Barely 30 years ago in 1979, one million Vietnamese soldiers faced another million Chinese soldiers along a tense border, underlining the strength of historical mutual mistrust and suspicion — until Deng Xiaoping unleashed the economic reform in China and promised to share its growing prosperity with its neighbours.
Today, says Kishore Mahbubani, dean of Singapore’s Lew Kuan Yew school of public policy, all the soldiers are gone except for a handful and the military tension on the border has been replaced by the smuggling of cheap and plentiful goods being churned out from Chinese factories, bound for Vietnam and other Asean (Association of South East Asian Nations) markets.
“China’s peaceful rise to the top has been simply masterful in the way it launched a preemptive strike against potential American containment by sharing their prosperity with all its neighbours. Now all the neighbours have such a vested interest in China’s prosperity that they will not join the US containment of China,” Mahbubani said.
India, he added, could take a leaf out of China’s book by offering its neighbours in South Asia the chance to participate in its growth story. “India’s capacity to manoeuvre is limited today because of the several disputes it has with its neighbours. The first test of India’s geopolitical competence is to take care of its own neighbourhood,” Mahbubani said.
“That is why China, even as it climbs to world number 2, will not displace world number 1, the US, because they know it is the greatest strategic error they will make to antagonise that big world power,” he added.
In Delhi to attend the first meeting of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Global Advisory Council last week — which included other key diaspora stalwarts such as Pepsico chief Indra Nooyi, global thinker Amartya Sen, economist Jagdish Bhagwati and information technology czar Sam Pitroda — Mahbubani was applauding the power of prosperity as it dramatically altered both reality and ideology, enabling Asia to snatch back its earlier pre-eminent position from Europe in the race towards an improved standard of living.
At first glance, as he stirs his tea in the noisy café of the Taj hotel in Delhi, Mahbubani looks an unlikely critic of the Bretton Woods empire. But as the recession took its toll of the Western hemisphere in the last decade, he has emerged all guns blazing in defence of the East.
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Multilateral lending institutions like the IMF and the World Bank with Europeans and Americans at their helms should cede power to developing nations like India and China, Mahbubani said, adding that the recession forced the “most unilateral president” of the US, George Bush, to convene the first G-20 meeting in the last days of his presidency in 2008, an acknowledgement of the role other parts of the world now play in the global economy.
Now China and India are rewriting the terms of global economic engagement after the last 200 years of displacement by the West, he said. For the first 18 centuries, China and India powered the world between them, then lost out in the battle for the industrial revolution. But both nations are now back with a vengeance, even as the West continued to be in denial about the Asian resurgence.
To give teeth to this global shift, and broadbase it beyond its national elites, Mahbubani said the Lew Kuan Yew school in Singapore had last year conducted a study on the state of international studies in India — on whose shoulders, along with China, the Asian renaissance was expected to flower.
Mahbubani said he told the PM that if India wanted to continue its dream growth run, then the fate of its schools and universities would have to undergo a significant change. To promote India’s place under the sun, a strong underpinning of international studies was essential. The Napoleonic maxim that information is power is as true today.
“It is paradoxical,” said Mahbubani, “how China, which is supposed to be a closed society seems to be doing much more to prepare itself for its new role on the world stage.”
The LKY study, titled ‘Workshop on international studies in India’, found that to make India a leading centre in education, research and knowledge, it was imperative “to produce a substantive pool of Indian scholars doing cutting-edge work…produce first-rate graduates to meet the demands and opportunities arising from the modernisation and rise of India in a changing world.”
The message, Mahbubani said, was to marry the strength of an expanded international studies network in India to the growing power of the Indian diaspora, and, in turn, leverage the diaspora to improve conditions at home.
Asked what else he told the PM, Mahbubani said he reaffirmed India’s strength of social capital in the diaspora. “Here I compare India with Japan, which has a much larger economy than India, but if you look 10-20 years into the future and ask yourself which country is better equipped to deal with globalisation, clearly India is better than Japan…India has this fantastic, global network where every influential person knows at least one Indian!”
In fact, it was in his 2008 book, ‘The New Asian hemisphere: The Irresistible shift of global power to the East’, that Mahbubani had located some of the global power shifts apparent today.
He is careful to distinguish between the end of history and the end of the Western domination of history, emphasising that the Western “monocivilisational” approach to life (“It was Francis Fukuyama who said that the end of the Cold War signalled the end of history, as if we were all going to become little carbon copies of the liberal, western democratic societies”) was like an invitation to a cremation.
“This is not an Us versus Them argument,” said Mahbubani, arguing that the West has been defining the terms of the debate for 200 years and it was time it gracefully ceded that space it had long outlived. “The West must move to a multi-civilisational approach, having a western perspective is not enough,” he added.
Clearly, India and China are examples of this multi-civilisational approach, as they grow in different directions politically, but converge in terms of free market economies, education as well as infrastructure. However, the modernising instinct is not necessarily the same thing as the western instinct, he added.
“One of the reasons the West is having such a problem with the Islamic world is because the West refuses to understand that the Islamic world thinks differently,” Mahbubani said.
But Mahbubani refused any China versus India comparisons, pointing out that differences were fundamental, beginning with how Indians are used to high degrees of chaos and can still create something out of that chaos, while the Chinese much preferred order and structure and organisation.