The Difference Principle

Can ethnic identity and individual freedom coexist?

Joel Kotkin from the February 1993 issue

(Page 4 of 5)

Driven by their sense of openness, the British tribe ultimately developed most of what became the basis of modern industrial, scientific, and technological processes. Between 1750 and 1950, Britons and Americans accounted for nearly three out of every five major inventions, discoveries, and innovations in the world. And they made Anglo-American cities such as New York and London the supreme arbiters of international finance, commerce, and business services.

In this sense, then, the Anglo-Americans have become the prime creators of the cosmopolitan world culture that so often chagrins nationalists, statists, and advocates of "trade blocs." As a top Bank of England official said over tea and cookies at his Threadneedle Street office: "We have a willingness, a desire, to operate on a global basis. Narrow national concerns, European concerns, are not nearly so important. We are interdependent with the rest of the world; they are our customers. Of course, we have to operate on a European level, but what makes London special is the overseas linkages. It is our heart and soul."

As we enter the last years of the 20th century, a similar cosmopolitan mentality is also emerging among the Asian tribes. Even the Japanese, whom sociologist Harold Isaacs has called "the truest nation on earth," have, as they have expanded their global presence, developed cosmopolitan and individualist tendencies that may play an important role in the gradual breakdown of state power globally.

Many of the so-called revisionist intellectuals–such as Karel van Wolferen and Clyde Prestowitz–reject the very notion that the Japanese may be evolving in a cosmopolitan direction. To the revisionists, Japan, as the ClA-sponsored Japan 2000 report put it, "is virtually impervious to change, and probably will remain so." Yet the reality remains that the Japanese, particularly those under 35, are indeed changing from the caricature of ultranationalistic automatons frequently proffered by the revisionists.

Critical in this change has been the younger generation’s exposure to the world outside Japan–both through the media and directly through their tribe’s global expansion. Having seen how others live and think, many now question the old ideas of loyalty to company and country above all. Asked in a survey conducted by Dentsu, Japan’s leading advertising agency, to identify their purpose for living, fewer Tokyoites under 30 named work than did their counterparts in either New York or Los Angeles. Almost none mentioned service to company or society. And young Japanese named "self-improvement"–the supposed be all of Southern California’s "me" oriented society–as their top priority twice as frequently as young Americans.

"The individualism is a product of the changes in the society," notes marketing expert Yohko Abe, who has done major research on youth attitudes. "They are less in rebellion against society as they are representative of a change in the stages of our development. It’s less dramatic, but maybe more lasting a change because it deals with the basic values."

Over time these changes could create a new kind of Japanese presence in the world, one that stresses the more individualistic and creative side of their culture. The current career favorites among younger Japanese–design, entertainment, advertising. fashion–do not carry the competitive message implied in the old choices of electrical or mechanical engineering; rather than expand their national empire, the younger Japanese may well be set to humanize and enjoy it.

In the next century a likely even greater cosmopolitan impact–with enormous implications for the spread of individual liberty–will come from the Indian and Chinese global tribes. Already the overseas Chinese are dominating the rapid economic development of their ancestral homeland, creating in the process a new kind of postnational ethnic "Chinese-based" economy whose real centers lie in the ultra-capitalistic bastions of Hong Kong and Taipei.

"This is something new, a pioneering effort," observes Taipei attorney Paul Hsu, a leading deal maker among the overseas Chinese. "The old government ideology of nation-states will be outmoded....The government won’t lead this effort. Until the late 1970s the government took the lead, but now the private sector is leading and creating this new thing, this Chinese-based economy."

Critically, this new transnational Chinese economy is already transforming the mainland’s society, creating a new burst of individualist economic activity. Virtually illegal at the beginning of the 1980s, Taiwan’s trade with the mainland has grown to as much as 10 percent of all Taiwan’s "foreign" trade and now accounts for nearly one

third of its total worldwide trade surplus. In the process, the role of the state–both in Taipei and Beijing–is falling before the logic of markets and the pull of ethnic ties, particularly in the southern coastal province of Guangdong.

"I don’t worry about [Beijing]," explains S. C. HO, president of Yuen Foong Yu Paper Manufacturing, one of Taiwan’s leading conglomerates. "The people in Guangdong just say, ‘Beijing issues the regulations, but we interpret them.’ "

This slow process of economic integration with their capitalist cousins may do more damage to the Communists than the democracy movement itself. China’s economic emergence in the 1980s also saw the precipitous decline of its socialist structures, as the state-owned share of industry nationwide dropped from over four-fifths of industrial production to barely half. In 1990 non-state-owned factories accounted for 70 percent of all industrial growth; the output from factories involving foreign, mostly Chinese investors grew at nearly 20 times the rate for government-owned plants.

The increasing personal contact between mainlanders and their diaspora brethren could prove equally corrosive to the Communist order. With more than 300,000 Taiwanese alone visiting the mainland every year, mainlanders have become more aware of the enormous strides taken by Chinese in place like Taiwan and North America, whose governments generations of mainlanders have been brought up to revile.

"It’s a long process but we’re making the channels to main land China here," notes Steve Lu, a Taiwanese engineer who is part of a California-based group using business and technical ties to spread anti-Communist information. "When the time comes [to overthrow the regime], we’ll have the direct contact. And direct contact is the Achilles heel of the Communists."