BOOKS : ASIA RISING 
International Herald Tribune
January 8, 1996
Philip Bowring

ASIA RISING

By Jim Rohwer. 382 pages. $25. Simon & Schuster (Butterworth-Heinemann in Asia).

Reviewed by Philip Bowring

THIS book is an assured success. It will appeal to the many in East Asia who like the warm glow of foreign admiration for the region's achievements. It will also appeal to those Westerners seeking evidence of the West's decline and those anxious not to miss out on Asia's economic opportunities. It is a breezily written hard sell of "the Asia thing" to North America.

Rohwer approaches his subject with all the fervor of the convert. Place an upwardly mobile Western journalist in East Asia for four years and the chances are that he will wax lyrical, or find fault with all achievement.

Rohwer was a correspondent in Hong Kong for the three years that coincided with China's post-Tiananmen economic liberalization under Deng Xiaoping, the country's paramount leader, and with the heightened tempo of growth in Southeast Asia and the start of a reform program in India. He vigorously supported the 1992-3 surge of foreign investment in China and joined critics of Governor Chris Patten's attempts to shape Hong Kong's constitutional future on lines different from those desired by the Chinese.

Rohwer is now an investment banker in Hong Kong.

The flavor of the book can be summed up by the index, which reveals more than a dozen references to Deng and to Singapore's "philosopher king" Lee Kuan Yew. Yet, President Suharto of Indonesia gets only a single mention despite leading a major Asian country for almost 30 years of economic growth and social progress much more impressive, and with less-dictatorial means, than China's achievements over that period.

Nor is there any reference to such key figures in the modern Asian story as Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad of Malaysia or, indeed, of any Malaysian, Thai, or Filipino leaders. There are numerous references to ethnic Chinese businessmen, who are credited with much of the economic success of the region. There is much praise for neo-Confucian authoritarian development models. A more accurate title for the book might be "Chinese Rising."

Rohwer defines Asia to suit his own purposes and lacks any sense of the continuity of Asian development since the mid-19th century.

for social development over a get-rich-quick mentality, for learning over display, for income equality over personal wealth, for nation above self: Are not these the virtues, the "Asian" values, that empowered Japan and Korea, the exemplars of modern Asia?

Philip Bowring is a journalist based in Hong Kong.

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