马凯硕：当我们步入“亚洲世纪”时，必须摆脱对西方思想的依赖

【文/观察者网专栏作者 马凯硕】

我很惊喜能来到台上给大家讲几句。三天前，我接到郝福满（新加坡国立大学东亚所所长）的电话，邀请我到论坛讲几句话，我以为是在一个小房间里和五到十个人对话，我没准备好对这么多人讲话。我想，我被受邀来今天的“思想亚洲”智库论坛上发言，是因为24年前我出版的一本名为《亚洲人会思考吗？》的书。令人惊讶的是，这本书在24年后还在印刷出版。尽管我没有做什么准备，还有点惊讶与困惑，但我希望尽我所能，在分配给我的15分钟里，把我的一些想法与经验和大家分享。

首先，我想说，在这个时间点召开“思想亚洲”论坛非常、非常及时。当我们进入一个完全不同的新世界时，我们早应开始认真思考亚洲的问题。我们人在亚洲，却一直在许多方面依赖西方的许多大思想，我们的确从许多伟大的西方思想中受益。但是，我们不能再继续这么做了。我来说下为什么。

11月2日，首届“思想亚洲”论坛在新加坡举行（图源：清华大学战略与安全研究中心）

我们的世界在三个方面发生了根本性的变化。首先，我们正目睹着由西方主宰世界历史时代的终结。随着亚洲国家回归其在全球经济中的历史地位，一个不同的时代已经开启。亚洲的回归是一个根本性的全球转变。

第二个根本性转变是地缘政治的改变——众所周知，这将会带来非同寻常的变化。例如，东南亚发展如此成功的原因之一是，在冷战期间，美国和中国进行了密切的合作，以加强东南亚，加强东盟，使我们从中受益。有这两个大国的支持，东盟当然做得很好。

很少有人能对未来做出有把握的预测，但我在写了《中国赢了吗？》一书后，可以有把握地预测，美中关系在未来10年将变得更糟，会非常棘手，我们需要为此做好准备。10天前我在纽约时，我设法了解了当下美国的情绪。有人告诉我，现在美国对中国的看法有分歧，有鹰派的声音，也有不负责任的鹰派的声音，但在中国问题上没有鸽派。所以对我们所有人来说，这将是一段艰难的旅程。

第三——这是关键的一点——西方国家的许多关键区域正在远离全球化。从某种意义上说，西方引领了当前这种全球化的创造过程。然而，现在许多西方的声音都在说，是时候关上大门了。显然，塑造西方思想的重大理念正在发生变化。

既然西方的思潮在转向，我们还要像过去那样继续追随西方吗？或许我们应该开始独立思考，想一想，有哪些西方思想可以帮助亚洲，哪些不再有帮助？毕竟，我们正在进入一个不同的世界、一个不同的时代。出于这个原因，你们的会议非常及时。

我提三个切实可行的建议，让所有人去思考亚洲在21世纪的作用，希望为本次论坛做些贡献。坦白说，也给自己的书做一点宣传。我很高兴地告诉大家，这本书是免费的，叫《亚洲21世纪》，我不靠这本书赚钱，你们可以从网上免费下载。今年1月出版时，我的德国出版商预计该书会有2万次下载，他说这将是非常棒的。到目前为止，在十个月内，《亚洲21世纪》已经获得了来自160个国家的200万次下载。  

我说这个数字不是为了自我吹嘘。200万的下载量表明，不仅在亚洲、在世界其他地区，如非洲和拉美，人们都意识到这将是亚洲的世纪。但是，如果这真的是亚洲世纪，我们亚洲人就必须开始提供智力引领，这是我们不习惯做的。过去，我们复制西方的思想，因为我们从拿来中受益，尤其从西方拿。我们应该要感谢日本人始于19世纪60年代的明治维新，这是日本成功的原因，它是第一个发展起来的亚洲国家，就是因为他们复制了西方的思想。我们其他国家也搬来了西方的道路，也都做得很好。但是，复制时代已经过去了，属于亚洲人的创造时代已经到来。这并不容易，我可以告诉你，可以说非常难。但我们要开始尝试，并且在某种意义上开启创造亚洲思想的过程。我将向大家提出三个建议——请注意，这些都是非常临时的建议，毕竟，我只有三天时间来思考并提出这些建议。  

第一个试探性建议是，我们亚洲人必须要放弃对西方的心理依赖，这一点很关键。这样说可能有点令人沮丧，因为正如我之前所说，我们曾受益于西方。但是，很多亚洲学者对西方出版物网有一种奴性依赖，他们热衷引用西方的出版物、西方的思想、西方的事物。的确其中有很多想法在过去是举世无双的，但是现在，坦率地说这些思想已经不再厉害了，也不再适用于一个从单极变为多极、从单一文明变为多元文明的世界。现在是一个不同的世界，它已经成为一个小型的、相互依存的、有许多人共同生活的地球村，我们必须应对前所未有的多样性。

特别是——这里我要提出一个非常敏感的观点，请不要误解——在西方，人们倾向于用非黑即白的方式看待一切，无论对与错、民主与专制，一切都是非黑即白。但世界是彩色的，这些非黑即白的视角错误地塑造了我们的观念。再给大家举个非常敏感的例子，乌克兰正在发生一场重大战争，这很不幸，令人悲哀。作为（新加坡）前驻联合国大使，我要明确说，俄罗斯入侵乌克兰是非法的，违反了国际法，这点非常清楚，毫无疑问。但与此同时，当有人说战争的唯一原因就是俄罗斯的入侵，我们都知道，地缘政治其实非常复杂。比如，毫无疑问的，是希特勒发动了第二次世界大战，但，是什么力量推动了希特勒呢？我们知道，这源于一战后令人痛苦的赔款。我们必须明白，这些事情非常复杂。所以，我对我的亚洲同胞说的第一点就是，放弃这种非黑即白的视角。

我的第二点建议是向东盟学习。如果你想了解为什么，比如说东南亚和东亚发展得很好，有很多因素在起作用。我已经说了一个：美国和中国之间的合作所创造的稳定的地缘政治环境。但另一个对我们地区非常重要的事实———这也是亚洲发展历史上最被忽视的贡献之一——是东盟，即东南亚国家联盟的贡献。东盟是一个最好的例子，说明为什么我们需要摆脱对西方的心理依赖。糟糕的是，你从西方读到的任何关于东盟的信息都是负面的。西方一直说东盟是一个弱势联盟，这是事实。但悖论在于，东盟的优势正来自于它的弱势，这就是，东盟获得了所有人的信任。为什么所有领导人都会来参加两周后的东亚峰会？因为没有人觉得会受到东盟的威胁，他们都会来，这反而让东盟有了其他国家所没有的号召力。    

但我要强调一点，如果你深入研究东盟，就像我在《东盟的奇迹》一书中试图做的那样，你会发现东盟内部隐藏着巨大的力量。作为一个参加了33年东盟会议的人，我可以这样告诉你，1971年我第一次参加东盟会议时，会场上充满了不信任的气氛。20年后，这种不信任感已经烟消云散，会场里满是信任，我们做成了一件奇迹般的事情。其中有几个关键人物：李光耀和苏哈托之间的友谊发挥了很大作用，还有像印尼前外交部长阿里·阿拉塔斯，泰国空军元帅西提·萨维斯拉等等。

作为一个长期参加东盟会议的人，我还可以告诉你，印尼文化中有一种特殊的力量叫做协商（musyawarah）与共识（mufakat）。神奇的是，我不知道印尼人是怎样做到把这种文化注入东盟的。这就是为什么在东盟内部，你会注意到我们从不进行投票，因为我们有共识。我相信，东盟这种“协商”和“共识”的文化正在传递给亚洲其他国家，并最终影响到世界和平。实际上令人惊叹的是，尽管相比欧洲国家，我们在亚洲有更激烈的地缘政治和其他竞争，但自冷战结束以来的所有重大战争，都发生在欧洲而不是亚洲的边界附近。这不可能只是因为运气，也离不开东盟做出的正确选择。

11月11日下午，国务院总理李克强在柬埔寨金边出席第25次中国－东盟（10+1）领导人会议。新华社记者 岳月伟 摄

因此，我希望“思想亚洲”在今后的工作中，能够认真思考东盟问题，去了解我们如何能使东盟成为一个新的、和平的亚洲秩序的核心支柱。幸运的是，我们无需从头开始。东盟有自己的机制流程、文化和活力，可以与世界其他国家分享。而且，对东北亚人民来说，可能也是一个教育过程。我想指出，“东北亚”这个词是相当矛盾的。日本、韩国和中国的经济总量要比东盟经济总量大得多、先进得多，因此从逻辑上讲，应该有一个“东北亚国家联盟”（ANEAN），以呼应东南亚国家联盟（ASEAN）。但50年后的今天，东北亚国家联盟并没有建立起来。中国、日本和韩国尽管很先进，但三国之间缺乏信任，而东南亚国家尽管落后许多，却有这一成功联盟。因此，东盟有一些隐藏的魔力，我们必须了解、提取并向世界揭示。

我最后要说的是，如果说在21世纪亚洲还能做出什么巨大贡献，那就是要承担起全球化领导者的责任。我这样说是因为很多西方的领导者正在远离全球化，这让我感到很沮丧。说到底，如果你想解读东亚国家的非凡成功——如果你想了解东亚奇迹——其中很大一部分是由于亚洲国家决定投身于全球化的海洋。我非常清晰地记得，2017年1月习近平主席在达沃斯所做的演讲，他说，“中国勇敢迈向了世界市场。在这个过程中，我们呛过水，遇到过漩涡，遇到过风浪，但我们在游泳中学会了游泳。这是正确的战略抉择。”这就是我们亚洲所做的事情。

跳入全球化的海洋是困难的。但当你成功时，你会做得非常非常好。新加坡就是一个最好的例子。世界上没有其他国家的贸易总额是其国民生产总值的3.5倍。为什么我们的贸易规模是国民生产总值的3.5倍？因为全球化。现在，西方国家正在从全球化中撤退、并谴责它，全球化需要新的领导者。而新的领导者必须来自亚洲，因为我们最终将成为全球化的最大受益者。

因此，我想留给大家的关键点是，当我们迈入亚洲的21世纪时，我们必须放弃对来自其他地方思想的依赖。我们必须专注于产生我们自己的想法，并与世界其他地区分享这些想法。非常感谢大家。

翻译：中国论坛武一琪、许馨匀  核译：韩桦

原文：

I’m actually very surprised that I’m standing up here talking to all of you. When I got a phone call from Bert Hofman 3 days ago inviting me to make some remarks, I thought I was going to speak with five or ten people in a small room. I was not prepared to address such a large group. I think Bert probably wanted to invite me to speak at the Think Asia Conference because 24 years ago, I published a book called Can Asians Think? Surprisingly, the book is still in print after 24 years. In any case, even though I’m unprepared, surprised and bewildered to be here, I will try to be helpful by making a small contribution to all of you in the 15 minutes assigned to me.

I want to begin by saying that it is very, very timely to hold a conference called “Think Asia” at this point in time. It is past time for us to start thinking seriously in Asia as we move into a very different new world. In many ways, we in Asia have relied on the West for many of our big ideas, and we have benefited from many big Western ideas. But I want to explain why we can no longer do that.

There are three fundamental ways in which our world has changed. Firstly, we are seeing the end of the era of Western domination of world history. A different era has begun as Asian countries are returning to their historical place in the global economy. This return of Asia has been a fundamental global shift. The second fundamental shift is in geopolitics—which, as you all know, is going to be very, very different. For example, one reason why Southeast Asia has been so successful is that during the Cold War, both the United States and China cooperated very closely to strengthen ASEAN, to strengthen Southeast Asia, and we benefited from it. With two great powers supporting it, of course ASEAN was going to do well. There are very few confident predictions one can make about the future, but having written the book Has China Won?, I can confidently predict that relations between the US and China will get worse in the next 10 years. In fact, they will get very difficult. We need to be ready for this. As I was just in New York 10 days ago, I managed to get a sense of the current mood in the US. I was told that in the US today, there is a division of views on China between the hawkish voices and the irresponsibly hawkish voices. There are no doves on China. So it’s going to be a rough ride for all of us.

Thirdly—and this is a critical point—many key constituencies in the West are turning away from globalization. In a sense, the West led the way in creating globalization in its current form. Yet, now, many Western voices are saying it’s time to close the doors. It is clear that the big ideas shaping thought in the West are changing.                

Since the big ideas in the West are changing, should we continue to follow Western thought as we did in the past? Or should we now start to think for ourselves and see which Western ideas will help Asia, and which will no longer help Asia? After all, we are entering a different world, a different era. And for that reason, your conference is very timely.

I hope to contribute to it by making three practical suggestions to all of us who are trying to think about Asia’s role in the 21st century. And, full disclosure, I might do some marketing of my latest book in the process. But I’m happy to inform you that the book I’m marketing is a free book. It’s called The Asian 21st Century. I make no money from the book, and you can download it for free from the Internet. When it was published in January this year, my German publisher expected 20,000 downloads of the book. He said that would be very good. So far, in 10 months, there have been 2 million downloads of The Asian 21st Century in 160 countries.          

I’m not bringing these numbers up to flatter myself. What the 2 million downloads show is that not just in Asia, but also in other parts of the world such as Africa and Latin America, there is an awareness that this will be the Asian century. But if it’s going to be the Asian century, we Asians have to start providing intellectual leadership. That is something that we’re not used to doing. We’ve gotten used to copying ideas, because we’ve benefited from copying ideas, especially from the West. We must thank the Japanese for this. It began with the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s and is the reason why Japan succeeded. Japan was the first Asian country to develop because it copied Western ideas very well, and the rest of us copied their approach and we all did very well. But the era of copying is over. The era of creating has now arrived for Asians. It won’t be easy. I can tell you that it’s not going to be easy at all. But in an effort to try, and in a sense start the process of creating Asian ideas, I’m going to make three suggestions to you all—with the caveat that these are all very tentative suggestions, okay? After all, I only had 3 days to come up with them.    

The first tentative suggestion, which is a critical one, is that we in Asia have to give up our psychological dependence on the West. I say this with some sadness, because as I said, we have benefited from the West. But there is a kind of slavish dependence by Asian scholars on Western publications. They love to cite Western publications, Western ideas, Western things. Many of these Western ideas, which were world-beating ideas, are no longer world-beating—and frankly, also not suitable for a world which is changing from a unipolar world into a multipolar world, from a uni-civilizational world into a multi-civilizational world. It’s a different world. It’s become a small, interdependent, global village with many people living together. And we have to deal with a level of diversity that we have never had to deal with before.

In particular - this is a very sensitive point I’m going to make; please don’t misunderstand me - in the West, there’s a tendency to see everything in black and white terms. Right or wrong. Democracy or autocracy. Everything is black and white. But the world is no longer black and white; it’s multicolored. These black and white perspectives shape our psychology. I’m going to give you another very sensitive example of this. It is, very sadly, the major war that is happening in Ukraine. It’s sad. And let’s be very clear: speaking as a former ambassador to the UN, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is illegal. It violates international law. That’s very clear. There’s no doubt about that. But at the same time, when people say that the one and only cause of the war is the Russian invasion—we all know that in geopolitics, everything is complicated. For example, we know that Hitler started World War II; there’s no question of that whatsoever. But what were the forces that generated Hitler? We know that they stemmed from the painful reparations after World War I. We’ve got to understand that these things are incredibly complex. My first point to my fellow Asians is thus to start walking away from black and white perspectives.

My second suggestion to you is to learn from ASEAN. If you want to understand why, for example, Southeast Asia and East Asia have done well, there are many factors at play. I’ve given you one already: the stable geopolitical environment created by the collaboration between the US and China. But the other fact that was very important for our region—and this is the one of the most underappreciated contributions in Asian history—is the contribution of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. ASEAN is a prime example of why we need to get away from our psychological dependence on the West. If you read anything from the West on ASEAN, it’s all negative. It’s terrible. The West keeps saying that ASEAN is a weak organization. It’s true. ASEAN is a weak organization, but the paradox of ASEAN is that its strength lies in its weakness. It’s why everybody trusts ASEAN. Why do you think all the world leaders are going to come to the East Asia Summit in 2 weeks’ time? Because nobody feels threatened by ASEAN, they all come, and that gives ASEAN a convening power that others don’t have.    

But—and I want to emphasize this—if you study ASEAN deeply, as I’ve tried to do in my book, The ASEAN Miracle, you’ll find that there are areas of tremendous strength hidden inside ASEAN. I can tell you this as someone who attended ASEAN meetings for 33 years. When I first joined an ASEAN meeting in 1971, the room was full of distrust. 20 years later, the distrust had evaporated, and the room was full of trust. We did something miraculous. There were several key people involved in this miracle. There was a friendship between Lee Kuan Yew and Suharto that made a big difference. We had exceptional foreign ministers, like Ali Alatas of Indonesia, Air Chief Marshal Siddhi Savetsila of Thailand, and so forth. As a longtime attendee of ASEAN meetings, I can also tell you that the Indonesians have a specific strength in their culture called musyawarah and mufakat. Musyawarah and mufakat are two Indonesian words that mean consultation and consensus. Magically, I don’t know how, the Indonesians infused that culture into ASEAN. And that’s why within ASEAN, you’ll notice that we never have votes. We have consensus. I believe that this ASEAN culture of musyawarah and mufakat is now being shared with the rest of Asia, and is also influencing peace. And it is actually quite surprising that even though we have many more bitter geopolitical and other rivalries in Asia, more so than in Europe, all the major wars since the end of the Cold War have taken place near the boundaries of Europe and not Asia. That cannot just be due to luck. It has to be due to something else that ASEAN has been doing right.

So, in its future iterations, I hope that Think Asia will think very hard about ASEAN and try to understand how we can make ASEAN the central pillar of a new, peaceful, Asian order. Fortunately, we don’t have to start from scratch. ASEAN has its own institutional processes, culture, and dynamic that it can share with the rest of the world. And it will also be, by the way, an educational experience for some people in Northeast Asia. Let me just point out that the term “Northeast Asia” is quite paradoxical. The economies of Japan, South Korea and China are much bigger than the ASEAN economies, much more advanced. So, logically, you should have an Association of Northeast Asian Nations, ANEAN, to complement the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN. But after 50 years, no ANEAN has been created. There is no trust between China, Japan and South Korea, even though they are much more advanced, while Southeast Asia, which is much less advanced, has this amazingly successful organization. So there is some hidden magic in ASEAN that we have to understand, extract and reveal to the world.

My final point is that if there’s one other big contribution that Asia can make in the Asian 21st century, it’s to take on the responsibility of becoming the champion of globalization. I say this because I feel very sad that so many of the leading minds of the West are walking away from globalization. At the end of the day, if you want to explain the extraordinary success of East Asian countries—if you want to explain the East Asian miracle—a large part of it is due to the decision by Asian countries to plunge into the ocean of globalization. There is one speech I remember very vividly, because I was there in the room when President Xi Jinping spoke in Davos in January 2017. In that speech, he said: When China made a decision to plunge into the ocean of globalization, we encountered choppy waters, we swallowed water, we struggled to swim, but then we became stronger. That’s what Asia has done. Jumping into the ocean of globalization is difficult. But when you succeed, you do very, very well. Singapore is a prime example. No other country in the world has a total trade figure 3.5 times the size of its GNP. Why do we have trade 3.5 the size of our GNP? Because of globalization. Now that the West is retreating from globalization and denouncing it, globalization needs new champions. And its new champions have to come from Asia, because we, at the end of the day, are becoming its biggest beneficiaries.

So therefore, the key point that I want to leave with all of you is that as we march into the Asian 21st century, we have to give up on our dependence on ideas from elsewhere. We have to focus on generating our own ideas and sharing them with the rest of the world. Thank you very much.   

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