National University of Singapore's Parang Khanna wrote a must-read book for those keen on how the rest of the 21st century might unravel. Entitled, The Future is Asian: Commerce, Conflict and Culture in the 21st Century, this 2019 publication supplies three overlapping themes with local resonance for discussions here: the growth of Asian market-power; China's infrastructural involvement through the Belt Road Initiative (BRI); and the countervailing US Asian strategy, commonly dubbed the Indo-Pacific Region (IRP). His macro-analysis constantly collides often with micro-level realities. Ultimately, the assumed Chinese world leadership globalises Asia as much as it thickens regionalism (in anchors, flows, and, well, his title: expectations), leaving it as vulnerably placated as it is fortified.
His Singapore colleague, Kishore Mahbubani, and he often depict the massive growth of market-size across Asia, both absolutely and relatively. Mahbubani's poverty measurement indicates that, in this century alone, more people than in the entire western hemisphere population has moved into the consumption-driven middle-class: over 2 (two) billion. This, in Khanna's estimates, will account for a whopping proportion of the $30 trillion middle-class consumption expected by 2030, as against a tumbling $1 (one) trillion in western countries. Led by, if not China anymore, then India, some of the highest economic growth-rates have consistently been in Asia, with mouth-watering performances all along the Asian rim-land: from Seoul and Tokyo in the east to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, with Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Bangladesh, standing out in between.
China's BRI investments played a pivotal part. One flank crosses the Euro-Asian landmass with enough detours to connect the major markets and spectacularly cross some massive mountains. The $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, for example, connects Gwador Port on the Arabian Sea with China's Southern Xinjiang Railway, snaking up the Karakorum peaks and exposing the stunning Gilgit Valley landscape. Just as the Great Wall became a wonder of the old world, this might be one for the post-modern world, exemplifying other such claims, given the enormous BRI outreach, pocket, and vacuous developmental opportunities.
Another flank, across the Indian Ocean, revolves around man-made islands, as in the South China Sea, or brand new ports, either converting old ones for 21st Century usage, as in Djibouti, or minting fresh ones, as in Hambantota. Yet, they highlight a growing debt-trap. Multiplying transactions cannot obscure increasing China-dependence. It is too early for even Khanna to estimate these costs, but with so many desperate countries outside Asia scoping Asian opportunities, his Asian "future" may be riddled with as many pitfalls as promises, not to mention generate too many external networks to make the geographically giant "Asia" notion look smaller in the grander global-flow scheme. Pitfalls, like overzealous BRI extractions, could recall the ostracised World Bank, though delivering the promises without US market-accesses does not seem feasible. Vibrant Asian countries, from China, India, and Japan, down to the second and third string countries, have long sought US market destinations to change the game.
Developments of this kind have not gone unnoticed in the west, particularly in the very country that has always courted Asia-based progress for over a century: the United States. Its own Pacific interests merely extended its 19th century domestic "westward movement" across the North American landmass, and helped initiate both Asia's westernisation, as in Japan after Commodore Perry's 1854 maiden visit, and low-wage migrant-flows that have enormously helped US growth, beginning with the Chinese in the 1860s, then Japanese from the 1890s, before the Filipinos, Indians, and Vietnamese, among others, entered. Fast-forwarding to the BRI emergence today, the United States sought to connect all these dots, militarily through the South East Treaty Organisation (SEATO) from 1954, economically through, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) a decade later. The aborted China corralling "Asia Pivot" and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) projects, down to the IPR target today continue that fruitless streak.
Although Khanna projects fissures brewing within these Asian frameworks, such as the competing infrastructural projects of India and Japan, secular developments, such as US President Donald J. Trump's "America First"-based tariffs against Asian countries, have helped China, India, and Japan to coalesce, unexpectedly promoting, rather than dividing, Asian stocks. Other secular developments could also have the exact opposite and more splintering Asian consequences. A China-fearful Russia could, for instance, easily shift preferences westwards.
Intra-Asian economic, and particularly trade growth may stand out as a 21st century miracle the way Germany's and Japan's were after World War II. Yet, the same problems persist: if it is not the demographic time-bomb (set to decimate the European productivity and purchasing power) already engulfing Japan and, soon, China and South Korea too, then identical nation-building conflicts that kept West Europe a constant battlefield until World War II await in the wings. Many contested boundaries remain, as between India and Pakistan, North and South Korea, or even the China-Russia flank around the Ussuri River. How can China forget those 1969 skirmishes with the Soviet Union when it refuses to bury the East China Sea hatchet with the same invading Japan from a century ago?
Shifting from territorial discussions, top-down governance in many Asian countries also poses problems in an age conflagrated by a representative western counterpart. Unpredictability haunts the air since many are not irreversibly democratic. Disruptions in Malaysia and Thailand, populism in Pakistan and the Philippines, and truly repressive regimes, as in Cambodia, North Korea, and the entire string of post-Soviet Union Central Asian countries, impact day-to-day life, taxing the economy through military expenditures, arms races, and thwarted innovative sparks.
Shifting from the political infrastructures to economic outcomes, many of these countries may be clipping poverty, but without building the costly social safety networks to replace traditional clan-based welfare functions. The faster their economic climb, the quicker those anchors may be needed. Many, led by Bangladesh, face the secular threats of coastal erosion and/or climate-change impacts upon river-flows disrupting agriculture. In even more, urban pollution is taken as a given of modernisation, unnecessarily exposing health and inefficiencies.
Be these as they may, the BRI payback terms may become the straw to break the camel's back. Much has been written on this, even in this newspaper, for example, the debt-burden of Pakistan and Sri Lanka over Gwador and Hambantota port-construction, and with 99-year land-leases to mollify the Chinese turning into export processing zones, Chinese arm-twisting may even surpass the World Bank's while deepening economic Chinese dependency. Such an unsustainable transactional atmosphere threatens the most durable foundations of all: each country's infrastructures.
Rising economic costs revives the very plague hitting the United States so hard that the Trump presidency has even contemplated retreating into isolation. His "America First" may be rhetorical, but the military-led IPR proposal may be the wrong approach to the wrong problem at the wrong time. Learning SEATO lessons rather than fishing in the dark could help.
Both authors capture the growing Asian dominance. Yet, elevating it as the century's only clarion call does not do justice to historical patterns, instinctual policy-making fickleness, and the numerous local tensions one cannot simply gloss over no matter how broad a brushstroke China, India, or Japan may be making. The future will be Asian, but also spotted, as before.
Dr. Imtiaz A. Hussain is Professor & Head of the Department of Global Studies & Governance at Independent University, Bangladesh.
imtiaz.hussain@iub.edu.bd