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I stood on the edge of a drainage ditch in southern Taiwan and watched
a big yellow digger excavating royal blue mud. I’ve no idea why it was royal
blue. That is, I’m not sure which particular industrial crime against the
planet was to blame. But it seemed all of a piece with the Taiwan I was
visiting for the first time in 10 years.

If children here paint the sky blue in their picture books, they must
be copying from foreign TV. Most of the time, even in the countryside, Taiwan’s
sky is a pearl haze of pollution. The central mountains rose just 20 kilometres
from where I stayed near Tainan, but I saw them through that haze only once
in five weeks. The ricefields are a violent, unnatural green from overuse
of fertiliser and the air is heavy with the stench of piggeries. Ironically,
the ditch was being emptied of its royal blue sediment because the local
community of (mainly Western) agricultural scientists couldn’t stand the
stink of it and feared it was making their children ill. It probably was.

Yet Taiwan is a success. The place has foreign reserves of $75 billion
– now the largest in the world. Its per capita GDP is around $8000. Over
the past 30 years Taiwan has secured a near-monopoly on some categories
of manufacturing, and now records huge trade surpluses every year.

On the strength of this success, Taiwan has embarked upon an astonishing
social and national experiment. It has earmarked more than $300 billion
to catapult itself into the First World within 66 months of today. Just
like that.

I have a lot of warm feelings for Taiwan. I worked there for two good
years and was overwhelmed by the energy of its people and their irrepressible
‘can do’ attitude. But standing beside that royal blue ditch a few weeks
ago I found it very hard to believe that Taiwan will be able to buy a place
at the world’s top table in five years time, even for US $300 billion. And
if that’s true about Taiwan, it will be true too for the other Asian tigers
aspiring to First World status.

For one thing, the money – vast sum though it is – may not be enough.

It seems to be accepted that all the nations of the earth are on some
kind of continuum of development, an escalator moving ever up towards industrialised
nirvana. Burkina Faso and Bangladesh are towards the bottom of that escalator.
Taiwan and the other Asian tigers are near the top. And if they are a mess
right now, the argument goes – well, every advanced Western has endured
its era of dark satanic mills. Maybe this is a kind of industrial rite of
passage. If Taiwan and its neighbours are at that stage now, it follows,
surely, that quite soon they will ‘overtake’ any slothful fat-cat First
World countries which don’t lift their game.

I wonder.

Developed nation status is not just a question of immediate wealth or
of industrialisation. With the one arguable exception of Japan, all of the
world’s developed nations had already achieved positions of international
power and status at least a century ago. Japan aside, no new members have
been admitted to the First World club since the 1800s. Nor has any country
ever been allowed to drop out of the First World.

Is it ordained somewhere that if nations can only get rich enough they
will automatically climb over some sort of threshold and win membership
to an elite advanced community? How big is this club going to get? Are existing
members supposed to be willing to step meekly aside – even step down – to
admit a newcomer?

The Third World/First World structure is the ultimate class system.
It may not now be true in any practical sense that the Third World works
for the First, but it’s an undeniable fact that there aren’t enough resources
on the planet for both Worlds to live the way the First does now. Does anyone
seriously believe that the developed nations are going to give up voluntarily
any significant part of their power to raise the standard of living in,
say, India? They don’t even need Indians as customers any more.

Things won’t get any better under the new world order. The component
parts of the Second World are now probationary members of the First World,
a status they have been accorded by way of reward for not nuking the West.
There is now even less reason than before for developed nations to throw
bones to the poor countries. Poor countries are no longer needed as proxies
nor as aircraft carriers.

We’ve just emerged from the first major resource war in history. That
demonstrated graphically how far the First World is prepared to go if the
Third tries to control its supply lines. As wars go, it wasn’t all bad.
The bad guy really was a bad guy, and lost.

But how long before we take arms against some South American republic
for destroying the rainforest, on the grounds that the trees belong to everyone?
Or start to block Bangladesh’s nuclear power programme because it can’t
afford the same safety controls as Belgium? Or impound Indonesian fishing
boats for using drift nets?

I’m not quite hypocritical enough to regret winning the lottery of life
by being born into the First World. But there are other forms of hypocrisy
that prevent us from seeing the world as it is – and thus from doing anything
much about it. One such piece of humbug is the cosy belief that it’s possible
for all countries to climb the development escalator to advanced nation
status, that it’s in everyone’s interests that they do so, and that they
will be welcomed with open arms when they get to the top.

Tim Griggs is a freelance journalist based in Australia.