Website review: Asia Times Online :: China News, Ch...
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laodan discovered 3 weeks ago- Asia pushes, West resists in AsiaTimes by Sreeram Chaulia a review of The New Asian Hemisphere. The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East by Kishore Mahbubani. PublicAffairs, New York, 2008.
Mahbubani asserts that a turbulent era of de-Westernization has commenced in Asia. With most Asians disavowing former beliefs that the West was the "most civilized part of the world", the latter has lost appeal as an ideal in human advancement. Chinese intellectuals, drawing on a history of insularity, have decolonized their mind the furthest and fastest. Accompanying China's accumulation of wealth and economic vitality is a popular rediscovery of its glorious cultural heritage and pride. De-Westernization is even more drastic in the Middle East. Hardly any Muslim society, perhaps not even Turkey, is trying to demonstrate that it is Western in spirit. Islamic publics view Westerners as immoral, greedy and insensitive to the loss of Muslim lives. Mahbubani considers India to be a bridge between the "West and the Rest". Indian thinkers do not see the West as the custodian of the highest values, but they also appreciate their country's historic place in constantly admitting and absorbing foreign influences. Mahbubani rides on China's geopolitical success to infer that "Asians are capable of delivering a more stable world order". Asia pushes, West resists Change is a process. Geo-political change is a rather long process and let's never forget that it often is fraught with violence. The root cause of the present geo-political change is the entry of China, India and the whole of Asia, Africa and South America into modernity. Modernity is first and foremost the application of the logic of capital to all aspects of life. Instead of continuing to eat the products that they grow on their fields people leave the land to go work in factories that have been financed by capital. From then on they will be forced to buy everything that is necessary to reproduce their daily lives and later everything that they think is necessary... This process of swelling domestic demand is satisfied by always more productions of goods and services. It becomes then evident that population size is going to be what differentiates the economic size of nations. Great-Britain was no match, in the 20th century, in term of population size for the US nor any other European country for that matter. After the 2nd world war Europeans took the path of unification and after half a century they got a unified currency and a European central bank and soon a president, a foreign affairs secretary and so on. But Europe is only marginally larger than the US... The story in Asia is definitely going to be far more world changing. China's population is not far from a billion and a half (official + not counted) and India is on the path to surpass China within a few decades. That gives us a population of 3 billion approximately versus a population of 3 quarters of a billion for the US + the EU. If those 2 countries can sustain for a few more decades their extremely rapid rates of economic growth each is going to surpass the economic size of the US and later the combined size of the US + the EU. This is going to have a decisive impact on how the world will be running in the coming decades not only economically but also politically and culturally. How is whiteman going to take those changes is the subject of Kishore Mahbubani's book.
- Asia pushes, West resists in AsiaTimes by Sreeram Chaulia a review of The New Asian Hemisphere. The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East by Kishore Mahbubani. PublicAffairs, New York, 2008.
