The East Asian Challenge: Luck and Might

A panel of Harvard East Asia experts yesterday discussed the challenges to the United States presented by the prodigious increase in East Asian economic might since World War II.

The three scholars who participated in the Science Center symposium, "The Challenge from East Asia," accepted a premise expressed in remarks by Dillon Professor of International Affairs Ezra F. Vogel, who presided over the discussion.

"What is happening in East Asia is bringing new patterns, not just culturally, of world power and perhaps of international relations," Vogel said.

Vogel said the nations of East Asia--Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan--probably will continue to increase in power for the forseeable future.

Geyser University Professor Henry Rosovsky said the extent to which Japan's economy benefitted from such "happy circumstances" as American aid and a culture tendency to avoid labor disputes has been underestimated.

"I do not want to take anything away from Japan's economy, but I do want to mention something of its luck and happy circumstances," said Rosovsky, former dean of the faculty of arts and sciences.

The third panelist, Boas Professor of International Economics Richard N. Cooper, said the United States' suspicion of Japanese economic progress threatens to undermine long-standing good relations.

"The fact is, in the past year the U.S. has had a bilateral trade deficit with almost everyone and that is because the [federal] deficit is so big," Cooper, a former Yale University provost, said. "Perhaps that hints that there is something wrong with the U.S. and not with Japan."