Easternization: Asia's Rise and America's Decline From Obama to Trump and Beyond

by Gideon Rachman

For the moment, the West’s institutional advantage has led to a continuing American and European dominance of international finance and law—which, in turn, translates into a form of political power. Access to Western financial markets, educational institutions, and courts still matters to the whole world.

The second, and more serious, obstacle to the smooth Easternization of global political power is the divisions and rivalries within Asia itself.

Thus, for the foreseeable future, there will be no “Eastern alliance” to supplant the “Western alliance.”

Most of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment—in both parties—still holds fast to the idea that the United States can and should remain the dominant power in the twenty-first century. These analysts will take comfort from the internal rivalries within Asia, since they hold out the prospect that Western domination of the global order can be prolonged, even as economic power migrates east.

The internal change in China that Western policy makers are willing to advocate openly is the eventual liberalization and democratization of the Chinese system.

A second reason for the United States to play for time in China

is the belief that China is fundamentally unstable and that some combination of economic problems, political upheaval, and regional tensions may eventually stop the country’s rise—or even cause it to break up.

Above all, China’s Communist Party has deliberately used nationalism as a means to shore up its internal legitimacy. Any signs of political turmoil in China will increase the party’s paranoia about Western plots against a rising China—and increase the temptation to focus public anger on external enemies, such as Japan or the United States.

The rivalries between states within Asia—particularly between China and its neighbors—also have the potential to pull the United States into a conflict.

the risks of such strategic miscalculations are rising—in Washington, Tokyo, and Beijing itself.

PART ONE: EASTERNIZATION IN ASIA

the Chinese, in particular, perceive the past as naturally cyclical. With a continuous history that extends across thousands of years, the Chinese are accustomed to the rise and fall of dynasties—with periods of prosperity and progress being followed by periods of chaos and regression.

The history of the American republic has moved only one way, toward greater prosperity and global power. The notion of national decline—or even of cyclical rises and falls in power—seems much stranger and more alien to Americans than to the Chinese.

Some thirty years after Zheng He reached Sri Lanka, China’s rulers banned oceanic exploration—probably on the grounds that it was a waste of resources. By contrast, Europe’s warring kingdoms and empires competed to develop new and better ships and to expand their trading opportunities around the globe.

It was, famously, the Chinese who invented gunpowder, and the first guns seem to have appeared in China in the 1100s.3 It was in war-torn Europe, however, that firearms were developed most rapidly. As a result, when European and Asian armies clashed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Asians were easily outgunned.

Britain’s East India Company was founded in 1600 and remained a largely commercial enterprise for its first 150 years.

East India Company forces defeated the nawab of Bengal and his French allies at the Battle of Plassey. Over the following century, the company used its military might to extend British rule across the Indian subcontinent, often in conjunction with local allies.

Britain’s desire to sell opium produced in India to Chinese consumers led to the notorious First Opium War of 1839–1842.

After Britain’s destruction of the Chinese fleet, invading forces temporarily occupied Canton and Shanghai. In 1842, what the Chinese called the “unequal” Treaty of Nanjing was signed, forcing the Chinese to cede Hong Kong island to Britain in perpetuity (it was returned in 1997) and to open five “treaty ports” to European trade.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the French, the Germans, the Russians, and the Americans had all been granted trading concessions in ports up and down the Chinese coast.

Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States and his fleet of black ships arrived in Japan in 1853, on a mission to compel Japan to open its ports to international trade. The Japanese were well aware of the military humiliations suffered by China. Rather than risk a comprehensive defeat, Japan signed a treaty in 1854, granting the main Western powers trading rights similar to those they already enjoyed in China.

At the outbreak of the First World War, European nations and their offshoots still dominated the world. In 1914, however, Europe’s great powers turned on one another. The First World War marked the beginning of the end of European dominance of the world.

It took the Second World War, however, to end European colonialism in Asia.

it is clear that the Second World War was a decisive moment in weakening the West’s political domination of Asia, creating the conditions for the process of Easternization that is currently unfolding.

The fact that decolonization in Asia had laid the basis for a shift of global political power to Asia was disguised for decades by two crucial developments.

The first was that the United States had succeeded European powers as the dominant political and military power in Asia and the Pacific.

The second critical development was that Asia’s two giants—China and India—turned inward in the 1940s and pursued economic policies that thwarted their economic potential.

The economic transformations that first laid bare the potential of Asia took place instead in Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia—countries that pursued capitalist policies under the shelter of the American military umbrella. It was not until China and India began to pursue similar policies of export-led growth, in the 1980s and the 1990s, that the true economic potential of Asia was unleashed.

Shanghai and Mumbai—the commercial capitals of China and India—are also two of the most important business cities in the world. Yet the symbols of these great Asian centers of commerce are both legacies of Western imperialism.

Many Americans bridle at the very idea that their nation—which was founded in revolution against the British Empire—went on to play an imperial role in Asia.

The humiliations inflicted on China by Britain and other imperial powers may be barely remembered in the UK, but Chinese leaders and intellectuals are intensely conscious of the idea that they are now righting historic wrongs—from the First Opium War of 1839–1842, to the burning of the Summer Palace.

“it is no exaggeration to say that millions, probably hundreds of millions of people in societies that have grown up with a history of subjection to Europe and America—the Chinese software engineer and the Turkish tycoon, as well as the unemployed Egyptian graduate—derive profound gratification from the prospect of humiliating their former masters and overlords.”

in South Korea and even China, the popular and intellectual animus toward Japan is currently stronger than any rivalry with the West.

Attitudes to the West are often a marker of where Chinese citizens stand on the spectrum between nationalism and liberalism.

Nationalists

inclined to dismiss Western pressure on human rights in China or territorial disputes as pure hypocrisy, given the We...

libe...

are more willing to accept that the legacy of Western imperialism is, in s...

Some Indian intellectuals argue that it is a sign of their nation’s growing self-confidence that “we can at last acknowledge, without shame or guilt, the good the British did for us.”

Singapore.

A fierce local pride in the city-state’s transformation from an imperial outpost into one of the great global cities is balanced by an equally fierce determination to protect some of the legacies of British imperial rule—whether that is the architecture of the Raffles Hotel or, more important, a tradition of a highly professional civil service and commercial courts system.

a widespread process of Easternization is under way, as Asian nations reassert their own histories and heritages, and scrape away some of the accumulations of Westernization.

You can see it in something as simple as place-names.

The ascent of China, in particular, has been stunningly fast.

the Chinese economy was just 6 percent the size of the American economy in 1990. By 2000, the figure was still only 12 percent; by 2008 it was 30 percent, and by 2011 it was 50 percent.

Measured in terms of the purchasing power of the average citizen—rather than in real exchange rates—the catch-up is even more dramatic, with China’s economy 58 percent of the si...

The members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are “developed” countries chiefly in the West but also including Japan; they accounted for 62 percent of global output in 1990. But the lines crossed in 2011, with the OECD now accounting for less than half of the world economy. It is growth in Asia that has largely accounted for the “rise of the rest.”15

The share of world real GDP (at PPP) accounted for by North America and Western Europe will fall from 40% in 2010 to just 21% in 2050, while developing Asia’s share will double to 48.1%. The share of China alone is likely to increase from 13.6% to 20%.”

a threat to America’s global position. But China is a much more plausible geopolitical rival to the United States than Japan ever was, for several reasons. The legacy of the Second World War ensures that Japan is very much embedded in the American alliance system that is one of the bedrocks of American global power. Japan is the home to major U.S. military bases on Okinawa and elsewhere, which play host to some fifty thousand American troops.

The political implications of this shift in economic power are profound. America became the world’s largest economy in 1871 and held that title until 2014. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the United States alone accounted for about one-third of global economic output. America has been the world’s sole superpower since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. But the rise of alternative power centers in Asia—and, above all, China—clearly raises the question of how long the United States can continue to dominate global politics. The very prospect of an end to American hegemony is already unsettling international politics and raising fears of war in Asia.