Friends or Foes?

• Author: Matthew Rees
• Position: President, Geonomica
• Pages: 51

Page 51

Rivals

How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade Harcourt, 2008, 352 pp. $26 (cloth).

For 13 years, Bill Emmott labored as editor-in-chief of The Economist, a lofty position he ascended to after a stint as the magazine's correspondent in Tokyo, where he served during the 1980s. At the time, Japan's economic expansion was arousing fears in the United States and elsewhere that the country was determined to remake the world in its image. But in 1989, Emmott wrote a counterintuitive book, The Sun Also Sets: The Limits to Japan's Economic Power, forecasting that the country's growth was unlikely to continue in the 1990s.

With that bulls-eye prediction, Emmott comes to Asia discussions with a healthy dose of credibility. His departure from The Economist in 2006 enabled him to return to reporting, and he has unleashed a freshdose of illuminating observations in Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade. Heavy on nuance and light on cliché-ridden cheerleading, Rivals is a valuable and accessible contribution to the (often turgid) discussion of Asia's economicand political future.

Who is right?

Emmott begins with the insight that Asia has never before been home to three powerful countries, all at the same time, and thus central to the continent's future will be how well they can manage their political and economic relationships with each other. The book quotes a senior Indian offi cial, from the Ministry of External Affairs, expressing the zerosum view: "The thing you have to understand," said the offi cial, "is that both of us [India and China] think that the future belongs to us. We can'tboth be right."

China's grievances against Japan's conduct during World War II remain an open wound, with many Chinese charging the Japanese with failure to repent for their war crimes. And China still laysa claim to the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh-a claim that led to war in 1962-while India says it is the rightful owner of a remote parcel of Himalayan land that today belongs to China.

Against this backdrop, China's decision to increase its military spending by 18 percent a year, and India's to increase its by 8 percent (while also signing a nuclear energy pact with the United States), looks ominous. Even Japan, although limited in what it can do to bolster its military, signed a...