The Future Is Asian
Page 27
Asians in Europe are no longer just a needy underclass; they are climbing the political and corporate ladders. In Great Britain, there have been about a dozen MPs of South Asian origin and a similar number of peers in the House of Lords. In 2018, Sajid Javid, whose parents came to England from Pakistan, became the United Kingdom’s home secretary. Born in Dhaka, Lord Sushanta Kumar Bhattacharyya came to Birmingham in the 1960s and upon completing his PhD founded the Warwick Manufacturing Group, which was responsible for the British Midlands’ manufacturing renaissance. Jitesh Gadhia, an investment banker made a lord in 2016, was sworn in using a copy of the Hindu epic Rig Veda. Asians have even become more visible in European countries without deep colonial histories. In Germany, the politician Cem Özdemir was the first (in 1994) Bundestag member of Turkish ancestry and has been chairman of the Green Party, while the ethnic Vietnamese Philipp Rösler served as minister of health in Angela Merkel’s cabinet. Indian-born Anshu Jain served as co-CEO of Deutsche Bank for three years. Two percent of Swedes are of Iranian origin, with many achieving national prominence in sports, arts, science, media, and politics. And Norway has more than 50,000 Pakistanis, including Hadia Tajik, the country’s youngest ever cabinet minister (of culture), and a number of MPs. Asian athletes have also gained high-profile visibility, including the boxer Amir Khan and cricketer Moeen Ali in the United Kingdom, while Arab, Japanese, and Korean footballers have broken into the English Premier League and the German Bundesliga.
Asian tourists are swarming to Europe in steadily growing numbers. Chinese tourists favor the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy, while Indians visit Eastern Europe as much as Western Europe, especially cities such as Prague and Budapest, where Bollywood scenes have been filmed. GAP stores in central Paris have large posters featuring cuddly Chinese-looking kids in cute outfits. Asians also love packing cruises, from Scandinavia to the Adriatic, with Norwegian Cruise Lines and Italy’s MSC each recently ordering ships with room for some 7,000 passengers, nearly double the previous capacity. Wealthy Arabs have long been avid visitors to the United Kingdom and France, spending lavishly in London and Paris hotels and keeping many horse stables in business. Lavish Indian weddings, long visible in the United Kingdom, have even come to France: the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal rented the Palace of Versailles (and hired the singer Kylie Minogue) for his daughter’s engagement party—not to mention shelling out for fireworks over the Eiffel Tower.
Living in Germany in the mid-1990s, I never thought I’d see the day when German-speaking Indians wearing lederhosen would be serving beer on Munich’s fabled Marienplatz. Yet today, according to surveys conducted by the European Commission’s Eurobarometer, South and East Asians overwhelmingly have positive views of Europe for its political stability and protection of rights. But many Europeans don’t share the same liberal outlook about Asians, especially Central Asian gangs using Lithuania’s lax border controls to enter the twenty-six-country Schengen area, within which people and goods can travel freely. More recently, the rising presence of Arabs, especially more conservative Arab Muslims, has elicited significant responses. France, the Netherlands, and Belgium are among the European countries that have implemented full or partial bans on women wearing a burqa or niqab in public, while Switzerland banned the construction of minarets on mosques. Austria has banned the construction of foreign-funded mosques altogether. In 2017 elections, Germany’s right-wing and frequently anti-Islam Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party won slightly more than 10 percent of the seats in the federal parliament, and an anti-immigrant conservative coalition took power in Austria.
These political events are symptoms of deep tensions building up as once homogenous European societies grapple with assimilating the migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers who have flooded in, spiking with the Arab uprisings that broke out in 2011 and the Syrian civil war. Germany accepted more than 1 million refugees in 2015 alone. On Sonnenallee in Berlin’s Neukölln district, every other shopfront sign is in Arabic. Sweden has more than 120,000 Syrians, most of whom arrived after 2011. Their presence has inspired deep soul-searching in the immigrant-friendly country about how to maintain its liberal culture.
Blowback on European soil from West Asia’s ethnic and sectarian turbulence is not new. It has been three decades since the Iranian fatwa against the Indian British author Salman Rushdie, who was accused of blasphemy for passages in his novel The Satanic Verses. In the 1990s, Turkish and Kurdish gangs played out their civil war with reciprocal bomb attacks on each other’s restaurants and gas stations in Germany. Al Qaeda’s devastating attacks on Madrid (2004) and London (2005) underscore how Europe has for some time been unable to escape West Asia’s instability. Each ISIS-affiliated terrorist attack in London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, or Barcelona shines a spotlight on Europe’s immigrant underclass while worsening its ostracized status. In eastern Europe, anti-immigrant sentiment has given broad license for Hungarians and Slovakians to drive Roma gypsies—an ethnic Indian people numbering in the millions across Central and Eastern Europe—from their homes. Slovakians harass even wealthy Arab tourists dining in public squares. But as Europeans get serious about migration restrictions, even with a steady degree of Muslim immigration, by 2050 Muslims will represent only 7 to 8 percent of the European population. The Asian demographic challenge for Europe thus remains much more cultural than numerical.
In fact, Europe desperately needs more Asians to plug its massive labor shortages. Across Europe, hotels and facilities are so understaffed that they cut back on services (yet resist automating them). Many of Germany’s industrious provinces require thousands of workers that could come only from southern Europe or Asia. Nationwide, Germany is seeking 200,000 nurses by 2020 and is actively recruiting Filipinos to care for its elderly. At the same time, Indian tech workers have become highly sought after to staff European companies. Even after establishing an institute in the United Kingdom to train more British engineers, Dyson still needs at least three thousand engineers for the company’s flagship manufacturing center in England. In the war for talent, Asians are being snapped up.
Then there are students. The United Kingdom remains the most popular destination for Asian students, but with post-Brexit cuts to the country’s education budget, the country will require even more full-tuition-paying Asian students than ever before. In parallel with US colleges, dozens of elite and second-tier European universities have set up parallel campuses across Asia.14 With subsidized tuition costs and a practical focus on preparing for management roles in multinational industries, Asian students see serious long-term value in European training. So, too, do Europeans shuttling between their home and Asian campuses. France’s Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), Italy’s University of Turin, and numerous other European universities are running special programs for their students to learn Mandarin and Chinese corporate governance on the ground and connect students to jobs with leading Chinese corporates such as Huawei and ICBC, for which they might work as managers when they are back in Europe. Both Asians studying in Europe and Europeans studying in Asia are thus becoming the pioneers of a future common Eurasian understanding; what they are building together is going to be more powerful than Europe’s paroxysms of populism.
European governments are belatedly, but systematically, stepping up efforts to elevate the greater Asian realm more broadly in the public consciousness. Since 2000, the Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF) has hosted sizable annual editions of its Creative Encounters series among artists. The Louvre in Paris has a standing partnership with Qatar’s resplendent collection of Islamic art. The Humboldt Forum, Berlin’s newest and most centrally located cultural monument, will make an extensive collection of Asian Silk Road artifacts its main standing exhibition when it opens at the end of 2019. For decades, Turks and Arabs have resented Europe’s vast collections of their cultural treasures, but now these are seen as reminders of the historical greatness they might once again achieve with European support.
Both Europ
eans and Arabs have realized the semipermanent nature of the latter’s involuntary arrivals. The German government has committed several billion euros to an immediate, large-scale program aimed at refugee assimilation. The European Union has launched a regionwide program to help universities match new migrants with jobs on campuses, a reminder of how much more generous European refugee policy has become than the United States’. Europe today is the wealthiest region in the world, with the best average quality of life, but there is no scenario under which it will not increasingly Asianize. In the decades ahead, the European Union may eventually expand its commonwealth to bring in new Asian members such as Turkey and Azerbaijan, and European nations may also assimilate more migrants (even if at a slower rate) to compensate for their low fertility and to care for their aging populations. Or they could do neither—in which case Europe will become depopulated and poorer and then have little choice but to open itself even further to Asian investors in its real estate and companies. Europe can choose its own path, but all roads lead to the same destination.
7
The Return of Afroeurasia
Europe, Russia, and Turkey are all turning to the east—and so is Africa. For centuries, the combination of European colonialism and Cold War manipulation kept the West in the driver’s seat of African strategic affairs. Although the Soviets backed Marxist revolutionary parties in Angola and Sudan and Chairman Mao pledged China’s solidarity with fellow developing nations, ultimately Great Britain, France, and the United States dictated Africa’s fortunes. Since the early 2000s, however, Africa has rapidly reoriented toward Asia. The most salient driver of this shift was the commodities supercycle of 2002–2012, during which trade between Asia and Africa grew by nearly 2,000 percent (yes, 2,000 percent). During that time, nearly half the world’s fastest-growing economies were in Africa. Africans would be much worse off today if Europe had remained their only major destination for food exports. Instead, today more than half of Africa’s trade is with Asia. The broader Indian Ocean realm from East Africa to Oceania is to some degree decoupling from the West on the back of its rising internal trade and financial flows. Instead of Paris and London, Dubai has become Africa’s leading offshore hub. Emirates has displaced Air France as the largest carrier of passengers to and from Africa.1 Dubai Ports World is expanding port facilities and logistics centers in Senegal, Algeria, Egypt, Rwanda, and elsewhere. Chinese, Indian, and other Asian traders and bankers meet most frequently with their African clients in Dubai.
Scholars of the precolonial world refer to the robust interconnections spanning the greater Indian Ocean as the Afroeurasian realm, indicative of just how historically rooted today’s rekindled Afro-Asian kinship is. While Western media and economists ignore Africa, Asian strategic interests in the continent are surging. As if to compensate for the Ming Dynasty’s failure to capitalize on its naval prowess, China has aggressively sought to strengthen its positioning in East Africa as a gateway to the continent’s interior resources and markets. Egypt, Ethiopia, and Kenya are Africa’s anchor members of the Belt and Road Initiative. In Africa, China is Asia’s talisman, its presence a sign that opportunity is coming. Wherever China goes, other Asian countries are sure to follow, bringing their wares and their deal making. Asian infrastructure from ports to Internet cables has laid the foundation for underdeveloped African countries to be much more efficient participants in the world economy, diversify their economies, and boost their consumption. Africa’s slowly emerging urban middle class is visible in the giant new shopping malls popping up in Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg, and the next tier of cities such as Kigali, Kampala, and Dar-es-Salaam. If Western firms are pleased with their growing sales in Africa, they have Asia to thank.
But it is Asian firms that are really capturing these opportunities. In Ethiopia, more than $10 billion in Chinese loans and $100 million in investment have gone into industrialization programs in textiles and pharmaceuticals. After a change in Ethiopia’s foreign investment laws, Chinese firms went into the leather industry and now employ hundreds of times as many Ethiopian workers as any local firm. In Lesotho, Chinese and Taiwanese firms have made clothing production (such as Levi’s jeans and Reebok shoes) the country’s largest sector.2 Helen Hai, the founder of the Made in Africa Initiative, has relocated Chinese garment production and other light manufacturing to countries such as Senegal and Rwanda. BYD Automobile Company is setting up a large-scale electric-car production facility in a Moroccan free-trade zone in order to reach both the African and European markets.
As China’s commercial presence in Africa has increased, the presence of Chinese xinyimin (immigrants), who number an estimated half million, has also become visible in many African cities. Most are not employees of state-owned enterprises but rather independent migrant workers following state employees and importing cheap goods from China for the overseas Chinese and local communities. Among those who head overseas on state-sponsored visas, many stay abroad permanently and start their own businesses in retail or manufacturing.3 On top of this, a new class of skilled, English-speaking Chinese managers is seeking out African experience through programs run by the Sino Africa Centre of Excellence Foundation.4 Though falling commodities prices, stronger local competition (including African businesses with their own connections to Chinese imports), and xenophobia have led to well over 150,000 Chinese returning home from Angola alone, there has also been a surge of Chinese manufacturing and greenfield investment in countries such as Kenya. Such businesses will bring a more diverse Chinese workforce to Africa.5
Stories about China’s vast African footprint, misplaced largesse, and neocolonial exploitation are piled high in Western media, taking impressive facts but leaping to speculative and dubious conclusions. Every railway, fuel refinery, sports stadium, and shopping mall is portrayed as a strategic ploy to advance the Chinese occupation of the continent—especially China’s new military base in Djibouti, where it has also taken over Dubai Ports World’s operation of the country’s key container port and planned naval support facilities in Namibia and Angola. Then there is China’s own propaganda, such as the recent blockbuster Wolf Warrior 2, in which benevolent Chinese troops and aid workers give a beat-down to ragtag US mercenaries trying to depose a legitimate African government.
African countries’ debts to China are mounting. China now owns more than half of Kenya’s external debt, with Zambia rapidly catching up.6 China has a sophisticated menu of options for responding to repayment problems. The most common is debt restructuring: rolling over payments to a longer time horizon—and sometimes redenominating debt in renminbi instead of US dollars or Kenyan shillings. China can also convert debt into greater equity in local enterprises and new investments in other sectors such as banking and telecoms. These multifaceted financial and commercial ties provide ample leverage for China’s escalated military presence. Beyond Djibouti, China has negotiated with Mozambique, Angola, and Nigeria for upgraded naval access.
It is far too soon, however, to project a path toward Chinese imperial gunboat diplomacy in Africa. China did not set out in the 1990s to colonize the planet. Rather, it grew so quickly that it found itself becoming the world’s largest importer practically overnight. Even as it seeks to secure the resource flows on which it depends, China’s primary objective is to diminish its dependence on unstable and far-off areas such as Africa. As some African nations default on their debts, it could well be that rather than seeking compensation through occupation—and invite an anti-Chinese backlash that would make twentieth-century anticolonial movements look tame—Chinese banks may simply sell their bad loans to other Asians such as Indians, who are still interested in those markets.
Indeed, Africa is a crucial showplace of how Asianization is far greater than China. China has been the first mover in terms of upgrading African ports, railways, and mines—but those assets make it easier for other Asian countries to participate in African markets. Where China opens doors, other Asian countries stream in to pursue their own age
ndas. As China’s imports of African commodities slow down, India’s and ASEAN’s imports are rising. China is buying less Congolese cobalt for mobile phones, but India is buying more. Indian trade with Africa has reached $100 billion per year and is growing at 35 percent annually, and 20 percent of Indian foreign direct investment is directed toward Africa.7 For decades, India’s corporations and tycoons have used Mauritius as a tax shelter, but now Indians are establishing businesses across Africa, from oil to hotels to breweries. Where Chinese infrastructure projects and technology acquisitions fail due to political backlash, Indians are already coming in as the new preferred partners. Numerous Ethiopian factories taking Chinese capital have turned to Indian consultants to boost their workers’ productivity.8