Asia Rising

...In her infantile cosmology, liberalism is warm and cozy and inviting and not Mean and everybody can come in to play, bunnies and bears and foxes and snakes, too: "If liberalism welcomes diversity and disjunction, fundamentalism casts these out in the name of purity...

...firms in Japan lie not in consumer goods but in the financial and high-tech industries that Japan will need to pull itself out of its present trough...

...What are today trumpeted as "Asian values" would be recognizable to our forefathers as the old Protestant work ethic...

...0i41...

...In Taiwan, the expansion of the franchise has been accompanied by increasing demands on the public purse...

...Survival was foremost, and Asian governments discovered that the only way out was fast economic growth created by "small pro-business governments"—which in turn benefited from a balance of power maintained by the U.S...

...Her agenda here is ostensibly to exalt literary bliss, but to sing of bliss in language so determinedly unmusical is worse than paradoxical...

...and of course why the old vision of selling China a billion Coca-Colas has been replaced by a billion copies of Windows 95...

...We begin to suspect that the come-one, come-all party invitation might shelter some dress codes in the fine print...

...in the process an entire industry of experts has sprung up eager to explain just how the East was won...

...Neurotics make better theater, but Washington's gift to his country was a temperament rooted in undemonstrative steadiness...

...To put it another way, the real debate today is not whether authoritarianism helped in getting from A to B: history shows that it did...

...But even Steiner sees things cannot be quite so simple: What if, for instance, there are basic disagreements inside...

...And in sharp contrast to the cut-and-paste books that have characterized the genre, Asia Rising is a substantive analysis of the reasons behind that success, and the social, cultural, and political challenges created in its wake...

...The book is also riddled with plain mistakes: 1. "Expatriot" and "expatriotism" are not mere misspellings (like "Mr...

...Without strong property rights and the private institutions they foster, a vote is simply a referendum on who gets to carve up the pie...

...Richard Brookhiser's wise analysis of it is a timely lesson for a contemporary America that worships shallow image and shrinks from the sternness of maturity...

...By welfare, moreover, Rohwer is keen to point out that he means more than public assistance to the poor and indigent: he means a whole raft of government transfers of How the East Was Won & What About Democracy...

...Twice in these pages Steiner actually essays what, in days of yore, English professors were expected routinely to do — 66 March 1996 • The American Spectator...

...when the programs failed (whether in South Korea, Indonesia or Malaysia), policy was smartly turned around...

...Though there is an undeniable link between rising affluence and the escalating demands of a growing middle class for more representative (and less patronizing) forms of government, whether this process moves in a straight line towards U.S.-style democracy is another question altogether...

...the epoch of rapidly growing export markets," he thought, "has ended...

...This is why Boeing believes that almost two-thirds of the growth in air travel will occur in Asia...

...The Salman Rushdie pages are largely devoted to a dry plot summary of The Satanic Verses...

...In 1971 Ross Terrill marveled in the Atlantic Monthly how Chairman Mao's new China "has healed the sick, fed the hungry and given security to the ordinary man"—this at a time when the country was still reeling from the destruction of the Cultural Revolution...

...Mickey Kantor may measure success by how many cars we sell to the Japanese —a "carrying coals to Newcastle" approach—but the real opportunities for U.S...

...Asia has come a long way in the past few decades, and it has come quickly...

...No one has done it better than Jim Rohwer, former Asia correspondent for the EconWILLIAM MCGURN is senior editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review...

...Brookhiser's deft brushstroke portraits of Jefferson the radical-chic liberal and Hamilton the overwrought Burkean elitist point up Washington's biographical Asia Rising Jim Rohwer Simon & Schuster /382 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY William McGurn Modern history has not been kind to the Asia hand...

...Chipps" and many others) but misunderstandings of the word...

...When the beneficiaries floundered," Rohwer writes, they were cut off...

...Between these battling straw men Steiner stakes out a no-man's-land called liberalism, "that most discredited of ideologies...without which aesthetic interpretation becomes grotesque...

...The book's governing idea is simple in the extreme: there are people who, in the name of "totalizing" and intolerant ideologies, would censor art and prevent pleasure...

...Nor does any of this trump Milton Friedman, who would undoubtedly note that non-intervention seems to have had the better record: not only is Hong Kong's per capita GDP more than twice that of Korea's, its economy is far better positioned to meet the new competition coming from an increasingly global economy...

...it was Stephen Dedalus, a character in a novel by Joyce, and what he actually said was: "I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning...

...Liberalism wants everyone inside...

...omist and now a director for CS First Boston in Hong Kong...

...It's true that governments here intervened in their economies in a variety of ways—most commonly by controlling credit and encouraging exports...

...and it is hard to see how the embrace of these virtues by three-fifths of the world's people can be anything but a blessing for the rest of us...

...whatever the sins of Roh Tae Woo and Chun Doo Huan, the twisting of the fledgling institutions of self-rule into a mechanism for settling old scores does not bode well for the ultimate survival of Korean democracy...

...64 March 199 6 The American Spectator income that simply does not happen in Asia...

...It's pretty clear, for example, that those with any other "faith" than liberalism might be "totalizers"—and hence unwelcome at her banquet of bliss...

...The benefits are fairly obvious: "Governments making fewer decisions implies companies making more of them—particularly since the lower taxes that accompany smaller governments lead to higher profits and greater accumulation...

...This is not to say that authoritarianism is necessary for continued growth...

...When she's not mired in academic jargon like "symptomatize," she slips into vulgarity, as when she crows about Hemingway's "virile chest-thumping" being replaced in curricula by the likes of Zora Neale Hurston — "the newly canonized works are often very good...

...What does she get off on, pleasure-wise...

...4. Orwell did not, as Rushdie alleged and Steiner carelessly repeats, endorse "disillusioned quietism" in his famous essay "Inside the Whale"—rather, he lamented it...

...America's new Congress is nothing if it is not about increasing the accountability of the representatives to the people and to the economy by eliminating the incentives politicizing life...

...He's right about the economics, of course...

...The right demands that art be purely aesthetic, DONALD LYONS is the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to the New Criterion...

...Taiwan was at the level of Zaire...

...Actually to believe in anything—say, God, or enduring moral values—is to risk being a wallflower at the Steiner cotillion...

...The process will not be without its jolts and setbacks, but at its core the Asia that The American Spectator • March 1996 65 stands before us today is the Asia that MacArthur sketched out aboard the USS Missouri in 1945: one that with American leadership had turned its energies from war to commerce and was becoming more free with each day...

...In the early 1960's, economist Gunnar Myrdal cast his eye over the region and predicted a sour future...

...These qualities are not a threat to the West," says Rohwer...

...and Chinese and Indian incomes were not even a third of Taiwan's...

...3. Lovelace is the name not just of the "actress-victim in Deep Throat" but also of the villain in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa...

...unengaged with history and politics...

...South Korea was about as rich as the Sudan...

...The irony of it all is that as we move into the twenty-first century American firms are very competitive in world markets, especially in high-value areas...

...problem: he was surrounded by so many complex intellectuals that he comes off as boring...

...Her prose advocates pleasure, offers none...

...Washington's increasing reluctance to shoulder the burdens of military leadership in the region, coupled with a pronounced drift towards managed trade, is, as Rohwer appreciates, "the biggest single threat" to the region's con-tinned development...

...More fundamental is a question even fewer American critics are willing to ask: whether American-style democracy is even desirable...

...Rohwer calls Asia's stunning economic success "the greatest, and most thrilling, event of the last half of this century...

...Today they conjure up frightful images of what Rohwer calls "the American houseboy in Asia...

...She likes "postmodern pastiche ...violation of decorum," things "comic, light, loud, and shamelessly imitative" as opposed to "classical purity [which] is tragic, deep, noble...

...the left reduces art to mere illustrations of the two...

...Capitalism thus becomes associated with the organized crime, prostitution, and drugs that have risen up with it...

...the different nations have met the social and political problems thus created in different ways...

...it is the vote, and the confusion between the two...

...Wbile Steiner's squirming here is amusing, it is about the only pleasure her book offers...

...Then we hear of something called "liberal dogma," of liberalism as "an especially good faith" and "a faith militant...

...But economic success alone may not be enough to overcome public fears that America will find itself pushed into second place by the new competition...

...Her discussion of the NEA controversy owes much to Robert Hughes, and the sketch of deconstruction-guru Paul de Man's Nazi background is indebted to David Lehman's extensive expose...

...Rohwer does not pretend that this will be easy...

...For me the problem with democracy in developing countries is not democracy per se...

...Not least of these, he argues, will be persuading an increasingly ambivalent America that its own interests will best be served in a world committed to a multilateral trading system, and an Asia in which it remains the dominant military power...

...landmarks...

...But in Asia these tensions are felt more acutely because of the tremendous shifts in the social landscape...

...why Citibank is already issuing more Asian credit cards than domestic ones...

...it's suicidal...

...They are what made the West in the first place, and will now help to remake it...

...But it is to say what many American thinkers, on the right no less than the left, have shied away from: the countries that engendered the world's fastest-growing economies were authoritarian, and the one Asian nation that has trumpeted its democratic credentials (the Philippines) is a synonym for corruption and stagnation, living off the remittances of its men and women forced to work in oft-menial jobs abroad to feed their families...

...Purism takes much harder hits when the author reproduces, in full-page illustrations, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and Robert Mapplethorpe's Self-Portrait—the one with the bullwhip sticking into, or out of, his anus...

...But it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interests...

...I am not sure that the aesthetic pleasures he provides are my favorites— Rabelais is not always my cup of tea—but I would not deny them...

...This is by no means a problem limited to Asia...

...Rohwer is almost alone among Asian analysts to note the rise of Christianity in China (evangelical Christianity in particular) out of this desire for some ethical tether...

...Hong Kong's, for example, is but half of Mother England's, and until recently even heavily regulated Japan had the lowest ratio among the developed nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development...

...In China, to name the most important example, a half century of Communism has taken its toll on traditional Chinese culture...

...Purity" is a dirty word in the liberal catechism...

...For despite Asia's interventions, government still accounts for a lower share of gross national product than almost any other Western nation...

...Even Hong Kong has taken a few steps down the road to serfdom lately, and it doesn't help when prominent democrats such as Christine Loh suggest that Hong Kong no longer needs economic growth...

...She swoons over some campy shoe drawings by Warhol, preposterously describing them as reactions "against modernist purism...

...Clearly Asia has done something right these past few decades...

...In Japan in 196o, he points out, each Japanese had only one-eighth the dollar income of Americans...

...I like Mapplethorpe's fearlessness in dramatizing his difference from me," she says...

...Liberalism turns out to exact a faith in no faith but itself...

...What is left is quickly being swept away by capitalism, which is expanding individual options in a place where the culture has been fatally weakened...

...Her culture-war stories are refried beans, heavily dependent, as even sympathetic reviewers have noted, on other writers...

...As Rohwer notes, by the year 2000 Asia will have some 400 million people with incomes equal to the current Western average...

...Because the stakes are so much higher in Asia—for all its progress it remains home to vast millions of desperately poor—American agitation about child labor and worker rights are seen not so much as misguided do-goodism but part of a deliberate effort to keep the region down...

...Besides wringing her hands at the Ayatollah and Senator Helms and Dinesh D'Souza, plus a token frown toward the puritanical left every now and then, what does Steiner like...

...That's a three-fold increase in the number today, another way of spelling opportunity...

...For Rohwer the reasons these nations succeeded was even simpler: they had no choice...

...These fears hearken back to the late 1980's when a cash-flush Japan began a spate of highly public buyouts of major U.S...

...Like all those who appreciate the dynamics of trade, he inclines to optimism here, believing that by the year 2000 "it will be impossible to claim honestly that the rise of Asia is doing anything but good to the economies and businesses of the West...

...These folks come from both the right—those who object to public funding for Andres Serrano or Robert Mapplethorpe, and the mullahs who'd cut off more than funding from Salman Rushdie—and the leftanti-porn feminists and joyless deconstructionists like Paul de Man...

...In political circles this fear tends to be expressed in calls for a "level playing field," but the suspicion out in these parts is that what really worries America is not that Asia is cheating but simply that it is working harder...

...The aim of intervention was not to protect the beneficiary firms from competition, from foreign influences, or from change itself but to accelerate the impact of all these things as a way of upgrading the firms' abilities...

...And though the World Bank in 1993 produced a remarkable volume called The East Asian Miracle charting the region's economic takeoff, when the miracle was beginning in the late 1950's, the Bank had its money on Burma, Vietnam, and the Philippines...

...Intervention that provides a spur is very different from the sort that acts as a cushion...

...The Philippines has the vote, but does anyone really believe it has democracy in the fundamental sense of government of, by, and for the people...

...The real question is what it will take to move from B to C. How the United States responds will have a great deal to say about the answer...

...In Korea, democracy has meant the unleashing of a new reign of terror set to devour the very people who created the Korean miracle...

...2. Babes on Broadway was not one of Busby Berkeley's geometric spectaculars, it's a Rooney-Garland musical...

...The conclusion Rohwer draws is limited but forceful: In the right circumstances, a country in the early stages of economic takeoff will benefit from a government that has the power to override special interests, and that it is quite likely in a poor country with weak institutions that an enlightened despotism will have a better chance of doing this than a democratically elected government...

...5. It was not James Joyce who "said that those concerned with language must live by silence, exile, and cunning...

...I'm not so sure...

...The Pleasure Isn't Ours The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism Wendy Steiner University of Chicago Press 251 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Donald Lyons The Scandal of Pleasure is a collection of thoughts on the culture wars by Wendy Steiner, chairman of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania...

...But the nature of these interventions explains why they were not the disaster they have been in other parts of the world...

...Seventh Fleet and access to the vast American market for their manufactures...

...Whether this will continue as the region's politics become more democratic is not clear, for the challenges of wealth may be more daunting than the challenges of poverty...

...Within the academy there is debate between those who see Asia's success as a textbook example of Capitalism ioi and those who attribute it to key interventions...

...By taking a cold-blooded approach to welfare, Asian nations kept government spending small, which today has left them lean and mean at a time when others (witness the bitter protests in France) are finding themselves caught in a bitter clash between the demands of world markets and their lavish social spending...

...For Rohwer the problem with democracy is the growth of special interests, which are more easily overridden under authoritarian rule...