The End of Asia? Redefining a Changing Continent

"Can Asians think?" Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's ambassador to the United Nations, famously asked in a 1997 lecture. Thunder From the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia drives us to ask a variation of Mahbubani's question: Can anyone think about Asia?

This is not because Thunder From the East is a bad book or because the authors' observations are uninformed. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are a husband-and-wife team of Pulitzer-prize winning journalists who know their subject: Kristof served as The New York Times' bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo, and WuDunn was a correspondent for the paper across Asia. Together they have logged thousands of miles and taped hundreds of interviews in years of travel through Asia. They have raised a family there, and with their son enrolled in a Japanese elementary school, they can offer an intimate, PTA-level view of Japanese society that is all too rare in the West.

Kristof and WuDunn describe Asians in every imaginable circumstance: from Japanese politicians revealed in private moments of frankness to Cambodian child prostitutes interviewed in front of their brothels; from bankrupt Thai ex-millionaires rebuilding their fortunes to Javanese peasants hacking "sorcerers" to death with machetes. The authors have captured the kaleidoscopic realities of contemporary Asia as few others have and reproduced them sympathetically.

GUARDED OPTIMISM

The recent Asian financial crisis, write Kristof and WuDunn, signalled a change of pace in Asia's economic growth but not its end. In the larger historical context, the book reminds us, Asia still has much ground to recover: although Asia's GDP amounted to 33 percent of world output in 1998, up from only 17 percent in 1952, the current proportion reflects a recovery only to the levels of 1890. The best estimates available suggest that in 1700, Asian output accounted for 62 percent of world production and that as late as 1820, China's output alone exceeded all of Europe's. Asian productivity presumably will over time approach that of European and North American economies, even with the slower growth the authors forecast for East Asia. This growth eventually will restore the central role in the global economy that the Asian nations temporarily lost following the Industrial Revolution. And from this economic growth, cultural and political consequences will flow: As the United States gradually (but only relatively) declines, the authors speculate, the twenty-first century will witness Asia's return to global preeminence.

The next Asian economic miracle, suggest Kristof and WuDunn, will come from India rather than East Asia. They could well be right. Having lagged behind its East Asian neighbors in opening its economy to world markets, India's growing population and generally low productivity rates give it great catch-up potential. But as the authors point out, obstacles remain. Indian expatriates hesitate to reinvest money back home, unlike Chinese mainlanders in Taiwan and around the world who have plowed billions back into the ancestral home. Until India convinces its dispersed offspring to invest, it will fall well short of its potential.

The book's economic and political forecasts for the rest of the region are mixed. Japan faces absolute population decline. The Chinese and most other East Asian economies will grow but at a slower rate than before the 1997-98 crisis. China, the authors predict, will ultimately be forced to abandon Tibet and Sinkiang, a province on China's northwestern border with a restive Muslim population.

"The optimist," the American novelist James Branch Cabell once wrote, "proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true." The authors are modestly upbeat by this definition, but they point out that success breeds its own problems. Nationalist rivalries and environmental disasters, for instance, could derail Asian progress. Nevertheless, Kristof and WuDunn's nuanced Cabellian optimism is shared by most Asia-watchers in Asia and abroad, and their ability to ground their judgment in close and careful reporting lends it additional credibility.

A MULTITUDE OF CIVILIZATIONS

On reading this book, however, the reader is struck by one basic question: What is Asia anyway? The continent is so large and diverse, and its leading countries are so differently circumstanced, that a book as exhaustive as this one only makes us ask whether it is possible to generalize meaningfully about "Asia" at all.

"India," Winston Churchill snidely remarked, "is merely a geographical expression." But the Asia of Thunder From the East is not even that. Pakistan is included, Iran is not. Why? And what then is Iran part of?

Kristof and WuDunn argue that their geographic Asia (roughly, moving from east to west, Japan through Pakistan) has a certain cultural unity -- the influence of Indic culture throughout the region via the vehicle of Buddhism. This may be true, but one might just as well call Norway part of the Middle East because it is Christian.