We need new ways of thinking about the 'rise' of Asian economies, PEODAIR LEIHY writes
How come Asia always has to rise? How many more headlines do we need about rising East and rising dragons, rising tigers, rising economies and rising powers? It seems journalists, and even academics moonlighting as journalists, can't help themselves. Asia just rises.
In a way it's understandable. Not only is Asia the clear engine of what growth the global economy can muster, the concept of Asia is historically intertwined with rising.
Etymologically speaking, orient comes from ''rise'' - the sun rises in the east. Actually, east also comes from the idea of rising; it's from the same root as ''yeast''. If you go back far enough, the word ''Asia'' can be traced to the Akkadian for rising, used in what is now Iraq thousands of years ago; the word was borrowed by the Greeks and applied to anything east of them.
Occident and west both derive from ''falling down'', as the sun does. Higher forms of Western art - such as tragedy and satire - have always dwelt on the downfall. Rising, progress and aspiration can be too middlebrow to mention; decline and fall, not rise and fall, is the aesthetic fixation. Western coverage of Asia has a complementary imbalance; Asia rises, unproblematically and without brooding indulgence.
Asian perspectives have sometimes been known to betray a similar, but more nuanced, concept of the rising east; Japan (riben in Modern Standard Chinese, and nihon in Japanese) is the sun's origin. That is, it's the Land of the Rising Sun.
Throughout Asia, Japan continues to be a symbol and source of progressive enlightenment, if sometimes in the form of perniciously headlong modernity. China itself is the Middle Kingdom. It doesn't rise. It's the centre. China appreciates there's a west; this used to mean the hotbed of civilisation that was India, and came to mean Europe. But China has always remained the centre in East Asian parlance. To the Chinese, what to outsiders looks like rising is more a return to equilibrium.
A current Monash University-based research project addresses the clear inadequacy that Asian knowledge and scholarly traditions have been sidelined too long by deference to Western cultures of enquiry and discovery.
Led by Hong Kong-born Monash researcher Philip Chan, the project is titled Asia as Method, and takes its cue from the Taiwanese cultural theorist Kuan-Hsing Chen. The project draws in primarily Asian research students and academics from Monash and other Australian and Asian universities. Chen insists that truly innovative thinking can avoid slipping back into the reproduction of imperial, colonial and cold war-style oppositions as Asian societies assert themselves.
Chen's work builds on that of other theorists who coined the term ''Asia as method'' when wondering, as the Japanese empire lay in ruins from the 1940s, whether Japan was with Asia or against it.
Japan has always had trouble apologising to its neighbours for wartime atrocities, in large part because the Japanese are very sorry. That's how guilt works; compare Australia's political leadership's struggle to hit the right tone with indigenous reconciliation.
Japan's Pacific war certainly did intensify ruminations on how Japan imagines itself, and is imagined by other Asians, as both in Asia and beside it.
While the possibility that Japan is anything other than Asian is counterintuitive from a non-Asian perspective, a growing sense of similar ambiguity now informs Australia's shifting identity in the region.
The Asia as Method project is far from the only attempt in academia to cross-pollinate Asian knowledge and perspectives. Other movements recognise the deficiencies of always passing everything over the academic norms and techniques generated in the Western tradition. Nevertheless, Asia as Method is a significant example of trying to make a synergy of the pull of opportunities of Asia and the push of fear of being left peripheral.
An aim is that the project be less about ''sponsoring'' Asian potential than has sometimes been the case, almost as if there is some surprise in Asia's claims to an equal footing with Western tradition. Over recent months, research generated under the project's auspices has been presented at conferences in Hobart, Hanoi and Hong Kong, and Chan and colleagues are editing a book of empirically and theoretically based studies.
The rhetoric of a rising Asia might be excusable from Europeans; Asia is still where the sun rises to them. To Americans? The sun only rises in Asia for them if it's a distant afterthought, having chiefly looked across the Atlantic rather than the Pacific since Columbus. And for Australians? Surely we're close enough to Asia to realise Asia's not where things rise.
As is sometimes said that to Australia, Asia is the Near North, not the Far East. We need to think more laterally than vertically about Asia. Australians should neither crane up to appreciate its rise, nor look down on it coming off the temporarily low base Asian countries are bouncing back from. We should know better.
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