No doubt the new Asia is part of the “crazy vitality of capitalism.” There’s little difference, not surprisingly, between the business pages of East and West—the same rollercoaster of stock ratings, celebration of management gurus and CEOs, only now some names are different. Business media in South Korea, Thailand, China, or India display the same Dionysian celebration of accumulation and consumerism. Surely there are multiple “Asias,” yet looking at the business pages there’s only one, engrossed in market worship. The news and editorial pages strike different and more mixed tones.

Is rising Asia being annexed to the world of interlinked golf courses with manicured lawns, country clubs, luxury estates, air conditioned airports, and a low profile, invisible proletariat? In China, this is the “Shanghai model.” In India, “golf cities” are emerging in Delhi, Jaipur, Lucknow, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Goa, combining golf courses with residential complexes. Srinagar’s golf course has sand imported from Australia because the local gravel isn’t up to par.

India boosterism is as prominent inside India as outside. A speech by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in New Delhi is reported under the headline “Next Bill Gates Could be an Indian.” “Harvard Here We Come,” cheers another headline. Asia is now “the most optimistic place in the world” notes another report, part of the nonstop hype. What is the relationship between the India of Tom Friedman (The World is Flat) and P. Sainath (Everybody Loves a Good Drought), between celebrating growth and deepening poverty, between Gurgaon’s Millennium City of Malls and abject poverty kilometers away, between dynamic “Cyberabad” as Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh, is often referred to, and rising farmer suicides nearby in the same state?
What is the place of inequality in this script? Is inequality a process glitch, a quirk en route to “superpower” status? Is inequality “over the horizon,” out there in the boondocks, unrelated to fast track success? Or, rather, is inequality one of “The Seven Habits of Effective Nations”? Is inequality a condition of accumulation, particularly of fast track growth, and would wealth not happen or shrivel without land appropriations, dispossession, and uprooting of the poor?

I devoted my fall 2006 sabbatical to a trip through six Asian countries posing the general question, “What are the social realities behind ‘Asia rising’?”. Secondly, while the world is talking about Asia, especially about China and India, I wanted to interrogate what Asia is talking about, what the local debates are.

In South Korea, questions of social justice—which have sharpened since the neoliberal turn of 1998—tend to be overshadowed by geopolitical concerns. Trade unions protest the free trade agreement that is under negotiation with the U.S., but public discourse is preoccupied with North Korea and, to be on the safe side, stays close to American security approaches—even as the sunshine policy of economic cooperation and political dialogue with North Korea continues. In this part of the world, says a colleague, the cold war isn’t over.

In Japan, social inequality has increased sharply during the Koizumi years, privatization is in motion, and the public sector looks bad or is made to look bad (inefficient, costly). Protests occur but remain local, shut out from the media and, in the general climate, a recent book observes, zombie politics prevails.

In Thailand, the talk of the day is the military coup of 19 September. Everyone agrees that Thaksin monopolized power and was preparing a total takeover, so arguably this was a coup to prevent a coup. The democratic process, even with the 1997 People’s Constitution was no match for an organized populist power grab like Thaksin’s—Asia’s Berlusconi, complete with big money and savvy media campaigns. One of the coup leaders is a business rival of Thaksin, so the intervention is also an intra-elite rivalry. Besides, a coup to prevent a coup is still a coup, and the ways part between those who want no part in this and those, including colleagues, who agree to take part in a government advisory committee “so the voice of the people can be heard.” Here, too, the Free Trade Agreement that is under negotiation with the U.S. is a major bone of contention.

Bangkok’s new super trendy malls—spacious sophisticated steel and glass designs, such as Paragon, with up-market stores well beyond the Asian bazaar with its mishmash of little shops under a roof—are striking. Ermenegildo Zegna, Versace, and Gucci stores display a luxury that would stand out in many western capitals. Hotels and department stores tower over Bangkok, overshadowing temples and palaces. Bangkok makes a bid to be Southeast Asia’s leading shopping center. The smooth monorail Sky Train connects shopping areas but doesn’t reach the poor on the city outskirts.

The Thaksin government violently repressed militancy in the Muslim south. It is as if rampant capitalism the world over goes together with a punitive attitude to marginal minorities. I spent a weekend in Pattani in the south in a meeting with radical Muslim intellectuals. They hold Ph.D. degrees from universities in Saudi Arabia, lecture at colleges that receive Saudi funding, maintain links with Aceh in Indonesia, and compare their educational and job opportunities with their fellow Muslims in majority Muslim Malaysia next door. This transnational horizon is part of their militancy. So is the memory of the Kingdom of Pattani as an ancient trading power. Repression will not change this. According to Thailand’s human rights commissioner, the new government seeks to develop a more conciliatory approach grounded in regional development policies.

Two globalization stories
About cutting edge globalization there are two big stories to tell. One is the rise of Asia and the accompanying growth of East-South trade, energy, and security relations. Some of this story is being covered in the general media. The other story, which is being covered only in a patchy way, is that these developments combine with major social crises in agriculture and urban poverty. In China, this is widely recognized and being addressed; in India, public awareness is split between middle class hype and recognition of social problems, but there are no major policies in place to address the main problems.

In China, there is a clear sense of a new direction. The party’s harmonious society policy is a serious response to social crisis and the spate of protests, particularly in the countryside. The problems of rural and urban poverty are staggering. They require difficult balancing acts between growth and social cohesion and local government capacity is limited to address them. If you reckon that 70 percent of China’s workforce, about 800 million people, has only a primary education, the “China threat” seems remote and overblown. The political commitment to achieve a new balance is apparent, for instance, in the ouster of the party’s Shanghai leader on corruption charges, which signals a break with the “Shanghai model” that prevailed under Jiang Zemin.

The Shanghai way meant rubbing shoulders with the powerful and following American economic examples; now inner circles debate China’s dollar reserves of $1 trillion, obviously a delicate matter. With 70 to 80 percent of its foreign reserves in U.S. dollars, China deviates markedly from the world average of dollar reserves which approached 60 percent in 2006. There are growing environmental concerns as well. The “new left” questions whether the planet can bear another billion keen consumers.

The “Beijing Consensus” has emerged as a Chinese alternative to the “Washington Consensus.” An emerging policy debate, not nearly as well developed as the harmonious society, concerns the harmonious world, or the idea that China’s rise should not come at the expense of other developing countries and the world’s poor. This is new on the agenda and is yet to take shape and find a balance with China’s other priorities. The November summit with 48 African countries was about resource relations and weaning African countries from relations with Taiwan but also concerned development cooperation.

India: Laxmi all the way
Such an urgent sense of seeking a new balance between growth and social cohesion is absent in India. That India lags way behind China is widely acknowledged—infrastructure is miserable, manufacturing is limited, and agriculture is in deep crisis. The IT sector, real estate, and retail are booming but are limited to the urban English speaking middle class.

Not only is there no comprehensive policy to target rural and urban poverty, but policies that are in place aggravate them, such as letting multinational corporations into agriculture (for aren’t market forces more efficient?) and vast land appropriations for info tech campuses, dams and Special Economic Zones. Public discussion is dominated by the electoral labyrinth of caste and communal politics—expanding reservations for higher education and government jobs to Other Backward Castes and possibly to underprivileged Muslims. The Hindu-right BJP (Bharatiya Janta Party) government fell because “Shining India” didn’t shine on the poor masses. The current Congress government is headed in the same direction—fast growth policies geared to attract foreign investment (the China model) at the expense of rural majorities and the urban poor. Between 1993 and 2003, according to official figures, 100,248 farmers committed suicide. Add to this a rising security threat. Armed Maoist struggles have spread to 170 rural districts, affecting 16 states and 43 percent of the country’s territory.1 With current policies, this unrest may double in size and scope.

Rapid growth in India is more recent than in East Asia and China, so quality growth comes later on the agenda. India’s multiparty democracy and the bureaucracy’s middle class leanings are other considerations. But more fundamental is caste politics. Most political debate and electoral juggling in India concerns caste and religion. Though advertised as “the world’s largest democracy,” India can also be described as “a confederacy of castes and tribes.”

Consider a mundane point. India is among the few Asian countries with hardly any public garbage cans and public toilets, even in New Delhi’s prime shopping areas. Is this because, in Brahmin culture, private purity prevails over public hygiene and sharing public facilities runs against caste segregation? Pakistan and Bangladesh and some Southeast Asian countries, not Hindu, also make do without public toilets, while public hygiene in Kerala and Tamil Nadu is much better than in the rest of India, so the issue is not quite as straightforward as it might seem. This example does indicate that in most of India the public sphere is undeveloped. This reflects a deep culture of inequality. Sunil Khilnani describes conditions in late colonial India thus: “The lower and poorer orders were ghostly presences—they came in at dawn, did their jobs, and melted away into the obscurity of their shacks beyond the middle-class colonies.” Sixty years on, the situation is not all that different. Unlike China, India has not experienced a social revolution. At this juncture, when India is experiencing economic success, the entrenched culture of caste and inequality may well be the biggest hurdle on its path.

American security and cultural influence in Asia are waning, and yet, as if it is still the 1990s, many government and business circles regard American capitalism as the most dynamic variety. Under the headings of “innovation” and “dynamism,” this attitude yields a conservative international business conformism. The successes are widely advertised (Microsoft, Wal-Mart etc.) but awareness of the growing failures of that model is dim (Enron, Katrina, near bankruptcy of GM and Ford, rising productivity and profits yet stagnant wages in the United States). Keen neoliberals influencing policy from Northeast to South Asia offer the odd spectacle of Asians underrating their own experience, their own developmental capitalism and alternative modernity, in particular the East Asian and Chinese experience.

If the new Asia contributes to social polarization and deepening ecological crisis, then what is new? The geography and history are different, but the script is familiar. The location changes and now, say the new elites under their breath, it’s our turn to screw up the world. This is not emancipation but annexation. It is the prestige merely of joining the club, not changing the club.

1 The figures are from a special issue on “Two Indias One Future” of Tehelka, The People’s Paper, 25 November 2006, pp. 14 and 9.