“The Pacific Century: America and Asia in a Changing World” by Frank Gibney, Charles Scribner’s Sons, © 1992, 596 pages, hardcover.
Looking back at this broad overview written 26 years ago, I am impressed with the economic insights and personality assessments Gibney brings to his descriptions of a Pacific world. As an American journalist who spent substantial time in the Asian Pacific, as an editor representing a big publisher introducing an encyclopedia effort to Asian leaders, as a writer who took the time to contemplate and record, and as a scholar who spoke Japanese and knew more Asian history than most undereducated Americans, Gibney has a story to tell. And we learn best through stories.
What astounds me is that in 26 years, there have been no reviews posted on this site. This book was adapted into an Emmy Award-winning public television series. It is frozen in time, a quarter of a century ago when Hong Kong was still the last British Colony, when many of these Pacific nations were still struggling to rise, and before China’s miraculous economic expansion had unfolded. Frank Gibney died April 9, 2006. If he was alive today, he would have to rewrite some sections where history went another direction than he forecast. But he would be proud to have anticipated other trajectories that he got correct. Since Amazon reviews are restricted to 20,000 characters, I only list the highlights (and shortcomings) of these 20 chapters.
“Traditionally unsteeped in Western concerns for individual human rights and win-or-lose legal justice, they have a relatively high political boiling point. They will work long and hard for the prospect of distant future gain. It is not for nothing that they have been called Confucian capitalists.” The Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Koreans have “an ethic which emphasizes mutual loyalties. They have an almost religious regard for scholarship and learning.” Their “traditions of group loyalties and working patterns, their passion for education, their willingness to sacrifice individual preferences for common goals…” provided Asia with assets the West lacks.
In a chapter on seaborne barbarians, he notes how Portuguese Matteo Ricci differed from “his sanctimonious fellow Christians” in realizing the superiority of the Chinese Imperial system that did not invade other countries and had a scholarly bureaucracy. Among the “merchant imperialists,” Gibney calls out Thomas Stamford Raffles as an enlightened (Singapore) administrator who differed from the average colonial supremists. He also notes the participation of Americans (the Delano family, pictured) in the opium trade.
Gibney’s real strength is his knowledge of Japanese and Japanese history, and here the book rises into “scholarliness” in detailing the Meiji revolution that institutionalized compulsory primary education before Britain or the U.S. did. Gibney uses historical photos of the era, and later in the book, these will often show Gibney-the-reporter meeting with individual top Asian leaders. Some of this related history reflects not just what he has studied, but what he understands through their leaders’ perspectives.
In “Independence and the Post-War Years,” Gibney profiles Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam), Syngman Rhee (Korea), Sukarno (Indonesia) and the complexities of the Philippines. The following chapter details the re-invention of Japan under MacArthur with Gibney’s long historical view and on-the-ground observations. So his statement “Without their own democratic tradition, however circumscribed, it is highly doubtful that the Japanese would have understood the reforms the Occupation was talking about. Still less would they have supported them.” Most readers would not have known of Japan’s prior democratic tradition. The next chapter (8) on “Income Doubling and the Economic Miracle” integrates an understanding of the Japanese corporation “family” and its rapid economic rise. Since Gibney was a widely-traveled journalist, I understand his big view reporting but am particularly impressed by his economic analysis and explanations.
The next chapter shifts to Korea and “The Confucian Capitalists.” He finds the Koreans “…draw on much the same cultural resources available to the Meiji reformers: a work ethic, a sense of family solidarity, a strong sense of group responsibility, and above all a disposition to accept the authority of the state…. The ideal of the Confucian sage is harmony, not justice.” [Those wishing to pursue further the prior relationship of Korea with China can consult “Yuan Shih-k’ai” by Jerome Ch’en, Stanford University Press.] Perhaps if Gibney spoke Chinese as well, he would have found the language to have also minimized terms with connotations of “rights” and maximized their language of responsibility. He did perceive that “Confucians made the very act of learning into a moral virtue.” Gibney accurately notes that despite rote learning, Korean, Chinese and Japanese students excel over American students in math and general aptitude for learning. And he quotes HKU’s Gordon Redding that the “capacity to cooperate” is justly called Confucian. Yet the second-class status of women in Korea, at the time Gibney writes, is also “Confucianism’s dark side.”
This chapter also continues the Singapore saga, although I do not at all agree with his pessimistic assessment of Lee Kuan Yew, the intellectual leader of a highly intellectual city-state who also is quoted: “A Confucianist view of order between subject and ruler---this helps in the rapid transformation of a society…in other words, you fit yourself into society---the exact opposite of the American rights of the individual.” Gibney just wasn’t in Singapore that much.
He was in Korea, where a professor explains “You talk of government of, by and for the people. Here the people have been used to government for the people, but definitely not by or of the people.” Gibney profiles Park Chung Hee who grew Korea’s economy overnight and explains the chaebol industry system. I will witness that Korea is probably the most Confucian of all cultures, sending large numbers of students to Qufu, Confucius’s home town in China, and keeping the flights going daily between Jinan and Seoul. “For in their Confucian world, obedience and harmony count for more than individualism and legal rights. Paternalism and filial piety go hand in hand. Family ties and connection building are permanent realities, far more than citizenship or personal development.”
Gibney describes the growth of Taiwan as “…a kind of halfway house between the seclusive family capitalists of Hong Kong and the mandarinate of Singapore.” Gibney gives an appraisal of an independent Taiwanese that preferred the organized life under the pre-War Japanese to their post-War life under the dictatorial Kuomintang. Had Gibney written 20 years later, he would have witnessed the aged Kuomintang returning home and wanting to reunify with China, and the Taiwanese ascending and holding back for independence. “Justice may be ideal, but harmony and prosperity are better.”
Gibney’s weakest part of the book is on China, which was just beginning to reap the benefits of Deng Xiao Ping’s opening up and economic growth. Gibney finished his book just after Tiananmen, and did not have access to the later-released “Tiananmen Papers” or Li Peng’s confirming diary. Gibney does have the overall cultural history correct before 1949, but should have spoken at greater length with John Patton Davies or John Service, excellent diplomats who had a far better understanding of the communist situation than Gibney, and whom he defends against Joe McCarthyism later in this book. Gibney makes one of his very few mistakes in saying “pressed by a wave of anti-Japanese feeling in China, Chiang finally agreed to cooperate with the Communists in the fight against a common enemy.” [No! A Nationalist general had to force Chiang Kai Shek at gunpoint to join with Mao in fighting against the Japanese, a widely known event in Lintong in Xi’an that Gibney should have known.] Unfortunately, Deng Xiaoping is not treated fairly either, although at the time this book was written, the extent of the success of Deng’s reforms had not yet grown so obvious. In addition, Gibney had interviews Zhao Ziyang who was deposed for failing to handle the student demonstrations. Zhao did correctly and clearly define China’s path: “We have to learn how to combine regulations by state planning with market regulation. That is a new experience for us.” In the end, Deng accomplished that. Deng was most concerned with guidelines for orderly retirement: “We must find good and reliable successors, so that once a succession takes place, new turmoil does not break out again.” Finally, Gibney describes Guangdong and Fujian provinces as the forefront of the new China economy, correct then, but not now.
Sadly, Gibney’s portrayal of the Tiananmen episode reflects the one-sided Western press view and does not reflect what we now know, that there were no democratic proposals requested, and that the standoff was providing legitimacy for criminal activity across the country. The chapter does describe better changes in government in Taiwan and Korea, but a disaster in the Ferdinand Marcos Philippines. Several good political turns appear associated with the country hosting the Olympics, a correlation that needs to be pursued somewhere, someday. Gibney’s coverage of Japan’s early colonial rule of Korea is substantial background. Gibney picks up at the Korean War, is not friendly to MacArthur, and backs up his objections with text from Ridgway. The admission of North and South Korea into the United Nations was made possible by Beijing’s refusal to veto South Korea’s entry in 1991. Today’s American perception that China remains a staunch ally of North Korea should be corrected by the realization that North Korea is one of China’s main worries.
For those who worry about trade deficits today, Chapter 15 describes the 1990s and Japan with a GNP per capita that exceeded the United States. Japanese companies with their view of workers as family, just-in-time inventory, and organization that allowed them to take a long view were producing better and cheaper products than the U.S., as anyone who bought American cars of that time knows. The American trade imbalance was also due to U.S. manufacturers who paid attention to satisfying stockholders, not customers. By 1991, one-third of cars sold in the U.S. were Japanese brands. But Gibney observes that “Americans tend to think that everybody is like them” and “that their ideas, laws, and lifestyle can work for everybody.”
In a discussion of the slaughter of nearly a half million Chinese in a genocide in Malay Indonesia, Gibney does get it wrong when he suggests it was a response to a communist coup d’etat. It was racial genocide based on envy of Chinese immigrant affluence. Gibney goes back to examine the U.S. annexation of the Hawaiian Islands and Samoa and is too kind to the imperialist Teddy Roosevelt, recently skewered by The Imperial Cruise and The China Mirage by James Bradley. Having been a journalist in the time of Henry R. Luce, the owner of Life Magazine, Gibney is also far too lenient on this propagandist responsible for polarizing the U.S. against communist China.
Gibney finally addresses America’s racist history, including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and subsequent bigotry including the Japanese World War II internment, “one of the most shameful acts of injustice in American history.” Most readers will not realize that America failed to fight to include the racial equality clause in the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I, and how this sent a message of Western racism worldwide. We were guilty of “moral universalism and political parochialism.”
Gibney considers “Joseph W. Stillwell…probably the best of American’s soldier heroes from World War II.” He also is familiar with Agnes Smedley, a journalist who followed the communist army at Yannan and wrote a biography of General Chu Teh. Gibney gets a little polemic in condemning U.S. academics who are not critical of Maoist China while at the same time criticizing pollyanna authors. He also repeats a China-products-made-in-prison-camp argument that is blatantly false today and trivial then. At the time of his writing, he notes the many remaining security problems in the Pacific, most of which are now resolved.
Gibney notes that in the end, the U.S. has contributed far more in aid to the Asia-Pacific than the Marshall Plan did in post-War Europe. And “…the new Asian middle class is far from converted to American-style ‘look, no hands!’ individualism.”
“Which raises the final critical question: how ready, willing and able is a weakened America, divided, soul-searching, and obsessed with its domestic problems, to play a strong senior partner’s role in the next Pacific century?” His last chapter speculates on “America’s Pacific future.” He lauds the Fulbright fellowships that promote academic travel both directions (now under attack), the “virtual sanctification of free scientific inquiry and unhampered research” (now under attack), and our “open society” (now going tribalist). He explains how for Asia, the idea of democracy is more collectivist or communitarian. He notes the desperation from trade imbalances that drove the first President Bush to blame America’s economic failings on the Japanese (as President Trump does with China) and suggests we might learn some things from this scapegoating. For a long time, Americans have realized that, on average, our children will have a less wealthy life than we did, and he notes that “In 1991, the average American worker was making, per hour, about fifty cents less in real dollars than he was in 1970.” [Indeed, 1970 appears to remain the high point in middle class earning power today, and was perhaps our last peak on a downward turn for America. President Reagan ran on a “Make America Great Again” slogan and so did Trump; and for a reason, the diminishing middle class feel it. Twenty-six years ago Gibney suggested that it is the Chinese idea of family and community as reinterpreted by various countries that can give us a new perspective. In this final “take away,” he is probably right.
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