What are the seven challenges to be overcome in the "Asian Century"?

Recently, the website of the online magazine Globalist in the United States published an article saying that in order to give full play to its potential, Asia needs to overcome seven major challenges in the 2 1 century.

1. Get more value from global value chain.

Asia seems to be a global leader in international trade and investment. But the reality is that countries like China, Indian and Indonesian are mainly engaged in activities with low added value in the global value chain, such as assembling electrical appliances and cars, cutting, sewing, decorating clothes and operating call centers.

More efforts are needed to gain more value from the value chain by opening the market, strengthening human capital and technological and innovation capabilities.

2. Maximize the potential of urbanization

Many Asian factory workers are poor immigrants who flood into cities and towns, hoping for a better life. But as they eventually live in urban civilian areas, their dreams are often broken.

▲ Profile picture: Tangxia Village is the largest urban village in Guangzhou.

Unfortunately, most developed cities in Asia, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Seoul, lag behind the West in seeking to become innovation and creativity centers.

3. Give all Asians a chance!

Our research shows that discrimination, prejudice and persecution are widespread in Asia, which hinders the full potential of economy and society. These problems include the LGBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) community in Asia, Japanese women, South Asian women who have suffered gender killings, forced child marriages and honour killings, Tamil groups in Sri Lanka and low caste groups in India.

4. Solve the population dilemma in Asia

Most Asian countries are facing a difficult demographic situation. In many parts of East Asia, the fertility rate is lower than the population replacement rate, the population is aging and the labor force is shrinking. In Japan, the population has begun to decrease.

However, governments have been slow to respond. At the same time, in South Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines, a large number of young people have been enriched into the workforce, but many of these young people have not received a good education and have insufficient job opportunities.

The potential demographic dividend may easily turn into an outbreak of social discontent. The reality of connecting these two groups of people is a potential possibility brought by immigration, and they benefit from each other. However, racially superior Asia rarely opens to immigrants.

5. Correct the flawed politics in Asia

Asia calls for democracy and better governance to improve the foundation of a stronger economy and a decent middle class society. However, by some measures, economic development has cultivated too little democracy in Asia, which is contrary to the hope of political scientists.

There are serious defects in the political structure of Asia, such as oligarchic democracy in Japan and South Korea, mercantilism and soft autocracy in Malaysia and Singapore, and fragile democracy in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal.

6. Combating economic crimes in Asia

One of the multiple consequences of flawed politics is that as Asia is transformed into a global economic center, Asia is also transformed into a global criminal economic center.

Asia is a major participant in many aspects of economic crimes, such as counterfeiting, smuggling, illegal drug manufacturing and transportation, environmental crimes, human trafficking and smuggling, corruption and money laundering, and cyber crimes.

Although flawed politics is one of the reasons for these criminal activities, these criminal activities are eroding the integrity of the country, because state actors are often criminals themselves or collude with criminals.

7. Can Asian countries live in harmony?

Although many factors have supported the revival of Asia in the past half century, the relative peace enjoyed by the region is perhaps the most important factor.

The United States seems to be losing control of Asia, and this situation may accelerate during Trump's administration.

This means that Asian countries need to strengthen cooperation more.

Asia is crowded.