1999 (44 page)

The soil and the climate proved to be friendly. In October 1987 Governor Thomas Kean of New Jersey visited Hangzhou. His hosts showed him the tree, now ninety feet tall. Even more significant, they said that forty thousand saplings from the tree were thriving in seven Chinese provinces.

The Chinese people and the American people are among the ablest in the world. They are both endowed with enormous potential. As we look into the twenty-first century, the soil and the climate are right for a productive Chinese–American relationship that could move the world to unprecedented heights of peace and freedom.

T
he countries outside the industrialized West and the Soviet bloc are commonly lumped together and called “the Third World.” It is a virtually meaningless term—just about as useful as “none of the above” in describing over 150 countries spread north and south of the equator over four continents and containing people of all races and religions. What most have in common is that they are grindingly, desperately poor. The average per-capita income of the over three billion people of the Third World is less than $800 a year, compared with $18,000 in the United States. They are poor for many reasons, but the single largest is that they have not yet found the way to productively harness their own vast human and natural resources.

We cannot solve all their problems. But in the years ahead we must do everything we can to help
them
solve them. If we do not we will be abrogating our moral responsibilities. We will also be permitting an endless cycle of poverty, despair, and conflict that will inevitably prevent us from building a structure of real peace in the world.

The most insidious aspect of the term “Third World” is the suggestion that we need a single, all-encompassing “Third World policy.” Most of those who think, speak, and act in such simplistic terms are playing variations on the same theme. We are rich, they
chant, and the Third World is poor. That much is true. But then they go on to say that the solution is “a transfer of resources from north to south”—in other words, the developed world should give the undeveloped world more money. They reduce the world with all its diversity and complexity to the simplistic dimensions of a Dickens novel: the selfish tycoon ignoring the starving beggar with the outstretched hand.

Western liberals spend far too much time on this kind of guilty hand-wringing over the Third World and far too little time rendering the kind of practical assistance the developing world can actually put to use. Recently a book critic writing for a major American newspaper condemned Kipling's
Gunga Din
for its racist overtones, but, over two centuries after the British arrived in India and a generation after the European powers abandoned their colonies, many Western intellectuals and politicians still have a superior, “white man's burden” mentality toward the poorer nations.

There is one simple reason why share-the-wealth schemes have never worked and never will. The developed world did not cause the Third World's problems by itself, and it cannot solve them by itself. It is the height of arrogance, even racism, to suggest otherwise. We can show these struggling nations the way because we have traveled the road from poverty to prosperity ourselves. But we do them no favors by simply carrying them along on our backs. We would only be creating a permanent underclass of pauper nations seeking handouts. Each step forward we take for them is really two steps backward as they become more dependent on our help and less able to cope on their own when our ability or willingness to help is exhausted.

But in shedding our counterproductive sense of guilt about the developing world, we do not shed our responsibilities. Poverty, malnutrition, disease, and war in these nations may not be our fault, but they are definitely our problems as well as theirs. If we stay on the sidelines, we will witness a competition for the future of the developing world that the West is certain to lose.

The Third World is important for four reasons:

First, the Third World has enormous natural and human resources. It produces most of the world's oil and other raw materials.
Without them the industrial economies would collapse. By 1999, four out of five people on earth will be residents of the Third World. In 1899, the ten largest cities in the world were in Europe, the United States, and Japan. By 1999, eight out of ten will be in the Third World.

Second, the Third World is where the real Third World war is already being fought. In Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Mideast, the Soviet Union is waging unconventional war to gain domination over the nations that have the oil and other resources vital to the survival of the West. Poverty, malnutrition, and disease are the ideal breeding grounds for political turmoil. Despair, despotism, and cynical Soviet opportunism all combine in the Third World to create a festering climate of economic stagnation and political instability.

Third, the Third World is the worldwide epicenter of war and revolution. Since the end of World War II, eighteen million people have lost their lives in Third World wars. This is more than were killed in action in World War I. Over forty wars rage in the Third World today. Most have nothing to do with the Soviet Union, but they have everything to do with the U.S.–Soviet rivalry. The greatest danger of war between the superpowers is the possibility of the escalation of a small war where superpower interests collide. A small war always has the potential of igniting a world war.

Fourth, we cannot in good conscience tolerate the status quo where the West is an island of wealth in a vast sea of poverty. We should not tolerate it, and the billions who live in the Third World
will
not. I have been to most of the Third World countries. The cold statistic of a low per capita income does not capture the picture of abject poverty and misery that one sees if he can break away from the restraints of protocol and guided tours. One quarter of the Third World's people live below the threshold of absolute poverty. Forty-five percent of urban dwellers and 85 percent of rural dwellers lack adequate sanitation facilities. Thirty thousand people die
every day
from dirty water and inadequate sanitation. Average life expectancy in much of the Third World is less than fifty years; it is over seventy in the United States. At the end of this century, the Third World's infant-mortality rate will be four times that of the United States. Because the average population
growth in the Third World is three times as great as the West's, the Third World's average per-capita income could decrease by the year 1999.

If the next century is to be a century of peace, the causes of misery and war in the Third World must be addressed. Its security needs must be met, its economic potential fulfilled, and its political aspirations satisfied if the suffering that has plagued so much of the globe in the twentieth century is to be eradicated in the twenty-first.

The causes of unrest and poverty in the Third World are different in every direction we look.

In the Far East we see the stark contrast between the vitality produced by economic freedom and the depressing dullness of totalitarian communism. The color of communism is gray, not red. In Latin America we see a similar contrast as the security of many promising but sometimes unstable young democracies is threatened by aggressive Soviet satellites. In the feuds between India and Pakistan we see the unforgivable waste of resources that both nations need for the good of their people being spent instead on an ongoing religious and political rivalry. In poverty-stricken Africa we see living, and dying, proof of the fallacy of throwing good money at bad governments in nations that are poorer today than they were before the West pumped in hundreds of billions in aid. And in the Mideast we see the traditional rivalry of Arab versus Jew evolving into a conflict between Islamic fundamentalists on the one hand and Israel and the moderate Arab states on the other. Unless these nations overcome their differences and recognize that they face a far more dangerous threat emanating from Tehran, the Mideast will remain the most potentially explosive area of the world—the cradle of civilization that could become its grave.

In Asia we see incontrovertible proof of which social, economic, and political policies permit nations and people to live and grow and which cause them to decay and die. The world has never before had such an effective contrast in the same region between
the misery produced by communism and the rich blessings of political and economic systems that permit a large measure of freedom.

Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan give the lie to the commonplace notion that developing nations without natural resources are doomed to poverty. Singapore's economy has grown an astounding 7.5 percent a year over the past quarter of a century. If this trend continues, in 1999 it will have a higher per-capita income than the United States. The population of the 404-square-mile British protectorate of Hong Kong has a life expectancy of seventy-six years and a per-capita income of almost $7,000; its economy has no external debt. At the end of the 1940s, the average income in Taiwan was $50, roughly equal to that of mainland China. Today its per-capita income is $3,500, ten times that of the People's Republic 120 miles away.

South Korea has replaced Japan as the Asian economic miracle most talked about by the West, the Soviets, and the Chinese. A 6.5 percent average annual growth rate over the past generation has allowed a war-devastated nation with a per-capita income of $50 in 1953 to develop into a potential economic giant with a per-capita income of $2,200 and a literacy rate higher than that of the United States.

Some explain away the economic success stories of Asia as the products of some mystical characteristics of the “inscrutable East.” But while Orientals are well known for their hard work and high productivity, these countries' successes are the results of well-considered and practical economic strategies that need not be unique to Asia. They all followed free-market policies designed to spur growth and increase their peoples' wealth. They responded to the opportunities offered by the world economy, interacting with it and profiting from it rather than stubbornly denying its existence as Marxist-Leninists do.