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Transcript of Asia’s Rise – How And When: Hans Rosling

Read the full transcript of Swedish physician and academic Hans Rosling’s talk titled “Asia’s Rise — How And When” at TED Talks conference. (Nov 25, 2009)

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

A Personal Awakening in Bangalore

HANS ROSLING: Once upon a time, at the age of 24, I was a student at St. John’s Medical College in Bangalore. I was a guest student during one month of a public health course, and that changed my mindset forever. The course was good, but it was not the course content in itself that changed the mindset. It was the brutal realization the first morning that the Indian students were better than me.

You see, I was a study nerd. I loved statistics from a young age, and I studied very much in Sweden. I used to be in the upper quarter of all courses I attended, but in St. John’s, I was in the lower quarter. And the fact was that Indian students studied harder than we did in Sweden. They read the textbook twice or three times or four times. In Sweden, we read it once and then we went partying.

And that, to me, that personal experience was the first time in my life that the mindset I grew up with was changed. And I realized that perhaps the Western world will not continue to dominate the world forever. And I think many of you have the same sort of personal experience. It’s that realization of someone you meet that really meant you changed the ideas about the world. It’s not the statistics, although I try to make it funny.

Predicting Asia’s Economic Rise

And I will now here on stage try to predict when that will happen, that Asia will regain its dominant position as the leading part of the world, as it used to be over thousands of years. I will do that by trying to predict precisely at what year the average income per person in India and China will reach that of the West. And I don’t mean the whole economy, because to grow an economy of India to the size of the UK, that’s a piece of cake with one million people. But I want to see when will the average pay, the money for each person per month in India and China, when will that have reached that of UK and the United States.

1858: A Watershed Year

But I will start with a historical background, and you can see my map if I get it up here. I will start 1858. 1858 was a year of great technological advancement in the West. That was the year when Queen Victoria was able for the first time to communicate with President Buchanan through the transatlantic telegraphic cable, and they were the first to Twitter transatlantically.

And I’ve been able, through this wonderful Google and Internet, to find the text of the telegram sent back from President Buchanan to Queen Victoria, and it ends like this:

This telegraph is a fantastic instrument to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty and law throughout the world.

Those are nice words. But I got sort of curious of what he meant with liberty and liberty for whom. And we will think about that when we look at the wider picture of the world in 1858, because 1858 was also a watershed year in the history of Asia.

1858 was the year when the courageous uprising against the foreign occupation of India was defeated by the British forces, and India was up to 89 years more of foreign domination. 1858 in China was the victory in the Opium War by the British forces, and that meant that foreigners, as it said in the treaty, was allowed to trade freely in China. It meant paying with opium for Chinese goods.

And 1858 in Japan was the year when Japan had to sign the Harris Treaty and accept trade on favorable conditions for the US, and they were threatened by those black ships there that had been in Tokyo Harbor over the last year. But Japan, in contrast to India and China, maintained its national sovereignty. And let’s see how much difference that can make.

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Visualizing Global Economic History

And I will do that by bringing these bubbles back to a Gapminder graph here, where you can see each bubble is a country, the size of the bubble here is the population. On this axis, as I used to have income per person in comparable dollar, and on that axis I have life expectancy, the health of people. And I also bring an innovation here. I have transformed the laser beam into an ecological, recyclable version here in Green India.

And we will see, you know. Look here, 1858, India was here, China was here, Japan was there, United States and United Kingdom was richer over there, and I will start the world like this. India was not always like this level. Actually, if we go back into the historical record, there was a time hundreds of years ago when the income per person in India and China was even above that of Europe.

But 1850 had already been many, many years of foreign domination, and India had been de-industrialized. And you can see that the countries who were growing their economy was United States and United Kingdom, and they were also, by the end of the century, getting healthier. And Japan was starting to catch up. India was trying down here. Can you see how it starts to move there?

The Impact of National Sovereignty

But really, really, national sovereignty was good for Japan, and Japan is trying to move up there, and in the new century, health is getting better, United Kingdom, United States. But careful now, we are approaching the First World War, and the First World War, you know, we’ll see a lot of deaths and economical problems here. United Kingdom is going down, and now comes the Spanish flu also.

And then, after the First World War, they continue up.