THE ANTI-FRIEDMAN:

Whose Asian Century? (Jim Hoagland, June 9, 2005, Washington Post)

Fred Bergstrom said later. He's right: The Middle Kingdom serves as a platform to bring together capital, cheap labor and industrial technology from throughout the region and ultimately the world. China relies on this empire, but does not totally control it.

India, on the other hand, has set out to become "a global knowledge hub, with a central place in the transnational movement of knowledge and services," Nath said in a conversation here last week. He argued that India's comparative advantage lies in its large and relatively young educated population. Seventy percent of India's 1.1 billion people are literate -- many of them are fluent in English -- and about half are under 30.

Nath's argument intrigues because it incorporates global demographic trends often ignored or glossed over because of the social and political dilemmas they create. Prime among these is the galloping aging of the population of advanced industrial societies that will not accept greater immigration flows to renew their labor forces. Where do these countries turn when they have too few workers to meet demand for goods and services -- and to support retirees?

"The answer is to move information and services, rather than people, across borders," according to Nath. Shifting low-wage or knowledge-intensive jobs through new communications or other technology to areas where there are surpluses of educated and willing workers has been controversial, he acknowledges, but if outsourcing decisions make economic sense, the savings they create will provide new jobs at home.

You're right again: He would say that, wouldn't he? But what about these remarks by an influential American, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns? Speaking to a U.S.-European group in Brussels on May 26, Burns observed:

"The greatest change you will see in the next three or four years is a new American focus on South Asia, particularly in establishing a closer strategic partnership with India . . . If you look at all the trends -- population, economic growth, foreign policy trends -- there's no question that India is the rising power in the East. . . . I think you'll see this as a major focus of our president and our secretary of state, and it will be the area of greatest dynamic positive change in American foreign policy."

It was fashionable a few decades ago to bemoan the weakness of democracies in the bipolar conflict of the Cold War. Despite that pessimism, totalitarianism did not prevail in that long race -- just as the communists in China will not win the right to shape the Asian Century alone.

Makes for interesting comparison to Tom Friedman's piece yesterday.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 10, 2005 7:11 AM