American Studies from Asia

admin February 11, 2026

0 1 5 minutes read

When I first covered Taiwan in the 1980s for The New York Times, it was a dictatorship under martial law, cracking down on dissent and imprisoning dissidents. The per capita income was only $4,000, and the government once tried to bribe me to give friendly help.

Now the world is upside down. Taiwan is today more democratic than the United States, according to the democracy index published by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Similarly, Freedom House ranks Taiwan as freer than the United States.

In addition, Taiwan is a rich technological marvel: Robots help in restaurants, and its citizens enjoy a higher per capita income than the Japanese. Because Taiwan produces more than 90% of the world’s most advanced computers, it may be the single most important center in the world economy.

Similarly, in my first visit to Vietnam in 1989, the income per person was about 100 dollars, and in one hotel my wife and I stayed in (one of the best hotels in Hue city), rats fell like rain on the ceiling of our room.

Last month at my Sheraton hotel in Vietnam, where the per capita income is now about $5,000, there was no rat rain. Buildings line city streets, reflecting an 8 percent economic growth rate, among the highest in the world, and a stock market that is up 37 percent over the past year in dollars. Life expectancy in Ho Chi Minh City is 77 years, longer than other US states.

Thus it traverses a large part of Asia, transformed at an astonishing speed. Some Asian countries have managed to double their economies in less than ten years. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says that emerging economies in Asia (including China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and others) contributed more to global economic growth last year than the rest of the world combined, and will do so again in 2026.

I was able to spend most of my career as an Asia watcher precisely because it was so insignificant in the 1980s that the Times didn’t care to send a young reporter there as a correspondent. This region has been changing so rapidly in recent years that, to borrow from Heraclitus, you cannot enter the same Asia twice. (Actually, that’s not entirely true: Sadly, you can repeatedly enter the same Myanmar and the same North Korea.)

Get editorials, opinion columns, letters to the editor and more in your inbox on weekday mornings. Sign up for the Opinion newsletter.

Asia is not a monolith, but the benefits that first appeared in Japan and the smaller “tiger” economies (Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore) then spread to China and most of Southeast Asia, and more recently to Bangladesh and India. One of the factors was investing in human capital, which is accompanied by smart economic policies.

As American democracy and society have struggled in recent years, caught in a riptide full of power and filled with inequality and discontent, I have wondered about the lessons we Americans can learn from some of Asia’s successes.

Education is power

My focus is the transformative power of education. It’s not a new thought, of course, and it’s one I’ve grappled with since my wife and I began visiting schools in Asia in the 1980s and sending our children to school in Japan in the 1990s. Every time I visit, I am envious of societies that seem to value education more than America.

Inspiration shows the tradition in the Confucian belt of East Asia that the way to glory is learning. Even today in Chinese villages, you occasionally come across an ancient “paifang” monument of a local man hundreds of years ago who obtained the prestigious “jinshi” degree in the state examinations. (When was the last time you saw an American village remember a local Ph.D.?)

In a modern echo, in some East Asian schools I have visited, students and teachers alike have described the “hot” girls and boys as valedictorians. It’s nerd heaven, and this set of values leads many students to work incredibly hard.

Think of Tran Ha Hoang Chau, whom I met in Ho Chi Minh City. He didn’t have money for college but he was determined to get a degree. So he decided to work full time and study full time. After studying all day at university, he then worked all night at a coffee shop, seven days a week.

When did you sleep?

“My chance to sleep is in a coffee shop, between 3 am and 5 am when there aren’t many customers,” he explained. He also caught on weekends, he said.

He did not have enough money to eat and was often hungry. But her persistence paid off, and she began to gain academic recognition for her scientific research, including one award for her work on COVID and one for research on cervical vertebrae. Rewards included cash payments that allowed him to eat more food.

That respect for education is the reason why Singapore’s schools are among the best in the world, with those in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan also in the mix.

We Americans invest in our children’s education, but we are not eager to pay to educate other people’s children. In Taiwan, by contrast, the constitution stipulated for decades that education, culture and science must be at least 15% of the national budget; the law he amended mandates that at least 22.5% of the total revenue of the consolidated budget of the government at all levels goes to education. (In the United States, education accounts for just over 2% of the federal budget and one-third of state and local spending.)

The important thing is to read

Obviously, not all Asian children are paragons, and there is a lot of poverty, inequality and injustice. Education is not a panacea; North Korea seems to have decent schools but is poor and dictatorial. But especially in Confucian-influenced countries, the respect for education is so deep that it can even destroy the hormones of youth.

“Dating or having a boyfriend is not necessary,” said Phan Thi My Duyen, 20, a technology student at Ho Chi Minh City University. “The most important thing for me is schoolwork.”

It keeps him busy. Duyen developed a tool to measure soil parameters so farmers can understand how to add fertilizer to improve crops. Then he built himself an S-RAM machine which I will tell you about when I understand it.

Duyen, who grew up in a rural area, benefited from a non-profit company called U-Go, which was started by a former Microsoft executive named John Wood. I love U-Go, which provides scholarships of up to $800 each so that bright, low-income women in Asia and Africa can attend university.

Can we build this kind of academically focused culture in America?

In any case, many in East Asia complain that their programs work hard for children, deprive them of joy, and focus too much on memorization and not enough on creativity. Yes, all of that is true.

But couldn’t we Americans bend a little towards Asia? We don’t need to build a memorial arch outside the home of Ph.D. each, but maybe we can handle a little comfort about academic mediocrity? Maybe we can acknowledge the imbalance in local school funding that results in sending rich kids to better schools and poor kids to weaker schools? Maybe politicians can stop misleading universities and taxing their gifts? What if we respected people’s money as money?

Nicholas Kristof is a columnist for the New York Times.

admin February 11, 2026

0 1 5 minutes read