BRAVE NEW WORLD : FAMILY TIES IN THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMY : Ethnic Tribes--From the Jews to the Japanese, Chinese and Indians--Are Reshaping International Commerce

THE 20TH CENTURY IS ENDING WITH HARBINGERS OF A FUTURE ROOTED DEEPLY, EVEN terrifyingly, in the past. Rather than the triumph of a rational and universal world order, we are witnessing a resurgence of popular interest in ethnic identities, religious roots and ancient affiliations that is shaking societies from the remnants of the former Soviet Empire to the streets of Los Angeles. In the words of sociologist Harold Isaacs: “Science advanced, knowledge grew, nature was mastered, but Reason did not conquer and tribalism did not go away.” * This resurgence contrasts with widespread hopes, sparked by the end of the Cold War, of the dawn of a new age liberated from national, religious and tribal constraints. Indeed, in much of Africa, South Asia and Eastern Europe, this renewal of ethnic and religious sentiments has been devastating, breaking apart many long-established nation states and triggering hideous outbreaks of intolerance and barbarity. * At the same time, and less noticed, we have seen the continued flowering of transnational ethnic groups--or global tribes--that increasingly play important roles in the fostering of both commerce and technological progress. Wherever they have settled, these global tribes have succeeded by combining a strong sense of a common origin and shared values, quintessential tribal characteristics, with two critical factors for success: geographic dispersion and a belief in scientific progress. Whether the Jews or British of the past, or today’s ascendant Asian global tribes, these groups do not surrender their ethnic identity but use their values and beliefs to cope successfully with change.

The continued resurgence of tribalism suggests as well the failure of the ideologies of modernity--whether socialist or capitalist--to answer many of the age-old, fundamental questions about human origins, values and spirituality. Even in a technologically advanced region such as North America, conflicting ethnic tension is escalating, with a concomitant rise in racially based politics and religious intolerance. This intolerance is evidenced by both the large vote for David Duke’s gubernatorial bid in Louisiana as well as the notoriety of such openly anti-Semitic and anti-white figures as professor Leonard Jeffries and minister Louis Farrakhan.

Yet there has been a general, and arguably far more positive, revival of spirituality among Americans. Once seen as doomed by the progress of modernity, religious faith and community seem to be enjoying a new vogue in the post-yuppie ‘90s, with one survey revealing that more than two-thirds of the population sees religion as the answer to many contemporary problems.

This revival of spirituality has been even more dramatic in the former Soviet Union. As the Communist facade fell after 1989, ethnic and religious sentiment blossomed. Mosques, churches, synagogues, Buddhist temples, even pagan shrines swelled with new adherents despite decades of state effort to smash these institutions and identities. For example, the Jewish spirit has revived both among emigrants and those who remained behind in the new Russia.

Shoshana Dworkina, the 19-year-old granddaughter of an old Bolshevik and who once dreamed of teaching Russian literature at a Soviet university, recalls how she was lured back to her roots. “When I was 10, I came home crying, saying, ‘I don’t want to be a Jew’--because other kids yelled at me--’I don’t want to be a Jew,’ ” the soft-spoken student said during a break at a makeshift Jewish school in a Moscow apartment. “But when I entered the university, my Jewish friends took me to the synagogue with other young Jews--they knew only (the song) ‘Avenu Sholem Aleichem’ but that’s enough.”

Similarly, China’s ventures into capitalism have rekindled the strong ethnic ties between Chinese everywhere. After the 1989 Tian An Men massacre, many Chinese, including some second- and third-generation Californians, rallied to the support of the beleaguered students, offering financial and legal assistance. Others were involved in boosting the technical and economic potential of their ancestral homeland.

For some Chinese, such as L.A realtor Lillie Lee, this renewed connection recalls the commitment of ancestors to earlier struggles. Lee’s grandfather, who owned a herbal shop in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, actively supported Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s efforts in 1911 to overthrow the Manchu dynasty. “It is natural for Chinese to help other Chinese,” she says. “Even if we live in California.”

THERE IS NO HINT OF GRANDEUR, NO SHINING CORPORATE LOGO, NO STATUE of modern art outside the imposing 19th-Century mansion on Faubourg Saint Honore. The stuffy, carpeted interior, with antique clocks and pictures, exudes more the hushed, reverently preserved atmosphere of a museum than the manic bustle of a worldwide financial empire.

A man born to wealth, Edmond Rothschild could well have lived a life of leisure. Yet like generations of his family, he is deeply involved in both business and charitable activities from the West Indies to Tel Aviv. “It’s very simple,” says Rothschild, as he drinks coffee in his office overlooking the rooftops of Paris. “Discipline. I received it from my mother and my father and, hopefully, my son is going to give it to his children. It’s the discipline of tradition.”

Jewish families like the Rothschilds, including many far less renowned names, have played a critical role in the development of the world’s greatest cities. Dispersed for most of their history, the Jews have been ideally suited for the role of arbitragers--traders in finance, information as well as goods--across international lines. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, their worldwide networks gave them key roles in the development of the earliest centers of capitalism, such as Venice, Amsterdam and London.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, this discipline--based on the gospel of hard work, thrift and self-help--was vital in the global economic expansion of the British, and later, the Americans. In contrast with their European competitors, notably the French and Spanish, who sought the grandeur of empire, the Anglo-Americans, influenced by the strict moral codes of Protestantism, expanded primarily for commercial advantage.

Although their absolute hegemony has faded, Anglo-Americans are still the world’s largest economic force, accounting for the five largest and nine of the top 15 industrial companies today. London and New York remain the centers for corporate finance on a global basis while California, once the fringe of the Anglo-American world, stands on the global cutting edge of both technology and mass culture.

Worldwide commerce is no longer limited to the traditional global tribes such as the Jewish and the British. It has expanded to other transnational groups, especially those based in Asia. In the 1980s, for example, international business expanded at more than twice the rate of global gross national product, opening the world trading network to an extent never before seen. Between 1978 and 1989, exports of business services--including finances, entertainment and all forms of information--jumped more than sixfold, with the majority of it taking place across continental barriers.

This global integration has been further expedited by improvements in communications technology--initiating what the late media guru Marshall McLuhan called “the age of acoustic space”--that allow dispersed groups to communicate with an ease unimaginable to the scattered traders of the past. Between 1980 and 1989, for example, traffic across international lines increased more than 400% in the United States while the cost of intercontinental calls dropped roughly fivefold.

Based largely on extraordinary organization and industriousness, the Japanese ascendancy has occurred in a manner strikingly at odds with the Jewish or British pattern of permanent settlement. Consisting mostly of temporary corporate sojourners, the Japanese network extends across a vast archipelago--with major outposts in Los Angeles, Bangkok, New York, Dusseldorf and London.

This Japanese “diaspora by design” has developed an economic empire that ranks second only to that of the Anglo-Americans’ in terms of industrial, technological and financial power. Yet the diaspora remains separated from its foreign milieu, whether in East Asia, North America or Europe.

“We are not really with the others,” explains Satoru Nakamura, a London-based executive with the far-flung Marubeni trading firm, over lunch at a restaurant overlooking the Thames. “My family is mainly with other Japanese families. So, really, it’s the same family life, the same business life as in Japan, except that now we’re in England. In a sense, we are still in Japan.”

Although there’s no doubt about the recent ascendancy of the Japanese, in the 1990s it will be the Chinese who will emerge as arguably the most economically important of the Asian global tribes. The roughly 55 million Chinese outside of the mainland, based primarily in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, have accumulated foreign currency reserves that easily surpass those of either the Japanese or the Anglo-Americans. More important, they also are increasingly dominant, both as immigrants and outside investors, in virtually every one of East Asia’s fastest-growing economies, from Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand to the newest “dragon,” Vietnam.

Locally based Chinese immigrants control the majority of corporate assets in Thailand, where they make up less than one-tenth of the total population. Even in Malaysia, where racial discrimination is strong, the Chinese, who make up slightly more than one-third of the population, boast incomes twice those of the average Malay. As Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed admitted: “Whatever we could do, the Chinese could do better and more cheaply.”

Today China, particularly the southern coastal region, boasts the world’s most dynamic industrial economy, growing at double-digit rates for the better part of the past decade. With overseas Chinese accounting for 10 times as much of China’s new foreign investment as the Japanese, the Communist regime in Beijing nominally supervises an economy--and a populace--ever more closely tied to its ultra-capitalistic brethren in the diaspora.

In his office in Taipei, attorney Paul Hsu sees a new transnational “Chinese-based economy” based on ties of common ethnic origin, language and culture. “This is something new, a pioneering effort,” notes Hsu, whose family fled the Communists in the late 1940s and now helps put together major business transactions for technology, real estate and financial interests across the Pacific Basin. “The old government ideology of nation-states will be outmoded. The government won’t lead this effort. Until the late 1970s, the government took the lead, but now the private sector is leading and creating this new thing, this Chinese-based economy.”

As with the Japanese, the Chinese influence is also increasingly being felt outside Asia, especially in North America. Chinese settlements have expanded massively in recent years, more than doubling in the United States during the 1980s. As immigrants, more than simply investors or sojourners, the Chinese influence in places such as California may prove more lasting than that of the Japanese. In Orange County and the Silicon Valley, Chinese entrepreneurs and technical workers have sparked the growth of some of the world’s most innovative electronics manufacturing firms, including personal computer makers Everex Systems and AST Research and Kingston Technologies, which ranked No. 1 on Inc. magazine’s 1992 list of fastest-growing private companies.

Similarly, these entrepreneurs have also spawned the growth of garment manufacturing in cities across the country. Many Chinese, both citizens and those from the diaspora, are helping take the L.A. fashion industry “upmarket.”

Chinese-American Bill Mow, for instance, controls Bugle Boy Industries, based in Simi Valley, and its global network of factories; two Hong Kong investors are partners with Orange County surf wear entrepreneur Steve Hogan in the highly successful Pacific Coast Highway line. These and other entrepreneurs are seeking to extend the state’s youth-oriented casual sportswear beyond its beach-sun-sand image into a more sophisticated look and bring higher-wage design, marketing and final production work to the area.

The Chinese are also emerging as one of the few sources of investment capital to inner-city areas, with dozens of small but growing banks clustered in California and around New York. There are more than 35 banks in the L.A. area alone. Chinese banks, enriched by the increasing wealth of their homeland, are seen by some economists as the ultimate boon to other sluggish regional economies. “There’s nothing wrong with New York,” says George Sternlieb, a leading New York regional economist, “that a million Chinese couldn’t cure.”

Further in the future lies the possible emergence of another great Asian tribe, the Indians. Though burdened by fratricidal divisions and the desperate poverty of hundreds of millions, Indians--Hindus, Muslims, Parsees and Sikhs--have in recent decades developed their own, increasingly potent, global diaspora that spans from North America and Africa to northern Europe and Southeast Asia. In virtually every country in which they have settled, Indians are among the best educated and most entrepreneurial segments of the population.

India boasts one of the world’s deepest reservoirs of scientific and technical talent, accounting for the second-largest English-speaking technical work force in the world. If liberalized and reformed, India could develop into the next powerful global economic force, says Anupam Saranwala, who recently returned home after a decade of working as an engineer in Northern California.

Given the deeply divided state of India today, he admits, such an assertion might seem a product of fancy. Yet only a century ago, similar doubts had been cast about the potential of the Japanese or the Chinese. “We can transfer the results-oriented culture of California to the time-oriented culture of India,” he says during a walk through the crowded streets of Bhangel, where a group of Indian investors from Hong Kong and the Silicon Valley is setting up a computer circuit-board factory. “India has the people and the talent. What they need is the opportunity to perform.”

IF THE RISE OF THE NEW ASIAN ECONOMIC POWERS POSES A CHALLENGE TO American industry and society, the effect on the European psyche may be even more severe. Roughly 10 million immigrants, largely from South Asia or North Africa and crowded into cities such as Paris, Rome, London and Berlin, now confront an increasingly hostile indigenous population increasingly determined to shut off or even reverse the immigration process.

Former Mayor Walter Momper of Berlin, a prominent Social Democrat whose city’s population was composed of 15% foreigners after the reunification in 1989, for instance, shrugs off any suggestion that any German city might evolve along the lines of a Los Angeles. “We are just not a multiracial and multicultural society,” he insists heatedly in an interview. “We are really a pure good German society with a German social and cultural heritage.”

Ultimately the Europeans may regret their opposition to immigration, multiculturalism and integration with the ascendant Asian global tribes. The advanced Western European societies have the slowest-growing labor force in the world. Europe held roughly 15% of the world’s population in 1950; four decades later it accounted for a mere 9% and by the year 2150 will represent less than 4%. The continent, notes French demographer Gerard-Francois Dumont, “is entering a demographic winter.”

But the greatest problem in turning back the newcomers lies not so much in relieving this demographic deficit, but in cutting off a vital source of new energies and skills. As Europe enters the 1990s, the shortages of employees--from skilled technicians to scientists--will likely accelerate. In 1990, Italy, France and Belgium produced barely half the engineers required by their industries and together educated barely as many engineers as South Korea. Without the foreign workers, especially from the huge skilled Chinese and Indian labor markets, says Sighart Nehring, a top adviser for the German government, the European countries in the next decade will face “a decline in the stimulus for technological and economic growth.”

Like the Europeans, North Americans’ future may also depend on their ability to adjust to the multiracial economic realities. Many whites and African-Americans in cities as diverse as Sydney, Vancouver, Miami and New York, as well as Los Angeles, have bristled at what they see as “unfair” economic competition from Asian or Latino immigrants. Australian liberal leader John Howard has openly worried over a possible loss of “social cohesion” because of too many Asians. And in Vancouver, the enormous immigration of Hong Kong Chinese has led some locals to rename their city “Hong-Couver.”

These issues are, if anything, felt more intensely in California. Fears over economic competition, gangs and environmental impacts from immigration have led to mounting tensions among the region’s ethnic groups.

Despite inevitable problems, it seems likely that these immigrants--along with their growing business networks--will become permanently embedded in the economies and cultures of most major American cities. With the United States, and particularly the major cities, facing chronic shortages of investment capital and manufacturing expertise, the benefits of luring cash-rich Asians and other immigrants will likely prove economically irresistible.

Finally, America is ideally suited for the creation of a new cosmopolitan world society, one that draws heavily on the resources of its diverse population. This cosmopolitan model, however, likely will not follow the somewhat discredited patterns epitomized by the term melting pot , in which each group submerges its own identity to that of the majority culture. While in Europe there remains the widespread hope of preserving the “white culture,” in the United States, the assertion of ethnic identity has gained momentum for decades and is rapidly becoming part of our overall urban culture.

Although all too often, advocates of Afro-centric and other new ethnic identities are themselves racist and exclusionary, the general trend toward greater ethnic awareness reflects comfortably the realities of a world increasingly dominated by global tribes. Since the rise of black political leader Marcus Garvey in the early 1900s, a strong movement has developed among blacks to embrace their African roots--forming a kind of a global diaspora with ties not only to Africa but to the Caribbean, South America and Great Britain. Garvey also urged blacks to follow the pattern of communal self-help, which he saw as largely responsible for the success of other ethnic groups, notably the Jews. “Remember always,” he wrote, “that the Jew in his political and economic urge is always first a Jew.”

Garvey’s principles of self-help and ethnic consciousness deeply influenced the preachings of Malcolm X, whose effect on the current generation of African-Americans is only now being fully appreciated. As the 1990s unfolded, this spirit of ethnic identity and self-help has been reinforced by waves of other newcomers such as Mexicans, Russian Jews, Israelis, Arabs, Armenians, Vietnamese, Indians and Koreans who often arrive with not only strong ethnic identities but also important business ties back home.

For some observers and political leaders, this proliferation of new identities contains within it the seeds of disastrous fracturing of our society. Yet, as evidenced by the aftermath of the Soviet Empire, there is likely no force that can prevent the return to religious and ethnic values. Such an embrace of tribalism or religion may seem a regression back to the instinctual, a celebration of the peculiarities and even the irrationality of our species.

The challenge, then, is to harness the positive values of ethnic identity and religion--self-help, discipline and family--to build a society that can compete in an increasingly globalized, multiracial economic universe.