Asian Influence

Asian
Influence

  

Japan, with a booming
economy, and granted a Most Favored Nation status with the U.S., attempted to establish production
facilities in the United
States in the 1980s. However, the Japanese
culture was unfamiliar with the individualism of the U.S. citizens of the 1970s and 1980s.
While any criticism of the Japanese or  Japanese
management style was met with cries of “White Racism” in the various trade
journals, Japan’s own
critique of the U.S.
as being a “Mongrel Nation” slipped quietly from the front pages. This was due
in large part to the efforts of Robert Angel, a paid lobbyist for the Japanese
government. He coined the term “Japan Bashing” to discredit critics of the
Japanese imperialistic approach to trade.

While Japan enjoyed
wide open markets in the United States,
Japanese markets were closed to a free-flow of goods from the U.S. This remains a running
argument in academic journals, as Japan
is sited as importing more goods per capita than the U.S.
has imported from Japan.
There may be some validity to this observation as Japan’s
population is approximately half that of the U.S. today.

When the U.S.
economy slid into the Peace Dividend[1]
recession in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following the fall of the Soviet
Union, Japan’s
economy faltered. The Japanese asset price bubble burst in 1990.

This is another lesson concerning globalization. Any nation which
produces goods specifically for consumption by another nation is liable to have
its economy falter if the customer nation is no longer willing or able to
consume the goods. Japan
had done a poor job at developing its own consumer markets. While it did a
phenomenal job of securing employment for its citizens, many of whom were still
stunned by the abject poverty following World War Two, Japanese business could
not be talked into spending the local economy back into prosperity. Even after
the Japanese asset price bubble burst, Japanese citizens retained sufficient
economic resources in liquid assets to recover from the economic slump. The
same character traits, thrift and savings, which allowed them to recover after
the war, stalled their economy during the 1990s. In today’s globalized economy,
there is much talk about China’s
rise to economic power. However, it is currently uncertain how well they are
developing the internal market to consume their own goods and services. If China’s economic boom is fully dependent on the U.S., or a Western, economy then an economic
slow down in the West will devastate China as it did Japan in 1990. As
sited in Morris Berman’s Dark Ages America, China’s
approach to internal economic development is an expression of Social Darwinism
– a current trend in the Free-Trade policies even in the US. This does not bode well for the
internal picture of the Chinese economy. It cannot be overemphasized that The
People’s Republic of China is still a communist nation; effectively it
is a national corporation where business are engaged in joint ventures with the
government itself. While China
may look good in the short term future, it is hard to predict what will occur over
a longer period of time.

  In A.M Sperber’s Murrow: His
Life and Times, it is sited that Edward R. Murrow, the voice of CBS during
World War Two, worked hard as a young man to persuade colleges to hire Jewish scientists
and other intellectual dissidents from Nazi Germany before the war broke out.
Mr. Gates may be attempting to rescue the best intellectual assets of the world
before regional chaos hits, by requesting more H-1B visas from Congress. Under
the H-1B Visa program, recipients do not have to apply for political asylum and
don’t have to reveal the true nature of their move to U.S. protection. This also creates
a pool of resources in the U.S.
to pressure for change in the country of origin should that be needed. This, of
course, is pure speculation, and as stated in the Wikipedia article on the H-1B
visa, “Economist Milton Friedman has called the program a form of subsidy.”[2]
It does displace technical and engineering expertise in the U.S. and will remain a sore spot in U.S.
labor relations in the foreseeable future.

China is no where near
as stable as we have been led to believe. According to reports which have
trickled through the broadcast of the BBC via NPR, recent Chinese defectors
have warned the West of the risk of investing in China. The best summary is that China
is unstable; however, the details are skeletal at best.

China seems to heading
toward some kind of economic crunch point not dissimilar to Japan’s crisis in 1990. Two factors which are
known are the threat of overheating the economy, and oddly enough, for a nation
of 1.3 Billion people, a labor shortage.[3]
China’s population is
growing old and a result of the zero population growth policies since 1979
(People’s Republic of China’s
one-child policy), there is a shortage of young workers to fill slots at the
entry levels of the economy.[4]  There are serious issues concerning China’s
handling of Chinese dissidents, as well, according to a report co-authored by
former Canadian cabinet minister David Kilgour and prominent rights lawyer
David Matas released in July of 2006 stating that, “Chinese political
prisoners, particularly Falun Gong[5]
adherents, are being ‘harvested’ for the lucrative sale of organs to foreign
buyers”.[6]

There are unsubstantiated reports that the PRC (People’s Republic of China) has transferred military equipment to
provincial riot police to quell uprisings in various regions within China.
The Chinese communist government may not be acting with astute wisdom in this
period of economic boom. While all these charges and observations may seem
somewhat sensationalized, there is an economic reality that cannot be
overlooked: An economic boom is usually followed by a bust. There is no general
indication how the current Chinese political culture will address the inevitable
bust when one occurs.

India is equally
threatened. Bangalor, the hub of India’s
technology and science based industries, is located on the Deccan Plateau in
central India.
It is venerable to aggression from a nuclear-armed Pakistan
and a potentially unstable China.
India
has become one of the gathering points for western economic diversification.
The net domestic product of Bangalor alone is estimated at 51.9 billion U.S.
dollars.[7]

The economic viability of India
may be its saving grace as far as China is concerned. China needs India as a gateway for further
development. However, there is a highly volatile situation: Kashmir.

As was summarized in Radicals, Religion, and Revelation,
“Kashmir is an 80,000 square mile region sandwiched between Pakistan and India. A Hindu monarch annexed this
Islamic state into India.
The fifty-year fight over this disputed claim has been marked by the exchange
of artillery shells between the two nations. The world will likely see the
first use of nuclear weapons since World War II over this stretch of hilly
land, each nation firing at the other’s most strategic target.”[8]

According to the article on Sino-Indian relations updated on April 30,
2007 in Wikipedia, “In November 2006, China
and India
had a verbal spat over claim of the north-east Indian state of Arunachal
Pradesh. India claimed that China was occupying 38,000 square kilometers of
its territory in Kashmir, while China
claimed the whole of Arunachal Pradesh as its own.[9]

In a related article on Arunachal Pradesh, “The Chinese Ambassador to India, Sun Yuxi has publicly stated in India: “In
our position, the whole of the state of Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory.
And Tawang is only one of the places in it. We are claiming all of that. That
is our position.”[10]
India’s External Affairs
Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, has countered that statement by saying that
“Arunachal is an integral part of India.”[11]
India and China are currently engaged in
talks to resolve the boundary question. Last year, both countries signed the
“Political Parameters and Guiding Principles” document to peacefully
resolve this issue.”[12]

These events pit India
against both China and Pakistan.
The current President of Pakistan is Pervez Musharraf. He is a moderate Muslim
in a nation which has a strong radical Islamic population. He has survived two
separate assassination attempts. Both attempts bore the signature tactics of
the Islamic radicals: suicide bombers. If, and it may be a big “if”, the radical
Islamic forces succeed in taking over Pakistan, they could inflict a serious
blow to the economy of the United States by looking no further than central
India. A conventional bombardment of Bangalor, let alone a nuclear strike,
would seriously damage all western economies.

Under the ideal of globalization such threats are dismissed. History,
however, shows what is good for business is not necessarily good for regional
politics. In many respects, the destruction of World
Trade Center
towers in New York City
did not do much to improve the prospects for peace through globalization. What the
attack did achieve was to enhance the image of Al-Qaeda as a political force of
liberation from Western Imperialism in Islamic lands, and created Osama bin
Laden as a folk hero in Afghanistan,
Iran, Palestine,
Syria, Lebanon, Saudi
Arabia, and Pakistan. Local politics are
dismissed at the jeopardy of the corporation, even if the corporation’s
headquarters is thousands of miles away from the instable region.

The business community declared that global war was
not possible in the late 1800s and early 1900s because it would disrupt world
trade. This was at the same time that Europe
was engaged in an arms race. The same theme was being discussed before World
War Two erupted. Once again, we hear this  same argument. Today, it is called
globalization. We hear that our business policies will prevail in bringing
wayward nations into the global community. Commerce will pave the way to global
harmony. This is being sung while Bill Gates tries to rescue the brain trust of
India’s and China’s Information Technology fields, at the
expense of the U.S. IT professionals, while the U.S.
rattles the saber at Iran.