Book Review: Can Asians Think? by Kishore Mahbubani
Source:Brisbane 4EB Sri Lankan Newsletter – Dæhæna – September 2021
“Can Asians Think” is a soul searching and provocative collection of essays by the former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani.
Mahbubani is a Singaporean of Indian descent. His parents moved to Singapore when they were displaced from the Sindh province of British India during the “Partition of India”. Mahbubani was born in Singapore. Supported by a President’s Scholarship in 1967, he graduated from University of Singapore in 1971 with B.A in Philosophy and a M.A in Philosophy from Dalhousie University, USA.
Written a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall (in November 1991) and the collapse of the Soviet Union in a world riding on western
triumphalism and becoming replicas of liberal democracies, Can Asians Think poses views against the tide at the time. Mahbubani mentions of his personal experiences of how the tolerance of dissenting views espoused by western liberal thinking did not extend to the challenge of western liberalism. The collection of essays is in four parts: The Return of Asia, The West and the Rest, The Asia Pacific and Southeast Asia and Global Concerns.
The first essay, “Can Asians Think” is an analysis of the four to five hundred years prior to the West domination and Eastern subsidence
where a mindset was formed in the East that the West is superior. A thousand years ago, the Chinese and Arabs (ie. Confucian and Islamic civilisations) had led the way in science and technology, medicine and astronomy. In the 15th century, when China was thriving,
no one would have predicted Europe would leap ahead in the next 500 years, colonising the rest of the world. Mahbubani asserts that “the most painful thing that happened to Asia was not the physical but the mental colonisation”.
The economic performance of the four Tiger economies (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) and Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand along with the academic performance of the Asians has given confidence to the belief that Asians can think indeed. The Author concludes that time will tell. The collection of essays is a brilliant and a courageous analysis of the world events for the past couple of millennia to the current century. His analysis of historical events and the economic advantages and disadvantages around the world is second to none. His analysis of shifting of powers, freedom of the press, behaviour of the leading powers gives food for thought. The author ends the collection with a couple of short and effective essays “The Ten Commandments for Developing Countries in the Nineties” and “Wanted: New Thinking, Not Tinkering”.
Wimal Kannangara
