[Kabar-indonesia] The Triumph of the East

[Joyo at aol.com]

The New Statesman [UK] 
27th June 2006

The triumph of the east

It is a commonplace that the past hundred years saw
the ascent of the west, even that it was the "American
century". This is a mistake. What really happened was
the rise of Asia, and the start of a momentous global
shift.

By Niall Ferguson

In the aftermath of the First World War a retired
German schoolteacher named Oswald Spengler published
the first volume of one of the most influential books
of the 20th century: Der Untergang des Abendlandes,
known to us as The Decline of the West. These days
Spengler is seldom read; his prose is too turgid, his
debt to Nietzsche and Wagner too large, his influence
on the Nazis too obvious. And no one takes seriously
his theory that cultures, like the weather, pass
through seasons. Yet Spengler expressed better than
almost anyone the inter-war German revulsion against
all that had been achieved by the west before 1900.

"The last century," he wrote, "was the winter of the
west, the victory of materialism and scepticism, of
socialism, parliamentarianism and money. But in this
century blood and instinct will regain their rights
against the power of money and intellect. The era of
individualism, liberalism and democracy, of
humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The
masses will accept with resignation the victory of the
Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them."

It was not a bad prediction of the direction German
politics would soon take. In particular, Spengler
grasped that the backlash would manifest itself partly
as a war on cities, which he saw as the embodiment of
a decadent civilisation. After "the powers of the
blood" had been reawakened by the "new Caesars", the
result did leave scores of European cities in ruins.

Nevertheless, events since 1945 have tended to
discredit Spengler's idea of a western downfall. It
has seemed much more persuasive to represent the
history of the 20th century as part of a protracted
occidental ascendancy. "Much of the last three
centuries," wrote the late J M Roberts in his Triumph
of the West, published in 1985, "is the story of a
triumph of the outright power of the west." It was a
triumph not only of western power but above all, he
argued, of western civilisation.

Just four years later, the 20th century appeared to
culminate in a comprehensive western victory, with the
break-up of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe and
the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. Famously, on
the eve of those events, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed
"the end of history" and the victory of the western
model of liberal, democratic capitalism. The west, far
from suffering its downfall in the 20th century as
Spengler anticipated, appeared to attain its historic
zenith.

Yet in many ways this represents a fundamental
misreading of the past hundred years. The 20th
century, far from being a time of western ascendancy,
witnessed something more like a reorientation of the
world and the decline of the west - not a decline in
the cultural sense that Spengler envisaged, but
relative economic decline, relative demographic
decline and, above all, imperial decline.

In 1900 the west really did rule the world. From the
Bosphorus to the Bering Straits, from Siberia to
Ceylon, nearly all of what was then known as "the
Orient" was under some form of western rule. The
British had long ruled India, the Dutch the East
Indies, the French Indo-China; the Americans had just
seized the Philippines; the Russians aspired to
control Manchuria. All the imperial powers had
parasitical outposts in China. The east, in short, had
been subjugated.

What made this possible was not so much scientific
knowledge in its own right as its systematic
application to both production and destruction.
Economic historians disagree about the timing of what
Kenneth Pomeranz has called "the great divergence" of
the economies of the west and the Orient. In his
seminal book of that name, Pomeranz argues that it was
only after 1750 that western Europe leapt ahead, due
mainly to the "windfalls" of New World colonies and
conveniently located coal.

The economic historian Angus Maddison, however, places
it earlier. In 1600, he estimates, China accounted for
as much as 29 per cent of global output, but
thereafter relative decline set in. By 1913 the figure
had plummeted to 9 per cent, even though China was
still home to nearly a quarter of the world's
population. Western Europe alone accounted for a third
of global output, but barely one in seven of the human
race.

Modernisation à la carte

Whenever it began, western ascendancy was due to more
than sugar and coal. It was also due to the failure of
the Asian empires to modernise, to say nothing of the
relative stagnation of oriental intellectual life.
Democracy, liberty, equality and, indeed, less benign
ideals such as racial purity: all of these concepts
originated in the west. So, too, did all the
significant scientific breakthroughs of the modern
era, from Newton to Einstein.

Historians influenced by Marx have very often made the
mistake of assuming that the backwardness of eastern
societies circa 1900 was the consequence of imperial
"exploitation". Rather, it was their backwardness that
made European imperial domination possible.

British rule over India was very far from a triumphant
success from the point of view of economic
development. Per capita income stagnated. The
subcontinent continued to suffer from periodic famine.
Yet it is hard to believe that, had the Mughals
continued to rule through the 19th century, the life
of the average Indian would have been much better. In
fact, the experience of China suggests that it might
have been worse. There, the continuation of Asian
imperial rule was characterised by a succession of
bloody rebellions, symptoms of the breakdown of the
imperial structure.

The Taiping Rebellion (1851-64), a peasant revolt led
by the self-proclaimed younger brother of Christ,
claimed between 20 and 40 million lives, according to
contemporary western estimates. Also bloody were the
Nien and Miao Rebellions, as were the Muslim
rebellions in Yunnan and north-western China. In some
cases the declines from one census to the next imply
mortality rates ranging between 40 and 90 per cent.

To blame these disasters on western commercial
penetration is to get the causation the wrong way
round. It was the crumbling of imperial rule that
allowed European merchants to carve out privileged
enclaves in China's principal entrepôts, European
bankers to run China's fledgling railways, and
European officials to collect China's customs revenue.

Nothing epitomised the subjugation of Asia better than
the violation of Chinese sovereignty in 1900 by a
multinational force (from Austria-Hungary, Britain,
France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the US) sent
to suppress the Boxer Rebellion, an inchoate,
millenarian, anti-Christian movement that had arisen
in the province of Shandong.

The Boxers' faith in martial arts and magic availed
them naught. Having raised the siege of the Beijing
legations, the international force staged a "grand
march" through the Forbidden City, pausing only to
"acquire" some ancestral Manchu tablets as booty for
the British Museum.

It is only when one appreciates the extent of western
dominance in 1900 that the true narrative arc of the
20th century shows itself. This was not "the triumph
of the west", but rather the crisis of the European
empires, the ultimate result of which was the
inexorable revival of Asian power and the relative
descent of the west.

What changed? The answer is that gradually, beginning
in Japan, Asian societies modernised themselves, or
were modernised. As this happened, the gap between
European and Asian incomes began to narrow and the
great divergence of the preceding centuries began to
be reversed.

If the Orient had simply "occidentalised" itself, of
course, we might still salvage the idea of an ultimate
western triumph. Yet no Asian country - not even Japan
in the Meiji era, when government ministers adopted
tailcoats and western dance steps - was able or wished
to transform itself into a replica of a European
nation state. On the contrary, most Asian nationalists
insisted that their countries modernise à la carte,
embracing only those aspects of the western model that
suited their purposes.

Crucially, the reorientation of the world could not
have been, and was not, achieved without conflict. The
Japanese, in particular, understood from the outset
that parity with the west meant war. That was why
their victory over Russia in the Manchuria war in
1904-05 was such a turning point; it was the first
meaningful victory won by an Asian power over a
European empire in well over a century.

Japan set a pattern. It began with a military
challenge, but ultimately switched to economic
competition. In the course of the 1930s Japan defied
the western powers by extending her domain into
Manchuria and all the way down China's eastern
seaboard. The Chinese, weakened by civil war, could
not repel the invaders. Japan, however, was acutely
vulnerable to western sanctions because of her
dependence on imported oil, rubber and other
militarily vital raw materials.

The Japanese decision to attack simultaneously the
European empires in Asia - the British, the French and
the Dutch - and the United States in the Pacific was a
doomed gamble. Yet, though it was impossible for Japan
to defeat the US, her victory over European
imperialism inflicted irreparable damage. One by one,
the Europeans' attempts to resuscitate their Asian
empires after 1945 foundered. Japan had permanently
shattered the illusion of innate western supremacy,
and her appeal to other Asians to throw off the
European yoke resonated throughout the postwar period.

"Europe and America don't want Asia to awaken," wrote
Okawa Shumei in his book The Establishment of Order in
Greater East Asia (1943). "[But now] the dark night
enveloping Asia has begun to break and the light of
hope has shone from the east . . . Now Asia is on the
verge of overturning European control everywhere and
is about to destroy corrupt indigenous social
traditions and to shed blood in building independent
nations."

Time to think with the blood

So it proved. Nationalists from the former Dutch
colonies hailed Japan as "the Leader of Asia, the
Protector of Asia and the Light of Asia". Ba Maw, the
Burmese nationalist whom the British had imprisoned in
1940, told delegates at the Tokyo conference of the
Greater East Asiatic Nations in November 1943: "This
is not the time to think with our minds, this is the
time to think with our blood . . ." The pre-war
Filipino ministers Jose Laurel and Jorge Vargas
declared that the Japanese victories "vindicated the
prestige of all Asiatic nations".

In this regard, the Second World War, far from marking
the advent of the "American century", was the decisive
moment in the relative decline of the west, even if
there was one western empire in Asia that endured into
the 1980s (the Soviet Union).

Military defeat did amazingly little to dissipate
Japanese energies, which were now directed
wholeheartedly into economic imitation of, and
competition with, the west. Between 1950 and 1973 no
economy grew faster than Japan's, which achieved an
average annual growth rate of per capita GDP in excess
of 8 per cent, more than three times the rates
achieved in the English-speaking world. At the start
of that period, Japan's economy was smaller than that
of Italy. By the end, it was close to taking second
place behind the US.

Why did other Asian countries - and particularly the
most populous ones - take so long to replicate Japan's
growth rates? The answer lies once again in the death
throes of the occidental empires. For one legacy of
western imperialism was to discredit all those things
for which the west had claimed to stand: the rule of
law, private property rights, the free market,
representative institutions.

"The time has gone for ever," declared Peng Dehuai,
the Chinese commander in the Korean war, "when the
western powers were able to conquer a country in the
east merely by mounting several cannons along the
coast." He was right. Neither in Korea nor in Vietnam
was it possible for the US and its western allies to
win decisive victories after 1945.

One tragedy of the second half of the 20th century,
however, is that it took so long for Peng's country to
appreciate that the rejection of western political
dominance did not necessitate the rejection of the
market economy. Mao's breakneck industrialisation,
followed by his cultural revolution, cost tens of
millions of lives and left the average Chinese citizen
little better off. In 1950 per capita GDP in China was
21 per cent of the world average. By 1973 it was 20
per cent.

Nor was it only China that suffered stagnation. After
the US withdrawal from South Vietnam, Indo-China did
not rebound, and India, though democratic, was
afflicted by a stifling combination of British
bureaucracy, Soviet-style planning and agrarian
populism. As recently as 1968 the US per capita
income, measured in current dollars, was still 120
times higher than that of east Asian countries. The
irony is that the ideology most responsible for this
final phase of stagnation - Marxism - was yet another
western import.

The days of Asian stagnation are gone. Today, after 25
years of double-digit Chinese growth, the average
American is just 30 times richer than the average east
Asian and earns an income, if one calculates their
respective earnings on the basis of purchasing power
parity, just eight times higher.

Again, what made this possible? The Soviet collapse of
1989-91 tended to distract western attention from far
more profound changes already under way on the other
side of the world: in China, another communist regime
had worked out how to introduce economic reforms
without making political concessions.

When Deng Xiaoping arrived in Washington on 28 January
1979, his trip was the consequence of a momentous
internal upheaval in the Chinese Communist Party. The
previous month, at the party's 11th Congress, the
decision had been taken to reorient China's economy
toward the market. Deng's strategy was to break up
communal control of agriculture and encourage the
development of township and village enterprises.
Within a few years, such rural businesses accounted
for nearly a third of total industrial production.

The crucial thing about Deng's US trip was that it
ensured that, as China industrialised, its exports
would have access to the vast US market. It also
ensured that, when Deng created free-trading special
economic zones along the Chinese coast, American
companies would be first in line to invest directly
there, bringing with them vital technological
know-how.

US firms saw this as an opportunity to "outsource"
production, and some analysts even predicted that the
SEZs would become like American colonies in east Asia,
while others quietly hoped that exposure to the free
market would weaken the Communist Party. This would
certainly have represented a triumph for the west, but
things did not work out that way.

When a potentially revolutionary situation developed
in 1989, the regime did what communist regimes had
routinely done when confronted with internal dissent:
it sent in the tanks. On 4 June 1989, the Democracy
Wall movement was suppressed ruthlessly, unknown
numbers of the students were arrested and leading
dissidents were jailed. Political reform was choked
off, but economic growth was not.

Like other Asian economic miracles, China's has been
propelled more by trade than by domestic consumption.
More than 11 per cent of US imports today come from
China - and the number is rising. Though American
companies hoped to become beneficiaries of the Chinese
export boom by investing in Chinese subsidiaries,
barely a tenth of recent foreign direct investment in
China has come from the US.

Indeed the roles have been reversed. As the US trade
deficit has soared, it is the Chinese who have been
lending to Washington. Meanwhile, more and more US
manufacturers are coming under pressure from Chinese
competition, because not only are wages in China a
fraction of wages in America, the Chinese have also
restrained the appreciation of their currency against
the dollar. And it is no longer just cheap apparel and
toys that they are exporting. Electrical machinery and
power-generation equipment accounts for more than
two-fifths of the US-China trade deficit.

America hoped that China would become a giant economic
subsidiary, but it is now an economic rival. A
forecast by Goldman Sachs has suggested that China's
GDP will overtake that of the US as early as 2041.
Some strategists anticipate not only trade wars but
conceivably also real wars over such questions as the
status of Taiwan.

Thus the supposed "triumph of the west" in 1989 is
exposed as an illusion. The revolution that Deng had
launched ten years earlier turned out to have much
further-reaching economic implications, and Deng's
ruthless suppression of opposition in 1989 was a more
important event than Mikhail Gorbachev's capitulation
before it that same year.

Smart money

A hundred years ago, as we have seen, the west could
justly claim to rule the world. After a century in
which one western empire after another has fallen,
that can no longer be claimed.

To be sure, the United States remains the world's
biggest economy and is still the predominant military
power. Moreover, the financial crisis of 1997-98 in
the so-called "tiger economies" provided a painful
reminder that even economic miracles can suffer
setbacks. Nevertheless, the smart money has to be on
China's leaders avoiding such pitfalls; and so, the
process of global reorientation that began in the 20th
century will continue and, indeed, accelerate.

We in the west would be foolish to hope for it to
slacken, alarmed though we may sometimes feel. The
descent of the west is not to be dreaded if it is
primarily the corollary of the ascent of Asia out of
poverty. At least we can hope to ensure that this next
stage of the great east-west reconvergence is less
marred by conflict than the first phase - the phase we
know as the 20th century.

Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch Professor of
History at Harvard University. His new book, "The War
of the World: history's age of hatred", has just been
published by Allen Lane, the Penguin Press (£25)

[http://www.niallferguson.org]

China by number

100 billions of US dollars saved by American consumers
in the past 25 years by purchasing low-cost Chinese
imports

61% year-on-year increase in bilateral trade between
the EU and China, 2005

20% of the world's population is fed by China

7% of the world's arable land falls within Chinese
borders

Research by Sohani Crockett

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