Ex-Singaporian Diplomat Opines on Religion in West and MENA

Mahbubani: Asians Puzzle Over U.S. Fundamentalism

History and culture have helped the region push religion out of the public sphere, so it can surge toward modernity.

By Kishore Mahbubani

Newsweek International

Nov. 13, 2006 issue – Most Asians are unaware that Christian evangelical movements have gained enormous political power in America. And if they were to learn this, they would be mystified. Their images of America remain the old ones: scenes of Hollywood and sexual permissiveness, secularism, money worship and devotion to modern science and technology. None of these squares with an America under the sway of fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity.

Asian intellectuals would be especially mystified. They have fully absorbed the Western narrative that

modernization should be the fundamental goal of contemporary societies. Deng Xiaoping chose his words carefully when he launched his economic reforms—dubbed the Four Modernizations—in 1977. “It does not matter whether a cat is white or black,” Deng said famously. “If it catches mice, it is a good cat.” With modernization was meant to come a pragmatic and secular state that focused on economic and social development. Both China and India—each in its own way—decided that they needed to shed their ideological straitjackets and work pragmatically to lift up their societies.

The big lesson that Asians thought they’d learned from the West was that reason and faith should be kept in separate boxes. Many Asians believed that religion and superstition had held their countries back while the West leaped ahead, even if few would have been as outspoken as Kemal Ataturk when he said: “The fez sat upon our heads as a sign of ignorance, fanaticism, obstacle to progress and attaining a contemporary level of civilization. It is necessary to … adopt in its place the hat, the headgear used by the whole civilized world.”

As East Asians moved decisively toward secularism, they were helped by the cultural fabric of their societies. Neither Confucianism nor Taoism inspires deep religiosity. The Confucian culture is attached to the world of today, not tomorrow. By contrast, West Asians (despite Ataturk’s lead) have found it harder to emulate the West. Islam penetrates more deeply into the souls of its adherents. In recent centuries, many of its followers have moved away from the spirit of skeptical inquiry that inspired the scientific revolution (even though the Islamic caliphates nurtured this spirit). Hence, the spread of fundamentalist movements in the Islamic world is not surprising.

For different reasons, China and India today have a vested interest in restricting the political space for religious movements. The sudden emergence of the Falun Gong surprised the Communist Party of China. It reminded its leaders of the Taiping rebellion—a civil war (1851-1864) inspired by fundamentalist Christian beliefs. It also provided an early warning that the biggest threat to the Communist Party’s political control and legitimacy could come from a religious movement.

Beijing is thus naturally wary of U.S. evangelicals, some of whom have been at the forefront of urging Congress to act against China. In 2005, after the West learned about the China National Offshore Oil Co.’s plan to raise $10 billion from Wall Street, much of it for oil investment in Sudan, articles blossomed in evangelical publications about the threat posed by this massive infusion of capital. Letters went out to large investors, and sympathetic political leaders blasted the stock offering as “blood money” that would aid Sudan’s attempt to eradicate the population of Darfur. As a consequence, the Chinese company could raise only $3 billion of its goal—a demonstration of the power of American evangelical movements.

India faces a different challenge. Traditionally, religion has occupied a larger part of the Indian soul than of the Chinese. Indeed, India is a veritable spiritual rain forest. The early Indian modernizers therefore saw the removal of religious superstition as critical for India’s development. Nehru said: “The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organized religion, in India and elsewhere has filled me with horror, and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seems to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.”

Gandhi shared the Western view that the church and state should be kept separate. He said: “Religion is a personal matter which should have no place in politics.” He even went further and told a missionary: “If I were a dictator, religion and state would be separate. I swear by my religion. I will die for it. But it is my personal affair. The state has nothing to do with it.”

India has also seen a revival of fundamentalist Hindu movements. But they are balanced by deep traditions of religious tolerance, going back millennia. Indeed, India may have planted the seeds of secularism even before the West. As Amartya Sen argues in “The Argumen-tative Indian,” “It is worth recalling that in Akbar’s pronouncements of four hundred years ago on the need for religious neutrality on the part of the state, we can identify the foundations of a non-denominational, secular state which was yet to be born in India, or for that matter anywhere else.”

With China, India and other non-Islamic Asian societies moving deeper into secularism, future historians will be puzzled why two contrasting societal poles—America and the Islamic world—have allowed religious movements to influence their political and even scientific agendas. U.S. evangelicals have launched a passionate campaign against stem-cell research and persuaded the Bush administration to oppose it. Over time, many Asians will begin wondering whether America is still moving toward modernity.

By contrast, Asian businesses today are passionately committed to scientific research. According to the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Asian share of global high-tech exports rose from 7 percent in 1980 to 25 percent in 2001, while the U.S. share declined from 31 percent to 18 percent. The late Nobel laureate Richard Smalley predicted that by 2010, 90 percent of all scientists and engineers holding Ph.D.s would be living in Asia. Could this be partly because Asian schoolchildren have no difficulty learning Darwin’s theory of evolution, while American educators battle over whether creationism should also be taught in American classrooms?

It would be a mistake to assume that religion is a spent force in Asia. In addition to growing Christian evangelism, there are strong revivals of Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim movements. Last year, when I attended the commissioning ceremony of my son as a second lieutenant in the Singaporean Army, I was astonished to find the occasion blessed by clergy from 10 faiths: Bahai, Buddhist, Christian, Confucian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Taoist and Zoroastrian. In virtually no other country would one see such religious diversity. But this diversity is managed by keeping religion out of the political space, not inside. Perhaps it’s time for America to study Asia’s best practices.

Mahbubani is the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, and author of “Can Asians Think?”

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

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Japan Ponders Increasing Immigration

Japan Will Allow More Immigration, Official Says (Update1)

By Jason Clenfield

May 23 (Bloomberg) — Japan will open its borders to more foreign workers to keep the economy growing as its population ages, Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Mitoji Yabunaka said.

“We’re ready to make Japan as open as possible,” Yabunaka said in a May 21 interview in Tokyo. “Clearly there’s the need for more immigration. We’re faced with all sorts of demographic questions.”

Japan’s population began declining in 2005 and the government said earlier this year that it may fall by as much as a quarter by 2050. Japan has never had to rely on mass immigration, unlike countries such as the U.S. and Australia that were founded by migrants.

“Japan has no official immigration policy like those of the U.S. or Australia,” said Hidenori Sakanaka, director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute. “The policy has been to keep people out if they intend to stay permanently.”

Foreigners accounted for 1.6 percent of Japan’s 128 million population last year. Almost half of the 2 million people that the government classifies as foreigners are people of Chinese, Korean and Brazilian descent who were born in Japan, said Sakanaka, who is a former head of the Tokyo immigration bureau.

The Foreign Ministry’s Yabunaka said the government’s decision last September to allow 1,000 Filipino nurses to work in Japan is an example of a more open immigration policy.

“It’s a small beginning, but it is a beginning,” he said.

Japanese Test

The proposed partnership, still subject to approval by the Philippines congress, requires workers to take six months of lessons in Japanese and nursing, followed by a supervised internship culminating in an examination in Japanese that critics say is so onerous as to make the program impossible.

“This won’t address the nursing shortage,” said Sakanaka. “Nobody will be able to pass the tests and they’ll all be sent home.”

Japan had six nurses for every 1,000 people in 2004, the most recent year for which government data are available, compared with 8.3 in the U.S. About a fifth of Japan’s population is over 65 years old and the percentage is climbing, increasing the demand for health-care services.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s key economic panel last week proposed that the number of foreign students in the country be more than doubled as a way to bring in skilled labor from abroad.

“I don’t know if it’s what you’d call cultural resistance, but since this is new, there are lots of things that have to be pondered and discussed,” Yabunaka said, when asked why Japan has been so slow to open its borders. “Naturally people are concerned about safety.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Jason Clenfield in Tokyo at jclenfield@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: May 22, 2007 22:25 EDT

Paranoia or Reality: Chinese Investment Trends in Africa

China’s total investment in Africa is quite small.

Study by the world bank

http:// siteresources.worldbank.o…a_Silk_Road.pdf

-pg 40 shows that Africa is not just investing in natural resources

-pg. 95, Sub-Sahara Africa only receives 1.8% of all FDI (foreign direct investment) in the world. South America receives 9.2%, and East/SEAsia 19.6 to give some perspective.

-pg 96. Shows Asian exports to Africa and imports from Africa have increased in the last 15 years ,but slowly.

pg. 124 shows total China FDI in Africa is only 5%. China invests 32% in Latin America, and 56% in Asia.

The fastest growth has bee nin Africa though.

-pg 120 – THE BIG ONE:

“FDI to Africa is predicted to continue to increase with more diversified
investors from different countries (see box 2.3). European countries (the
United Kingdom and France) and North American countries (the United
States and Canada) have been the main foreign investors in Sub-Saharan
Africa, accounting for 68 percent and 22 percent of the FDI stock, respectively.
However, FDI from developing countries, particularly from South
Africa, China, and India, as well as from Malaysia and Brazil, has increased
substantially in Africa. FDI from Asia accounts for 8 percent of total FDI
inflows to Africa.”

China is not investing much, remember the 8% stat is all of Asia, including India, Japan, South Korea, etc.

The West is bar far the greatest investor in Africa.

Based on this I think “Sinophobia” is over blown.

North East Asians and Abraham’s Sons

Found an interesting article on the Gene Expression ( Confucianism & China), by Razib. Not normally a big fan, but he is spot on here.

He did leave out Japan though, much of their “early modern” culture was in part a fusion of traditional Shintoism and Chan (Zen) Buddhism from China and a Chinese government structure (based on Confucianism). Although Confucianism is not as strong an element in Japan it is a critical thread to modern Japanese cultural tradition. Japan like its East Asian neighbors (Chinese and Koreans) has a small Christian population, in fact the smallest, probably less than 1% of the population, despite Europeans proselytising in Japan as early as the 1500’s. I would go a little further and say that there is something intrinsic in East Asian cultures (not SEAsian) that make them very resistant to monotheistic Abrahamic religions (Judiaism, Christianity, and Islam).

The Economist has an article up about the revival of Confucianism in China. There has been a lot of talk about Christianity & Christianesque cults in China over the past 15 years (see Jesus in Beijing). It seems plausible that ~5% of the citizens of the People’s Republic of China are now Christian or Christianesque, and this number is likely to go somewhat higher. But, it is important to remember that the number of Christians in Taiwan has long been stabilized at 5%, and in the 5-10% range in Hong Kong, both jurisdictions where Christianity was somewhat favored by the powers that be for decades. Meanwhile, South Korean Christianity seems to have plateaued at about 25% of the population after decades of rapid growth. The point is that one would probably bet against China becoming a Christian nation anytime soon, and without that Christianity being able to assume center stage as a unifying ideology seems unlikely.¹

So Confucianism is an interesting alternative. Below I talked about the fact that even in a post-Christian continent the basic raw material of Christian belief is still abundant amongst the population which remains as a reservoir of older practices and outlooks. Is the same true of China? Though State Confucianism fell in the first decades of the 20th century as the organizing principle of the Chinese polity, the the idea of Confucianism as central to the Han Chinese identity did not really suffer major body blows until the Communist take over of the mid-20th century. While most Europeans remember a time when Christianity was ascendant as the central motivating belief structure of their culture, and some European nations still have Christianity embedded in their organizing political documents, the same is not true of Confucianism. Rather, Confucian ideas floated outside of the power structure and passed from generation to generation informally. Outside of China (e.g., Taiwan) Confucianism did not go through the gauntlet of the Cultural Revolution, so even if there was not within China some memory of this ideology it could conceivably be re-planted from without.

But what exactly is “Confucianism”? The “original” Confucianism, as elaborated by Confucius himself and preserved in The Analects, was basically an elaboration of the ideals of Zhou Dynasty China. Its core, family values and traditionalism, are not particular controversial. Later on thinkers such as Mencius and Xun Zi added layers of philosophy on top of the original system, and the rise of Buddhism, and the counter reaction religious Daoism, gave birth to synthetic ideas of Neo-Confucianism, exposited effectively by intellectuals such as Zhu Xi. Some have also asserted that State Confucianism, as promulgated first by the Han Dynasty, had more in common substantively with Legalism (though Legalism was strongly influenced by one of the three fathers of Confucianism, Xun Xi), the bete noire of early Confucianism, with only stylistic flourishes being carried over from the original ideas of Confucius. Whatever the exact truth is, I think the critical overall point is that it is less important what Confucianism is, then that it served as a common anchor for the Chinese bureaucratic elite. Until recently the common anchor for the modern Chinese mandarinate were the texts of Marx & Engels, the policies of Lenin and later the thoughts of Mao (the Little Red Book was actually modeled on the Christian pocket pamphlets ubiquitous in the China of Mao’s youth). For obvious reasons that is now less appealing, and attempting to reconstruct them to be congenial to nationalist capitalism is a difficult project. Confucianism is also in some ways an odd fit, especially with its historical contempt for the merchant classes and non-primary producers in general, but at least most Chinese can accede to the fundamental value of Confucian ideas and perhaps make them relevant to the modern age.² Just as the Constitution of the United States serves as a unifying document for the American nation, so a reconstructed Confucianism might serve as the hub around which the various spokes of Han Chinese culture revolve.

1 – I use the word “Christianesque” because many of the new Christian inspired “cults” are really pretty strange, and mix a lot of folk beliefs within Christian orthodoxy. Since so much of the growth is outside conventional channels and uncoordinated from above it tends to span a lot of “idea space.”

2 – One could observe that the synthesis of Christianity and capitalism which is the norm in much of modern Western culture is also rather unexpected.

Africa’s Silk Road – Broadman

I saw this guy speak a few months ago at a NGO I can not remember, it was quite interesting. I still have not read his book, but it is free online here (Front Cover (PDF 3.81 mb)), published by the World Bank (where he is a senior economist). Many people are already in a state of geopolitical panic at China’s rise in FDI in Africa, as well as loans and trade, but the currently China’s trade is marginal when compared to America, the UK, and France.

 

 

Africa’s Silk Road: China and India’s New Economic Frontier
by Harry G. Broadman

Recently accelerating Asian trade and investment in Africa hold great promise for Africa’s economic growth and development—provided certain policy reforms on both continents are implemented. This is a central finding of a new book, Africa’s Silk Road: China and India’s New Economic Frontier .

The author of the book, World Bank Economic Adviser Harry Broadman, says that skyrocketing Asian trade and investment in Africa is part of a global trend towards rapidly growing South-South commerce among developing countries.

Africa’s Silk Road provides, for the first time, systematic empirical evidence on how the two emerging economic giants of Asia— China and India—now stand at the crossroads of the explosion of African-Asian trade and investment.

Broadman surveyed 450 firms, including Chinese and Indian companies, operating in four African countries—South Africa, Tanzania, Ghana, and Senegal—and developed in-depth business case studies in the field of additional 16 Chinese and Indian firms in Africa. Africa’s Silk Road offers original firm-level data on the African continent of Chinese and Indian firms operating there.

Growing demand and greater investment

The book shows that exports from Africa to Asia tripled in the last five years, making Asia Africa’s third largest trading partner (27 percent) after the European Union (32 percent) and the United States (29 percent).

Indian and Chinese foreign direct investment in Africa also grew, with China’s amounting to $US1.18 billion by mid-2006.

China and India each have rapidly modernizing industries and burgeoning middle classes with rising incomes and purchasing power. These societies are demanding not only natural resource-extractive commodities, agricultural goods such as cotton, and other traditional African exports, but also diversified, nontraditional exports such as processed commodities, light manufactured products, household consumer goods, food, and tourism.

Because of its labor-intensive capacity, Africa has the potential to export these nontraditional goods and services competitively to the average Chinese and Indian consumer and firm.

“To be sure, if you take a snapshot of today, the overwhelming bulk of Africa’s exports to Asia is natural resources,” says Broadman. “But what’s new is there is far more than oil that is being invested in—and this is an important opportunity for Africa’s growth and reduction of poverty because Africa’s trade for many years has been concentrated in primary commodities and natural resources.”

Roadblocks along the way: asymmetries and the need for policy reforms

While growing Asian trade and investment is cause for optimism, the book cautions that there are major asymmetries in the economic relations between the two regions. While Asia accounts for one-quarter of Africa’s global exports, this trade represents only about 1.6 percent of the exports shipped to Asia from all sources worldwide. By the same token, FDI in Asia by African firms is extremely small, both in absolute and relative terms.

And, the rise of internationally competitive Chinese and Indian businesses cuts into both domestic sales and exports of African producers of, for example, textiles and apparels.

“It is imperative that both sides of this promising South-South economic relationship address asymmetries and obstacles to its continued expansion through reforms,” says Broadman.

The study details a series of reforms that should be undertaken by all the countries:

* “At-the-border” reforms, such as elimination of China and India’s escalating tariffs on Africa’s leading exports; and elimination of Africa’s tariffs on certain inputs that make its own exports uncompetitive.
* “Behind-the-border” reforms in Africa, to unleash competitive market forces, strengthen its basic market institutions, and improve governance.
* “Between-the-border” improvements in trade facilitation infrastructure and institutions to decrease transactions costs, such as customs administration, transport and communications.
* Reforms that leverage linkages between investment and trade to allow African businesses’ participation in modern global production-sharing networks generated by Chinese and Indian investments in Africa.

With this newest phase in the evolution of world trade and investment flows taking root—the increasing emergence of South-South international commerce—African businesses cannot afford to be left behind. Those reforms are critically important to allow Africa to be able to genuinely participate—and most importantly, benefit from—the new patters of international commerce.

Why Don’t We Make Babies Anymore?

Almost every developed country from Japan and South Korea to the UK has low birth rates.  I’m sure some folks in high density countries like Japan and the Netherlands are happy about this, however there is a demographic problem in that their will not be enough workers to burden the welfare state as the baby boom generations start to retire.  America is not as bad, because Americans tend to have slightly more children and that is largely due to poor minorities and immigrants.  In France most of the high birth rate is due to Muslims and they have a very high unemployment rate which makes them a net negative for the government coffers, not a benefit.

So why aren’t us, the rich of the world (and yes believe it or not you are quite rich) not making babies anymore?  What to do about it?  Japan seems to think they can innovate their way out of it by creating better technology, so far there is no sign that is going to work.  Other nations want immigration but are afraid to turn their country into a third world state or radically change the existing culture with fundamentally different immigrants who will not assimilate (Japan is one of these, and many European nations are starting to go this way).

In the end evolution and history do not care who has the best technology, the best culture, the most intelligent population, etc.  All that matters in the end is if you live to reproduce and ensure that your children grow to adulthood to reproduce to continue the cultural and biological line.  That is pure Darwinism.  The way we are going…most Western nations, as we know them will either be fundamentally altered or nearly extinct.  I wonder are they cultures worth saving?  If not, what type of cultures produce political and economic systems where reproduction stagnates or stops?  Is that a good culture?  Are our liberal capitalistic democracies broken?

Germany

Raving ravens

May 3rd 2007 | BERLIN
From The Economist print edition

Germany needs more children. Who will pay, and who will look after them?

A TIRELESS reformer, Ursula von der Leyen is also one of Germany’s most popular politicians. She has two degrees (in medicine and business) and seven children. She may be ideally qualified to run the family ministry, but this does not always make her popular with her government colleagues.

By 2013 Mrs von der Leyen wants to treble the number of available nursery places to 750,000, covering one-third of Germany’s under-threes. That, she argues, will make it easier for mothers to work, and encourage them to have more children: Germany has the lowest birth rate in rich Europe, with 1.3 children per woman compared with 1.9 in France and 1.8 in Sweden. The birth rate among professional women is particularly low.

Mrs von der Leyen thinks Germany is getting a bad deal. The state spends 2.9% of GDP on family policy compared with an average of 2% in the rich countries of the European Union. Most goes in cash payments to parents; in France and Scandinavia, by contrast, most of the budget goes on child care. In western Germany almost all schools and nurseries close at lunchtime. But the proposal has infuriated social conservatives. Walter Mixa, a Catholic bishop, said it degraded women to “birthing machines”. Such attacks reflect in part the German state’s troubled relationship with family policy in the past. Leonie Herwartz-Emden of Augsburg University says the word “motherhood” is loaded because of the Nazis’ glorification of child-bearing. Yet these days working mothers are sometimes called Rabenmütter or raven-mothers, reflecting the notion that this species abandons chicks pitifully early in life.

An even bigger row is about the cash, estimated at €3 billion ($4 billion) a year, needed to pay for the reform. Germany’s federal states and municipalities have backed the scheme, but only if they don’t have to pay for extra running costs. The Social Democrats suggest paying for it by cutting child-benefit payments and tax breaks for married couples. But their partners in the governing coalition, the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, as well as the chancellor, Angela Merkel, oppose rejigging subsidies this way. Mrs von der Leyen is meeting the finance minister on May 9th. Much will depend on whether the even more popular Mrs Merkel will continue to back her protégée.

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