The Future Is Asian

by Parag Khanna

  Vancouver is now North America’s most Asian city. In recent years it has superseded Los Angeles as the top destination in North America for flights outbound from China, with nearly 120 direct flights per week from ten Chinese cities. At the same time, intra-Chinese rivalries have become part of daily life as the number of immigrants from mainland China has outstripped those from Hong Kong, meaning that “Hongcouver” has lost its Cantonese edge to a new Mandarin-speaking majority.18 As if in lockstep with this process, Canadian deportations of Chinese refugees or illegally smuggled migrants have been steadily rising, while undercover Chinese state security operatives have entered Canada to intimidate former employees of state-owned enterprises into repatriating themselves and the funds they’ve allegedly embezzled. Now Ottawa is facing pressure from Beijing to sign an extradition agreement so China can expeditiously haul back economic fugitives and dissidents—in exchange for a free-trade agreement that Canada covets. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s close ties to Canada’s Sikh community proved embarrassing during his February 2018 visit to India, where memories of the Sikh separatist movement has not faded. All of this ethnodemographic-diplomatic drama could be just the beginning given the high-level Canadian government discussions on how to increase the country’s population from the current 35 million to potentially 100 million by the end of the century.

  Anchors or Opportunists?

  In many towns across the United States, home prices have been driven upward by an influx of Asian families. Real estate investment schemes such as the EB-5 program have attracted more than 50,000 Chinese, Vietnamese, and South Korean investors, who since 2015 have contributed approximately $30 billion per year to the US economy in exchange for residency, which paves the way for potential citizenship. In the wake of the Trump administration’s reduction of H-1B visas, Indians have also begun to take up the EB-5 “golden visa.” Real estate developers are preparing ever more materials in Chinese to speed up the deal making. In 2017, Berkshire Hathaway launched a partnership with the Chinese property site Juwai.com to reach an even larger Chinese audience.19 By some estimates, a similar number of Asian “anchor babies” are born each year in the United States to women engaging in birth tourism.20

  Students constitute the largest flow of Asians into the United States. Chinese lead the way with nearly 100,000 new arrivals each year, and a total of about 300,000 Chinese are currently enrolled in US educational institutions. India, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia are the next three largest sources of foreign students in the United States, with each sending more than Canada. In total, Asians have surpassed Europeans as the largest share (more than half) of the more than 1 million international students currently studying in US universities.21 The single most pan-Asian spot in the United States on any given day might be a West Coast US college cafeteria, where Asians gravitate toward one another—and tend to vote for one another in student council elections.

  Education is already one of the United States’ largest economic sectors, with public and private spending nearing 10 percent of GDP. Tuition payments in the United States by Chinese students alone amounted to nearly $10 billion during the 2014–15 academic year.22 As Asian student numbers have swelled, new cottage industries have arisen to funnel Asians into community colleges and provide tutoring services to get them up to speed in English or other subjects. The University of Illinois pays commentators to broadcast its football games in Mandarin, Purdue University has hired Mandarin-speaking counselors for its mental health center, and the University of Iowa’s business school has hired instructors to coach professors in how to pronounce Chinese names.23 Assimilating Asian students is itself a new cultural economy. Asian students’ presence in the United States also has far-reaching economic effects in the rental market, the food and beverage industry, and tourism. If Asian students were gone, the United States would miss them dearly.

  Yet a sea change is under way in the Asian student flow. As US universities cut budgets and raise tuition, while the number of student visas issued has declined precipitously since 2015, many Asian students have been choosing to go to Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and other countries. Indian student visa applications fell 30 percent in just the first year of Trump’s presidency. Suspicions about loyalties also play a role. The FBI claims that all of its regional bureaus have encountered cases of Chinese students in particular doubling as amateur spies, collecting information that is then indirectly reported back to Beijing. In early 2018, the University of Texas at Austin terminated funding from the state-supported US-China Cultural and Educational Foundation, and the Trump administration imposed restrictions on Chinese students pursuing master’s degrees in high-tech fields. If Chinese government agencies reduce scholarships for Chinese students to come to the United States, their numbers will decline proportionately as well.

  Certainly, over the past two generations, millions of Asians have settled in the United States and become proud Asian Americans. Most of their children—whether American-born Chinese (ABC) or American-born confused desi (ABCD) for Indians—think of themselves simply as American—no ethnic prefix hyphenation needed—and will only ever have American passports.24 Chinese and Koreans continue to take Western and Christianized names such as Thomas, John, and Andrew for boys and Vivian, Lucy, and Amy for girls. A previous generation of Asians concentrated in ethnic ghettos wherever they went. Today Asians want to fit in everywhere.

  But unlike previous generations from China and India, who were leaving behind poor and stagnant countries, today the percentage of international students who return home upon obtaining degrees is rising steadily; for Chinese it grew from 72 percent in 2012 to 82 percent in 2016.25 Given the tightly knit Asian collegiate communities, in which many students often socialize only among themselves, it seems as though many Asians studying in the United States, if not the majority, wind up networking mostly with one another, building relationships that result in entrepreneurial collaborations executed back home in Asia. A degree from MIT or Stanford and a brief stint in Silicon Valley are now predictably followed by a return to Asian tech hubs such as Bangalore and Hangzhou. Rather than remaining in the United States and contributing to the US economy—as immigration liberals argue should be encouraged and rewarded with immediate green cards for foreign graduates—Asians are increasingly taking their US educations back home.

  This contradicts the common view in the United States that the large numbers of Asian students are a symbol of the United States’ eternal appeal and centrality in the global cultural order, as if studying in the United States were the primary (or only) path to self-fulfillment and automatically confers a lifelong adoption of American values. Clearly, most Asian students do not come to the United States to become American, absorb American values, and disown their homelands but rather to acquire an important, but not essential, feather in their pedigree cap to prepare for global professional life—most likely back in Asia.

  Asia is teeming with “repats”—Asians who have returned home. Both China and India have attracted several hundred thousand returnees (or “reverse diaspora”), including notable success stories such as Robin Li, who started Baidu after studying in Buffalo and working for Infoseek. Even weaker Asian societies such as Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines are luring back talent. Up to 2 million Uzbeks working in Russia may return as the country launches a new phase of modernization. When expats become repats, bringing back skills and cash, they establish themselves as heads of large companies and start-ups, advise governments on major reforms, buy up properties to redevelop, and start schools and hospitals for underserved populations.

  The majority of Asians coming to the United States for education are therefore not new Asian anchors but rather opportunists, taking the best of American academic expertise and entrepreneurial culture back to their homelands, where they can be among extended family and make a greater difference to their national futures. With or without racial profiling in the United States, this is what is happening.
Additionally, Asian governments are rolling out the red carpet to lure back émigrés to lead R-and-D projects in hundreds of new industrial parks.26 Chinese think tanks also have taken on the American-style revolving-door approach to active policy advisory, luring back the country’s social scientists based abroad.27 Building on the previous generation’s pedigree, a growing number of elites in inner leadership circles from Riyadh to New Delhi to Beijing have Western MAs or MBAs (including former Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and China’s new vice premier, Liu He) or enjoyed sabbaticals and visiting scholarships in the United States or United Kingdom, bringing the best of Western knowledge home to adapt to their own societies. Interestingly, though overseas returnees are accustomed to favorable treatment in the job market, they are increasingly facing competition from talented students who have never left China.28 Indeed, two decades ago, China launched Project 985, pledging to invest more than $2 billion to upgrade nearly forty universities to help them earn a place in the top tier of global academic rankings. In 2017, Tsinghua University and Peking University landed spots in the top twenty, with eight other Chinese universities in the top one hundred.29 India, however, still lags behind with only two universities in the global top two hundred.

  Meanwhile, working for Asian companies is no longer uncommon in the United States. Americans have worked for Japanese car companies for decades, and Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and other states continue to compete for Toyota or Hyundai to locate plants in their states. Numerous states jockeyed to lure Foxconn with billions in tax breaks and cash rebates, a contest eventually won by Wisconsin. US workers, like Asians, care much more about their paycheck than where their employer comes from. This should come as no surprise given the deteriorating economic health of many American families. Sectors such as banking, insurance, housing, real estate, health care, and entertainment make the United States a gargantuan economy, but financial problems have eaten away the American dream of home ownership on both ends: financially insecure millennials can’t afford to buy their first homes—and may never buy a home as the family unit shrinks in size30—while struggling elderly families sell their homes to cash-rich Asians and live out their final years in more modest rental properties. Meanwhile, e-commerce has decimated the United States’ retail sector, with shopping malls closing weekly nationwide. Sixty percent of the US economy is consumption, but 60 percent of the population is struggling economically, with 80 percent of US jobs low-skilled and low-paying. Rising inequality has become a hot-button political issue, with the top 10 percent claiming an ever larger share of national wealth. The rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer: the country’s median income actually fell by 5 percent between 2010 and 2013, to $46,700, while middle-class incomes continue to stagnate.

  All of this makes Americans the perfect mass market for cheap Asian goods—just like billions of other customers around the world. Indeed, tens of millions of poor Americans don’t have smartphones that would allow them to access lower-cost mobile banking and instead pay high fees for low-balance bank accounts, debit cards, check-cashing services, or payday loans. They would all be better off with cheap Asian smartphones and WeChat, not to mention low-cost Indian generic medicines, which already represent one-third of the US market. Americans’ binge consumption has meant not only endless shopping for largely unnecessary merchandise but also binge eating at all-you-can-eat restaurants that are fueling the nation’s obesity crisis. Even a shift from bingeing to an “experience economy” will benefit hard-working Asians, who push themselves overtime in the gig economy, have lower rates of drug addiction, and can thrive in hot entrepreneurial areas such as selling coding courses or Chinese lessons.

  Even if the number of Asian real estate investors, birth mothers, and college students coming into the United States and Canada plateaus, the demographic Asianization of North America will continue to a considerable degree. This is generally for the greater good. From San Francisco to Pittsburgh, educated Asians are a key ingredient in what makes some American cities more cosmopolitan and desirable as places to live in. Vibrant and populous cities with ethnically diverse residents (such as Vancouver and Toronto) rank at the top of the tables when it comes to livability and creativity.31 Americanization has been a boon for Asians seeking a stable life and liberal education. Now Asianization is breathing vitality into American communities—and giving Americans global opportunities they cannot get at home.

  From Asian Americans to American Asians

  In addition to the return of Asians to Asia, what is also new—and deeply significant for Western attitudes toward Asia—is the rising numbers of Americans who are consciously exposing themselves to Asia from an early age and then traveling to study and live in Asia itself. Americans are traveling en masse to study Mandarin in China, launch start-ups in Singapore, and backpack around Vietnam and Myanmar. The difference between today and a generation ago is that it is not clear whether today’s Western millennials decamping for Asia will ever return.

  The Asia bug bites as early as kindergarten, with Chinese immersion programs growing in popularity in major American cities—and even as alternatives to overcrowded, low-quality public schools. New York City’s sticker-shocking Avenues school promises Chinese fluency before graduation. In Colorado, Mandarin has displaced Spanish as the most popular second language to study. In 2015, then president Obama launched the 1 Million Strong program in an effort to have 1 million American students learning Mandarin by 2020—an impressive figure, except when compared with the estimated 400 million Chinese who are learning English.

  For the majority of Americans not deeply exposed to Asia before college, the pull of Asia takes hold during freshman year as romantic aspirations to study Italian give way to larger and more lucrative Asian linguistic opportunities. Asian studies departments and Asian language teaching are strengthening nationwide. Asian thought also holds a growing allure as an entry point into an Asian future. Harvard’s most popular class after economics and computer science is Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory. Adding to the roster of American scholars who have developed a strong competency in Asian languages and history, more universities are hiring Asian faculty members and awarding fellowships to Asians who bring authentic perspectives and enhance the training of Western academics.32 From Edward Said’s manifesto Orientalism to the rise of postcolonial studies—with its critical views on the legacies of imperialism from Asian luminaries such as Gayatri Spivak, Sara Suleri Goodyear, and Homi Bhabha—the migration of Asian scholars to the West has spurred essential debates about the dynamics and norms of global society. For established academics, long-standing and fruitful intellectual exchanges such as the Harvard-Yenching Institute’s collaboration with Beijing University are being reinforced with ever more platforms for scholarly sharing.

  Once seduced by this rigorous exposure to Arab, South Asian, or East Asian affairs, undergraduates then go through the ritual of studying abroad, with the number of students doing so doubling in the past decade. Europe still receives half of US study-abroad students each year, but Asia has now overtaken Latin America for second place.33 China is the world’s third most popular destination for study abroad—and would easily surpass the United Kingdom were it not for all the Chinese themselves who are studying there. India, Japan, and Korea have also been growing steadily as major study-abroad destinations.34 Nearly 15,000 Americans head to China each year, and the rest of Asia pulls in a nearly equal number. Anglophone programs in the Philippines and Australia are witnessing up to 10 percent growth per year in American participation.

  Asian countries welcome not only American students with open arms but also American university campuses. Particularly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when Asian students began to experience difficulty in getting their student visas approved to matriculate in the United States, US colleges raced to expand their international presence. Georgetown, Cornell, and Northwestern have campuses in Doha; New York University has campuses in Abu Dhabi and Sha
nghai; Yale has already graduated several cohorts of students from its campus in Singapore; and Duke has a full-fledged undergraduate program near Beijing. The emergence of top-tier Western centers of learning in Asia may have significant consequences for the number—and caliber—of Asian youths who travel to the United States for their tertiary education. Singapore’s top graduates, known as government scholars, are accustomed to spreading themselves across Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge but now have the option of attending NYU Shanghai or Yale in their own backyard. Additionally, leading Chinese, Japanese, and Korean universities have in the past decade launched all-English curricula with a mix of faculty including repatriated Asian PhDs and Western academics seeking well-paid opportunities abroad.35 Asians increasingly have the luxury of getting their top-tier English-language education delivered in their home country, meaning that a decade or two hence, Asia’s best and brightest may well remain in Asia for their entire educational journey.

  A growing number of Americans are doing the same. Because many such Asia-based programs offer subsidized tuition and accommodation, state-of-the-art facilities, and other perks, many top-tier American high school graduates are choosing at the outset to get their “American” education in Asia. Suddenly, instead of just one year abroad, their entire undergraduate education is spent overseas. Think about what this means. Each year, thousands more Western students are not imbibing a standard Western narrative and the presumptions of superiority that come with it. They remain open-minded, and Asian ideas become part of their intellectual foundation moving forward.

  After college, Asian opportunities abound. Each time I have lectured at Beijing’s Tsinghua University in the past decade, I have noticed ever more Western faces among the graduate students taking advantage of its high-quality, competitively priced MA program, which is taught in both English and Mandarin and offers robust networking opportunities with multinationals and Chinese companies. The year 2016 also witnessed the launch of the Schwarzman Scholars program, a generously endowed scholarship branded as the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Rhodes Scholarship— but drawing top talent to Asia, not Europe. Chinese commentators have long complained that China sends its best students abroad to study but does not get other countries’ best minds in return. Now that is changing.