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The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East | 
 enlarge | Author: Kishore Mahbubani
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 11980
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 1586484664
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.5
EAN: 9781586484668
ASIN: 1586484664
Publication Date: January 22, 2008
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Product Description
For centuries, the Asians (Chinese, Indians, Muslims, and others) have been bystanders in world history. Now they are ready to become co-drivers.
Asians have finally understood, absorbed, and implemented Western best practices in many areas: from free-market economics to modern science and technology, from meritocracy to rule of law. They have also become innovative in their own way, creating new patterns of cooperation not seen in the West.
Will the West resist the rise of Asia? The good news is that Asia wants to replicate, not dominate, the West. For a happy outcome to emerge, the West must gracefully give up its domination of global institutions, from the IMF to the World Bank, from the G7 to the UN Security Council.
History teaches that tensions and conflicts are more likely when new powers emerge. This, too, may happen. But they can be avoided if the world accepts the key principles for a new global partnership spelled out in The New Asian Hemisphere.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 The New Asian Hemisphere June 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Kishore Mahbubani presents an engrossing account, written with clarity and incite, detailing the shifting landscape of our human planet. He is able to comprehensively portray the changing forces - strengths and weaknesses, economically, politically, and culturally - affecting the dynamics of the interactions and changing powers of the world's civilizations. I became interested in the book after watching Mr. Mahbubani on an interview on UCTV in which he made a potentially boring-sounding topic sound potentially interesting. IT WAS FASCINATING!
Hail the March to Modernity! May 24, 2008
25 out of 27 found this review helpful
First I noticed the controversy about this book in Hard Talk on BBC, where the host and the author did some very unsatisfactory pirouettes around the contentious issues, which are related to the Western reservations about current Asian progress. Then I read an even worse interview in Der Spiegel, where the interviewers excelled in stupidity while the author excelled in stubbornness.
Consequently I had to pick up the book and read it. KM expects to provoke 'us' Westerners, but he asks some pundits to write blurbs, which Summers and Zbig and others did.
KM's thesis is this: Asia rises, and that is good for the world. The Western leaders have trouble in adjusting their mental maps, which are trapped in the past. Asia has benefitted from the world system as established after WW2 and has no interest in endangering it. The current wave of optimism will enter West Asia as well and Pakistan, Iran and others will want to have the same progress as China and India etc...
The March to Modernity is good for all, and it is not just material, rather the escape from poverty has far reaching immaterial value for the masses of Asia.
In short, KM is a 'hopeless' optimist, and I do hope that his victorious scenario wins. My biggest doubts are over the Islamic world's ability to join the trend. Maybe KM knows better. I do hope so.
One surprise for me was that KM steps away from the old litany of Lee Kuan Yew and others, i.e. that Asian economic success is due to traditonal Confucian values. In the contrary, KM argues that China, India, and the others, are following Japan in adopting the '7 pillars' that were the basis of the West's surge forward some centuries ago. These 7 pillars are: 1. free economy (expect Adam Smith in the Asian pantheon of the future!), 2.science (enormous push forward; quote Rajiv Gandhi: better brain drain than brain in the drain); 3. meritocracy/equal opportunity, a trend which requires overcoming huge traditional obstacles, but which is clearly on the way; 4.pragmatism: possibly a euphemism for copying; 5.a culture of peace (maybe hard to believe for many in the West); 6. the rule of law: far from being an attained target so far; 7.education.
If KM is right, the adoption of Western values is going far beyond copying Gucci bags and Lacoste shirts. In that sense I would'nt be surprised if he got as much headwind in Asia as in the West.
The headwind in the West comes from his criticism of the exportation of democracy into nations that are not ready for it. And of course from his criticism of the way the West dominates the international institutions and applies double standards.
Why are we not happy with the Asians following our example? Because it means loss of power, plain and simple.
Can't say that I don't see his point. Equally I think he is right in blaming the current Western leadership for gross incompetence in critical issues such as Middle East policy (the Iraq invasion as the single worst case of bad judgment and terrible implementation), free trade, nuclear non-proliferation, global warming...
Incidentally, KM points out, at the time when Giordano Bruno was burned for heresy in Rome, the Muslim emperor Akbar the Great pronounced principles of a secular government in India. So much for Western conceipt.
 Asia's March to Modernity May 13, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Kishore Mahbubani, former diplomat and currently dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, was one of the leading exponents of "Asian values" in the 1980s. Although they were in vogue for a time, the merits of those values were lost on many during the Asian financial crises of the 1990s. But since then Asian countries have made a remarkable recovery, and now Mahbubani is back taking his argument to a new level.
With 7-10% annual economic growth rates, Mahbubani sees global power shifting from West to East. He attributes this success not only to Asian values, but also to what he calls "the seven pillars of Western wisdom." Those pillars are free-market economics; science and technology; meritocracy; pragmatism; a culture of peace; rule of law; and education. Modernization in Asia began in the late 19th century with Japan opening to the West, then followed by the 4 tigers, and finally China and India. This march to modernity, as he calls it, has not only raised living standards but also Asian expectations in global power-sharing.
Mahbubani's grudge against the West is that the West is not playing by the rules which it created. The West, which he sees as Europe and North America, has only 15% of the world's population and 48% of global GDP; whereas the East - which is everyone else - has 85% of the world's population and 52% of GDP. The West is still dominating the world through outdated institutions such as the UN Security Council, the IMF, and the World Bank. Under a system of meritocracy or democracy the East should have a much larger role in global affairs.
Mahbubani makes many suggestions that would rectify this situation such as making India and China members of the G8, and opening up some of the top jobs at the IMF and World Bank to Asians. I couldn't agree more. His criticisms of the West have, for the most part, been correct. America's botched operation in Iraq is an easy target. Nuclear proliferation issues and the West's failure to stop genocide the Balkans and Rwanda are also given as examples of the West's incompentence. True again. This should not, however, be contrued as being anti-Western, it is only constructive criticism.
Unfortunately Mahbubani is as uncritical of Asia's shortcomings as he critical of the West's. When he says that the Chinese are freer today than they have been at any time in their history, one would have to agree. (This is also the view of Parag Khanna in The Second World.) But what about the rights of Tibetans and other minorities in China? What about legal and political rights in general? Autocracies only allow economic freedom. He also conveniently overlooks the violence in Kashmir, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. And why blame only the West when nuclear proliferation in North Korea, Pakistan, and now Iran is mostly a result of China's neglect? Asian ascendancy has not been without its own fiascoes.
Parag Khanna argued that there will be three global leaders in the new century: the US, the EU, and China. Mahbubani would like to add India, for he sees India as a bridge between the East and the West. This is a valid point since many Indian intellectuals are at home in both the East and the West. He claims there is still a resistance among public intellectuals and journalists in the West to accept the East on equal terms, but I myself have not seen this resistance. I see a greater recognition of the East almost on a daily basis. With Asia's growing economic power, political power will follow no matter how much real or imagined resistance there is.
 A good extension of "Can Asian Think" May 2, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
The author again focuses on big ideas about the east and the west, his arguments are well-balanced, yet as in "Can Asian Think", there is no theory, no foundamental theme by which he can convince readers who stand on the east and the west.
The New Asian Hemisphere April 8, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
Excellent read; author tells it as it is. A realistic assessment for anyone monitoring trends in global politics.
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