Weak in providing historical context, this volume focuses market-by-market on some key individuals who spurred their countries’ economic development.

The Miracle:
The Epic Story of Asia’s Quest for Wealth
By Michael Schuman
HarperCollins Business, New York.
2009. 422 pages
ISBN-10: 0061346683.
ISBN-13: 978-0061346682

By Philip Bowring

This is a typical book by a journalist – in this case Time magazine’s chief business correspondent in Asia – with equal doses of the upside and downside of current journalism. It is easy to read and by focusing on celebrities more than underlying factors provides useful insights into the achievements of the individual players in the drama. Yet it is singularly lacking in historical context, leaves out vast areas of modern Asia which do not fit the simple Time-style thesis, and heaps lavish praise on all Asia without making actual comparisons of performance on key issues like literacy, lifespan, and gender equality with other developing regions.

Of course it has some value to North American readers in telling them what has been obvious for at least three decades – that the West’s relative position in the world is in decline and that some parts of Asia have risen to equality with it while others will do so in the not too distant future.

But rather than outline the factors that demonstrating that Asia’s Miracle is destined to continue, the book is a grab-bag of the achievements of individuals, most of whose main work was in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Of the cast of 13 who each get a chapter to themselves, only three are still active. A similarly low percentage of Schuman’s Cast of 60 are still movers and shakers.

The book in some ways seems curiously dated, reading much like the series of “Asian miracle” books that appeared in the mid-1990s before the Asian crisis, with chapters extolling the roles of Mahathir, Suharto, etc. Asia has of course recovered well from that crisis, breathing life back into those earlier books, but while Schuman adds some names to the earlier lists, the thesis is much the same.

Even The Miracle itself is not defined. Clearly the post-1950 economic trajectories of South Korea, Philippines, India, Burma, China, and Taiwan have been vastly different from one another, and do not always compare well with, for example, Turkey or even Egypt. Is there some peculiarly “Asian” explanation for the standout failures, Burma and North Korea?

But after looking for explanations of the causes of The Miracle, Schuman can only put it down to The People, as though there was something innately special about people in Asia – though at no point does he bother to define Asia, a European geographical construct, not a cultural or ethnic one.

The focus on a few people has it uses and makes interesting enough reading for those not familiar with the careers and achievements of such diverse characters as Suharto, Akio Morita, Kim Woo Choong, Manmohan Singh, Stan Shih, and Mahathir Mohamad. Schuman brings alive some key moments in their careers, which left a lasting impact on their nations. Nor does he try to fit them into a mould. The diversity of the individuals and of the development methods they used is acknowledged, as, sometimes, are cronyism and other negatives. So too is the importance the example provided by Japan.

However, it would spoil the journalists’ story to suggest that the seeds of East Asia’s post-war rise were laid in the first half of the last century. Could Taiwan and Korea have come half as far, half as quickly, without the physical and educational infrastructure created by the Japanese? Could Singapore and Hong Kong have existed as commercial entrepots without British imperialism? Typically Schuman falls for the Lee Kuan Yew propaganda claim that Singapore was a “down and out tropical outpost” before independence. Actually it had for decades been about the richest city in Asia, a hub of Asian commerce and banking and magnet for migrants from China, and linked directly into a Western-dominated global system.

Naturally the role of the United States in providing a security blanket, aid in the early years, and decades of market access, capital, and industrial know-how are acknowledged. But the reader may reasonably ask: take them away and would The Miracle continue?

The main players in Schuman’s drama were all, in their different ways, self-made men. Suharto and Park were soldiers in the colonial armies. Mahathir was an outsider among Malay aristocrats. Honda and Morita classic tech-savvy entrepreneurs. But in politics and business, dynasties seem increasingly the Asian way. Does this put The Miracle at risk?                                                        

Also noteworthy is lack of attention to the demographic factors behind East Asian growth – or the consequences for The Miracle when those factors become (as they are already for Japan) a drag on savings, on youthful inventiveness, etc. Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore will face those quite soon, Thailand not long afterwards, China in two decades.

Maybe these issues are out of place in a people-centered book. But that is the fundamental problem of trying to define a vast region in terms of the achievements of a few individuals.

— Philip Bowring, former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, is a Hong Kong-based commentator and columnist.