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The End of the Asian Century
Michael R. Auslin 304 pages; $34.31
AS THE TITLE SUGGESTS, Asia’s domi- nance as the most infl uential political and economic force in the 21st century will be short-lived. Indeed, at best, it has dramatically faltered, and at worst, stagnated.
This is author Michael Auslin’s
conclusion; it’s a lonely, but persuasive, one. Perhaps it’s because the author has refused to give his perspective on the Asia-Pacifi c region a typical predictive bent. He tells us what he knows from decades of study and visits to the Far East as a former history professor at Harvard and current director of Japanese Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Auslin vividly describes its geopolitical landscape, its nations’ tensions and armed confl icts through history and into the 21st century. And to his primary focus, economics, the author provides a compelling clarity to a region that’s been beset by democratic and authoritarian regimes expert, via their political obfuscation, at playing around with numbers. The tales of the nations profi led
within Asia-Pacifi c — about 24, but concentrating on China, the Koreas, Japan, Vietnam and India — are a surprise. Western thinkers have long touted the global economy as being the salvation of a region coined the “world’s workshop.” The Asian Century is described as stable, with each nation interlinked and interdependent, the
A HistowweInvesting foci of exponential economic growth and where autocracies are destined to bloom into democracies. Yet Auslin convincingly argues that the half-century of globalizing infl u- ences and integrated economics of the region are, in fact, half-baked. Change has been so dynamic that the West (and most importantly, Asia-Pacifi c) has not truly caught up, as he puts it, to how this has occurred and to what eff ect. The author creates a risk map of
Asia-Pacifi c that explains and wonders at the sustainability and/or continuing evolution of the region’s growth and stability. Though economic risk dominates, concerns about demo- graphic risk, the West’s poor under- standing of the risk inherent in these nations’ “unfi nished revolutions” (democratic, pseudo-democratic and totalitarian), the lack of a formal political community, with no NATO- or EU-like institutions to strategize, hear or quell grievances, and the ever-present risk of military confl ict paint a grim picture of what Auslin expects will be an aborted Asian Century. China, of course, sits at the head of
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the Asia-Pacifi c table. Its 2015-2016 stock market crashes illustrate the author’s concern about stagnation and the limits of growth in a region rife with government mismanagement, confu- sion over the true freedoms of a free market and a passion for corruption and intimidation of foreign interests. The developed democracies of the region, such as Japan, suff er from “political arthritis” and are considered to be anchors dragging down the progress of the Asian Century, as they look for ways to retool their fl ailing economies. The solution for Asia-Pacifi c is an
unlikely turn to greater liberalization and rules-based order in all fi ve of Auslin’s risk areas. The catalyst must be a US more open to a trans-Pacifi c partnership. Traditionally more of an Atlantic nation, America should ponder what the world would look like today if Asia-Pacifi c had fi zzled aſt er the Second World War, and what global prosperity in the future would look like if the US does not help stem the region’s slowdown into what may be long-term stagnation. — Robert Colapinto
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