If we try our best and work hard, the future is beautiful. I came here to build a new society. The people here need houses. I am making money but we do not come here just for money. Thirty years ago China was like Angola; it was not good but now it is more beautiful.
—XUEBAO DING, A CHINESE WORKER IN ANGOLA,
QUOTED IN ALEC RUSSELL, “THE NEW COLONIALISTS,”
FINANCIAL TIMES, NOVEMBER 17–18, 2007
Hope is confidence.
In the Western world the notion of hope has two different connotations. There is hope in the spiritual sense of the term, the belief in the salvation of humanity through the redemption from sin. But there is also the secular meaning of the term. Hope is trust in one’s identity, in one’s ability to interact positively with the world. The words of the Chinese worker in Angola that serve as the opening to this chapter are a nearly perfect postmodern illustration of the secular significance of hope. Hope is the opposite of resignation, a form of trust that pushes us to move toward others, to accept without fear how they differ from us.
Is there a lesson to be drawn from the fact that hope has moved from West to East, from a Christian-dominated world to a largely pantheistic world where secularism predominates (as in China) or where spirituality has stopped being an obstacle to growth (as in India)? Not for nothing is one of the best recent studies on India’s miracle (written by Edward Luce) titled In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India.
Hope has not only moved east but also taken on a materialist, secular overtone, as the spiritual meaning of the word dwindles in salience. In the twenty-first century, hope is based on doing better in this world here and now, not on the belief in some future better world, either on earth or in heaven. In spite of the traditional belief in reincarnation so powerful throughout Asia, a growing number of Chinese, Indians, and other Asians now feel driven to do as well as possible, individually and collectively, during their present earthly passage, as if they have come under the influence of the so-called Protestant ethic, which drove the growth of the West (demonstrating, by the way, that secular hope already existed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).
Hope today is about economic and social empowerment, and its chief dwelling place is in the East. What’s more, for significant numbers of Asians, what counts is not only that they seek to catch up with the West, but that they are confident they can and will do it. If faith is “a hope in the unseen,” the Asian world is steadily moving beyond faith, putting their hope in the material progress they can see, feel, hear, taste, and experience in the rapidly changing world around them.
Consider for a moment the skyline of Pudong, the newly developed district of Shanghai that is rapidly becoming a financial hub for all China. Before 1990 where these proud towers are now standing, there were mainly farm fields. Today the place is booming with energy. The architectural style chosen by the city planners conveys an impression of modernity and confidence, of optimism in the future. The architects, mostly Chinese but including a few Westerners, have been given (within the limits of a very tight political system) a blank check and the exhortation “Be inventive, be daring, be tall—in sum, be modern.” The result is a gleaming array of futuristic spires as breathtaking as any in the world: the tiered, 88-story Jin Mao Tower; the Shanghai World Financial Center (the second-tallest skyscraper in the world); the distinctive Oriental Pearl Tower (with its three massive columns supporting eleven suspended spheres of varying sizes); and the latest addition, Shanghai Center, a supertall skyscraper now under construction that will ultimately soar 580 meters (127 stories) into the sky. This is twenty-first-century architecture—often at its best, sometimes at its worst, but never less than audacious.
The Pudong skyline does not represent the last gasp of an outdated style, like the Paris Opéra, built by Charles Garnier for Napoleon III, a testimonial to the inflated ego of an empire about to crumble based on a reinvention of the classical style of the ancien régime. Nor does it mimic the heavy and grandiloquent style of Russian architecture under Putin. It is something new that consciously celebrates the confluence of two approaches to modernity, Western and Asian. It is the visual proof that modernity can no longer be equated with Westernization, a sign of another school of modernity coming out of Asia.
Move from architecture to operas. Monkey: Journey to the West, an opera based on The Journey to the West, a classical masterpiece of Chinese literature, was presented during the 2007–2008 season in Manchester, Paris, and Berlin, in a version that is the ultimate synthesis of Western pop music, Chinese dance and circus traditions, and above all modernity. The show can be described as a cultural UFO of the global age, or as one of many preliminary symbols of a new cultural age. It is especially a demonstration of confidence by a China that no longer hesitates to submit its classical texts to the most modern treatment combining Western and Chinese influences. Thus it is a throwback to an earlier, self-confidently imperial China, the China of the eighteenth century, whose emperors felt confident enough to permit Chinese artists to create paintings and drawings in the “Jesuit” (Western) style. It is the insecure country that feels the need to shield itself from foreign influences. Confidence and cultural openness are intertwined.
(The cultural confidence of modern China, however, has its limits. When one of the best-known Chinese actresses, Zhang Ziyi, played a Japanese prostitute in Hollywood’s Memoirs of a Geisha, the reactions were far from positive. Many claimed she demeaned China and went too far by playing such a role in an American movie.)
Let us move to the world of fashion, where the influence of young Asian designers—Japanese, Chinese, and especially Indians—has been growing rapidly. For the first time in Paris in the fall of 2007, an Indian stylist (Manish Arora) opened Fashion Week with a show that fused modernity and popular Indian imagery. These fashion parades represent in yet another way the crisscrossing of influences among cultures that have gained or regained so much confidence that they can welcome fusion with other cultures. The Indians and Chinese no longer need to be culturally defensive (or, for that matter, offensive); they can simply be themselves, the unique products of mixed influences between them and us. They acknowledge what they owe the West but realize proudly that we in the West have also been changed by our mutual encounter.
It’s instructive to consider how cultural cross-fertilization has changed in recent decades. Asian influence, particularly Chinese, helped shape the fashionable rococo style of eighteenth-century Europe; the impressionist painters and symbolist poets of late-nineteenth-century Europe were very much under the influence of Japan. At that time Asia represented poetry for Europe, while Europe represented modernity for Asia. Now this equation has been reversed, with Asia exemplifying the future while Europe stands for a glorious but fading past. This turnabout raises significant questions for both continents. Will Europe become predominantly a museum in Asian eyes? Is Asia losing its uniqueness as a result of globalization, even as it moves to take the dominant position in shaping the world’s culture once claimed by the West?
There is also a new sense of balance between the West and Asia. Consider the field of medicine, where Chinese traditional techniques such as acupuncture now happily coexist with modern Western practices, not only in Asia but in a growing number of hospitals, clinics, and medical offices throughout Europe and America. Or look at the popularity of Bollywood movies in the Western world, which has mushroomed to the point where Indian stars are helping revive the musical comedy film genre in the West. For the last twenty-nine years (in the case of China) and the last eighteen years (in the case of India), these two powerhouses have been growing economically at almost 10 percent per year. The Indian journalist and politician Jairam Ramesh coined the term “Chindia” as a quick and easy way to refer to the two rapidly growing demographic giants of Asia.
It’s a handy term, but also a deeply ambivalent concept. China and India are not in the same category in terms of economic weight. Measured by population, GDP, and other standard indicators, China is twice as powerful as India. Yet if one adds the more than 350 million Chinese who have climbed to middleclass status to the more than 350 million Indians who have accomplished the same thing, they add up to the greatest emerging giant in the world, an entity of more than 700 million people who are transforming the international economic and even strategic order. Chindia refers to these 700 million. The question is whether they are a sufficiently strong locomotive to pull the remaining hundreds of millions who inhabit their homelands out of poverty and massive inequality.
In a broader sense, Chindia refers to two very different civilizations that feel both sufficiently strong and self-confident to open themselves to the world and submit their cultural essence to the test of others. Yet the self-confidence of Chindia is selective. In the case of China, it does not extend to the political field—understandably, since China’s leaders have no real understanding of the meaning of freedom and democracy and their contradictory allegiances to both communism and capitalism are probably untenable even in the short run. Nor does it extend to the control and management of China’s “imperial policy.” The brutal repression in Tibet in the spring of 2008 expressed the near panic of Chinese leaders at the risk of seeing similar explosions in other parts of their empire.
In fact we see in China the coexistence of two brands of nationalism: a defensive nationalism, which insists on shutting down any activity that might threaten the empire, and a positive nationalism, beaming with optimism and confidence. (According to a recent Pew survey, the Chinese are the most optimistic people in the world.)
Nor does Chindia’s self-confidence embrace the poor masses, who despite their vast numbers do not define the mood or the direction of either country, but who could, if they were to become desperate, derail the logic of hope throughout the region.
Nevertheless, as long as the sense of progress among the rising millions transcends the despair, anger, and hunger of the poor majority, then the culture of hope will prevail in Chindia. And not only there. The region of hope also includes the members of the ASEAN group (Association of Southeast Asian Nations, now including Cambodia, Brunei, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, Vietnam, and the Philippines, and the 2008 leader of the group, Singapore). In an uneven and unbalanced way, they too are progressing; they have surmounted the financial crash of 1998 and their respective political turbulence with a sense of pride and dedication and a sane sense of emulation addressed toward their prosperous neighbors: “We too can do it. We will show you.”
Of course to describe an entire continent under a single rubric, the continent of hope, is inevitably somewhat provocative and perhaps simplistic. Let’s consider some caveats and provisos that must be taken seriously.
First, as we’ve already noted, the very concept of Asia is largely a Western one. Asians do not naturally call themselves or consider themselves Asians—at least not nearly to the extent that Europeans consider themselves Europeans. Asians do not have a common religion in the same way the Europeans share the complex (and now somewhat diluted) fusion of Greek, Jewish, and Roman religious cultures in what is called Christianity. They do not have a common history. They do not have a common enemy (which is what Islam once represented for the Christian nations of Europe). They do not have common cultural references. For example, in the Chinese tale already mentioned, The Journey to the West, the “West” referred to is India. It is perhaps significant that it is the small city-state of Singapore, which uses English as its common official language to unite its Chinese, Malay, and Indian populations, that has the only Museum of Asian Civilization in Asia.
Second, the culture of hope does not embrace all the countries of Asia. As I’ll explain, the important country of Japan has, so to speak, gone beyond the brand of hope now embraced by the rest of the continent, while numerous other countries, from Pakistan to the Philippines, are not yet there.
In Pakistan, for example, one of the most contradictory and problematic countries of the world, there is, at the level of the elites and of a small nascent middle class, something like a streak of modernity and a sense of what is needed to go beyond fundamentalism and violence and to integrate the country into the Asian culture of hope. But this awareness is shared by just a small segment of the population. Pakistan is one of the most worrisome countries in the world, not only because it is a nuclear power but because it gives the impression of being on the verge of political implosion. When you walk the streets of Karachi, you feel far away from the hopeful Asia of Beijing or Delhi.
By contrast with Pakistan, North Korea seems slightly less dangerous today, even if it looks more like the victim of a brutal and cynical political sect than a vessel of hope. As for Burma (Myanmar), in spite of its rich natural resources, it has been dragged down the ladder of growth and prosperity by the oppressive, corrupt, and systematic mismanagement of its brutal military junta, becoming an Asian equivalent of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
In the spring of 2008, Burma and China both were faced with dramatic challenges from nature—the cyclone in Burma, the earthquake in China. Their reactions could not have been more different. The responsible behavior of the Chinese was in perfect contrast with the incompetent, despotic brutality of the military junta in Myanmar. Of course the Chinese saw in the catastrophe, coming as it did on the eve of the Olympic Games, an opportunity to redress their image so damaged by the events of Tibet. The government’s attempts to silence the voices from civil society demanding investigation into the shoddily built schools where Chinese children died may signify a swing of the pendulum back toward repression.
If there is hope in Myanmar, we see it in the heroic defiance offered by opposition leader and Nobel prizewinner Aung San Suu Kyi and the spiritual resistance of the Buddhist priests. It is a country that has managed to isolate itself from international influences almost completely; that is why sanctions against Myanmar should not focus so much on isolating the regime as on exposing its leaders to the realities of the world outside their national ghetto.
So it must be understood from the outset that our description of Asia as the continent of hope, including countries like the Philippines and Indonesia, which are at the fringes of hope, given their noticeable yet still incomplete economic progress, is one-sided and slightly exaggerated, yet fundamentally accurate.
When one speaks of Asia as the continent of hope, it is clearly China and India that come to mind. Their dual economic rise as the two demographic giants of the planet has been remarkable in spite of their equally gigantic shortcomings. Yet each country constitutes in itself a unique and very different case.
“China is back” was the explicit message of an exhibit titled “The Three Emperors” organized under the auspices of the Chinese government at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2005. The centerpiece of the exhibit was a huge painting in the European (“Jesuit”) style familiar in eighteenth-century China, depicting a parade of European envoys paying tribute to the Chinese emperor. The message could not be clearer: “You too will soon pay tribute to us.” In today’s China of course there is no emperor, just a bland, enigmatic, and mildly competent bureaucracy under the leadership of Hu Jin Tao. But there is a tremendous sense of pride and confidence over what China was yesterday and what it is becoming again.
On my first trip to China in 1985 the first monument I was required to see was a gigantic dam across the Yangtze River. “We were the first people in history to have mastered the art of the dam,” was the first message my guide from the diplomatic service wanted to convey to me. More surprisingly, he also conveyed to me his deep frustration with his life. He considered himself a failure and nearly exploded with rage when he accompanied me back to my luxury hotel for foreigners and saw that my room was bigger than the apartment he lived in with his entire family. “I made the crucial mistake of joining the diplomatic service,” he told me, “rather than becoming a businessperson.”
To this day I wonder what has happened to him. Has he fulfilled his capitalist dream?
This contrast between pride and frustration constituted my first impression of China in the mid-1980s. Today both emotions continue to run high in China, for frustration is in its own way a byproduct of hope: The more you progress, the more you demand and expect.
To understand the particular nature of the Chinese psyche, the difference between China and Egypt may be enlightening. Both the Chinese and Egyptian civilizations were among the oldest and richest in the world. But high Egyptian civilization disappeared long ago (despite attempts by contemporary Egyptian leaders to evoke those past glories as a way of claiming current relevance and importance). By contrast, traditional Chinese civilization still exists, unique and largely unchanged, having passed the test of time. This continuity is a source of both problems and creativity.
China has always been the most populous country on earth. As a result, the fear of social and economic chaos has always obsessed China’s leaders. In reaction, they have created a system where individuals have always had to submit to a collective logic rather than a personal one.
China’s size influenced its national psychology in another important way. The self-perception of China as the Middle Empire implied not simply geographic centrality but also the conviction that China was in some way the center of gravity of the universe. Unlike Russia (for example), this immense and self-confident empire did not have to expand to exist. The Great Wall made China a sanctuary, but it also expressed the fact that China did not need to conquer others to feel important. China did expand, of course, but its territorial growth was driven not so much by the force of arms as by demographics, the sheer numbers of Chinese, used by the regime as a colonizing and controlling force. Recently, for example, China has encouraged a large influx of Han Chinese to Tibet and Xinjiang, where China fears pan-Turkic and pan-Islamist subversion. The demographic card is also being played by China in Central Asia, where, according to Professor Harry G. Gelber, quoting unofficial estimates, by 2004 there were already as many as three hundred thousand Chinese, mainly merchants, in Kazakhstan alone. (Recently, however, with the growth of the Chinese economy, the number of Chinese in Siberia seems to be diminishing. Job opportunities, it seems, are now available in greater numbers in the Chinese homeland.)
Another dimension to this demographic card is of a softer, cultural nature. Chinese influence in the world is multiplied by the strong role played by the Chinese diaspora, the millions of ethnic Chinese and their descendants who have established powerful footholds in business, culture, and politics around the world, primarily in Southeast Asia but also well beyond. The diaspora can be counted on by Beijing, especially in the current period of economic growth and national pride, as a precious relay of influence and as a vector of business deals.
Thus, from the strict standpoint of territorial expansionist ambitions, the comparisons often made by Western analysts between China today and Germany at the end of the nineteenth century do not really apply. The rivalry among China, India, and Japan will not shape the future of Asia as the rivalry among Great Britain, France, Russia, and Germany shaped Europe (and the world) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nor will the Asians tear themselves to pieces through nationalistic warfare, as some Western commentators believe. The differences between Germany then and China now are much greater than the similarities. Newly united Germany was a power in a hurry, especially after the departure of the influential chancellor Bismarck (who was the only man capable of exercising restraint on Emperor Wilhelm II). It was both overconfident and insecure. China, by contrast, is a reemerging empire whose sense of time is infinitely longer than ours in the West. Far from being overconfident, it is deeply aware of the huge challenges and contradictions it has to surmount and of its manifold vulnerabilities.
If one seeks a nineteenth-century European analogy for contemporary China, I suggest one look not at Germany but at the exhortation given to the French citizens by François Guizot, the prime minister of King Louis-Philippe: “Get rich and be quiet.” But what happens when this “contract” is broken? Will the Chinese keep quiet if they no longer get rich?
Yet despite China’s awareness of its vulnerabilities, it remains convinced that time is on its side. This conviction was reinforced both by the events of 9/11 and by the American reaction to hyperterrorism. That reaction has accelerated “the return of Authoritarian Great Powers,” Israeli military historian Azar Gat has argued powerfully in Foreign Affairs. China believes not only that the soft power of America has been hurt by the Bush administration’s behavior but also that its own soft power has been boosted by the growing skepticism about democracy and human rights, values that America preaches but often fails to practice.
The rise of economically successful and nondemocratic countries such as China and Russia is a proof for Beijing that its authoritarian approach represents a viable alternative path to modernity. In their dealings with the African continent, the Chinese are poised to advance this message to African regimes: “Unlike our counterparts in America and Europe, we are not a former colonial power spouting hypocritical lessons about democracy and human rights. Nor are we a new imperial power from the East. Instead we are dealing with you in a matter-off-act way. We need your natural resources to keep growing, and you need our money to start growing. Let’s work together for mutual benefit.”
At the same time, it’s clear that the new Chinese middle classes and the wealthy want to live in Western style. In fact the world’s biggest economic, ecological, and perhaps political challenge comes from the fact that 1.3 billion Chinese would like to live and spend like Westerners without necessarily being governed like them. They love our music, our films, our food (including, increasingly, our ecologically risky meat diets), and our clothes. But in so many other ways they do not want to become like us, even if they do not know exactly what they do want to become or what kind of international role they want to play.
The great question is whether China’s ambivalent and hybrid approach, in which Western capitalism and individual economic ambitions coexist with Eastern-style authoritarianism, is realistic. In the short term, it may continue to be successful. But in the long term, it spells trouble. China needs the rule of law as well as hardheaded mercantilism. It was the absence of the rule of law and the resulting corruption that led to the sacrifice of thousands of children when their schools collapsed upon them during the earthquake of 2008. There is a limit to how many such disasters China’s people will accept.
The arrogance of the Chinese regime has also been creating problems on the international scene. The Chinese attitude toward the repression led by the Burmese generals in the fall of 2007 has been, to say the least, less than helpful. China is the only country in the world that can exert real pressure on Myanmar, yet it deliberately failed to use its clout, at least not in any visible fashion. In the same manner, China’s vicious reaction to the reception offered in 2007 by the United States to the Dalai Lama of Tibet was neurotic, demeaning to the regime, and detrimental to the image of China in the world. And one senses something like a competitive irresponsibility between Russia and China in their attitudes toward Ahmadinejad’s Iran, in spite of the complex ambivalence of their positions. In Africa we see still more examples of China’s cynical short-term calculations, the principle of noninterference leading to an implicit criminal complicity with the regime of Omar Hassan al-Bashir in Sudan (in spite of its grave violations of human rights in Darfur) and with the murderous regime of Mugabe in Zimbabwe. China badly needs a new elite animated by a sense of the common good if it is to remain a stable country and to become one day a positive and responsible stakeholder in world affairs or even a benevolent superpower.
Nevertheless, there are small signs that China is beginning to grow into its new role as a great power on the world stage. The return of Hong Kong to China in the mid-1990s proceeded more smoothly than most observers expected. The Chinese leaders have demonstrated sufficient intelligence to balance Hong Kong’s semi-Western level of freedom with the need for control by the Chinese authorities. Chinese leaders have played a globally positive role in the so far successful attempt to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis: They managed to prevent a collapse of North Korea, which could have led to a reunified and stronger Korea and brought a flood of refugees pouring across China’s borders, and they have significantly curbed North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
Furthermore, in helping create the Shanghai Group (along with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan), the Chinese seem to be playing a balancing role in the style of nineteenth-century Europe, helping offset Western influence in Central Asia with a stabilizing Asian counterforce and doing so in a much more prudent manner than their nineteenth-century counterparts. In the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s former national security adviser (quoted by Harry Gelber), “There is no doubt that China is quietly creating a very successful coprosperity sphere in East Asia. The countries of the region increasingly are paying China due deference, something to which the Chinese graciously respond.”
Thus it would be a gross misreading of the international situations and of Chinese thinking to see China only as a disturbing and threatening factor. And we should not measure China solely according to its commitment to democracy. The absence of democratic accountability and the lack of any real understanding of the rule of law are above all a problem for the Chinese themselves. We cannot and must not impose our categories on them. We in the West have to consider what they do at least in part through their eyes and in a multidimensional, not unidimensional, way, without ever forgetting and forfeiting our values. It is a difficult balancing exercise, which implies a sensitivity to diplomatic nuance not always demonstrated by Western leaders, who end up awkwardly pinned by the contradictions between their human rights rhetoric and their defense of national commercial interests.
The lack of freedom and the absence of an independent judiciary system constitute serious brakes on the Chinese path to long-term economic growth and sustainable ecological development. But the immense majority of Chinese judge their leaders with different criteria in mind. They want material progress, more decent housing conditions, and the freedom to travel abroad (which certainly takes precedence for most Chinese over the freedom to think, write, and publish dissent). After a century of suffering through deprivation and scarcity, disorder and insecurity, all exacerbated by a surfeit of ideology, most Chinese want a period of political rest. But they also expect their state to protect them from the violence of nature, from manmade pollution, and even from the brutal behavior of corrupt and inefficient local officials. These demands inevitably have political consequences.
Nonetheless, political change is very slowly coming, driven mainly not by outside pressure but by internal factors, including the demands of an increasingly self-assertive middle class.
Chinese citizens are also starting to demand more from their authorities. The picture of the woman who stood up for her house a few years ago to oppose its destruction made world news, and her photo became a modern symbol of civic resistance, a twenty-first-century equivalent of the young student facing down a tank on Tiananmen Square in May 1989. Of course both lost—the house was destroyed, and the student movement was crushed—but in the near future the next such symbol of opposition may be victorious.
While traveling in the heart of China in the summer of 2006, my older son witnessed some early signs of an emerging Chinese civil society. Travelers who had had their flight between two Chinese cities canceled as the result of the incompetence of the Chinese air company organized a kind of demonstration. The representative of the airline not only “lost face” but was forced to grant financial compensation to the stranded passengers. Similarly, after the tragedy of Sichuan, bereaved parents did call for justice and not just for financial compensations.
The current combination between economic progress and political stagnation will last as long as hope prevails. For hope implies above all the continued pursuit of economic growth.
In reality, the Chinese do not think they have to do much internationally in order to continue to grow in terms of prestige, influence, and authority. They simply have to go on reaping the benefits of the mistakes made by others, especially what they and many perceive as the American overreaction to Islamic fundamentalism. One day, as events dictate, they will enjoy their moment of emergence on the international diplomatic stage, as the United States emerged in 1905, when it organized the San Francisco conference that ended the Russo-Japanese War. China is patiently waiting for its own equivalent.
The chief stumbling blocks that could stymie the patient Chinese plan are of course Taiwan and Tibet. The issues at stake are very different. Tibet is ruled by China in a heavy-handed manner, while Taiwan is, for all practical purposes, fully independent from Beijing under the formula “One state, two systems.”
The rise of China seems likely to lead inevitably to an eclipse of American influence. America may, for better or worse, remain the key actor in Europe and the Middle East. But when one looks at the 2008 North Korean and Myanmar crises, one wonders whether this is still true in East Asia. It appears that China, not the United States, is becoming to East Asia what Great Britain was for Europe through most of the nineteenth century: the great balancer. Of course the spectacular rise of China has led the other Asian countries, Japan in particular, to do their best to balance China, for China (unlike Great Britain) is a continental power with possible expansionist temptations.
In its attempt to stem the growth of Chinese power, the United States is counting on two main cards. The first is its hope that market-driven economic growth will force China to accept democratic moderation, even if it does not become a full-fledged democracy. The second is the influence of India. At the peak of the transatlantic crisis over Iraq in 2003, a top American diplomat remarked triumphantly to me, “We may have lost five hundred million Europeans, but we have gained more than one billion Indians. The first are in a process of decay, but the second are emerging as a new force in the world.” Let us turn now to India and see whether these American hopes for a benevolent Indian influence in Asia are warranted.
If “China is back,” India is arriving on the world stage for the first time. It does not feel like an old empire recovering its central status, but like a new nation celebrating (in 2008) the sixtieth anniversary of its independence with a combination of immense pride and deep self-questioning: “We did so much so quickly, but have we done it the right way?”
Certainly the task of creating a new nation in the vast subcontinent was daunting. Is there another country where one encounters such an extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, languages, religions, and cultural practices? Winston Churchill used to say of India that it was “merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator.” Yet India has proved Churchill wrong. It is much more than the sum of its contradictions. It may once have been merely a myth and an idea, yet now it has become a very pragmatic reality.
If India lacks China’s history as a great imperial power, it nonetheless has a rich and powerful tradition in a very different realm. Sixty years ago in libraries around the world, books about India were to be found mainly under the “spirituality” category, not under “economics” or “politics.” The wealth of India was of a “spiritual nature”; economist Amartya Sen reminds us that the Chinese in the first millennium CE classically referred to India as the “Buddhist kingdom.” He reminds us also, in The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity, that it was Ashoka, a Buddhist emperor of India, who, in the third century BCE, “not only outlined the need for toleration and the richness of heterodoxy, but also laid down what are perhaps the oldest rules for conducting debates and disputations, with the opponents duly honoured in every way on all occasions.” This tradition of tolerance formed a sharp contrast not only with China but also at the time with Europe.
The inheritance of Gandhi’s legacy of nonviolence extended this unique dimension of Indian culture to the political realm. It is difficult to assess what’s left of Gandhi’s inheritance today. In October 2007 Arte, the Franco-German television channel, featured a program entitled On Gandhi’s Path that contained a laughing competition named after Gandhi. So much for the profound teachings and political lessons of Gandhi. The same program showed how, in nearly all Indian villages, the omnipresent busts of Gandhi have now been deposited in municipal garages. It is as if India, in a deliberate fit of “realism,” had turned its back on him.
Similarly, when India was the guest star country at the World Economic Forum in Davos, it celebrated with elaborate fashion shows and other glitzy symbols of stylish capitalist consumption. It was difficult to imagine that a half-naked philosopher and political activist who preached simplicity and austerity was the father of this new nation.
So India’s inner contradictions are at least as deep as China’s, but they are of a different nature. Indians are legitimately proud of their democratic status. The Indian formula “the largest democracy in the world” is as ritualized as the Chinese claim to be “the oldest civilization in the world.” But this pride coexists with disgust over the incompetence and corruption of India’s political class—the worst in the world, according to many Indian intellectuals. Of course free elections, an independent judiciary, and a free press do matter, but these assets are seriously weakened by the eroding force of corruption. What is the meaning of democracy without a properly functioning rule of law?
The other major flaw of Indian democracy is its unique caste system. Disturbingly, it seems that the battle against class divisions (including the caste system) has weakened in India in recent years. Not only has Nehru’s dream of establishing a social system free of class stratification barriers not come true, but it seems to be slowly evaporating, victim of the nonseriousness of the political elites in power and the greed of the capitalist classes, which are more obsessed with economic growth than with social justice.
Rich Indians tend not even to see the huge masses who live in poverty. Their selective eyes go across or above them with a serenity of mind that may be at least in part due to the existence of the caste system. The implicit attitude is: Of course they are very poor, but what can you expect? It has always been like this, and at least there are fewer of them today, and they don’t die of starvation any longer.
It is true that absolute poverty has decreased significantly in India. Today fewer than 10 percent of the population live in absolute poverty, as compared to 25 percent two decades ago. Yet the problem of poverty is far from solved, and it is distressing to see the Indian elites taking an attitude of indifference toward it.
During the celebrations of India’s sixtieth anniversary, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh addressed this problem, emphasizing the need not so much for a continuation of economic growth as for much greater fairness in distributing the benefits from economic progress. In fact the denunciations of social injustice offered by the Indian prime minister and the Chinese premier sounded very much alike, as if they wanted to reinforce the validity of the concept of Chindia—in this case, a Chindia that demands greater social justice even as most societal energies are focused on the pursuit of economic growth.
India demonstrates that modernity does not automatically bring about greater equality. Perhaps modernity is even exacerbating the country’s less savory traditions. For example, as Edward Luce has noted, the gender gap between boys and girls in India has sharply increased. Modernity also seems to be intensifying the roles of nationalism and religion in politics. Bloody communal riots have once again broken out across India, killing more than two thousand Muslims in 2003. And in 2008 the spectacular terrorist attack on Mumbai, which was perceived by many Indians as their own 9/11, demonstrated both the vulnerability and the resiliency of India. To resolve these problems, neither a secularized Europe nor a materialistic China provides a model for India. If there is a model, it is much more the United States, with its (mostly) stable combination of secularized, nonsectarian religion and inclusive patriotism, symbolized by the unofficial national motto “In God We Trust.” But can India develop an ethic based on the implicit motto “In Gods We Trust”?
In comparative terms, there is probably more hope and less despair in India than in China. Very rich Indians are amazed by what they have been able to achieve in such a short period of time and by the international respect they have attained. Nonetheless, unlike the Chinese, the Indians seem deeply uncertain about their new identity as an emerging giant. They appear to derive the confidence they need to assume their new status in the world from the respect, if not envy, that the rest of the world feels for their economic dynamism and success. At the May 2008 President’s Conference in Jerusalem marking the sixtieth anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel, there were two “stars.” The obvious, visible star was the president of the United States, George W. Bush; the more discreet one was Lakshir Mittal, the giant steel company that is a symbol of India’s coming-of-age in the world of globalization.
Beyond India there is the Indian diaspora, which numbers around twenty million. Its members are increasingly successful and assertive, deriving confidence, pride, and even a sense of personal legitimacy from India’s rising international status. Today Indian financial analysts are highly sought after in New York and London; Indian physicians are prized staff members at the leading medical centers in the United States; and an Indian-American (albeit a Christian), Piyush “Bobby” Jindal, now serving as governor of Louisiana, was even mentioned as a potential vice presidential candidate during the 2008 election cycle.
The rising confidence of upper-middle-class Indians, whether in India or elsewhere in the world, has for counterpart the fabled “resilience” that Pavan K. Varma describes in his book Being Indian as a quality derived from centuries of adversity. “No foreigner can ever understand the extent to which an Indian is mentally prepared to accept the unacceptable,” writes Varma. As long as belief in change keeps the many marginalized peripheries engaged, hope will prevail in India.
If China’s confidence is based partially on its imperial past, India’s is based on its vision of the future. A youthful nation (with 700 million out of 1.1 billion under the age of twenty-five), India is “the 1 percent society”: In the words of T. N. Ninan, one of the country’s most respected editors (quoted by Edward Luce), “Whichever indicator you choose, whether it is economic or social, India is improving at a rate of roughly 1 percent a year.” “To judge by the living conditions of Indians,” continues Luce, “and not by the drama of national events, the country is moving forward on a remarkably stable trajectory.” Yet to keep growing, India must develop its infrastructure, reduce inequality, and curb corruption.
In comparative terms, the complex diversity of pluralist India may be one of the key reasons for the survival and stability of its democracy. By contrast, China’s centralized nature makes it much more efficient but also much more vulnerable to the rapid spread of chaos if political instability were to mount.
If the two-headed giant Chindia represents the full flowering of Asian hope, what about the other great Asian economic powerhouse, Japan? Why is that affluent island nation not also a full-fledged participant in the culture of hope? Let’s take a brief detour to examine the circumstances that make Japan the major exception among the nations of Asia.
Japan of course pioneered the Asian economic miracle as early as the mid-1960s. The Tokyo Olympics in 1964 celebrated the Japanese renaissance less than twenty years after the end of World War II and more than forty years before the Olympic Games came to Beijing.
A chameleon-like country that in its insularity is probably more mysterious and more difficult to apprehend for a Western mind than either China or India, Japan is living proof that modernity and Westernization cannot be equated. Japan is also perceived as “Asian” only by the West. In Asia today, Japan, more than sixty years after the end of World War II, is still resented as uniquely, arrogantly “Nippon” by the majority of its neighbors. Too Western for the majority of Asians, the Japanese have remained too Asian to be fully understood by Westerners.
One of the key reasons for the divorce still existing between Japan and the rest of Asia is of course history and the scars of the past—specifically, the flirtation of its military leaders with fascism and nazism and its military and diplomatic alliance with the Germans, with all the resulting tragic consequences for Japan’s neighbors and ultimately Japan itself. No process of postwar reconciliation like the one between Germany and its European neighbors has taken place in Asia. Is it that the Japanese, unlike the Germans, do not know how to apologize for deep religious, cultural, or historical reasons? Or is it somehow unrealistic and unfair for us to think about Japan in terms of analogies with Germany? For the Dutch writer Ian Buruma, it is a combination of these factors, plus another key element. Having been the first and happily so far the only victims of the atom bomb, the Japanese believe they’ve already paid a huge price for their wartime behavior, which they consider a mistake but not necessarily a crime. “We will be ready to apologize for starting the war in Asia when America is ready to apologize for Hiroshima,” a former Japanese diplomat told me during my last visit to Japan in October 2008.
There may also be a still deeper cultural phenomenon at work. Relation to the past is one of the keys to the future, and history, it seems, is perceived differently in Europe and Asia. In a continent where the belief in reincarnation does exist, the rebuilt version of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto burned to ashes so many times is considered as authentic as the original building. Could this “relativity” of Asian history help explain their different attitude to the past?
Most Europeans, the people of the Balkans being a major exception, have managed to transcend their past and engaged successfully in the construction of the European Union. By contrast, most Asians still have difficulty dealing with their past, and they have done so in the most selective and often contradictory manner. The Chinese, for example, take every opportunity to mention Japanese war crimes but choose to ignore their own domestic misdeeds, from the Tiananmen repression of 1989 to their recent repression of Tibet.
Even when it comes to the contrasting emotions of hope and fear, a gulf seems to separate Japan from both its neighbors in Asia and its counterparts in the West.
Japanese national fears have been traditionally very different from Western fears. Japanese fears are dominated by nature. Fear of earthquakes, tsunamis, and flooding lead Japanese families to keep survival kits at hand in the entrances of their houses. European fears, by contrast, focus on what other men can do through aggression or invasion. In a sense, the Japanese preoccupation with nature can be seen as uniquely modern in that it predates the current Western worries about the environment. But even here the difference is more significant than the similarity, for whereas the Western world focuses on what man can do to nature, the reverse is true in Japan.
However, the current culture of fear in Japan is not solely focused on natural disasters. It explains why Japan is not part of the Asian culture of hope and why today’s Japanese are more in tune with the Western culture of fear. The Japanese climate of self-doubt is now nearly twenty years old, having originated in the 1988–1990 financial collapse precipitated by the bursting of its housing bubble. Japan then went through a structural crisis that lasted at least until 2002 and the accession of Prime Minister Yoichi Koizumi. (As a number of economists have noted, there are disturbing parallels between the decade-long trauma suffered by Japan in the 1990s and the financial crisis that hit the United States in 2008. It remains to be seen whether American leaders will be able to avoid a prolonged period of stagnation and decline comparable to that experienced by Japan.)
Even today Japan has not yet fully recovered from the crisis of the 1990s. One senses that the country no longer knows precisely where it is going or where it belongs. It is painfully aware of the fact that India has overtaken it as America’s main diplomatic partner in Asia and that China has become America’s main economic partner and global rival. In fact one senses in foreign policy circles in Tokyo and particularly in the Gaimucho, or Foreign Ministry, something like an obsession with China. It reflects the painful sense of a reduced international status from the years, prior to the 1990s, when Japan was the only important Asian country on the world stage.
But Japan’s self-doubt has other root causes. Its aging population is about to become the oldest in the world, making it difficult for Japan to behave with the dynamism and energy that a culture of hope demands. Its suicide rate, especially among young people, is one of the highest in the world. And with the notable exception of the Koizumi years, the Japanese political system has been marked by what could best be described as mediocrity and stagnation. The Japanese themselves in the 1990s used to describe their system as combining the worst features of Mexico and Italy: rigidity and inefficiency.
Japan in fact shares many of the strengths and weaknesses of Europe. Both possess strong and dynamic enterprises, stable democratic systems, and high-quality health systems. But both also share a tendency to depression, introspection, anxiety, and self-absorption. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the Western culture of fear should have infected Japan as well.
Diplomatically as well as emotionally, Japan is generally aligned with the West rather than with its Asian neighbors. Like such Western nations as Australia, Canada, and Germany, Japan is democratic, prosperous, a nonnuclear power, and a nonpermanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Japan tends to be “passionately moderate” in its approach to the world and often seeks to serve as a bridge across various kinds of divides: the former geographic divide between Eastern and Western Europe, the social and ethical divide between Canada and the United States (the former widely viewed as peace-loving, the latter as bellicose), the economic divide between the global north and the south, but above all the cultural divide between the East and the West. Often seen as Western in Asian eyes and Eastern in the eyes of Europeans and Americans, Japan seems to enjoy being in a kind of bridging posture.
But the ascendancy of China and India is now leaving Japan feeling less like a bridge between cultures and more like a mongrel that has been left behind, its uniqueness, importance, and influence diminished. During the decades of Japan’s postwar rebuilding, generations of Japanese made economic sacrifices for the greatness and prosperity of their country, and as a nation Japan was a willing and eager student of Western-style democracy and capitalism. Now those sacrifices and those years of student status appear almost pointless as Japan’s giant neighbors gather more and more power and clout without making comparable sacrifices. It is as if after being the best pupil in the class for decades, Japan is watching “bad” students being rewarded with better grades. And as China becomes an increasingly important economic partner of Japan, many Japanese are beginning to resent the fact that they are working so hard, not for the “King of Prussia” (as eighteenth-century Frenchmen used to complain) but for the “Emperor of China.”
For all these reasons, Japan is now dominated by a vague sense of anxiety about its future. The hope that ruled Japan in the 1960s and 1970s has given way to fear.
In spite of their differing political systems, China and India, those two great empires of hope, are faced with remarkably similar challenges. Both countries must lift hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty, forestall potential ecological tragedies, prevent the further spread of the HIV-AIDS epidemic, and reduce the gap between society and politics. This last challenge, which is proving difficult even for the “mature” Western democracies, is an especially daunting task for a disorderly democracy like India and a stultified autocracy like China. The culture of hope that inspires millions of Indians and Chinese exists, for the most part, not because of their political leaders but in spite of them.
As China and India come of age on the world stage, both countries face enormous questions on their future relations with each other and with the other great powers. For each, one major challenge will be deciding how to negotiate their relationship with the United States, which remains, after all, the single greatest global power.
India has already begun taking steps to demonstrate its independence from its erstwhile American sponsors—for example, by developing plans for building an oil and gas pipeline to Iran and by pushing back against U.S. demands in the ongoing bilateral negotiations over India’s civilian nuclear industry.
Today India must decide what kind of power it wants to be. Upon its birth in 1947, India viewed itself much as the European Union views itself today, as a “moral superpower,” largely on the basis of its success in achieving independence peacefully under the spiritual leadership of Gandhi. But in the twenty-first century India can’t rely on any nostalgia for its onetime moral status. Its key challenge in the years to come will turn on its ability to forge an international identity in relation to the United States in a mature and balanced way, dominated neither by an Indian variant of Gaullism (the quest for independence at all costs) nor by a strict balance of power view in which India’s main function is to balance China on behalf of America.
Meanwhile China’s power dilemma is almost the reverse of India’s. One senior Western diplomat quoted by the Financial Times remarked, “The idea that the Chinese leadership wakes up every morning with ideas about dominating the world simply does not stand up. If anything, they wake up worrying about how to deal with a hundred different problems at home.” This is right—for now. But how long will the Chinese stick to their policy of not rocking the boat? Either excessive confidence and global hubris (perhaps unlikely) or loss of confidence and the need to divert attention from domestic problems (more likely) could lead China toward some form of irresponsible nationalism, involving aggressive steps toward Taiwan, for example.
The evolution of the international roles played by China and India will depend upon the ability of the two countries to reform themselves. Can China remain an engine of growth for the global economy and become the largest trading nation in the world without accelerating the internal evolution of its policies? Will China continue to be the world’s most promising new market for multinational corporations if Beijing’s governance remains stultified? How will India develop a mass-scale, labor-intensive manufacturing sector without providing a minimum level of education to the millions of rural Indians now living in near-total poverty? And how long will India remain an attractive supplier of goods and services to Western companies without dramatically reducing its excessive levels of private and governmental corruption?
These challenges are real. Yet they do not weaken the case for calling Asia the continent of hope. We might even say that Chindia constitutes a reassuring basis for global hope precisely because its leaders do not see themselves as having a mission to save the world from the forces of evil (as George Bush once did) or even to set universal ethical, social, and cultural norms (as Europe sometimes does). Yet as China and India keep growing, they will have to accept the fact that responsibility comes with power and that in an interdependent world, respect for international rules and norms is part of that responsibility. It remains to be seen what the full impact of the 2008–2009 economic crisis on the two Asian giants will be. Because they are more accustomed to suffering than Westerners, and because their appetite for success is greater than ours, Asians have an ability to rebound that should not be underestimated, as they demonstrated in 1998–1999 during their first financial crisis.
From the second half of the twentieth century until today, Asia has moved from being a continent of wars to a continent of hope—even if we acknowledge that it is a modest form of hope, one based not on grand dreams of world peace and freedom but simply on a vision of steadily rising material prosperity. For the world’s billions of hungry people, such a modest vision is surely an attractive one, but will it be enough in the long run? This is one of the great questions that the twenty-first century will answer.