The Paupers Arrive... Late For The Banquet

 
In a world on the brink, a hyped tale of Asian economic miracle is irrelevant

JEREMY SEABROOK

Boasting by the leaders of India and China over their economic success is supported by the fulsome praise of western observers who have admired these great engines of development and applauded the arrival on the world stage of two great civilisations, taking their rightful place in the comity of nations. More searching scrutiny is required, not only of these attainments, but of the approval they call forth from those with whom they are supposed to be in competition. "The East is rising," announced former prime minister Tony Blair on April 3, sounding more like a reincarnation of Chairman Mao than a converted Catholic anxious to harness religion to his version of 'progressive' politics. Foreign secretary David Miliband also spoke of "the transfer of economic power to the East", while in January this year, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown acknowledged that between India and Britain, there now exists "a relationship of equals" (what this implied for the relationship until now remains in shadow). The captivating story with which the West now enchants India and China promotes new stereotypes, quite different from earlier versions, which figured supplicants in one case and Red fanatics in the other; mired in backwardness, casteism and stagnation or stultified by the conformism of grey tunics and intense regimentation. The begging bowl now lies broken, and the skinny hands lately held out for charity now skip nimbly across the keyboards of world-class technology. Naturally, all this is music to the rulers of India and China. Characteristic of this new relationship was the rapture of press reaction in India to the acquisition by the Tatas of Jaguar and Landrover. 'Jaguar is now an Indian Beast', 'The Desi Tiger has Eaten up the British Jaguar', 'Tatas Rule Britannia'. A Times of India article began, "So what if the Kohinoor diamond—once considered the ultimate symbol of Indian wealth and power—now resides with the Queen of England? On Wednesday evening, icons of British luxury passed into Indian hands for over £1.15 billion...." Hyperbole? Exaggeration? Perhaps. But it is true that India is now one of the world's major players. The country is walking tall. The giants are wakening. The powerhouses of the future. De-coupling from the US economy. The cliches fall like ripe fruit. The story is that China, and to an only slightly lesser degree, India, have taken on the West at their own game, and are beating them. This highly seductive proposition is difficult to resist, and feeds growing nationalistic sentiment in both countries. But we may wonder if there is not something disingenuous in the concession by a country like Britain that its power is waning, that it is defeated in the global economic struggle for supremacy. This should not be taken at face value. The praise heaped upon India and China in the western press has a different inflection in Europe and America. The people of Britain are constantly being warned that "the world does not owe us a living". Wherever the rise of India and China is mentioned, the word 'threat' is rarely absent. The readiness with which jobs—in services as well as manufacture—dematerialise from Britain and America and take up their abode in Guangzhou, Bangalore or Gurgaon serves as a warning to the workers of Europe and the US, grown, some maintain, fat and lazy in the good times which are fast nearing their sub-prime term. The economic triumphs of India and China are invoked to discipline the workforce of the western countries. Is it true that India and China menace the well-being of the people of the West? After all, the economy of India is still less than half that of Britain, and has 20 times more people, while China's economy in 2007, worth $2.7 trillion, has still not reached that of Germany.According to the UN Human Development Index, China stands at 80 and India at 128 out of 177 countries. Is the economic power of the West really challenged? What does it mean, that former imperial possessions and dependencies are beating us at our own game? If it really is 'our' game, then does not the eager participation in it of China and India suggest they have succumbed to a form of development from elsewhere, that their own indigenous traditions, the potential of something unfolding from within their cultures, have failed? Does it not imply acknowledgement that the western 'game' (if such it is) is truly superior to anything that these ancient civilisations (to quote another flattering designation widely circulated in the western media) could possibly come up with? Does this suggest capitulation to the wisdom of sometime overlords and masters? Or is it true that the economic rules devised in the West are indeed universal, and correspond to something deep in the DNA of humanity, which the West simply 'discovered', much as it 'discovered' America and India? It would seem so. The pattern of development has been laid down in advance; and the West has insisted there is no alternative. China and India obligingly pursue the pattern followed by Britain in the early 19th century, of breakneck industrialisation. But whereas we tore recklessly through the resources of our own modest landmass and then plundered those of whole continents, they are being urged to pause and do something different. The world cannot support existing levels of pollution, the Carbon-di-oxide poured into the atmosphere from the great industrial plants, mines and power stations in their countries. More than this: when the West industrialised, the violence and exploitation led to fierce resistance, the birth of trade union and labour movements. Governments were compelled to make concessions, to set up the welfare state and health service, to give guarantees against destitution. But where governments in Europe were compelled—however reluctantly—to intervene, those of India and China are extolled precisely because they have resisted the soft option of safety nets, minimal levels of healthcare and pensions, and offer no security against misery and want. It doesn't add up. "Become like us", is the message, "but not in the way that we became as we are now." It is almost as though the West is revising its own 'errors' by proxy, in a strange re-run of other people's history, that has left the biosphere to the ravages of unchecked industrialisation and the people to the injuries of unbridled economic forces. Or have India and China become the sites of a practice-run for an untested historical experiment, to find out what happens when unlimited appetites are allowed to express themselves freely within a finite world, and with no colonial hinterland to exploit? A Business Week article two years ago, while lyrical over the emerging superpowers, mentioned as a kind of afterthought, "Both nations must confront ecological degradation that's as obvious as the smog shrouding Shanghai and Bombay, and face real risks of social strife, war and financial crisis." So who is beating whom? Even if the wager proved possible, and India and China could miraculously conjure forth the wealth to create the equivalent of the western way of life, what would the cost of this truly miraculous achievement be? It is significant that the West has been swift to 'blame' India and China for the vertiginous rise in world food prices: 'they' have developed a taste for foods we take for granted, and this is taking bread—or rice—out of the mouths of the poor.While the extravagances of India's more than one lakh dollar millionaires are the object of awed celebration in the western financial press, those same wealth-creators are then castigated for developing a perverse liking for what used to be called "the finer things of life". In a world of prodigality and poverty, of excess and exiguity, and a system that violates the elements that sustain life, if India and China increased their wealth twenty- or fifty-fold, what would be the effect on the resource base of the earth? It is yet another unfortunate historical accident that India and China should be poised on the brink of the age of heroic consumption at the very time when the western powers are coming to the sober realisation that this era may be drawing to its close. The insistence that India and China forbear to pollute in the reckless fashion of the West at the time of its early industrialism is an indirect recognition of the impossible task they are faced with. Although the economy is the only area of experience in which the knowing and cynical of the world still believe miracles to occur, it would require unprecedented supernatural intervention to satisfy unbound human desires, which hover like an epic plague of locusts over the harvest-fields of the earth. To realise the promise that a whole world can be remade in our image would require resources beyond imagination. Competition is doubtless an effective driver of achievement, but when we have made a wasteland of the earth, tainted its evaporating waters, rendered its air unbreathable, swollen its seas and drowned its cities, who then will be the victors and who the vanquished? If western praise for 'Asian tigers' is exaggerated, perhaps this is because we are sufficiently acquainted with the fate of real tigers to know what we are talking about. (Jeremy Seabrook is the author of Refuge and the Fortress: Refugees in Britain 1933-2008, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan.)

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