The Asian century still a long way off

Joshua Kurlantzick
September 15, 2008

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So much for the Asian century. The Thais are bickering with themselves, and when they're done doing that, they'll bicker with the Cambodians - again. China may be Japan's biggest trading partner, but they hate each other anyway. And Malaysia and Indonesia are two countries divided by the same language.

I've spent a lot of time in Asia and the place is a geopolitical mess. Hogtied by nationalism and narrow self-interest, the countries of the East won't be banding together to replace the West as the seat of global power anytime soon.


An Asian version of the European Union is not out of reach, but the continent battles a kind of split personality. Many cultural, economic and political trends suggest Asian nations are more integrated. But a virulent nationalism is spreading that feeds on reinterpreted or imaginary history to stir up hatred and push small-minded agendas.

Elites in Asia understand the benefits of integration, and businesses and officials are promoting the trend. Chinese yearly trade with the 10 South-East Asian nations is likely to surpass $US200 billion ($243 billion) by 2010, while the expansion of satellite television, Asian airlines and regional hiring by Asian conglomerates mean businesspeople watch the same news and cool their heels together at cocktail parties and pan-Asian business summits. Fads that start in Tokyo or Seoul, such as drinking red wine or dying hair blond, sweep through the region.

Despite all that love, most of the region's multilateral institutions do little more than meet for the sake of meeting, and calls to nationalism and an obsession with sovereignty are drowning out calls for co-operation.

The passage of time since World War II, when nationalism led to catastrophe, has allowed politicians to wield it more freely for short-term gain. "The Chinese are ignorant, so they are overjoyed," the Tokyo governor, Shintaro Ishihara, quipped after China launched a manned spaceship in 2003. "That [spacecraft] was an outdated one. If Japan wanted to do it, we could do it in one year."

This sort of nationalism is not the stuff of a few firebrands. Across the continent populist politicians have scrubbed school textbooks, whether to minimise Japan's atrocities in South Korea and China during World War II, or to erase the memory of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia - perhaps because the Prime Minister, Hun Sen, was an officer in the genocidal regime before he turned against it.

In Cambodia I meet teenagers who know practically nothing about what happened in their country in the 1970s. China, too, has whitewashed the memory of the Tiananmen Square crackdown of June 4, 1989. When a Frontline documentary crew went to Beijing University a few years ago and showed students the iconic 1989 photograph of the man who stopped a tank in its tracks, no one recognised it.

The internet allows Asian nationalists to air their vitriol unchecked. On Chinese online bulletin boards such as the "Strong Nation Forum," which is run by the People's Daily, respondents ridicule Chinese leaders for compromising on issues such as relations with neighbouring countries or Tibet or Taiwan.

In Japan the blogosphere helped spark sales of the manga comic book Hating the Korean Wave. And in Indonesia online writers helped fuel anger at Malaysia for the use of a supposedly Indonesian jingle in a tourism campaign, and for the mistreatment of an Indonesian karate referee. These are petty grievances, but the internet amplifies even the smallest outbursts, and reactions can be fierce.

Whenever I visit Asia, I meet young people who detest neighbours they barely know. "The Thais, all they care about is money, nothing else," one Burmese acquaintance told me in Rangoon, despite never having been to Thailand. In one study taken last year by a leading Japanese non-governmental organisation, two-thirds of the Chinese polled said they had either a "very bad" or "relatively bad" impression of Japan.

Even countries with little history of animosity can be swept into a rage by the new nationalists. In 2006 thousands of Thais marched to the Singapore embassy in Bangkok to protest against the purchase of a telecommunications giant by a Singapore state investment company, leaving Singaporean diplomats flat-footed.

An entire industry has developed around predictions that the Asian century will replace the American one. And maybe it will - a few centuries from now.

Joshua Kurlantzick is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy. This is an edited version of an article which first appeared in The Washington Post.


This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/09/14/1221330646507.html