经济学人：Introducing our new Asia column: Banyan

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Banyan
In the shade of the banyan treeApr 8th 2009
From The Economist print edition
It’s time for a column about half the world’s people
Illustration by M. Morgenstern


SOME 165 years, 161 years and 114 years since its correspondents first filed reports respectively from Calcutta, Shanghai and Yokohama, The Economist this week launches a column on Asian affairs. We have taken a while, but is this not, after all, to be the Asian century? We think probably so.
For some, however, dedicating a column to the idea of Asia is to jump the gun by many years. Lexington writes of a clearly etched polity with a written constitution, Bagehot an unwritten one. A constitution is still not within the grasp of the European Union, but the “European project” provides a justifiable basis for Charlemagne. In Asia, an insipid collection of regional and sub-regional clubs amounts to something far short of a continental project. The last powerful intellectual push for pan-Asianism was promoted nearly a century ago by Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali Nobel laureate. He was rapturously received on tours in China and Japan, where he urged people to counter Western imperial might and material with sacrifice and an Asian spiritualism.


Yet Tagore was more often rejected. The head of the nascent Chinese Communist Party mocked dreamers like him for seeking to “destroy our railroads, our steamships and our printing presses in order to return to woodblock printing, the canoe carved from a tree-trunk, the wheelbarrow.” Imitation of the West seemed wiser than atavism, not least among Japanese, who in the 1930s dressed pan-Asianism in wolf’s clothing. Any broader Asian dream must escape from the grotesque shadow of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, the name given to dignify Japan’s occupation of its neighbours in the 1930s and 1940s.

That name itself highlights another problem, that of geography. For most of its history, Asia has not just been indifferent to its own existence, as Bill Emmott, a former editor of this newspaper, puts it in “Rivals”, his book about China, India and Japan. There has also been confusion about quite where Asia is. For East Asia, Japan’s militarists had in mind those places heavily touched by Confucianism (China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan), plus Indochina, the Malay Peninsula and the island states of the Philippines and Indonesia. Yet much of this area is well south of South Asia, big chunks of which are still north of the modern definition of East Asia. Central Asia, belying its label, is on the edge of this space politically as well as physically. The continent, as we noted when we introduced an Asia section in The Economist in 1987, is a “geographical accident”, stretching for our purposes from Kazakhstan in the north-west to New Zealand in the south-east and from the Maldives in the south-west to the northern tip of Japan.

The suspicion lingers that Asia is a Western construct. Yet the search for an Asian identity is growing. It forms the backdrop to the annual East Asia Summit, held this year in Thailand from April 10th, grouping the ten South-East Asian countries with not just their partners in China, Japan and South Korea but India, Australia and New Zealand as well. The powerful impulse for co-operation is materialism based on rapid economic development: the antithesis of Tagore’s invocation. Japan raced down this path to prosperity 150 years ago. At the turn of this century, it looked as though China would have the field pretty much to itself, having brought 250m out of poverty since its autarky ended in 1978. But India was also throwing off many self-imposed shackles, and has since thrust itself forward. And Asia has prospered. If differences in prices among countries are taken into account, its share of world GDP has gone from 26% in 1990 to 38% in 2007.

To many in China and India, this marks a return to historical greatness. There remains a long way to go. Both countries’ economies were relatively much bigger before the West’s industrial revolution. For now, growth is bringing wealth, respect and freedom of action. The global economic slowdown, however hard it is hitting Asia, may in relative terms serve to bolster Asian influence. After all, the world looks to China as an engine of growth. Japan leads the drive to boost the resources of the IMF as the backstop to national economies in crisis.

Trade is already promoting economic integration. Two-fifths of Asian exports, and rising, are intra-regional even if half that share forms part of a global supply-chain anchored in the West. But the political process may in the end prove even more profound. The region must see that the simultaneous rise of two continent-sized big powers is peaceful. A main issue is whether or when China will seek to regain its historical role as East Asian leader. Another is whether India has definitively left the problems of its subcontinent behind it, or will again be held back by the bitter disputes with its neighbours. The chief Asian project will be to enmesh both countries into a broader set of economic and security norms, while ensuring a continued security presence for the United States, still the region’s top dog in military terms. Failure would put paid to notions of an Asian century.

Asian valuesSo why Banyan? A dearth of pan-Asian images speaks volumes, but the banyan tree serves better than most, for it or similar trees are found somewhere in most Asian countries. The banyan spans Asia’s spirituality and its entrepreneurialism. The Bodhi tree, under which Buddha attained enlightenment, was a banyan by another name. Gujarati merchants conducted business under it, and the Portuguese lent their name, banyan, to the tree. It stuck.

In early March, in Perak in Malaysia, the state assembly convened an emergency session under a tree. It was, said outraged national ministers, a return to the jungle, making Malaysia a laughing-stock. We beg to differ. An ancient connection exists between public business and the banyan tree, as between its huge overarching shade and its deep intertwining roots. In South-East Asia, and Java in particular, the shade was a place of learning and a site where rulers vowed justice. Those are Asian values to which Banyan will happily subscribe.


http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13446191&source=hptextfeature

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