Is it too Early to Claim an Asian Century?

Despite the significant progress in Asia, the 21^st century is not the Asian Century unless Asia becomes an influential power to lead the world's economy, politics, and international relations. These are the characteristics that scholars have defined the American Century with, “that the global

economy, security, international relations, and institutions during the twentieth century were profoundly influenced by the U.S.” (Anonymous, 2013, p. 30). With demography as Asia's winning card its unstoppable and accelerating rise (West, 2018, p. 3) has been acknowledged. While the average of the working population is increasing to 50 percent (Anonymous, 2013, p. 9), Asia will “become home to most of the world’s middle class by as early as 2025” (West, 2018, p. 3). China has driven the growth of the global economy (West, 2018, p. 2) and the lives of nearly three billion people in China, India, and Indonesia are getting better, but Asia is yet to dominate the world.

Various fundamental problems have hindered the 21^st century to be the Asian Century. The biggest problem is that culturally and politically Asia is too fragmented and cannot form a single influential power over the world. Some commentators even go further to completely deny Asia to be “in any sense a cohesive entity” (Anonymous, 2013, p. 11). Asia consists of separate sovereignties, each based on a distinct culture and historical context, while that is not the case in America. China holds Asia's largest economy but the impacts of government in many sectors are greater than that of the private sector. While centralization has restricted innovation (Anonymous, 2013, p. 20), China suffers a “middle-income trap” (Anonymous, 2013, p. 22). All these have darkened the horizon of economic sovereignty.

Other problems as highlighted by West (2018) that could hamper the Asian Century include the failure to address disagreements among Asian elites, weak governance in tackling corruptions, lack of global norms such as democratic policies and institutions, human rights, inclusive societies, rights of ethnicities and minorities, women, LGBT people, and children. In spite of rapid growth the Asian region is not comparable to America and it is too early to name the 21^st century as the Asian Century.

References:

Anonymous. (2013). The Asian century: Reality or hype? The International Economy 27(3), 8-31.

Anwar, D. (2019). Indonesia-China Relations: Coming Full Circle? Southeast Asian Affairs, 2019, 145-161.

West, J. (2018). Introduction. (pp.1-15). In Asian Century on a knife-edge: A 360 degree analysis of Asia’s recent economic development. Singapore: Palgrave MacMillan.