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Economics may have shaped the Asia of today but politics are forging its tomorrow, says Bill Emmott, the former editor of The Economist, in ‘Rivals: How the Power Struggle between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade’ a striking new book that predicts a dangerous power struggle between China, Japan and India.

Emmott explains to the Times Online that prosperity is not an automatic stabilizer. “Economic growth is a process, not a destination,” he writes. History has not been abolished or forgotten. War is not inevitable but neither is it inconceivable. The rise of China threatens Japan. The revival of Japan challenges China. The arrival of India as an economic and political actor creates a balancing power. All the while, titanic forces reshape global trade and wealth.

Excerpts from the book, also available on Times Online say Rivals is clever and concise. It opens with a look at the power game in Asia and goes on to examine the three countries in turn. It restores Japan to the trinity of big powers in Asia. It weighs up the opportunities offered by China against its primitive political system. It examines the claims of India to first-rate status but says “not yet”.

The book starts off by explaining the nexus between America, India and China. Few of his contemporaries think of George Walker Bush as a visionary American president, unless they are using the term to imply a touch of madness. Yet early in his second term Bush launched a bold initiative to try to establish closer American ties with India, the world’s biggest democracy, in what may eventually be judged by historians as a move of great strategic importance and imagination.

It recognized the fact that while Al-Qaeda and its cohorts pose the biggest short-term and perhaps medium-term challenge to America, in the long term it is the expected shift in the world’s economic and political balance towards Asia that promises to have the greatest significance.

That is why this month’s events in Tibet, as well as the purchase by India’s Tata Motors of Land Rover and Jaguar from Ford, need to be seen in a wider context.

Bush, meanwhile, has managed to cast aside 40 years of hostility and suspicion between America and India – and even agreed to start collaborating over nuclear energy – in the hope of strengthening India and its economy. And all for a special reason: the rise of China.
In context with India’s growth in the last few years and Tata’s acquisition of Ford’s marquee brands Jaguar and Land Rover – the book notes – If a Chinese car maker had sought to buy Jaguar and Land Rover, it would almost certainly have encountered opposition in America’s Congress – but India, unlike China, is seen as an ally.

India, however, needs help in financing the construction of its roads, airports and power plants and it needs help with technology. In fact, it is already being helped by Japan – egged on by America – with its infrastructure financing. And Bush’s civil nuclear deal was aimed at providing the technology that India desperately needs.

So even if the dates and figures in forecasts such as Goldman’s are wrong, Asia is going to get richer and stronger, probably for a long time to come. The reason why Tibet and Tata come into the picture is that the rise of Asia is not just going to pit Asia against the West. It is going to pit Asians against Asians. This is the first time in history when there have been three powerful countries in Asia at the same time: China, India and Japan. That might not matter if they liked each other or were somehow naturally compatible. But they do not and are not. Far from it, in fact.

An array of disputes, historical bitternesses and regional flashpoints weigh down on all three countries. Conflict is not inevitable but nor is it inconceivable. If it were to occur – over Taiwan, say, or the Korean peninsula or Tibet or Pakistan – it would not simply be an intra-Asian affair. The outside world would be drawn in.