The Future Is Asian

by Parag Khanna

  From Li Ka Shing to Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, some of Asia’s highest-profile billionaires have endowed professorships and centers devoted to their region’s affairs, their names adorning buildings at leading American and European universities. At home, however, cultural traditions urge them not to be boastful about wealth but instead to give discreetly and humbly. What is changing is both the scale of giving and its formality, with charity becoming more formalized and visible in order to inspire others and create a greater impact. Between 2010 and 2016, China’s top one hundred philanthropic donors tripled the size of their commitments to $4.6 billion. No single Asian country has as vast a demand for welfare as India. Mohandas K. Gandhi influenced an early generation of Indian industrialists, such as the Tata and Godrej families, to donate 10 percent or more of their annual earnings to a range of causes such as education. More recently, a far larger set of India’s wealthy has stepped up, with charitable donations rising sixfold between 2010 and 2016, overtaking foreign sources in value. Asian business leaders are increasingly recognized in the West for their efforts at financial inclusion, such as ICICI Bank CEO Chanda Kochhar, who received the Woodrow Wilson Award for Global Corporate Citizenship in 2017.

  At the same time, Asian philanthropy will not follow the same path as in the West because of an abundance of caution about the trustworthiness of civil society groups that lack substantial track records and oversight. As a result, most Asian billionaires (with the exception of some Arabs and Indians) aren’t jumping to sign on to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge to donate most of their wealth. Instead, they invest in operational charities. The Ayala Foundation in the Philippines has, since the 1960s, focused on programs in education, youth leadership, arts, and culture. In China, forty-six of the country’s wealthiest two hundred individuals have now established such foundations. Private banks such as Credit Suisse have assisted dozens of clients to set up such foundations. In 2015, Laurence Lien, the chairman of Singapore’s Lien Foundation, founded the Asian Philanthropy Circle to foster collaboration among regional donors. Also in 2015, China’s first independent philanthropic training center, the China Global Philanthropy Institute, began operations with the support of philanthropists from China and the United States. Asians cannot donate to change makers until they produce more of them.

  Given the importance of education in almost all of Asia’s rags-to-riches stories, it is no surprise that spreading and enhancing educational opportunities are a leading focus of philanthropists such as Abdulla bin Ahmad Al Ghurair, the founder of Mashreq Bank, who has donated $1.1 billion to educational causes. Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro, has given $8 billion to charities, and his eponymous foundation focuses primarily on improving rural education. Tencent cofounder Charles Chen left the company in 2013 to devote himself full-time to a $320 million fund for transformational ideas in education and gave $300 million to upgrade the liberal-arts-focused Wuhan College. This new vanguard of Chinese tech billionaires also has the advantage of deploying the very technologies that created their wealth. Both Alibaba’s and Tencent’s foundations have set up websites for the donation of discarded mobile phones and desktop computers, together raising hundreds of millions of dollars for local technology distribution programs. Tencent “charity boxes” in stores and airports have payment platforms that allow donations of less than $1 using its popular e-payment system. Zakat, too, has gone digital: an online UNHCR appeal that ran during Ramadan in 2013 raised $700 per donor.

  Impact investment has become a major new thrust of Asian philanthropists. The Emirates Foundation, the Arab Foundations Forum, and Islamic Development Bank have all raised funds and directed them toward social enterprises delivering innovative health care models, both alone and with Western partners such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Lives and Livelihoods Fund, a $2.5 billion initiative to combat illnesses such as polio and river blindness, which has become the largest such fund based in the Arab world. But wealthy and conscientious Asians need to do much more to address the consequences of poverty, inequality, and social stress. India, Pakistan, and the Philippines have millions of homeless people and street children. Sri Lanka, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan have among the world’s highest suicide rates. Porous borders and fragile societies also help explain why Asia’s human trafficking, from Saudi Arabia through Pakistan and India and across Southeast Asia, surpasses the rest of the world by a wide margin.22

  Asia’s swelling populations and large-scale challenges have elevated the role of technology in societal governance. Across Asia, one finds leaders fluent in the language and application of the latest digital technologies. The UAE has appointed a minister devoted to AI, is putting all government data and services on blockchain platforms, and is rolling out a fully digital currency, em-Cash, by 2020. In China’s Jiangsu province, one-meter-tall robots in government offices scan, review, and administer the sentencing of tens of thousands of standard cases such as traffic violations or unpaid bills. The Seoul municipal area’s mVoting system allows millions of residents to effortlessly evaluate and vote on initiatives relevant to their district or interests. Meanwhile, the United States is still fighting over net neutrality and Italy can’t figure out how to deploy broadband Internet.

  China is at the forefront of using big data as a tool to encourage behavioral conformity. Drawing on data from Alibaba, Tencent, and other platforms, authorities use the new social credit system (SCS) to determine which citizens have committed dishonorable acts and issue penalties. Some have been denied loans, cannot buy airline or train tickets, have had their passports suspended, or temporarily lose their Internet access. Though seemingly Orwellian from the outside, many (if not most) Chinese want greater transparency into what the government monitors—and now, for better or worse, they know. Importantly, the social credit system also cracks down on restaurants that sell contaminated food and vendors selling counterfeit goods. Reputation has long been an important currency in Asian societies, and now it applies to everyone in the social and commercial marketplace.

  Asian countries are simply doing first what Western governments would do more of if they were allowed to deploy such technologies without being outed by whistle-blowers. Given the revelations about the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies’ unconstitutional breaches of citizens’ privacy, the lines are blurring between the notions of Western rule of law and Eastern abuse of power. As Chinese companies deploy their surveillance technologies, including facial scanning and mobile app tracking within China (especially in the restive Muslim Xinjiang province), as well as export them across Asia and to countries in Europe, the lines will blur ever further.

  Asians have watched as digital technologies have destroyed jobs, warped politics, and ruptured societies in the West—and they don’t want to follow the same path. Their governments are demanding that Western tech companies such as Apple remove VPNs from their apps and location data about their citizens on their territory. Most of the largest Facebook-using populations besides the United States and Brazil are Asian—India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, and Turkey—but those countries, democracies or not, also represent the largest share of requests to censor content deemed offensive to the state. Asian leaders such as Narendra Modi and Jokowi Widodo have huge followings on Twitter and Facebook that have been crucial platforms for citizen engagement, policy messaging, and campaign mudslinging across Asia. But after observing Russia’s manipulation of Facebook in the 2016 US election—and viral videos sparking riots in India and Myanmar—Asians have recruited Facebook and WhatsApp to actively screen and counter viral hoaxes in order to ensure that “fake news” does not destabilize communal harmony. As the economist Danny Quah puts it, free-for-all populist cultures resemble the comments section of online newspapers: they get hijacked by ranting trolls. A better model might be liberal societies in which officials act more like Wikipedia editors who ensure veracity and a sense of order.23

  Across
Asia’s vast array of cultures and regimes, societies generally appear to be comfortable with certain norms such as mixed capitalism, technocratic governance, and social conservatism. It is not likely that Western ideas will triumph over this Asian mind-set. To the contrary, in the coming decades, global competition will punish the sentimental. For societies to prove that they are capable of confronting the complexities arising from the intersection of social, political, economic, technological, and environmental stress, they will need capable leaders with a utilitarian mind-set. Asian technocracy is already proving that it is as well—and perhaps better—suited to the task as Western democracy is.

  Governing the World the Asian Way

  Asia’s rise is also rebalancing the narrative of global governance. Governance is the provision of order and rules, not just regulating but even supplying public goods. Asia has long been on the receiving end of global governance, but now it is very much a shaper of norms and provider of public goods. When the United States was spending heavily on its global military presence and others were able to keep their budgets down, it was called a security umbrella. When China recycles its trade surpluses and reserves into low-cost infrastructure for dozens of countries, why don’t we call it a development platform? When the United States requires that all dollar transactions be cleared by US banks so the US Treasury can sanction financial flows, it is considered to be upholding the financial system. But when Alibaba provides a platform for millions of SMEs to seamlessly trade with one another worldwide, why is it not called a breakthrough in global peer-to-peer commerce?

  Westerners don’t want to hear that Asians are taking on greater leadership in setting global rules any more than they want to hear that the United States is disengaging from crucial aspects of global governance—but both are happening nonetheless. Rather than Western conversations about some vague Eastern authoritarian challenge to their systems, it is much more fruitful to look at the tangible contributions Asia makes to regional and global order and governance.

  The provision of global public goods is, like world order itself, multipolar. The United States does provide the world’s leading reserve currency and polices the oceans. However, Asians (and many others) not only view the United States as having abused its strategic and financial weight, but they can fulfill ever more of these functions themselves. In the military domain, Asian powers already undertake their own joint sea-lane patrols. They are, as India terms it, “net providers of global security.” In the global economy, Asia has been the key source of countercyclical spending and demand during the prolonged Western economic downturn, keeping entire sectors from commodities to consumption afloat. About half the G20 is made up of Asian states, whose central banks are crucial for global economic policy coordination.

  As with Europe, Asia’s great-power stability is the region’s biggest contribution to global governance. But there are further essential public goods that Asians are taking the lead in. It is useful to contrast the ways in which the public goods of security and infrastructure are deployed. Military alliances are exclusive in nature. The United States supports countries that buy its hardware and protect its interests. By contrast, the provision of infrastructure is much more a platform service for anyone to use. In addition to all the roads, railways, and ports China builds—which will remain in use even if China no longer actively needs them—China has become one of the world’s largest shipbuilders, reducing the cost for developing countries to reach global markets. It also installs electricity grids and fiber-optic Internet and launches satellites that help with everything from fishing-vessel navigation to bike sharing. These investments may facilitate Chinese trade, but that does not change the fact that they are also elevating entire economies into the twenty-first century. When China buys up global lithium supplies to make cheap batteries for electric cars and sells affordable solar panels worldwide, it brings revenue to Chinese companies but also contributes to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, China, Japan, and India are all major exporters of the solar, wind, nuclear, and other energy technologies that reduce our global carbon footprint.

  This is a reminder that while China makes many contributions to global governance, these join a long history of Asian activity. Japan has been one of the world’s largest foreign assistance donors, providing more than $300 billion in aid to 185 countries. It continues to be second to none in its generosity as a contributor to human development. India has provided more than 200,000 troops for more than fifty UN peacekeeping operations. (China has provided barely 2,000.) Japan and India have together launched more than two hundred satellites for other countries, reducing the cost for their national telecommunications systems. For the first seventy years of the Nobel Peace Prize, almost no Asians were recognized internationally for their humanitarian or peacemaking efforts. But since the 1970s, more than a dozen Asians have been awarded the prize, from Japanese prime minister Eisaku Sato for committing to the country’s denuclearization to the microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus to Pakistan’s teenage activist Malala Yousafzai.

  Yet the measure of Asian countries’ contributions to global governance is not their obedience to Western-led bodies that have little relevance to their lives. That idea is both arrogant and meaningless. It is not for Asia to adapt itself to what have become effectively transatlantic organizations but rather the reverse. As the world becomes more multipolar, the rules of the system must adjust or the old order will simply collapse. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and UN Security Council do not actually govern global finance, development, and military activity, respectively. Rather, these organizations, and the powers behind them, are competitors in a much larger marketplace of global financial, economic, and security services—with Asians equally capable of devising institutions that better suit their needs. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade agreement and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) are just two major examples. If the UN Security Council fails to expand to include more Asian powers, they will simply ignore it.

  Rising powers both shape global norms and selectively ignore and undermine them—much as the United States has done time and again. The United States has circumvented and violated World Trade Organization (WTO) rules with its unilateral tariffs, while China has undermined the same organization through its exemptions and noncompliance. India leads developing countries in WTO negotiations to protect food subsidies against Western corporate pressures. It is impossible to imagine the Western agenda of strengthening intellectual property protection moving ahead without significant changes to the way in which Western companies have defined and protected it.

  Already we can see many other examples of what will happen—for good and for ill—as Asians get more involved in global governance. In the UN Human Rights Council, most Asians—whether Israel, Arabs, or Chinese—are not interested in Western countries’ (or one anothers’) efforts at annual reviews of their records. They would just as soon shut the Council down—though it was the United States that quit the body altogether in 2018. The World Bank has sought to make itself more relevant in Asia by pushing critical units out of Washington and expanding its offices from Istanbul to Singapore. Those Asian hubs do not simply carry out the headquarters’ agenda; rather, they serve Asia’s priorities of infrastructure and clean energy. The international police federation Interpol has established a twin Asian headquarters in Singapore to focus on tackling cybercrime, but China and Russia are using the organization to issue more politically motivated “red notices” to apprehend enemies of the state—including the head of the Interpol itself, Chinese Meng Hongwei, who vanished during a visit to China in September 2018. The growing number of Asian banks participating in the SWIFT interbank network has increased the organization’s ability to facilitate global financial flows, but these new participants are taking a tougher line against excluding Iranian banks, which the United States has tried to do. In partnership with the World Economic Forum, Japan, China, and India have set up cen
ters to help design the future of regulation of AI, blockchain, drone, and other technologies. At the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), where the future of Internet regulation is taking shape, Asian officials go toe to toe with Americans and Europeans on matters of data privacy and e-commerce regulation.

  The future landscape of global regulation appears to be a hybrid of conventional Western rules and Asian practices. Investments by Asian sovereign wealth funds will be robust, but much more scrutiny of deals will create greater transparency. The United States and European Union will ever more confidently block Chinese investments in their territories unless their companies are granted reciprocal access—and have protections for their innovations. All the while, other Asian powers will be building their technological and financial foundations, snapping up assets where Chinese are rejected and building their own global portfolios. The only new global rules that will be accepted will be those that Asians agree to.

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  Asia Goes Global: The Fusion of Civilizations

  To describe something as “Asian” can often have opposite connotations: elegant or unsophisticated, precise or chaotic, risk averse or bold. Not only do outsiders have divergent understandings of “Asian,” but so, too, do Asians. The vast diversity of Asian tongues from Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi to Chinese, Vietnamese, and Bahasa is a salient reminder that Asians will always struggle to speak with one voice. European colonialism also had a lasting impact on the construction of national identity, warping it from inclusive to exclusive. Asians identify themselves to one another by their country of origin—and do the same when they go abroad: Indians, Chinese, and Koreans don’t travel the world saying they are “Asian.” The notion of “Asian” thus appears to be an artificial construct. Among Asians, there is no longer any common understanding of what it means to be Asian. Europe may have invented the term for Asia’s geography, but it has robbed Asia of Asian identity. It does not help that Western media accounts of intra-Asian relations can be summed up with one predictable word—nationalism—usually modified by adjectives such as toxic and virulent.