[2009.04.11]In the shade of banyan tree 菩提树下

Banyan

In the shade of the banyan tree
菩提树下
Apr 8th 2009
From The Economist print edition

It’s time for a column about half the world’s people

SOME 165 years, 161 years and 114 years since its correspondents first filed reports respectively from Calcutta, Shanghai and Yokohama, The Economist this week launches a column on Asian affairs. We have taken a while, but is this not, after all, to be the Asian century? We think probably so.
《经济学家》的通讯员曾经分别在165，161和114年前首次从加尔各答，上海和横滨发来报道，而本周，本刊将开始刊登亚洲事务专栏。虽然破费周章，但是无论如何，二十一世纪不是所谓的“亚洲的世纪”吗？我们认为大概就是如此。

For some, however, dedicating a column to the idea of Asia is to jump the gun by many years. Lexington writes of a clearly etched polity with a written constitution, Bagehot an unwritten one. A constitution is still not within the grasp of the European Union, but the “European project” provides a justifiable basis for Charlemagne. In Asia, an insipid collection of regional and sub-regional clubs amounts to something far short of a continental project. The last powerful intellectual push for pan-Asianism was promoted nearly a century ago by Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali Nobel laureate. He was rapturously received on tours in China and Japan, where he urged people to counter Western imperial might and material with sacrifice and an Asian spiritualism.
然而在一些人看来，专门为亚洲开辟一个专栏似乎为时过早。列克星敦以书面方式记录下了一个明显已经被时间侵蚀的政治体制，而白志浩则是以非书面的方式。欧盟仍然无法达成一套宪法，但是所谓的“欧洲计划”却能为查理大帝用作自我辩护的依据。在亚洲，地区和次地区的联合加总起来显得毫无生气，远未能达到一个洲际方案的标准。上一次知识分子争取范亚洲化的运动还是在近100年前由诺贝尔奖得主，孟加拉诗人泰戈尔所倡导的。他在日本和中国受到热烈欢迎，而他则鼓励那里的人们以牺牲精神和一种亚洲的唯心理论来对抗西方帝国主义的强权和物质思想

Yet Tagore was more often rejected. The head of the nascent Chinese Communist Party mocked dreamers like him for seeking to “destroy our railroads, our steamships and our printing presses in order to return to woodblock printing, the canoe carved from a tree-trunk, the wheelbarrow.” Imitation of the West seemed wiser than atavism, not least among Japanese, who in the 1930s dressed pan-Asianism in wolf’s clothing. Any broader Asian dream must escape from the grotesque shadow of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, the name given to dignify Japan’s occupation of its neighbours in the 1930s and 1940s.
然而大多情况下泰戈尔的意见都不为人们所接受。中国共产党初期的领袖曾经嘲笑像他这样想要“摧毁我们的铁路，蒸汽船和印刷机以求回到木板印刷，独木舟和渡轮手推车时代”的说梦的痴人。模仿西方似乎比倒行逆施显得更加明智，尤其是对于在30年代披着范亚洲化羊皮的日本狼。任何对于亚洲实现更加广泛联系的梦想都应该摆脱大东亚共荣圈的的丑陋阴影。日本人用这一名词来美化其在三四十年代对其领国的侵略行径。

That name itself highlights another problem, that of geography. For most of its history, Asia has not just been indifferent to its own existence, as Bill Emmott, a former editor of this newspaper, puts it in “Rivals”, his book about China, India and Japan. There has also been confusion about quite where Asia is. For East Asia, Japan’s militarists had in mind those places heavily touched by Confucianism (China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan), plus Indochina, the Malay Peninsula and the island states of the Philippines and Indonesia. Yet much of this area is well south of South Asia, big chunks of which are still north of the modern definition of East Asia. Central Asia, belying its label, is on the edge of this space politically as well as physically. The continent, as we noted when we introduced an Asia section in The Economist in 1987, is a “geographical accident”, stretching for our purposes from Kazakhstan in the north-west to New Zealand in the south-east and from the Maldives in the south-west to the northern tip of Japan.
这个名词本身在地理意义上就反应了另一个问题。长久以来，亚洲对于自身存在的意识十分淡薄，就像本报前任编辑Bill Emmott在他所著的关于中国，印度及日本的一本名为《对手》的书中所写的那样。日本的军国主义者谈到东亚想到的就是受儒家文化影响深重的国家（中国大陆，台湾，韩国和日本）再加上印度支那，马来半岛和菲律宾和印尼这两个岛国。然而以上许多地区都在南亚的南边，而南亚地区相当大一部分处在现在所说的“东亚”的北边。而中亚地区则实际名不副实，他并非在亚洲中心，而是在东亚的边缘，地理上政治上均是如此。就向本报在1987年引入亚洲版块时所强调的那样，这一个大洲是一个“地理意外”，而我们这一版块所指的亚洲，西北方向至哈萨克斯坦，东南方向至新西兰，西南方向至马尔代夫，最北端则是日本。

The suspicion lingers that Asia is a Western construct. Yet the search for an Asian identity is growing. It forms the backdrop to the annual East Asia Summit, held this year in Thailand from April 10th, grouping the ten South-East Asian countries with not just their partners in China, Japan and South Korea but India, Australia and New Zealand as well. The powerful impulse for co-operation is materialism based on rapid economic development: the antithesis of Tagore’s invocation. Japan raced down this path to prosperity 150 years ago. At the turn of this century, it looked as though China would have the field pretty much to itself, having brought 250m out of poverty since its autarky ended in 1978. But India was also throwing off many self-imposed shackles, and has since thrust itself forward. And Asia has prospered. If differences in prices among countries are taken into account, its share of world GDP has gone from 26% in 1990 to 38% in 2007.
人们对于这样一个亚洲概念颇有微词的地方是其西方式的结构。但是越来越多的人都开始找寻一种亚洲身份的定义，这就成为了东亚年度峰会的背景。今年的东亚峰会于4月10日在泰国召开，与会的不仅有是个东南亚国家及其来自中国，日本和韩国的伙伴，还包括印度，澳大利亚和新西兰。快速的经济发展使得合作的强烈动力变为现实，这恰恰与泰戈尔所乞求的背道而驰。日本150年前就踏上了繁荣的道路。而本世纪初，中国却似乎成为了这片舞台的主角，自从1978年其封闭经济终结至今，中国已有2亿5千万人脱离了贫困。但是印度也甩掉了许多自身背负的包袱，并自此奋力前行。亚洲就此繁荣起来。如果考虑不同国家价格水平的差异，亚洲占世界GDP的比率已经从1990年的26%增长到了2007年的38%。

To many in China and India, this marks a return to historical greatness. There remains a long way to go. Both countries’ economies were relatively much bigger before the West’s industrial revolution. For now, growth is bringing wealth, respect and freedom of action. The global economic slowdown, however hard it is hitting Asia, may in relative terms serve to bolster Asian influence. After all, the world looks to China as an engine of growth. Japan leads the drive to boost the resources of the IMF as the backstop to national economies in crisis.
对于许多中国和印度的人而言，这标志着这两国又重回历史性的大国地位。然而前路漫漫。这两个经济体相比工业革命之前的欧洲国家规模都要大许多。目前，经济增长正带来财富，尊重和行为自由。无论全球经济放缓对于亚洲造成了多大的打击，都可能相对提升亚洲的影响力。毕竟，世界都将中国看作增长引擎。而促进IMF资源增长来增援处于危机中的国家经济的任务则由日本领军。

Trade is already promoting economic integration. Two-fifths of Asian exports, and rising, are intra-regional even if half that share forms part of a global supply-chain anchored in the West. But the political process may in the end prove even more profound. The region must see that the simultaneous rise of two continent-sized big powers is peaceful. A main issue is whether or when China will seek to regain its historical role as East Asian leader. Another is whether India has definitively left the problems of its subcontinent behind it, or will again be held back by the bitter disputes with its neighbours. The chief Asian project will be to enmesh both countries into a broader set of economic and security norms, while ensuring a continued security presence for the United States, still the region’s top dog in military terms. Failure would put paid to notions of an Asian century.
贸易正在促进经济一体化。亚洲出口量的五分之二都是地区内贸易，并且这一份额仍在增长之中，尽管这也是以西方国家为中心的全球供应链的一部分。然而，政治进程最终可能被证明是更为深远的。这一地区必须确保两个面积达一个大洲大小的大国的同时崛起是和平的。一个主要的问题在于中国是否会寻求重新赢回其东亚领导的历史地位，或者它何时会这样做。另一个问题是印度是否已经完全让次大洲的问题成为历史，还是会又被其同邻国之间的纷争缚住手脚。现在亚洲的主要任务是将这两个国家都归到一套更加广泛的经济安全标准当中，同时确保美国继续维持安定局面。从军事上看，美国仍然是这一地区的佼佼者。失败则会让亚洲世纪的观念化为乌有。

Asian values
So why Banyan? A dearth of pan-Asian images speaks volumes, but the banyan tree serves better than most, for it or similar trees are found somewhere in most Asian countries. The banyan spans Asia’s spirituality and its entrepreneurialism. The Bodhi tree, under which Buddha attained enlightenment, was a banyan by another name. Gujarati merchants conducted business under it, and the Portuguese lent their name, banyan, to the tree. It stuck.
那么为什么选榕树呢？泛亚洲形象的缺乏意义重大，但是榕树却最为适合，因为在大多数亚洲国家都有榕树或者类似的树木存在。榕树即代表了亚洲的精神又代表了其经济意识。佛是在菩提树下悟道的，菩提又名榕树。古吉拉特的商人在这种树下做生意，所以葡萄牙人就取商人的称呼，banyan，用作这种树的名称并流传至今。

In early March, in Perak in Malaysia, the state assembly convened an emergency session under a tree. It was, said outraged national ministers, a return to the jungle, making Malaysia a laughing-stock. We beg to differ. An ancient connection exists between public business and the banyan tree, as between its huge overarching shade and its deep intertwining roots. In South-East Asia, and Java in particular, the shade was a place of learning and a site where rulers vowed justice. Those are Asian values to which Banyan will happily subscribe
三月上旬，在马拉西亚的perak， 国会在一棵树下召开了一次紧急会议。而义愤填膺的国家部长们说这是倒退到丛林时代，使得马来西亚成为众人的笑柄。我们恕不同意。公共事务和榕树之间有一种久远的联系，就像其拱形的树荫和其相互交缠的深根之间的联系一样。在东南亚，尤其是爪洼岛，树荫是学习的场所，也是统治者宣誓遵守正义的地方。这些都是榕树乐于赞同亚洲的价值观。

 

译者/wuxuenib:  http://www.ecocn.org/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=18578&extra=page%3D1