Asian Drama was the title of a 1968 three-volume opus by the late Swedish Economics Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal. The subtitle was: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations. In the 1960s to the extent that there were promising developing countries at all, they tended to be seen in Latin America, in de-colonizing Africa and in the Middle East, notably Iran. Asia, on the other hand, mired in poverty and wars, was hopeless: a drama, a tragedy.
These dramatic perceptions (and realities!) changed in the course of the 1980s when the World Bank and other institutions started enthusing about the “Asian miracle economies”. Fast forward a quarter of a century to today when it has become quite common to speak of the 21st century as the “Asian century”. Certainly growth and development in much of East and South Asia – conditions in Central and Western Asia remain dramatic – have been impressive. In contrast to the perceived synonym between Asian and poverty, hundreds of millions of Asians have been lifted out of poverty; there is a rapidly rising middle class; and there are lots of very rich Asian entrepreneurs with global clout.
So today Asia generally, while acknowledging remaining pockets of misery, is seen as a success rather than as a drama. That is at least true so far as Asian men are concerned. The situation for women in most Asian countries is rather different. This is illustrated by a random series of recent articles.
An article in the New York Times states that the ethos in the rising Chinese urban middle class is becoming regressive in attitudes to women in employment. In earlier decades cheap female labor was exploited in every respect in the course of China’s initial post-reform rapid industrialization, as is evocatively and movingly depicted in the novel by Sheng Keyi, Northern Girls. Much more fundamental to this drama is the widespread practice of female infanticide and the abortion of female fetuses. The result, among other things, is a huge surplus of horny Chinese men in the sexually active age, which hardly augurs well for the future.
In India, though theoretically a democracy and not having had China’s one-child policy, female fetus abortion is rampant. The plight of women can be seen from an article in the FT which reported that at least ten died and dozens more were left critically ill following operations carried out in a state-sponsored sterilization program last November. This follows the description of the hideous gang-rape of a twenty-three year old woman in Delhi in December 2012. The case made international media headlines, but is hardly one-off;ninety-three rapes are said to be reported every day in India!
Female illiteracy levels in India are high; indeed it is estimated that there are more female illiterates in India than in the rest of the world combined. In its report on modern slavery the Walk Free Foundation states that India has the highest number of slaves in the world (an estimated 14.3 million), the great majority of whom are women, partly due to the fact that among the slaves are many girls placed into forced marriages.
One Asian woman who captured the headlines in recent weeks is Cho Hyun-ah, a vice-president of Korean Air and daughter of the airline’s chairman, who forced a plane taxing in New York airport to return to the gate where the steward was forced to deplane as he had incurred her wrath by serving macadamia nuts in a plastic bag rather than on a plate. Spoiled brat daughters and sons of wealthy parents are by no means an Asian, let alone a Korean, monopoly. However part of Hyun-ah’s self-indulgence might come not just from being born with a silver spoon, but also from being such a rarity: South Korea has one of the world’s lowest rates of female members of corporate boards.
There are quite a lot of paradoxes in this Asian female drama. One of them is that compared with other parts of the world, discrimination and maltreatment of women notwithstanding, Asia has/had quite a large number of female political leaders. Among them are: the current president of South Korea Park Geun-hye; a former president of Indonesia Megawati Sukarnoputri; two former presidents of the Philippines, Corazon Aquino and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo; recently ousted Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatara; iconic chief of the opposition and possible future president in Burma Aung san Suu Kyi; the two dominant and bitterly rival altercating heads of government in Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia; the late (assassinated) prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto; the late (also assassinated) prime minister of India Indira Gandhi; and, in fact, not last, but first, and definitely minister of India Indira Gandhi; and, in fact, not last, but first, and definitely not least, the long serving head of government of Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon), Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who in 1960 became the first female head of government not only of Sri Lanka, or Asia, but indeed of the modern world. (It would be another nineteen years before Sri Lanka’s former colonial master would have its first female prime minister: Margaret Thatcher.)