Читать онлайн "When China Rules the World" - Жак Мартин - RuLit

The net result is that most Westerners, be they tourists, businessmen or expats, spend most of their time in a familiar, sanitized, Western-style environment, making the occasional foray into the host culture rather than actually living in it: they see these countries through a Western distorting mirror. It would be wrong to suggest that we can understand nothing from observing the hardware of modernity — the buildings, malls, consumer products and entertainment complexes: they tell us about levels of development, priorities, and sometimes cultural difference too. However, the key to understanding Asian modernity, like Western modernity, lies not in the hardware but in the software — the ways of relating, the values and beliefs, the customs, the institutions, the language, the rituals and festivals, the role of the family. This is far more difficult to penetrate, and even more difficult to make sense of.

THE RISE OF EAST ASIAN MODERNITY

For the first half of the twentieth century the cluster of countries that had experienced economic take-off in the nineteenth century continued to dominate the elite club of industrialized nations, with virtually no additions or alternations. It was as if the pattern of the pre-1914 world had frozen, with no means of entry for those who had missed the window of economic opportunity afforded during the previous century. [301] In the 1950s the school of ‘dependency theory’ generalized this state of affairs into the proposition that it was now impossible for other countries to break into the ranks of the more advanced nations. But there were good reasons why the economic ground froze over. While large parts of the world had remained colonized the possibilities of economic growth and take-off were extremely limited. Futhermore, two world wars sapped the energies not only of the main combatants but of much of the rest of the world as well.

From the late 1950s onwards, there appeared the first stirrings of profound change in East Asia. Japan was recovering from the ravages of war at great speed — but as a fully paid-up member of the pre- 1914 club of industrialized countries, its economic prowess was hardly new. Rather, what caught the eye was the rapid economic growth of the first group of Asian tigers — South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. They were small in number and even smaller in size — a medium-sized nation, a small country and two tiny city-states, all newly independent, apart from Hong Kong, which was still a colony. They had, in varying degrees, been debilitated by the war, in Korea ’s case also by the Korean War, and were bereft of natural resources, [302] but they began to grow at breakneck speed, with Taiwan and South Korea often recording annual growth rates of close to double-digit figures in the following three decades. [303] By the late 1970s they had been joined by Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Some of the later Asian tigers — China being the outstanding example — achieved, if anything, even faster rates of growth than the early ones. The world had never before witnessed such rapid growth. (Britain’s GDP expanded at a shade over 2 per cent and the United States at slightly over 4.2 per cent per annum between 1820 and 1870, their fastest period of growth in the nineteenth century.) [304] The result has been the rapid and progressive transformation of a region with a population of around 2 billion people, with poverty levels falling to less than a quarter by 2007 (compared with 29.5 per cent in 2006 and 69 per cent in 1990). [305]

The myth that it was impossible for latecomers to break into the club of advanced nations has been exploded. The Asian tigers have instead demonstrated that latecomers can enjoy major advantages: they can learn from the experience of others, draw on and apply existing technologies, leapfrog old technologies, use the latest know-how and play catch-up to great effect. Their economic approach, furthermore, has largely been homespun, owing relatively little to neo-liberalism or the Washington Consensus — the dominant Western ideology from the late seventies until the financial meltdown in 2008. [306] Nor is their novelty confined to the economic sphere. The Asian tigers have given birth to a new kind of political governance, namely the developmental state, whose popular legitimacy rests not on democratic elections but the ability of the state to deliver continued economic growth. [307] The rise of the Asian tigers, however, has an altogether more fundamental import. Hitherto, with the exception of Japan, modernity has been a Western monopoly. This monopoly has now been decisively broken. Modernization theory, which was very influential in American scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s, held, like Karl Marx, that the developing countries would increasingly come to resemble the developed world. [308] We can now test this proposition by reference to the East Asian experience.

SPEED OF TRANSITION

A defining characteristic of all the Asian tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam) [309] has been the speed of their transformation. In 1950 they were still overwhelmingly agrarian and had barely started the process of industrialization. In 1950 79 % of South Korea ’s population worked in agriculture (relatively little changed from 91 % in 1920); by 1960 the figure was 61 %, and today it is around 10 %. In the late 1960s the farming population still comprised half of Taiwan ’s total population, whereas today it accounts for a mere 8 %. [310] The figure for Indonesia in 1960 was 75 % compared with 44 % today, for Thailand 84 % compared with 46 %, and for Malaysia 63 % compared with 18 %. [311] Eighty-five per cent of the population of China worked in agriculture in 1950, but today that figure is hovering around 50 %. A similar story can be told in terms of the shift from the countryside to the cities. In 1950 76 % of Taiwanese lived in the countryside, whereas by 1989 — in a period of just thirty-nine years — that figure had been almost exactly reversed, with 74 % living in cities. [312] The urban population in South Korea was 18 % in 1950 and 80 % in 1994; while in Malaysia, which took off later, the equivalent figures were 27 % in 1970 and 53 % in 1990. [313] In China the urban population represented 17 % of the total population in 1975 and is projected to be 46 % by 2015. [314] We could also add Japan in this context, which experienced extremely rapid growth rates following the Second World War, its GDP increasing by a factor of over fourteen between 1950 and 1990 as it recovered from the devastation of the war and completed its economic take-off with a major shift of its population from the countryside to the cities. Between 1950 and 1973, its most rapid period of growth, its GDP grew at an annual rate of 9.29 %.

Compared with Europe, the speed of the shift from the countryside to the cities is exceptional. Germany’s urban population grew from 15 % in 1850 to 49 % in 1910 (roughly coinciding with its industrial revolution), and 53 % in 1950. The equivalent figures for France were 19 % in 1850 and 38 % in 1910 (and 68 % in 1970). England’s urban population was 23 % in 1800, 45 % in 1850, and 75 % in 1910. In the United States, the urban population was 14 % in 1850, 42 % in 1910, and 57 % in 1950. [315] If we take South Korea as our point of comparison (with a population broadly similar to that of Britain and France), the proportion of its population living in cities increased by 62 % in 44 years, compared with 52 % for England over a period of 110 years, 34 % over 60 years for Germany (and 38 % over 100 years), 19 % over 60 years for France (and 49 % over 120 years), and 28 % over 60 years (and 43 % over 100 years) for the United States. In other words, the rate of urbanization in South Korea was well over twice that of Germany’s — the fastest of these European examples — and was achieved in approximately two-thirds of the time; it was three times quicker than France’s, taking roughly two-thirds of the time, and twice as quick as that of the United States in two-thirds of the time.