Japan, China Seen As Lacking Vision For Future Without Right Leadership, Laws Nations Unprepared For Long Term
Japan and China, the world’s leading trader and fastest-growing economy, respectively, lack long-term vision for growth into the next century, described by scholars as the “Pacific Century.”
Those were the observations of Tsuneo Akaha, professor of international policy studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and Dwight Perkins, professor of economics at Harvard University.
The pair were part of opening-day discussions on National Strategies in the Asia-Pacific, conducted by the National Bureau of Asian Research of Seattle and MIIS. The two-day conference drew about 50 scholars and business leaders from throughout the world.
Japan and the U.S. have clashed over trade issues in the past decade, but Japan still looks to U.S. leaders for strategic support in defense and trade relationships.
“Japan is looking for signals from Washington and when signals from Washington are confused so are the Japanese,” said Akaha, who is currently visiting research scholar at the University of Tokyo’s Faculty of Law.
Akaha noted that a recently published book by Japan’s Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto is titled “Vision of Japan,” but “there is no vision. What there is a string of anecdotal stories about his role in bilateral negotiations (with the U.S.). It is nothing more than that.”
Hashimoto, Akaha said, intimated in his book that Japan would support and join the Asians-only East Asian Economic Caucus “should the U.S. forge an exclusivist NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement).”
Japan needs a leader who will take the risk to become an international leader, Akaha said, but with no long-term perspective, “more of the same is expected from Tokyo, unfortunately.”
China’s struggle to become a full member of the international economic system has three obstacles, Perkins said. They are:
China has operated under the Confucian “rule by good men not by good laws” for centuries, totally the opposite of the international system.
China’s business enterprises are intertwined with sanctioning government leaders, again in opposition to the international system of autonomous industrial enterprises operating in response to market forces.
China has been slow to respond to external pressures. Historically, China has seen that external policies in the past 150 years have not been for its benefit.
Yet, Perkins said, the rewards of an open-market economy are too great for China to pass up. In 1978, Perkins said, China had $10 billion in exports and by 1995, exports were between $140 billion and $150 billion. In 20 years, that export level could reach $300 billion, he said.
“If it (China) expects to do that, it has, to some degree, to play by the rules,” Perkins said.
Michel Oksenberg, former director of the East-West Center in Honolulu and now a scholar at Stanford University, said that China cannot pursue export growth as it has in the past 15 years. To sustain economic viability, he said, China’s strategy has to be consumer-led growth.
Considering that China has more than 1.2 billion people, there are a lot of consumers who can contribute to that growth.