Kishore Mahbubani

It’s part of the conspiracy of colour never to mention society’s deepest faultline. Thus, Kishore Mahbubani, whose perceptive essay, “The West and the Rest”, sparked off the Asian values debate before Samuel Huntington hit the headlines, goes to extraordinary lengths in his latest book, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, to avoid the one word that says it all. He fumbles instead with definitions of territory and religion that obfuscate (deliberately?) the brown man’s warning that the white man’s day is done.

Singaporean Mahbubani rather than Sindhi Mahbubani is a more circumspect creature than Sukarno for whom Bandung ushered in the “century of the awakening of the coloured peoples”. Or Jawaharlal Nehru who lamented a pecking order that placed Anglo-Saxons at the top and Negroids at the bottom, with Latin Americans and Asians occupying the middle rungs. Shying away from explicit ethnicity, Kishore implies it by mentioning “an implicit compact between America and Europe as well as with the Anglo-Saxon states of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand on global policies”. Though commonplace in India, such prognostications, couched in trenchant prose and formidably backed by facts and figures, are novel enough in Singapore to prompt The Economist to call Kishore “an Asian Toynbee preoccupied with the rise and fall of civilisations”.

His argument here and elsewhere, that Barack Obama’s election or Asian chiefs for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund would send a powerful message, is more in keeping with the twinkling enfant terrible of our first encounter in the early Nineties in the Shangri-la hotel during a session of the World Economic Forum. I was advising a colleague not to light a cigarette when a locally-accented voice interjected, “Don’t worry. You won’t be caned!” It was daring of a Singaporean in the wake of the Michael Fay affair publicly to poke even gentle fun at the justice system. Then came the disappointment. Kishore said he read me in the International Herald Tribune. An innocuous remark meant as a compliment, except that my byline appeared far more frequently in the local Straits Times where I worked. To ignore that and note the American IHT from Paris was very Singaporean.

What I should like to know is whether the shift in global power he predicts will ever produce an Indian, Chinese or Japanese equivalent of the IHT that Americans, Europeans and, yes! Asians will want to write for, read and talk about. Will Delhi, Beijing or Tokyo replace the judgment of Paris? South Africa’s chic high commissioner, Zanele Makine, obliquely questioned the emergence of a civilizational equivalent of wealth at the book’s grand launch, an event that, incidentally, was part of a sales blitzkrieg that nicely meshed Kishore’s Sindhi and Singaporean identities. The distinguished ethnic Chinese scholar, Wang Gungwu, who presided, set the tone for Makine’s question by gently invoking Macaulay and Mill, presumably with Prospero-Caliban implications in mind.

Sindhis and Singaporeans alike view life through an economic telescope. But there are more things in heaven and earth, Kishore, than are dreamt of in your pragmatism. An Asian country’s will to reach out for global hegemony in the footsteps of the Western colonial powers is one. Translating economic growth into military might is another. Also, does history really repeat itself? Standing recently in the church at Tra Kieu that crowns the citadel of Simhapura, centre of the forgotten Hindu kingdom of Champa in Vietnam, I could understand Nani Palkhivala’s despairing wondering if a nation can ever regain its lost greatness. The glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome and the wonder that was India … all the pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre.

A bustling pragmatist like Kishore optimistically expects history’s wheel to turn back for India and China. He is a master of realpolitik and Asian nationalists will love his book (which Public Affairs has published in the US) despite a clumsy title that does scant justice to the incisive substance. But the thesis invites at least two caveats. First, a seasoned diplomat, who has represented Singapore all over the world and twice at the United Nations, must know that despite currently fashionable platitudes, too much lies between India and China for them to constitute a power bloc in the foreseeable future. Past disputes are less important in this context than present and future trajectories. It’s only third parties that lump them together in contradistinction to America and Europe because neither is white and both are in the amorphous eastern half of the Eurasian landmass conveniently dubbed Asia. Second, recalling Japan’s “honorary white” status, one wonders whether Asia will remain Asian as it prospers in a world where the relentless march of Western infotainment sets the trend. Singapore is the best example of a synthesis that might rudely be called deculturization.

Kishore strengthens fears on this count by arguing that Japan, Southeast Asia’s tiger economies, China and now India have done (or are doing) well because they have assimilated what he calls the seven pillars of Western wisdom — free market, science and technology, meritocracy, the ability to change and adapt, the culture of peace and education. Substitute American for English in Macaulay’s famous argument that the value system laced into instruction in the English language would “create a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” and you have the future many Asians yearn for.

Far from regarding this as a threat, Kishore, who deplores the British colonization of Indian minds, welcomes being American in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect as being bang up to date. Americanization is modernization. What happens then to the much-vaunted Asian values, to Confucius who, truth to tell, often reads like Samuel Smiles and sounds like Queen Victoria in drag, or to India’s quintessential culture of compassion that prompted Kipling’s comment that as long as there is a crust of bread in the land neither prince nor pauper will starve?

To be fair to the author, he does acknowledge differences between India and China as well as the importance of soft power. On the former point, he quotes Pratap Bhanu Mehta, whom Telegraph readers know, saying that China is a closed society with an open mind while India is an open society with a closed mind. He could have added that China holds the “foreign-returned” student in greater esteem than India where, especially in Bengal, the genre used to be a figure of fun. But from Soong Ching Ling (Sun Yat Sen’s wife), who wrote “The Influence of Foreign Educated students in China” in 1911, to Deng Xiaoping who expected a national transformation when thousands of students returned home, the Chinese have taken a more positive view of foreign-trained talent. On culture, Kishore says only a sub-structure of economic power can legitimize other manifestations of national aspiration. “The economic power is shifting to the East. The soft power has not yet shifted. But it is going to.” I shall still suspend judgment until there really is an Asian equivalent of the IHT, not an Asian edition that some canny Western entrepreneur publishes in Hong Kong or Singapore.

As for colour, Asians are far more sensitive than Lady Mountbatten who “simply could not remember” once whether the “most amusing dinner guest” sitting next to her “had been black or white”. A report from Beijing says that ambitious Chinese “hire” Westerners to grace social and business occasions. “White people are an expensive commodity….It is a glorious thing to show off that you have foreign friends,” says a sociology professor at Renmin University. Perhaps the fad will spread to India. Some might argue that lending face to enriched Asia is the impoverished West’s ultimate destiny. The question is, who gives and who gains? It could be the theme of Kishore’s next intellectual exercise.