Why Asia and America are trading places | Parag Khanna | Big Think

[Music] There's been a real psychological sea change across generations in Asia. Older Asians, if you take for example Japanese or Koreans or even Chinese, they grew up in a world in which there was the Cold War but the United States prevailed. It was the world's sole superpower. And of course, for Japan and South Korea, there was an alliance system in which they were part of the U.S. security system that really governed and provided the stability for East Asia. So they look up to the United States in many ways.

But a younger generation didn't grow up with that experience of the Cold War, and they didn't grow up with that sort of American—even post-Cold War—triumphalism. Because the majority of Asian peoples, or younger populations, were of course born after 1990, and in many Asian countries, that represents the majority of the entire country's population. So their memories, when they think of America, are of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the financial crisis, the election of Donald Trump, and so forth. So their views are really quite different about America. They don't remember America firsthand from what it was; they only remember what they see.

They see a lot of political division. They see sort of social fragmentation, and they see that their economies, particularly that of China, are actually as large as that of America. And they see how innovative they themselves have become.

So depending on the country that you're looking at in Asia, you're seeing less and less Asians actually traveling to the U.S. at all or traveling to Europe. It's also because the West is trying so hard to bring its best foot forward, its educational system, to Asia. So in Singapore, you have campuses of MIT and Yale, Georgetown and Duke, and other universities have campuses in China and so forth.

So Asians now have the luxury of enjoying a high-quality Western education without ever having to leave home. So this is another reason why you see this Asian-first—I like to say an Asia-first mentality—where they believe that they really are the center of the world and everyone is bringing their best exports to them.

It's very commonly thought today that we live in a world where walls and borders are going up, where protectionism and xenophobia and populism are the order of the day, where anti-globalization movements are sweeping our politics and our society. But if you look at Asia, which is again the majority of the world population, you don't really see those sentiments. You have a pro-globalization sentiment that's very strong because they know that it is globalization that has elevated them economically.

You also have a lot more demographic openness—it's to a remarkable extent—because these civilizations of Asia are quite mutually unintelligible. They're very diverse. Indian people don't have much in common with Chinese people; they can't even understand each other. Yet what you're seeing happening, just on the basis of demographic supply and demand, is that the aging countries of Asia, like Japan, South Korea, and China itself, are importing people from around Asia like never before.

The younger, vibrant, and working populations of the Philippines, Indonesia, all the way to Pakistan, are sending people to the aging societies as caregivers and also to study in their better universities. So if you look at a country like Japan, which we think of as being almost self-isolating and homogeneous, they've actually never been as many foreigners living in Japan as you have today.

And in South Korea, you have a rising rate of intermarriage with Korean and Chinese populations. So Asia, to the extent that one can describe it as a melting pot, is becoming more and more so. Now, as a percentage of the Chinese population, foreigners will always be a drop in the bucket, but the overall trend is towards a greater mingling of Asian peoples, especially in the places where they meet in the middle—the cities, the thriving metropolitan, cosmopolitan cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, for example, which have very high percentages of their populations being foreign-born.

On top of all of this, because of the high growth rates, there's a huge desire among Western populations—Europeans and Americans—to go and to experiment in Asia, to be entrepreneurs in Asia, to build businesses in Asia, to serve the markets of Asia. And that means that countries are opening up to that talent as well.

So you see developing countries like Thailand or others having entrepreneur visa schemes or investor visa schemes, where you can pretty much have a residence visa on arrival and come and stay for four or five years, build your business there, explore the market, invest in the population, train local people. And if you do that, and if you make a good profit, you'll be allowed to stay even longer.

So what we're seeing is that the tenure of an expat who moves to Asia is getting longer and longer. In this book, I talk about the rise of what I call American Asians. Now, I grew up as an Asian American. I immigrated to the United States, and my family and most immigrants like me never thought we would ever leave America.

There's been a pattern of the last 50, 60 years or more where people want to move from south to north and east to west. But now suddenly, what I've noticed is that you have a lot of Americans and Europeans moving east on one-way tickets. And I'm one of them because I relocated to Singapore about five years ago, and suddenly we find ourselves in a situation where it's sort of just become home in a default way and will be there indefinitely.

And the same certainly applies to the young entrepreneurs that I'm seeing arriving in Asia now. The first thing you'll notice when you do arrive is that you're not the only one. As I just mentioned, there's already thousands and thousands, and in the aggregate perhaps a couple of million young Western citizens who have already migrated to Asia.

And you'll find that they already have paved the way for you. You'll find their co-working spaces, their social clubs, and their hangouts, and their meetups thriving. And it's not just in the wealthy cities like Tokyo or Hong Kong or Taipei or Singapore, but now the second-tier cities have become really hot tech hubs and entrepreneurial hubs because of the market size.

A country like Indonesia and a city like Jakarta is not considered the most livable city in the world, but it's certainly very affordable, and given the market size of more than 200 million people, it's a hotbed of entrepreneurialism and activity. The same is true of a place like Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh City—it really is a thriving ecosystem, if you will. And it's not just one city in one country; it's all of them networking more and more together.

So we tend to think of innovation and entrepreneurialism having a physical or geographic locus—a place like Silicon Valley. But what's happening in Asia is because the money is in one place, the academic talent is in another place, and the market is in a third place, and the software developers in a fourth place, they're all really working together across borders, and that's helping to build this greater Asian ecosystem.

So that means, therefore, that when you go to Asia, don't be so sure where you're going to live, quote-unquote, because you may live in a whole bunch of places over the period of time that you're there. [Music] You.