‘The Asian Century’

The issue whether the next decades will be the Asian Century is being hotly debated. There are Westerners who want to cultivate good relations with countries in Asia and take advantage of their growing prosperity and progress, while others are cultivating hate and violence against Asian migrants in their countries.

The British imperialist Cecil Rhodes wrote that “the world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered and colonized.”

Rhodes was an imperialist, and to an imperialist, “expansion was everything.” Imperialism is the policy of expanding the rule of a nation or empire over foreign countries by force. In the 1800s, European nations acquired great wealth and power from both the natural resources of the lands they conquered and the forced labor of the people from whom they took the land. Imperialists used ideas from eugenics and Social Darwinism to justify their conquests. To imperialists like Rhodes, the idea that there would soon be no opportunity for further expansion was unsettling.

The French held similar views. In a speech to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1884, Jules Ferry, who twice served as prime minister of France, said: “Gentlemen, we must speak more loudly and more honestly! We must say openly that indeed the higher races have a right over the lower races… I repeat, that the superior races have a right because they have a duty. They have the duty to civilize the inferior races… In the history of earlier centuries these duties, gentlemen, have often been misunderstood, and certainly when the Spanish soldiers and explorers introduced slavery into Central America, they did not fulfill their duty as men of a higher race… But in our time, I maintain that European nations acquit themselves with generosity, with grandeur and with the sincerity of this superior civilizing duty.”

Armed with these ideas of racial and cultural superiority, Western nations expanded into Asia from the mid 1850s to the beginning of World War I. The “Age of Imperialism” was fueled by the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the United States, and it profoundly influenced nation-building efforts in Japan and China. As the desire to exert regional strength grew, Japan also began to expand its colonial influence across East Asia.

“A new book entitled ‘The Asian Century’ by John West should be a must-read for everybody who is anybody! John West has written a very worthwhile book. His worldview, while very different from mine, is clearly expressed in a very readable fashion. I therefore recommend this book to everyone who is concerned about how the 21st century may progress.” (Frank Li, econintersect.com, February, 2018) “West’s analysis is timely, insightful and highly readable. Many recent studies have focused on specific problems, such as Asia’s yawning infrastructure gap and the implications of artificial intelligence and robotics. West paints with a much broader brush. He provides welcome coverage of the trampled rights of ethnic minorities, women, children and the LGBT community.” (Robert Wihtol, the interpreter, lowyinstitute.org.)

This book delves into the widely held belief that the 21st century will be the Asian Century by examining Asia’s rapid economic development in the post-war era and the challenges it faces in forging ahead of world leaders in the West.

“The impact of the current turbulent global political climate in Asia is critically analysed, employing a holistic and multidisciplinary approach, combining economic, social, political and geopolitical perspectives. Written in an accessible style, the book offers students, business, government and civil society players powerful insights on Asia.”

The other countries in Asia primarily China had a culture and civilization more ancient than Western countries.

Certainly the Philippines had a different history than what Western scholars thought it had before it was colonized.

Almost 130 years ago today, Dr. Jose P. Rizal arrived in London where he spent less than a year meeting with some of the most influential orientalists in Europe and, more importantly, worked on the formation of the Association Internationale Des Philippinistes or the Philippine Studies.

Rizal went to London to learn the English language but did more than that.

He lived in a house in Chalcot Crescent near the British Museum to look for materials on the Philippines before colonization, where a community of intellectuals lived.

While Rizal was in London he worked to launch the Philippine Studies as he “wanted the Association to be truly international and planned to invite scholars who were interested in Philippine affairs.”

He worked in the British Museum to annotate Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (English: Events in the Philippine Islands). It was a book written and published by Antonio de Morga, considered as one of the most important works on the early history of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines.

The first English translation was published in London in 1868 and another English translation by Blair and Robertson was published in Cleveland in 1907.

It is recognized as a first-hand account of Spanish colonial venture in Asia during the 16th century. The book was first published in Mexico in 1609 and has been re-edited a number of times. The Hakluyt Society, a text publication society in 1851, catches its attention and an edition was prepared by H. E. J. Stanley but was only published in 1868.

The title literary means “Events in the Philippine Islands.” The book’s primary goal is a documentation of events during the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines as observed by the author himself. The book also includes Filipino customs, traditions, manners and religion during the Spanish conquest.

But recent findings in the Philippines such as the baybayin script show that there must have been an ancient culture that was lost before colonialism. And that was the reason Rizal may have wanted to work with other intellectuals in Paris and London to help him discover that earlier history.