Amy Chua
New York: Doubleday, 2003
$26.00
228 pp.
Reviewed by David Wilson
Amy Chua's awakening to racial and ethnic reality began more rudely than most. Her aunt, a wealthy ethnic Chinese woman living in the Philippines, was murdered in 1994 by her Filipino servant. What appeared at first to be a random killing turned out to have a decidedly racial undertone. As Chua came to discover, the intense resentment felt by the mostly poor Filipino majority toward the exceedingly wealthy Chinese minority in that country has led to the kidnapping of hundreds of Chinese a year, some of whom are murdered even after a ransom is paid. Others are killed in connection with robberies. The police, who are ethnic Filipino, are "notoriously unmotivated" to investigate crimes against Chinese, Chua says. The servant who murdered her aunt was never apprehended.
The experience got Chua, a Yale law professor who is herself ethnically Chinese, thinking about ethnic relations in countries where a majority and a minority share space and compete economically. She turned her attention to the United States' push to implement its favored political and economic systems—democracy and free markets—in countries around the world. She concludes in her book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, that the effort can lead to disaster.
In the many countries with a "market-dominant minority," free markets and democracy are two trains on a collision course, she says, especially in countries where the markets and the democracy were rapidly introduced. Free markets concentrate wealth in the hands of an able and connected few, while democracy concentrates power in the hands of the poorer majority. When the few constitute one race or ethnicity and the majority constitute another, the result is chronic tension, repressive regimes, and genocide. This she calls the "sobering lesson of globalization over the last twenty years."
As might be expected from a liberal academic, Chua ignores racial differences in intelligence and temperament as explanations for differences in economic success. Only briefly does she mention "cultural differences" as a possible explanation. Disappointingly, she seems to deny any biological basis for race at all. "Ethnicity," she says, preferring the word to race, is "not a scientifically determinable status" but "a kind of group identification, a sense of belonging to a people ... That ethnicity can be at once an artifact of human imagination and rooted in the darkest recesses of history—fluid and manipulable yet important enough to kill for—is what makes ethnic conflict so terrifyingly difficult to understand and contain."
The reader eager for Chua's brilliant solution to the world's ethnic conflicts will be disappointed; in fact, to her credit, she acknowledges there may be none. A solution like "additional education spending" typically "produces depressingly few benefits," she says, and believably so. She dismisses forced assimilation. I was surprised to hear Chua recommend affirmative action as a possible ameliorative, but she righted herself by later acknowledging that affirmative action often creates more tension than it soothes. Beyond that, she resorts to that liberal catchall, more spending on the poor. But even here, Chua so honestly qualifies the benefits to be had as to acknowledge that spending, too, can be of little help. If nothing else, it will demonstrate humility, she says. As an example, she cites Coca-Cola's construction of El Paplote, a children's museum in Mexico City.
Whether such gestures yield results is questionable. If, in fact, huge cash donations by wealthy white Americans to poor black and Hispanic Americans served to lessen racial tension, then Bill Gates's recent donation to New York City public schools would mean that white people in New York City would not be subject to racial attacks by blacks and Hispanics. And yet they are. In recent decades, whites have clamored to present blacks with gift baskets on bended knee, and yet blacks have only become more resentful, more demanding, and more violent. Similarly, the American government's coddling of illegal immigrants has resulted in only more brazen demands by the immigrants and their lobbyists.
Chua concludes that "Market dominance is surprisingly intractable, and resistant to government-sponsored 'corrective' ethnic policies." But as Chua herself seems to admit, it isn't really "market dominance" that's so intractable. After all, as Chua details, a racial majority can and will seize the assets of a market-dominant minority through nationalization, which may dampen economic performance but certainly solves the problem of market dominance by a minority. What Chua really means is that racial difference is surprisingly intractable, and resistant to government-sponsored corrective ethnic policies.
It is interesting that Chua would lay out so thoroughly the incompatibility of democracy, markets, and multiracialism. Her critical praise on the dust jacket takes her work to be an indictment of "markets" and "democracy." Needless to say in this day and age, "multiracialism" is left out. For Chua, as for so many others, multiracialism is a given that we must work around. But why? If democracy and free markets are not compatible with multiracialism, is she suggesting that totalitarianism and communism are? In fact, she might be: Tito, she recalls, kept a lid on ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia with just those tools.
That should be a sobering insight for the multitudes of conservative and liberal race-deniers, and it is perhaps the best insight to be drawn from World on Fire. If the price of multiracialism is the loss of freedom, do we want to pay it?