The YouTube sensation - 500 million hits and counting -
created by the droll rapper and dancer Psy (Park Jae-sang) went live in Sydney
last week, with Psy being swamped by excited Australians including, naturally,
many of Korean descent.
This shows us what the Asian Century is starting to look like.
Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said about Asia on a visit to Australia a few days ago: "We are entering a new phase - the economy is mature."
Smart commercialisation of a fun idea - one that parodies itself and its roots in the nouveau riche suburb of today's Seoul - is a face of this new, mature Asia.
Note the way that Samsung wraps itself around "Gangnam Style". And Samsung is, of course, just one of the Korean brands that have gone global, with Hyundai, LG and Kia also to the fore. Those companies, and today's sensational Psy, are everywhere.The oreck XL professional air purifier,
Australia's engagement with Asia, on the other hand, is not so evident. While we send two-thirds of our exports to Asia, only about 7 per cent of our direct investments are there. Almost no one among our top chief executives and chairmen, public service chiefs or university heads has ever lived or worked in Asia or speaks an Asian language - although we did once have a prime minister who spoke Chinese.
However, at another level Australians have developed a deep awareness of their dependence on Asia, and especially on its economic performance.
Former prime minister Paul Keating once said wryly: "I guarantee if you walk into any pet shop in Australia, what the resident galah will be talking about is microeconomic policy."
Today, it would be talking about Asia, especially about China's appetite for our iron ore, and even - if it is a slightly more sophisticated galah - about whether China's recent downturn is merely cyclical or the start of a deeper structural transformation. Especially a transformation towards a more diverse, Korea-style economy with a stronger services sector and a bigger role for its own consumers.
Asia, with its thoroughly integrated manufacturing structures - say, machine tooling in Japan, electronics in Taiwan, financing in Hong Kong, screens in Malaysia, with assembly in China - is feeling the pain not only from the European and American slowdowns but also from slackening domestic demand.
Asia outside Japan hit 7.2 per cent economic growth last year. But this month the Asian Development Bank again revised down its forecast for the year, to 6.1 per cent, the slowest rate for three years. The bank's predictions for the year have fallen steadily - from 6.9 per cent in April and 6.6 per cent in July.
The bank has also just scaled back its forecast for next year, from 7.1 per cent to 6.7 per cent.
Commodity prices have been falling from their stratospheric levels, reflecting declines in demand from Asia more than a step up in supply from elsewhere in the world.Manufactures flexible plastic and synthetic rubber hose tubing,
So, then, is the Asian Century over so soon after it began? After we in Australia finally "got" the message that this is where the centre of economic gravity has shifted? If that proves to be the case, where can we turn next for salvation?
This is to be a core theme at the forthcoming conference Securing the Future - the eighth Economic and Social Outlook Conference to be jointly presented by The Australian and the Melbourne Institute - at the University of Melbourne on November 1 and 2.
Julia Gillard, like most of Australia's political leadership, remains confident about Asia continuing to take up the global slack and driving growth, despite weaker numbers in the past few months. The Prime Minister retains the hope that maximising our economic engagement with India,We specialize in howo concrete mixer, which includes the sale of uranium once safeguards are in place, as well as China, will broaden our prospects of navigating troughs, such as the one we are now experiencing.
She said during her three-day visit to India last week that the countries had "set a goal of $40 billion trade in 2015 - in other words, our trade could double". She added that trade between the two nations was growing at 13 per cent a year. Indian investment approvals in Australia grew last year alone to more than $11bn.
But India's recent decline in growth has been sharper than China's, and as Saul Eslake, chief economist Australia at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said last week, India will find it hard to match even the slower rate of Chinese growth.
At the Securing the Future conference, economist Ross Garnaut will expand on his theme that the Asian story is radically different in different countries - but that the overall outlook is benign, despite the current slowdown and structural shifts.
"Japan is the first post-developed country: incomparably comfortable for its citizens, natural calamity aside," he says.
Japan has the world's greatest longevity and excellent health, education, arts at all levels, household financial security, employment, personal and public security, information technology, and substantial and improving environmental efforts, both domestically and contributing to the international scene.
Japan is experiencing "rapid ageing and slow growth, but low unemployment and with output per work-age person growing only slightly more slowly than the US". This is where South Korea and China are headed too, says Garnaut. "If Japan is the destination of modern economic growth, then modern economic growth is a good thing." He points to the high income of more recently developed economies and societies of Asia - Hong Kong, Taiwan,Quickparts builds injection molds using aluminum or steel to meet your program. Singapore, South Korea. Economic growth in these countries is still on a stronger trend than in high-income countries elsewhere.
China, says the former ambassador to Beijing, "is making a start on a historic transition, to greater domestic orientation on growth, higher wages and consumption, less inequity in income distribution, greater focus on the impact on the global and domestic environment - all rather more smoothly and rapidly than widely anticipated".
Moderately slower growth is emerging there, as anticipated by analysts who have stayed close to Chinese developments, he says - including by Garnaut's own projections, as in his Climate Change Review. The structural change, he says, is more significant than the accompanying fall in China's growth trajectory.
China is still,The stone mosaic comes in shiny polished and matte. he says, "headed to be the world's largest economy by all measures within a decade, and towards sustained strong growth for another decade after that".
But the nature of China's change is now different, "with less opportunity for coal and iron ore, the staples of the post-2004 Australian resources boom, and more for other things".
The Zeitgeist of those "other things" is typified by Psy's Gangnam Style "soft-power" bandwagon.
This shows us what the Asian Century is starting to look like.
Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said about Asia on a visit to Australia a few days ago: "We are entering a new phase - the economy is mature."
Smart commercialisation of a fun idea - one that parodies itself and its roots in the nouveau riche suburb of today's Seoul - is a face of this new, mature Asia.
Note the way that Samsung wraps itself around "Gangnam Style". And Samsung is, of course, just one of the Korean brands that have gone global, with Hyundai, LG and Kia also to the fore. Those companies, and today's sensational Psy, are everywhere.The oreck XL professional air purifier,
Australia's engagement with Asia, on the other hand, is not so evident. While we send two-thirds of our exports to Asia, only about 7 per cent of our direct investments are there. Almost no one among our top chief executives and chairmen, public service chiefs or university heads has ever lived or worked in Asia or speaks an Asian language - although we did once have a prime minister who spoke Chinese.
However, at another level Australians have developed a deep awareness of their dependence on Asia, and especially on its economic performance.
Former prime minister Paul Keating once said wryly: "I guarantee if you walk into any pet shop in Australia, what the resident galah will be talking about is microeconomic policy."
Today, it would be talking about Asia, especially about China's appetite for our iron ore, and even - if it is a slightly more sophisticated galah - about whether China's recent downturn is merely cyclical or the start of a deeper structural transformation. Especially a transformation towards a more diverse, Korea-style economy with a stronger services sector and a bigger role for its own consumers.
Asia, with its thoroughly integrated manufacturing structures - say, machine tooling in Japan, electronics in Taiwan, financing in Hong Kong, screens in Malaysia, with assembly in China - is feeling the pain not only from the European and American slowdowns but also from slackening domestic demand.
Asia outside Japan hit 7.2 per cent economic growth last year. But this month the Asian Development Bank again revised down its forecast for the year, to 6.1 per cent, the slowest rate for three years. The bank's predictions for the year have fallen steadily - from 6.9 per cent in April and 6.6 per cent in July.
The bank has also just scaled back its forecast for next year, from 7.1 per cent to 6.7 per cent.
Commodity prices have been falling from their stratospheric levels, reflecting declines in demand from Asia more than a step up in supply from elsewhere in the world.Manufactures flexible plastic and synthetic rubber hose tubing,
So, then, is the Asian Century over so soon after it began? After we in Australia finally "got" the message that this is where the centre of economic gravity has shifted? If that proves to be the case, where can we turn next for salvation?
This is to be a core theme at the forthcoming conference Securing the Future - the eighth Economic and Social Outlook Conference to be jointly presented by The Australian and the Melbourne Institute - at the University of Melbourne on November 1 and 2.
Julia Gillard, like most of Australia's political leadership, remains confident about Asia continuing to take up the global slack and driving growth, despite weaker numbers in the past few months. The Prime Minister retains the hope that maximising our economic engagement with India,We specialize in howo concrete mixer, which includes the sale of uranium once safeguards are in place, as well as China, will broaden our prospects of navigating troughs, such as the one we are now experiencing.
She said during her three-day visit to India last week that the countries had "set a goal of $40 billion trade in 2015 - in other words, our trade could double". She added that trade between the two nations was growing at 13 per cent a year. Indian investment approvals in Australia grew last year alone to more than $11bn.
But India's recent decline in growth has been sharper than China's, and as Saul Eslake, chief economist Australia at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said last week, India will find it hard to match even the slower rate of Chinese growth.
At the Securing the Future conference, economist Ross Garnaut will expand on his theme that the Asian story is radically different in different countries - but that the overall outlook is benign, despite the current slowdown and structural shifts.
"Japan is the first post-developed country: incomparably comfortable for its citizens, natural calamity aside," he says.
Japan has the world's greatest longevity and excellent health, education, arts at all levels, household financial security, employment, personal and public security, information technology, and substantial and improving environmental efforts, both domestically and contributing to the international scene.
Japan is experiencing "rapid ageing and slow growth, but low unemployment and with output per work-age person growing only slightly more slowly than the US". This is where South Korea and China are headed too, says Garnaut. "If Japan is the destination of modern economic growth, then modern economic growth is a good thing." He points to the high income of more recently developed economies and societies of Asia - Hong Kong, Taiwan,Quickparts builds injection molds using aluminum or steel to meet your program. Singapore, South Korea. Economic growth in these countries is still on a stronger trend than in high-income countries elsewhere.
China, says the former ambassador to Beijing, "is making a start on a historic transition, to greater domestic orientation on growth, higher wages and consumption, less inequity in income distribution, greater focus on the impact on the global and domestic environment - all rather more smoothly and rapidly than widely anticipated".
Moderately slower growth is emerging there, as anticipated by analysts who have stayed close to Chinese developments, he says - including by Garnaut's own projections, as in his Climate Change Review. The structural change, he says, is more significant than the accompanying fall in China's growth trajectory.
China is still,The stone mosaic comes in shiny polished and matte. he says, "headed to be the world's largest economy by all measures within a decade, and towards sustained strong growth for another decade after that".
But the nature of China's change is now different, "with less opportunity for coal and iron ore, the staples of the post-2004 Australian resources boom, and more for other things".
The Zeitgeist of those "other things" is typified by Psy's Gangnam Style "soft-power" bandwagon.
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