Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade

Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade | Bill Emmott | The first book to predict the economic trends of all three nations

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Rivals: How the Po...

	Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade Bill Emmott Harcourt, 2008 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 6 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The former editor in chief of the Economist returns to the territory of his bestselling book The Sun Also Sets to lay out an entirely fresh analysis of the growing rivalry between China, India, and Japan and what it will mean for America, the global economy, and the twenty-first-century world.

Though books such as The World Is Flat and China Shakes the World consider them only as individual actors, Emmott argues that these three political and economic giants are closely intertwined by their fierce competition for influence, markets, resources, and strategic advantage. Rivals explains and explores the ways in which this sometimes bitter rivalry will play out over the next decade?in business, global politics, military competition, and the environment?and reveals the efforts of the United States to manipulate and benefit from this rivalry. Identifying the biggest risks born of these struggles, Rivals also outlines the ways these risks can and should be managed by all of us.

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Strategic primer on Asian diplomacy

Bill Emmott's thesis is, as the title makes plain, that Asia's three great powers are competing against each other rather than conspiring against the West. He shows this by always returning to the national interests that drive each country's progress and by explaining how shared interests can quickly turn into conflicting and competing ones.

The book is divided into nine chapters. Chapters one and two examine the diplomatic environment in which China, Japan, and India interact and the economic and military forces that are shaping their relationships.

Chapters three to five look individually at China, Japan, and India. Emmott examines their internal politics, their economic development, their peculiarities, and their national economic and foreign policies.

Chapters six to eight look at three crucial diplomatic issues among the three powers: environmental impact, history, and the risk of conflict. The chapter on historical holdovers is particularly useful in understanding the source of rivalries.

The chapter on the risks of military conflict is perhaps the most important in the book. It underlines the danger to world peace that rivalries among the Asian powers present. Among the five flashpoints Emmott looks at are how a war could start between between China and India, and how a war could start over North Korea should that country's regime collapse suddenly. Given that Asia has four declared nuclear powers (China, India, Pakistan, North Korea) and a potential one (Japan), peace among them matters.

Emmott ends the book by comparing 21st century Asia with 19th century Europe. Just as the Concert of Europe gave it 50 years of solid peace and then broken only by relatively small wars (when compared with the Napoleonic Wars) the Asian Drama in developing neatly. To ensure the smooth unfolding the this drama, Emmott would like to see nine recommendations followed. Many of these are ironically directed towards the United States, not an Asian nation, simply because it is the de facto beast of burden of international politics.

"Rivals" concludes by making a case for both "plausible pessimism" and "credible optimism". A healthy diplomatic environment in Asia matters to the whole world.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

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The first book to predict the economic trends of all three nations

RIVALS: HOW THE POWER STRUGGLE BETWEEN CHINA, INDIA AND JAPAN WILL SHAPE OUR NEXT DECADE is the first book to predict the economic trends of all three nations, exploring how these trends will affect the world and the environment, and pose risks to global peace. But it doesn't stop at an assessment of possible dangers: the meat of RIVALS lies in its blend of analysis and nine specific recommendations on how their rivalry can be managed for optimum benefit to the world. College-level collections strong in Asian social issues in particular will find it important.

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The three pillars of the new Asian continent

In Rivals, Bill Emmott, a former reporter for the Economist in Japan and, until 2006, the editor in chief of the magazine, shows us that no other region will have as fundamental an impact, or play as crucial a role, on the international scene than Asia in the coming decades. From intensifying regional trade, economic development and their impact on the environment to spending on defense and nuclear nonproliferation, Asia -- with China, Japan and India acting as pillars -- is transforming at a stunning pace, and the variables involved in this complex relationship are such that predicting its future course is an impossible task, something Emmott himself admits.

Still, by looking at key regional aspects -- economics, defense, domestic politics, the environment, and history as an active contemporary agent -- Emmott sees certain trends emerging that could help us narrow down the possible futures to "plausible pessimism" and "credible optimism."

What quickly becomes evident is that China is now the center of gravity in the region, both in terms of its economic might and as the shaper of politics. Emmott, as do a handful of other authors, maintains that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is here to stay and that it has the wherewithal to deal with the number of isolated challenges that may arise domestically. Aside from environmental degradation and its impact on human health, no other issue in China has the potential, he argues, to mobilize the population to the extent that it could threaten the regime; nationalism, such as in Tibet or Xinjiang, is too localized to spread throughout China, which thus makes it possible for the CCP to rely on force to put down disturbances. Its economy, meanwhile, has become solid and mature enough to withstand most shocks.

Japan, no so long ago the undisputed regional leader, has been supine since the 1990s, but Emmott sees signs that its government has launched reforms that, in the long term, could bring about its recovery. A certain sense of urgency, inspired by China's rise, could also accelerate that process and encourage those within the Liberal Democratic Party (and in Washington) who seek to amend the country's peaceful Constitution so that Japan could become a "normal" country once again and play the role it believes it should be playing in the region. In Emmott's view, discarding Japan as a passe regional power would be a serious oversight, as would ignoring recent reporting that a majority of Japanese support their government taking a harder stance vis-a-vis China.

Last is India, the oft-forgotten emerging power whose role as a strategic counterweight on the balance-of-power chessboard could be the determining factor in the future course of the region. While India remains nowhere near as developed as China or Japan, it is nevertheless beginning to make its presence felt in some regional institutions, joint military exercises, and through the modernization of its forces. Furthermore, sensing its utility as a means to tie down China, the US and Japan have struck deals with India that could help buttress the modernization of the world's largest democracy. In fact, Emmott opens his book by arguing that even if it meant blowing a hole in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, US President George W. Bush's nuclear pact with Delhi in 2006 was a strategic tour de force, as it added a third leg to the regional balance and ensured that Delhi would side with the US and Japan should relations with China deteriorate. In response, Beijing has continually sought to exclude India from regional multilateral organizations.

Shifting alliances notwithstanding, Emmott is optimistic that the regional powers and the smaller countries that gravitate around them see no advantage in compromising all the progress that has been made in the past decade by waging wars, an argument that pessimists would argue was also made when similar dynamics obtained in Europe at the turn of the 19th century -- with two devastating world wars to follow. Why Emmott does not believe a repeat of the European fiasco is likely in Asia is partly the result of the somewhat benevolent, albeit not always welcome, presence of the US, which acts as a brake on those who would be inclined to use war as an instrument of foreign policy. However, how Beijing perceives that presence will have a direct impact on the future direction of China's military; if the US, alone or through alliances, is seen to be seeking to contain it, conflict would be likelier, or China could actively pursue a closer alliance with Pakistan to counter India.

Other tensions, which lurk close to the surface, could spark conflict. From the unresolved and poisonous issues of Japan's responsibility in World War II to the flawed Tokyo Trials, post-Kim Jong-il North Korea to Islamic radicalism and nuclear weapons in Pakistan, instability in Myanmar, the Taiwan question, unresolved border disputes, Tibet after the Dalai Lama and disputed islands in the East China Sea, Emmott argues that the likeliest source of conflict -- which could draw in other powers, such as the US -- will be accidents and miscommunication, or, as he puts it, one side misjudging the cost of warfare in the modern world. Wars by proxy -- a tool of the Cold War that remains relevant today -- in places such as Myanmar, Tibet, North Korea and Pakistan -- could also be launched as the three powers position themselves for the future. As demand grows, competition abroad over natural resources could also serve as a conflict accelerator between those three countries.

Emmott's "new" Asia is a dynamic one, filled with potentialities, whose global impact will only become greater as its economies continue to grow. Through economic exchanges and the birth of regional alliances like the East Asian Summit, the ill-defined geographical Asia of old is quickly turning into a more tightly knit polity that, for better or worse, will have a greater say in global affairs and whose participation in international bodies such as the UN Security Council and the G8 will be paramount if those organizations are to remain relevant.

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Rivalry Thesis Is Oversold

The central thesis of this book is that the rise of Asia is going to pit Asians against Asians. A new power game is under way between Japan, China and India: for the first time in history, three great nations in Asia are vying for regional supremacy all at the same time. Japan used to be number one and cannot content itself with being a distant number two. China and India both think that the future belongs to them: they cannot both be right at the same time. As Bill Emmott puts it, "the balance between the regional powers is going to become the crucial determinant of whether Asia's rise will be one of peace and prosperity or one that brings conflict and turbulence, both to the region itself and to the world as a whole."

Bill Emmott sees proof of this emerging rivalry in the hedging strategy of the world superpower. The United States can no longer rely on a regional triangle with one ally, one competitor and one neutral third party: they need to ally with two powers in order to keep the third one neutral. This is why Bush, in his landmark visit to India in March 2006, chose to sideline concerns about nuclear proliferation and signed a deal for extended cooperation with India, including in the field of civil nuclear energy. India is a country with the potential to balance the rising power of China, and it is courted as such by the US, but also by Japan and the ASEAN countries which agreed, against all common geographical sense, to include the South Asian giant in their new East Asian Summit caucus.

Although the rivalry thesis is worth considering, I found the whole thing a little bit oversold. For a start, it is by no means the only thread to the story, but rather an editing gimmick that provides a catchy headline to a book that is basically a survey about the three great Asian powers. The individual chapters on China, Japan and India are valuable in their own right: they are written in the no-nonsense, right-to-the-point style that is the hallmark of The Economist, where they each could have been included as special country surveys.

There is an interesting discussion on Chinese statistics, where one learns for instance that in 2005 twenty-nine out of thirty-one regions reported "higher than average" growth rates. Contrary to the myth of unlimited labor supply from the Chinese countryside, the author thinks that the combination of higher incomes from agriculture and low birth rates will likely lead to less migrant labor and rising wages. Emmott today encounters in Beijing the same lack of transparency and accountability, the same feeling of self-confidence and even arrogance among senior officials, the same over-investment and misallocation of capital that he used to confront in Japan twenty years ago. Now Japan worries whether its credit rating will fall above or below Botswana, and it is dismissed by foreigners as a greying and declining nation.

The author of The Sun Also Sets nevertheless thinks that Japan could rebound if it succeeds in reinventing itself, like America did during the decade of the "new economy" which brought a sharp and unexpected jump in its productivity levels. He also thinks that with the right reforms, India could achieve growth of more than ten percent for at least a decade, provoking a transformation of a magnitude comparable to what China experienced in the last twenty years. As he notes, "the process of economic growth is in part a process of removing obstacles, rather as the dredging of boulders from a river will permit the water to flow more smoothly. There are a lot of obstacles to be removed, so there is a lot of potential for improvement."

Rivalry between the three Asian powers is therefore not the whole story. Indeed, it could be argued that the rise of new powers, like China and India, is more likely to lead to stabilization and peace than to disruption and war. China's trade (imports plus exports) is equivalent to 67 percent for GDP, whereas the ratio is 22 percent for America and 28 percent for Japan. The greater openness of China's economy, although it is still smaller than Japan's, means that China has more trade and investment with its smaller Asian neighbors and with the rest of the world than Japan does, often resulting in greater influence, as the flag follows foreign trade. A few decades ago, neighboring countries viewed the rise of Japan as stifling their economic independence. There was a time when European multinationals marketed themselves as an alternative to an exclusive reliance on Japanese firms. Now many view the rise of China as creating competition and thereby liberating them. Contrary to Japan's, Chinese trade is a two-way street, and it offers a great market for exports from its neighbors.

As Bill Emmott notes, Asia is piled high with historical bitterness, unresolved territorial disputes, potential flash points and strategic competition that could readily ignite even during the next decade. But the potential for cooperation is also great, and the sweetener of commerce should soothe nationalistic hurdles and instead promote a healthy spirit of competition in which all partners will gain.

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eh, I expected more

I really thought that Bill Emmott would offer some deep insights into Asia's development, but he has nothing to say other than a summary of the past 10 years of Economist articles. If you've read the Economist with any regularity, you do not need this book.

If you haven't read the Economist, you probably won't make it through the book though. It is in desperate need of an editor. Long rambling prose, back tracking as often as possible. The same book could have been 100 pages shorter if he had been held to the Economist style guide.

I'm giving it 3 stars though because at least everything he says is accurate and there is no hyperbole.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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