The Future Is Asian

by Parag Khanna

  The aviation industry also relies on Asia. The British Rolls-Royce has an entire supply chain for jet engine production spread across Southeast Asia. Since the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) is still a long way from competing with Boeing and Airbus, both Western aircraft manufacturers depend heavily on rising orders from Gulf carriers such as Emirates and Asia’s other large carriers such as Turkish Airlines, Singapore Airlines, and Chinese and Japanese carriers. China will surpass the United States as the world’s largest domestic aviation market by 2024, with approximately 1.3 billion travelers per year versus 1.1 billion in the United States.53 By that time, India is projected to reach 450 million annual air travelers, Indonesia will account for 250 million, and Vietnam 150 million. In the automotive sector, while the United States’ domestic car sales have been contracting since 2016, Asia’s car market nearly quadrupled from 2009 to 2016. General Motors’ sales in Asia are growing between 5 and 15 percent per year. Asia also accounts for nearly 50 percent of Volkswagen’s sales. And from Abu Dhabi to Singapore, the defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are rolling out their best weaponry at Asia’s air shows, hoping to win large contracts for drones and missiles from modernizing militaries in the Gulf region, India, and East Asia. China will not be a major market for their wares, but much of the rest of Asia already is.

  Asia’s rapid urbanization has inspired Western networking hardware giants such as Cisco Systems and IBM to deploy their most advanced technologies in Asia. Singapore offers such companies a “living lab” for demonstration projects in using sensor networks to efficiently manage everything from traffic to security for large populations. In Singapore, France’s Dassault Systèmes has created the world’s most advanced 3D geodata platform, where it designs customizable and energy-efficient bridges that it hopes to sell across Asia. Western know-how is therefore accelerating Asia’s claim to be home to the “smart cities” of the future. The Los Angeles–based AECOM, one of the world’s top engineering and design firms, has three thousand staff in China, another three thousand across Southeast Asia, and a growing number in India, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE its fastest-growing offices. The legendary Chicago architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, while Gensler of San Francisco designed the Shanghai Tower, currently the world’s second tallest building.

  Even as Washington looks askance at the Belt and Road Initiative, US banks see it as essential to their Asian positioning. Citibank recently launched a strategy called “Asia to Asia” (A2A) that identifies a half dozen of the most rapidly intensifying intra-Asian trade relationships (South Korea–Vietnam, Japan-Thailand, and so forth) and aims to finance or advise as many of those cross-border transactions as possible. Asia’s share of global mergers and acquisitions activity rose from 16 percent in 2005 to 40 percent in 2016, with China’s share ranging from 30 to 60 percent. Effectively, Europeans and Asians have enticed US companies to shift their headquarters and technology to their own markets, where they also pay lower corporate taxes. Americans have been all too happy to oblige, a response that is sure to continue despite President Trump’s ambitions to the contrary. The United States’ recovering economic growth, rising interest rates, and reduced corporate tax rate have led to the repatriation of hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate cash, but only some of it will be invested at home. Top US companies are likely to use their cash piles for global acquisitions, buying undervalued Asian companies that have a large customer base, and for sourcing cheap skilled manpower. The evidence is visible at the Manila campuses of the Canadian-owned Telus Corporation, where more than fifteen thousand staff provide data analytics services for US tech giants as well as banks such as JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Similarly, professional services and consulting firms such as McKinsey & Company, Deloitte, KPMG, Accenture, and Ernst & Young have all expanded their Asia-based practice areas from infrastructure advisory to fintech to help Asian clients improve their corporate governance and consumer offerings.

  The growing adoption of 3D printing for designing and producing auto components, medical devices, and various consumer products on a large scale might replace large volumes of goods mass-manufactured in Asia and reimported to the United States and Europe. But since most such goods are sold in Asia anyway, more and more companies are positioning these technologies as much abroad as at home. The San Francisco–based Flex (formerly Flextronics), one of the world’s largest and most technologically sophisticated supply-chain managers, is deploying advanced design and tailored manufacturing solutions for clients ranging from Cisco Systems to Nike—especially in Asia, where the customers are.

  Not only are Americans selling in Asia, but their travel as professionals and tourists to Asia helps US companies as well. As Asian consumption of entertainment surges, American pop singers, rock bands, and sports teams spend weeks touring Asia, selling out stadiums. Forty percent of American overseas tourists go to China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong), while nearly 20 percent visit India and 15 percent Japan, followed by the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore. Western travel magazines continuously regale their readers with dispatches from the Philippines and Indonesia, whose beaches perennially top the rankings. Marriott International has more than a hundred hotel properties in China and the same number in India, where it has overtaken the Taj Group, and more than thirty in Southeast Asia with a dozen new hotels under way. Airbnb has partnered with Alibaba and Tencent to promote seamless home-sharing bookings in China. But Western travel and hospitality companies have learned to be cautious about Asian sensitivities. In 2018, both Marriott and Delta Air Lines issued profuse apologies to China (and Marriott’s China website was shut down for a week) after they identified Tibet and Taiwan as independent countries. The more Westerners and Asians mingle, the more they will learn to adapt to each other’s preferences.

  5

  Asians in the Americas and Americans in Asia

  The United States was founded by migrants from across the Atlantic, but in the nineteenth century Asians streamed in from across the Pacific. Filipinos were the first to arrive; their numbers steadily grew during the Philippines’ time as a US colony. The Chinese became the largest foreign-born Asian population, settling mostly on the West Coast, until the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Fast-forward more than a century, and in 2010, Asia officially outstripped Latin America as the largest source of new immigrants into the United States.1 At the same time, Indians are the fastest-growing number of illegal immigrants, whether by overstaying their visas or by trying to enter the United States via Mexico.

  Today 21 million US residents claim Asian heritage, the largest groups being Chinese (4.8 million), Indian (4 million), Filipino (4 million), Vietnamese (2 million), and Korean (1.8 million).2 There are also an estimated 3 million Americans of Arab descent. Arabs have been migrating to the United States for more than a century, with the metro Detroit area attracting the first wave of Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, and Yemenis, who worked first as shopkeepers and eventually in Ford’s automobile plants. The 1970s–’80s Lebanese civil war, the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 all continued to drive Arabs to Michigan even as the automotive industry declined as a major employer. Though the total number of Asians is just under half that of Hispanics, the gap is closing.3 Immigrants from Asia are granted twice as many green cards per year as those from any other region and are becoming citizens at twice the rate of other regions as well.4

  Nearly half of all Asians in the United States live in the West, with California alone accounting for one-third. California has by far the largest number of Asians at nearly 7 million, followed by New York with 2 million.5 As a proportion of state populations, Hawaii leads the way with more than half (56 percent) of its residents of Asian heritage (primarily Filipinos and Japanese), followed by California (16 percent), then New Jersey, Nevada, and Washington, each of which is 10 percent Asian.6 Asians also have the highest rate of intermarriage (29 percent) of
any ethnic group.7 By 2050, Asians are projected to displace Hispanics as the largest immigrant group, even though Latinos will still comprise a larger share of the total population.8

  In recent decades, Asians have become much more visible in the American economy.9 But Asians’ incomes are as diverse as their ethnicity. Indians have the highest median household incomes, followed by Filipinos and Japanese, then Chinese, Pakistanis, and Koreans.10 As a whole, Asians have a median income approximately $19,000 higher than that of whites, who are the next most prosperous group. Arab Americans also have a higher median income than the general population, and Syrian refugees are quickly joining the labor force.

  Given the size and wealth of the Indian diaspora, the Indian wedding industry alone contributes an estimated $5 billion per year to the US economy (more than the annual spending on weddings in India itself). Even though second-generation Indians may be uncomfortable with religious rites they don’t fully understand, they are drawn to the pomp of weddings involving horses and drummers. The University of Pennsylvania professor Devesh Kapur has termed this hybrid of American and Indian rituals a “big fat Indian wedding.”11 To capture Asian Americans’ consumption power, department stores such as Macy’s now actively celebrate Asian and Pacific American Heritage Month each May with a lineup of events featuring Asian chefs, fashion icons, and social influencers.

  The United States’ academic achievements have been furthered by the country’s Asianization. From the Scripps National Spelling Bee to the Regeneron Science Talent Search competition, a substantial majority of winners are first- or second-generation Asian immigrants. Top New York high schools such as Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science were three-quarters Caucasian in the 1970s and are now majority Asian. The emerging emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education in the United States is due in part to a recognition of the competitive achievements of Asian societies in science as well as the demands of Asian parents in the United States. So, too, is the rising academic stress manifest in the elevated teen suicide rate. Asians’ superior academic standing in college admissions has generated major lawsuits against prestigious universities such as Harvard, with aggrieved whites claiming that Asians benefit from affirmative action policies that whites now seem to need to guarantee sufficient representation in universities and Asians demanding that admissions criteria be more meritocratic rather than artificially limiting their enrollment through racial quotas.12

  It is safe to say that Silicon Valley would not be what it is today without Asians. With their level of educational attainment, Indian immigrants (72 percent of whom arrive in the United States with a bachelor’s degree or higher) now account for 70 percent or more of the United States’ annual quota of H-1B visas. The influx of hundreds of thousands of tech workers from southern India has made Telugu the fastest-growing language in America. According to the researcher Vivek Wadhwa, from 1995 to 2004, 53 percent of tech start-ups in the Valley were founded by at least one foreigner, overwhelmingly Asians.13 The campuses of Google and Facebook are tech equivalents of UN headquarters, with canteens offering cuisines from Arabic to Japanese.14 Indians in particular are not only powerfully represented in the tech workforce but also highly networked through organizations such as The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE).

  Asians have also become prominent on the US athletic scene. From China’s Yao Ming in basketball to Japan’s Ichiro Suzuki in baseball, individual Asians have achieved legendary status in American sport. The Taiwanese American NBA star Jeremy Lin is considered a marketing dream for his jersey sales among Asian Americans and the popularity of clinics he holds during tours around Asia, while Japan’s Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels is already being hailed as the next Babe Ruth for his pitching and batting abilities. Almost every American figure skater on the 2018 US Winter Olympics team was Asian, as was the Korean American Chloe Kim, who won the snowboarding gold medal.

  Americans have become ever more attuned to Asian belief systems and spirituality. In the late nineteenth century, the Indian monk and philosopher Swami Vivekananda elevated Hinduism in global consciousness through his speech at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893 and lectures across the United States, giving rise to numerous Vedanta centers teaching Hindu ideas. Fritjof Capra’s 1975 bestseller The Tao of Physics popularized Hindu and Buddhist mysticism while elevating their status in the West by claiming that their insights were complementary to those of quantum mechanics. Karen Armstrong’s books on Buddha and Muhammad and Deepak Chopra’s books, which repurpose Vedic philosophies for a modern age, have also been bestsellers. The thirteenth-century Persian mystic Rumi is the United States’ bestselling poet.15 The number of self-identified Muslims in the United States is rising at the rate of nearly 100,000 per year, a mix of converts from Christianity as well as immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. The number of Muslims in the United States has more than tripled since 2000 to 3.3 million, despite the precipitous rise in anti-Muslim sentiment and hate crimes against Muslims since 9/11.

  The prevailing stereotype of Asian minorities celebrates their academic and economic achievements but assumes their political impotence. That, too, is changing. Though Asians have been active in US politics for two generations, they are gaining greater prominence today. Hawaii has had several Asian American governors, beginning with George Ariyoshi in the 1970s. Former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal ran for president in 2016. In 2017, a record number of Asian Americans were sworn into the 115th US Congress, including representatives Ami Bera and Ro Khanna, both of California; Stephanie Murphy of Florida, the first Vietnamese-born member of Congress; and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, the first Thai member of the Senate.16 The half-Indian Kamala Harris is the junior senator from California, and since 2013, the half-Samoan Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is the first practicing Hindu congresswoman. She was sworn into the House using a Bhagavad Gita instead of the Bible. From state legislatures to school boards, Asians are also climbing the ladder of local politics with ever more confidence. In 2017, Hoboken, New Jersey, elected its first Sikh mayor, Ravi Bhalla, despite a campaign of flyers that labeled him a terrorist threat. There one also finds the recently opened Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, one of the largest Hindu temples in the world, made entirely of hand-carved marble. At the federal level, the Nobel Prize–winner Steven Chu served as President Obama’s secretary of energy, the Indian-born Preet Bharara was a high-profile US district attorney prosecuting white-collar crimes in New York, and former South Carolina congresswoman and governor Nikki Haley, of Sikh parentage, now serves as the Trump administration’s ambassador to the United Nations.

  With its centuries of history as a global immigration magnet, the United States has always been a place where the internal politics of foreign lands plays out through diasporas. More than one-third of Americans have some Irish heritage, and many Irish Americans provided cash for the separatist IRA to purchase weapons in the 1970s and then supported the 1990s peace initiatives of the Clinton administration. The global Jewish diaspora, 70 percent of whose 5.2 million members reside in the United States, have also practiced a form of long-distance nationalism evident in their political and financial support for Israel. More recently, the United States has been thrust into the center of Turkish politics for serving as the home of the moderate Islamist preacher Fethullah Gülen, whose movement Turkish president Erdoğan considers a terrorist organization.

  The presence of South and East Asians has added a new layer to the United States’ international ethnopolitics. In 2014, while the US-based Sikhs for Justice petitioned Congress to label the Hindu-nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) a terrorist organization, its political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was ramping up fund-raising across the United States for the campaign of Narendra Modi, who was himself banned from entering the United States due to his alleged complicity in anti-Muslim riots in his home state of Gujarat in 2002. Modi’s global grassroots campaign ultimately carried him to India’s hig
hest office, and the ban was lifted given his diplomatic immunity. Indian Americans today are as divided about their party loyalties in India as they are in the United States: tech superstars are cozy with Democratic elites, while many doctors, real estate professionals, and small-business owners have backed Trump for his muscular antiterrorism talk and tax cuts.

  China, which in the 1990s often found itself on the wrong foot diplomatically as the United States criticized its human rights record and frequently demanded the release of political prisoners, has turned the tables worldwide, punishing countries that host the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama. As Chinese dissidents spread around the world, so, too, do China’s domestic politics. In 2017, the fugitive Chinese real estate mogul Guo Wengui gained notoriety with his accusations of corruption at the highest levels of the Communist Party. The Chinese diaspora—amplified through social media—was torn between those who aggressively disseminated his claims and those who declared him (and his supporters) to be traitors and Party spies.

  Canada already finds itself in a very advanced state of cohabitation with Asian domestic affairs. When it liberalized its immigration policy in the 1970s, it welcomed waves of immigrants from Hong Kong, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan, as well as refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Since the 2000s, however, mainland Chinese and Indians have far outstripped other Asians except for Filipinos, while in total Asians represent well over 50 percent of all migrants into Canada.17 Canada has for years offered foreign students a direct path to citizenship, with the countdown beginning the day they set foot on any university campus. Already almost one in every seven Canadians is of Asian heritage.