Through the Eyes of Tiger Cubs: Views of Asia’s Next Generation by Mark L. Clifford & Janet Pau
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When trying to discern Asia’s future, perhaps the group whose viewpoints should be most sought after are those of Asia’s young. This is the group, after all, who be living that future. (I admit, in full disclosure, to being one of them.)
Through the Eyes of Tiger Cubs is one of the results of an essay competition jointly organized by the Asia Business Council, Time Magazine and the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy. The competition solicited essays from writers under thirty-two, on the topic of the major challenges that Asia would face in the coming decades, and ideas for possible solutions.
Tiger Cubs is a cogent synthesis of the almost four hundred essays that were submitted. Excerpts from relevant essays have been synthesized into a common narrative, describing Asia’s various problems and possible solutions. As discussion shifts from topic to topic, from growing income inequality to the lack of a regional identity, the book manages to combine these disparate essays into a single voice: the voice of Asia’s educated young. At almost no point does the work feel stitched together; each point seamlessly flows into the other.
This synthesis reveals something interesting about how Asia’s young look at the world. The essayists quoted in Tiger Cubs seem to recognize the same problems and support similar policy prescriptions. Few write anything that could seriously be considered—at least in my university and, I imagine, others—outside the mainstream.
Had this book had been composed a generation or so ago, one would have expected the level of consensus to have been much reduced. Essayists would surely have debated capitalism and communism, import substitution and export-orientation, or alignment vs non-alignment. References to American imperialism would have been made, to the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and perhaps the Third World as a separate entity, with greater discussion of South-South dialogue and trade.
In comparison, the intellectual differences between essays in Tiger Cubs seem small. All essayists appear, for example, to accept the intellectual foundation that underlies mainstream economics. Many support centrist economic policies, arguing for open markets in general, with limited government intervention where it would serve to improve social welfare and ameliorate market failures. The debate in Tiger Cubs is not between Smith and Marx, nor is it even between Keynes and Hayek; instead, Tiger Cubs portrays an Asian youth that has come to a consensus about the problems facing Asia, and who generally agree on the necessary policy prescriptions.
Ultimately, Tiger Cubs shows the success of the Western paradigm in understanding economic and political issues. Perhaps there was some level of selection bias (presumably those writing in English for an international writing competition would be somewhat Westernized already) but, on some level, the Western paradigm is apparently seen by many in Asia as a very useful tool for understanding and recognizing problems and solutions. Perhaps it is no longer accurate to call this a “Western” paradigm given its widespread acceptance.
Globalization plays a large role as well. Open borders have allowed the global young to attend universities in the West, where they are instructed using similar techniques. The globalization of higher education has created a group of globalized, educated young around the world; in Asia, this group will likely use what they have been taught to recognize and deal with the problems around them.
This might make it more difficult to recognize developments that fall outside that paradigm. As the famous saying goes: “It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.”
But this intellectual consistency has benefits. Communication and cooperation is made much easier. Problems can be recognized earlier, and other actors are more easily convinced that a given issue is a problem. Common solutions can be more easily crafted once multiple nations agree that a given issue needs to be solved. At the very least, a shared intellectual paradigm will allow differing viewpoints between future Asian and Western leaders to be mutually understood and recognized as "reasonable" arguments.