China

John McCain, it seems, can’t stay out of trouble. After enraging most of the Republican blogosphere with his radical (for a Republican) proposals to fight climate change, he has now succeeded in also angering China.

chinadialogue.net last week translated and published McCain’s remarks and have since had to deal with an upset response. Readers have suggested that these policies are indicative of "anti-Chinese sentiment coming from the West" and that China and other developing countries are far from the "chief culprits" when it comes to climate change.

The attention of the international media to the Tibetan issue is set to continue for some time. But a part of the Chinese media and internet community has been sidetracked by a 21-year-old philosophy student in Hong Kong whom they have christened “Tibet Independence Girl”. Tibet Independence Girl (aka Christina Han Chau-man) was one of nine protestors arrested in China for wrapping a Tibetan flag around herself during the Olympic torch relay and has now sprung to internet fame – for all the wrong reasons.

With forests of skyscrapers rising in Shanghai, fantastical contents emerging off the coast of Dubai, and fibre-optic arteries pumping knowledge from the heart of India's IT boom, it is difficult not to be impressed by the pace of transformation across Asia. Tremendous change is afoot in much of the region, greased in places by growing oil revenues and elsewhere by decade-old programs of liberal reform that now seem to be bearing fruit. This goes beyond the putative "Asian giants" of India and China; with many smaller countries also sharing in the economic success, a whole continent seems to be on the rise.

In the glow of heady financial statistics, many analysts see an epochal shift of power from the west to Asia. Some scholars, like the Singaporean diplomat and writer Kishore Mahbubani (author of The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East), have described the pendulum swing in civilisational terms. "Asian values" of harmony, commitment to education, and stability all speed the east's ascendancy (and the west's decline).

Others, like Clyde Prestowitz (author of Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East) reaffirm their faith in liberalisation in Asia's example. With stagnation and protectionist moods gripping many western countries, capitalist success stories in the east restore belief in the ultimate logic of the free market.

Both these views come together in Roger Cohen's recent column in the New York Times, "The Baton Passes to Asia". Gloomy about the slump in the American economy, Cohen grandiosely heralds "the end of the era of the white man". "The West's moment", he says, "is passing. Money and might are increasingly elsewhere. America's little dose of socialism from Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson might stave off the worst but cannot halt the trend." He then trots out the familiar statistics that accompany such prognostications - there are 450 million cellphones in China; 300 million Indians will move into cities in the next 20 years; by 2030, the Indian and Chinese economies will sit only behind the United States in terms of size.

But the difference, he insists, is not simply statistical.

It's about the mind. Come to Asia and fear drains away. It's replaced by confidence and a burning desire to succeed. Asian business leaders are rock stars. The culture of education and achievement is fierce. China is bent on beating the U.S.A.

What you feel in Asia, said Claude Smadja, a prominent global strategist, is "a burst of energy, of new dreams, and the end of the era of Western domination and the white man."

Some of the above is, of course, indisputable. The mood of the business elites in India, China and elsewhere in Asia is indeed bullish and optimistic, in marked contrast to the anxiety in Wall Street and the City. While European and north American strategists plot the revival of their economies, their Asian counterparts just want the good times to keep on rolling.

At the same time, Cohen and Co. miss much of the larger picture of what's happening in "the East" by looking simply from the top, simply through business. He glowingly describes "Asians and Arabs spending their way" through Dubai's glitzy airport. This is the view of the airport lounge, the sleek hotel, the limousine, the conference centre. Not only is it limited, it's predetermined to see what it wants to see.

Asia's problems remain as great as its prospects. Without recapitulating the Berkeley economist Pranab Bardhan's masterful critique of Chinese and Indian superpower aspirations, the depth of change in India and China and elsewhere is easily overstated. The rate of poverty reduction in India has actually slowed in the last decade; China has lost tens of millions of manufacturing jobs since the mid-1990s; staggering gulfs of inequality widen in both countries. India's crippling paucity of infrastructure and of at least the inklings of social safety net remain its major stumbling blocks; in the long-run, the unimaginative authoritarianism of the Chinese system may ensure instability, rather than stability; even the astronomical prosperity of the Gulf rests on the unsustainable and problematic lucre of oil.

Beyond these material limitations, there is a willful simplicity in the portrayal of Asia (and Asians) that seems to borrow from the hackneyed stereotypes of "model Asians" - single-minded, ambitious, over-achieving, automaton-like. Commentary on the transformations afoot in the east needs more flesh than the dry bones of statistics. Asian countries are as messy, as lively as any other country. They deserve probing interrogation and analysis, not Roger Cohen's vacuous attempts at provocation.

All politics are local, according to the cliché. If the saying needed much more in its ballast of truth, one need only look at a recent spat in the Indian parliament. The main opposition parties in the Lok Sabha – the lower house – walked out today in furious protest over the government's refusal to take a firmer line on unrest in Tibet. Violent demonstrations in the capital Lhasa over the weekend had brought the Himalayan region once again beneath the global spotlight. Opposition politicians wanted the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to clearly condemn China's actions in Tibet and push for United Nations intervention in resolving the demands of Tibetan dissidents. The ruling coalition only managed to "express its concern", prompting the exodus of MPs. It would be a bit too hopeful, however, to read in today's parliamentary histrionics much more than domestic point-scoring.

After all, as one foreign ministry representative pointed out, India's Tibet policy has changed little since the failed uprising of 1959 which brought the Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of Tibetan refugees into ongoing exile in India. While supporting the Dalai Lama and backing "non-violent" and "peaceful" political transformation in Tibet, New Delhi has done little to internationalise the Tibetan cause (with one eye, of course, on the lingering crisis in Kashmir) or to bring the force of international institutions to bear on China.

Ever since its humiliating losses to China in the 1962 war (the countries' only major clash), India has treated its looming neighbour gingerly, even as Beijing equipped Pakistan with military and scientific hardware and continuously undermined India's position within south Asia. This is even more unlikely to change now that China and India both harbour global ambitions and are wary of "balancing" each other to the west's advantage.

Why, then, did opposition MPs beat their chests about Tibet when their parties, if in power, would have done little different? Why did members of the Bharatiya Janata Party – a party linked to pogroms targeting India's minority Muslims – rail against the "cultural genocide" of minority peoples in China? The answer is local. Conspicuous in its relative silence in today's discussions was the Left Front, a bloc of communist and other leftist parties that give external support to India's ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance. All is not well with the Left-UPA fraternity, with a serious feud threatening to scupper the Indo-US nuclear deal. The Left accused the UPA of selling India short and pandering to the United States, still disparaged as "imperialist" in many quarters of Indian public opinion. Yet, the Left is seen by many as happy to lean towards China. Many of its parties maintain strong links with Beijing and, upon occasion, attempt to ape China's heavy-handed development strategies (as occurred recently with such controversial effect in the prospective establishment of a Chinese-style "special economic zone" in Nandigram in communist-ruled West Bengal). Some members of the Left dismiss their UPA counterparts as "pro-American", while the latter brand the former "pro-China". Such rhetorical tags matter less in their substance than in their power to firm the impression of ideological fissures between the Left and the UPA.

Thus the issue of Indian policy on Tibet has fallen into the opposition's lap as a crowbar to pry the Left and the UPA apart. If the opposition succeeds in making Tibet a serious issue in parliament, further strain will be placed on the Left-UPA alliance, as the stubborn silence of the communists will wrestle with the reluctant, moralising concessions of UPA MPs. Instead of directing outwards, debate about Tibet in India is pointed inward.

This week Beijing is hosting the seventeenth Communist Party congress - an event gathering more than 2,200 party members from across the country. openDemocracy published an analysis of the global relevance of the event, in which Kerry Brown underlined the challenges which the new generation of leaders will have to face as China elevates its economic status to the third largest economy in the world. This problem was also picked up by The International Herald Tribune blogger Daniel Altman who remarked that "training new generations of regulators, business people and planners is a process that can’t easily be accelerated" and that changing culture is a long, difficult and complex job. [more]