When "Christchurch" gets mentioned now, it is not for a cricket test match score, or its recent earthquake recovery. "Muslim invasion," "white supremacy," "terrorism," and "dark days" instantly dominate the conjuring negative images. As people recuperate from the shocks, brave, isolated actions throw a glow: the Afghani New Zealander who sacrificed his life by confronting the perpetrator, Brenton Tarrant; the Christchurch policeman who brought the premeditated armed murderer down; the lion-hearted wheel-chaired Bangladeshi, Farid Ahmad, who forgave the murderer of 50 people, including his own wife, Husna; and the gallant new mother, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, embracing refugees, migrants, and Muslims as "one of us," while rejecting twisted minds, like Tarrant's, as "not one of us."
Missing in this emotional analytical roller-coaster, at least in this opening round of what may become a protracted probe, is the underlying economic trigger. Asia's economic and intellectual ascendancy over the western world has long been slowly, softly, and subtly unravelling, brewing incremental envy, hate, and overt anger. Though an overloaded canister of vitriol exploded at Christchurch, it must be kept in mind Christchurch is neither a feeding nor the first playground in this confrontation. Yet, the frequency with which "white supremacy" is exposing itself violently becomes as alarming a takeaway as any jihadi outburst, in fact, even more so given the lower attention threshold potential perpetrators have received.
Muslims may be the tip of an anger iceberg for a number of reasons: as Asians, they belong to a more competitive continent capable of eclipsing western civilisation; association with heartless atrocities and jihadi summons carries an Asian ring; and both of the above depict a lifestyle at odds with the liberal, transparent, and flexible western type. Peace, prayers, and past traditions guide the Muslim bulk, yet exposing them far easier to demented minded people.
The bulk of that iceberg revolves around a different, so-called "invasion" referent: plausibly of workers from abroad, just as US President Donald J. Trump labels Mexicans, even as their northern flows have drastically fallen. Cheap imports nudging US workers off their assembly-line jobs served as the previous contention bone, producing the Japan-bashing mentality across the United States in the 1980s (mostly over automobiles, but also including semi-conductors). Today China represents that same Asian force, challenging white-collar workers in the citadels of the service economy, like in Silicon Valley, through, for example, 5G competitiveness (as evident in the charges against Huawei operations and operators, which the Huawei owner dismisses as political). Both countries have helped build an image of low-wage, one-way-traffic-minded Asian economic players, economically squeezing the United States.
That both China and Japan began their global transactions with a more mercenary strategy than market-driven did not help any. Though it made both countries top US partners, the US preoccupation with the Cold War and the war on terrorism opened the gateways to do so. Japan became the world's second largest economy and second largest US trading partner, after Canada, until 1994 (when Mexico displaced it, but still behind Canada), while China's rise to become the second largest economy in the world has also been based primarily upon trade surpluses with the United States and foreign direct investment by corporations from that country.
Both countries began easing their gung-ho nationalistic attitudes, Japan after hitting a recession in 1990, which still struggles to disappear, making it the longest recession of an industrialised country. Even more gripping for Japan has been its demographic time-bomb: without foreign workers, it can no longer sustain its economy (slipping, as it has, to the fourth largest in the world). Opening up both low-wage/service-sector jobs, as well as farming, to Asians is a huge reversal of its attitude towards a continent historically seen as "lesser."
As China currently negotiates with the United States, its largest market and a source of a bulk of the $4.3 trillion trade coffer it has built, US costs dangle like a Damoclean sword: they depict US citizens deprived of jobs, as corporations migrate overseas to remain competitive, and lowered job expectations of graduate students, even those with a privileged MBA degree, have only bred deepening resentment. These become any politician's fodder.
At least three developmental streams led the United States to begin retaliating, a dynamic powerful enough to induce other western countries to think about going-with-the-flow. A neo-liberal economic embrace from the 1990s carried US free-trade compacts, in circuitous ways, to other countries, triggering predatory and competitive behaviour, particularly between the western countries, until 9/11 relegated economic priorities to security considerations. The second was the simultaneous growth of too many other Asian countries after their own late-1990s financial crisis, and particularly more so than the high western expectations pinned upon a now dismally performing Latin continent: those Asian countries made their economic hay when the US security sun was sky-high. Finally, the third was 9/11, spawning a jihadi era, perhaps at a crossroads now that the ISIS threat in the Iraqi-Syrian nexus of the world has been quelled.
All three combined with each other in such a way as to make it virtually impossible for the laid-off white western youth to disentangle: Asia was the common denominator of them all, but it was easier to blame and make scapegoats of Muslims than the Chinese, Japanese, or Latinos: job-frustration could be expunged by lashing out at perceptually medieval-minded Muslims. Prior oil-price hikes had antagonised the western world against arrogant Arabs from as early as 1974, while Holocaust-based sympathy for Jews and Israel, only compounded the case against Arabs in particular, but Muslims in general.
Secular forces also intervened in that anti-Asian, anti-Muslim, or simply any anti-foreigner mindset. No authority better captures them than Singapore's Kishore Mahbubani (see his The Great Convergence, 2013; and The ASEAN Miracle, 2017): by inducting over 2 (two) billion people into the consumption-spiking middle-class from lower ranks just in this century, Asia was able to bring many more people into the market than there were people in the entire West European continent, in fact, at least as much, if not more people, than in the entire Western Hemisphere (on both sides of the North Atlantic). If that is not all for a very consumer-minded new Asian middle-class bloc, the west population has also shrunk to barely 12 per cent of the world's tally today, that too, in that same neo-liberal age alluded to where market-size matters.
If that does not make the future look worse for western forecasts, the rate at which Asian universities have been climbing global rankings foretells worsening relative positions. One favourite ranking-list in the west is by the Times Higher Education, in the 2016 rankings of which five Asian universities crashed into the Top-50 global universities: National University of Singapore (#26), Peking University (#42), University of Tokyo (#43), University of Hong Kong (#44), and Tsinghua University (#47). With 39 Chinese, 39 Japanese, 24 South Korean, 24 Taiwanese, 16 Indian, and 11 Turkish universities also making upward-mobility noise in a larger list, the western economic sun may be drifting eastwards too fast (Chris Parr, "This is the Asian Century," World Economic Forum, Newsletter, June 2016).
That sun cannot be at two antipodal locations at the same time. Christchurch's catastrophe captures that fleeting sun, signalling a season when fastening our seat belt and keeping extra vigil may make all the survival difference.
Dr. Imtiaz A. Hussain is Professor & Head of the Department of Global Studies & Governance at Independent University, Bangladesh.
