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| September 7, 2003 THE METAPHOR OF THE TWO SUNS By Tom
Plate |
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| HONG KONG -- Machiavelli wrote that to keep order, it’s best if the Prince is both feared and loved. But if only one option is available, fear works better. The perception one gets from traveling through Asia is that Washington is mainly feared, Japan is going to be feared whether it wants to be or not, and China hasn’t yet figured out its geopolitical philosophy, so, at the moment, it is neither feared nor loved. China, a work in progress, can also be explained with an apt metaphor courtesy of Singapore’s George Yeo, who has the intellectual depth of a political philosopher but a day job as Singapore’s minister of trade and industry. Since the Cold War’s end, he posits, the geopolitical universe has had but one sun at the center -- the United States. All planets orbit around its gravitational pull. But a second sun is starting to edge into this solar system -- China. Its full entry will modify the global gravitational field forever. Only those planet-nations that accordingly adjust their orbits to avoid coming too close to either of the two suns will escape nasty burns (or even self-destructive incendiary collisions). The metaphor is downstream thinking, to be sure. ‘‘This two-suns theory won’t be a reality for maybe a hundred years,’’ says Ronnie Chan, the Hong Kong-based chairman of Hang Lung Properties Ltd., currently doing boffo real-estate business in Shanghai. Perhaps. We do often forget that China remains a Third World nation with over-developed coastal areas, under-developed hinterlands and a million problems. Even so, it will always have something like four times the population of the United States and 10 times that of Japan, once regarded as the singular land of the rising sun. Aggregate population isn’t everything, of course. If it were, India would start its own political solar system and Indonesia could vie for inclusion. Besides, Japan’s days in the sun are far from over. In the last few months, its economy is starting to look amazingly un-Japan-like: It is showing signs of pep; penny-pinching Japanese consumers are starting to throw money around like materialistic, gadget-obsessed Westerners. And Japan now sports a very un-Japanese prime minister: Junichiro Koizumi doesn’t put folks to sleep, and many people, even outside Japan, have come to like his stylish ways. Even so, Asia as a whole can’t make up its mind whether it prefers a Japan that’s up-and-coming (thus stimulating the region’s economy and pitching in on regional issues, as Koizumi is doing with North Korea) or one that’s safely on the down-and-out (with reduced potential to become a military threat again). The bottom line is that Japan is still more feared than loved -- especially by older generations who remember those World War II atrocities, even as younger generations of Japanese (who had nothing to do with those horror shows) work hard to remold their society in a peaceful way. But even the fear of a remilitarized Japan does not loom as large as the fear of America these days. This is heartbreaking to report, especially at a time when courageous American men and women are sacrificing their lives in Iraq to demented car bombers and Washington struggles for some way out. Has the United States, on the whole, ever been so unloved? Chan rightly points out that today’s resentment is first prompted by America’s overwhelming preeminence. It is still the only sun on the block. Any country so blindingly prominent would be resented, even if it were utterly angelic. Alas, our image is hardly heavenly, for the pushy Bush administration style constantly grates: we Americans talk, you Asians listen; we do, you follow. Nobody likes this; Asians especially hate it. Anti-Americanism in this region is palpable. Consider: One of Asia’s richest men -- who needs to remain anonymous -- tells me he is reading avidly the polemical essays of Noam Chomsky. I was stunned. Chomsky is the celebrated theorist of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but as a political philosopher, he is a basher of America. If Chomsky is winning the minds and hearts of people such as this billionaire, then America’s image problem goes far deeper than anyone has realized. There is no reason why America, the greatest country on Earth, can’t be as much loved as feared. But right now the emotion in Asia is fear, and that’s scary. |
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For publication and reprint rights, contact the author directly or John Simpson (john.simpson@latsi.com) of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate International. |
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Bio Remarks: Tom Plate is a professor of Policy and Communication Studies at UCLA where he founded the Asia Pacific Media Network. He is a regular columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate International, the South China Morning Post, The Straits Times and the Honolulu Advertiser. He is a member of the World Economic Forum, the Pacific Council on International policy and the author of five books. He has worked at TIME, the Los Angeles Times and the Daily Mail of London. |
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