Asia's unspoken codes and discreet thought customs

Of course, all cultural traditions have their own codes and customs of thought. What is important today about those originating from China's broad Confucian tradition is the role they play in defining elites throughout East and South East Asia. This has assumed an acute importance as the economies of the region have flourished in manufacturing and applied technology as the US and other Western economies have declined in these areas.

This Confucian success might be summed up as the exploitation by Confucian strategists of Western corporate vulnerability. Bolstered by the dogma of the free marketplace, few corporate managers can resist the temptation of quick and easy profits facilitated through off-shoring production capacity to cheaper and more capable management and labour. There seems to be no capacity to reflect on the longer term consequences of short term fixes.

Over more than half a century the West has found no way to identify and respond to this challenge in a manner that leads to effective counter strategies. In the process, Confucian elites have drawn their own conclusions about the ideals and realities of Western democracy and marketplaces and their vulnerability to corporate manipulation and corruption.

The importance of all this should be highlighted by the way in which successive Asian states have surprised, even astounded, the West by the pace with which they have transformed their own economies and their relationships with the West over the past half century. The inability of the West generally, and Australia in particular, to comprehend behaviour based on unfamiliar cultural certainties is now becoming critical.

As Western credibility and authority are undermined by financial crises, self-defeating small wars and the increasing abuse of existing international structures, initiatives like the G20 are likely discreetly viewed in the Confucian world as little more than futile gestures. Australians who praise the Foreign Minister for his role in its establishment simply expose their own failure to follow relevant developments and the growing marginalisation of the global institutions set up around 1945.

Indeed, Australia's recent Mandarin speaking Prime Minister highlighted this illiteracy by choosing to use his language skills to criticise Chinese policy in Tibet before students at Beijing University, while declaring himself a true friend (zhengyou) of China. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation in Tibet, there is enough public information available on the internet to alert any intelligent person to the likelihood that this would be interpreted by people who matter in Beijing as support for hostile clandestine activity in a region of China.

Our then Prime Minister was extraordinarily clumsy in his rudeness, insensitivity, naivety and naked exposure of his true loyalties.

While his behaviour may come across to some in the Australian electorate as frank and robust diplomacy, or something of the kind, it simply invited reflection amongst Chinese that he was a fool with no subtlety, or substance.

Until more Australians in positions of political and diplomatic influence learn to look at the world from the perspective of cultures that many still regard as somehow backward, these types of follies are only likely to multiply. In a world entering a period of major transition because of self-inflicted financial crises and other follies in the West, this does not augur well for our future.

No longer is economic productivity the object of strategic calculation today. That battle has been lost by the West. Today's struggle is to determine the reordering of power, influence and institutions in a world where Anglo-American certainties are rapidly becoming little more than historical footnotes. A powerful, if not the major, influence in that reordering will derive from the "unspoken codes and discreet thought customs" of Confucian Asia.