The North as new South, the East as new West

He covered, amongst other things, the debate about whether China’s recently reduced surplus balance is likely to maintain its downward trajectory, reflecting the John Ross argument that the huge surplus established has been accidental, or whether it is simply a temporary blip as China invests heavily in copper (the Duncan position).

See the four posts here, here, here and here, or remain uninformed.

Duncan makes reference to this when he recounts what Danny Quah of the London School of Economics had to say the other week:

‘Danny Quah raised a very interesting point disputing the concept of Excessive Asian Savings. He called the concept ‘Western Centric’. To an extent I agree.Professor Quah is certainly correct to note that in previous debt crisis (Asia in 1997, various LatAm incidents in the 1980s and 1990s, etc) the blame has been firmly placed on those who have borrowed more than they could afford. It is the reckless borrower who suffers the consequences of their actions thourough structural adjustment.’

Quite right.

All the indications are that the industrialised West is swiftly becoming a secondary player in the world economy, yet we still describe Asia’s growth in terms of its impact upon the West.

But why should China care much about what happens to the West? Is it not quite possible that China can continue its growth without reference to the West, increasingly preferring trade within Asia to the decreasing sales to a newly impoverished West?

As this article (via Vino) by an American diplomat notes, China’s ecnomic muscle is now perhaps being used to develop a new ‘physical’ empire (including the near-annexation of the high seas), and you can almost sense the air of new American powerlessness in it; China, increasingly, no longer need to worry about how the rest of the world sees it, because it is fast becoming what the US was 20 years ago.

Moreover, isn’t it really quite possible that, over the next 20 years, the East/West role reversal will be complete, with China and India looking to the West for a cheap-but-well-trained source of labour, perhaps even for its cheap source of primary products?

Before the British empire took full hold on the Indian sub-continent, the British were the ones who tended to adapt to the customs and norms of their host country. It was only once empire was established by military means that the imposition of British culture was imposed upon the conquered majority.

Is it inconceivable therefore that the East, as it reverses economic roles with the West completely, might also start to reverse the direction of the imposition of socio-cultural (and language) norms, and that the global Americanisation of the 20th century might give way to the Asification of the 21st?

When China, for example, talks of doing its business ‘with Chinese characteristics’, does that actually mean a good deal more than imposing more state control over production than the industrialised West is now used to (with, as John Ross is keen to note, pretty impressive results).

Should the West be preparing for the inevitable? Should, for example, the UK be starting to invest heavily in language training that allows its workforce to compete for and labour under contracts which no longer need to be translated into English?

Should we accept that what we always thought was the lingua franca may not, in fact be as franca as we thought it would always be?

Of course, there are more questions than answers here, and I’m not trying to be some kind of futurologist. But perhaps it is time that we started to look at the growth of Asia (and other countries such as Brazil) in their own terms rather than our own.

And for us Western lefties , perhaps we really need to get a handle on the universality of socialist principles, and the need to argue them from a position of global weakness rather than global strength.

What will it mean to us, for example, if Chinese-owned firms simply decide to abolish the basic labour rights and norms that the left has worked so hard for in the West, and which even neoliberalism at its height has not fully destroyed, because they simply do not fit with the ‘Chinese characteristics’ of the global economy we are all going to have to make our way in.

At the conference Duncan and I attended the other week, I asked a deliberately slightly Western-centric question of John Ross and Danny Quah: ‘Is the promotion of labour rights in China now an irrelevance?’

I got the answer I expected from both of them, though in different terms: ‘China is pulling hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty, and it is doing it its own way.’