Asia is an artificial construct. But that’s its greatest strength

I was in Bangalore recently, and it wasn’t always pleasant. Born and raised in orderly and well-manicured Singapore, India’s relative chaos challenged me. I got stuck at the airport because I didn’t have my visa-on-arrival documents in order. The wifi didn’t work. Crossing the road, filled with criss-crossing vehicles, can be scary.

My troubles were the result of my own incompetence, mixed in with me being in a totally different landscape. If not for my local colleague, my trip would’ve been much rougher.

Although I’m ethnically Chinese, I’m as much a foreigner in India as an American exchange student backpacking in “exotic” Asia. And here’s a truth: “Asia” is an artificial construct concocted in the West. The Diplomat’s Akhi Pillalamarri writes:

The idea of Asia as a distinct continent is problematic in both a geological and cultural sense. Geologically, there is no particular distinction between Europe and the rest of Asia; together, they sit on the same geological plate, the Eurasian plate.

[…]

Culturally, Asia is also a problematic concept. What is Asia, other than a way of setting apart a group of non-Western cultures from the West? The West, is fairly well defined – to put it simply, it is a civilization that arose from Roman civilization, Christianized, and then went through developments such as the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution. But what, really, is Asia? It consists of cultures as diverse as Japan and the Arabs, who really have no more in common with each other than with Europeans.

From an economic and technological standpoint, there are in reality two Asias, and even that is an over-simplification. On one hand, you have developed Asia, with high mobile and internet penetration, credit card usage, and per-capita income. On the other, there’s less developed Asia, which contains some of the world’s fastest growing economies.

So the notion of a singular Asia is something we discard quickly – and accuse ignorant Westerners of harboring. But we can’t always blame them. Even I sometimes can’t tell apart spoken Japanese from Korean. It also took me a while to figure out the various western English accents.

Yet there’s something appealing in this idea of one Asia.

Think about how technology works. Google made knowledge accessible and free for everyone. Amazon gave small retailers access to the world’s markets. Facebook and Twitter made online publishing democratic and viral in ways that wasn’t possible.

To borrow Thomas Friedman’s words, these technologies flattened the world and leveled the playing field between the haves and have-nots (this is probably naive, but let’s assume there’s a kernel of truth to it).

Which also means that creating a singular Asia – artificial as it is – simply expresses what technologists everywhere have been trying to do for ages.

Silicon Valley’s trash is Asia’s treasure

Asian in origin, but global from day one