It would seem so. The pattern of development has been laid down in advance; and the West has insisted there is no alternative. China and India obligingly pursue the pattern followed by Britain in the early 19th century, of breakneck industrialisation. But whereas we tore recklessly through the resources of our own modest landmass and then plundered those of whole continents, they are being urged to pause and do something different. The world cannot support existing levels of pollution, the Carbon-di-oxide poured into the atmosphere from the great industrial plants, mines and power stations in their countries. More than this: when the West industrialised, the violence and exploitation led to fierce resistance, the birth of trade union and labour movements. Governments were compelled to make concessions, to set up the welfare state and health service, to give guarantees against destitution. But where governments in Europe were compelled—however reluctantly—to intervene, those of India and China are extolled precisely because they have resisted the soft option of safety nets, minimal levels of healthcare and pensions, and offer no security against misery and want.
It doesn't add up. "Become like us", is the message, "but not in the way that we became as we are now." It is almost as though the West is revising its own 'errors' by proxy, in a strange re-run of other people's history, that has left the biosphere to the ravages of unchecked industrialisation and the people to the injuries of unbridled economic forces. Or have India and China become the sites of a practice-run for an untested historical experiment, to find out what happens when unlimited appetites are allowed to express themselves freely within a finite world, and with no colonial hinterland to exploit? A Business Week article two years ago, while lyrical over the emerging superpowers, mentioned as a kind of afterthought, "Both nations must confront ecological degradation that's as obvious as the smog shrouding Shanghai and Bombay, and face real risks of social strife, war and financial crisis."
So who is beating whom? Even if the wager proved possible, and India and China could miraculously conjure forth the wealth to create the equivalent of the western way of life, what would the cost of this truly miraculous achievement be? It is significant that the West has been swift to 'blame' India and China for the vertiginous rise in world food prices: 'they' have developed a taste for foods we take for granted, and this is taking bread—or rice—out of the mouths of the poor. While the extravagances of India's more than one lakh dollar millionaires are the object of awed celebration in the western financial press, those same wealth-creators are then castigated for developing a perverse liking for what used to be called "the finer things of life".
In a world of prodigality and poverty, of excess and exiguity, and a system that violates the elements that sustain life, if India and China increased their wealth twenty- or fifty-fold, what would be the effect on the resource base of the earth? It is yet another unfortunate historical accident that India and China should be poised on the brink of the age of heroic consumption at the very time when the western powers are coming to the sober realisation that this era may be drawing to its close. The insistence that India and China forbear to pollute in the reckless fashion of the West at the time of its early industrialism is an indirect recognition of the impossible task they are faced with. Although the economy is the only area of experience in which the knowing and cynical of the world still believe miracles to occur, it would require unprecedented supernatural intervention to satisfy unbound human desires, which hover like an epic plague of locusts over the harvest-fields of the earth.
To realise the promise that a whole world can be remade in our image would require resources beyond imagination. Competition is doubtless an effective driver of achievement, but when we have made a wasteland of the earth, tainted its evaporating waters, rendered its air unbreathable, swollen its seas and drowned its cities, who then will be the victors and who the vanquished?
If western praise for 'Asian tigers' is exaggerated, perhaps this is because we are sufficiently acquainted with the fate of real tigers to know what we are talking about.
(Jeremy Seabrook is the author of Refuge and the Fortress: Refugees in Britain 1933-2008, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan.)
