Changing trends: Asian Tigers?

If you have been following the Western press, then you will know that more and more writers now demonise Asians as people who not only work much too hard for too little money but also force their children to work day and night for virtually no remuneration.

This theme crops up again and again. It is the sub-text to most articles about the garment industry. Big international garment brands are only able to sell clothes on the cheap, we are told, because they are produced in places like Bangladesh where the workers toil away, working ridiculous hours at 
absurdly low wages.

The theme crops up again when carpets or other handicrafts made in the Indian sub-continent are discussed. They are all the products of child labour, we are told. Children, sometimes even as young as seven, are forced to make these so-called artisanal products.

And of course, it is implicit in all discussions about 
outsourcing. Why are call centres being set up in India 
and the Philippines rather than in 
England or America?

Well, it is because Asians do not dem-and a living wage, work unreasonable hours, and do things that no self-respecting American employee would do: forgo leave, not ask for medical benefits, etc.

In the software industry, they even have a name for this phenomenon. If an American job is shifted to India because Indians can do it for less money (and perhaps do it even better), then the job is said to have been ‘Bangalored’.

When it comes to manufacturing, the same sort of arguments apply. How can American workers compete, we are asked, when Chinese workers will put in 18-hour days and manufacture the same goods at much lower prices?

In all these arguments, the unifying feature is the claim that Asians are willing to work much harder for less money in worse conditions than their Western counterparts.

The next step takes two forms. Some people argue that this amounts to unfair competition and demand legislation 
to protect Western workers or the imposition of tariffs on Asian products. Others take a doomsday scenario.

In the end, they argue, the West is doomed because Chinese workers are like well-constructed robots who will always under-cut their counterparts in the West.

I don’t want to get into a debate about the merits of these arguments. Some are valid. Garment factories in Bangladesh can be unsafe, some industries in Asia (say the fireworks or matchbox industry in India) have been known to employ child labour and, yes, Asian workers are less demanding then Westerners.

Some are overstated. All cheap manufacturing is not a consequence of child labour or inhuman working conditions. And call centre workers may be paid less than Americans but they are hardly 
underpaid or mistreated: call centre jobs are highly prized in India and the Philippines.

Plus, there is the obvious contradiction in the Western position. Two deca-des ago, the West asked Asia to remove tariff barriers and to allow in Western goods into our countries. Yes, America and Europe told us that Western goods are cheaper than those made in the Third World by protected industry. So yes, some of your factories will close down when protection is removed and they find they cannot compete.

But, in the new world order, we must remove inefficiencies and work towards getting global consumers the cheapest goods. The Third World bought this line. But now that it is American and European jobs that are on the line, it is the West that is having problems applying the same principles to itself.

My interest is not in the rights and wrongs of the Western position. What I find fascinating is the way in which the West has completely changed the way it looks at Asia.

If you read the accounts of the early British colonialists who came to India, you will notice that they regarded Asians as lazy and indolent. Indians wanted to take it easy and were given to decadence, they claimed.

But Westerners with their Protestant work ethic were rigidly disciplined and their capacity for hard work allowed them to subjugate the indolent and 
debauched natives. Various Europeans even went on to suggest that people in warm countries became lazy because of the heat. Those in cold countries, they argued, knew how to work hard.

Contrast that caricature of Asians with the paranoia of today’s Westerners. Now, the complaint is the very opp-osite. The problem with Asians is not that they are lazy. It is that they work too hard!

Consider also the attitude to Asian manufacturing. Till the ’70s, most Westerners regarded anything made in Asia as being second-rate. By the early ’ 70s, Japan had begun to beat that characterisation hollow.

Japanese electronics and cars started to be regarded, quality-wise, as the equivalent of Western goods. But it was not till the ’90s that China and Korea were able to shake off the ‘second-rate’ tag. ‘Made In India’ was an unwanted label till a decade ago, when the success of the IT industry overhauled India’s global image.

Yet, even as Americans and Europeans were discussing Asian quality, they ignored the evidence in their own countries. In England, Indians consistently perform better in schools and colleges than white kids from similar backgrounds. In America, ‘Asians’ (a catch-all term for Koreans, Chinese and Japanese in the US — oddly enough, Indians do not belong to this category though India is in Asia) are top of their classes in science and mathematics.

Now, the West is finally coming to terms with this phenomenon as well — as Asian styles of parenting (the so-called Tiger Mother syndrome) are 
suddenly being discussed.

So, here’s my question: now that Asians are being demonised or feared for being too hard-working and too bright, can somebody please explain to me why the West ever thought that Asians were lazy and stupid?

It is a question to which I have still to hear an answer.

NEOLOGISM

The term ‘Bangalored’ is said to be coined by the Americans to refer to a (systematic) layoff due to the outsourcing of services to lower wage economies. In the early stages of this phenomenon, most companies started moving operations to India, which gave rise to this term — even though the new base of operations is not necessarily Bangalor