5. Contested Modernity

When a Western tourist first sets foot in Shanghai, Tokyo or Kuala Lumpur, peers up at the shiny high-rise buildings, casts an eye over the streets teeming with cars, walks around the shopping malls filled with the latest, and often familiar, goodies, his reaction is frequently: ‘It’s so modern!’, and then, with barely a pause for breath, ‘It’s so Western.’ And so, at one level, it is. These are countries in which living standards have been transformed — in a few cases, they are now on a par with those in the West. It is hardly surprising then that they share with the West much of the furniture and fittings of modernity. There is a natural tendency in all of us — an iron law perhaps — to measure the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar: we are all relativists at heart. As we see objects and modes of behaviour that we are accustomed to, so we think of them as being the same as ours. When we recognize signs of modernization and progress, we regard them as evidence that the society or culture is headed in the same direction as ours, albeit some way behind. As yet one more McDonald’s opens in China, it is seen as proof positive that China is getting more Western, that it is becoming ever more like us.

Of course these impressions are accentuated by the places frequented by Westerners. Businessmen land at an international airport, travel by taxi to an international hotel, go to meetings in the financial district and then return home. This is the ultimate homogenizing experience. Modern airports are designed to look the same wherever they may be, so give or take an abundance of Chinese eateries, Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok Airport could be Paris, Munich or Montreal. International hotels are similarly place-less, designed to meet an international formula rather than to convey any local flavour: in the lobby of an international hotel, one could be forgiven for thinking that most men on the planet wear suits, speak English and read the International Herald Tribune.

One might think that the experience of the expatriate who chooses to live in East Asia for a period is more illuminating. And sometimes it is. But all too often they inhabit something akin to a Western cocoon. A significant proportion of Westerners who live in East Asia are based in Singapore or Hong Kong, city-states which have gone out of their way to make themselves attractive to Western expats. Hong Kong, as a British colony for nearly a century and a half, still bears the colonial imprint, while Singapore, more than any other place in the region, has sought to make itself into the Asian home of Western multinationals, a kind of Little West in the heart of Asia. It is hardly surprising then that precious few expats in these city-states make any attempt to learn Mandarin or Cantonese: they feel there is no need. The great majority live in a handful of salubrious, Western-style residential ‘colonies’, enjoying a life of some privilege, such that for the most part they are thoroughly insulated from the host community: living in the Mid-Levels area on Hong Kong Island or Discovery Bay is a very different experience from Shatin in the New Territories.

The net result is that most Westerners, be they tourists, businessmen or expats, spend most of their time in a familiar, sanitized, Western-style environment, making the occasional foray into the host culture rather than actually living in it: they see these countries through a Western distorting mirror. It would be wrong to suggest that we can understand nothing from observing the hardware of modernity — the buildings, malls, consumer products and entertainment complexes: they tell us about levels of development, priorities, and sometimes cultural difference too. However, the key to understanding Asian modernity, like Western modernity, lies not in the hardware but in the software — the ways of relating, the values and beliefs, the customs, the institutions, the language, the rituals and festivals, the role of the family. This is far more difficult to penetrate, and even more difficult to make sense of.

THE RISE OF EAST ASIAN MODERNITY

For the first half of the twentieth century the cluster of countries that had experienced economic take-off in the nineteenth century continued to dominate the elite club of industrialized nations, with virtually no additions or alternations. It was as if the pattern of the pre-1914 world had frozen, with no means of entry for those who had missed the window of economic opportunity afforded during the previous century. [301] In the 1950s the school of ‘dependency theory’ generalized this state of affairs into the proposition that it was now impossible for other countries to break into the ranks of the more advanced nations. But there were good reasons why the economic ground froze over. While large parts of the world had remained colonized the possibilities of economic growth and take-off were extremely limited. Futhermore, two world wars sapped the energies not only of the main combatants but of much of the rest of the world as well.

From the late 1950s onwards, there appeared the first stirrings of profound change in East Asia. Japan was recovering from the ravages of war at great speed — but as a fully paid-up member of the pre- 1914 club of industrialized countries, its economic prowess was hardly new. Rather, what caught the eye was the rapid economic growth of the first group of Asian tigers — South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. They were small in number and even smaller in size — a medium-sized nation, a small country and two tiny city-states, all newly independent, apart from Hong Kong, which was still a colony. They had, in varying degrees, been debilitated by the war, in Korea ’s case also by the Korean War, and were bereft of natural resources, [302] but they began to grow at breakneck speed, with Taiwan and South Korea often recording annual growth rates of close to double-digit figures in the following three decades. [303] By the late 1970s they had been joined by Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Some of the later Asian tigers — China being the outstanding example — achieved, if anything, even faster rates of growth than the early ones. The world had never before witnessed such rapid growth. (Britain’s GDP expanded at a shade over 2 per cent and the United States at slightly over 4.2 per cent per annum between 1820 and 1870, their fastest period of growth in the nineteenth century.) [304] The result has been the rapid and progressive transformation of a region with a population of around 2 billion people, with poverty levels falling to less than a quarter by 2007 (compared with 29.5 per cent in 2006 and 69 per cent in 1990). [305]