ABSTRACT
In recent years, much has been written about the rise of Asia as an economic and political power. Both academic and popular books have sought to describe and explain the strong economic performance of many Asian countries, not only China and Korea but also India and the ASEAN countries. Impressed by this success, journalists and scholars in Europe and the United States have been competing with each other to find appropriate metaphors to capture the changing economic and political architecture of the world. Fareed Zakaria (2006) has, for example, used the term “Post-American World” to describe the rise of Asia and by implication the decline of America. The title of Martin Jacques’s (2009) recent book is When China Rules the World; and a part of the title of Tom Friedman’s new book, written jointly with Mandelbaum (2012), is That Used to be Us. This book not only attempts to explain how and why America has fallen behind but also assumes the inevitable and continuing rise of Asia.
