Rivals: How the power struggle between China, India and Japan will shape our next decade

By Bill Emmott Allen Lane,

This is a superb ‘point in time’ book by a Japan specialist. Emmott ends by painting negative and positive scenarios of the Asian ‘drama’, reminding us that it won’t end but run and run. There could be a brutal put down of Tibet and the installation of a puppet regime by Beijing in North Korea upon the death of the Dalai Lama and Kim Jong-il; equally, China’s economy may eclipse America’s by 2030 and raise the region out of poverty.

If you really need to cut to the chase then read chapters one, three and eight of this highly intelligent book by the former editor of The Economist. Chapter one reminds us that accustomed as we are to thinking about China or Japan or India as discrete entities, the 21st century is an Asian century and there is a robust set of cross-regional relationships poised to erupt as economies grow, power shifts and military budgets blossom.

Chapter three focuses on China, the great preoccupation of the West in the year of the Beijing Olympics, and works brilliantly as a standalone essay, while chapter eight runs through the five flash points that could lead to a military clash in the region – the Sino-Indian border around Aksai Chin and Tibet; Korea; the East China Sea and the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands; Taiwan; and Pakistan.

If the book has any weaknesses, they consist of the relative absence of Russia and a degree of being ‘in thrall to now’. Anyone steeped in early 20th-century history will be forgiven for feeling a sense of déjà vu; there was never an absence of tension and military conflict in this region in any part of the last century, which, in demographic terms, was already an ‘Asian century’. A further weakness, despite devoting chapter six to the environment, is Emmott’s apparent lack of alarm over climate change, his preference, as an economist, being more towards economic growth and grand strategy.

Indeed, claims Emmott, there’s a reasonable hope that money will prevail as the new religion in such an Adam Smithian way as to stave off military conflict. China increased its military spending by 17.8% last year; Japan has exploited a loophole in the post-1945 settlement to re-create a Navy disguised as a coastguard and India is looking to build its own aircraft carriers. Yet peaceable commerce is very much the order of the day in relative terms. The border ‘war’ over Aksai Chin in 1962 that resulted in the Chinese slaughter of 3,000 Indian troops is far less likely to occur today because there is so much more at stake. Hopefully he’s right. RL

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet

By Jeffrey Sachs Allan Lane

With Al Gore and Bono as cheerleaders and the bestselling The End of Poverty under his belt, robustly populist Jeffrey Sachs is to economics what Steven Pinker is to experimental psychology or Richard Dawkins to evolutionary biology. Or what John F. Kennedy was to idealism. Indeed, the book’s title – and foreword – reminds us of that particular president’s assertion that world peace will come by recognising our common wealth.

Sachs, who is director of the Earth Institute and professor of sustainable development at Columbia University (and also special adviser to the secretary-general of the UN), is as idealistic as JFK. Not only can extreme poverty can be solved, it can be solved “easily”, he regularly informs agog interviewers; in 2006, he told the UN General Assembly “Millions of people die every year for the stupid reason they are too poor to stay alive.… That is a plight we can end”. Early on in this book he tells us: “Market forces alone cannot help the poorest countries escape the poverty trap.”