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One Asia, or Many? Reflections from connected history*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2016

SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM
SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of California at Los Angeles, United States of America Email: subrahma@history.ucla.edu
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Extract

It is now widely rumoured that the ‘Asian century’ is upon us. But what does this really mean? As late as 1988, Deng Xiaoping—in remarks made before the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi—expressed some scepticism about the facility of the formulation. As Deng stated then:

In recent years people have been saying that the next century will be the century of Asia and the Pacific, as if that were sure to be the case. I disagree with this view. If we exclude the United States, the only countries in the Asia-Pacific region that are relatively developed are Japan, the ‘four little dragons’, Australia and New Zealand, with a total population of at most 200 million. (. . .) But the population of China and India adds up to 1.8 billion. Unless those two countries are developed, there will be no Asian century. No genuine Asia-Pacific century or Asian century can come until China, India and other neighbouring countries are developed. By the same token, there could be no Latin-American century without a developed Brazil. We should therefore regard the problem of development as one that concerns all mankind and study and solve it on that level. Only thus will we recognize that it is the responsibility not just of the developing countries but also of the developed countries.

Whatever the doubts about his standing as a Marxist, then, we may say that Deng remained resolutely universalist in his perspective, at least outwardly.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 5 - 43
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Delivered as a Modern Asian Studies Lecture at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, on 1 May 2015. For help with conceiving this article and providing references, I am grateful to Perry Anderson, Nile Green, Claude Markovits, Matthew Mosca, Richard von Glahn, and R. Bin Wong. I am also indebted to Caroline Ford for comments on an earlier draft.

References

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