Asia Awakes, America Sleeps : PACIFIC DESTINY Inside Asia Today <i> by Robert Elegant (Crown: $24.95; 511 pp.; 0-517-57234-6)</i>

Less photogenic than the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, but even more revolutionary, Asia’s dynamism in manufacture and trade is mushrooming into a full-blown assertion of global economic dominance. To keep from panicking, Americans to a large extent seem to be planting their heads firmly in sand.

This is the situation that Robert Elegant addresses in his new book, “Pacific Destiny: Inside Asia Today.” If we do not acknowledge the problem, we have no chance of overcoming it, he argues: “Complacency is the greatest single obstacle to the Western--and American--revival.”

Famed for his best-selling novels (“Dynasty,” “Mandarin,” “Manchu”), Elegant also is a veteran correspondent who spent a quarter of a century in Asia reporting for Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times. Having witnessed both the personal industriousness of Asians as well as the industrialization of their nations, he urges Westerners--and Americans in particular--to redouble their efforts to restore competitiveness with Asia.

But this is the work harder/spend less/save more refrain that has been chanted by countless others and which, no matter how worthy, seems to be falling on unwilling ears. What sets Elegant apart from this crowd is his approach to the future through the past. Destiny, after all, is shaped by historical context.

Elegant believes that Americans, never ones to be forced into anything, might galvanize into action quickly if they could get a clear picture of what they’re up against. And so, by train, ferry, auto and plane, Elegant hauls his readers on a country-by-country tour of Asia, investigating the backgrounds from which these economic powerhouses have sprung.

The itinerary is erratic. The book hopscotches from Taiwan to South Korea to Japan to Malaysia, with Australia thrown in for good measure, before ever reaching China, the stepmother (sometimes wicked) to many of these countries. It is a complicated tapestry of cultures brought together and wrenched apart, of ruthless invasions and bloody retreats, forced assimilation and self-imposed isolation. Elegant emphasizes the unique character of each country, but underlying most of them he traces the common thread of Confucianism.

A pervasive set of ethics rather than a religion, Confucianism stresses that harmony is the desired state of being--and that it can be achieved if superiors and inferiors know their places and act accordingly. Human nature the world over tells us that good behavior does not always arise spontaneously, so practical Confucianism has buttressed itself with rewards and punishments of considerable magnitude--leading to various manifestations of authoritarian rule throughout East Asian history, which in turn have forged what is an essential Asian hallmark today: the close coordination among academia, industry, government and finance.

This tight orchestration is a fact that does not rest easily with the democratic sensibilities of Americans, but after more than two millennia, Confucianism has etched itself into the soul of Asia. By comparison, the United States’ 2OO-year history comes off as a social experiment. Elegant quotes one Asian who puts things into perspective with this gentle reproach, “Who ever said that democracy was the eleventh commandment?”

It is difficult acknowledging our own arrogance. Equally difficult is recognizing that cultural bias is a two-way street: Asians increasingly are looking down on us as ineffective, spoiled and lazy. With this added insult to injury, we must take care that our reaction does not degenerate into what some already are capitalizing upon--putting an end-of-the-century spin on that old standard, “the yellow peril.”

Even this book’s self-appointed tour guide, fluent in Chinese and Japanese, and conversant in the politics and customs of East Asia, carries cultural baggage of his own that sometimes proves to be cumbersome. Elegant’s occasionally harsh remarks crop up unexpectedly, like islands in the mists of the Tsushima Straits.

About the Japanese, he declares that they are “hollow . . , no immutable values sustain them.” However, he concedes elsewhere that he has “always been charmed by Japanese women, who are virtually a different--and superior--race from their men.” Similarly jarring generalizations are applied to the Chinese, but Elegant is more forgiving toward the Australians when, after portraying them as unambitious fun-lovers who are “mollycoddled by their officious nanny state,” he confides that they still somehow inspire in him a “visceral optimism.”

Why Australia, a completely separate continent, is included at all in a book subtitled “Inside Asia Today” gives rise to the complaint that Elegant’s selection of subjects is curiously arbitrary.

The Soviet Far East, for example, gets from Elegant only a few nods in passing, no chapter of its own, despite its resource-rich lands along the Northern Pacific Basin, its connections with North Korea and China, its naval strength in the Pacific, and the avowed intentions emanating not only from Moscow but also from within the region to establish itself as a significant Pacific presence.

Similarly, Elegant’s valuable observations about tough but unlucky Vietnam, a country that is in far more desperate straits as the victor over the United States than was any country ever defeated by the United States, are buried in a chapter that lumps together Thailand and all of Indochina.

Elegant rightly asserts that it was the engagement of Vietnamese and American troops that freed up the rest of Asia to engage in economy-building during a few critical decades past. He further suggests that a softening in the official U.S. stance toward Vietnam would give Washington the ability to play Hanoi off intransigent Beijing. Surely these provocative ideas deserve exploration in a book about the Pacific region’s destiny, but Elegant only touches upon them before hurrying on to the next venue.

In fact, reading this book is as fascinating and frustrating as taking the kind of tour that trots one through eight countries in seven days. Elegant spouts off so much anecdotal wisdom at such a breakneck pace, it’s hard to cull the truly illuminating from that which is merely remarkable.

Although it was his intention not to stray too far into the future but instead to provide foundations upon which today’s young generation can build, Elegant does provide a hint of what’s to come by sprinkling population-growth statistics throughout his book.

Whether the burgeoning babies of today can be accommodated as the adults of the next century, he suggests, will be the ultimate determinant in whether the region’s destiny can indeed be Pacific.