Second Year (1949-1950): Toward Economic Growth ... - PDF, 101 mb

Perspectives 15
As contacts with the outside world were extended by students and
travelers returning from abroad, intellectuals in Asia began to desire
to catch up with the West by rapid industrialization. But many obstructions
stood in the way, including the low productivity and purchasing
power of the agrarian populace, lack of developed resources
and power, lack of skilled management and labor, inexperience in largescale
organization, and a tendency to hoard savings, let them out at high
interest, or use them for speculative buying rather than for investment
in productive enterprise.
A widening· distribution of industrial products, commonplace in the
West but beyond the means of most Asians, produced a growing
awareness of poverty and degradation. Discontent spread. The responsibility
had to lie. somewhere---and where more obviously than among
the "foreigners" \vith their strange languages and manners and ideas,
their affluence and, too frequently, their overbearing conduct and disregard
of "face"?
Antiforeignism developed long before the advent of communism in
Asia. This was true in the countries that had come under colonial rule:
India, Burma, Ceylon, Malaya, Indochina, the East Indies, and the
Philippines. It was true too in China, which had been reduced by ttun_
equal treaties" to a semicolonial status; witness the rebellion engineered
there in 1900 by the Righteous Harmony Band, better known as the
Boxers. And it was true in Japan, which, after initial resistance to alien
inHuence, had borrowed heavily from the Occident. In the 1930's, when
Western colonialism had begun to recede, the Japanese used "Asia for
the Asiatics" as a passionate slogan in support of their own expansionist
designs.
As ancient beliefs and values were shaken by the thinking which
emanated from more dynamic cultures, new conceptions of the value
and. rights of the individual began to take root, as did ideas about
science, technology, economic and social development, freedom, democracy,
and equality among nations. But the ferment was accompanied
by frustrations and bewilderment. It did not bring answers to
the immense problems of huge, depressed populations. Nor did it offset
the animosities that had developed or the feeling, among many of the
politically conscious, that somehow ttforeign imperialism" was at the
root of their troubles.
This feeling underlay, in country after country, the rise of nationalism,
strongly tinged with anticolonialism, which has been so prominent
a factor in the recent history of Asia. This fourth inHuence has