Seeing the world through other eyes

Posted on March 8, 2022March 8, 2022 by Razib Khan

As most of you know I am the child of Bangladeshi immigrants to the US. I don’t make much of my “identity” because it rests lightly on me, and is not a major concern. I’ve been to Bangladesh twice in the last 40 years. My views on ascriptive identity are old-fashioned, you should listen to me because I am a human, not because of my sex, gender, class, race or religion. My experience and background are not trivial, but neither are they the most important thing.

But sometimes they do matter. Recently I saw this Tweet:

This person lives in Washington D.C. and refers to herself as “Tree-hugging, granola-crunching, whale-saving, ACLU card-carrying, liberal Democrat; world traveler; tennis fanatic; animal lover; political junkie and activist.”

I think it is understandable that Lithuania is angry considering its geopolitical circumstances. The cancelation of the shipment seems petty, but it’s obviously within their rights, and for historical reasons, Lithuanians are extremely passionate about the current conflict in Ukraine and look very negatively upon Russia.

But what about Bangladesh? Here I can actually offer some personal perspective, because my parents grew up in Bangladesh (East Pakistan), and much of my family lives in Bangladesh. On the whole, feelings toward Russia are warm, if somewhat distant and abstract. On a geopolitical level, Russia has been a “friend” to both India and Bangladesh for decades. This is not just a theory at the scale of the nation-state, there were personal connections, as Indians and Bangladeshis traveled to the Soviet Union to study, and the USSR sent advisors to the subcontinent. On the merits Indians and Bangladeshis may not be comfortable with the Russian invasion, but should they turn their back so quickly on a relationship that goes back decades? Will Western countries embrace India and Bangladesh with open arms to reward them for their actions?

For Bangladesh, there is a more concrete historical reason for Russophilia: the Soviet Union was in the end on the side of India and the soon-to-be Bangladesh during the 1971 conflict with Pakistan. Because the US was a staunch ally of Pakistan, the official government’s position was to ignore evidence of massive human rights atrocities being reported by their own diplomats. The Bengali civilian death toll is usually given to be in the range of ~100,000 to 2 million. The latter figure actually comes from Pravda, and I think there is reason to be skeptical that 1 out of 33 Bengalis in East Pakistan were killed. But the ~100,000 figure is possibly too low. In any case, it wouldn’t be a trivial death toll even if it was around 100,000, and the need for widespread abortion clinics after the war attests to mass rapes (the rape had a eugenic intent, a Pakistani general asserted that they would “change the race of this bastard nation”).

The Nixon administration even took some threatening moves with naval power once India intervened and was clearly going to defeat Pakistan, aided by the Bengali nationalist left-wing militias. The Soviet Union mobilized its own naval power to check the US. People of my parent’s generation remember these events with some clarity (my mother was shot by Pakistani soldiers).

In 1972 Bangladesh was founded as the “People’s Republic of Bangladesh.” The name should make it clear that Bangladesh’s origin was as a secular socialist left-nationalist nation-state. Over the decades many things have changed, in particular, the rise of a more Islamic self-conception and the shift away from socialism to export-oriented capitalism. But the founding myth of a socialist nationalist struggle remains, and people of my parents’ generation remain strongly influenced by 1970’s Third World socialism.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a disaster for geopolitical stability, and now the world economy. It’s been a disaster for Ukraine, and Russia is not really benefiting so much in material terms. I am personally terrified of the increased risks of nuclear war. All that being said, are the Russians intent on a war of total subjugation laced with genocide? My own understanding is that they thought Ukrainian nationalism was a paper tiger and that the corrupt government would fall and they would take over quickly. The Ukraine invasion is far more important than the genocide in Bangladesh in the early 1970’s (that targeted Hindus and intellectuals) because the fate of the world hangs in the balance, even if the probabilities are low. But to be candid on the grand scale of humanitarian disasters I doubt the civilian death count will reach anything like what happened in Bangladesh. Would Bangladeshis really want to sacrifice the old friendship for abstractions about the international order? Or a humanitarian crisis of far lesser magnitude than what they themselves went through two generations ago?

In the years after 9/11 the US went through foreign policy disasters because it refused the understand the world that it tried to change. There are other histories and other viewpoints out there. You may not agree with them, but they are there nevertheless.

The end of America as the world as we know it

Posted on February 17, 2019March 20, 2019 by Razib Khan

Today in Variety, ‘Alita: Battle Angel’ No Match for China’s ‘Wandering Earth’ Overseas:

The Chinese New Year is bringing in huge business in the Middle Kingdom. China’s sci-fi epic “The Wandering Earth” pulled in a massive $96.6 million from three territories, bringing its international tally to $606.8 million. Another movie from the Mainland, “Crazy Alien,” earned $28 million for an overseas total of $318 million, while fellow local title “Pegasus” brought in $25.7 million, taking its bounty to $238 million.
Fox’s “Alita: Battle Angel” led films on the Hollywood front, generated $56 million when it launched in 86 overseas markets this weekend. Directed by Robert Rodriguez and produced by James Cameron, the sci-fi adventure has now grossed $94 million internationally. The movie saw the best opening in Russia, where it earned $6.5 million. “Alita” also had sizable debuts in Mexico ($4.2 million), Australia ($2.9 million), and Thailand ($2.5 million).

The Wandering Earth is based on a story by Liu Cixin. It is kind of a big deal, the second highest grossing mainland Chinese film ever.

The graph at the top of this post is based on data taken from Angus Maddison’s magisterial Contours of the World Economy. No matter how you calculate it, it does look like the United States of America became the world’s largest economy at some point in the last quarter of the 19th century. The USA has maintained that position for more than one hundred years. This has undergirded the power of the United States of America in the second half of the 20th century in all dimensions. Cultural, geopolitical, and yes, moral.

Of course, the size of the economy is not the only thing that matters in relation to influence and power. The Chinese economy was very large in the 19th century, but it was not mobilized and deployed in a manner which allowed China to maintain military parity with Western nations, and later Japan. In the years between 1900 and World War I, the powers of Europe remained culturally and geopolitically at the center of the world, despite the fact that the United States of America had surpassed any specific European power economically. That is, there was a certain “cultural overhang” which was a lagging indicator in relation to economics.

The United States during this period was a debtor nation which maintained very small armed forces as it was rising to economic prominence. Culturally it looked to Europe, with homegrown American movements such as Transcendentalism of national, but not international, interest. The British retained their self-conception as the world’s hegemon after 1900 due to their colonial Empire, despite the factual reality that the USA and Germany had matched or surpassed them economically.

After World War II, the USSR achieved some level of military parity (at least roughly) through mobilization of a disproportionate fraction of its economic resources toward the armed forces. But the USSR never matched the USA in terms of overall economic output or cultural influence. The dissolution of the Communist Bloc after 1990 resulted in the unipolar moment, when the United States of America was unchallenged militarily, geopolitically, and culturally. With the recession of the Japanese economy, the Asian flu of 1998, and American vigor in the second half of the 1990s, the USA was also economically a model for the world again.

As someone who grew into manhood in the 1990s, it was an interesting and charmed time. The future was American. Liberal democratic. Market-oriented. The popular culture of the future would be the American popular culture. The specter of Chinese economic might was still something a generation down the road. Fodder for think pieces. But mostly blue-sky. Abstract.

Twenty years on from 1999 we are now facing the world we had dim glimmers of then. There is a mix of the expected and unexpected. The expected is the demographic-economic juggernaut of China is now within spitting distance of the United States in terms of nominal GDP. Parts of China are already basically a developed economy. Barring a major catastrophe, which some have predicted every few years since the 1990s, China will become the world’s largest economy by 2030, as it was in 1880. One hundred and thirty years of the USA being the largest economy in the world will end.

The period after 2030 is murky. China faces serious demographic headwinds due to the one-child policy. Much of its population will be poor, while coastal areas will be tightly integrated with the rest of the world. The USA will likely remain the wealthiest large nation on a per capita basis for the foreseeable future. China’s preeminence as the largest nation economically will be in the context of much greater parity between it and other big economies, as well as structural factors pointing to its eventual decline. We are not looking to another unipolar, even bipolar (e.g., USA vs. Chinese), world, in the second quarter of the 21st century. Probably the best analogy is the period around 1900 when a mix of cultural, economic, and military proto-superpowers jostled for their time in the sun. The first modern age of globalization of trade and travel.