Rebalancing needed all over the place, including SE Asia
Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 4:34PM 
FT story on "rail renaissance" in SE Asia. Driver? "There is a realisation that they should do more to tap into intra-regional trade." So says a UN RR expert out of Bangkok.
Why must they do more?
SE Asia sees writing on wall: the region as a whole cannot rely on Europe and America to same degree on export-driven growth. So, to keep up with networking China, SE Asia, which has talked about a common market by 2015 but done little to do it (why bother when the export-driven growth remains hot?), now feels some real urgency to begin. Infrastructure is considered the big bottleneck.
Hence the $2.2B investment plan so the region's RR consists of more than just that coastal line that wraps around.
Goal is to make consumer goods travel better through SE Asia, cut down supply chain costs to rest of world, and open up another land bridge route between China and India--more to the latter's east coast than the current one. On all routes, the RR vision competes with paved roads, but the logic overall is, the more the merrier.
Some will look at this and see "regionalism replaces globalization!" But in truth, we're talking about a filling-in-the-blanks dynamic long overdue. If anything, this is globalization spreading far deeper and more pervasively across the region, because all this intra-regional connectivity allows everybody more rapid access to everybody else.
Reader Comments (1)
An actual occurrence in MSM about not fearing china, with many of the tipping points you refer to (per capita income on par with US later in 20xx if all goes swimmingly, but hurdles in population and representation to overcome could prove substantial).
I have a takeaway that the systems in China and the systems in America allow for the same end states, but the systems in America seem more harmonious (pol <--> econ <--> social), so that allows the US to roll over the speedbumps.
We went through growing pains to get here (RevWar, CivilWar, CivRightMvmt, WWI, etc). How well suited are the current Chinese systems to overcome the similar growing pains? Teenagers all face the same suite of hurdles, but some adapt, improvise, and overcome better because of internal and external support systems. Is the personal growth analogy appropriate here?