The Future Is Asian

by Parag Khanna

  In generations past, when Asians set their sights on the West, they might have heard of or visited New York and California, but they normally didn’t go to Goa or Guangzhou. The United States and Europe have been major beneficiaries of the desire of the Asian middle class to vacation at Disney World and in the Big Apple, take selfies at Big Ben and atop the Eiffel Tower, or splurge on skiing in Zermatt or Whistler. Las Vegas casinos advertise themselves months in advance as destinations for Asian holidays such as Chinese New Year. Each year record numbers of Asians travel abroad, led by more than 130 million Chinese, with India recently overtaking Japan and projected to reach 50 million outbound tourists by 2020. Global revenues from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian tourists amount to more than $350 billion annually, triple the spending of American tourists.12

  But a new generation of Asians has balanced out regional and global travels. Today the world’s most visited cities are Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, and Dubai—all Asian. (Only London ranks alongside these Asian cities.) One reason is that the top eight destinations of Chinese tourists are Asian countries, followed by the United States and Italy. Since 2016, Paris has actually declined as a destination for Asians. South Korea remains the top destination for Chinese tourists (despite the recent ban on Chinese visiting the popular Jeju Island), while Chinese also swarm through Japan and Australia and sent a record 1.5 million tourists to Russia in 2017. With visa restrictions drastically reduced and low-cost airlines flourishing, Asians are discovering their own region in record numbers. India’s inbound tourism is growing by double digits annually and just crossed 10 million visitors. It’s hard not to spot Japanese and Israelis from Himachal Pradesh to Goa. Indian destination weddings are a business boon for Dubai, Bangkok, and Bali. Iran grants simple on-arrival visas to woo Chinese and Japanese, nearly 5 million Russians visit Turkey annually, and Arab intellectual and business elites, feeling less welcome in Europe, increasingly spend their downtime in Istanbul and Antalya. Islands such as Hainan have branded themselves a mix of Hawaii and Dubai and attract throngs of Asians looking for safe low-cost holidays and a first contact with China.

  As Asia becomes a more attractive tourist destination, it is also learning not to destroy the habitats the world is so eager to visit. Bhutan has pioneered high-value, low-impact eco-tourism. On Bali and other Indonesian islands, visitors often spend a day working with cashew growers or learning about fragile shark habitats. Thailand and the Philippines have also developed a sustainable tourism culture to support local communities. In 2018, the Duterte government announced a six-month closure of the popular island of Boracay to give resorts time to modify their infrastructure to minimize the pollution caused by the constant crush of tourists. A sustainable Asia is one that both Asians and the world are far more likely to continue to appreciate.

  Recycling Asian Culture

  True to their syncretic history, Asians continue to absorb Western influences, often as a means toward bridging diversity in their own societies. Language is one example: listen to speakers of Hindi and Tagalog today, and you are hearing “Hinglish” and “Taglish.” American English as a global language has become an important cultural bridge within Asia. Microsoft’s recent breakthrough in instantaneous translation of complex Chinese into English will significantly enhance communication among Chinese, other Asians, and the world at large.

  The recirculation of Asian culture through global media and commerce is accelerating Asia’s self-discovery. Mixed martial arts is an unmissable story in this regard. For many years, outside of their rustic dojos, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Thais had almost exclusively national martial arts cultures, with only low-level fight cards across Asian boundaries. But suddenly, with the arrival of America’s Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), mixed martial arts (MMA) trainers, and TV networks, the fusion of boxing, wrestling, muay thai, judo, and other Asian specialties became sellout events with a huge pay-per-view TV following. The Thai national Chatri Sityodtong returned from a career on Wall Street to found the hugely successful ONE Championship mixed martial art (MMA) series in Singapore, bringing together dozens of Asian competitors in frequent events across the region. In the process, Asians have become much more aware—and proud—of their warrior traditions. At the same time, the rise of MMA has elevated Americans’ consciousness of these Asian martial arts. Karate, judo, and taekwondo gained popularity in America in the 1970s and 1980s, but now muay thai kickboxing gyms have popped up across the United States. Entertainment based on Asian martial arts is now big business as well: American Ninja Warrior is just one of the global spin-offs from the Japanese original, Shaolin monks, with their kung fu stunts, regularly tour all continents, while kung fu academies have sprouted up from Europe to South Africa.

  Asians have also benefited from global recognition of their contemporary artistic output. Two decades ago, only a few Asian artists, such as the Japanese abstract painter Yayoi Kusama and the pop art maestro Takashi Murakami, drew widespread recognition. But by 2008, the Guggenheim’s major retrospective of the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s installations and a record-fetching sale in Hong Kong of a Zeng Fanzhi painting placed Asian contemporary artists on the global map, with museums and galleries seeking out their works not purely for an exotic complement to Western collections but in reverence of their creative qualities. In the arts, too, global circulation has been crucial. A number of the most prominent Japanese and Chinese artists learned to express themselves fully during long stints in the West, especially New York, where Ai Weiwei began his career as both an artist and a prolific political critic; he now resides in Berlin.

  Asia’s leading cities are ramping up investments in becoming cultural hubs. Tokyo is already an architectural mecca for students and admirers of the buildings of Kengo Kuma, Tadao Ando, and Toyo Ito. Hong Kong’s annual Art Basel week has attained a stature equal to its counterparts in Switzerland and Miami. Now other Asian metropolises are undergoing an artistic renaissance as dilapidated industrial sites are converted into lofty ateliers as in Taipei’s Songshan Cultural Park, Beijing’s lively 798 Art Zone, and Shanghai’s M50 Creative Garden. Sharjah and Jeddah have emerged as hubs for cultivating Arab artistic communities in avant-garde galleries, while Doha and Abu Dhabi have marked the beginnings of an Arab cultural renaissance with spectacular architectural landmarks such as Doha’s Islamic Art Museum and Abu Dhabi’s branch of the Louvre. Singapore has opened both a stately new national gallery that contains the world’s largest collection of Southeast Asian art and converted a former army barracks into an open-air village of interactive galleries. Singapore Art Week and Art Stage Singapore have stoked the demand for art by the region’s nearly one hundred billionaires and growing upper class. As poorer Asian countries such as Indonesia have stabilized politically and liberalized culturally, they, too, have allowed art schools to flourish, not only in hot spots such as Bali but also in lesser-known hipster cities such as Bandung and Yogyakarta. The respected Sundaram Tagore Gallery now promotes Filipino photographers, sculptors, and street artists.

  All of this points both to Asians themselves paying more attention to—and spending more money on—Asian art. Chinese billionaires and cultural institutions are scouring the world for Chinese artifacts held abroad for centuries to bring them home. Whether Arabs looking to park money or East Asian tycoons seeking collections to show off, Asians from the Gulf states to Japan are stocking up their collections of both Western and Asian art, driving double-digit growth in revenue for auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s, which are ever more on the lookout for the next Asian art wave to elevate for their Western clients, just as they have promoted South Korean minimalism (dansaekhwa), Indian sculptors such as Anish Kapoor, and Indonesian pop art.

  Similarly, Asia’s music scene has benefited from adopting Western rituals such as wild dance festivals and viral YouTube videos. A decade ago, there were only a handful of events, such as the Fuji Rock Festival. Today, there are also Summer Sonic in Japan, Pentaport
Rock Festival in Korea, Electric Zoo Shanghai, ZoukOut in Singapore, and the global Ultra Music Festival across nearly ten locations in Southeast Asia alone. After importing these Western habits, Asia’s cultural exports have fanned outward. The Korean Wave (Hallyu) is the most obvious example. While the satirical rapper Psy’s hit “Gangnam Style” was the first video to reach 1 billion (and then 2 billion) views on YouTube, he is the tip of an iceberg whose foundation includes K-pop groups that have thousands of fan clubs as far away as Hungary and Peru, with K-pop competitions being held in the United States and France. In May 2018, the Korean boy band BTS reached number one on the US Billboard top 200. The rap singer Nichkhun stars in one of Korea’s most popular boy bands—even though he is Thai and grew up in southern California. With his fluency in Thai, Korean, and Mandarin, Nichkhun is one of a growing number of truly pan-Asian stars appearing in commercials and movies across the region. To capture ever more global entertainment mind share, the Korea Foundation for International Culture Exchange (KOFICE) has become a powerful agency dedicated to promoting Korea’s lucrative cultural exports.

  Asian food, too, has become a global sensation, from fast food to haute cuisine. Broadly defined, Asian cuisine is a vast collection of ingredients and culinary styles, from Mediterranean chickpeas to smoky grilled Central Asian lamb to Southeast Asian coconut milk and spices to Pacific Rim soy sauce. Each reflects a distinct cultural blending that has evolved over centuries, mostly with Asian neighbors. Colonial influence on Asian cuisine is far less prominent than the reverse. Though Vietnamese enjoy banh mi sandwiches resembling French baguettes (but made with rice flour) and one finds mayonnaise on salads in Laos, Western food has barely made a dent in Asian tastes. Only Japan and China have more than one thousand McDonald’s outlets, with other large Asian countries having around two hundred to five hundred each. More important, McDonald’s menus across Asia look nothing like those in the United States; they feature masala dosa burgers in India, shrimp burgers in Japan, and McNoodles across the region. The dozens of items on McDonald’s menus in Asia that one cannot get in the United States are a reminder that even though there are aspects of Western life to which Asians aspire, to truly succeed in Asia, one must become Asian.

  By contrast, Asian culinary traditions are very much and ever more part of Western life. Tea, of course, originated in China and was taken to India by the British in order to compete with China’s dominance in the tea trade. Ketchup comes from the Hokkein kê-tsiap and derives from a Vietnamese fermented fish sauce that British traders took back to England (where tomato was substituted as a base) as far back as the early eighteenth century. In 2018, the Swedish media confessed that their country’s famous meatball recipe had been borrowed from Turkey in the eighteenth century by King Charles XII. Across the West, rice is now stocked in wide assortments, from Indian basmati to Thai jasmine to Korean short grain.

  Across the board, over the past two decades, Asian food has gone from diaspora staple and cheap takeout to mainstream fast food and upscale cuisine. Japanese sushi is ubiquitous in both low-cost malls and high-end restaurants and hotels, and ramen noodles, once nothing more than a late-night fill-me-up for college students, are now a feature of menus nationwide. Alongside the usual Chinese retaurants serving General Tso’s chicken, Korean barbecue and kimchi-laden bibimbap bowls have popped up in many US cities. (Wherever Kia opens an automotive plant, kimchi is sure to appear on menus nearby.) Panda Express generated $2 billion in 2014 alone, and Taiwanese bubble tea—milky with lemongrass and tapioca jelly pearls—is gaining a foothold across the United States with hundreds of new shops nationwide. In Europe, Euromonitor International reports a 500 percent growth in sales of Asian fast-food restaurants since 1999. Indian curry houses in England employ more workers than the country’s combined iron, steel, coal, and shipbuilding industries, and Indian chicken curry sells in greater volume in Great Britain than does fish and chips. In London, Hakkasan, which blends Cantonese cuisine with fancy cocktails, has earned a Michelin star.

  Fusion across culinary cultures is producing innovation and success. China-India fusion cuisine is popping up in Mumbai and Shanghai, as well as New York and London. At the annual superstar chef gathering Madrid Fusion, Indian and Thai chefs such as the Blue Elephant’s Nooror Somany have been feted. After his training at the Culinary Institute of America, the Korean chef Yim Jungsik rocketed to stardom by adapting molecular gastronomy to produce a new Hansik (Korean) style. His exotic concoctions have earned his New York restaurant two Michelin stars, while his more traditional outlet in Seoul has only one star. One of the latest trends spreading across American food trucks and malls is “Ko-Mex” (Korean-Mexican) fusion, which began with Korean Americans in Seoul longing for the Mexican flavors of their American childhood, another testament to how reverse migration and ethnic intermingling produces novelty.

  In the world of fashion, Asia is now holding its own and expanding—both alone and through smart partnerships with European incumbents. The Japanese icon Issey Miyake began his career with Givenchy in Paris before launching his own labels, which brought Eastern styles to global prominence. Today Asian fashion is prominent from streetwear to haute couture. Uniqlo is a widely known Japanese label that has earned a large and loyal global following, while Shanghai Tang, which revives Chinese styles from a century ago, was bought early on by the Swiss luxury group Richemont and carried worldwide. Superdry is a highly successful British brand that uses gibberish Japanese characters on its clothing to enhance its unique appeal. The more the phenomenon of “Fashion Week” spreads from Dubai, Mumbai, and Shanghai, the more aggressively local designers compete to gain attention and customers in Asia, Europe, and beyond. Until recently, the nearly two-hundred-year-old high-end Lane Crawford department store chain in Hong Kong carried only four Asian labels, given its clientele’s Western aspirations. Today it boasts thirty Asian brands across its collections. H&M’s profits have been down substantially since 2015 as Asian brands capture Asian tastes. All Western apparel brands want more visibility among India’s urban elites, but dozens of Indian designers, including Manish Malhotra, Tarun Tahiliani, Ritu Kumar, and Neeta Lulla, have already reached such paramount status that they will have to Indianize themselves to compete. Simply put: Asian is now cool. Just ask Lady Gaga, who regularly wears Roggykei outfits, a label created by graduates of the Osaka College of Design.

  Asian fashion models have also broken through on the global stage. Though South Asian models such as Padma Lakshmi and Yasmeen Ghauri graced Western fashion magazines nearly two decades ago, it was China’s Liu Wen who became the first Asian to earn a spot on the Forbes list of highest-paid models in 2013 upon becoming the first international spokeswoman for Estée Lauder. Since then, Japanese, Korean, and other Asian models have made strides in the industry as well. In the cosmetics industry, Korean beauty products are the new global standard, with brands such as Dr. Jart+, Missha, and Etude House opening US outlets and global e-commerce sites. With Chinese ladies closely following the Korean trends, Unilever leapt to purchase the Korean beauty product maker Carver Korea for $2.7 billion in 2017. Between K-pop and cosmetics, Korea has become the most sought-after destination for European nannies seeking positions in Asia.

  And then there is cinema. Asian themes are not new to Hollywood, not least because of 1980s classics such as Gandhi, The Last Emperor, and A Passage to India, as well as notable films from the 1990s and 2000s set in Asia including Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai, the Clint Eastwood–directed Letters from Iwo Jima, and the all-Asian casts of The Joy Luck Club and Memoirs of a Geisha. Many Western moviegoers have also become familiar with the Taiwanese-born, American-educated, Oscar-winning Ang Lee for his melancholic Brokeback Mountain, the erotic Lust, Caution, the special-effects pioneer Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the sympathetic 3D drama Life of Pi. Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai has earned global acclaim for his films of repressed desire such as In the Mood for Love and its sequel, 2046. Numerous other Chinese film director
s have also achieved global standing, including Zhang Yimou, who adapted Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum to the screen and also directed the spectacular opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. Jia Zhangke’s film Still Life won the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival. Wang Bing, whose acclaimed documentaries confront sensitive social issues such as labor camps and Burmese minorities, embodies how Asian film-makers are confidently bringing local themes to global audiences with a humanistic appeal. All of this was before Crazy Rich Asians conquered American cinemas in the summer of 2018.

  For Hollywood, China’s economic heft has cut two ways. On the one hand, China’s opening of two dozen new movie screens every day (including with immersive architectural environments catering to 4D experiences) has Hollywood studios salivating over surging ticket sales. Asia as a whole and China in particular have helped numerous franchises from Jurassic Park to Star Wars to The Fast and the Furious and the Marvel superhero films to reach $1 billion in global revenue in ever shorter time spans. China’s commercial and political tentacles, however, have insinuated themselves into Hollywood, both helping the industry finance more films and compromising its artistic freedom. Dalian Wanda’s purchase of AMC in the United States and Odeon in Europe, as well as the production studio Legendary Entertainment, has capitalized ambitious productions and ensured penetration into China’s massive audiences. But access has come at a price, with plotlines shifting to favor pro-Chinese narratives such as China’s space agency conducting an interplanetary rescue in The Martian or replacing a mystical Tibetan in Doctor Strange with a Nordic-looking character.