Insight: Ideas for Change - How Asian wisdom can Complement Western Thinking - Kishore Mahbubani

welcome to all to this interview session with Keyshawn Weber Barney I assume because you're here you probably have some idea who he is but let me introduce him briefly he shows a former head of the Singapore and foreign ministry twice ambassador to the United Nations now Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School at anywhere he's a man who's written about how one of the characteristics of Asians is a willingness to avoid conflict but thankfully he doesn't madness and always live up to that himself and so makes for a lively discussion that is prepared to take things on his most recent book is called the new Asian Hemisphere the irresistible shift of global power to the east Keshawn it's a great read and I was very struck in the Oakland chapters the way in which you weave in your own personal story and transformation in your life with the the broader story of the rise of Asia could you perhaps recap some of that flow for the audience well I decided to begin on a very personal note because I suspect the very people could realize that you could actually grow up in a with five of us living in a one-room house in Singapore in a typical developing country with no flush toilet until the age of 10 with racial riots had my doorstep with people cutting each other with bottles and I saw there's a ten-year-old child you know it right in front of my house so to grow up in a sort of very typical third-world environment and then in the course of my life own life time to sort of live enough in a first world society I believe that the journey that I travel is one that is now going to be travelled by hundreds of millions of people if not billions of people and the critical thing I realized that to succeed you actually got to believe that you can succeed and I can I need to be very candid when I grew up in as a child in Singapore and it was a British colony until I was about 11 years old I actually believed that I was ethnically inferior that the whatever we call a white man the Westerner was naturally superior naturally were smarter perform better and we Asians will always be second class and I'll in the course of my lifetime again to see this complete reversal of roles where now if you go to American universities many of the Western kids complain they're too many asian-americans in my class too many Asians Asia in my class I can't compete with his body Indians and Chinese why is life so unfair and that you know you just imagine that you know that would have been inconceivable when I was in school a university and now you have this complete reverse and that's why I wanted to put it in in personal terms because when you multiply it by hundreds of millions and billions you realize that this release is a big story and do you think that that's a story in a way that unites very disparate parts of Asia because in a way that's something that the Chinese are going through that Indians are going through as well and it creates a sort of pan-asian sympathy they understand that there's a sloughing off of old poverty but also psychological burdens yeah well I think that was the big advantage actually you know when you grow up as a minority ethnic minority within a minority I grew up as an ethnic Cindy and the Indians only 6% of population the Cindy is only 10,000 people and in a Chinese majority society I could actually I found from my personal experience that's an Indian I could connect with the over billion people in India growing in a Chinese majority society I could connect directly with a 1 billion people in China and both our neighbors ironically my we were Hindu refugees from Pakistan when my mother arrived in Singapore in 47 and all through my childhood both our neighbors are Muslims and so again we had a very close relationship with our Muslim neighbors and that enabled me to also connect with the Islamic world and I think is the capacity to understand three of the biggest streams in Asia that enables me to write so confidently that when I speak about Asia it actually applies not just to the Chinese in Singapore the Malays in Singapore or Indians in Singapore price of much larger societies because I've seen them and what if I were to society but hang on Quito we're talking about 40 percent or more of the world's population is it even conceivable that one can generalize about such a huge group yeah I mean I'm sure when you dig deep into it there will be lots of differences but you know what's interesting to me is watching the Asian reactions to my writing okay and I get very large block of sympathy in China apparently my chinese name mark i saw is very well known in china if you google it Meganium better known in chinese speaking world that i'm in the english-speaking world and if i travel to india of course quite naturally there's an affinity because of my ethnic background but also frankly when I go to Iran know and I go through the Arab speaking world and when people have watched me for example a BBC heart talk at the interview I got emails from Morocco from China from India saying hey we're glad you spoke up for us and when you're speaking up for us so to speak are you in a sense also telling the West often saying look we've had it with being elected to by the West is that not of the message yeah well I think you know as you know we one of the most significant aspects of the era we entering now is what I call the end of the Euro of Western domination or world history and this domination was overwhelming for over 200 years and so he was like it's like layers of Western influence that been wrapped around the world and now these layers of Western influence are being unwrapped around the world and in the process all kinds of minds are changing and I found it one of the things that I found most puzzling is that the Western societies are supposed to be among the most open societies in the world the most receptive to new ideas but they've been very resistant to accepting this idea that is the the end of the era of Western domination of all history and part the reason why is you know I write things as sharply as I do reason I do that is to provide a kind of wake-up call to the West and say stop trying to do things in the same old way that you did before except the fact they go to share power where the rest of the world and essentially the the good news that I have for the Western world and and I want to emphasize this because as you know there's so much pessimism today in the West sorry sorry sorry so ironic that I as an Asian now feel obliged to inject some optimism into the Western world and said oh no it's not over it's not over you haven't lost everything you are hope you got hope keep on fighting you can do it you know so it's sort of ironic that someone in my background is now telling the West you know don't give it all so enjoyable in a way now that's getting too personal now I think what what iiiii the reason why I study philosophy at the National University of Singapore is because I like the clash of ideas so what I enjoy is actually meeting a formidable debater and then having a good debate because it's my nature and so and then having to deal with so much Western arrogance you know which I can tell you at the end of the Cold War was amazing and it was my good fortune that I was in Harvard in 91 92 at the peak of the Francis Fukuyama essay at the end of history and I remember many of the Harvard professors just found it inconceivable that there could be any other order of history except the Western world of history and that's when I began to realize hey they got to listen to something new okay now you've argued that the West can learn now having discount lessons for many years the rest of all now needs to learn some lessons and I think one of the things you think is the westerns become very unpro grammatic as you put in that Asians a more pragmatic could you could you expand on them well I think if you look at this crisis just in the last three years okay what's happened and I think though firstly if you look the causes in the case of the United States of America to put it very bluntly and briefly Alan Greenspan actually believed ideologically that markets were smarter than governments let the invisible hand do all the work and everything would be okay and that wasn't a huge ideological mistake he made the Asians never believed that the Asians believe you need the invisible hand of free markets and the visible hand of good governance so you have to combine the two and I always say somewhat unkindly in the in the land of the 2-handed the one handed is at a disadvantage so so that's why I think and I think the role of government in Ronald Reagan unfortunately us great president in many other ways one of the worst things he ever said which I think damaged Western society was his line government is not the solution government is the problem and I can tell you the one thing that virtually all Asian societies agree upon is that you need government societies need government because if you don't have government things will get much much worse and there for years when the Chinese mindset the thing that they fear more is not the lack of freedom the thing that they fear most is chaos blue one and that's why having strong governance is so important and frankly as it now turns out the big lesson of the last crisis is that you need to emphasize and develop good governance in all societies and for the West it will be very painful backtracking from the etiologic opposition's they used to take you've gone further I think in my own newspaper and argue that the West is one of its problems it tells itself lies now what do you mean by that well I think frankly you know and even listening to Chancellor Merkel yesterday here I mean the one thing that Asians have learned because the Asians actually have struggled enormous ly to escape two centuries of inferior performance and the lesson that they have learned after two centuries of struggle is that change doesn't easily that to succeed you have to have painful sacrifice you have to work harder and you have to you know sacrifice for the long term and I find not a single Western politician not Obama in a State of the Union speech not Chancellor Merkel yesterday speaking to us well use the word sacrifice and say I'm sorry the good times are over we can get them back but let's work harder let's sacrifice now and then we can transform and change but the word sacrifice and I've been waiting for one major Western politician to use it but don't agents you know some Asian countries also tell lies just a bit of a different sort I mean if you think say when China says well we've arrested AI weiwei because there's something wrong with his taxes that's a lie well it is a fact that all governments like I have not yet found a single government that doesn't lie to its people and frankly if any government decides to be truth hundred percent of time it obviously hasn't read Machiavelli and and doesn't realize that that's not how you run government and from time to time you go to shape messages and also and so forth but the question is the degree of lying and here one of the biggest failures in Western understanding of China is that they see the Communist Party and they assume that the Communist Party is a dictatorial force sitting down and oppressing the Chinese people actually the last 30 years of Chinese Communist Party rule have been the best 30 years that the Chinese have enjoyed the last 200 years and they do see the Chinese Communist Party rule as having liberated them from lots of things so as long as there is the Chinese population considers the government legitimate right there is a bond between the two it can carry on because the Chinese Communist Party is acutely aware that the minute they stop performing the minute they stop delivering economic growth they can be gone very quickly so there is a social contract over there that exists and the difference is that the reason why I say there's greater lies in the West than in the East is because the social contract is broken down because people don't realize that they've got to make some fundamental transformations if the West is going to turn wrong yeah now a popular debate in the West and also in Asia as well is this contrast between China and India you know who will who will succeed better will it be the democratic system of India or the more authoritarian one-party system of China where do you come down on that debate or do you see that as a misleading debate and they're the commonalities being more interesting I I think frankly both will succeed you know but both would succeed differently I mean China will succeed because of his government India will succeed despite his government and so and they are very very different so SD police'll democracy is a disadvantage right no no no no no no not all in fact I do think that all societies have to become democratic eventually and that's actually a competitive advantage that India has over China because China will have to make a painful transition to democracy at some point in time but the critical thing as I explained my book is that the reason why both are succeeding is because they are both understood absorb and I implementing what I call you know seven pillars of Western wisdom so I give the West a lot of credit for the success of Asia and it is these things like free-market economics the mastery of Science and Technology a culture of pragmatism meritocracy all these things they're implementing in their own way and that's why I think both will succeed what about this issue that I raised in the introduction this question of conflict avoidance I mean you might think think that the West in recent years has made a mistake by sort of looking for fights around the world but ticking in the Middle East and the nations saying ma'am I have taken a different view yeah I think the the thing that's most surprising is that internally within the Western universe within the European Union within North America there's total peace but the United States has I mean I like the United States but you have to be objective has emerged as the most trigger-happy country in the last 10 20 years and I think it's got to learn that war is not the solution it wasn't a solution in Iraq it's not going to be the solution in Iran and if you compare and contrast you know when we decided up a long term policy of engaging Myanmar Burma everybody laughed at ASEAN and said you're not going to change the military regime through this kind of engagement process and believe me I'm absolutely astonished at how quickly me and my eyes opened up in the last few weeks far beyond my expectations but I think that's a result of this drip drip drip method of everyday exposing the Myanmar rulers to the rest of Southeast Asia and then we can ask themselves the obvious question when they fly to Bangkok or lumpur Hanoi Singapore why are we not progressing why are they progressing and is by making them aware that things have changed and that's what I would do with Iran I would Frank I don't don't forget that Iran like China like India represents one of the oldest civilizations in the world that has its own cultural traditions and the Iranians are among the smartest people in the world engage them expose them to the rest of the world and then over time you will evolve what about those who argue that actually the future of Asia may not be that peaceful and may not always be characterized by an avoidance of conflict because there's a growing anxiety about the power of China and the way it's clashed you know with with the Japanese over the fishing boats and the Vietnamese the Indians last time I was there were very anxious about their territorial dispute aren't things actually a little bit more denser and more conflictual than anything well I mean as you know geopolitics has been around for 2,000 years it will be around for another two thousand years and whenever you have rising powers it is natural to have rising tensions and that's why one of the best things that the Lee Kuan Yew school has done is to raise an eight million dollar endowment fund to study how China and India can avoid conflict so we do believe that there's a of that happening and that's why we're investing money in that so it is possible and I would say there's a 10 to 20 percent probability of some kind of conflicts emerging in Asia I don't rule that out but I still think there's an 80 to 90 percent probability of it emerging peacefully because remember one important thing they'll all fortunately all the leaders of China and India remember what life was like 30 40 years ago right who Jintao Xi Jinping went through the Cultural Revolution they know how bad life was then they know that this is the best historical moment that China has had this is the best historical moment that India is having so why waste it on conflict and you have to in a sense be almost devoid of common sense to engage in that kind of conflict and and I think that I think that's amazing in Asia is some brilliant success stories that no one writes about I mean a China that Taiwan Straits was supposed to be on the monitor all the most dangerous flash points in the world today no longer talk no one talks about Taiwan says there's a joke a little flash point that's because of a very slow patience strategy of gradually linking Taiwan economically with China so the sense we're coming back to where we started where the certain sort of wisdom comes out of knowing in your childhood real turmoil real poverty and then you can recognize how much you have to lose maps from a more advantaged perspective but since we're coming to a close could I ask you to look a little further ahead you talked about in the book about the irresistible shift of power to the east and the rise of Asia so what would the world look like I mean how will it differ and feel different from from how it does now say in 3040 years time when China is easily the world's largest economy when India's up there in the top three or four a shift of power will that necessarily make things feel less comfortable for the West or will it be a different sort of world well I I'm going to apologize for my optimism I actually think that we are headed into the best century that humanity has ever enjoyed and I actually believe that this century will be not just be good for the Asians because they'll have a dramatic improvement in standard living the number of people living in the middle class in Asia is going to grow from 500 million people today to 1.75 billion by 2020 that kind of change you've never seen before in history but the West will also benefit from this change and if the West engages Asia in a different way in an equal way without trying to be condescending or looking down and so on so forth then I think we can have a wonderful new year of human history where I wrote about this incidentally almost 20 years ago in response to Samuel Huntington I said we will not see a clash of civilizations a 21st century I say we will see a fusion of civilizations and that's coming what about those who say the environment can't take it that you know it may be frightfully unfair but as a matter of fact if Asians living like Americans if they won't have cars and fridges the world's going to fry I completely agree and I think the Asians have got to accept the fact that life is unfair that even though the the Americans had this incredible number of cars they refuse to text their gasoline they refuse to make any sacrifices I think Asians got except that they will have to grow differently and fortunately by the ways you know in the case of China has got the largest solar program or the largest wind turbine programs India's got large wind turbine programs that's an awareness in the governments that they got to grow in a green way but will it happen fast enough I mean the last time I was in Beijing let's smoke is appalling you look at the car statistics I'm gonna number of cars coming onto the roads in China and one can't see that slowing down because in everybody tune of personal liberation and people have wealth they buy a car yes but the again tell you you're absolutely right again but then look at cities like Seoul okay I was congested too crowded and everything and then they decided to build a stream reopen a stream in the middle of the city they said we need to get re-engaged back with nature so that will come and increasingly I mean if you look at how Singapore is built the largest botanic gardens in the middle of the city on sound them was expensive land in the city that's in itself a very telling symbolic sight hmm now in our last five minutes I'll just collect to come back to this question of values we were talking earlier nice enemy oil clearly agent values debate it's an old one but I think that you know it as we're looking forward to a more you know world in which Asia is clearly bound to way much much more economically culturally and so on a big question is whether the kind of values that we in the West a lot of people in the West have come to believe our universal belief in certain forms of human rights individualism etc actually are universal or whether they stem from a distinctly Western tradition or whether in fact we're right and in the end they'll be a sort of maybe even deRossett Fukuyama was right and that there will be a convergence around a universal model which does involve individualism human rights democracy etc I mean clearly some values are universal I don't like to have my nails pulled out I don't want to be tortured in Guantanamo I want to be hanged naked in Abu Ghraib you know it's true maybe none of us likes to be tortured so I think those kinds of values will be universal and so I there's no there's no fight over those those kinds of issues I also think that democracy of the universal that all societies would one way another will have to become democratic but the the question is not the destination the question is a route and I think the biggest mistake that the West has made is to try to export democracy and to say hey I'm right and you are wrong I value either that whether you do it by the Iraqi road of you know invading a country which is a disaster or you try and preach to the deviations and I think the fundamental point I make at the very beginning is that the the end we've reached the end of the era of Western preaching so if these values are universal and I agree they're universal let them be absorbed by their own in their own way let people choose them and accept them and what people actually have not noticed I mean even if you look at China right which is technically still run by the Communist Party of China the amount of freedom that the individual average Chinese citizen enjoys today is almost like 100 deep years ahead of what they had in Mao's Cultural Revolution so they made an enormous transformation the quality of I began travel around the world every year 40 million Chinese leave China freely and return to China freely why not because it's a prison but because it has actually liberated the population so I do believe that it's going to happen but what's not going to happen if people are saying hey you the West you're right and we are wrong and if that's what the West is waiting for then it'd be disappointed okay good note to end on key some other bunny thank you very much indeed

Channel: World Economic Forum

Views: 57,494

Keywords: world economic forum, WEF, Davos

Id: pb85Bw9sHY0

Length: 25min 38sec (1538 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2013