Asia has been the greatest show on earth since Japan's rise from the
ashes of World War II, accompanied in successive decades with the
emergence of the Asian tigers, and eventually the two giants China and
India. The Asian miracle has few precedents in the modern era, with
billions lifted from poverty in a generation. The region's openness to
trade and investment aligned perfectly with the tailwinds of
globalisation. However, in recent years Asia has become a victim of its
own success with commentators not differentiating between a utopian
high-income Asia and a dystopian middle- and low-income Asia, where a
significant majority of the region's population live. Asia today can be
divided into countries which have a lot, have a little, and have none.
The continent's dream run is also coming to an end as Covid-19 exposes
sharp weaknesses in state capacity and structural challenges like the
U.S.-China trade war is putting globalisation into reverse gear,
jeopardising the region's hard-earned economic success. Asia's
growth-obsessed policymakers have also ignored social pressures from the
impact of technology on jobs, rising inequality, fabulous wealth
accumulation by a favoured billionaire class, a deepening demographic
divide, climate distress, and gender disparity, which threaten to
destabilise the region's famed cohesiveness. In his penetrating new
book, well-known Asia expert Vasuki Shastry argues that while Asia's
reckoning may have been the subject of speculation before the pandemic,
Covid-19 has made that inevitable. Inspired by Dante's Inferno, Shastry
takes readers on a journey through modern Asia's eight circles of hell
where we encounter urban cowboys and cowgirls fleeing rural areas to
live in increasingly uninhabitable cities, disadvantaged teenage girls
unable to meet their aspirations due to social strictures, internal
mutiny, messy geopolitics from the rise of China, and a political and
business class whose interests are in conflict with a majority of the
population. Shastry challenges conventional thinking about Asia's place
in the world and the book is essential reading for those with an
interest in the continent's future.
