The Asian 21st Century - by Kishore Mahbubani
ISBN: 9789811668111Date read: 2025-07-08
How strongly I recommend it: 2/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
A collection of his essays around the subject of Asia thriving, but too often comparing with America, and rehashing his other book “Has China Won?”
my notes
A healthy society requires more than just democratic elections. It needs to raise the living standards of its people.
The fruits of the economy must be shared across the entire population, and not just the top one percent, as in a plutocracy.
World population (2025):
Asia 57%
Africa 18%
Americas 10%
Europe 9%
Oceania 0.5%
The past 40 years of have been the best 40 years in 4000 years of Chinese history.
45% of Americans have family members in jail or prison.
Social Progress Index of 2020: out of 163 countries, USA, Brazil, and Hungary are the only three countries where people have become worse off.
Societies with the highest levels of trust in both government and business today are China, Indonesia, India, and the UAE.
US throttled Huawei, so Chinese tech companies avoid dependence on America for key components, and are instead making their own.
ASEAN consistently and quietly delivers peace to one of the most Balkanized regions in the world.
ASEAN is the fifth-largest economy in the world.
Ethical power enjoys a key advantage.
By 2020, the per-capita income of Bangladesh (US$ 1968) became larger than that of India (US$ 1900).
China’s total trade with the world ($4.5 trillion) is more than five times that of India ($800 billion).
The population of ASEAN is half that of India, yet the total trade of ASEAN ($2.8 trillion) is more than three times that of India.
China has become more capitalist than the US.
India and Pakistan fought their last major war in 1971.
China and Vietnam have been suspicious of each other for 2000 years.
But since the mid-1990s, trade between Vietnam and China has grown 3000 times.
The Chinese haven’t fired a shot in 40 years, since the end of the war with Vietnam in 1979, whereas even during the last year of the presidency of Barack Obama, a peaceful man who won the Nobel Peace Prize, America dropped 26,000 bombs on seven countries.