When the film Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, was released this year, the Prime Minister of Malaysia was outraged. Dr Mahathir Mohamad protested that in one scene, the Hollywood movie showed non-existent slums right under the twin peaks of the Petronas Towers, the pride of Kuala Lumpur.
In complaining that the image was misleading, Dr Mahathir missed the point however. The movie was, in fact, showing global audiences that this Asian country has a modern infrastructure, dominated by the fabulous Petronas Towers building which, at 88 stories and 1,476 feet, is the tallest structure in the world, 22 feet higher than the Sears Building in Chicago.
The world may still however have a distorted image of Asia today because of the unparalleled pace of change in the latter half of the 20th century.
Consider the state of Asia just 50 years ago. Not a tall building stood anywhere. Malaysia's workers slaved to produce rubber and tin for Europe. Japan's cities were devastated by war. Singapore was a bombed-out British possession.
China was wrecked by civil conflict and lurching towards famine. Hong Kong was a shanty town. Korea was bankrupt and on the verge of war. Indonesia was striving to create a country after its anti-colonial struggle against the Dutch.
The Indian subcontinent was mired in poverty and seething with unrest. Cambodia and Vietnam were about to plunge into an abyss of bloodshed and destruction.
It would have been impossible then to foresee the changes which have transformed much of the Asian landscape. Nine of the world's 10 highest buildings are now to be found in Asia. Shanghai and Beijing have as many skyscrapers as Manhattan.
Of the 13 world cities with populations over 10 million, seven are in Asia. From almost zero, the middle-class population of Asia is approaching half a billion. Japan has the world's second-largest economy. China has sustained growth of eight per cent a year for two decades. Malaysia is building the first multimedia super corridor, called Cybercity.
All across Asia, there are first-class hotels, resorts, airports, shopping malls and American-type fast food joints and coffee shops, representing Asia's entry into the multicultural world. Walk into the lobby of the Petronas Towers building and you are in an air-conditioned shopping mall lined with international designer stores, almost indistinguishable from any in the United States.
In some countries all this is but a veneer.
Throughout Asia two and a half billion people still struggle for a living, often in conditions of appalling poverty. Some have had their traditional rural livelihoods stripped away in the quest for wealth by the new Asian elite, and in the slums of Bangkok, Phnom Penh and Jakarta the new millennium holds out little hope for improvement.
The region has, however, advanced so quickly that commentators talk now about the dawn of the Asian Century, and many forecast that Asia will emerge in the 2000s as the third dominant region in the world along with Europe and the United States.
Forecasting the future is of course a risky business. As Asia's tiger economies grew furiously during the 1980s and '90s, authors rushed to write books with titles like The Asian Renaissance and Asia Rising. Then suddenly in 1997 came the meltdown, as confidence in the economies evaporated and currencies and stock markets collapsed, first in Thailand, then in Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea.
The two strongest economies, Hong Kong and Japan, went into recession. In the autumn of 1998 Asia barely managed to avoid a catastrophe due to sudden shifts in the flow of global capitalism, where huge sums of money moved across borders at the keystroke of a computer. Inevitably a book appeared called Asia Falling.
But no sooner did it than the most seriously mauled tiger economies began to whisk their tails again. With help from the International Monetary Fund (to Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea), and reforms aimed at improving systems riddled with cronyism, protectionism and bad bank loans, the region has just as rapidly begun to recover. South Korea has come roaring back, Malaysia is showing high growth again, and Japan and Hong Kong have emerged from recession.
But Asian countries are still subject to volatile and unstable capital flows and this has changed fundamentally how strategists see the future.
Some don't believe one should even think in terms of an Asian century, but of a new world order centred on global communications. Among them is Eisuke Sakikabara, alias Mr Yen, one of Japan's most powerful financial bureaucrats until he retired recently.
Asked if the world was embarking on the Asian Century, he cited the French historian Fernand Braudel. Braudel, he said, once stated that the world centre moved from London to New York in 1929 and 10 years ago that it was moving from New York to somewhere else he couldn't identify.
"I suspect we are moving the centre from New York to cyberspace," said Mr Yen, so-called because of his one-time influence over the Japanese currency. "We do not need stock exchanges any more. All we need is a computer network. The financial centre has shifted to a cyberspace that is connected globally."
Maybe so. Certainly those parts of the world which adapt best to information technology will make the century their own. Asian countries seem better equipped than Africa, South America or Russia. They have the resources.
Half a century ago the region mostly exported commodities to the rest of the world, but at the end of the 20th century Asia is a major manufacturing zone and source of direct investment. It is awash with cash.
Japan has the biggest reserves of foreign currency in the world, worth $272 billion, about the same as all the euro countries combined. Next comes China with $153 billion, followed by Taiwan with $99 billion and Hong Kong with $89 billion. Add to this the high saving rate of Asians, about 30 per cent compared to zero or less in the US. Asians as a rule work hard and save hard, accumulating capital to compensate for lack of social services and retirement plans.
They also have the skills. The high level of performance of Asian schoolchildren is a phenomenon of the late 20th century. In cities like Tokyo, Shanghai and Singapore, teenagers regularly outperform their Western counterparts, particularly in mathematics.
Common to all Asian students is a desire to learn English, which has become the common tongue of cyberspace and the Asian economies, and is the lingua franca on most Asian streets.
Assistants in big stores (except in Japan) usually speak some English. But even in Japan the barrier against the Anglo Saxon tongue is breaking down as it becomes a tool for survival in the corporate world. The Japanese firm, Nissan, has a French CEO and the boardroom language is English.
Mandarin Chinese has also made advances and it is catching up on Cantonese in Hong Kong. But the goal of most Chinese students is to study in an English-speaking country, especially the United States. It is this new educated and bilingual generation who will drive China's economy in the new century.
Will it be China's century? "China doesn't matter very much," wrote the American scholar, George Kennan almost 50 years ago. "It is never going to be powerful."
Modern thinkers like Gerald Segal echo this view. "It's not that China does not matter at all," wrote Segal in the US journal, Foreign Affairs, this autumn. "But it matters far less than it and most of the West thinks. China matters about as much as Brazil for the global economy."