since it is open to all ideas and closed to none. The paradoxical result of this deep-seated assumption is that the Western mind is actually unaware of the limits of its understanding and comprehension. This essay was an attempt to open new windows in the Western mind. Of all the essays that I have published, two have gained the greatest notoriety. The ﬁrst was this essay. The second was my response to Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations”; see “The Dangers of Decadence: What the Rest Can Teach the West” on pages 97 to 104 in this same section. Reading this essay a decade later, I am astonished how quickly some of my long-term predictions have materialised. In the essay I said, “In the eyes of the North African population, the Mediterranean, which once divided civilisations, has become a mere pond. What human being would not cross a pond if thereby he could improve his livelihood?” When I wrote this, the illegal immigration across the Mediterranean was a trickle. Now in the new millennium, it is a river. European newspapers report The West and the Rest 55 these crossings with great alarm. But how could they not see it coming? The deaths of 19 Chinese trying to smuggle into England in mid-2000 in a container box provided more eloquent proof of the arguments of this essay than my words ever could. Today, the conclusions I drew remain valid. The image I used, of the defenders of Singapore in World War II with their guns pointing the wrong way, is still apt: there remains a strong impulse in the West to draw up the ramparts. But a huge contradiction is developing between the unilateralist impulses of Western political power and the interdependent and interconnected world spun by Western technology. When this huge contradiction explodes, I hope some will recall the points in this essay. ………… 56 CAN ASIANS THINK? THE WEST WON the Cold War, conventional wisdom holds, not because of its military superiority but because of the strength of its social, economic and political institutions. Hence, it is not surprising that a new consensus has quickly developed that the West merely has to hold a steady course in the post-Cold War era. Francis Fukuyama, with his celebration of the triumph of Western values, captured the spirit of the moment. The rest of the world, if it is to free itself from the “mire” of history, will have to adjust and accommodate to the ways of the West. Having already got things basically right and facing no imminent threat, the West has no need to make major adjustments of its own. This essay will challenge these widely held assumptions. It will argue that “steady as she goes” is not a viable option for the West; that while it may not face any immediate military threat, the West faces serious and growing dangers of other kinds; that it cannot afford to turn its back on the Third World because the Cold War is over; that in a shrinking and increasingly overcrowded world, in which the population of the West constitutes an ever smaller percentage, a comprehensive new strategy is needed; and that an aggressive effort to export Western values to the non-West does not constitute such a strategy, but will only serve to aggravate already serious problems. Arriving at a sound strategy, a difﬁcult enough task in the best of circumstances, will be harder because of the deeply ingrained habits acquired during the long years of the Cold War. There is a real danger that problems will be wrongly identiﬁed and deﬁned, and that consequently the West’s strategic sights will be pointed the wrong way. For someone of my background, this danger recalls the famous British guns of Singapore in December 1941. The guns of that supposedly impregnable fortress were conﬁdently pointed seaward, as the Japanese came quietly over land on bicycles and on foot to conquer the island with embarrassing ease. This analogy is particularly apt because one of the most serious challenges that will confront the West in the new era will also arrive on bicycles and on foot, or their equivalents: the challenge posed by mass immigration from Third World countries. Superior Western military The West and the Rest 57 technology will be useless against these invading armies because they will arrive as poor and defenceless individuals and families, moving without commanders or orders, and seeping slowly through porous borders. If and when this happens, it will be only one dimension of a multiple crisis, a crisis resulting from the combination of a fundamentally changed Western attitude towards the Third World, and some well-known but inadequately understood secular trends. THE RETREAT OF THE WEST For the four decades of the Cold War, both sides attached great importance to the Third World. Seeing themselves as engaged in a global struggle for the highest stakes, neither felt able to treat any country, however small, poor or distant, as unimportant. Everything counted; nothing was irrelevant. Even as the West shed its colonial empires, the Third World successor states became more rather than less strategically relevant, especially for the United States. Because everyone else was already committed to one camp or the other, these countries constituted the main arena of competition, the contested hearts and minds and territories of the Cold War. Although most Third World countries belonged at least nominally to the Non-Aligned Movement, that organisation was incapable of providing them with effective security. For that, most felt they had only two effective choices: to identify, to a greater or lesser degree, with either the Western or Soviet camp. Thus a ramifying system of patrons and clients, one with an elaborate if mostly tacit set of rules, spread over the globe. Third World states were by no means always the passive objects of superpower manipulation in these arrangements, and many became very skilful at exploiting the Cold War for their own ends. But it was a dangerous

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