Why start with film, then? Isn’t Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov a slacker gone sour? Richard Carstone, the doomed heir of Dickens’ “Bleak House,” is a slacker of the first order. Sherlock Holmes, viewed through the right prism, is both a slacker and a classic case of a high-functioning autism disorder. (I’m not entirely kidding.) If we confine our search to foreign-language cinema, the main question becomes where to set our limits: Jean-Paul Belmondo’s nihilistic thug in “Breathless”? The roles in “Going Places” and “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs” that made Gérard Depardieu famous in the ’70s? All the disaffected young people found in Godard’s “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her,” Rivette’s “Céline and Julie Go Boating,” Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers,” Philippe Garrel’s “Regular Lovers” (a film I mention any chance I get) and any of dozens of other movies?

You see the problem: Europe came up with slackers long before they got to Austin, Texas, and the whole damn place is still crawling with them. Cross the sea to Asia, though, and things get interesting. Plenty of Asian cinema sticks to the archetypal themes of that continent’s life: Work, family, poverty, war, duty, spiritual contemplation and so on. But with the globalization of Western values and rising prosperity has come a uniquely East Asian form of the slacker, perhaps combining the Euro-American bohemian tradition with long-established tendencies toward contemplation and mysticism. (On the other hand, one could argue that Asian culture has included a version of this archetype for centuries, as in the “floating world” of Edo-period Japan, depicted by Utamaro and other great woodblock artists.)

You can certainly find versions of the slacker in Chinese-language filmmakers like Wong Kar-wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien and (especially) Tsai Ming-liang, but our subject today is the Korean director Hong Sang-soo, who has raised the art of the self-regarding movie about some half-defeated buddies sitting around drinking and behaving weirdly toward women to a new level, irrespective of continent, language or nationality. If you’ve never heard of Hong, well, nobody really has outside of the international film-festival circuit. I doubt most ordinary people in Korea have ever heard of him. Furthermore, if my initial description just makes you think his movies would piss you off, you’re probably right. They piss me off sometimes too, and there are a couple of Hong pictures I’ve really had to labor through. But at his best — and his new movie, “The Day He Arrives,” is among his very best — Hong offers a strange mixture of magic, mystery, rueful melodrama and dry comedy that’s like absolutely nothing else.

As usual with Hong, the main character in “The Day He Arrives” is a filmmaker of marginal renown who seems right on the edge of being thoroughly washed-up. He’s drifting around Seoul, the Korean capital, on a snowy day even though he doesn’t live there anymore, having taken a low-paid teaching job in the boonies. He gets drunk with some film students and then insults them, shows up at his ex-girlfriend’s apartment and blubbers on her shoulder, and goes on an increasingly surreal reiterative date with a couple of friends, who keep going to the same restaurant and then the same bar over and over again, where the same things keep happening. The waitress keeps disappearing for extended periods and then coming back apologetically, and she looks so much like the cried-upon ex that our hero hits on her with passionate and perhaps idiotic abandon. (In fact, the beautiful waitress is played by the same actress as the ex, so the filmmaker, like the rest of us, is right to feel that reality has somehow slipped gears.)

Simply composed and beautifully shot in black-and-white, “The Day He Arrives” is almost a perfect summation of Hong’s artistic approach and ideas. Like his strongest works (I would suggest “Woman Is the Future of Man” and “Woman on the Beach”), and for that matter like Richard Linklater’s “Slacker,” its repetitive and seemingly insignificant story conceals a profound, agnostic meditation on the nature of coincidence and randomness in human life. Events happen and people cross our path, often over and over again. We sense a pattern, grasp at one, become convinced that we are connected by powerful threads of meaning, and then it slips away from us and we despair.

Hong’s movies resemble conventional cinema so little that he’ll certainly never have much of an audience, in the United States or Korea or anyplace else. (When his pictures go on too long, like 2009′s “Like You Know It All,” they can try even a fan’s patience.) But if you simply let “The Day He Arrives” happen, it becomes a sweet-natured magical incantation confined to 90 black-and-white minutes in one snowbound city, and the sad, drunken, womanizing and apparently hapless filmmaker at its center doesn’t look like such a failure anymore.

“The Day He Arrives” is now playing at Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York, with more cities and home-video release to follow.

Officially known as “adverse possessions” — and colloquially known as “chitmahals,” or paper palaces — are a collection of Indian and Bangladeshi villages home to 51,000 people, where for generations, citizens have been stuck on the wrong side of the border.

The residents of the 102 enclaves inside Bangladesh are technically citizens of India. Those in the 71 enclaves inside India are technically citizens of Bangladesh. In reality, they are stateless and virtually prisoners in their homes, cut off from public services such as electricity, schools, and hospitals.

They are unable to leave their villages without illegally trespassing on foreign soil. Residents of the Bangladesh-India enclaves are able to get electricity only by bribing local officials. For access to schools, jobs and hospitals, they must pretend to be someone else.

“If we take someone to the hospital, they now ask for national ID cards,” complained Mokul Hossain, a resident of Dashiar Chara enclave. “If we can’t show them then they leave us to suffer outside the hospital. Our only choice then is to take them to a witch doctor.”

As desperate as a hunger strike is, this one hasn’t received the press that others have in the past. Like the plight of the stateless enclave residents themselves, this extreme act of protest has largely gone unnoticed abroad.

The situation enclave residents find themselves in would be similar to that of Liberty Island — which belongs to the New York state but is located inside New Jersey — if the Statue of Liberty was housing 50,000 people who had been trapped there for more than six decades.

Without citizenship, enclave residents feel that they will never have the chance to improve their lot. They have been fighting for their rights since 1947.

The ongoing struggle of the enclave residents highlights the dysfunctional relationship between India and Bangladesh, and their many unresolved border issues. Relations between the neighbors have almost always been contentious, souring immediately after a brief honeymoon period when India helped Bangladesh gain independence from Pakistan in 1971.

Enclave residents have grown increasingly bereft as numerous accords to resolve border disputes have been inked, but few get implemented.

The latest was a pact signed last September to simply swap ownership of the enclaves, but ratification of the land-swap deal juddered to a halt in the Indian parliament.

“We want exchange of the lands,” said Moniruzzaman Monir, a resident of Dashiar Chara, an Indian enclave inside Bangladesh. “All opportunities are closed to us until then.”

A grand Indian tradition

Delhi and Dhaka theoretically settled a host of disputes last September, from finally agreeing on a demarcation of the land border to pledging to stop extrajudicial killings of Bangladeshi citizens by Indian border forces.

But little has changed on the ground. This has driven people like Rahaman, who daily live the consequences of these political differences, to extreme steps such as the indefinite hunger strike.

The fast-unto-death is a grand Indian tradition. During India’s struggle for independence, Mahatma Gandhi frequently employed the tactic to extract concessions from British colonial rulers, prompting an aggravated Winston Churchill to send a telegram inquiring “why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.”

Most recently, septuagenarian anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare’s hunger strike in April 2011 led to nationwide protests in his support, ending with the government agreeing to form a committee to appoint an anti-corruption ombudsman.

With little other leverage, impoverished enclave dwellers resorted to the hunger strike, hoping that this drastic measure will finally get their suffering heard.

At least five have been admitted to hospitals since the strike began on March 18. But in stark contrast to the Hazare media storm, their action has received minimal coverage and has failed to elicit a peep from the officials whose attention they are seeking.

Rahaman, who lives inside the Indian side of the border, is understandably bitter.

“There is no human in the government. They are all stupid,” he said.

Attracting the bulk of the ire of those instigating for a resolution is chief minister of the Indian state of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee.

West Bengal, where all the Bangladeshi enclaves are located, is suspected to oppose the land exchange because of worry over how the subsequent change in electorate might impact local elections.

Banerjee has a history of scuppering landmark deals between Dhaka and Delhi. Last September the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh landed in Bangladesh ready to sign a crucial water-sharing treaty, only to pull out due to Banerjee’s last minute opposition.

India considers itself to be a kind of big brother figure to the younger nation, but most Bangladeshis view the South Asian giant as the neighborhood bully.

Similarly many Indians distrust Bangladeshis, viewing them mostly as a source of unwanted large-scale illegal immigration.

The trouble the two countries have in reconciling border issues and executing the land swap raises questions about their ability to tackle more complex disputes over trade and natural resources, and bodes poorly for the future of regional cooperation in South Asia.

A worst-case scenario

The Bangladesh-India enclaves are by no means unique. Enclaves can be found on almost every continent.

In November 2011 a New York Times blog compared the Bangladesh-India setup to the enclave complex of Baarle, a town split between the Netherlands and Belgium on the Dutch side of the border.

Baarle is “a money-spinning tourist attraction,” where houses on the border move their main entrance to face whichever country has the cheaper taxes because taxes are paid to the country where the front door is located.

Baarle, the blogger opined, was a best-case scenario. The Bangladesh-India complex, on the other hand, was the worst.

On March 26, people in Indian enclaves inside Bangladesh hoisted the Bangladeshi flag in celebration of the nation’s day of independence. It was their way of asserting their claim of citizenship of the country they have spent their entire lives in.

Meanwhile, Rahaman and his neighbors continued their fast, determined to call attention to their cause.

But when the broker failed to show up after the 10-hour operation, Hasan found himself stranded in Dhaka with nothing but mounting hospital bills and chronic pains in his chest and abdomen.

“He didn’t pay me a single penny,” Hasan said.

In Bangladesh, the trade in internal organs is big business. Each year, hundreds put their body parts up for sale in the underground organ bazaar hoping to escape the clutches of poverty, only to be short changed by brokers or burdened with chronic health problems, according to police officials and residents.

The grisly trade made headlines here in August, when police broke up a network of organ brokers centered on Joypurhat, a district in the northeast of the country. The agents, led by one organ-seller-turned-broker, preyed on poor villagers — many plagued by mounting microcredit debts — promising them a ladder out of poverty.

Given Bangladesh’s reputation as the birthplace of Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank, it’s a rather ironic turn of events — one that exposes a dark side of the country’s microfinance success story.

Hasan, a rural day-laborer, said he hoped to use the payment as seed money for a small business. Though he eventually received 145,000 taka ($1,914) in compensation from the family of the sick man who received his liver, the money has nearly run dry, and the pain has impeded his ability to return to work.

“Plowing the land or digging the land is really tough with all this pain,” he said. Like the raised welt cutting a swathe across his belly, “I feel like I’ll have to carry this pain throughout my life.”

Police estimate that 43 people sold their kidneys in Joypurhat, with another 10 or so villagers in the pipeline when the ring leaders were arrested in late August.

Alamgir Chowdhury, a local television correspondent who has followed the story closely, says most people go to the operating table out of desperation. “To pay back the installments on [pre-existing] loans they took out new ones with local money-lenders. They got caught in a web of loans,” he said.

Selina Akter, from nearby Berendy village, went under the knife in July to pay down 400,000 taka ($5,280) in microfinance debts.

“I had a vegetable farming business and it went into loss, and then I had to take loans from another [microcredit] NGO to pay them back,” said the 25-year-old, who received 220,000 taka ($2,904) in exchange for her kidney. Three other members of her family — her husband, father-in-law and brother-in-law — also sold kidneys to alleviate the family’s debts.

In the case of Mahmuda Akter, who is not related to Selina, it was the constant, humiliating visits from debt collectors — pursuing 150,000 taka ($1,980) in microcredit debts — that finally pushed her over the edge.

“When the NGOs came here to collect money from me they harassed me and said bad things, things which cannot be repeated,” said Mahmuda.

She received 250,000 taka for her kidney after an operation in March. Though it helped eliminate her debt, she now regrets having the operation. “I heard from the neighbors that if you donate a kidney you can make some money,” she said. “I feel like I had to sell it because I was under too much pressure.”

According to Fazlul Karim, the police inspector who led the investigation into the Joypurhat organ-trafficking ring, the network was headed by a local man named Abdus Sattar.

While working at a garment firm in Dhaka, Sattar sold his own kidney to a sick man in 2005. Then, apparently seeing an opportunity to profit from the grisly trade, he allegedly returned to Joypurhat and started seeking out potential sellers.

Slowly, police say, Sattar and his agents built up a network that connected kidney patients in Dhaka with willing sellers in the villages, creaming off fat commissions in the process.

“The brokers roam around the diagnostic centers where kidney dialysis takes place. They know it’s a good hunting place for kidney patients,” Inspector Karim said.

Once a willing donor was identified, and brought to Dhaka for the necessary tests, brokers and hospital administrators produced legal documents fabricating a family relationship between the seller and the recipient. (Under Bangladeshi law, only family members are legally permitted to donate organs).

At his office in Joypurhat, Karim showed GlobalPost the documents that “legalized” Mehdi Hasan’s liver transplant — one claiming he was the nephew of the recipient, and another claiming he was the son of the man’s sister. The all-inclusive fee charged by Sattar and his associates would typically range from 400,000 to 500,000 taka ($5,280 to $6,600), but only a fraction of this was actually passed along to the seller.

So far, police have arrested nine people accused of involvement in the Joypurhat trade, including three in Dhaka, and are confident the local organ market has been shut down.

But some say Joypurhat is just the tip of the iceberg. Dr. Monir Moniruzzaman, an anthropologist from Michigan State University who has studied the Bangladeshi organ trade, estimates that roughly 250-300 people sell their organs in the country each year.

If anything, he said, that figure is likely to fall on the conservative side. “Joypurhat represents only a fraction of the trade of Bangladesh. The other parts of the country are unexposed, where the majority of the trade is going on,” he said. “If you combine it the picture is really grim.”

None of the accused were available for comment for this story, but Moniruzzaman said that in his own interviews with organ brokers, most claimed they were helping to save lives — that the sale of kidneys to the sick was “a win-win situation”.

Indeed, the exposure of the Joypurhat organ ring has prompted calls for the liberalization of Bangladesh’s organ-donor law.

Critics of the law say the scant availability of legal donors has created a flourishing black market. “We should make it liberal, so liberal that people cannot make profit out of it,” said Dr. Tareq Salahuddin, the health editor at the Daily Star newspaper. “If it’s open, there can be no way of making someone a loser.”

Mohammed Mozzamel Haque, the Joypurhat police superintendent, said the law needs to create a new regulatory board to establish family links between donors and recipients, utilizing DNA tests if necessary.

He argued that the law should also be amended to allow “emotional” donors — those with close non-familial relationships to recipients. “Sometimes blood relatives are not willing to donate kidneys, but friends should be able to donate a kidney. But the present law does not permit it,” he said.

Others warn that legalization would only succeed in turning the body parts of the poor into commodities for the wealthy. “It’s an unequal, unjust system where the rich can afford to buy [organs] and the poor are selling their own body parts,” said Moniruzzaman from Michigan State University. “It is expanding every year, so the law has to be stricter.”

He said the country’s demand for kidneys or other organs could easily met by establishing a cadaveric organ donation system similar to that in many Western countries — something he said would be a “moral and ethical” source of life-saving organs.

There are few studies showing the health effects of organ donation on the rural poor, but Moniruzzaman said that based on his interviews with organ sellers across Bangladesh, many suffer from post-operative pain, intermittent fever and body-weight problems.

But the most lasting cost he saw was often not medical, but psychological.

“Some sellers said they feel they are living like sub-humans,” he said, “as if they sold one of God’s gifts.”

No wonder Jim O’Neill, who coined the neologism BRIC and is now chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, has been stressing that “the world is no longer dependent on the leadership of the U.S. and Europe.” After all, since 2007, China’s economy has grown by 45 percent, the American economy by less than 1 percent — figures startling enough to make anyone take back their predictions. American anxiety and puzzlement reached new heights when the latest International Monetary Fund projections indicated that, at least by certain measurements, the Chinese economy would overtake the U.S. by 2016. (Until recently, Goldman Sachs was pointing towards 2050 for that first-place exchange.)

Within the next 30 years, the top five will, according to Goldman Sachs, likely be China, the U.S., India, Brazil, and Mexico. Western Europe? Bye-bye!

A System Stripped to Its Essence

Increasing numbers of experts agree that Asia is now leading the way for the world, even as it lays bare glaring gaps in the West’s narrative of civilization. Yet to talk about “the decline of the West” is a dangerous proposition. A key historical reference is Oswald Spengler’s 1918 essay with that title. Spengler, a man of his times, thought that humanity functioned through unique cultural systems, and that Western ideas would not be pertinent for, or transferable to, other regions of the planet. (Tell that howler to the young Egyptians in Tahrir Square.)

Spengler, of course, captured the Western-dominated zeitgeist of another century. He saw cultures as living and dying organisms, each with a unique soul. The East or Orient was “magical,” while the West was “Faustian.” A reactionary misanthrope, he was convinced that the West had already reached the supreme status available to a democratic civilization — and so was destined to experience the “decline” of his title.

If you’re thinking that this sounds like an avant-la-lettre Huntingtonesque “clash of civilizations,” you can be excused, because that’s exactly what it was.

Speaking of civilizational clashes, did anyone notice that “maybe” in a recent Time cover story picking up on Spenglerian themes and headlined “The Decline and Fall of Europe (and Maybe the West)”? In our post-Spenglerian moment, the “West” is surely the United States, and how could that magazine get it so wrong? Maybe? After all, a Europe now in deep financial crisis will be “in decline” as long as it remains inextricably intertwined with and continues to defer to “the West” — that is, Washington — even as it witnesses the simultaneous economic ascent of what’s sometimes derisively referred to as “the South.”

Think of the present global capitalist moment not as a “clash,” but a “cash of civilizations.”

If Washington is now stunned and operating on autopilot, that’s in part because, historically speaking, its moment as the globe’s “sole superpower” or even “hyperpower” barely outlasted Andy Warhol’s notorious 15 minutes of fame — from the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union to 9/11 and the Bush doctrine. The new American century was swiftly throttled in three hubris-filled stages: 9/11 (blowback); the invasion of Iraq (preemptive war); and the 2008 Wall Street meltdown (casino capitalism).

Meanwhile, one may argue that Europe still has its non-Western opportunities, that, in fact, the periphery increasingly dreams with European — not American — subtitles. The Arab Spring, for instance, was focused on European-style parliamentary democracies, not an American presidential system. In addition, however financially anxious it may be, Europe remains the world’s largest market. In an array of technological fields, it now rivals or outpaces the U.S., while regressive Persian Gulf monarchies splurge on euros (and prime real estate in Paris and London) to diversify their portfolios.

Yet, with “leaders” like the neo-Napoleonic Nicolas Sarkozy, David (of Arabia) Cameron, Silvio (“bunga bunga”) Berlusconi, and Angela (“Dear Prudence”) Merkel largely lacking imagination or striking competence, Europe certainly doesn’t need enemies. Decline or not, it might find a whole new lease on life by sidelining its Atlanticism and boldly betting on its Euro-Asian destiny. It could open up its societies, economies, and cultures to China, India, and Russia, while pushing southern Europe to connect far more deeply with a rising Turkey, the rest of the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa (and not via further NATO “humanitarian” bombings either).

Otherwise, the facts on the ground spell out something that goes well beyond the decline of the West: it’s the decline of a system in the West that, in these last years, is being stripped to its grim essence. Historian Eric Hobsbawm caught the mood of the moment when he wrote in his book “How to Change the World” that “the world transformed by capitalism,” which Karl Marx described in 1848 “in passages of dark, laconic eloquence is recognisably the world of the early twenty-first century.”

In a landscape in which politics is being reduced to a (broken) mirror reflecting finance, and in which producing and saving have been superseded by consuming, something systemic comes into view. As in the famous line of poet William Butler Yeats, “the center cannot hold” — and it won’t either.

If the West ceases to be the center, what exactly went wrong?

Are You With Me or Against Me?

It’s worth remembering that capitalism was “civilized” thanks to the unrelenting pressure of gritty working-class movements and the ever-present threat of strikes and even revolutions. The existence of the Soviet bloc, an alternate model of economic development (however warped), also helped. To counteract the USSR, Washington’s and Europe’s ruling groups had to buy the support of their masses in defending what no one blushed about calling “the Western way of life.” A complex social contract was forged, and it involved capital making concessions.

No more. Not in Washington, that’s obvious. And increasingly, not in Europe either. That system started breaking down as soon as — talk about total ideological triumph! — neoliberalism became the only show in town. There was a single superhighway from there and it swept the most fragile strands of the middle class directly into a new post-industrial proletariat, or simply into unemployable status.

If neoliberalism is the victor for now, it’s because no realist, alternative developmental model exists, and yet what it has won is ever more in question. Meanwhile, except in the Middle East, progressives the world over are paralyzed, as if expecting the old order to dissolve by itself. Unfortunately, history teaches us that, at similar crossroads in the past, you are as likely to find the grapes of wrath, right-wing populist-style, as anything else — or worse yet, outright fascism.

“The West against the rest” is a simplistic formula that doesn’t begin to describe such a world. Imagine instead, a planet in which “the rest” are trying to step beyond the West in a variety of ways, but also have absorbed that West in ways too deep to describe. Here’s the irony, then: Yes, the West will “decline,” Washington included, and still it will leave itself behind everywhere.

Sorry, Your Model Sucks

Suppose you’re a developing country, shopping in the developmental supermarket. You look at China and think you see something new — a consensus model that’s turning on the lights everywhere — or do you? After all, the Chinese version of an economic boom with no political freedom may not turn out to be much of a model for other countries to follow. In many ways, it may be more like an inapplicable lethal artifact, a cluster bomb made up of shards of the Western concept of modernity married to a Leninist-based formula where a single party controls personnel, propaganda, and — crucially — the People’s Liberation Army.

At the same time, this is a system evidently trying to prove that, even though the West unified the world — from neocolonialism to globalization — that shouldn’t imply it’s bound to rule forever in material or intellectual terms.

For its part, Europe is hawking a model of supra-national integration as a means of solving problems and conflicts from the Middle East to Africa. But any shopper can now see evidence of a European Union on the verge of cracking amid non-stop inter-European bickering that includes national revolts against the euro, discontent over NATO’s role as a global Robocop, and a style of ongoing European cultural arrogance that makes it incapable of recognizing, to take one example, why the Chinese model is so successful in Africa.

Or let’s say our shopper looks to the United States, that country still being, after all, the world’s number one economy, its dollar still the world’s reserve currency, and its military still number one in destructive power and still garrisoning much of the globe. That would indeed seem impressive, if it weren’t for the fact that Washington is visibly on the decline, oscillating wildly between a lame populism and a stale orthodoxy, and shilling for casino capitalism on a side street in its spare time. It’s a giant power enveloped in political and economic paralysis for all the world to see, and no less visibly incapable of coming up with an exit strategy.

Really, would you buy a model from any of them? In fact, where in a world in escalating disarray is anyone supposed to look these days when it comes to models?

One of the key reasons for the Arab Spring was out-of-control food prices, driven significantly by speculation. Protests and riots in Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Austria, and Turkey were direct consequences of the global recession. In Spain, nearly half of 16- to 29-year-olds — an overeducated “lost generation” — are now out of jobs, a European record.

That may be the worst in Europe, but in Britain, 20 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds are unemployed, about average for the rest of the European Union. In London, almost 25 percent of working-age people are unemployed. In France, 13.5 percent of the population is now officially poor — that is, living on less than $1,300 a month.

As many across Western Europe see it, the state has already breached the social contract. The indignados of Madrid have caught the spirit of the moment perfectly: “We’re not against the system, it’s the system that is against us.”

This spells out the essence of the abject failure of neoliberal capitalism, as David Harvey explained in his latest book, “The Enigma of Capital”. He makes clear how a political economy “of mass dispossession, of predatory practices to the point of daylight robbery, particularly of the poor and the vulnerable, the unsophisticated and the legally unprotected, has become the order of the day.”

Will Asia Save Global Capitalism?

Meanwhile Beijing is too busy remixing its destiny as the global Middle Kingdom — deploying engineers, architects, and infrastructure workers of the non-bombing variety from Canada to Brazil, Cuba to Angola — to be much distracted by the Atlanticist travails in MENA (aka the region that includes the Middle East and Northern Africa).

If the West is in trouble, global capitalism is being given a reprieve — how brief we don’t know — by the emergence of an Asian middle class, not only in China and India, but also in Indonesia (240 million people in boom mode) and Vietnam (85 million). I never cease to marvel when I compare the instant wonders and real-estate bubble of the present moment in Asia to my first experiences living there in 1994, when such countries were still in the “Asian tiger,” pre-1997-financial-crisis years.

In China alone 300 million people — “only” 23 percent of the total population — now live in medium-sized to major urban areas and enjoy what’s always called “disposable incomes.” They, in fact, constitute something like a nation unto themselves, an economy already two-thirds that of Germany’s.

The McKinsey Global Institute notes that the Chinese middle class now comprises 29 percent of the Middle Kingdom’s 190 million households, and will reach a staggering 75 percent of 372 million households by 2025 (if, of course, China’s capitalist experiment hasn’t gone off some cliff by then and its potential real-estate/finance bubble hasn’t popped and drowned the society).

In India, with its population of 1.2 billion, there are already, according to McKinsey, 15 million households with an annual income of up to $10,000; in five years, a projected 40 million households, or 200 million people, will be in that income range. And in India in 2011, as in China in 2001, the only way is up (again as long as that reprieve lasts).

Americans may find it surreal (or start packing their expat bags), but an annual income of less than $10,000 means a comfortable life in China or Indonesia, while in the United States, with a median household income of roughly $50,000, one is practically poor.

Nomura Securities predicts that in a mere three years, retail sales in China will overtake the U.S. and that, in this way, the Asian middle class may indeed “save” global capitalism for a time — but at a price so steep that Mother Nature is plotting some seriously catastrophic revenge in the form of what used to be called climate change and is now more vividly known simply as “weird weather.”

Back in the USA

Meanwhile, in the United States, Nobel Peace Prize laureate President Barack Obama continues to insist that we all live on an American planet, exceptionally so. If that line still resonates at home, though, it’s an ever harder sell in a world in which the first Chinese stealth fighter jet goes for a test spin while the American Secretary of Defense is visiting China. Or when the news agency Xinhua, echoing its master Beijing, fumes against the “irresponsible” Washington politicians who starred in the recent debt-ceiling circus, and points to the fragility of a system “saved ” from free fall by the Fed’s promise to shower free money on banks for at least two years.

Nor is Washington being exactly clever in confronting the leadership of its largest creditor, which holds $3.2 trillion in U.S. currency reserves, 40 percent of the global total, and is always puzzled by the continued lethal export of “democracy for dummies” from American shores to the Af-Pak war zones, Iraq, Libya, and other hot spots in the Greater Middle East. Beijing knows well that any further U.S.-generated turbulence in global capitalism could slash its exports, collapse its property bubble, and throw the Chinese working classes into a pretty hardcore revolutionary mode.

This means — despite rising voices of the Rick Perry/Michele Bachmann variety in the U.S. — that there’s no “evil” Chinese conspiracy against Washington or the West. In fact, behind China’s leap beyond Germany as the world’s top exporter and its designation as the factory of the world lies a significant amount of production that’s actually controlled by American, European, and Japanese companies. Again, the decline of the West, yes — but the West is already so deep in China that it’s not going away any time soon. Whoever rises or falls, there remains, as of this moment, only a one-stop-shopping developmental system in the world, fraying in the Atlantic, booming in the Pacific.

If any Washington hopes about “changing” China are a mirage, when it comes to capitalism’s global monopoly, who knows what reality may turn out to be?

Wasteland Redux

The proverbial bogeymen of our world — Osama, Saddam, Gaddafi, Ahmadinejad (how curious, all Muslims!) — are clearly meant to act like so many mini-black holes absorbing all our fears. But they won’t save the West from its decline, or the former sole superpower from its comeuppance.

Yale’s Paul Kennedy, that historian of decline, would undoubtedly remind us that history will sweep away American hegemony as surely as autumn replaces summer (as surely as European colonialism was swept away, NATO’s “humanitarian” wars notwithstanding). Already in 2002, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, world-system expert Immanuel Wallerstein was framing the debate this way in his book “The Decline of American Power”: the question wasn’t whether the United States was in decline, but if it could find a way to fall gracefully, without too much damage to itself or the world. The answer in the years since has been clear enough: no.

Who can doubt that, 10 years after the 9/11 attacks, the great global story of 2011 has been the Arab Spring, itself certainly a subplot in the decline of the West? As the West wallowed in a mire of fear, Islamophobia, financial and economic crisis, and even, in Britain, riots and looting, from Northern Africa to the Middle East, people risked their lives to have a crack at Western democracy.

Of course, that dream has been at least partially derailed, thanks to the medieval House of Saud and its Persian Gulf minions barging in with a ruthless strategy of counter-revolution, while NATO lent a helping hand by changing the narrative to a “humanitarian” bombing campaign meant to reassert Western greatness. As NATO’s secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen put the matter bluntly, “If you’re not able to deploy troops beyond your borders, then you can’t exert influence internationally, and then that gap will be filled by emerging powers that don’t necessarily share your values and thinking.”

So let’s break the situation down as 2011 heads for winter. As far as MENA is concerned, NATO’s business is to keep the U.S. and Europe in the game, the BRICS members out of it, and the “natives” in their places. Meanwhile, in the Atlantic world, the middle classes barely hang on in quiet desperation, even as, in the Pacific, China booms, and globally the whole world holds its breath for the next economic shoe to drop in the West (and then the one after that).

Pity there’s no neo-T.S. Eliot to chronicle this shabby, neo-medievalist wasteland taking over the Atlanticist axis. When capitalism hits the intensive care unit, the ones who pay the hospital bill are always the most vulnerable — and the bill is invariably paid in blood.

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Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His latest book is “Obama does Globalistan.”

A defense ministry official said earlier that 10 mines could have been pushed down Wumyeon Mountain. The official declined to be named because of policy. Another ministry official, spokesman Kim Min-seok, played down the immediate risk because a concrete wall on the hillside could be stopping the mines from reaching rescue workers.

South Korea’s military dug up many land mines on the mountain between 1999 and 2006, but about 10 couldn’t be accounted for, officials said. Fences around the base have warnings about unaccounted land mines.

There were also fears of land mines in northern provinces also hit by flooding and slides, prompting the Joint Chiefs of Staff to order mine-search operations where needed.

The landslide Wednesday in southern Seoul killed at least 16 people. About 5,000 firefighters, soldiers, police officers and others mobilized Thursday to try to find any survivors and clean walls of mud piled in residential areas near the base of the mountain, emergency official Kim Wu-min said.

Bae Jin-sun, a 27-year-old who works in southern Seoul, said she was worried about the safety of rescue workers near the mountain.

“There is still the possibility of a land mine falling through the cracks,” she said.

Footage by YTN television network showed excavators removing a mass of mud and fallen tree parts and rescuers in raincoats shoveling up the dirt piled up near an apartment. Uniformed soldiers and firefighters wearing cotton gloves used their hands to pull out rocks and tree branches from the mud.

Another landslide early Wednesday killed 10 college students sleeping in a resort cabin in Chuncheon, north of Seoul. The students from Inha University in Incheon, just west of Seoul, were volunteering at a local elementary school.

The National Emergency Management Agency reported 18 more deaths because of a stream flooding and landslides elsewhere in towns near Seoul. No deaths of foreigners have been reported.

The rainfall left almost 5,000 people homeless, flooded about 1,380 houses and caused power outages at more than 125,000 homes throughout the country, the National Emergency Management Agency said in a statement Thursday.

The 17 inches (440 millimeters) of rain that fell on Seoul on Tuesday and Wednesday was about 15 times more than the average two-day rainfall at this time of year, according to the state-run Korea Meteorological Administration.

Associated Press writer So Yeon Kwon contributed to this report from Seoul.