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Reviewed by:
  • The Asian American Century
  • Franklin J. Woo (bio)
Warren I. Cohen . The Asian American Century. Cambridge (MA) and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. viii, 150 pp. Hardcover $22.95, ISBN 0-674-00765-4.

This thin volume of 150 pages consists of the author's Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures, given at the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University in 2000. Focusing primarily on the last half century of cultural as well as political relations between the United States and East and South Asia, Warren Cohen tells an interesting story with flair, wit, and insight. His first of three chapters, "The Struggle for Dominance in East Asia," is an excellent, succinct history of U.S.-Asian interactions, a helpful account of many of the major events (some obscured or forgotten) that have contributed to the shaping of both the United States and the countries of East Asia. The following two chapters, "The Americanization of East Asia" and "The Asianization of America," however, are mixed bags of mutual cultural influences from the sublime to the entrepreneurial.

One of Cohen's main theses is that the people and culture of the United States "cannot be considered products exclusively of Western civilization," and it is high time we realized this fact. Another theme is that the best in one's culture can only be freely and willingly chosen by other societies, and not forced on them. [End Page 124] He cites the Philippines as one obvious example of democracy instituted by direct U.S. coercion, where "'People Power' and Cory Aquino have come and gone, but the wretchedness of life in the Philippines persists," while at the same time "Filipino popular culture was unquestionably Americanized." Another example of Cohen's caution against the heavy-handed sharing of what is considered best in one's culture is Japan at the end of the American occupation in 1952. Conservative Japanese leaders were only too ready to jettison all the institutions and vestiges of American-style democracy forced on them but for the will of the Japanese people to the contrary.

In these lectures Cohen also offers a good review of the American approach to its national self-interest in Asia, manifested in its wavering foreign policy. Initially the region commanded little interest to a United States preoccupied with Europe and the rise of Communist influence there after World War II. However, with the establishment of the People's Republic of China in late 1949, the United States was eager to drive a wedge between the new China and the Soviet Union. Cohen reminds us that President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson were quite ready to strike a deal with Beijing by abandoning Taiwan, but their plans were violently disrupted by the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950.

The United States found it expedient to support the inept Chiang Kai-shek and his regime in Taiwan with military and economic aid. To further contain the spread of Communism it entered the hot war in Indochina, where American power replaced that of the French. The United States, Cohen also reminds us, even tried to dismantle Sukarno's Indonesia. In today's parlance we would call that attempt an effort to bring about "regime change." Despite American reluctance at the time to become involved in Asia following World War II, it nevertheless extended the Cold War contest with the Soviet Union into that region, where the United States is today a dominant power and is determined to remain so.

In demonstrating how people freely and selectively choose what they perceive to be good for themselves from the cultural values of others and in turn adjust these values to fit the context of their own history and lifestyle, Cohen highlights the important concept of "hybridity,"1 that is, the borrowing from other cultures with consequent changes in, but not the complete supplanting of, one's own culture. In any case, whether it involves cultural exchange or appropriation, both Asian and American "characteristics" remain.

In this book on intercultural interaction Cohen devotes several pages to Christianity in China, which was largely the bearer not only of good tidings...

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