Quotes of the Day

Being an American in Asia has never been more humbling. I recently appeared on a panel at a conference in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou with investment guru Jim Rogers and Kirby Daley, an outspoken Hong Kong – based financial strategist. Though both Americans, the two appeared to be engaged in a contest to decide who could bash their home country the hardest. Rogers called China "the next great country of the world," while comparing a debt-burdened America to the failed British Empire. Daley lambasted American economic policy as ill conceived and out of touch. Rogers warned his listeners against a declining U.S. dollar; Daley said the U.S. consumer, who has been the world's most important, was spent as an economic force. The severity of the criticism became so uncomfortable that one Chinese audience member took hold of a microphone and said: "You don't have to say bad things about the United States."

The unmistakable undertone of many of the conversations I have daily is that Americans are a people whose time has come and gone. Asian policymakers tell me of the need to diversify their economies away from the U.S.; corporate leaders talk of building new businesses in other emerging markets; economists predict how China and India will make gains at the expense of the U.S.

To be sure, there's no denying the facts. The U.S. is the world's largest debtor nation and only digging itself in deeper. Respect for corporate America is evaporating. Profligacy produced sham economic growth. A disconnect between Washington's global ambitions and its available resources — what British historian Paul Kennedy calls "imperial overstretch" — has undermined national strength.

I'm fully aware that American hubris and misjudgment — lots of both — have gotten us into the mess we're in. Yet at the same time, I must honestly say I'm proud of America's global achievements. Behind U.S. global expansion was an ideal of a world based on free enterprise, mutual prosperity and open societies. It was that ideal that brought my Holocaust-survivor grandparents through Ellis Island in 1949 in the hopes of rebuilding their lives and finding better opportunities for their 3-year-old daughter — my mother. These ideals have too often been trampled by greed or myopic self-interest. But the positive impact they have had on the world cannot be denied. Asia has risen to new heights of wealth and power partly because of American policy, consumers and corporate practices. As Singapore's patriarch Lee Kuan Yew once told me, "Without the United States providing security and stability throughout the region, there would have been no growth."

That fact has apparently been forgotten. The very concepts behind the American economy are now frowned upon as the sources of the global recession. Instead we hear praise of China's "state capitalism" — the notion that semi-command economics can work better than Economic Man. And what of America's liberal political ideology, which used to inspire suppressed peoples everywhere? I recently gave a talk to about 30 students from China at a journalism class at a Hong Kong university. Riots had erupted in China's Xinjiang province between the indigenous Uighurs and Han Chinese immigrants only days before. The subject quickly turned to Western press coverage of the upheaval, which tended to portray the Uighurs as a beleaguered minority deprived of opportunity. Why, the students asked, do Western media report stories so differently than the Chinese (state-controlled) media? What quickly became clear was their unstated attitude: What right do you Americans have imposing your paradigm on us?

There is no doubt that China is the world's next superpower, but we sometimes forget that this is a nation that can't make safe milk, and where activists vanish from their homes. Look at how China exerts its new global influence — by backing some of the world's most odious regimes, in North Korea, Sudan and Burma. Most pundits mistakenly praise the Chinese system as blindly as they criticize the American one. Many economists ignore China's immense problems that could undermine Chinese growth in the future.

The world has been too quick to dismiss the U.S. Its political culture, though chaotic, allows for the vigorous debate that leads to self-correction, while Americans remain unparalleled in their ability to innovate. That's why the U.S. is still a beacon of hope and opportunity. The number of professionals with advanced degrees who became permanent U.S. residents in fiscal 2008 was eight times greater than in 1999.

During that conference in Guangzhou, a Chinese participant asked, "Is there anything we can learn from America?" I told him I thought there was. "The U.S. has always shown an amazing ability to change itself, to morph into new things," I said. "I'm hoping that it will do so once again." Perhaps I'm nostalgic for a bygone era. Or perhaps I just realize the world is better off with a thriving America than a declining one.

• Michael Schuman
• True, the U.S. has lost its way, but, at its best, it is still a source of inspiration for the world