Pragmatic East Wind prevails with a flourish as West Wind struggles

These days, the Western world is facing a grim, no-win dilemma. Not so the nonWest, especially China.

The power and influence of the West’s long-dominant empire is visibly waning, along with its predatory neoliberal global order. What has risen to challenge it on its home ground is not socialism or its humane impulses to care for the 99 percent, and not the 1 percent. The heyday of that effort has come and gone.

The new, emerging challenger to the status quo is a right-wing nationalism that’s crude, ugly and vindictive. Antiforeigner, anti-women, anti-everythingthat’s-not-us, it is fuelled by the frustrated aspirations of have-nots – the angry losers under the neoliberal order.

The proof is the stunning triumphs of the xenophobic right over the past couple of years – Brexit, and electoral victories from the US, Italy and Austria to Hungary, Poland and now, Brazil. Even Angela Merkel, that durable icon of neoliberalism, is fading into the sunset. Today’s “America First” has distinct echoes of history’s “Deutschland über alles”.

If the West is in a deep funk, it’s an entirely different story elsewhere. Especially in Asia, hope and optimism prevail. Increasingly pulled into the orbit of its dynamic epicenter, China, the region leads the world in economic growth. It has also matched or surpassed the West in many other areas of human endeavor and achievement.

Above all, Asia has accomplished this over nearly seven decades without the toxic clash of ideologies that has so devastated the West in modern times. In essence, Asians in the post-WWII era haven’t given a hoot about “isms” – capitalism, socialism, fascism, democratic liberalism, etc.

Asians care about what works, what delivers results – not sweeping, romantic ideals. The avatar of this ethos was, of course, Deng Xiaoping, chief architect of reform in China. It was he who resurrected the world’s largest nation from death by ultra-left communism and put it on its march to renewed greatness.

In coining his most famous policy guideline, Deng was only expressing something already in the Chinese and Asian DNA: It doesn’t matter if it’s a socialist/market-driven/democratic cat; it’s a good cat if it catches the mice. Though Deng was a committed Marxist who sought to care for the 99 percent of Chinese and make the nation strong and prosperous, he was also slyly subversive of communist dogma that ran against China’s interests. He junked those parts and replaced them with inspirations from China’s own traditions, customized to concrete Chinese conditions. They worked like a dream. That’s the meaning of his socialism with Chinese characteristics. And therein lies his greatness.

Pragmatism aside, the great force for progress in modern Asia has been nationalism. In the West, of course, the N-word is frowned upon. And that’s entirely understandable… going by the Western experience. It was the clash of nationalisms that caused countless wars and deaths in Europe, culminating in the two World Wars – but they were essentially Western civil wars – among European nationalisms.

Not so in much of the non-Western world. Colonized or semi-colonized by Western imperialists, its peoples naturally turned to nationalism in the attempt to recover their own identities. People who don’t know who or what they are, have no direction or future. Such rediscovery, whose animus was nationalism, was the essential first step in any struggle for national liberation.

So all the greatest heroes of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America are nationalists: Aung San, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, Fidel Castro. The Asian ones, at least, were less concerned about which ideology they adopted to drive their causes. Marxism proved the effective vehicle in some cases, capitalism (as well as mixed bags of various “isms”) in others.

The legacy and spirit of these giants still provide the fuel for Asia’s dynamism and progress. English-language readers don’t hear much about it because the mainstream media is not much interested in reporting the central role of nationalism in Asia. Naturally, Asia’s nationalisms sometimes compete with one another, and the challenge is to manage them so they don’t spiral into war.

As for China, it is engaged in something epochal. The “Chinese model” is a unique mixture of elements from socialism and capitalism, with heavy infusions from China’s own Confucianist, Buddhist and Daoist heritage.

Internationally, the Beijing-inspired Belt and Road initiative is set to link the entire Eurasian landmass and transform it into the biggest development project in the history of the world. Africa will be a part of it too. Significantly, it will be a living illustration of how nations with different cultures and values can work together for mutual benefit. It will be mankind’s best hope for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable future in the 21st century.

As the West recedes and the rest rise, those who would evaluate international affairs solely from Western perspectives, and with Western benchmarks, will increasingly lose the plot. In the 21st century, the world needs multinational, multicultural perspectives more than ever.

The author is a former senior editor at the international newsweekly Asiaweek (English) and founding editor of Yazhou Zhoukan (Chinese). opinion@globaltimes.com.cn