by Parag Khanna
Though no doubt Asian societies, like European ones, have deeply ingrained preferences for racial purity and even strains of xenophobia, the ground-level story points toward an accelerated intermingling across the region. Asians already share cultural and material affinities that date back to the ancient Silk Roads, and colonialism forged a common Asian spirit of resistance against Western empires. Despite economic stasis and political lethargy, postcolonial affinities blossomed as well. Since the 1950s, each successive Asian Games has garnered expanded commitment and ever larger national teams, as well as sporting spirit of fans and the media. Today, cross-border education and labor opportunities combined with intermarriage are changing the complexion of Asia—even though its enormous population sizes make it harder to notice.1 Asia’s layering of peoples and cultures is far too textured for Asian states to be racially defined as European societies have been. Rising intra-Asian connectivity has also launched new conversations that are nourishing regional understanding. Asians are finding that their preferences for technocratic governance, social order, and conservative justice bind them together in an era when Western societies no longer serve as role models for their future.
Asia today is more a sponge than a bloc. The Turkic former Soviet republics of Central Asia have ditched Cyrillic for Latinized scripts so they can communicate more easily with Turks and Indians. Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s main foreign television content comes from India and Turkey. Asian expats are mingling and intermarrying in Mumbai, Seoul, Hong Kong, Sydney, Shanghai, and Singapore (whose official languages are English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil). The more mixed up Asians become, the more they might find “Asian” to be an easier identifier than the complex hyphenations of their multinational origins. Asia is recovering its Asian-ness.
Branding Asia
Asian countries are at very different stages of branding themselves to the outside world. China’s image mobilization has included sponsoring lunar New Year’s festivals and setting up more than five hundred Confucius Institutes around the globe. China also spends lavishly on advertorial supplements in Western newspapers and China-focused documentaries on the BBC, Discovery, and other channels. From 2009 to 2013, a high-level presidential council deliberated how to promote Korea’s brand, leading to the country’s increasing its contributions to global aid agencies. Arab countries spend lavishly on Washington and London lobbying firms to burnish their images among politicians and investors. The rise of Al Jazeera International, Russia Today, and China’s CGTN—all in the English language—represents a major shift in how Asians and the West consume “global” media: Not only have Asians ceased to defer to Western news to interpret their own affairs, but intellectually curious Americans and Europeans increasingly flip to foreign channels for a global perspective and an alternative to their own programming.2 Branding budgets aside, a survey by Portland Communications and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy found that Japan holds the highest ranking (sixth) for global appeal among Asian countries,3 while Singapore tops the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS) among Asians as the model Asians would like to see their country emulate.4
India still lags well behind its Asian peers in active self-promotion, but its passive approach is paying dividends. Post-Independence India fascinated Western hippies, poets, and writers. The “hippie trail” carried streams of European wanderers overland to India in the 1950s and 1960s, during which time Allen Ginsberg toured India for fifteen months seeking wisdom, while Jack Kerouac parroted his readings in Indian philosophy in Dharma Bums and wrote a posthumously published biography of the Buddha. The time of the Beatles’ late-1960s retreat to India to study Transcendental Meditation is widely considered to have been one of the band’s most productive periods. In the mid-1970s, Steve Jobs wandered India barefoot wearing only a lungi, an ascetic seeking purity and Buddhist inspiration, before returning to California to apply his quest for inner perfection to computing hardware by cofounding Apple. Marc Benioff similarly took a meditative sabbatical around India after leaving his job at Oracle, resulting in the birth of the cloud software giant Salesforce, whose offices have ample meditation rooms.
More recently, hit novels such as Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love have further popularized visits to India’s many yoga ashrams. Bollywood has not only infiltrated global film culture but also spawned dance classes, DJ music mixes, and wedding themes around the world. There are few more famed musicians than India’s sitarist Ravi Shankar or maestro conductor Zubin Mehta, who has directed philharmonics in Montreal, Los Angeles, New York, and now Israel.
Referring to the rich history of Buddhist exchange between India and China, the noted twentieth-century Chinese scholar and diplomat Hu Shih claimed that India had conquered China for two thousand years without ever sending a soldier over the border. In 2011, China even donated $1 million toward India’s ongoing effort to revive the once great Nalanda University, the ancient world’s greatest center of Buddhist learning. Today India’s spiritual heritage and practices are gaining far broader global appeal. India’s most significant cultural coup has been the designation of June 21 by the United Nations as International Yoga Day, now celebrated by millions of people in hundreds of cities. Since 2012, the number of yoga practitioners in the United States has climbed by 50 percent to nearly 40 million, with most reporting improvements in strength, balance, dexterity, and mental clarity. Yoga is complemented by the practice of mindfulness—a mix of reflection, gratitude, and living in the moment, loosely derived from Buddhist meditation—which has swept Western homes, universities, and corporate campuses (which are increasingly designed by Chinese feng shui consultants). The Art of Living Foundation (AOLF), founded in 1981 by Ravi Shankar, has become a global mindfulness and peace movement spread over 156 countries. Mindfulness courses are part of career enhancement at Google and General Mills, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella credits mindfulness with his turnaround of the company’s strategy. Mindfulness apps such as 10% Happier have been downloaded millions of times. Could it be that the next Enlightenment will come from adopting the teachings of ancient Asian cultures?
Given that numerous Asian civilizations can draw on more than five thousand years of cultural heritage, reviving their distinct historical wealth naturally concerns them more than generating a unified pan-Asian identity. Even with their deference and respect for one another, there cannot be a singular Asian cultural resurgence across such a vast and diverse domain. But there is a renaissance of sharing under way among Asian societies that rising wealth and integration is enabling. Asians are ever more favoring Asia, a trend reflected in shopping, eating, arts and entertainment, and migration and tourism. It is only a matter of time before someone launches an “Asiavision” song competition.
Asians Crisscrossing Asia
As in the nineteenth century, Asia’s pattern of migration, intermarriage, and demographic blending is repeating itself but on an ever larger scale. Indeed, Asia’s own Asianization may be the most significant demographic megatrend of the twenty-first century. Asian enclaves in other Asian countries are not a new phenomenon by any means. The Spanish colonial government in the Philippines established the first Chinatown in the Binondo district of Manila in 1594. Today, Asia is the origin of nearly 40 percent of the world’s migrants, and according to the United Nations’ 2015 International Migration Report, between 2000 and 2015, Asia added more migrants to its own population than did any other region, with 26 million international settlers across the region (ahead of Europe’s 20 million). Asia, then, is both the world’s main source and main destination of international migrants.
China’s diaspora of more than 50 million people is found mostly across Southeast Asia, where their roles have evolved from plantation farmers and merchant traders to construction workers and bus drivers to corporate executives and athletic coaches. Though China’s diaspora is larger than India’s, the 30 million members of India’s diaspora are more widely dispersed. Within India’s immediate neighborhood, the 4 million Indians in Nepal const
itute 15 percent of its population, and the nearly 1 million Indians in Sri Lanka account for 5 percent of its population. In Southeast Asia, the 2.5 million Indians in Malaysia make up 10 percent of its population, and the 350,000 in Singapore make up 9 percent. And in the Gulf region, the 4 million Indians in Saudi Arabia make up 15 percent of its population and the 3.5 million Indians in the UAE make up 40 percent of its population.5 Indians based in the Gulf countries send home more than $12 billion in annual remittances; elections in Indian states such as Kerala sometimes hinge on the Gulf remittances that fill campaign coffers. There are also 4 million Pakistanis around Asia, 3 million of whom are in Saudi Arabia and the UAE alone. Another 2 million Bangladeshis reside across the Gulf region.
As South Asian populations ballooned in the Gulf region from the 1970s through the 2000s, they were mostly laborers in construction and low-level clerical functions. Today Indians and Pakistanis continue to fill the majority of those roles, but, especially in the UAE, Oman, and Bahrain, they have also formed a class of managers, executives, industrialists, and entrepreneurs who are playing important social roles—and even political ones advising the monarchies. Over time, technology could do away with the need for a substantial percentage of lower-end Asian workers: Dubai is mandating that one-third of homes and offices be constructed using 3D printed materials, meaning easy-to-assemble modular construction requiring much less labor, and Oman wants to use drones rather than Bangladeshis to water its parks. Many unskilled South Asians will therefore return home to India and Pakistan, where construction wages are rising on the back of massive infrastructure investment. At the same time, yet more skilled South Asians may continue to flow to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries as they seek managers for their many new special economic zones and logistics hubs.
From Dubai to Hong Kong, millions of Filipinos and Indonesians continue to work as maids, cleaners, nannies, clerks, and drivers and in other low-wage services jobs. Along with South Asians, these Southeast Asians form a semipermanent community that is graduating from exploitation toward acceptance. For decades, South Asian construction workers have had their passports confiscated by Arab contractors, while one-third of Southeast Asian maids have reported being overworked, underpaid, and humiliated. But the Filipino government has begun to use its diaspora as a lever, temporarily banning its nationals from working in countries where employers abuse them, such as Kuwait, until they are allowed to keep their passports and guaranteed timely salary payment and insurance. The Indian government has begun to deploy its own insurance scheme covering its blue-collar workers in the GCC and a dozen other countries. From Dubai to Singapore, local movements have sprouted (with government support) to encourage sharing meals and stories with guest workers to show appreciation.
Middle-income countries making large investments in modernization, such as Thailand, are magnets for foreign labor. Thailand has an estimated 5 million migrant workers, mostly from Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. A crackdown on undocumented labor in 2014 forced 200,000 Cambodians to scramble for the border—but the resulting paralysis in the construction sector forced the Thai government to immediately reverse course and offer amnesty. Malaysia also depends on foreign labor from Thailand, Indonesia, and Myanmar, boosting its GDP while serving as a major source of remittances for rural families across its borders.
The staggering demographic mismatch between Asia’s old and young countries means that youthful Asians will continue to be pulled farther from home to meet labor demands. Even large countries such as China, Russia, South Korea, Japan, and Thailand have huge labor shortages—up to 30 percent of their current working-age labor force between now and 2030—while Pakistan, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines have enormous surpluses of labor to export both within and beyond Asia. If aging China has exported so many people around the world, imagine young India and Pakistan, whose combined population is larger than China’s and whose citizens already speak English or learn it much more quickly.
Rising migration is notable even in Asia’s historically most impervious cultures, Japan and South Korea. To this day, it is not uncommon to see signs outside Japanese bathhouses, shops, and pubs declaring restrictions against foreigners. Yet although Japan and South Korea have the lowest rates of foreign-born residents among advanced economies, the numbers are growing rapidly.6 In 1990, foreigners made up 0.1 percent of South Korea’s population; today they are 3 percent and climbing toward an estimated 10 percent by 2030, a level comparable to some Western societies that have been experiencing foreign immigration for many decades longer.7 In South Korea, the rate of international marriages has also skyrocketed, from just over 1 percent in 1990 to 14 percent by 2014. Just one generation since their Cold War hostility, Vietnamese women now make up the largest number of international brides for South Korean men, followed by Chinese, ethnic Korean Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Cambodian women.8 The number of multiethnic families in Korea now stands at nearly 1 million, double the number of just a decade ago, with the highest rates—nearly 40 percent—in towns such as Wangok near Ansan, which has declared itself a “borderless village” due to its two-thirds non-Korean population. Korean media use the term Kosean to capture the Korean-Asian mixed-race future.
In Korea and Japan, assimilation has gone from a taboo topic to a necessary reform. Though integrating “New Koreans,” as they are known, presents formidable cultural challenges, their inclusion in local voting and councils indicates that the country is ready to revise its citizenship laws, which have long been tied to ethnic bloodlines and ancestry. Even in Japan, which has gone out of its way to treat foreigners as temporary industrial interns, surveys suggest that youths are less wedded to ethnicity as a marker of identity.9 Rather than being the rigid ethnonationalism portrayed from the outside, Asian identity is clearly under construction.
Asians are also pouring into China due to its economic growth, demographic imbalance, and widening labor shortages.10 In recent decades, thriving coastal China has relied on its vast pool of rural labor to serve as low-wage construction and factory workers, cooks, and cleaners. But even the 200 million Chinese who have been part of this domestic labor force will not be enough as China’s population ages. Officially, the number of foreigners taking up residence in China has increased by 10 percent per year since 2000, according to the 2010 census. Unofficially, there are countless more already spread across China. The Filipino Consulate in Hong Kong estimates that more than 200,000 undocumented Filipinas work as domestic helpers and nurses in China. Each spring, an estimated 50,000 Vietnamese illegally cross the border into Guangxi province to harvest sugarcane. Since 2015, the provincial government has even formalized a program to attract Vietnamese to work in Guangxi’s factories. Women from neighboring countries are also being imported to marry China’s 35 million surplus males. With a total foreign population under 1 million, however, it will be some time before non-Chinese make up even 1 percent of China’s enormous population. China will therefore never become a “melting pot” but rather something of a salad bowl in which foreigners are a sprinkling of pepper.
Migration and intermarriage are already hallmarks of Asia’s most diverse cities such as Dubai, Hong Kong, and Singapore. For many years, Singapore’s national ID cards allowed a “CMIO” choice of ethnicity: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Other. But as the rate of intermarriage nearly tripled from 7 percent in 1990 to 25 percent in 2017, the government now allows citizens to choose two races. Singapore is already home to a large number of “Ch-Indians,” including prominent ministers. One generation hence, the government will surely have to allow three races to be chosen on each ID card. In the Gulf, legal, religious, and cultural restrictions prevent any significant rate of marriage between Gulf Arabs and South or Southeast Asians,11 but that does not prevent Indians and Filipinos from marrying in cities such as Dubai and raising a new generation of “Indi-pinos.”
The next generation of Asian identity is also being formed in Asia’s schools and universities. In 2016, there wer
e 400,000 foreign students in China, a 5.5 percent increase over the year before. There are four times as many Southeast Asian students in China as Americans and three times more South Korean students as Americans, as well as growing numbers of Indians and Russians. Pakistan’s government plans to make Chinese-language study mandatory after sixth grade, meaning that a decade hence, the number of Pakistani students in China could be many times higher than the current 20,000. Japan comes in second with more than 150,000 foreign students, and the number is growing at nearly 10 percent annually, with the largest numbers coming from China, Vietnam, and South Korea. In 2016, South Korea crossed 100,000 foreign students on the back of growing numbers of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese students. India, too, saw a 7 percent increase in the number of foreign students, to about 42,000, with the largest cohorts coming from Nepal, Afghanistan, and Bhutan. Malaysian universities attract large numbers of students from Iran, Indonesia, and China, while Thai students spread across Japan, China, and South Korea. ASEAN is approving the mutual recognition of member states’ academic certifications, which will allow for the subregion of 700 million to advance toward its own version of Europe’s popular Erasmus Programme. In recent years I’ve met many cross-border ASEAN couples hailing from Malaysia to Laos who met while studying in Japan and migrate together pursuing careers in multiple countries. The more Asians study in one another’s countries, the more they will socialize into a pan-Asian generation with greater regional understanding and shared identity. This now stretches to the Arab Gulf, with cities such as Dubai increasingly popular among Russians and Chinese seeking internships in a fast-paced business environment. Across the Gulf region, affiliate campuses of Western MBA programs such as that of the London Business School make going to London itself unnecessary.
