我们可以察觉到，东方正表现出一种好几百年未见的沉着。这在亚洲人身上是一种新现象，来得难以捉摸、突然，却又明确无误。
——帕特里克•史密斯(Patrick Smith)，《Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a post-Western World》
这种"实力东移"从本月伦敦举行的一场拍卖会上就可以感受得到。在位于伦敦郊区Ruislip的拍卖行Bainbridges，一位北京口音的匿名买家用5300万英镑（合8500万美元）拍走了一个16英寸高的清代花瓶，创下了中国艺术品的最高拍卖价。这也应了当下的一种潮流：中国人正集结巨额资金，将流失海外的文物收集回国。
人们该如何看待经济及地缘政治影响力朝向东方的这一重大转移？这种转移以中国的崛起为代表，是资本、创新和经济影响力都在向亚洲转移这一大趋势的一部分——在许多人看来，这是自19世纪末美国崛起为一支新兴力量以来，全球财富和实力最重要的一次再平衡。
人们可以从哪里发现这种转移？是中国、印度和印尼非同寻常的经济增速；还是日本、韩国和新加坡已达到的西方收入水平；抑或是亚洲各国央行金库里堆积的巨额外汇储备？也许人们应该看一看全球速度最快的超级计算机"天河一号A"的内部结构？这台计算机是由中国（而非美欧）科学家开发的。或者去揣摩一名印度资深外交官的充满怜悯的话？这位外交官在美国总统巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)本月访印之前表示，新德里需要掏出巨额资金购买美国飞机和设备，"帮助他们解决所有那些失业"。
当然，答案隐藏于所有这些事情背后，还有其它各种数据、财务排名以及态度改变。从中国汽车销量去年超过美国，到印度的信实(Reliance)、韩国的三星(Samsung)以及众多中国资源集团等亚洲企业的全球业务地盘与日俱增，人们明显感觉到，世界的重心正在东移。
尽管是2008年美国投行雷曼兄弟(Lehman Brothers)的倒闭，才让这种转移暴露出来，但这一趋势至少在30年前中国经济改革初见成效之时就已开始，甚至可以追溯到更早的日本工业化奇迹。但即使是现在，当西方强国惊恐地看到自己身负重债和军力下降时，人们可能也未能完全认识到重心东移的重要意义。
很久前就已预见亚洲崛起的耶鲁大学(Yale)历史学家保罗•肯尼迪(Paul Kennedy)表示："一些人认为，这不过是一场严重的财政和贸易平衡危机，5年内必然会彻底复苏，到时候我们就会回归正常。但我不这么认为。美元的全球角色正面临挑战，亚洲海军的相对实力在增强……而（亚洲国家）相当肯定，美国将退出亚洲舞台，"他表示。"世界的各种份量和平衡就在我们眼前转移。"
美国前总统吉米•卡特(Jimmy Carter)时期的国家安全顾问兹比格涅夫•布热津斯基(Zbigniew Brzezinski)表示："我们面前的形势与以往有着质的区别。远东正在普遍觉醒。"
在研究当下的经济、地缘政治乃至心理变化之前，先要提出几点重要的告诫。首先，中国以及印度的崛起并非命中注定（见下文）。两国的实验性改革承受着巨大的经济、政治和环境压力，这些压力仍有可能阻止它们前进的步伐。上世纪80年代有关日本定将成为全球最大经济体的一个接一个预言，是针对直线式预测的警示。
第二，人们很容易将中国的崛起与亚洲的崛起混为一谈。从某种意义上说，先是日本经济腾飞，接着是亚洲四小龙，现在轮到中国和印度——这是亚洲重返18世纪占全球一半产出这一地位的一部分。香港前总督彭定康(Lord Patten)表示，我们正目睹世界回归更正常的均衡。
但一些人反驳称，划分亚洲界限的是西方，用诺贝尔经济学奖得主阿玛蒂亚•森(Amartya Sen)的话说，"你选择如何划分世界，会影响你如何认知目前发生的事情"。他在谈到亚洲的经济发展时表示："我对此兴奋吗？认为这是一个巨变吗？不，18世纪印度和中国占全球GDP的一半是事实。但我不敢说这真的有意思。他们是大国。"
实力东移的说法，还掩盖了伴随中国崛起为地区巨人而产生的紧张关系。许多亚洲国家对中国的崛起感到惧怕，尽管它们在经济上得益于中国的崛起。
第三，这些转移是相对的。尽管英国的全球地位有所下滑，但在20世纪大部分时间里，它仍然越来越富裕。亚洲的崛起未必威胁到西方人的舒适或安全，尽管全球化让所有人都成为赢家的叙述遭到了相当猛烈的打击。
伦敦证交所董事长高博深(Chris Gibson-Smith)对实力角逐的讨论不屑一顾。他估计，等到中国经济的规模赶上美国和欧洲时（按美元计算），全球经济已经从目前的58万亿美元增至150万亿美元。"如果你在150万亿美元的经济中无法立足，那你只能怪自己。"
第四点与上面存在一定联系：唱衰美国将是愚蠢的。美国仍拥有最棒的技术、人数最多的中产阶级、最大且装备最精良的军队，最具创造力的企业和众多顶级大学。美国一极独大的时代或许已经过去，但在今后几十年里，美国可能仍是最重要的强国。布热津斯基表示："中国并没有举起大锤敲美国的脑袋，使其从世界上消失。显然，各国的优势会出现一些洗牌，但这取决于我们在美国做些什么。"
尽管如此，几乎没有人会否认亚洲（以及世界其它地区的发展中国家，如巴西）的影响力在相对增强。摩根士丹利(Morgan Stanley)亚洲及新兴市场策略师乔纳森•加纳(Jonathan Garner)称其为"第三次转移"。明年，中国将超越美国，成为全球最大的制成品生产国（按价值计算）——这仅仅是250年来全球制造业领先地位的第三次易手。加纳表示，1990年，中国和其它新兴市场的制造业增加值总计只占世界的14%。现在，这个数字为37%。
这种变化也体现在其它方面。按购买力平价计算，1973年，日本、中国和印度的国内生产总值(GDP)合计占世界的15%。今年，这三个国家的GDP合计将达到24%——尽管日本目前处于相对衰落。整个亚洲的GDP则占世界的三分之一左右。
传奇人物、富达(Fidelity)基金经理安东尼•波顿(Anthony Bolton)为投资中国而推迟了退休，他谈到了一种"长期的东移趋势"。他指出，全球市值前10大银行如今有4家是中资银行，这还不算，西方跨国企业也日益把自身战略向亚洲倾斜。
举例来说，在截至2009年的5年里，美国日用品企业宝洁(P&G)的新兴市场营收占总营收的比例，从23%升至32%。今年头9个月，在花旗集团(Citigroup)约90亿美元的总利润中，有35亿美元来自亚洲。亚洲还有望掀起一波海外投资潮，收购IBM个人电脑业务的中国企业联想(Lenovo)，以及收购捷豹(Jaguar)和路虎(Land Rover)的印度塔塔汽车(Tata Motors)，只是两个开路先锋。
在经济进步的支撑下，亚洲的地缘政治影响力在日益提升。肯尼迪教授说："中国越来越让美国军方心神不宁。"他补充表示，中国现在每七年就把海军规模扩大一倍，而美国却在考虑削减国防预算。中国在对有争议领土宣称主权方面更加自信，这加剧了亚洲的军备扩充。印度已拥有一艘航母，目前在采购另两艘。越南、韩国和澳大利亚正在扩充自己的海军。就连受《和平宪法》束缚、但对中国实力感到不安的日本，也拥有比英国、法国和意大利加起来都大的海军。
至于中国，它已展示出击落卫星的能力，并测试了可用来打击1000英里半径内航母的长程弹道导弹。彭定康表示，中国或许过高估计了自己的力量。"我不肯定中国是否在很好地把握形势。与'四面出击'相比，'韬光养晦'这个建议要好得多，"他引用把中国带上经济强盛之路的已故领导人邓小平的箴言说道。
亚洲各国的外交远未形成合力。但总体而言，亚洲经过奋力打拼，国际地位已比以前重要得多。就在雷曼兄弟倒闭前不久，七国集团(G7)的许多领导人还公开嘲笑扩大该俱乐部的想法。今天，中国、印度、韩国、印尼和澳大利亚均在全球峰会上占据了一席之地，几乎不会有人认为它们会被轻易的排挤出去。
自金融危机以来，中国政府便开始对美国的宽松财政与货币政策指指点点，并抛出了以其它货币取代美元成为全球储备货币的想法。新兴的亚洲强国在各个方面挑战原有的（即西方的）智慧，从国际货币基金组织(IMF)的构成，到实施非洲援助计划的最佳方式。
专注于亚洲事务的作家帕特里克•史密斯(Patrick Smith)认为，伴随着物质方面的进步，亚洲会出现某些意义更加深远的现象，那就是自信、以及克服历史怨恨（源自该地区被殖民的经历）。他说，当一种新的世界观脱茧而出时，它将影响我们思考各种事物的方式，从个人在社会中扮演的角色，到经济进步的意义和小说史。
史密斯认为，人们不应把亚洲将要对全球辩论做出的贡献，与任何花言巧语版的"亚洲价值观"——威权政府为证明自身正当性而鼓吹的一套所谓共同理念——混为一谈。但他表示，如果认为亚洲历史性重新崛起的唯一后果只是消费品标签上的产地发生改变，那将是短视的。他还说道："我不认为亚洲的崛起、进步或物质成就意味着必然有人成为输家。但是，如果说19世纪和20世纪属于西方，那么21世纪将另有所属。"
译者/何黎
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001035744
We can detect a nascent self- possession the east has not known for many centuries. That is what is new among Asians – elusive, unannounced and unmistakable all at once.
– Patrick Smith, Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a post-Western World
Asense of "the great shift east" could be found this month on Station Parade in the London suburb of Ruislip. At Bainbridges auction house, an anonymous bidder with a Beijing accent stumped up £53m ($85m) for a 16-inch Qing dynasty vase. The purchase, for what is believed to be the highest price paid for a Chinese work of art, forms part of a trend: huge sums of Chinese money are being marshalled to bring the country's heritage back home.
How does one calibrate the momentous shift of economic and geopolitical clout towards the east? Symbolised by the rise of China, it is part of a broader movement of capital, innovation and economic muscle to Asia that is, in many people's reckoning, the most important rebalancing of global wealth and power since America emerged as a new force at the end of the 19th century.
Does one find this transition in the remarkable growth rates of China, India and Indonesia; in the western levels of income in Japan, South Korea and Singapore; or in the mountains of foreign currency reserves piled up in the vaults of Asian central banks? Should one look for it, instead, in the innards of the Tianhe-1A, the world's fastest supercomputer, built by scientists not from America or Europe but from China? Or might it lurk in the pitying remark of a senior Indian diplomat who, speaking before President Barack Obama's visit to India this month, said New Delhi needed to spend billions on American aircraft and equipment "to help them out with all that unemployment"?
Naturally, it is to be found in all these things and a myriad of other data points, financial league tables and attitudinal changes besides. From sales of vehicles in China, which surpassed those in the US last year, to the rising global presence of companies such as Reliance of India, Samsung from South Korea and numerous Chinese resources groups, there is a palpable sense that the world's centre of gravity is shifting eastwards.
Though these shifts have been laid bare by the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, the US investment bank, they started at least 30 years ago with the initial success of China's economic reforms, and before that with Japan's miraculous industrialisation. Yet even now, when western powers are staring with alarm in the mirror of their own indebtedness and military weakness, the magnitude of this move eastwards may not yet have fully hit home.
"Some of them are just thinking this is a bad fiscal and trade-balance crisis, which surely will shake itself out in five years' time and we'll be back to normal," says Paul Kennedy, a Yale historian who has long forecast the rise of Asia. "I just don't think that's right. The dollar's role in the world is coming to a rendering of account, there's a shift of naval power to Asia . . . and [Asian states] are pretty much convinced that the US is on the way out of Asia," he says. "The world's weights and balances are shifting before our eyes."
Zbigniew Brzezinski, US national security adviser when Jimmy Carter was president, says: "We are dealing with something qualitatively different from what has gone before. It is a general awakening of the far east."
Before examining the economic, geopolitical and even psychological changes taking place, there are important caveats. First, the rise of China and, behind it, that of India, is not preordained (see below). Enormous economic, political and environmental pressures at the heart of both national experiments could yet halt their progress. Breathless predictions in the 1980s that Japan was destined to become the world's largest economy are a cautionary tale against straight-line projections.
Second, it is too easy to conflate the rise of China with the rise of Asia. In one sense, the economic upsurge of first Japan, then the Asian tigers, and now China and India is part of a tilt back to a region that accounted for half of world output in the 18th century. Lord Patten, former British governor of Hong Kong, argues that we are witnessing the restoration of a more normal equilibrium.
But others counter that Asia is a region defined by the west and that, in the words of Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize-winning economist, "the way you choose to partition the world makes a difference to the perception of what's going on". Of economic progress in Asia, he says: "Am I excited about it, do I think it is a gigantic change? No. That fact, that India and China produced 50 per cent of global GDP in the 18th century, is a fact. But I am not sure it is so interesting. They are big countries."
The idea of a shift also masks the tensions that are accompanying the emergence of China as a regional colossus. Many Asian countries are fearful of China's rise even though their economies are riding on its back.
Third, these are relative shifts. Britain grew richer throughout most of the 20th century even as its place in the world shrank. The rise of Asia does not necessarily threaten the comfort or security of people in the west, though the narrative of a globalisation in which everybody wins has taken some pretty hard knocks.
Chris Gibson-Smith, chairman of the London Stock Exchange, has no time for talk of a struggle for power. By the time China's economy is as big as that of the US and Europe in dollar terms, he calculates, the global economy will have grown from $58,000bn today to $150,000bn. "And if you can't find your place in a $150,000bn economy, well, shame on you."
Fourth, and related: it would be foolish to write off the US. America still has the best technology, the biggest middle class, the largest and most sophisticated armed forces, the most creative companies and many of the best universities. Its unipolar moment may be over but it could remain the most important power for decades to come. "It's not that China has a big hammer and hits America on the head and it disappears from the world," says Mr Brzezinski. "Obviously, there's going to be some reshuffling of advantages. But it depends on what we do in America."
That said, few would deny the relative shift to Asia (and to other parts of the developing world, such as Brazil). Jonathan Garner, Asian and emerging markets strategist at Morgan Stanley, calls it the "third transition". Next year, China is set to overtake the US as the biggest producer of manufactured goods by value – only the third change in global manufacturing leadership in 250 years. In 1990, says Mr Garner, China and other emerging markets accounted for just 14 per cent of manufacturing value added. Now, that number is 37 per cent.
This change is mirrored elsewhere. In 1973, Japan, China and India together accounted for 15 per cent of global gross domestic product in purchasing power parity terms. This year, the three countries will have reached 24 per cent, notwithstanding Japan's relative decline. Asia as a whole accounts for around one-third.
Anthony Bolton, the legendary Fidelity stock-picker who deferred his retirement in order to invest in China, talks about a "secular shift east". Not only are four of the world's top 10 banks by market capitalisation now Chinese, he says, but western multinationals are increasingly tilting their strategies towards Asia.
In the five years to 2009, for example, emerging market revenues at Procter & Gamble, the US consumer goods company, rose from 23 per cent of the total to 32 per cent. In the first nine months of this year, Citigroup reported $3.5bn of profit in Asia out of roughly $9bn globally. Asian multinationals such as Lenovo, the Chinese company that bought IBM's personal computing business, and India's Tata Motors, which bought Jaguar and Land Rover, are just two pioneers in what is expected to be a wave of outward Asian investment.
Asia's economic progress underpins growing geopolitical clout. "The US military is getting obsessed with China," says Prof Kennedy, adding that the Chinese navy is doubling in size every seven years, at a time when Washington is considering cutting defence budgets. Beijing has become more assertive in pressing its claims over disputed territory, catalysing an arms build-up. India already has one aircraft carrier and is procuring two more. Vietnam, South Korea and Australia are building up their navies. Even Japan, constrained by a pacifist constitution but nervous of China's capabilities, is bigger navally than the UK, France and Italy combined.
Beijing, for its part, has shown it can shoot down satellites and has tested long-range ballistic missiles for potential use against aircraft carriers within a 1,000-mile radius. Lord Patten says China may be overplaying its hand. "I'm not sure China is handling this all that well. 'Hide your brightness, bide your time' was much better advice than 'throw your weight around'," he says, quoting the entreaty of the late Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who put his country on the road to economic might.
Diplomacy in Asia is far from united. But over all, the region has carved out a much bigger international role. Shortly before the collapse of Lehman, many leaders of the Group of Seven industrial nations openly scoffed at the idea of enlarging their club. Now, China, India, South Korea, Indonesia and Australia have claimed a seat at global summits and few imagine they will be easily dislodged.
Since the financial crisis, Beijing has taken to lecturing the US about its loose fiscal and monetary policy and has floated the idea of an alternative to the dollar as a global reserve currency. Newly emerging Asian powers have challenged accepted (western) wisdom on everything from the make-up of the International Monetary Fund to the best way of conducting aid programmes for Africa.
Patrick Smith, an author on Asian affairs, argues that along with the region's material progress will come something much more profound: self-confidence, and an overcoming of historical resentment born of the region's colonial experience. A new way of looking at the world, when it fully emerges, will affect how we think of everything from the role of the individual in society to the meaning of economic progress and the history of the novel, he says.
Asia's coming contribution to the global debate should not be confused with any glib version of "Asian values", a supposed set of common ideas trumpeted by authoritarian governments to justify themselves, Mr Smith argues. But, he says, it would be short-sighted to imagine that the only consequence of Asia's historic re-emergence will be a change in the "Made in" labels on the products we consume. "I don't think that Asia's rise or advance, its material success, means that anybody has to lose out," he adds. "But if the 19th and 20th centuries belonged to the west, the 21st century will be somebody else's."
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