THUNDER FROM THE EAST: Portrait of a Rising Asia

THUNDER FROM THE EAST: Portrait of a Rising Asia.

By Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Knopf. 377 pp. $27.50

Kristof and WuDunn spent five years reporting from China for the New York Times and won a joint Pulitzer for their brave and informative pieces on Tiananmen. Thereafter, based in Japan, they covered Asia as a whole for their paper. Their political, economic, and social reporting—well researched, closely observed, and revealing—was in the best Times tradition. When it comes to writing books, though, the writers prove much less surefooted. Thunder from the East seeks to explain the Asian crisis of the late 1990s and to speculate about the region’s future. The crisis, Kristof and WuDunn conclude, "was the best thing that could have happened," because it destroyed the cronyism, bad business practices, and even the ill-advised kindheartedness that had stifled Asian economic development. As for the future, the authors predict (with perhaps and probably as safety nets) that "Asia is likely to wrench economic, diplomatic, and military power from the West over the coming decades." These conclusions, though plausible, are not particularly original, and they’re repeated many times, as if the authors doubt the attention span of their readers.

The book does contain a mountain of fascinating material about the vast territory stretching from Afghanistan to the Pacific, though relatively little about China and nothing about Burma or Hong Kong. Kristof and WuDunn provide an evenhanded analysis of the Japanese massacre in Nanking in 1937, an informative discussion of Asian economic affairs (drawn largely from their reporting for the Times), and a chilling account of the region’s pollution and its terrible costs and dangers.

But Thunder from the East suffers from an overly personal style (the acknowledgments are a monument to cutesiness), jarring inconsistencies, and, too often, highly dubious generalizations. For example, the authors ascribe some five centuries of slow development in Asia, not just China, to misjudgments during the early 15th century, when Ming emperors terminated the Indian Ocean expeditions of eunuch admiral Zheng He: "A few catastrophic calls by some Chinese emperors in Zheng He’s time . . . helped send all of Asia into a tailspin from which it is only now recovering." As an even partial explanation of events from Afghanistan to Japan over many centuries, this is paltry. Elsewhere, the authors speak of the "cold, cruel discipline that...is one of the lubricants of Asia’s great economic machine," fueling the vast region’s "competitive advantage"—and cite as an illustration the practice of selling young girls into prostitution. If that were the key to prosperity, Asia would have taken off centuries ago.

—Jonathan Mirsky