Teaching Asians to Think

Just saw a letter in the Straits Times Forum page entitled “Time ripe for a pan-Asian university,” which argues that in light of the blame game for the “Covid-19” and growing anti-Chinese sentiment (which affects non-China Chinese) in the West, it was time for Asians to produce a “Pan-Asian University.” The letter can be found at:

https://www.straitstimes.com/forum/letter-of-the-week-time-ripe-for-a-pan-asian-university

This letter also reminded me of a talk I attended that was conducted by Her Excellency, Ms. Kara Owen, the High Commissioner of the United Kingdom, a few months ago (back in the pre-Circuit Breaker days). In that talk, the High Commissioner acknowledged that Singapore had sent many students to the UK and said that she hoped that there would be more student interaction between the UK and Singapore with more UK students heading to study in Singapore.

Interestingly enough, the topic of universities is one of the classic cases of Westerners having more confidence in the future of Asia than Asians. I remember telling someone of South Asian decent what the British High Commissioner had said and his only reaction was “She must be mad, why would they want to come here when they have the best universities there.” This reaction is, sadly, not a lone one. As far as most Asians are concerned, the world’s best education remains Western.

To an extent, this is true. If you look at rankings of the world’s best universities, they are, with the exception of Oxford and Cambridge, inevitably American. A look at the Times Higher Education Ranking can be found at:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/best-universities/best-universities-world

These rankings are pretty entrenched and if you look at the normal Asian mindset, unlikely to change anytime soon. I look at Singapore as the prime example. We invest heavily in education. We are proud of our universities and we spend a lot of money on them. Yet, despite all our pride in our home-grown universities, our country is inevitably run by people who went to Oxbridge for a first degree and did an MBA in an American University.

There are of course, reasons for the dominance of Western Universities in the top ranks of the world’s best. For all the apparent issues with Western societies (think social unrest on American streets at the moment), they remain societies that are open to free expression and more importantly the free flow of ideas. America in particular has rolled out the welcome mat for the world’s best brains and allowed them to flourish. Furthermore, as in the case of America, there is a culture that encourages experimentation. Part of that culture includes a tolerance for failure, which remains an anathema to many Asian societies

For many Asian governments, there is also prestige in having people trained by the world’s best. Here in Singapore, we take pride in the fact that our top people have not just proven themselves at home but in world-renown places like Harvard, Cambridge and so on. Governments in places like China have also done the same.

Having said all that, the question remains – why can’t Asia produce a world-class university and why can’t we accept the idea that people from the West might want to come to study in this part of the world.

The economics are certainly making Asia a more attractive place to be. For all it’s faults, China is the world’s second largest and most dynamic economy and other Asian countries are also following suite. Business interest in the West has certainly become more focused on Asia. I remember, when Ogilvy hired Tham Khai Meng as its global creative head. While the local media made a song and dance about the first Singaporean to be a global creative head of a major ad agency, there was also another person who got promoted, which was Miles Young, who became CEO. Mr. Young cut his teeth in Asia-Pacific.

A major ad agency thought it was important to fill its key positions with people with Asian experience because it saw that this was where the future consumers would be. However, are Asians being more than just copycats of a Western Mind?

Developing a great university would be the right start to proving that the answer is no. There are positive signs. I think of John Chambers, former CEO of Cisco Systems singing the praise of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). I think of the efforts of Singapore’s Universities to create a start up system in the same way that Stanford did around Silicon Valley (as a matter of disclosure, I am working for NTU’s start up and commercialization arm and I have worked for the IIT Alumni).

However, more needs to b done. Asian societies will need to encourage greater innovation, which means a culture that allows experimentation, failure and questioning of established rules. The money is there to spend on research but cultures need to match. Think of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), which has the full financial backing of Saudi Aramco, the world’s most profitable company. The facilities are wonderful and its hired famous names but has the culture created innovation and great research?  

Admittedly, I didn’t shine in university but if you look at what universities do, you’ll see that they are the bedrock of producing an innovative and prosperous economy. America has ruled the world in just about every sphere. It has most of the world’s best research universities. Surely that cannot be a coincidence. Instead of sending students there, most Asian governments could do well to ask what makes American universities so good and to replicate it within. There’s no reason why there can’t be a great Asian university.

Awfulness and Stupidity - the Second Mover Advantage

One of the things that used to irk American policy makers was the fact that their Asian bugbear at the time, was Japan, which had a talent of copying everything that the Americans invented and making them cheaper and, in many cases, better. The most noticeable was in the automobile industry, where the likes of Toyota, Honda and Mitsubishi ended up bruising the Detroit Big Three (GM, Ford and Chrysler) in their domestic market.

What the Japanese demonstrated was called “Second Mover” advantage and rather than inventing brand-new things, they found a way of improving on what existed. As is often said in the area of work place efficiency, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel when you can use what you already have.

There are lots of examples of how the second mover has gone onto surpass the original. 

Unfortunately, for many people at risk of getting coronavirus or being suffocated by burning forest, the most prominent second mover is Mr. Jair Bolsonaro, a proud Trump imitator who revels in the name of “Trump of the Tropics,” and has a secondary job of being President of Brazil.

While Mr. Bolsonaro has not made the headlines that the original Trump sitting in the North of the Rio Grande has, he’s had a way of surpassing the original in the things he says and does. It should also be said that while Brazil isn’t the world power that the US is, it is a country that counts. Brazil is the “B” in the “BRICS,” and with an area of 8,515,767 square kilometres, it is the fifth largest country in the world and its population of 210,147,125 it is the sixth most populous nation on the planet. Brazil’s nominal economy is estimated at 1.86 trillion US dollars, making it the ninth largest economy. It is by far and away the country that counts in South America. In the pre-Bolsonaro days, Brazil was regarded as the most benign of the BRICS. Here was a large market with lots of resources. However, unlike China, Brazil is democracy that values human life, unlike South Africa had something other than natural resources and unlike India, it was comparatively free of communal strife.

Mr. Bolsonaro has decided that these things were a crock of shit and that ordinary Brazilians were being screwed for being nice to the rest of the world. It helped that his predecessors had legal issues (euphemism for being corrupt) and Mr. Bolsonaro, like his idol in the North of the Rio Grande was swept into power on the promise to make things right for Brazil’s poor.

His first decision of helping Brazil’s poor was to allow the Amazon Forrest. Mr. Bolsonaro used to line that we’ve grown very used to in Southeast Asia – economic development takes priority over preserving the environment. In other words, we’re going to get rich whether the lefties in the West like it or not. The result has devastated much of South America, covering neighbours in a smog like haze, which many of us in Southeast Asia are familiar with and potential natural resources provided by the forest have been squandered.

When French President, Emanuel Macron called him out on this, Mr. Bolsonaro publicly announced that the French President was merely jealous because his wife was better looking, which had nothing to do with the issue at hand but seemed to satisfy a certain sense of lost masculinity in Bolsonaro voters.

Mr. Bolsonaro, like Mr. Trump had the good fortune to preside over an improving economy and so the masses forgave him. The covid-19 struck and the truth of Mr. Bolsonaro’s tough guy with a heart for the people was revealed.

While the Original in the North tried to downplay the seriousness of the virus and then started looking for scapegoats and then prescribed unproven cures, Mr. Bolsonaro has been remarkably constant in his handling of covid 19. That is, he’s been remarkably consistent about disregarding the reality of the devastation brought about by the virus. Despite losing his health minister and justice minister, Mr. Bolsonaro has decided that it is perfectly acceptable to trash the advice of his own healthcare officials. Mr. Bolsonaro refuses to stay in orders, attends rallies and likes his big crowds. As with his hero in the North, Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters blame the “left win” media for trying to tarnish their hero.

Where Mr. Bolsonaro outdoes the original Mr. Trump is in his belief that the virus is no big deal. The Trump and his supporters when down playing deaths caused by the virus at least make the effort in giving their nonchalance a little bit of context, such as “more people are killed by the flue” etc.

Mr. Bolsonaro is quite open about the fact that he really doesn’t care about the deaths caused by covid-19 and the potential risk to national health. As Brazil’s death toll reached past 5,000 – his only thoughts were “So What?” More can be found at:

 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/29/so-what-bolsonaro-shrugs-off-brazil-rising-coronavirus-death-toll

Another area in which Mr. Bolsonaro trumps the Trump is in the way in which he encourages the public to undermine stay at home orders. While Mr. Trump tweets his encouragement for protestors against stay home orders, Mr. Bolsonaro, a former army officer, has lead from the front and gone as far as to call for the military to intervene (though, as President, one wonders why he’s calling from the military to intervene, when as President, he could order the military to do so). More can be seen at:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/brazil-bolsonaro-joins-protest-coronavirus-curbs-200420042616860.html

Unlike the US, which was born as a democracy and had 200-years to build its institutions, Brazil has on the scale of things only just achieved things that make society prosperous like a government for the people and rule of law. Mr. Bolsonaro is working to undermine these things, which cannot be good for Brazil, South America or even the wider world.

At the time of writing, Brazil has 102 thousand cases and over seven thousand people have died.  It looks like Mr. Bolsonaro is trying to catch up and perhaps surpass his hero in the North of the Rio Grande. This cannot be good news for Brazil’s poor in the overcrowded favellas.  

You’re not even a Nigger – You’re Lower than That – You’re an African!

The TV has decided to play “Hotel Rwanda” as its late night/ early morning show. The movie tells the story of Paul Rusesabagina, the Rwandan hotelier who managed to hide 1,268 Tutsi and moderate Hutus during the 1994 genocide.

I remember the genocide. I saw it on TV. It happened at the same time as the Bosnian War and while Europe and the USA made lots of noise about placing an arms embargo on the Milosevic regime in Serbia, the Rwandans decided to do things the old-fashioned way – they butchered each other with machetes and the world watched as it happened.
To put it in its crudest terms, Bosnia was an unequal war while Rwanda was a “Snuff Movie-Made Real.” Everyday you would turn on the TV and you’d get to graphic images of people who had been hacked to death. One day, one group of people decided that they would take a sharp chopper to their neighbours and that was that.

The Western Powers lead by the USA, who had so efficiently kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait two-years earlier, sat by and watched. Saddam had to be kicked out of Kuwait because he was a murderous thug was an amateur compared to the chaps in Rwanda. What went wrong?

Well, the simple answer is this – Kuwait was and is a reliable oil supplier for the West while there is utterly no strategic interest in Rwanda. The contrasting attitudes were best summed up by one of the most poetic lines in the movie – “You’re not even in a Nigger – You’re Lower than That – You’re an African.” It is important to save Kuwait from a murderous thug called Saddam because Kuwait has oil – nobody scores points for saving African lives.

I never appreciated it at the time but the difference in the way the world reacted towards Rwanda and Kuwait were lessons that history had already demonstrated. Great powers inevitably act towards the world – they inevitably act in their self-interest. This was true of the British in the 19th century and it is the same of the Americans in the current one. China has shown that if it grows into the next power, it will do the same.

Both the British in the 19th century and the Chinese in the next century have been clear on how they’d run things. The Americans are a different case. They’ve worked on the policy of “Doing Good.” Whenever they’ve invaded a country in the last century, they’ve always done it on the official premise they were “liberators.” To be fair, both Saddam in Iraq and Noriega in Panama were dictators. However, if you look at the way they’ve tried to manage Iraq, you have to question their real motives.
Which leads to the point on what can the rest of the world do? Well, for the most part, it is best to work with the superpower in terms of trade. Chances are the superpower is a superpower for a reason. In the 19th century it was the British and today it is the Americans who have the skills and the technology that the rest of us simply don’t have. As such, it’s always a good idea to send your best and brightest to learn from the superpower. This is a good exchange. For the British, educated natives helped to run the colonies. The Americans use them to help run multinationals.

Superpowers, especially America can be benevolent. Americans forces have helped keep the peace in various parts of the world. Both PAX BRITANICA and PAX AMERICANA have kept the world from exploding into a larger conflict.
However, smaller nations and people from smaller nations have to remember that superpowers don’t act out of the love of their smaller brethren but out of their own strategic interest.

Simply put, anyone who believes that the super power will rush to their defence out of the goodness of their heart will be in for a massive disappointment. So what can smaller countries stuffed with black, brown and yellow people do.

Well, the answer is to learn to be independent and self-reliant. One should learn the skills of the superpower and what makes the system tick but not be dependent on the superpower for ones security and prosperity. While I don’t always agree with the official stance of the Singapore government, I do give credence to the idea of National Service – simply put, - it is good to have someone defend you but also important to doubly ensure that you know how to defend yourself.

It’s good to have alternatives. As long as you remember that as far as the superpower is concerned, you are “Lower than a nigger,” you’ll always have the instincts to look out for yourself and not rely on the superpower to do it for you.