What is odd about the West’s perception of Asia?

"We in the West have an odd way of looking eastward. It is odd because it is at the very latest a late-19th century way of seeing.”

How so?

“The Asia in our minds resembles a disassembled machine — nuts and bolts. It is long on data (the lowest form of knowledge) and short, very short, on understanding (the highest, the best we can ever do)."

What concept illustrates the danger of this kind of thinking?

"The intellectual folly this kind of thinking produces is called ‘Chindia.’ It is quintessentially utilitarian. It signifies at once the comparative treatment of China and India, while telling us to think of more than two billion people as one immense mass of unindividuated humanity. It may produce all manner of useful information about cost-effectiveness, labor rates, property statutes and other such matters.”

But what is lacking in this idea?

“There is no room in it for histories, religions, institutions or an almost infinite variety of humanity in both countries, never mind the two together."

How has Asia interpreted modernization?

"Modernizing in Asia has meant, above all, the making of a new material world and the erection of institutions identified as parts of the apparatus of the modern: skyscrapers, rail systems, telephone networks, parliaments, judiciaries, ballot boxes, tax regimes.”

Which Asian country has completed this process?

“Japan, even first among Asians, is finished in this respect: The job is done. For others, the end is in sight."

Has the Asian idea of modernity changed?

"After 150 years with the modern, the modern has lost its strangeness for Asians. Neither is the modern understood any longer to be Western.”

What does this mean for the West?

“To put the point plainly, the West's monopoly on the modern is now behind us. This is a change of epochal consequence."

Who will the 21st century belong to?

"We do not stand at the start of ‘an Asian century’ to match the one just passed, commonly considered ‘American.’ Role reversal is not at issue. It is our turn in the West to say the new century is simply someone else's, other than altogether our own."

What has changed the balance of power?

"What were once Asia's disadvantages are now often its advantages. By the same measure, what were once the West's great strengths are now its challenges. What propelled us at one moment in history may restrain us in this, another."

And finally, what is peculiar about the Chinese today at this stage?

"Part of what it means to be Chinese today is to be confused about what it means to be Chinese. I know of no Chinese alive who does not, in some fashion, entertain this question."