HOW HE SEES IT U.S. takes economic beating in Asia

By JAMES PINKERTON
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
BANGKOK, Thailand -- One of these days, Americans are going to throw their weight around and discover that others have even more weight than they do.
That hasn't happened yet, but it will soon, here in Asia. And such counter-weighting will come as a surprise to Americans, who should be paying attention but aren't.
This city of 6 million looks like Tokyo or Seoul a few decades ago. That is, most of the people are poor, but they are hard-working, gadget-crazed and focused on getting ahead.
Like the other Asian economic tigers before them, Thais are cutting corners on their way to wealth. The Bangkok Post reports that 80 percent of the software used here is pirated. That's bad, although elsewhere in Asia the figures are worse; in China, an estimated 92 percent of software is ripped off. Software thievery costs software makers -- most of them American -- some $29 billion a year.
A similar contempt for Western intellectual property is shown toward pharmaceuticals. The big idea coming from the recent AIDS conference here was that the "pharma" companies should either give away their AIDS medicines or give away their patents, so that generic drug makers -- there are many such companies here and many more in India -- can make the profits instead.
Thievery
Some will justify such thievery as being justified by the life-saving nature of the drugs at issue. But it's harder to justify the action of China, which recently canceled Pfizer's patent for Viagra, enabling the drug to be made generically and locally. That single decision chipped billions off of the value of the Manhattan-based company, including benefits to its employees.
Yet, Americans seem heedless. Most don't follow foreign news, even when it affects their own well-being -- and the U.S. government is almost entirely focused on the Middle East. And so, if present trends continue, at about the time that the United States succeeds in pacifying Fallujah, the Chinese economy will have grown larger than America's.
Indeed, the investment firm of Goldman Sachs projects that in 2050 China's gross domestic product will be 25 percent bigger than ours, while India's GDP will be three-fourths that of the United States. To be sure, America's per-capita income will still be much higher, but power -- military as well as economic -- is a function of aggregate totals, not individual shares.
And while forecasts are notoriously unreliable, signs of this geopolitical shift abound, even if they are not much noticed back in the United States. Two years ago, President George W. Bush labeled North Korea as part of the "axis of evil," but since then Uncle Sam has lost interest. The Pentagon has even announced plans to withdraw a third of U.S. forces from South Korea. And so the United States plays from a weakened position.
Earlier this month, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice traveled to Beijing to seek China's help on disarming Pyongyang's nuclear weapons. But the Chinese round-filed Rice's request; they wanted to send a much different message. The headline in the July 15 Bangkok Post was blunt: "US told to stop arms to Taiwan." Probably not one American in a hundred knows that Beijing regards Taiwan as a part of China in the same way that Americans view Long Island as part of America. That comparison doesn't necessarily make the Chinese morally correct, but it does suggest that they are ultimately prepared to go to war for the island.
When China was weak, the United States paid little price for putting its "strategic umbrella" over Taiwan. But how high will that price be when China has more resources than we do? One straw in the wind: The Washington Times reports that China has developed a new submarine. American intelligence had no inkling of the program's existence until a sub was spotted being finished in a shipyard. We must wonder: What else do the Chinese have up their sleeve?
And so it goes with Asia. Since we are not paying attention, we are being beat out economically and one day, perhaps, we will be beat out militarily.
X James Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.