The Asian Century
Wherever you turn, the rise of Asia is making its impact felt on our existence.
To many Victorians, British supremacy was a simple matter of racial supremacy - Europeans, and the English in particular, were fated to be the masters. The truth is that they are masters of the world no more. The global power shift from the West to the East is no longer just a matter of debate confined to learned journals and newspaper columns - it is a reality that is beginning to have a huge impact on our daily lives.
Napoleon III compared China to a sleeping giant and warned: “When China awakes, she will shake the world.” After a long hibernation, China, and her 1.3 billion people (twice the population of the U.S. and EU combined) is awaking almost overnight. And not just China. The world’s second most populous country, India, is industrialising at a historically unprecedented pace.
Like anything, there are downsides that are becoming more apparent. Unskilled workers in the West have become unsettled by the threat to their jobs as production moves East. The most vulnerable Western workers have found their wages stagnate as they struggle to compete in an increasingly global market place. And competition for raw materials is pitting East against West.
Europeans have, for half a millennium, been unchallenged as the global colonisers, but last month the respected Economist magazine dubbed the Chinese “The New Colonists“. The dire warnings from the International Monetary Fund this week that the West now faces the largest financial shock since the Great Depression, while the Asian economies are still powering ahead, simply underlines our vulnerability in this new world order.
There is an infectious confidence in Bollywood, and the price of Chinese antiques is rocketing as the newly rich Chinese decide they want a slice of their history.
Asian countries are not just buying up foreign raw materials, but as their companies try to become global leaders, they are buying up Western companies. From Kazakhstan to Indonesia to Latin America, Chinese firms are gobbling up oil, gas, coal and metals. Canadian authorities were recently alarmed to find the Chinese interested in exploring the Arctic Ocean, in a bid to get a share of the minerals beneath the thawing icecap.
And Western governments are concerned that the rules of the game are changing. Most worryingly, as China’s brutal suppression of the once independent Tibet shows, this is not a superpower that respects Western standards on human rights. Western attitudes of superiority to China and the rest of the East will also subside, as Westerners realise they are no longer the masters of the world.
