The little village of Kibithu is the easternmost settlement in India and easily one of the most spectacular. Located in the snow-capped eastern Himalayas of Arunachal Pradesh state, it is couched in lush forests traversed by rushing rivulets and waterfalls. Where these rivers of melting snow cut through mountain ramparts has long been a highway of civilisations. Through these passes, Buddhist teachings made their way from India into Tibet, China and Burma. Silver and spices were brought up Burma’s Irrawaddy River, bound through the mountain passes for China and India. These were the courses along which the preparation and cultivation of tea emanated from China into British India and Burma.
Kibithu lies close to the point where Indian, Chinese and Burmese territory meets. It is part of the 65,000 kilometres of territory claimed by Beijing as part of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Kibithu was subject to a ferocious battle between Chinese and Indian forces in October 1962, and was briefly occupied by the People’s Liberation Army before it withdrew across the ‘Line of Actual Control’ – the ostensible but disputed boundary between India and China. The Line of Actual Control follows quite closely the border drawn up under the supervision of Sir Henry McMahon, the foreign secretary of the British Raj in India, who oversaw a boundary convention in the colonial hill station of Simla in mid-1914. The Simla Convention had been convened to find a solution to the problem caused when Tibetans had evicted Chinese troops and officials after the collapse of the last dynasty in Beijing in 1911.1 The negotiations in Simla divided the eastern Himalayas into ‘inner Tibet’, to remain part of British India, and ‘outer Tibet’, with nominal independence under Chinese suzerainty. The British and Tibetan representatives in Simla signed the agreement but not the Chinese. The McMahon Line became part of the independence settlement, as Britain dismantled the raj after the end of the Second World War. When inner Tibet became part of independent India in 1947, the Tibetan government tendered a note to the new government in New Delhi claiming large parts of the region. On gaining power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party repudiated the McMahon Line on the grounds that the Tibetans had no right to conclude a boundary treaty in 1914, and declared its intention to liberate inner Tibet.
India and China are not the only parties disputing the easternmost parts of Arunachal Pradesh. The region is also home to tribal militias who call themselves the ‘Naga peoples’ and identify more strongly with kin across the border in today’s Myanmar than with Indians or Chinese. A long-running insurgency has plagued the region and the Indian government since the 1970s. But for the arbitrary border drawn between India, China and Burma by the British Empire in 1937, the Naga peoples could have been living alongside their ethnic kin in Myanmar – or instead of fighting Indian troops, they could be battling China’s People’s Liberation Army.2
By such quirks of history, Kibithu is part of India and therefore classified as part of ‘South Asia’ or the ‘subcontinent’. Both these labels carry loaded connotations: chronic poverty and underdevelopment, ‘Hindu rates of growth’, overcrowding and poor sanitation, vast inert bureaucracies, and almost constant instability and conflict. But had British geographers decided to place Kibithu in Burma rather than India, it would have been part of Southeast Asia, not South Asia. Automatically it would have been part of a different system of classification, implying that it belonged to a society that was stable, ordered and ruled by technocratic (though not necessarily democratic) government, promoting rapid economic development. Or if the People’s Liberation Army had not withdrawn in 1963, Kibithu would today have been part of China and therefore Northeast Asia, an even more prestigious club still: of industrial power, high-tech cities, gleaming infrastructure, ‘Confucian’ discipline and control.
Dividing the world’s largest, most populous and most diverse continent into arbitrary chunks is a very old habit of the human mind. Geographers tell us that to understand and navigate the world, we need to divide and order it according to shared ‘mental maps’. Asia’s great expanse and diversity seems too great for the mind to encompass and comprehend all at once; it seems natural to divide it into sub-regions in order to focus in and understand it properly. But for much of the past half millennium, Asia was divided for more than simple taxonomic reasons. The great wealth of the Asian continent was far too alluring to the kingdoms and republics of Europe to rely on simple trade flows. Treasure and power would flow to those that could carve out exclusive empires in Asia, bringing to an end the flows of east–west trade and establishing absolute colonial enclaves between the metropole in Europe and its imperial territories in Asia. In the process, a continent once responsible for close to 70 per cent of all economic activity on earth was reduced to a series of peripheral appendages of European empires, connected more vitally to the metropole and its other colonies than to other Asian economies.
The ancient Greeks were the first to call the vast continent to their east by a single name, Ἀσία, which they distinguished from their own Europe and from Africa to their south. The pre-colonial empires and kingdoms that inhabited the Asian continent occupied distinct and largely self-contained spaces, often separated from each other by mountains, seas or deserts. War, trade and religion maintained regular exchanges and influences across the vast continent. Beliefs, techniques, spices and knowledge were remarkably portable among Asia’s diverse societies and, for the most part, those societies proved strongly absorbent of outside influences. A flexible pragmatism seemed to govern the interplay of cultures: whether the imported beliefs were Hindu concepts of governance, or Chinese characters, or Malay standards of commerce, or Buddhist moral codes or Arabic mathematics, the recipient cultures adapted them to their own needs while maintaining their own distinctive cultural traditions.3 Pilgrimage, commerce and alliances forged human diasporas and networks along Asia’s trading routes, while a tolerance for difference resulted in richly complex mixes of culture and religion in many of Asia’s societies.
The first time the diverse peoples of the continent called Asia were given a sense of their common geography came at the end of the thirteenth century, when the vast empire of Genghis Khan stretched from southern China into central Europe, creating the conditions for the flourishing of the Silk Road.4 Far to the south, along the Indian Ocean and western Pacific sea lanes, the continent’s other great trading highway emerged, linking three commercial zones. Demarcated by proximity and monsoonal rhythms, the great trading route from the islands of Japan to the Persian Gulf was divided into three circuits centred on the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea, plied by Arab, Indian and Malay and Chinese merchants respectively. At the great trading ports of Melaka, Calicut and Hormuz, cargoes were exchanged between Arab, Indian and Malay and Chinese merchants for the next leg of the voyage.5
These traditions of easy interpenetration did not reach beyond the shores of the Mediterranean. European society was neither open to new and diverse influences nor tolerant of heterogeneity. Christendom had split into acrimoniously competing eastern and western variants; western Christendom would soon fracture further, leading to vicious sectarian warfare. Unlike in Asia, territory in Europe was strictly divided and jealously exclusive. Territorial divisions became the basis for religion and belief, and minorities were regularly persecuted and driven out. And unlike the easy exchanges and collaborations across Asia’s terrestrial and maritime silk roads, commerce in Europe was brutally competitive.
Ironically, it was trade with Asia that drove commercial warfare in Europe. Capturing the wealth of the Asia trade was an alluring prize to European states gripped by the spiralling costs of a new age of warfare, brought about by the gunpowder revolution. As the costs of war outstripped tax revenues, kings and republics alike began to see the revenues from trade as a matter of life and death. Unlike the Ottoman, Mughal or Ming empires in Asia, the kingdoms and republics of Europe saw no distinction between commerce and politics, or merchants and warriors. As early as 1506, 27 per cent of the income of the king of Portugal came from the spice trade; by 1518 it was 39 per cent – greater than the taxation income of the crown. Over half of the revenue flowing to Henry VI of England came from customs duties.6 The logic was inescapable. The more commercial revenue that could be captured by Europe’s monarchs and republics, to the exclusion of their competitors, the stronger the prospects for survival of the realm. The smaller the realm, the more urgently it needed commercial revenue.7
Commercial warfare was most intense in the eastern Mediterranean, where Asia’s two silk roads converged to service Europe’s insatiable demand for spices, porcelain, incense and silk. Byzantium, Venice, Genoa and Frankish Sicily fought to dominate the shores, islands and maritime straits of the eastern Mediterranean; by the end of the fourteenth century, through brutality and guile, the Venetians had prevailed. With the naval might of Venice holding the eastern Mediterranean, an increasingly desperate search began for an alternative route to the riches of Asia. The courts of Spain and Portugal were the most vigorous at first, and their competition was fierce. In 1481, the Portuguese secured a papal bull, Æterni regis, granting all lands, discovered and undiscovered, south of the Canary Islands to Portugal. The Spanish, unwilling to allow Columbus’s discoveries to be allocated to Lisbon, capitalised on Pope Alexander VI’s Spanish blood to secure another bull, Inter caetera, in 1493, granting Spain all lands west and south of the longitude 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. The following year, in 1494, Spain and Portugal divided the world outside Europe between them by the Treaty of Tordesillas.
Accordingly, Vasco da Gama, who rounded the southern tip of Africa and sailed to India in 1497, regarded the Indian Ocean as a Portuguese lake – as did the Portuguese captains who followed him. Their king, Manuel I, had styled himself ‘King of Portugal and Algarves of either side of the sea in Africa, Lord of Guinea and of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India’. The Portuguese aim was not to compete with the Venetians in the Asia trade, but to seize it from them – and the Arabs, Indians, Malays and Chinese.8 In effect, the Portuguese copied Venice’s model of armed trade monopoly in the Mediterranean and applied it to the Indian Ocean. Lisbon’s empire became a vast and brutal protection racket. Portuguese warships seized strategic ports, including Goa, Cochin, Colombo, Malacca and Macao, from which they patrolled the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean. Any non-Portuguese ship found to be without a cartaz – a permission note obliging it to call at Portuguese ports and pay customs duties – was attacked and sunk. The Portuguese crown established a monopoly over the Indian Ocean spice trade to keep prices high and competitors out.9 At the height of the Portuguese empire, Tomé Pires, a Portuguese apothecary-turned-diplomat, mused: ‘just as doors are the defence of houses, so seaports are the help, defence and main protection of provinces and kingdoms … whoever is lord of Melaka has his hand on the throat of Venice’.10
But soon powerful predators appeared. Ill-advisedly, the Portuguese had begun to hand over the distribution of their spice trade in northern Europe to the Dutch. These dour, calculating Protestants had a keen nose for opportunities to expand their trade and transport businesses. They had also thrown off the rule of Europe’s superpower of the time, imperial Spain. When the Spanish king Phillip II acceded to the Portuguese throne in 1580, the Dutch flipped from being distributors for the Portuguese empire to direct competitors. A Dutchman named Jan Huyghen van Linschoten chose his nationality over his religion (he was a Catholic like Phillip II, unlike most Dutch) and passed on the knowledge he had gained from years working in the east to his compatriots. A very large island called Java, rich in spices and open to conquest, could be reached without sailing through the waters patrolled by Iberian gunships – if the Dutch were prepared to brave the open ocean.11
Fortified by their Protestant faith in a direct relationship with God, the Dutch were prepared to take greater risks than the Portuguese, whose carracks hugged Africa’s and Asia’s coasts and monsoon highways. A ship that sailed directly east after rounding Africa’s southern tip soon found itself driven hard by a constant westerly wind, whipped up by a stream of warm air from the Equator meeting the earth’s rotation and unmediated by any baffling landmass. Dutch merchants skimmed across the Indian Ocean far south of where they would be asked for cartazes, turning north on reaching the vast silent continent of Australia and soon finding themselves in a spice paradise – what is today called Indonesia. The aromatic riches of Java and the Moluccas convinced the burghers of Amsterdam that their control over the spice trade could be as total as that of the Portuguese, whom they would displace. But instead of controlling trade routes, the Dutch decided to control entire commodities, from cultivation through harvest, transportation and distribution. As well as consolidating their control over the Indonesian Spice Islands, the Dutch systematically dismantled the Portuguese protection racket by seizing key ports and shutting down its production and transport operations.12
The Dutch protection racket in Asia was as short-lived as that of the Portuguese. Another Protestant maritime people, the English, had tasted the heady promise of trade in the course of its own desperate struggle with imperial Spain. The Dutch were able to eject the English from early footholds in the East Indies but were powerless to stop their accumulation of commercial footholds on the Indian subcontinent and in the Persian Gulf. Soon the Dutch found that the English were strangling their trade monopoly in the same way the Dutch had strangled that of the Portuguese. The English trade protection racket in Asia was different again from those of the Portuguese and Dutch. It was governed by a series of crown privileges, allowing favoured corporations to engage in certain trades to the exclusion of all other competitors as a way of maintaining high crown royalties and eliminating the risk of competition. The overall strategy was to place London at the centre of a trading empire: boosting British industry and exports, maximising the carrying trade in British hulls, strangling competitors and making London the warehouse and clearing house of a global system. The British soon set about dislodging the Dutch, the French and any uncooperative local rulers from ports and coasts that would be vital for British trading monopolies.13
So the struggle for national survival in Europe drove a progressive carving up of the riches of Asia. The Spanish and Portuguese, the Dutch and English, and the Russians, French and Germans in effect reproduced in Asia a patchwork of mutually exclusive territories reminiscent of those they had etched across the face of Europe. So important was the Asia trade to national survival that the intensity of the competition among the Europeans became a driver of high imperialism: a need to establish absolute control over lucrative territories and exclude competitors from access to their raw materials and markets; a dread of competitors gaining footholds; and an obsessive urge to expand territorial control to forestall rivals.14
The imperial age in Asia brought an end to Asia’s silk roads – the generally peaceable commercial highways across which commodities, ideas, people and faiths had flowed relatively seamlessly for centuries. Instead, Asia’s diverse societies became locked into a series of mutually exclusive global empires. The territories controlled by the British became more vitally connected with the other parts of the British Empire – in the Americas, Africa and the Pacific – than with Asian societies outside the British Empire. The same was true for Asian societies governed by France, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal. The flows of commodities, ideas, institutions, faiths and peoples were now imperial; a subdivided Asia became globally integrated but continentally disintegrated.
The result was the distortion of Asia’s economies, their progressive marginalisation within the global economy and the withering of the trade between Asian societies. Asia’s economies, once proudly self-sufficient and little interested in the outside world, were reduced to appendages of the metropolitan powers. Crops such as indigo, sugar, jute and tea that couldn’t be grown in Europe displaced food and other crops in Asian fields; industries such as textiles and metalware that competed with European manufactures withered beneath a flood of imports. When Asian societies had insufficient demand for what Europeans could offer to balance what Europeans wanted from them, products such as opium were aggressively traded to create that balancing demand. The subdivision into colonies and dependencies inaugurated a long era during which the fortunes of the world’s largest continent were determined by empires and great powers outside Asia.
The carving up of Asia into colonies and states between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries wasn’t to be the last time that the world’s largest continent was subdivided. As the societies of Asia threw off colonial rule in the twentieth century, many of their independence leaders embraced the doctrine of ‘pan-Asianism’ – the idea of the essential solidarity of Asian societies. But new mental maps – partly the result of the world’s inability to think about Asia in its vast, varied entirety and partly the result of new political imperatives – were to subdivide the continent anew.
The first impulse towards subdivision was regionalism, the intellectual child of the Allies’ ordering of the Second World War into separate theatres to better apportion their forces, coordinate their activities and plan and sequence their campaigns. The British established a Southeast Asia military command as a way of coordinating Allied efforts to push back the Japanese advance – the first time the label had been used. After the war, military theatres morphed into subregions for the purposes of joint Allied administration and postwar reconstruction. As economic and political integration underpinned the remarkable recovery of Western Europe from the ravages of war, ‘regionalism’ caught on as a project in other parts of the world too. Soon the worlds of academia and diplomacy began to reinforce the logic of regionalism, as western universities developed ‘area studies’ teaching and research clusters, and foreign ministries reorganised along geographic as well as functional lines.15 The wartime appellation ‘Southeast Asia’ persisted after the war, soon to be joined by ‘Northeast Asia’, a convenient label to describe the rapidly industrialising economies of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. South Asia and Central Asia were to follow. Further west, the colonial label ‘Middle East’ maintained primacy over the term ‘West Asia’.
At the same time, a third wave of subdivisions was being etched over the map of Asia, arising from the bitter rivalries of the Cold War. The collaboration among the victors of the Second World War soon crumbled into mutual loathing, suspicion and all-out ideological competition. Once again, the subdivision of Asia had its origins in antagonism and mutually exclusive territorial divisions in Europe. As Europe lay in ruins, the implicit understandings hammered out in wartime summits at Tehran and Yalta about a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern and Central Europe became manifest. In Washington, the ‘Containment’ doctrine marshalled the resources of the United States and its allies to prevent what they believed was an innate Soviet impulse to break out of the current territorial limits of the communist bloc. This commitment to defend the new territorial status quo was reciprocated in Moscow, where the Soviet Politburo interpreted America’s offers of reconstruction aid and calls for free elections as ploys to subvert the new status quo and drive the west’s sphere of influence eastwards. With customary rhetorical flourish, Winston Churchill proclaimed the descent of an Iron Curtain dividing Western and Eastern Europe.
These ideological antagonisms soon infected the dynamics of Asia’s postwar and postcolonial settlements. A communist movement that few had taken seriously at the start of the war seized power in China, Asia’s biggest country and one of the ‘four policemen’ that Franklin Roosevelt believed would safeguard international peace and security after the war. The ‘loss of China’ to communism sparked a bitter debate in the United States, and a country that had been passionately anti-imperialist found itself supporting the bids of the European colonialists to retain their empires in Asia. Against a monolithic and expansionist communist menace, American policymakers began to sketch out a defensive perimeter of containment in Asia. Secretary of State Dean Acheson drew that line explicitly in an address to the National Press Club in Washington, DC in January 1950:
This defensive perimeter runs along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus … [and from] the Ryukyus to the Philippine islands … So far as the military security of other areas of the Pacific is concerned, it must be clear that no person can guarantee these areas from military attack … Should such an attack occur … the initial reliance must be on the people attacked to resist it and then on commitments of the entire civilized world under the Charter of the United Nations.16
Five months later, North Korean troops invaded South Korea with the help of Soviet weapons and advisers. Joseph Stalin had interpreted Acheson’s speech as a declaration of Washington’s lack of interest in the fate of Korea. The blood-drenched war that followed confirmed the American belief in communism’s innate expansionism and reinforced America’s determination to defend the borders of the free world wherever they lay in Asia. Stalemate delivered a de facto demarcation with communism at the 38th parallel in Korea, but within two years a new confrontation had emerged, thousands of miles to the south, on the 17th parallel dividing communist North Vietnam from nationalist South Vietnam. The American defensive perimeter moved onto the Asian mainland: along the 38th parallel, into the jungles of Vietnam and onto the military bases of northern Thailand.
Absolute ideological division settled over Asia. It divided countries: Korea, China and, for a while, Vietnam; it polarised neighbours and fuelled bitter insurgencies. Despite Sino-Soviet rivalry, communist Asia was cut off from non-communist Asia and integrated with the rest of the communist world through trade, investment, educational exchanges, arms and technology transfers, and diplomatic alignments. Non-communist Asia drew together in solidarity against communist aggression from without and subversion from within. Pan-Asian sentiment, manifested in the Non-Aligned Movement – a collection of developing countries that rejected the Cold War’s polarising alliances – fell prey to intramural squabbles and accusations of bad faith. Those who tried to maintain equidistance between the camps, such as Indonesian president Sukarno, lost control to a military coup that brought a staunchly anti-communist New Order regime to power. Other attempts at non-alignment foundered as Cold War tensions spilled into local conflicts, and countries such as India gravitated towards either the west or the Soviet bloc. Fear of the other side drove the consolidation of authoritarian regimes and ideological zealotry in both communist and non-communist countries.
From colonial land grabs to ideological antagonism and subregions, the successive divisions of Asia originated from beyond the continent. But the motivations for these divisions were adopted and internalised by Asian societies themselves. As decolonisation proceeded across the continent, Asia’s newly independent states not only took up the absolute boundary demarcations the imperialists had imposed, but also invested them with a deep significance and defended them with passionate fervour. Unresolved boundary disputes led to ongoing tension, dangerous brinkmanship and repeated conflict in Asia as on no other continent on earth. Asia remains home to two of the world’s three surviving Cold War standoffs – the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Straits (the third being the hostility between the United States and Cuba). The bitter humiliation of colonial rule or fiat also led to the passionate embrace of the western concept of sovereignty by Asian countries at a time when western states were beginning to abandon their attachment to the concept. From the beginning, Asian governments were hypersensitive to any form of external criticism or interference, as well as deeply intolerant of internal criticism. Societies that had just wrested their independence from colonial overlords were stubbornly unprepared to cede any initiative or control to international institutions, whether regional or global.
Many of Asia’s newly independent states were also determined to avoid replacing a system of colonial economic exploitation with one of postcolonial exploitation. The drive to modernise led governments to impose tight restrictions on foreign trade and investment, and to invest heavily in import-substituting industries. By 1970, imports comprised just 2.7 per cent of China’s economy, 3.9 per cent of India’s, 9.6 per cent of Japan’s, 15 per cent of Indonesia’s and 19.4 per cent of Thailand’s.17 Locals and visitors had to be contented with ‘Thumbs Up’ cola in India, ‘Long March’ toilet paper in China and ‘Darkie’ toothpaste in Thailand. Global and regional moves towards trade or investment integration were kept at arm’s length. When, in 1976, the members of ASEAN decided to push forward regional economic integration by inviting members to nominate sectors of their economies to be liberalised, Indonesia announced it would dramatically slash tariff barriers on snowploughs. By the start of the 1990s, trade among the countries of ASEAN stood at less than 20 per cent of their combined gross domestic products.18
The coming of stability and prosperity to Asia in the last quarter of the twentieth century unleashed an array of forces that have begun to dissolve the motives and rationales for subdivision, and to drive the reintegration of Asia, from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean. Sovereignty is as keenly held as ever, and subregional labels are still widely used, but in many ways the transnational connections among Asian countries are becoming equally as or more significant than their individual connections with non-Asian countries and regions. Pan-Asian interconnections are rising and thickening, in trade and investment, industry and services, regional organisations, flows of people and mindsets. As these connections grow, they are becoming more consequential: Asian states have a greater and greater stake in each other’s success, even as competition and rivalry among them grows. The reintegration of Asia is an event of millennial significance: it heralds a new age in which the most consequential dynamics in the world – be they commercial, ideational, strategic or social – will once again occur on the world’s largest continent, and these dynamics will affect the problems and possibilities of the rest of the world.
The roots of Asia’s reconnections lie more than a century in its past, ironically at the time of its most abject subjection and division at the hands of high imperialism. In the late nineteenth century, Japan responded the fastest and most vigorously to the challenge of western imperialism because it very quickly found a balance among three possible responses to the west: rejection, emulation and confrontation. At the heart of the Meiji Restoration was a realisation that unless Japan adopted the techniques underpinning western dominance and used them to confront the urges of high imperialism, it would soon be colonised. But balancing these responses was a determination to retain the authenticity of Japanese culture, continuity with Japanese traditions and pride in Japanese values. And so Japanese society became a vanguard for interpreting the techniques and terminologies of western modernisation in terms of classical East Asian concepts. Many of these classical concepts had originated in ancient China and, as they were re-exported to China and Korea, they provided conceptual handles for responding to the challenge of the west, while at the same time maintaining continuity with the classical traditions of these Asian societies. Japan became a hub for intellectuals from a wide array of Asian societies grappling with the challenge of how to respond to western dominance while maintaining cultural authenticity and pride.19 An awareness began to spread of the common predicament of Asian societies in the age of imperialism, accompanied by a belief in the commonalities among Asian societies and the value of solidarity and cooperation.
To Asia’s tragic cost, Japan’s reaction to the west soon stretched to the logic of high imperialism and direct confrontation leading to war. Ideals of pan-Asian solidarity became justifications for Japanese colonialism under the guise of an anti-imperialist drive to eject the west from Asia. In Taiwan, Tokyo’s first colony, imperial Japan embarked on an experiment with enduring results. When Goto Shimpei took over as colonial governor of Taiwan in 1898, he inaugurated a program that he labelled ‘scientific colonialism’. So began an approach that distinguished Japanese from western colonialism: the administration of colonies as laboratories for the technocratic planning of economies and societies, based on the experiences of Japan after the Meiji Restoration. Programs aimed at the wholesale reconstitution of colonised societies in Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria ensued, encompassing urban planning; public hygiene systems; transport, water, communications and energy infrastructure; and widespread public education.20 Inspired by the ideal of ‘constructing East Asia’, thousands of young Japanese engineers poured into Japan’s colonies, their efforts often welcomed by local elites who had pioneered efforts to modernise their societies before the Japanese arrived.21
On these foundations of infrastructure, planning and education, imperial Japan drove forward the industrialisation of its colonies. Its motives were entirely selfish – bolstering the power and self-sufficiency of the Japanese Empire and relieving pressure on Japan’s home industry – but the effects were enduring. Not only did colonial and wartime industrialisation accustom Taiwanese, Korean and some Southeast Asian societies to industrial techniques and disciplines, it also implanted what political scientist James Scott has called a ‘high modernist ideology’ in many of Japan’s former colonies.22 This would emerge after the war and after independence as a broad consensus belief in the value of technology in mastering nature and fate, the importance of industry for social development and human wellbeing, and the need for rational social order and discipline.
Japan’s experience with empire-building ended in defeat and destruction, as well as enduring memories among its neighbours of the savagery of Japanese conquest and occupation. From 1952, Tokyo began to pay reparations to many of its former colonies – and, characteristically, these reparations were different from those paid by other defeated powers. At the core of Japan’s reparations was technical assistance in the form of machinery and materials, knowledge and training, and specialist engineers. There was a familiar cast to the sectors targeted – planning, infrastructure, industry, energy and communications – and consequently a marked receptiveness among the societies formerly subject to Tokyo’s ‘scientific colonialism’. As reparations gave way to development aid, the same logic applied. By 1989, Japan was the world’s largest aid donor, providing nearly twice the amount of development assistance as the United States – and its aid predominantly went to regional countries and concentrated on technical assistance.23
The motivation was not pure altruism or even just a desire to make amends – there was substantial self-interest in Japan’s distinctive reparations and aid payments. Tokyo’s technical assistance provided lucrative contracts for Japanese construction firms and industrial conglomerates, nurtured export markets for Japanese manufacturing and eased access to raw materials. There was a distinct pattern of Japanese aid being targeted to sectors and countries in which Japanese business had the greatest interest or saw the most potential. As the economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore began to register the same sustained rates of high economic growth as Japan, economist Kaname Akamatsu dusted off a forgotten 1930s metaphor to describe how Asia would catch up with the western economies: industrialisation in Asia would resemble a flock of flying geese, whereby successive tiers of countries would follow leading regional economies by adopting their methods, technologies and industries. The key mechanisms would be foreign direct investment by more-developed economies in less-developed economies and technology transfer.24 The implication was that Asia would follow its own path to rapid industrialisation and development, pioneered in Japan and adopted and adapted by other regional countries. Asia’s distinct model would involve the close involvement of the state in economic development, an emphasis on import substitution and export-led growth, controlled exchange rates and a corporatist mobilisation of labour. As the four ‘little dragons’ – South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore – had followed Japan, so Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and other Asian economies would progress up the path of rapid development.
Tokyo’s vision of coordinated development in Asia soon took institutional form. Japanese policymakers were aware that the distinctive characteristics of the Asian development model and Japan’s own approach to economic aid did not sit well with the philosophies underpinning the major global institutions: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Bank. So they created the Asian Development Bank (ADB) as a genuinely Asia-wide institution, which would protect and promote what they believed was Japan’s distinctive approach to development. Again, self-interest was a major motivator as, in its early years, the vast bulk of ADB funding flowed to countries and sectors with which Japan had substantial investment relationships. From the beginning, Japan dominated the ADB, as its largest funder and source of successive presidents and the largest number of its institutional staff. Within the ADB Japan waged some of its most trenchant battles against a United States that was increasingly critical of what it saw as Asia’s statist approach to development. Eventually, under American pressure, the ADB funding began to flow to countries and projects of less immediate interest to Japan’s economy. But the bank maintained its strong emphasis on funding the infrastructure and providing access to the technologies that countries needed for industrialisation. The recipient countries eagerly endorsed this approach, and soon imported it into other regional institutions such as ASEAN and the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.25
East Asia’s singular history of transnational industrial development goes a long way to explaining this region’s role at the cutting edge of a recent transformation in the world economy – global production-sharing. Global production-sharing is the accelerating trend of producing the component parts of elaborate manufactures – cars, phones, computers, cameras, machine tools, pharmaceuticals – in different countries and by different companies as a prelude to their final assembly and export to consumer markets. This trend is transformative in two ways. First, it reverses a two-centuries-long trend in the world economy that had seen larger and larger industrial firms complete more and more of a given production process within their own structures. In economists’ jargon, the trend is now towards vertical dis-integration, as the global manufacturing giants subcontract increasing segments of their manufacturing chains to outside companies, often located in diverse countries. The second transformation is even more important. Global production-sharing allows companies and countries that, in the past, could never have competed in the brutal world of global manufacturing to industrialise and prosper. By specialising in particular segments of manufacturing, small companies and developing countries find it much easier to access investment and technology, and bind themselves into the global manufacturing sector. And so developing countries’ share of the global trade in component parts has increased from a quarter in the early 1990s to one half today.
While production-sharing is a global trend, East Asia is indisputably the world’s leading exponent of it. In the past two decades, between 70 and 80 per cent of the growth in manufacturing in East and Southeast Asia has come from global production-sharing. Just eleven economies in East Asia – Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia – export 39 per cent of the world’s component parts. And components comprise a much higher proportion of East Asia’s internal trade (35 per cent) compared to the global average of 22 per cent. Within Southeast Asia, this trend is even more marked: almost half (44 per cent) of its intra-regional manufacturing trade is made up of component parts.26
Economist Prema-chandra Athukorala lists five reasons for East Asia’s disproportionate lead in global production-sharing: the region’s higher labour productivity-to-cost ratio relative to other regions, more-liberal trade and investment policy settings, high-quality logistics and infrastructure, a long history of welcoming foreign industrial investment, long-term regional stability and proximity to China as both a final assembly hub and a prospective market for finished manufactures.27 A common denominator, much harder to quantify, underpins these conditions: a 100-year history of transnational development. Nothing has so constantly nagged at the region’s sovereignty obsession, ideological rivalries and subregional parochialisms as the constant evidence that Asian economies prosper most under conditions of transnational collaboration and joint development. And according to some economists, the potential for these forms of transnational production-sharing to encompass other parts of Asia – particularly South Asia – is high.
The alacrity with which Asian countries have assisted and encouraged industrial firms to distribute their production processes among Asian economies has undoubtedly been to the collective benefit of all. Major global corporations are drawn to siting their industry in Asia because of host countries’ friendliness to foreign investment and their willingness to ensure the seamless flows of component parts to higher and higher stages of the production chain. But with collective prosperity also comes collective vulnerability. Extensive production-sharing among Asian economies makes the manufacturing sector in East and Southeast Asia highly sensitive to disruptions to the supply chain in other countries. When a devastating tsunami hit Fukushima in Japan in March 2011, it cut Japanese automobile production by 47.7 per cent and electrical component production by 8.25 per cent. But Japan’s was not the only industrial sector damaged by the Fukushima disaster. The sudden cessation in automobile component exports from Japan also caused a 19.7 per cent drop in Thai auto manufacturing, a 24 per cent drop in that of the Philippines and a 6 per cent drop in that of Indonesia. The interruption of the flow of electrical components out of Japan reduced the volume of exports from the electrical sectors of the Philippines by 17.5 per cent and Malaysia by 8.4 per cent.28 As they continue to industrialise, Asia’s economies have real stakes in each other’s fortunes – for better and worse.
If manufacturing has drawn together the countries of Asia’s eastern coastline, another powerful consequence of development has begun to link them to Asia’s other subregions: South, Central and West Asia. As Asia’s societies have developed and urbanised, their demand for energy – particularly oil and gas – has increased markedly. Developing countries in Asia have been responsible for over half of the growth in global energy demand since 1990. The International Energy Agency estimates that these countries will account for 63 per cent of the growth in global energy demand to 2035, with China accounting for 31 per cent, India 18 per cent and Southeast Asia 11 per cent. Today, India and China account for one-quarter of world energy consumption, and the consumption of the two Asian giants is predicted to rise to one-third by 2040.29
Asia’s most rapidly developing societies can’t supply their own energy needs now, and will increasingly depend on energy imports into the future. Five of the largest oil importers in the world are Asian. China’s energy demand is so great that, even though it has the largest oil reserves in Pacific Asia, it currently imports over half the oil it consumes, with this projected to rise to three-quarters of its oil consumption by 2035. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and India have few oil reserves of their own, with the first three being almost completely dependent on imports and India over 70 per cent dependent.30
Because energy is a bulky commodity that is consumed in large quantities, countries tend to buy it from the closest point of production. For the countries of South, Southeast and Northeast Asia, the closest source of oil and gas is Central and West Asia. Whereas, in 1990, one-third of developing Asia’s oil came from the Persian Gulf, today one-half does. And given the projected increase in Asia’s energy demands, it is only the vast reserves in West Asia – estimated to hold over half of all the world’s proven conventional and unconventional oil reserves – that can slake the Asian giants’ thirst for oil and gas.31 Today, China sources 51 per cent of its oil imports from the Gulf; in 20 years it will be three-quarters. Japan sources 83 per cent of its oil from West Asia, India 64 per cent and South Korea 85 per cent – all these amounts are projected to rise.
Looming large as a single source of energy for Asia’s giants is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Riyadh exports three times more oil to its five largest Asian customers – China, India, Japan, South Korea and Singapore – than to Europe and North America combined. Almost half of all Saudi oil production is bound for Asia’s big four: China, India, Japan and South Korea. The Saudi Arabian Oil Company, or Saudi Aramco, is the single largest supplier of oil to China, Japan, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and the Philippines.32
For Asia’s booming economies, these energy linkages with West Asia are increasingly strategic – if, by strategic, we mean a matter of life and death, today and into the future. Developed or developing economies that no longer have access to dependable long-term supplies of energy at stable prices are at risk of social chaos and political implosion. Energy is the lifeblood not only of burgeoning manufacturing and services sectors but is also crucial to the very capacity of Asian societies to supply their teeming cities with food and water, sanitation and basic transport infrastructure. Electricity and petroleum are the enablers of an expanding middle class on which the political legitimacy of many regimes in Asia depend. And so the oil and gas producers of West Asia are the best guarantors of energy-supply security for developed and developing economies in South, Southeast and Northeast Asia. With almost one-fifth of the world’s proven oil reserves, Saudi Arabia has traditionally played the role of the ‘swing producer’ in the global energy markets, by expanding or reducing its production to smooth out fluctuations in supply and price. Saudi Arabia and the other two Gulf oil giants, Iran and Iraq, represent the most dependable sources of supply as Asia doubles its oil and gas consumption over the next two decades. Of course, all three Gulf oil giants live in an unstable neighbourhood. The prospect of increasingly powerful Asian giants, as they become more deeply dependent on Gulf oil supplies, offering to guarantee the stability and security of their suppliers is increasingly likely.
For the Gulf oil producers – and Saudi Arabia in particular – the energy relationship with Asia’s rising powers is equally strategic. Oil production comprises 55 per cent of the Saudi economy and 75 per cent of government revenue. As one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world, overseeing a fast-growing population of which almost half are under the age of twenty-four and 90 per cent are under fifty, Riyadh has traditionally used transfer payments largely funded out of oil revenue to maintain social peace while avoiding political reform.33 In early 2011, shaken by the ‘Arab Spring’ revolts in neighbouring countries, the Saudi monarchy announced US$100 billion extra in social benefits payments, particularly in public housing, as well as 60,000 additional jobs in the state security services. Oil revenue is equally crucial to the Kingdom’s external security. As a relatively small population sitting atop vast energy wealth, Saudi Arabia feels threatened by the Gulf’s two Shiah-majority powers, Iran and Iraq, and has spent billions over successive decades on its military and in bolstering Sunni regimes and causes in West and Central Asia. For Riyadh, a sudden reduction in external demand for oil and gas would be catastrophic. This is why the constant rhetoric, dating from the 1970s oil shocks, from Saudi Arabia’s traditional customers in Europe, North America and Japan about the need to reduce their dependence on Middle East energy has been so unsettling. And this is why the emergence of Asia’s rapidly expanding energy thirst during the last two decades has been so reassuring – particularly since the discovery of shale oil in the United States has made Saudi Arabia’s previous biggest customer a net energy exporter for the first time in half a century.
The links across Asia go beyond the production, transport and consumption of oil. China, Japan and South Korea have all invested in energy assets in the Gulf region, with Asian investors playing a vital role in Saudi Arabia’s efforts to diversify its economy by expanding its petrochemicals sector. China is now the largest market for exported Saudi petrochemicals. Saudi Arabia has reciprocated by investing heavily in petroleum-processing plants in China. Meanwhile, the trade between China and Saudi Arabia has increased by a factor of fifty since 1990, with Chinese manufactures rapidly displacing western products in the Saudi market. An International Energy Agency study calculated that two-thirds of every dollar China spends on oil imports from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) returns to the Chinese economy through purchases of Chinese manufactures. Little wonder that references to ‘Asia’s new silk road’ appear regularly in the public statements of Saudi and Chinese officials as they talk of the economic and strategic links between eastern and western Asia.34
Other, more tentative, signs of Asia’s reintegration shouldn’t be discounted either. Subregional organisations have found that adhering to strict demarcations in their membership makes less and less sense. From the mid-1990s, ASEAN has gradually expanded its regular heads-of-state summits, first to include Japan, China and South Korea and then to bring in India, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and the United States. APEC, an organisation that once held rigidly to its Pacific Rim self-definition, now is increasingly tempted to admit India, with its booming economy. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, conceived as a forum for states with Central Asian interests, has accepted Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Mongolia and Iran as observers, and Sri Lanka, Belarus and Turkey as dialogue partners. Given the increasingly strategic economic relationships developing between East, West and South Asia, we may soon see these organisations expanding further or new pan-Asian institutions being born.
More tangible infrastructure is starting to spread across the Asian continent also, reflecting shared beliefs that it is here that the fortunes of Asia’s rising economies will be secured. One estimate puts Asia’s infrastructure spending at 60 per cent of the global total by 2025.35 Roads, railways and pipelines are crossing borders and defying Asia’s uncompromising geography to give industries access to new markets and trade routes, or to bring the oxygen of commerce to isolated and underdeveloped provinces. A range of subregional infrastructure initiatives, from Central and South Asia to the Mekong subregion, have begun to be connected with each other through large pan-Asian blueprints. Dating from 1992, the Asian Land Transport Infrastructure Development initiative envisages an integrated network of 141,000 kilometres of standardised highways, crossing 155 borders across thirty-two countries in Asia. A more recent vision is that of an energy system linking oil, gas and electricity production, transport and consumption across Asia. A recent study by the Asian Development Bank estimated that if Asia is able to invest US$290 billion in trans-Asian infrastructure between 2010 and 2020, it could lift the income of developing Asia by as much as US$13 trillion.36
Asia’s emerging infrastructure superpower, China, seems to have been inspired by these visions to develop its own strategic plans. Long accustomed to meeting its own continental-scale infrastructure needs, China has been reaching across geographic barriers to connect with its neighbours for over half a century. There is no greater symbol of the vaulting ambition of China’s infrastructure plans than the 1300-kilometre Karakoram Highway, the highest paved road in the world, which spans the ramparts of the Himalayas between Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang province and Abbottabad in Pakistan. More recently, China’s president, Xi Jinping, has unveiled a major ‘strategic conception’ of networks of Chinese commerce, investment and infrastructure linking China with the other economies of Asia and beyond. Dubbed ‘One Belt, One Road’, Xi envisages a ‘New Silk Road Economic Belt’ stretching from western China across Central Asia and into Europe, and a ‘Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road’, stretching from the Chinese coast through Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean.37 Responding to the shortfall in investment for Asia’s infrastructure needs, Beijing has also launched a multilateral Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, with twenty-six founding members, to provide over US$50 billion in infrastructure funding to Asian projects.
Much of the boost to infrastructure building across Asia has been driven by rivalry. Japan has responded vigorously to China’s emergence as a major transnational investor, announcing major funding initiatives for infrastructure across Southeast Asia. In Central Asia, the competition among Asian powers – China, Japan, Russia and perhaps Iran and India – for access to the region’s energy via competing pipelines has been dubbed the ‘new great game’ for strategic influence in the region.38 Worried that China’s Maritime Silk Road is actually a ploy to build naval dominance in the Indian Ocean, India has countered with a range of initiatives to link Central Asian economies with the Indian Ocean using road and pipeline corridors through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Connections across Asian societies are occurring at the human level as well. One more consequence of rapid economic development in Asia is the emergence of a very big consuming and spending middle class. Today, there are half a billion middle-class people in Asia, a number that is projected to triple within the decade. The OECD predicts that, by 2030, Asia will be home to two-thirds of the planet’s middle class and be responsible for over 40 per cent of global consumption.39 As the brilliant American economist Thorstein Veblen observed so acutely over a century ago, the distinguishing feature of the middle class is conspicuous consumption: the acquisition and display of goods and services that advertise one’s social position.40 This is as true in Asia today as it has been in Europe and America historically, and one prominent feature of Asia’s conspicuous consumption has been leisure travel. For the past two decades, Asia’s fastest developing economies have become the source of the most dynamic growth in global tourism. According to the World Tourism Association, emerging Asia’s rates of international tourist departures have been growing at over 10 per cent per year. What is striking is that Asian tourists are overwhelmingly choosing destinations in other Asian countries for their holidays. Eight of the top-ten international destinations for Chinese tourists are in Asia; for Japanese tourists, Asian countries comprise seven of the top-ten tourism destinations; Indians choose six Asian countries among their top tourism preferences.41
For centuries, Asia was a continent defined more by its domination by others and its differences than by any collective identity or essence. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when nationalist writers began to visit each other and talk about pan-Asian values and solidarity, they had to speak to each other in the language of colonisers. Today, while the language barriers remain, the connections among Asian societies are beginning to be more significant than the divisions and differences. Developing Asian economies, once so single-mindedly focused on access to markets in, and investment from, Europe and America, are today very aware that their own economic viability depends increasingly on the dynamic economies of other Asian countries.
One consequence of the increasing connections among Asian societies is that the old habit of subdividing Asia makes less sense with each passing year. Western countries have a tendency to define ‘Asia’ as including those countries that are believed to be significant at a particular point in time and excluding all other countries occupying the continent. For a long time, Asia was defined by economic success – particularly of the economies of Pacific Asia – while the remainder of the continent, west of the Malay Peninsula, was defined out of the picture. This changed as the Indian economy started to boom: ‘Indo-Pacific’ Asia replaced ‘Asia Pacific’ Asia – but again to the exclusion of the rest of the continent.
Persisting with this habit means we are more and more likely to misunderstand what is happening on the earth’s largest and most populous continent. As Asian societies’ successes and anxieties are increasingly affected by other countries on the continent, developing a clear understanding of Asia means recognising these connections in their entirety – and defining Asia in its entirety: from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, and the Arctic to the Indian Ocean.