Before this “Asian century” arrived, we had a mighty argument about “Asian values.” In the final fifteen years of the twentieth century, the “Singapore school” led by Lee Kuan Yew argued that distinct values drove what the World Bank called the East Asian “miracle.”
LKY said Asia could become modern without becoming Western. He invoked Confucian values of hierarchy and obedience to produce “shared values” for Singapore society. “Asian values” emphasised the family, group or society ahead of the individual. Authority was accorded great respect, morals were conservative. Education was prized, thrift rewarded.
The values case drew strength from the economic success of Japan and East Asia. The policy impact was in politics and diplomacy — cultural assertion buttressed government power. Values arguments were used by Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad and Indonesia’s Suharto. Authoritarian rule in China and Vietnam was given a cultural shine.
The Singapore school suffered an intellectual crisis, however, when an American academic took the argument to a dangerous conclusion. In 1993, in an article for Foreign Affairs on “the clash of civilisations,” Samuel Huntington claimed that conflict between civilisations posed the greatest threat to world peace. The most important distinctions among peoples would be cultural and religious, not ideological or political.
In his article and the book that followed, Huntington predicted that non-Western societies, particularly in East Asia, would develop the wealth and power to assert their own values. The resurgence of China’s Confucian or Sinic civilization would draw the Japanese civilisation away from its Western attachments.
The editors of Foreign Affairs called Huntington’s work one of the most controversial pieces they’d ever published. But the Singapore school was aghast: the Asian values proponents wanted to get as rich and as powerful as the West, not go to war with the West.
The Asian financial crisis in 1997, coupled with the decade-long stagnation of Japan’s economy, wiped out the notion that distinctive Asian values would produce a uniquely Asian form of growth. As the twenty-first century arrived, the gentle point from the Singapore school was merely that Asian values should not be seen as inferior to the West.
The pushback I used to offer in Singapore when I was based there as a correspondent at the height of LKY’s vision was simple. Which Asians? Which values? How can you draw any simple formula from the huge diversity of that vast region?
The problems Asian values encountered haunt the notion that this is the Asian century. According to the simple rendering, the nineteenth century belonged to Europe, the twentieth to the Americans, and so the twenty-first would belong to Asia (and perhaps Africa can have the twenty-second). Australia’s most enthusiastic embrace of an Asian era was the Gillard government’s 2012 white paper, Australia in the Asian Century, which proclaimed:
Asia’s rise is changing the world. This is a defining feature of the twenty-first century — the Asian century. These developments have profound implications for people everywhere. Asia’s extraordinary ascent has already changed the Australian economy, society and strategic environment… The Asian century is an Australian opportunity. As the global centre of gravity shifts to our region, the tyranny of distance is being replaced by the prospects of proximity. Australia is located in the right place at the right time — in the Asian region in the Asian century.
Like the Gillard government, the white paper vision didn’t rule Canberra for long. The sunny optimism gave way to the dark forebodings of the “Indo-Pacific.” The two terms might describe the same set of players but they arrange and weight them differently.
Canberra’s Asian-century usage blended liberal internationalism with an optimistic view of Asia entering a new phase of deeper and broader engagement, privileging geoeconomics over geopolitics. The successor, the Indo-Pacific, gives more weight to geopolitics, shifting the focus from economic bonanza to surging strategic rivalry between China and the United States.
Canberra’s official reason for adopting the Indo-Pacific was to factor in India. The other compelling reason, fudged in the telling, was to get a frame big enough to handle — or contain or engage or balance — the giant dragon in the room. Australia worried about an Asian century that would be run by China.
Is the Asian century just a polite way to describe the Chinese century? If it’s all about China, then the century will be defined by how the United States is pushed out of Asia — and how China reduces American influence in the rest of the world.
The limitation of a US–China binary is part of a new assault on the “myth of the Asian century” by one of Southeast Asia’s sharpest foreign policy minds, Bilahari Kausikan. I’ll refer to him by surname, although throughout the region he is known as Bilahari, a wise owl, instantly recognised by his round-framed glasses, always up for an argument.
A Singapore diplomat for thirty-one years, Kausikan retired as head of Singapore’s foreign affairs department in 2013. His book doesn’t mention the Asian values experience, but his attack on the Asian century draws lessons from the earlier debate.
The myth, he writes, obscures much more than it illuminates, offering little understanding of Asia’s place in the world. The Asian century has gone from metaphor to cliché, concealing so much it’s “not just useless but harmful.”
The proposition that an Asian century is replacing an American century is flawed, Kausikan says, because “Asia is too broad a category to have any coherent political or strategic meaning.” Asia has lots of economic muscle (46 per cent of world GDP in 2024 in purchasing-power-parity terms) but growth and economic weight don’t equate to “strategic coherence, nor does it lead to collaboration.”
Kausikan says China embraces the Asian century as a seemingly objective version of the Maoist slogan resurrected by Chinese president Xi Jinping: “the East is rising and the West declining.” Beijing uses the Asian century for its narrative about “China’s inevitable and unstoppable rise,” he writes:
Implicit in some usages is the idea that China, due to its size, spectacular growth, and increasing global reach, will define Asia’s future. The glory days of Japan are over; India is too far behind and internally incoherent to matter much; and the rest, whether “little dragons” or “tigers,” are too small to make a real difference. So the “Asia” whose century it now is, can only be China. The corollary is of course that the “West” — that protean term which is often shorthand for the United States — must be the past.
China’s emergence as a major global player is one of the most important geopolitical facts of the last century, Kausikan notes: “The effects will reverberate through the twenty-first century and perhaps beyond.” Then he offers the caution. China’s rise implies a change in the relative position of a dominant US, “but relative change is not absolute change.”
The relative balance between the US and China is a huge question with many moving parts. Add to that equation another big fact of history that kicks against the Asian century vision: the relationships of Asian states “are not naturally cooperative.” Asian political convergence has never existed, Kausikan writes, except in the imaginations of pan-Asian visionaries.
Chinese nationalisms bump against other Asian nationalisms, he writes: “How will the tensions between geoeconomics and Asian nationalisms play out?” Part of his answer is that “while China is influential” in Asia, “it is not trusted.”
Kausikan argues that Asia is far less shocked than Europe by the second coming of Donald Trump. Apart from Australia, he writes, Asian friends of the US have always dealt with Washington on the basis of common interests rather than “the illusion of common values.”
“Trump has ripped the moralistic wrapping off American foreign policy and exposed certain eternal verities,” Kausikan says. “Unilateralism, distrust of multilateral institutions, emphasising strength, and the making of threats were not invented by Donald Trump.”
Asia’s diversity “makes it a naturally multipolar region,” he goes on, and great-power competition is a normal state of affairs. Hedging, balancing, and bandwagoning are simultaneous, not alternative strategies. Asian diplomacy “has almost always been polygamous or omnidirectional,” even among US treaty allies. The one exception Kausikan offers to the alliance bigamy trait is the loyalty of Australia, “which is perhaps why Australians seem to feel more keenly betrayed than America’s other Asian allies now that their true love no longer feels obliged to reciprocate their feelings.”
Asian states will play the field, but they always want the US as a big player on the field. Asia will hedge and diversify, Kausikan writes, but there’s no economic or strategic alternative to the US:
Concerns about US reliability have been endemic in Asia for decades. Still, despite inevitable gyrations of policy from different administrations, the United States has been remarkably consistent for almost half a century in maintaining equilibrium in Asia as an offshore balancer. Since there is no substitute for the United States, whether it is reliable or not is moot. Asia works with the United States because it must.
Even if Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and ASEAN could act collectively, Kausikan judges, they “cannot balance China by themselves.” Thus, the key question for Asia is what sort of deal the transactional Trump will do with China?
Kausikan dismisses as “improbable” an agreement dividing the world into spheres of influence, with Washington conceding Asia to China’s control: “Much as Trump relishes deal-making, he is even more interested in winning and being seen to win. A ‘grand bargain’ that concedes the fastest-growing region of the world to China will be seen as a clear loss for America. Trump will not want to go down in history as a loser who was bamboozled by China.”
Nuclear-weapons proliferation will be one element in what Kausikan calls “a century of multiple Asias.”
America’s extended nuclear deterrence, designed to protect Asian allies, is being eroded by North Korea’s development of missiles to go with its nuclear weapons and China’s modernisation of its nuclear forces. Asia will face a version of the question posed in Europe decades ago by Charles de Gaulle: will San Francisco or Los Angeles be sacrificed to save Tokyo or Seoul? The question is whispered behind closed doors in Japan, Kausikan writes, and openly discussed in South Korea:
Neither Japan nor South Korea is eager to build nuclear weapons, but the logic of their strategic circumstances will inexorably drive them in that direction. In my judgement, it is not a matter of whether but when Japan and South Korea become nuclear powers. It will almost certainly happen well within the remaining years of the twenty-first century. Acquiring independent nuclear deterrents is the only way for Tokyo or Seoul to avoid subordination to Beijing and the eventual break-up of the US alliance system in Asia… An America that defines its interests narrowly and transactionally will catalyse such decisions.
If South Korea and Japan get nuclear weapons, Kausikan says, Australia will have to ponder the same choice. The escalation will be fraught but he thinks the end result will be stabilising: “A nuclear balance will freeze the region’s multipolar configuration, making it impossible for China or any other power to impose a hierarchical structure on it. There will not be an Asian century but a century of multiple Asias.”
The myth of the Asian century, Kausikan argues, is to think of Asia as an arena rather than a diverse and dynamic set of actors. Look at the long histories, deep pride and cultures of China, India, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia: “They are never going to be anybody’s tool or play deputy to any sheriff.” Asia’s powers “act and react to each other and thus change their hopes and fears, their successes and failures, their ambitions and their insecurities, in an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of contingencies and possibilities.”
Kausikan believes US–China competition is unlikely to consolidate international order in the same way the cold war produced a bipolar order based on the US and Soviet Union. Asia knows the fundamental strategic realities it faces with the US and China:
Dealing with both simultaneously is a necessary condition of dealing with either effectively. Without a relationship with the US, we will deal with China in such a state of disequilibrium that our autonomy will be in serious jeopardy. But without a relationship with China, a more transactional US will take our interests for granted. Our relations with the US and China will need to be delicately calibrated to keep them in some form of balance that does not tip too far one way or another.
Asia’s power test will be shared by Europe. The trends are global and “geography is becoming less relevant as an indicator of political or strategic alignment.” Kausikan sees Asia as the epicentre of broad international shifts: the global web of supply chains; the rise of China and India; “the deep and pervasive influence of US–China competition.”
Concerns about American and Chinese behaviour mean no country will want to align all their interests with one power. Different interests in different domains will shift to get the most advantage. Every nation will face such choices. Kausikan offers one bit of jargon — “asymmetrical dynamic multipolarity” — to describe this emerging system: “The US–China relationship will be the main axis around which eclectic clusters of countries will continually form, dissolve, and reconstitute themselves as their interests dictate. States must learn to understand equilibrium dynamically — as continual motion to adjust to other motions that will in turn adjust to other adjustments — not as a static balance.”
The need for shifting international coalitions and clusters means “middle-sized or even small countries powers could carry weight on specific domains or on particular issues.” Kausikan lists Asian powers that can “play crucial roles” in this emerging structure: “Japan, India, Australia, South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam and even some of the smaller ASEAN members.” Then he offers examples of how the system is already operating.
Japan and Australia took the lead to form the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership after the first Trump administration abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership. India embraced the Quad because of its China worries, but that didn’t stop it joining China’s Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. India walked out of the ASEAN-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership but New Delhi still participates in ASEAN’s East Asia Summit.
In a Foreign Affairs article about the second coming of Donald Trump, Kausikan said Asia can easily deal with “Trump’s transactional foreign policy because it involves balancing mutual benefits rather than sustaining the liberal international order”:
Indeed, much of Asia views the liberal order with ambivalence. When Asian countries talk about a “rules-based order,” the phrase tends to carry significantly different meanings than it does in the West. For Asia, far more than a radical deviation from existing US foreign policy, Trump’s return to power amplifies and accelerates a trend that has been underway since the Vietnam era.
Rather than an Asian century, Kausikan describes a multipolar age of myriad deals, where partners regularly shift. Asia will offer up many leaders in this century, not an agreed view of the century.
The US and China will be central but neither will lead a settled team of nations. This future is too complex, Kausikan says, to be characterised by any one continent, especially a continent as diverse as Asia. The Singapore wise owl gets his argument into that one elegant sentence: “There will not be an Asian century but a century of multiple Asias.” •
The Myth of the Asian Century
By Bilahari Kausikan | Lowy Institute Paper/Penguin Special | $12.99 | 160 pages
