Volume 23, Number 4 · March 18, 1976
The New Order in Asia
By John K. Fairbank
Asia and the Road Ahead: Issues for the Major Powers
by Robert A. Scalapino
University of California Press, 337 pp., $10.95
Europe's colonial expansion was a 500-year wonder, but today the major nations of Asia, modernizing late upon the ruins of ancient empires, are reasserting their claims to be of central importance. Europe's most dynamic product, the US, has to live with the older and bigger cultures of China and India as well as Japan and Indonesia. Meanwhile, Europe's other dynamic offshoot, the USSR, approaching by land, is becoming an Asian-Pacific power in a way that America's approach by sea can never equal. Will not the ancient empires, once they mature as modern nations, industrialized and militarized, retain a more collectivist and bureaucratic style suited to their traditions as well as their denser and poorer populations? As we grow also and adjust to them, can we retain our openness? Our bicentennial finds us painfully aware that our frontier politics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are not the only model for mankind, that indeed every other major people has had a more recent revolution, and our official ideology is ill suited to much of the world. To rejuvenate it we must be less culture-bound, more informed and realistic.
Review, 3030 words
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