The Future Is Asian

by Parag Khanna

  Other Asian film industries have taken a more commercial and less editorial approach. The Abu Dhabi–based Image Nation has also financed Hollywood films such as Men in Black 3 and The Circle, while the government has lured New York University to establish a film academy alongside its academic campus there. South Korea has taken a purely commercial approach. Its film exports increased by 82 percent in 2016 alone on the back of Yeon Sang-ho’s zombie thriller Train to Busan and Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, with multiple Korean films picked up for distribution by Netflix and Amazon—both of which are competing vigorously in India, with Netflix launching several original Indian series, such as Sacred Games, starring Bollywood A-listers.

  Hollywood is seeking ever more crossovers with Asian cinema. The success of Slumdog Millionaire, which swept eight Oscars in 2009 (including one for the English director, Danny Boyle, and the Indian composer, A. R. Rahman), kicked off a broader thrust to bridge American and Asian cinematic cultures. But the biggest shift in Asian cinematic tastes is the enthusiasm for cross-Asian collaborations. Cultural sensitivities have prevented major crossovers among Asia’s major cultural markets, despite notable exceptions such as the half-Japanese, half-Taiwanese Takeshi Kaneshiro—sometimes called the “Johnny Depp of Asia”—who has starred in both Chinese and Japanese movies. In 2006, the Thai production Invisible Waves featured a Japanese lead actor, with other cast members from Hong Kong and Korea, and was shot in Macau. Chinese and Korean studio executives have put out a raft of joint productions such as A Wedding Invitation and the 3D sports action drama Mr. Go. An even trickier but more lucrative act is Bollywood’s crossover with Chinese cinema. Jackie Chan’s 2017 movie Kung Fu Yoga features stars from China and India who manage to speak each other’s languages when they need to (plus lots of subtitles), with English and Arabic thrown in across sets spanning Dubai and the Arctic. The film is designed to have pan-Asian appeal well beyond the two major driving markets, and despite the cultural complexity of the undertaking, it earned about $200 million worldwide. In 2016, Image Nation and China Intercontinental Communication Center launched a $300 million fund to promote joint productions such as Chinese- and Arabic-language content in the countries lying between Saudia Arabia and China. Some now speak of a pan-Asian “Asiawood” industry.

  Commercial Hindi cinema has been no stranger to global outreach. As far back as 1946, Indian cinema achieved global acclaim with the Cannes Film Festival’s grand prize awarded to Chetan Anand’s Hindi-Urdu film Neecha Nagar. The Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray was revered by Martin Scorsese and received an honorary Academy Award in 1992; Wes Anderson dedicated his 2007 film The Darjeeling Limited, which was set mostly in India, to Ray. Non-Indian audiences across Asia have been enthralled by Bollywood for decades. As early as the 1950s, Raj Kapoor films were the rage in the USSR, where they were seen as an antidote to Hollywood poison. Bollywood remains popular across Central Asia and the Caucasus. In the 1980s, Bollywood films were so popular in Egypt that they threatened local film revenues, leading to the government limiting Indian film screenings. Today there are more than thirty Arab TV channels that show Bollywood films, with talk shows devoted to interviews with their stars. On the back of Bollywood films that achieved international acclaim such as Shah Rukh Khan’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and Aamir Khan’s Three Idiots, Bollywood fan clubs have sprouted around Europe. In 2010, the University of Vienna hosted a three-day international conference on Shah Rukh Khan and Global Bollywood.13 Aamir Khan’s 2016 biopic Dangal, about female wrestlers in India, earned more revenue in China than in India itself. As Saudi Arabia has opened movie theaters again (including to women), Pakistani films have been among the first to be screened, with “Lollywood” (Lahore’s Bollywood) planning new productions aimed at the Saudi market.

  Bollywood’s North American audiences have been largely limited to the Indian diaspora, though that is large enough to fill entire stadiums in New Jersey when Bollywood stars tour the United States performing entertainment ensembles. Still, from the caricature cartoon character of Apu in The Simpsons to the slapstick Asian stereotypes of the Korean Indian Harold & Kumar duo to the full Asian cast of Fresh Off the Boat (based on Eddie Huang’s memoir), each decade has brought a rising number of Asian stars into mainstream American television and cinema and mainstream Asian issues onto the American social agenda. The Bollywood starlet Priyanka Chopra was brought in to headline ABC’s prime-time action drama Quantico, and the Taiwanese singer Jay Chou was cast in The Green Hornet to draw a larger Asian audience. Most major American TV networks now have a plethora of South and East Asian anchors.

  India’s cultural exports have reached as far as Latin America, where self-styled Indian gurus lead large crowds in meditation at “yoga raves” and Indian rock bands tour Brazilian music festivals. After the Mexican actress Bárbara Mori’s breakthrough in the 2010 Bollywood action drama Kites, a cottage industry has been spawned of Latina actresses seeking success in India’s film industry.14 More than a dozen Bollywood films have been screened at the Bogotá International Film Festival, while Rio de Janeiro hosts an annual festival dedicated to Bollywood films. Ever since an award-winning 2009 Brazilian soap opera was set in Jaipur, with Brazilian actors dancing to Bollywood hits, upward of 30 million Brazilians have watched Indian films while Brazilian tourism to India grew eightfold by 2016. Each Indian film shot in Bangkok or Dubai, Switzerland or Spain, Iceland or New Zealand brings throngs of Indian tourists to the country a year later. It is no wonder that government agencies from Finland and Poland to Israel and Fiji are offering major tax rebates to Indian film studios.

  It cannot be overstated to what extent Bollywood has been a moral medium for Indian society, whose polyglot nature has most persuasively been bridged through cinematic drama rather than newspaper translations and government edicts. Today the most hot-button issues, from gender stereotypes to government corruption to caste resentment, are aired through film first and foremost. Film has artfully stirred national pride by re-creating epic mythologies and celebrating anticolonial uprisings big and small, as in Aamir Khan’s Lagaan about a ragtag group of Indian villagers who learn cricket well enough to defeat a team of seasoned British colonial officers, earning relief from their crushing tax burden. Importantly, whereas national politics has succumbed to religious chauvinism, Bollywood has remained a club of secular solidarity, with an estimated one-third of star actors being Muslim (double the Muslim percentage of the population). Aamir Khan and other leading film personalities have evoked the spirit of one’s “duty as a citizen” to carry the torch of tolerance.

  There are other ways in which ethnocultural pride are supplanting long-ingrained deference to colonial norms. Local languages are again flourishing, not just in cinema but also in literature. Also, South Asia’s (and Southeast Asia’s) obsession with skin whitening is being challenged by a nascent “brown is beautiful” movement. Asians are realizing that neither remaining stuck in, nor blaming the past for present social ills is of any use. They are no longer being divided and ruled and should stop finding more ways to continue to divide themselves from one another.

  What Asians Think

  A century on from the pan-Asian idealism of Okakura Tenshin, Rabindranath Tagore, and Liang Qichao, Asians are rediscovering their intellectual synergies and composing narratives that seriously challenge the West’s uncritical self-appraisal and tenants of modern Western political history and thought. Why does the West brand itself as the defender of human rights globally when it has backed so many dictatorial regimes? Is unrestrained individual freedom truly the essential foundation of commercial innovation and success? Isn’t capitalism essential for democracy rather than democracy being essential for capitalism? Should meritocratic training be more important than democratic popularity in selecting political leaders? As was the case with Asia’s Cold War nationalists, educating Asians in the West produces not pro-American stooges but rather intellectuals able to stand up to the West in a language it understands.

>   Pan-Asian intellectual convergence today is nothing like the Nehruvian brotherhood envisioned during the insecure postcolonial years, but something much more constructive. Today’s leaders don’t aspire to a fanciful “United States of Asia” but a more humble yet productive commonwealth of commerce and learning. Even though very few Asians born, raised, and educated in Asia have found a prominent voice in the West, they have been proven right by events because they have not lost their authentic understanding of their region’s rhythms and dynamics.

  But Asians still need to read much more about one another. Though Asians share interrelated histories, differences in culture and language have limited the penetration of pan-Asian ideas. Western publications have filled the gap.15 In the West, geopolitical occurrences from 9/11 to China’s rise have boosted funding for Arab and Asian studies. Well-funded North American universities and scholarly outlets such as The Journal of Asian Studies, the flagship publication of the Association for Asian Studies, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, continue to lead the field. Publications edited by Asian scholars at Asian universities such as the Asian Journal of Social Science, published by the National University of Singapore, have decisively less reach both within Asia and certainly in the West. Asia now has many academic centers that now produce rigorous scholarly output that Western academics should pay more attention to rather than citing one another in self-referential loops. In just the past few years, I have noticed a change in tone: American “experts” now come to Asia to be schooled, not to lecture.

  There have been numerous Asia-centric efforts to report Asia from the inside out. From the 1940s to the 2000s, the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) enjoyed a wide following in Asia for its extensive local coverage of the Asian business scene. In the 1970s, two former FEER correspondents founded Asia Week with the explicit intent to deliver “Asia through Asian eyes.” By the 1980s, competition for eyeballs on Asian newsstands intensified as Western magazines launched Asian editions such as Time Asia, Fortune Asia, and Asian Geographic, but these remained effectively imports from the West with limited indigenous content. Asia Times, founded in Bangkok in 1995, markets itself as the “only all-digital, pan-Asian site aimed specifically at English-speaking users.” Its readership is half Asian, half European and North American. For the Sinophone world, there is Yazhou Zhoukan (Asia Weekly), focusing on international affairs from a Chinese perspective. On the whole, though, these pan-Asian publications have fallen far below the reach of domestic media in local languages.

  Asians have had far more success in the global literary than journalistic scenes. Owing to their shared linguistic and cultural heritage, East Asians have centuries of familiarity with each other’s literary traditions. The Tale of Genji, written by the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu in the early eleventh century, is widely considered the world’s first psychological novel and has inspired many writers through the ages including Jorge Luis Borges. China’s four great classical novels spanning six centuries—Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, and Dream of the Red Chamber—are read and taught across South Korea and Japan.

  The past two generations have witnessed a great acceleration of awareness of Asian literature. China, Japan, and India have produced a raft of writers who have risen to global acclaim. Rabindranath Tagore was the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, but then came a void until Yasunari Kawabata of Japan in 1968. Kenzaburo Oe won the prize in 1994, Gao Xingjian of China in 2000, Mo Yan of China in 2012, and the Japanese British writer Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017. From Western Asia, the Israeli Shmuel Yosef Agnon won the Nobel in 1966 and the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in 2006. The prestigious Man Booker Prize has gone to numerous Asian writers such as Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga, Kiran Desai, and Arundhati Roy, all of whom have made Asian themes more familiar to Western readers, and the prize’s international award went to the Korean novelist Han Kang for her multipart drama The Vegetarian.

  Indian and Japanese authors in particular have attained mass global audiences, notably Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood) and Amitav Ghosh (The Glass Palace), as well as the Afghan-born Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner). In popular culture, Asian-Western crossover literature that tackles issues of social stress at ethnic intersections has caught fire with the success of Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club), Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies), Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere), and Kevin Kwan (Crazy Rich Asians). American writers who delve deeply into exotic Asia such as Lisa See (The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Shanghai Girls) have also proved their staying power on best-seller lists. Jin Yong’s fabled Condor trilogy, often likened to a Chinese Lord of the Rings, has taken decades to translate into English but has gained a huge following.

  Asians have also achieved prominence in the sciences, often by directly focusing on the most pressing societal needs. Japanese scientists have long led the way in Asia’s contributions to global research, winning numerous Nobel Prizes in medicine and physics, as well as the prestigious Shaw and Lasker prizes in life sciences. Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka, the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, tops the Asian Scientist list for revolutionizing the field of stem cell research, and in 2016 Yoshinori Osumi won the Nobel Prize for his research on autophagy (cellular decay). The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the Chinese pharmacologist Tu Youyou for her discovery of the malarial treatment artemisinin, shared with the Japanese biochemist Satoshi Omura. Importantly, Tu Youyou received all of her education and conducted all of her research exclusively in China at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The award is just the latest in a string of prominent public and clinical recognition of the success of TCM and ancient Indian medical practices such as Ayurveda, which argues that holistic healing must place equal emphasis on the mind and spirit in addition to the body. There is more to Asia’s fusion of science and spirituality: The global medical and environmental communities increasingly converge around the physiological and ecological benefits of a vegetarian diet. In other words, if everyone ate like a Hindu, the world would be a more sustainable place.

  Epilogue: Asia’s Global Future

  Asia dominated the Old World, while the West led the New World—and now we are coming to a truly global world. There is no turning back from today’s multipolar, multicivilizational order. There is also no turning back the clock. The Western world order no longer exists and will not return. It was as contingent as any other era, and we are better served by aspiring to a more inclusive and stable horizon. Be wary of those who believe that history repeats itself or even rhymes. The cumulative turnings of the historical wheel yield movement in new directions. Never before has there been a global system so strongly imprinted by multiple civilizations, regions and poles of power spanning all continents, a world order in which the success of each depends on a healthy degree of globalization among them. The task before us, as Henry Kissinger noted in his book World Order, is to channel “divergent historical experiences and values . . . into a common order.”1

  Globalization has created a global society, but in recent centuries, as Duke University philosophy professor Owen Flanagan points out, the default compass of morality has derived from the views of the most unrepresentative group: Western Educated Industrial Rich Democracies (WEIRD). Meanwhile, the Asian majority of the global population, according to the social psychologist Richard Nisbett, has very distinct cognitive processes, especially East Asians, who do not draw sharp distinctions between subject and context. Eastern philosophy advocates the unity of self and other, man and nature, while Western philosophy elevates the distinctions between them and places the individual rather than family or community at the center. While Western approaches seek true or objective knowledge, the cultural scholar Prasenjit Duara argues that Asia’s transcendental faiths are open-ended: knowledge does not have to have an immutable form but can change according to circumstances, and its purpose can be to pursue universal goals such as harm
ony. This seems a sophisticated relativism appropriate to today’s times.

  Global thought requires more than just creating space to hear others’ ideas or juxtaposing cultures. Asia has reached a full reckoning with the impact of Western history on its present. Now the West must reckon with the rise of Asia on its future, immersing itself in the Asian worldview in an effort to rise above both self and other in search of synthesis on matters as wide ranging as international law and scientific ethics.

  There is some positive evidence that these more syncretic conversations are taking place. The Buddhist Dalai Lama has demonstrated that he is quite an empiricist, stating that if science refutes certain Buddhist beliefs, then science should prevail. Pope Francis has opened up dialogues with Islamic authorities and the Chinese government, looking for common ground. The pillars of the global religious establishment are clearly aware of the world’s irrevocable spiritual multipolarity; they must accept one another’s unwavering strength and find mutually acceptable ways forward. In all spheres of global life, there is a need to graduate from dialogue to synthesis: Western atomism and Eastern holism, humanism and scientific materialism, freedom and harmony, democracy and technocracy—all enriching our shared experience.

  Global order is not passed down by divine mandate; it is a complex, ever evolving process. Asia today is reviving the ethos that enabled its earlier eras of greatness: confidence in its values and open to knowledge. It has even crossed the threshold from learning to application, generating innovations that are being shared around the world. The relations among the world’s centers of gravity involve recycling capital, refining ideas, and adopting technologies in ways that have enriched them all. Europe amassed great power and profit from colonizing Asia, Asia has grown stupendously from American and European outsourcing, and now the United States and Europe are being buttressed by infusions of Asian investment and talent. This, not multipolar competition, is the true nature of a global system.