Review: Book exposes Asia's underlying fault lines

After decades of grandstanding by politicians, think tanks and talking heads on the unstoppable rise of Asia and the inevitability of an "Asian century", Vasuki Shastry has produced a book that pricks some of the bubbles of this breathless optimism.

Provocatively titled Has Asia Lost it?, his reader-friendly tract seeks to expose the fault lines that could hold back Asia's march towards a promised land of peace and rising prosperity - or even reverse it.

Challenging the conventional wisdom, especially on Asia, is a worthy project, given how wildly off the mark some past projections have been.

In the early 1960s, top economists at the World Bank predicted India and Pakistan's economic growth would surpass that of South Korea from 1962 to 1976, that Sri Lanka's per-capita income would exceed Taiwan's by the end of that period and that Burma (Myanmar) and the Philippines would be the star economies of South-east Asia.

Hong Kong and Singapore were viewed as laggards. China did not even merit a mention.

Then in 1993, the Bank produced a study titled The East Asian Miracle, which glossed over the distortions building up in the region that culminated in the Asian financial crisis in 1997.

Asia has a long history of debunking the forecasts of even the most vaunted experts.

In laying out his thesis, Vasuki - a former journalist with The Business Times who has also worked with the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the International Monetary Fund and Standard Chartered Bank - takes inspiration from the 13th-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri.

In the first part of his epic poem The Divine Comedy, The Inferno, Dante takes the reader through a dystopian underworld of nine "Circles of Hell", which represent all manner of human depravity.

Vasuki posits that Asia has eight "circles of hell", which collectively make up the often ignored underbelly of the continent.

He argues that many of developing Asia's political leaders - whether democratically elected or not - are out of touch with the needs and aspirations of their citizens, especially the young.

This is partly because the leaders themselves belong to what he calls "the radio and telegraph era", and their agenda is often more focused on consolidating power than serving their people.

Developing Asia's economic model, centred on cheap labour and exports, is ripe for disruption amid rising de-globalisation, automation and other technological changes - a collective threat to social mobility.

Asia's third circle of hell is its 700 million strong under-class - the migrant workers, labourers in the informal sector and foreign domestic helpers, who enjoy little or no social protections and are acutely vulnerable to calamities, as one has seen during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At the other end of the social spectrum are Asia's billionaires - a tiny minority who often collude with politicians to subvert public policies for their own benefit at the expense of the masses.

Large parts of Asia are subject to environmental devastation on an epic scale - from choking cities to burning forests to polluted waters.

A sixth circle of hell is gender disparities, which in many countries condemn about half the population to lifelong discrimination and abuse.

Asia continues to face internal insurgencies along ethnic, religious and ideological lines. The eighth circle of hell is the region's fragile geopolitics, with multiple potential conflicts brewing, amid great powers vying for influence.

This is an impressive list of the darker aspects of the Asian story that deserve more attention than they get. But many of them - for instance, Asia's teeming underclass, the lack of social safety nets, gender disparities, environmental degradation and domestic insurgencies - have been around for decades.

They have not prevented Asia from lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty within a generation - so governments, as flawed as they may be, have arguably got more right than wrong.

They have also adapted to changing circumstances.

China dramatically overhauled its economic model after Mao Zedong, with stunning results. India launched economic reforms in 1991 that enabled it to break out of the so-called "Hindu rate of growth".

Indonesia liberalised after the 1960s, following the chaotic populism of the Sukarno era. Vietnam successfully made the transition from a reactionary communist state to a more pragmatic business-friendly regime.

Taiwan and South Korea transformed from authoritarianism to thriving democracies.

Of course, much more needs to be done to fix the remaining fault lines and Vasuki offers some constructive suggestions on the priorities: do not fetishise GDP growth; focus more on the United Nations' Human Development Index, which is a better measure of welfare; look at tax to GDP ratios, which are the key to raising resources; and do not neglect social infrastructure, especially health and education.

However, one could take issue with a few of his diagnoses and prescriptions.

He makes much of the age gap between the rulers and the ruled, even presenting a list showing that the vast majority of Asian leaders were born before 1960.

But progressive reformers have not always been young, as attested by Deng Xiaoping in China, Manmohan Singh in India, Kim Dae-jung in South Korea and Joe Biden in the United States, among many others.

The progressive instinct is more a psychographic than a demographic.

What also matters more than age is a leader's ability to build coalitions for progressive policies and the political will, as well as persuasive powers, to see them through.

Vasuki proposes that Asia builds more cities to accommodate its teeming millions, but does not explore policies to reform agriculture, as China, South Korea and Taiwan did, but India and Indonesia did not.

Agricultural areas are where most of Asia's poor live and their improvement is critical to raising living standards on a mass scale.

His suggestion that Asia's geopolitics parallels the pre-World War I situation in Europe also seems improbable (though not impossible) in an age of country coalitions, economic inter-dependencies and nuclear weapons.

Moreover, a lot of the fault lines that he identifies - rising inequalities and oligarchs, the neglect of social spending, gender discrimination, environmental destruction and dysfunctional cities are not unique to Asia.

So if Asia has "lost it" for those reasons, so have most other parts of the developing world.

Indeed, one could pick just about any country or region - even a prosperous one - and write volumes focusing exclusively on its failures and injustices.

To that point, Vasuki's treatise has a whiff of what the Indian nationalist leader Mohandas Gandhi described as "a drain inspector's report".

Mr Gandhi was responding to the 1927 book Mother India by American writer Katherine Mayo, a relentless chronicle of the horrors she encountered during a tour of the subcontinent, such as child marriages, the repression of women and other cruelties.

In his review of Mother India for The New York Times, Mr Gandhi wrote: "If I open out and describe with punctilious care all the stench exuded from the drains of London and say: 'Behold London!', my facts will be incapable of challenge, but my judgment will be rightly condemned as a travesty of the truth."

But this conclusion does not hold for Vasuki's insightful book.

Not only does it draw attention to some of the most neglected and urgent problems facing Asia, but it also serves as a reality check, a valuable counterpoise to the often thoughtless cheerleading about Asia's glorious future.

That future might well be bright, but as Vasuki points out, the journey may prove harder than is widely presumed.

Moreover, as Mr Gandhi wrote towards the end of his review, "we learn more from our critics than from our patrons".

If you like this, read: Has The West Lost It? by Kishore Mahbubani (Penguin, 2018, $18.19, Books Kinokuniya), which makes the opposite case.