Contemporary Asia is a far more complex economic, political and cultural presence than is typically acknowledged. Associate Professor of History Lisa Trivedi points out that while India, for instance, is "still a country in which many people are extremely poor and live primarily in villages," it also has a proliferating computer industry, the world's largest middle class, the world's largest steel producer and a service economy "poised to challenge the best in the world." Both Foreign Affairs and The Economist lauded "the India model" in 2006, contrasting its high-tech, consumer-driven growth to that of China, which has emphasized low-cost exports and state-centered mobilization of resources.
In China's case, Western media often are unable to see beyond Tiananmen and Tibet, suppression of internal dissent, and the torture of Falan Gong followers — topics of real concern, but only a fragment of the whole picture. The China of today is not the China of the Opium Wars or the Cultural Revolution, says Cheng Li, the William R. Kenan Professor of Government and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It is still a repressive communist state, but as the limits on personal freedom have loosened over the past generation, China has undergone a remarkable transformation. It has experienced the largest urban migration in human history. Two hundred and fifty million people have climbed out of poverty and into an urban middle class. Up and down the coast, there has been a building boom the likes of which the world has never seen. Five thousand skyscrapers have gone up in Shanghai in 15 years. Beijing will host the Olympics next year; Shanghai will be the site of the World Expo in 2010. China has a rapidly modernizing military, an industrial infrastructure and a space program aiming for the moon.
The region has plenty of problems, too, both internally and in foreign affairs. India is saddled with high public debt and the remnants of what critics call suffocating pre-1991 economic controls and regulations. China's development has been staggeringly out of balance; four hundred million people still live on less than two dollars a day. Its rapacious appetite for natural resources has devastated the environment. Beijing tolerates software piracy and the theft of intellectual property. It still claims Taiwan as its own. And it has a huge and growing trade imbalance with the United States — $232 billon last year alone — and is buying up U.S. government debt.
While all this adds up to a potential threat to American interests, China's economic growth also means tremendous business opportunities there, as elsewhere in Asia. Japan and India have the world's third- and fourth-largest economies. Even South Korea, now often overlooked except as a geopolitical foil to the communist North, has the 10th-largest economy in the world. Policymakers can reap the full benefit of these opportunities only if they begin to grasp the region's complex modernity rather than seeing it from the colonial perspective of the 19th century or with a Cold War mentality.
"Sources of competition and opportunity are largely in the Far East," Li believes. "China, India, Japan, some small countries, South Korea, Singapore." And, he adds, we can no longer afford to regard those markets and competitors as distant ones. "The local economy is the global economy," he says. "If you cannot play well locally, you cannot play well globally."
