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 enlarge | Author: Bill Emmott
Publisher: Harcourt
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $16.21
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 19970
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.4
ISBN: 0151015031
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.112095
EAN: 9780151015030
ASIN: 0151015031
Publication Date: May 5, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-6 of 6 | | « PREV | | |
 Apples and Oranges April 27, 2008
14 out of 19 found this review helpful
Bill Emmott has written a good summary of the current journalistic wisdom on China, India and Japan. As might be expected from a successful past editor of the Economist he has a strong bias toward the economic development of the countries described. This book seems to be aimed at readers who are fairly new to the subject and contains little new for people who have been reading news reports on these countries for several years. There are a number of good books dealing with each of these countries separately to which this book might form an introduction. However in some ways it is a misleading introduction. Emmott says his editor persuaded him to deal with the 3 countries together and this was a mistake. Actually the 3 countries have very little in common even if circumstances have thrown them together. An interesting comparison might be made between India and China but Japan is the odd one out.
It is a mistake to treat India and China as though they were 19th century European powers vying for hegemony throughout their quarter of the world. As Emmott correctly points out India is absorbed with internal issues, and quarrels rather than rivalry with next door states. In the last few weeks China has revealed again that its major concern is "splitism". China's great fear is that it may disintegrate and this rather than imperial ambitions dominates its thinking. In this regard Emmott shares a conventional error that for long periods in the past China has been a great economic power or has held hegemony over the area we now call Asia. In fact for the last millennium China has been the victim of repeated invasions and conquest by foreign armies. When foreign armies have not been available, China has provided an alternative by breaking up into a series of warring states and regions. Terms such as GNP have got no application to China's past because GNP only has a meaning when there is a significant surplus over subsistence that can be employed by central government or private enterprise.
Emmott completely misses the uniqueness of Japan as compared with the other two countries. Japan is the only country in Asia in the last millennium that could conceive of a seaborne invasion of another country with the sole exception of the Mongolian armies that attempted to invade Japan in 1274 and 1281 and failed completely. On the other hand in what English speakers call the late Elizabethan period the Japanese carried out a vast naval invasion of Korea that briefly conquered the whole peninsula.
Another vital point that Emmott misses is that while China and India are obsessed with issues of internal unity Japan is probably the most internally unified country anywhere in the world.
Another missed point is what one glance at a map shows clearly: Japan's sole strategic goal must be to control the sea access to eastern Eurasia. China is well advised to ensure that Taiwan does not come back under Japanese influence and Russia to ensure that Japan never retrieves Sakhalin Island. Japan's great mistake in the 20th century was to get involved in large military operations on the Asian mainland and as a result lose control of parts of this island chain. Whereas both China and India must spend large parts of their wealth in building and maintaining forces to protect their borders and control internal stability Japan has no internal security problems and no land borders. Her strategic object is to build a navy and air force that can control the sea between the Japan islands and Eurasia and dominate the sea routes between Singapore and the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Another point that Emmott does not stress nearly enough is the great difference between the growth of China and India depending heavily on imported capital and expertise and Japan's great caution in allowing foreign capital to operate in Japan. Japan chose to buy technology rather bring in foreign companies and this makes the development of the two countries completely different. While the size of the national GNP is important to modern states it is only important in regards to national objectives. What is the point of having 3 times the military budget if it requires 4 times in order to gain strategic parity? It turned out that Darius' large military budget was ineffective against Alexander's smaller budget. Large though his budget was Darius could not control his borders or the territory he claimed to dominate. In these terms Japan can but India and China can't.
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