East Is East

Principalities & Powers has a thought-provoking post on the cultural blindness of many "Asian Century" boosters who welcome a world where America has been eclipsed by China and India. Those westerners eagerly looking forward to the end of the Empire never show much interest in what such a world would look like; but if there's one thing we've learned as Emperors of the World, it's that economic power eventually translates to cultural and social power. Are you ready to live by China and India's cultural rules? The World With Asia In Charge

Here is a very intelligent man, Hans Rosling, a professor of international health in Sweden, examining population, health, and prosperity trends, comparing the West and Asia over the last 150 years with particular reference to Japan, and to India and China before and after they achieved national sovereignty. He joyfully anticipates Asia regaining its position as the dominant part of the world, which he (half jokingly) predicts will happen on July 27, 2048.

Rosling's excitement plays well before his Indian audience. But his disregard for politics is striking in several ways. He referred to Chinese independence in 1949 as "the emergence of a modern china in a way that surprised the world." Of course, by this he meant the take-over of the country by the Chinese Communist Party under the butcher tyrant, Mao Zedong. The only words of criticism he voiced--jestingly--were "no more stupid central planning," as though that were the only reason that China "fell down" in their prosperity and health during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

It's easy enough to see how Chinese and Indian sensibilities are already having an effect in the US. Companies like Google and Yahoo, which love to play the part of the free speech absolutist in the US, willingly trim their sails in order to accommodate the political censorship in China and the cultural censors in India. Indeed, they have even assisted - if indirectly - the arrest and harassment of Chinese dissidents. Hollywood is much more eager to insert anti-American themes, or at least downplay pro-American ones to better appeal to the foreign market. And US progressives look longingly at the heavy hand of the central planning state that can still direct huge swaths of the Chinese economy.

For many Americans, multi-culturalism has already come to mean a steady erosion of their own cultural identity.