The prospects for a Pacific century

...There may well be, in the future, political conflicts between China and the West, but these would derive from historic great-power shifts, rather than from "culture...

...Economic growth rates are a product, basically, of the mobilization of resources and the education of a labor force...

...South Korea (633,000 troops...

...By the year 2000, we may have a clearer picture...

...All this suggests that the spectacular Southeast Asian growth rates of the last two decades—which may continue into the first decade of the twenty-first century—could reach an asymptote—a slowdown, if not a ceiling...

...Historically, as nations have emerged upon the SPRING • 1995...

...The key to any political community in Asia is China...

...Vietnam (857,000 troops...

...Many Southeast Asian countries, as a recent report of the Morgan Stanley bank suggest, may be near the limits of their potential growth could face unmanageable inflation in the future...

...But to return to the original question: Does all this make the Pacific rim a Pacific community...

...Above all this is the looming presence of China, with its huge population, which has to find some new way of creating political stability and mastering the new economic forces it has unleashed...

...Hong Kong will become a 200 • DISSENT Politics Abroad "mini-Singapore" when it is absorbed into China in 1997...

...Probably it has only been the United States and Japan that have been able to make this transition with some relative stability...

...Electoral reforms and the probable realignments of parties may fashion a new political system...

...Existing knowledge bases have a high rate of obsolescence, and a nation needs the capacity to replace obsolete knowledge and adapt or initiate the new...

...Toward a Pacific Community...

...It makes little sense to think of China as a "Confucian" civilization, especially as the materialist impulses of economic development are running rampant there...

...What is most important is the impact of "modernity" on Asia, and the fear that "modernity," as we have seen it in the West, entails a challenge to traditional values and to traditional structures, especially the patriarchal family...

...Japan's economic growth rates began not after World War II but in the Meiji restoration, beginning in the nineteenth century, when leaders such as General Yamagata and the civilian Prince Ito self-consciously chose the German model of state-led economic mobilization...

...And the postwar cooperation of the two batsu (cliques), the bureaucracy and business, guided Japan's renewed growth...

...A country such as Japan, which has been far in the lead in climbing the "technological ladder," finds itself competing with South Korea in shipbuilding and steel, and increasingly in semiconductors and consumer electronics...

...There are, he contends, "Confucian civilizations" and "Islamic civilizations," which will be increasingly opposed to "the West," as the bearer of modernity...

...satisfying as these may be for the individuals who reclaim them, they do not represent new creative impulses that can expand world culture...

...Nowadays these themes have little meaning...

...It was, however, dominated by one party that rested on a coalition of factions whose strength depended on an electoral system that favored the rural voter and the ruling (Liberal-Democratic) party...

...Nationalism instills a sense of pride and identity within a people...

...Hong Kong and Taiwan account for more than two-thirds of foreign direct investment in China...

...And beyond these, two further aspects: (e) authoritarian versus democratic government and (f) stability and the role of institutionalized succession, or the possibilities of peaceful political change over generational time...

...The making of products depends on standardization within production and cheap labor costs...

...There are also claims to the possibly oil-rich areas of the Spratly and Paracel islands in the South China Sea, which are disputed by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei...

...One is the "ethos or values" of a country that, embodied usually in religion, gives it a distinctive stamp that marks it off from other "cultures...

...There is a crucial distinction between initiating products (that is, invention and innovation) and making products...

...The Pacific community suggests the fifteen nations that make up the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) organization that began in 1989, centering primarily around Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, and China, as well as the United States and Canada...

...As I have argued elsewhere, I think this perspective is confusing and wrong...

...Much of this expectation arises from the fact that in 1960, 4 percent of the world's GNP was generated by the East Asian economies, that in 1990 this rose to 25 percent, and by the year 2000 this may well be 33 1/3 percent...

...A consequence may be more political and labor turmoil, yet that is the price of democracy...

...It is also expanding its navy and air force, and upgrading its nuclearweapon arsenal as well as adopting a new military doctrine that emphasizes rapid deployment...

...If in the next years there is an overt threat to security—say, an action of North Korea against South Korea—the United States would probably rely more on providing technology rather than direct military action...

...ii) heavy industry (e.g., steel, shipbuilding, automobiles, engineering...

...All this reduces the role of Moscow as a major player in the Pacific region...

...There is a Five Power Defense arrangement, which binds together Malaysia, Singapore, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand...

...This is also set within a historical context: the change from an agrarian to an industrial to a postindustrial (or more specifically an information) society...

...197 Politics Abroad hospitality and have their pictures taken...

...In many respects, the regime of President Suharto in Indonesia functions on this authoritarian model, though with a higher degree of family control than in the other countries...

...But what can take its place...

...Few of these authoritarian states have provided for a structured peaceful succession of power once their old rulers have gone...

...In addition, there is a "technological ladder": (i) light manufacturing (e.g., textiles and shoes...

...Security remains, as always, an ever-present problem between nations...

...In all three cases the military still plays an important background role...

...Tokyo can no longer rely, as it has, largely upon the United States for security...

...Cambodia is still not a settled society, with the Khmer Rouge, aided to some extent by Thailand, still a disruptive force...

...The People's Liberation Army (PLA) has received five consecutive years of double-digit budget increases, and is buying a range of sophisticated weapons from Russia...

...Military and Security Questions Few societies can exercise economic and political power without having some military force, where necessary, to back up their power or to provide security against other powers...

...Yet little of this has translated itself into effective regional political cooperation...

...this, in turn, will be translated into a new global politics...

...Japan is the largest investor in Thailand...

...from the demands of new groups, such as a rising middle class, for inclusion in power...

...Japan has been the model of a stable political regime for more than forty years...

...But for historical analysis, it is more useful, I think, to use institutional frameworks and see where nations or economies stand in these terms...

...Much depends upon what kind of succession takes place in China and Indonesia...

...Will economic interdependence overcome historic animosities, such as those felt by Korea and China against Japan...

...Besides the Japanese dispute with Russia over the Kuriles, there is an argument among China, Japan, and Taiwan over the Senkaku islands, about two hundred miles north of Taiwan in the East China Sea, which may have large oil reserves...

...That leaves Japan and the United States, but China has mixed feelings toward both because of the necessity for technology and trade...

...The former Soviet Union is now, effectively, divided into three blocs: Russia, which is primarily the European area, but which is preoccupied with the Ukraine and threats from ethnic groups in Azerbaijan and Chechnya...

...195 Politics Abroad remains a question whether, with the decline of the Congress party, there is a cohesive enough force to keep the nation together...

...Between 1989 and 1993, Sino-Japanese trade increased from about $20 billion to $35 billion, and Japanese investment in China quintupled from $440 million to over $2.5 billion...

...the Central Asian Republics—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan— which are increasingly independent...

...What seems to have happened is an erosion of the distinction between high and low culture, in favor of mass culture, and the erosion of cultural boundaries, as in the novels of Murakami and Endo...

...Yet given this fact, the question may be raised whether economic might translates itself into political and military and cultural leadership, or despite China's still growing so rapidly (though inflation prone), whether the curve of Asian economic activity may not be reaching an asymptote, a ceiling that suggests a slowdown in the future...

...iii) petrochemical (e.g., plastics...

...In Japan, there has been a return, somewhat, to traditional modes, such as the tea ceremony or flower arrangements and to certain crafts...

...and Siberia, which, while nominally part of Russia, is now increasingly oriented to the Pacific rim, of which it is a part...

...And the gains in personal freedom may remain as well...

...To sum up: there has been so much attention to Asia's economic growth and to trade that security matters have been largely overlooked...

...Viewed within this context, the growth of economies such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and to some extent South Korea and China, has occurred because these countries have taken over the production of goods,largely because of cheaper labor costs and standardization...

...Increasingly, the Japanese political world will have to make fateful choices, particularly in the areas of foreign policy and the questions of remilitarization...

...the modern Noh plays of Yamazaki...

...There are the Association of East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Asian Regional Forum (ARF) and the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation organization (APEC), which meet regularly, but all that these organizations seem to do is to have their leaders enjoy one another's lavish SPRING • 1995...

...199 Politics Abroad world scene, this has been accompanied by an upsurge in creativity...

...The iconoclastic economist Paul Krugman argued in the November/December 1994 issue of Foreign Affairs that the growth rates of certain Asian economies, such as that of Singapore, came from huge investments in physical capital and the educational upgrading of the labor force, which may have reached a limit...

...It is clear that Singapore has become the model for China in carrying out Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms...

...the films of Kurosawa and Ozu...

...In 1990, Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad of Malaysia proposed an East Asian Economic Group, which evolved into a caucus known as EAEC, though it is unclear how this differs from the APEC, other than in making strong anti-American statements...

...In the post–World War H period, Japanese culture made a dramatic impact on the West, as great perhaps as the period a hundred years ago when Japonisme, particularly the Ukiyo-e prints, had a major impact on the style of Degas, Whistler, Vuillard and other Western artists...

...All this may be an open question, but my surmise is that the mass consumer culture of the West, particularly of the United States, reinforced by the new technological tricks of video and computer games and animation, will swamp Asia (Japan may already have been swamped...

...These were also state-led economies in which policy (and often administration) was coordinated by bureaucracy, and where labor movements were repressed or bought off...

...In that same period of time the share of East Asian exports to the United States market fell from 34.1 percent in 1986 to 24.2 percent in 1992, indicating a turn away from dependence on the United States to increased trade flows and investment within Asia...

...China, in particular, has been engaged in a military modernization program...

...North Korea (1.13 million troops...

...Yet how much power the political system has vis-a-vis the bureaucracy and the business keiretsu (interlocking companies) remains to be seen...

...The other dimension of culture is artistic...

...The contributions of the grand historic cultures of China and Japan may end up only in the museums, not in the lives of people...

...The change from military and authoritarian regimes to democracy and a reliance on trade, rather than war, are the prerequisites for the creation of a Pacific community...

...Yet in any realistic perspective, these remain major, unsolved issues...

...Singapore is the prime example...

...Cultural Issues Culture can be looked at in two different dimensions...

...South Korea made the transition—which is rare in politics—from a military to an open political system, paralleling, in this instance, Chile and Brazil...

...The victory, briefly, of Morihiro Hosakawa's New Party "broke" that pattern last year...

...China, with its one billion population, seems to be poised for a take-off, yet as the Hong Kong economist Henry K.H...

...The more immediate issue for China is Taiwan, which has been purchasing anti-ship missiles and airplanes from the United States...

...The United States maintains bilateral security treaties with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand, together with the hundred thousand forward-positioned American troops stationed in East Asia, and backed by the Seventh Fleet...

...Throughout the rest of Asia, however, we see authoritarian regimes with a facade of elections and democracy...

...But nationalism also often requires an enemy against which to mobilize a society...

...After about two thousand years of Europeancentered civilization as we know it (in philosophy, religion, and science) and five hundred years of European and then American economic and political dominance, will the center of gravity and the new tidal forces move to the Pacific, as once they had been concentrated in the Mediterranean and then shifted to the Atlantic rim...

...Nonetheless, what is evident today is the large degree of intra-Asian trade...

...q SPRING • 1995...

...With the North American Free Trade Agreement, the United States and its neighbors are developing a common market, and although there may not be a formal North American community, it is clear that on political issues there are few differences between the United States and its neighbors...

...It is clear that communist ideology no longer can be the binding force of the country...

...Yet dynamism, while it creates growth within a society, cannot always control instabilities generated either by war or peace...

...On the "Confucian" side he placed China and North Korea, but not Japan...

...In Europe animosities, as those between Germany and France, were overcome, but largely because there was a new common enemy—the Soviet Union—and a reliance on the United States for defense, through NATO, against a possible military threat...

...There are, still, small territorial claims between Asian nations...

...In the past twenty years, we have seen huge refugee populations flee from Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and East Timor...

...and Pakistan (577,000 troops...

...As an article in Foreign Affairs reports: "With the launch of its H-2 rocket last February, Tokyo has a potential ballistic missile and independent reconnaissance capability...

...The linchpin of Asian security, so far, has been the United States, with its bilateral security arrangements in the region and its status as the world's strongest and most technologically advanced military power...

...And, somewhat surprisingly, Japan is China's largest trading partner...

...As to the first, there has been considerable attention in the last two years to the thesis of Harvard's Samuel Huntington that the old divisions between nations, based on economics and ideology, will now be replaced by a new divide based upon cultural conflicts...

...But in thinking in historical terms, we are dealing here primarily with Asian nations...

...China today has a "floating" population of more than one hundred million persons (almost the entire population size of Japan) as transient groups leave the farms and begin to flood the cities, a transition from agrarian to industrial societies that was barely managed in the past...

...Democracy and "Institutionalized Succession" Other than the Philippines, after the forced departure of Marcos, and an isolated vote in Thailand in 1975, democratic elections for president never directly caused a change of government in East or Southeast Asia prior to the early 1990s...

...All of this is a loss, both for the distinctive cultures of each society, as well as for world culture, which has always been fructified and renewed by the vigor of newly powerful societies...

...The initiation of products depends upon a large knowledge-based college-educated class who are given the opportunity to initiate new products...

...In Europe during the twentieth century, the major powers fought two devastating world wars with each other, but today there is a common market and the framework of a European community...

...The Economic Dimension Most measures of economic performance deal with gross domestic product (GDP), or trade, or capital investment, or productivity and other such narrow economic measures...

...There is first a heritage of conflict...

...But much of this has dimmed and there has been notably little impact on world culture by other Asian countries, with the small exception of some of the newer films from China...

...To identify Islam so completely with fundamentalists in the Arab world and Iran ignores the two largest Islamic countries in the world, Indonesia and Turkey...

...Under Mao Zedong, the society was mobilized against "class enemies" within and imperialism without...

...The other is the "expressive" products in the arts and literature and styles of a society that display its "creative" contributions...

...So it is likely that in the next few years we may see political turmoil in Asia: from competition of different elites for power...

...China, given its historic Confucian system, the rigidities introduced by the totalitarian regime, and the virtual destruction of an older intellectual class, may be handicapped in moving into the postindustrial sectors of economic development...

...Defense spending in the region has been increasing, as many nations are seeking to modernize their forces, and many advanced fighter planes and modern naval vessels have been introduced...

...Japan, and to some extent South Korea, may be best suited to adaptation if there is an expansion in the economic role of the new science-based industries, in particular the revolutions in materials science...

...But there is one historic gain from modernity that cannot be reversed, and this is the greater equality for women and the right of women to make their own decisions, rather than as subordinate to men...

...Lacking institutionalized rules for succession, power struggles are bound to break out, especially in Indonesia and China where the military and the party, the two key instruments of power, are also economic machines...

...There is now, in the West, a reaction against such excesses, and this is reflected, too, in an exaggerated degree, in religious fundamentalist movements...

...Historically, Hanoi was an enemy, but Vietnam today is too small and pitiful...

...There have long been such "civilizational" distinctions and, to a considerable extent, with the exception of fundamentalist movements in the Arab Middle East, Iran, and North Africa, they have even tended to diminish...

...At its best, modernity has meant the extension of personal freedom, particularly in life styles...

...China has long held its culture to be superior, historically, to the other nations of the world...

...Toward The Year 2000 There is little question that Asia is the most dynamic economic region in the world...

...and (v) science-based (e.g., biotechnology, space and satellites, materials science—like fiber optics for copper...

...But Japan has other problems—an aging population and "social deficits" in housing and other dimensions of the quality of life...

...The most obvious candidate is nationalism...

...Trade among the societies of Asia is expanding rapidly, and economic growth (though often based on cheap labor) gives the region an expanding share of the world economy...

...In this "cycle" even the late-coming "tigers" are relocating laborintensive products such as textiles and shoes and cheap electronic items to "sweated" economies such as China and Vietnam...

...At its worst, modernity has meant the overstepping of boundaries to encourage drugs, pornography, libertinism, and the lack of individual responsibility for one's actions...

...Most regimes were military dictatorships or oneparty states that rarely tolerated opposition...

...India is not involved in the trading blocs of the Pacific region, and there SPRING • 1995...

...There were the novels of Tanizaki, Kawabata, Mishima, Abe...

...If we are to assess the future of the Pacific/Asian community, we may see this best, not nation by nation, but along several different dimensions, even though these, in practice, overlap: (a) economic, (b) political, (c) military/security, and (d) cultural...

...India (1.265 million troops...

...or from military conflicts as regimes seek to find "external" enemies in order to rally the society behind the regimes...

...The occupation of Korea and many Southeast nations, such as Indonesia and Singapore, still rankles...

...Yet the transition is unmistakable and is probably irreversible...

...Korea has both the threat of the North and the tight control of the older chaebols (interlocking business groups), which may inhibit new entrepreneurial initiatives...

...These are not automatic sequences for economies, but different capacities...

...Deng, Lee Kwan Yew, and Suharto still hold the reins of power but it is unlikely that they will be there at the end of the decade...

...The crucial question is whether the Pacific rim countries will become a Pacific community...

...This is not the situation in Asia...

...Although there have not been any large-scale land conflicts in Asia for the past twenty years, an uneasiness remains, principally because there is no Asian version of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which serves as a forum for negotiation...

...Therefore, the way we assess the character of a society is by locating it within these distinctions...

...Many open questions remain...

...And Washington would be very hesitant to intervene in the array of other territorial disputes—Japan and Russia, China and Taiwan, China and Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia...

...the architecture of Tange, and other dazzling forms of expression...

...Woo argues in his new book The Making of a New China Mind, the competitive requirements for an economy in the postindustrial age are a knowledge base and intellectual capability...

...The large increases in industrial production (but not productivity) in the Soviet Union in the Stalin period came from the transfer of labor from the agrarian to the industrial sector, and the concentration on specific industrial targets through a command system of the physical allocation of materials and labor—but at a 196 • DISSENT Politics Abroad tremendous cost in efficiency and misuse of capital, all of which became increasingly evident in the Brezhnev period...

...iv) "high-tech" (e.g., instruments and optics, electronics and telecommunications, computers and microprocessors...

...As such they face competitive threats from the outside which are different than the internal threats that they have been able to control...

...But increasingly, the United States has been reluctant to intervene militarily in different parts of the world, especially with land troops...

...Military forces in Asia have been growing...

...If it seeks a leading role in Asia, then it may need a stronger political—and military—voice...

...At the same time, Japan has been forced, because of labor costs and the exchange rate of the yen, to relocate production facilities for autos and electronics to the United States, Great Britain and, in Southeast Asia, to Thailand and Malaysia...

...Finally, there are the "flashpoints" between North and South Korea that threaten, often, to escalate into conflict, and are the basis for the continuing American military presence in Asia, since the United States has already withdrawn from the Philippines...

...By imposing a strong discipline on the society, and regulating immigration (foreign workers usually have to leave after a few years' residence), Lee Kwan Yew has worked an "economic miracle...

...Japan has been increasing its defense budget...

...There are now the beginnings of change...

...There is the old enmity with Russia, but Russia is no longer a player in the Pacific arena...

...Between 1890 and 1941, Japan went to war four times—against Korea, Russia, China, and the United States...

...China has simulated a naval blockade of Taiwan, and in September 1994 undertook 198 • DISSENT Politics Abroad large-scale joint-services maneuvers off its coast just north of Taiwan...

...This has usually been called the realm of "high culture," and Japan provides a bright illustration of it...

...We leave aside India and the former Soviet Union...

...Asia has six of the world's eight largest standing armies: China (3.03 million troops...

...The "Islamic" side was centered in the Middle East...

...And there has long been a xenophobic strain in the attitude of China to other nations...

...Taiwan is now the largest foreign investor in Malaysia and Vietnam...

...Its civilian nuclear reprocessing program will give Japan access to perhaps fifty or more tons of plutonium, and it is building its theatre missile defenses...

...And it remains uncertain whether, after Deng, China can hold itself together and not fall prey to internal regional rivalries...

...The divisions between North Korea and South Korea, as well as China and Taiwan, remain to be resolved...