Move, page 22
I. For millennia, the Jewish people existed more as diaspora than nation, enduring expulsions from ancient Assyria to Nazi Germany—hence the saying that while trees have roots, Jews have legs. The Jewish diaspora was instrumental in the creation of Israel after World War II, but to this day the Jewish diaspora numbers an estimated 8 million people, still larger than Israel’s 6 million population.
CHAPTER 10 RETREAT AND RENEWAL IN PACIFIC ASIA
Metropole China
The world’s most populous country needs more people—fast.
The mass migration of hundreds of millions of Chinese from rural to urban areas has uprooted thousands of years of tradition by which extended families lived together under one roof. Younger Chinese are no longer home to take care of two aging parents just as the elderly population crests: By 2030, about a quarter of China’s nearly 1.5 billion people will be over sixty-five, meaning China will have as many elderly people as America has people. By that time (and beyond), a young Chinese person will face the “4-2-1” problem: being alone but financially responsible for two parents and four grandparents.
But elder care is no more a job for hardworking, urban, and mobile Chinese as it is for Americans and Germans, hence China has begun a major binge of importing women. Already many thousands of Korean, Vietnamese, and Burmese women have been brought to China as brides for the surplus male population. Whether or not they have children, their main job will be to care for their husbands’ parents.
And what will the men do? China’s breakneck urbanization, rapid automation, and massive gender imbalance have created an enormous rump of underemployed men, many of whom lack high school degrees. They make up the bulk of the 300 million migrants lacking registration (hukou) in the places they live, restricting their access to social benefits. The government recently began to eliminate hukou requirements so Chinese could be more freely mobile—but they also introduced the social credit system, which allows the government to determine anyone’s right to travel anywhere.
Does China have a grand plan to sort out its massive demographic mismatches? Millions will continue to be drafted into the military and police, millions more will work on massive hydro-engineering projects across the country, yet more millions will be sent to resuscitate farmlands, and millions more will labor on energy and construction projects across Asia, Africa, and as far as South America in the service of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. All of this should keep them off the streets.
Western and Asian powers have built coalitions to ensure China doesn’t dominate them, but can foreigners adapt to a China that is a world unto itself? Only 1 million foreigners live in China; even five times more would scarcely register. More important than the number are the trends among them. At university campuses across China, one finds large numbers of European, African, Arab, and other Asian students—a total of nearly five hundred thousand in 2019 (only twelve thousand of which were American). On top of this there are growing numbers of young professionals from Nigeria to Pakistan who undertake vocational training in China. As one Peking University scholar put it to me, “Even if the number of students from the USA is down, the students from BRI is way up,” referring to the nearly one hundred countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative.
China is also, surprisingly, home to growing numbers of Japanese scientists who can’t find jobs in Japan despite their advanced degrees. At least eight thousand of them are currently spread throughout Chinese universities and institutes advancing China’s research into everything from astronomy to zoology, and most importantly climate science and engineering. China is acting more nationalist on the world stage, but Beijing is also branding itself as a cosmopolitan metropole as London and Paris were to their colonial populations in centuries past.
Many view US-China trade and technological frictions as indications that American firms—and thus their expat employees—will retrench and return home. But companies follow supply chains, not government diktats. There are many reasons for foreign firms to reduce their exposure to China, such as rising local wages, intense competition from national champions, a crackdown on English teachers without advanced degrees, and more. But none of this suggests they’ll come home. Indeed, the total number of Americans in China rose to seventy-five thousand in 2019 on the back of the country’s consumer growth. From Apple to Nike to Tesla, American companies have adopted (or been forced to adopt) an “in China, for China” strategy, making locally what they sell locally. Europeans are in the same boat, for their companies depend even more on Asian revenue than American companies do. Expats who want to be employed as managers in these companies’ operations will very much still need to learn Chinese.
In search of the “Asian Dream”
These days, the phrase “family values” applies to stably married and loyal East Asians as much as or more than it applies to family units in Western societies. But as with Western youth, it’s ever more difficult to pinpoint an age at which young Asians “settle down.” Nearly 1 million Chinese have already moved to Japan, where they work across professions, from cashier to financial analyst, and a quarter of a million have moved to South Korea. The older generation of all three countries harbors deep mutual suspicions, but youth couldn’t care less. As one thirty-year-old Chinese tech millennial in Singapore told me, “I don’t want to get married and have kids. I’d like to retire by forty-five and spend some time in Japan on a farm, then travel more. I’ll shift my assets into crypto and move around.”
Asian tourists and business travelers are already unmissable in every corner of the globe—but the intensity of their cross-border movements is twice as high in their own region as outside of it. For thousands of years, Asia has featured multiple unique and deep civilizations; now it has the makings of a common one as well.
While South and Southeast Asian societies are still lower-middle-income compared to their neighbors to the northeast, their youth are in a similar boat. Millennials are already more than half of India’s workforce, competing against one another as well as algorithms. India’s annual job creation in manufacturing and tech is falling way below promises and expectations, and unemployment for India’s university graduates is painfully high. For the millions of new labor force entrants each year—and those laid off due to automation—the jobs won’t come to them. They’ll move to the West or to Southeast Asia’s dynamic economies.
Southeast Asia, the world’s third most populous region after China and India, is also one of the youngest, with more than half of its 700 million people under the age of thirty. They too have two things on their minds: moving to cities and gaining relevant skills. With free labor mobility across the region, it’s not uncommon to find upwardly mobile millennials in Singapore and Bangkok who have already lived in three or four countries. Southeast Asian millennials have rising rates of intermarriage and share an optimistic outlook and progressive ethos. Despite their already giant populations, Asian countries have also thrown open their doors to foreign investment and talent. Starting in the 1960s, newly independent Singapore invited in multinational companies and workers, the two forces in tandem propelling the country’s economic growth and diversification. Fifty years later, one-third of its population is foreigners and it ranks as one of the world’s most innovative economies. Countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines are now privatizing utilities, banks, farms, airlines, and other large state-controlled companies, bringing in fresh capital and management teams from around the world to guide more productive investments.
The number of expats populating Southeast Asia is growing every year as these countries roll out the red carpet with easy visas, good schools, quality healthcare, and fast connectivity. After witnessing how the US and much of Europe mishandled the coronavirus, Western expats in Asia have no plans to voluntarily return to their low-growth and populist homelands. During the pandemic, some Western expats lost their jobs and had to return home against their will, but at the same time, American and Australian applications for Thailand’s “Elite Residence” program surged because of the country’s low infection rate and affordable medical tourism offerings.
Asia today features ever more people who never thought they’d be there: not just Western expats but Asians themselves who left decades ago for the West but have returned as executives and entrepreneurs—and with their families. So many such “re-pats” are part of the great global migration story that we need to reverse familiar formulations: I use the term “American-Asians” to describe myself and many thousands of Asian-Americans who have returned to Asia even though our parents and siblings remain in the West. The going is good for the foreseeable future, but should things change, we can always move again.
Asia’s swirl of climate migrants
While much of the world gets hotter and drier, Asia’s high altitude and tropical wetlands are getting wetter. Two hundred and forty million people live in the Hindu Kush and Himalayan region—across Pakistan, India, Nepal, China, and Bhutan—but about 1.6 billion depend on the ten river systems originating there. At a time when droughts have parched China, India, and Pakistan, the melting of fifteen thousand glaciers in the Himalayan Mountains and Tibetan Plateau might be seen as a welcome development. But torrid glacier runoff and extreme rainfall have caused dams to burst, resulting in treacherous flooding and landslides across India’s northeast. If two-thirds of the Himalayan glaciers melt in the coming decade, hundreds of millions of lives will be imperiled. Melting glaciers are already contributing to the permanent flooding of the Ganges delta across India and Bangladesh. But eventually, the rivers will dry up, with floods giving way to droughts. Over the coming decades, hundreds of millions of people will have to move due to rising seas, flooding rivers, and droughts—both within and across Asia’s many borders.
The headwaters of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Mekong Rivers all lie in Tibet, whose importance to China rests not in its tiny population but its environmental geography: China wants to ensure uncontested control over the Earth’s “third pole.” China has built or planned hundreds of dam projects to direct flows into its gargantuan South-to-North Water Diversion Project, a system of canals transferring water from the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers to those supplying the water-stressed northeast, where hundreds of millions of Chinese drink contaminated water every day. China is the only country that can spend the eventual price tag of $100 billion and force more than a dozen provinces to coordinate their infrastructure investments while displacing millions of people (as it did to build the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric power plant). And it has to, since it can’t get its citizens or companies to better conserve water, nor can it count on buying bottled water plants in countries such as New Zealand, where protests have forced a halt on siphoning the country’s pristine lakes. Meanwhile, China has been less than transparent with its downstream neighbors about its plans: It has no formal water sharing agreements with India, Bangladesh, or other countries. Even if it did, water levels have begun to fluctuate so unpredictably that on some tributaries dams have been built for water that may never arrive.
India possesses even less freshwater than China for its 1.4 billion people who inhabit dozens of the world’s most polluted and freshwater-deficient cities. That’s why India has launched enormous efforts to channel Himalayan water to farms and urban reservoirs. In the western Himalayan territory of Ladakh, ingenious solutions have been tried such as piping glacial runoff into stupa-shaped formations (appropriate for the Buddhist faith prevalent in the region) that melt slowly and can be used to irrigate high-altitude farming. The Modi administration has also planned a Chinese-style National River Linking Project (NRLP) to ensure India’s continued role as a global breadbasket.
India’s tumultuous internal migration has not only been from villages to cities but also from north to south in search of jobs and better climate. Forty percent of those surveyed in New Delhi in 2019 about their likely response to the city’s worsening air quality said they were considering moving farther south to cities with cleaner air. Large southern states such as Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have witnessed millions of north Indians moving in over just the past ten years, and the beachfront paradise of Goa has been overrun by north Indians (and European tourists) as well. Bangalore has gone from India’s “garden city” to its “garbage city.” Meanwhile, Chennai’s 2019 water shortage required the government to dispatch several fifty-carriage locomotives each day carrying millions of liters of water from more than three hundred kilometers away.
Maybe the many Indians that have moved south will recirculate back north toward the Himalayas again. In 2019, the Indian government administratively separated Buddhist-populated Ladakh from Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir, revoking their semi-autonomous special status and converting them into “union territories” directly governed from New Delhi. This political maneuver made it possible for any Indian—not just Muslim Kashmiris—to buy land in Kashmir, something many Indians would no doubt be eager to do given its moderate, seasonal climate and breathtaking Himalayan scenery. Equally importantly, Kashmir is home to the headwaters of the Indus River and all of its tributaries. India is expediting major dam projects on the upper Indus to boost irrigation for Kashmir and Punjab, which produces more than 10 percent of India’s wheat and cereals.
For more than seventy years, Kashmir has been part of India but not quite. Like Han Chinese moving into Muslim Uighur homeland Xinjiang, Hindu Indians will colonize Kashmir, showing how domestic population shifts can be just as strategically significant as international ones. Such demographically motivated decisions can also alter the regional power balance, for India can now cut off water flows to Pakistan, as it threatened to do in February 2019 after a terrorist attack in Kashmir.
With no hope to settle Kashmir in its favor or control its crucial water supplies, Pakistan will also have to become more strategic about its demographics and geography. Currently, the country’s two most potentially livable provinces are its most sparsely populated. Stunning and mountainous Gilgit-Baltistan has for the past two decades been in the news more for harboring Islamist terrorist groups than as home to more than one hundred 7,000-meter plus peaks (such as K2). But with accelerating glacial melt causing torrential flooding, Pakistan’s government has to invest large sums into disaster management and channeling river runoff. Prime Minister Imran Khan has also pledged to reforest neighboring and rugged Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province with ten billion trees. With the country’s teeming megacity of Karachi on the Arabian Sea baking in early summer heat waves and drowning in late summer monsoons, and droughts ravaging Pakistan’s populous breadbaskets of Punjab and Sindh, many more Pakistanis may soon head north as well.
More than four hundred dams and two hundred hydropower projects are planned across the Himalayan region, making even small kingdoms such as Nepal and Bhutan key players in the region’s resource maneuvers. Nepal has the potential to produce eighty times more hydropower than it currently does, which it desperately needs to avoid its own regular power cuts, fuel basic industries, and sell electricity to India. Just as significant will be hydro infrastructure to pipe irrigation water to India’s Gangetic plain states such as destitute yet fertile Bihar. As the government finally invests in better roads and water management, Bihar could go from basket case to fruit and vegetable powerhouse.1 If Nepal expands its own agriculture, it could wind up with millions of Indians filing northward toward—or across—their eighteen-hundred-kilometer open border.
Bhutan too allows Indians to visit without visas—but certainly not to reside. The kingdom most associated with mystical Shangri-La lore has only eight hundred thousand people and allows fewer than thirty thousand tourists each year. Extensive tree planting has even made it a negative emissions carbon sink. Given its rudimentary infrastructure, Bhutan is viewed more as a source of hydropower for India and Bangladesh than a permanent destination—but soon enough it will be geopolitically coveted as a high-elevation climate oasis. China has been chipping away at its territory from the north, while more Indians may flow in from the south. Even across the world’s highest frontiers, people will be on the move.
China’s Himalayan strategy of directing water and power from the upper Yangtze River to industrious Sichuan (population: 90 million) and verdant Yunnan (population: 50 million) Provinces will reinforce their status as scenic and low-cost alternatives to China’s overpriced and polluted coastal provinces. Chinese youth have been flocking to Sichuan’s capital, Chengdu, and Yunnan’s capital, Kunming, where new railway lines into Laos and Thailand have made those cities the de facto capitals of the southern silk roads.
Yunnan is also a magnet for displaced Southeast Asian farmers and other poor laborers—downstream victims of China’s upstream water and energy policies. For low-lying Southeast Asian nations, too much water is as much a problem as too little. The region’s coastal megacities, such as Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City, may all be sunk by 2050. Vietnam’s Mekong River delta lies barely one meter above sea level, meaning tens of millions of rural Vietnamese may need to retreat upland within a decade or two. Yet even as sea-level rise nudges coastal Vietnamese inland, they face more frequent droughts in the lower Mekong plains due to China’s hoarding of the watershed, pushing them northward toward China itself. Today there are tens of thousands of Laotians and Vietnamese who have crossed into Yunnan in search of work; soon it could be millions.
Devastating cyclones are already driving the coastal populations of India, Indonesia, and the Philippines inward. Mumbai needs to replicate itself on sturdier ground rather than the exposed peninsula on which it currently sits. Indonesia is planning to relocate its entire capital, Jakarta, from coastal Java (the world’s most populous island, with nearly 150 million people) to the far larger island of Borneo. Whether or not that ever happens, Indonesia needs a sustainable strategy for its largest island, Sumatra, which is home to 50 million people and lush tropical jungle. Given its much vaster terrain and higher elevation, Indonesia would be wise to conserve Sumatra for future habitation rather than recklessly slashing its precious rain forests.
