The Giants of Asia

2018 note: With their huge populations and buoyant growth rates, China and India are two of the economic and technological powerhouses of the twenty-first century. And though many seem to forget it after two lost decades, Japan is the third largest economy in the world, the second largest developed economy and the world’s largest creditor nation. Over the past 10 years, too, growth in Japanese GDP per head has also outpaced that of Europe and the US

Nor do the three giants get on. They dispute borders (China-India), as well as maritime boundaries and islands (China-Japan). Moreover, to its two rivals, China looks too friendly towards countries such as Bangladesh, Pakistan and North Korea.

For America, China saves too much, consumes too little, steals US innovations, engages in cyber-war, runs its currency too cheap, hoards rare earth metals, and tramples on human rights. For many environmentalists, the industrialisation and motorisation of China and India are a disaster. Meanwhile Japan still takes flak for its resistance to inward investment, immigration, women’s rights and political reform. Despite the opportunities it sees in Asia, the West is still disdains the giants there.

The West underestimates China’s growing consumer class, and Its growing powers of innovation. But can Xi Jinping prevent social and economic turmoil – turmoil that Wen Jiabao, his forerunner, warned could be as great as that of the Cultural Revolution? Can Narendra Modi escape censure for his denial of citizenship to 4m Muslims in Assam? For how much longer can Japan’s economy, now effectively nuclear-free, really avoid a third ‘lost decade’ of zombie banks and ineffectual governments? And when might Asian production finally and decisively shift to low-cost Indonesia and Vietnam?

 

SPEAKERS

• Professor Barry Buzan: emeritus professor, LSE; author, The United States and the Great Powers: world politics in the twenty-first century
• James Woudhuysen: professor of forecasting and innovation, De Montfort University; co-author, Energise! A future for energy innovation
• Dr Linda Yueh: fellow in economics, St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford; adjunct professor of economics, London Business School; economics editor, Bloomberg TV

Chair: Phil Mullan: economist; business transformation director, Easynet Global Services; author, The Imaginary Time Bomb