Asia’s More Than the West’s Next Market

HONOLULU —  Jeff Berg, head of Hollywood’s International Creative Management agency, and Sondhi Limthongkul, the Asian media mogul, demonstrated at a major PacRim conference here last week why there may still be more truth than cliche to the old Kipling line about how East and West won’t ever meet. Gathered to the East-West Center by UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management, the conferees from all over the world heard the superagent go positively bullish on all the dough to be made in Asian markets and heard the superpublisher go positively bearish about the region’s coming crises. For those who like their professional conferences spiced up with a little yin and little yang, it rarely gets spicier than this.

Mr. West, the irrepressible Berg, dazzled the assembled international lawyers, businessmen, government officials and academics with his almost lascivious enthusiasm for cashing in on the PacRim phenomenon. This clearly struck home with the audience and no doubt with the meeting’s backers and bankrollers, Sony Corp. and Bank of Hawaii. These are two major PacRim players who make a whole lot of money by emphasizing the positive. As does, of course, Mr. West. His Beverly Hills-based ICM, which represents performers from Mel Gibson and Barbra Streisand to Julio Iglesias and Meatloaf, more or less views the world beyond Morton’s as potentially one giant multiplex. “The key question for everyone in this business,” gushed Berg, “is, what’s next in the Asia-Pacific? How do you market to that population?”

At times, the superagent almost made Henry Kissinger seem bare of ambition: “Today’s media companies have become like peculiar kinds of nation-states. They have their own foreign policies, their own equivalents of a secretary of state, and they make their own treaties with nations.” Berg’s own foreign policy, though, sounded more bottom line than high-minded: “In Asia-Pacific and Latin America, there is a whole range of programming that’s never been seen. We can be pioneers.”

Enough saccharine and salesmanship already! Let’s hear from Mr. East, Limthongkul, who publishes the up-and-coming English-language newspaper Asia Times and the monthly Asia Inc. as well as L.A.’s Buzz magazine. After paying “brief homage to the economic cliche of Asia,” Limthongkul, a Thai, tore into idealized views of the region.

Asia, he insisted, faces major energy, resource depletion, deforestation and ecological crises: “The Asia-Pacific nations and their Western counterparts, together with their conglomerates, are much to be blamed for the next environmental catastrophe in this region. We have reached the point that business communities and emerging nations would rather make money now than prepare themselves for sustainable growth, which will take time, education and absolute prudence.” Noting that rising living standards in China and India will by 2015 increase carbon particulate matter in Asia’s air by more than 50%, Limthongkul warned: “If car use in China ever reached the density of, say, Germany, with one car for every two people, China would be home to 600 million cars. How many of them will be outfitted with catalytic converters and use only unleaded gas? . . . . This is very bad news, because if all of us don’t try to chart our future course with some sensible direction, I’m afraid we won’t have an Asia-Pacific century long enough to last for our children.”

To protect everyone’s investment, not to mention the health of present and future generations, responsible Western investors and/or hucksters in Asia should have, he implied, an “environmental secretary” as well as a “secretary of state.” Delightfully, the tart-tongued Thai was also critical of shortsighted Asian leaders, not only in China and India but also in Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam: “The problem of most emerging nations in Asia-Pacific is always the absolute worship of economic growth rather than the quality of life. It’s very unfortunate that we have learned and inherited so well from the West.” In the end, one felt more enlightened by the red-flagging of the Cassandra-esque Thai than by the PacRim flag-waving of the cheerleading Angeleno.

There’s a lesson here: PacRimsters, when they’re not careful, do everyone an unintended disservice when they underplay Asia’s serious problems while celebrating the region’s obvious attributes. Indeed, as one of those sometimes-unbridled enthusiasts, I too need to remind myself of this.