The UN Asian Development Institute has done well to publish this collection of papers which were read at the symposium it organised in Bangkok last November in collaboration with UNESCO. It gives the readers an opportunity to find out fairly quickly what leading Asian social scientists are thinking and saying on the vital issues of development.
But perhaps it would have been more appropriate to title the collection “The Asian Dilemma” rather than “Asian Rethinking on Development”. For, while it does not contain a single contribution which can be said to represent an Asian approach to the problems of development, it brings out effectively, even if indirectly, the dilemma Asian scholars face in tackling them. This is specially true of the summing up by Prof. Yogesh Atal.
As Mr. P. Wignaraja of the UN Asian Development Institute put it in one of his interventions, three models of development prevail among the experts – the technocratic model with its emphasis on greater managerial efficiency and better utilisation of resources, the reformist model with its additional accent on social justice and distribution and the nameless one which is based on the premise that “man is the biggest asset in Asia” and his emancipation and participation is the sine qua non of development. But while the first two models are clearly Western in origin, all talk of an egalitarian bias in Asian religions notwithstanding, the third has either not been tried, as in India, or is being modified, if not being given up, after a prolonged trial as in China.
This is the crux of the matter and it is no use pretending that any Asian leader or scholar has found a solution to it. Indeed, it is just not possible to maintain the pretence in the face of the shift of emphasis in China so soon after Mao Tse-tung’s death.
One of the topmost men in the present Chinese leadership has publicly acknowledged that the country, being backward, needs foreign equipment for its petrochemical industry, for the exploitation of oil and other natural resources, for its steel works and power generation. And he has announced that from now on its needs and foreign exchange resources would guide the import of foreign materials and technology. Needless to add, this is quite contrary to the spirit of Maoism with its emphasis on self-reliance and the primacy of man versus machine.
The repudiation of Maoism by China and of Gandhism earlier by India would not matter if either the technocratic or the reformist model was a practical proposition. But, unfortunately, neither is. Modern technology is highly capital intensive and generates a relatively small number of jobs. The difference between the present-day technology – and it is growing at a truly phenomenal rate – and what the West and even Japan employed at a comparable stage of their development it qualitative, not just quantitative. Thus if the use of a machine in England in the 18th century displaced 10 persons, its successor today would displace 1,000 and perhaps more. And the difference in costs would perhaps be even bigger. Where is the money to come from and where are the displaced artisans to be employed ?
There is a great deal of talk of modernising agriculture in Asia and Africa. But it is not realised that modernisation calls for large holdings. Europe solved the problem created by the eviction of millions of peasants in the process of the commercialisation of agriculture through emigration to the United States. From 1820 to 1924 when Washington imposed restrictions on immigration, no less than 36.3 million people entered the United States, mostly from Europe. The first big wave began in the late 1840s and it emanated from Germany and Ireland precisely because both these countries were experiencing the effects of population growth and agricultural improvement. The emigrants in most cases had been driven off the land as a result of the growth of their numbers and agricultural improvement.
Mr. Raymond Frost sums up the problem in his book, The Backward Society (Longmans, 1961). He writes:
“Ireland went through the crisis of emigration when the pressure of population on the land had reduced 80 per cent of the land holdings to an average size of 15 acres. But in India today, fifteen acres is the average size of what is categorized officially as “large” landholdings, enjoyed by a plutocratic 30 per cent of all farmers….
“…….. the notable feature of comparison between 19th century Europe and 20th century Asia is that in Asia the agricultural revolution has not taken place or has been much impeded. In Europe it caused much social distress, even though much of that distress was relieved by wholesale emigration. But in Asia an equivalent amalgamation of holdings, and reduction in the numbers employed on the land would not only cause distress; it would destroy the fabric of society.”
The scholars represented in the volume have not touched the problem. They have been too busy proving that Mr. Gunnar Myrdal is wrong in ascribing Asia’s backwardness to its culture and religions. Other experts have sought to circumvent the problem by referring to the size of farms in Japan and Formosa in disregard of the self-evident facts that Japanese agriculture supports around 10 per cent, of the population and not 80 per cent, as in India or China or Pakistan and that the level of investment is so high there that these countries cannot possibly follow its example. It is a various circle. A similar-size plot produces much less in these countries than in Japan because of the difference in the level of investment which cannot be made good because of the number of persons it has to support.
But whether one faces the problem or tries to circumvent it, the result is the same in the sense that no one has a solution to offer. Gandhiji would not have had a chance to see his ideas implemented even if he had lived. Indian society at the grassroots is too deficient in energy, drive and idealism and the Indian elite wholly unwilling and unable to organise a polity capable of trying to implement his programme. Mao tried to impose his will on China when he initiated the “great leap forward” programme in 1957. By 1959 he had been repudiated by the party leadership and forced to step down head of state. Since then, till the time of his death last September, he managed to humiliate his foes, real or imaginary. But he did not succeed in producing and implementing successfully a specifically Chinese path of development. And where Mao failed, no one else has a chance in the foreseeable future.
The difficulties are obvious. First, whatever Asian leaders and scholars may believe, modern science and technology are not value-free. They are the products of the West and their introduction on a significant scale in any country tends to weaken adherence to traditional norms and promote new lifestyles and values imported from the West in however distorted a form. Secondly, it is no longer possible for any country to insulate itself from the West in view of the progress in the means of communication and transport on the one hand and the growing integration of the world economy on the other.
It is an ironical situation. The Western assault on non-Western societies was less pervasive and powerful at the height of Western imperialism in the 19th century when non-Western societies were able to resist this encroachment at least to the extent of throwing up movements for the preservation and prolongation of their traditional cultures, religions and ways of life. In the post-war period, which witnessed the rise of scores of independent states, nothing like that has been possible. In fact Asian intellectuals are trying to fool themselves by making untenable distinctions between modernisation and westernisation and so on.
There has been a great deal of talk in the West itself to the effect that industrial civilisation faces a crisis because it has been devouring non-renewable resources too fast and polluting the waters and the air on which human life depends. It has also been said quite often both in the West itself and elsewhere that the Western youth is beginning to be fed up with the worship of material goods and rejecting the philosophy of endless progress. But this has not weakened the pull of the West for non-Western societies. This is the second irony in the situation we face. The Western impact on other countries grows and spreads when an increasing number of discerning Westerners are becoming worried about the future of their own civilisation and extremely doubtful about its transferability to other peoples and climes.
The reasons should be fairly obvious to any discerning student of contemporary development. First, the West continues to dominate the world scene by virtue of its dynamism, productive capacity and resourcefulness. In the post-war period, it has faced three challenges – the independence struggle in Asia and Africa, the gradual rise of the Soviet Union to the status of a super-power, the triumph and consolidation of communism in China – and it has more or less mastered all of them. The loss of the empires has not enfeebled it. The Soviet Union is trying to achieve Western standards of living with the help of growing economic links with it. And China ceased to be a threat to it a long time ago.
Secondly, the West has an invaluable ally in the third world elites anxious to promote economic development which is also not a value-free affair because it not only calls for dramatic changes in the life and behaviour patterns of individuals and societies but leads to an imitation of its lifestyles and values.
The central issue in this context is not, as most of the contributors to the volume in question appear to believe, whether or not Asian value systems are monolithic, or whether or not they are an obstacle to economic growth but whether or not the process of development involves the weakening and even the disruption of traditional social and individual behaviour patterns. Surely the answer cannot but be in the affirmative.
Finally, most, if not all, concepts which are currently popular with the dominant intelligentsia in the third world are essentially Western in origin. Nationalism, socialism, secularism, humanitarianism, social equality, social justice and liberty, as we know them today, are all Western concepts and it is no use pretending otherwise.
This analysis is, on a surface view, disspiriting. But it need not depress anyone who is familiar with the history of the clash of civilisations. The three great civilisations of Asia – the Chinese, the Indian and the Islamic – cannot be submerged by the Western flood. They will surely resurface. But how and when and in what new shapes, no one can possibly predict. That is the great issue of our times and not the strategies of development. But discussion of that problem is pertinent and those interested in it will find Asian Rethinking useful.
* ASIAN RETHINKING ON DEVELOPMENT: Edited by Yogesh Atal and Ralph Pieris (Abhinav Publications, Rs. 35)
The Times of India, Sunday Magazine, 21 November 1976