‘This Brave New World,’ by Anja Manuel

As a child, Anja Manuel lived in the frontier province of Pakistan — at one end of the harrowing Karakoram highway that led to wild, bandit-filled western China and near Pakistan’s violently disputed border with India. It gave her a lifelong interest in Asia.

She has since held positions in both the public and private sectors that have given her a front-row view of the axial shift of power from the U.S. and Europe to China and India. She describes the two new superpowers, and our interest in their evolution, in an incisive new book, “This Brave New World: India, China, and the United States.”

The book posits two visions for the relationships among China, India and the U.S. in the year 2030. In one, we enter a new Cold War, in which major powers, including China, are pitted against the U.S. and its allies. The alternative future — and the one she advocates — is one in which China and India cooperate, and pursue their goals at a lower level of weaponry, cost and environmental impact.

In a crisp narration, she describes our interests in one or the other outcome, and considers what is required of us. In essence, the book asks what the relationship would look like were partnership our objective.

The book is informed by the two decades that Manuel has spent traveling to both countries, first as a State Department official negotiating with Delhi and Beijing, and now at the consulting firm of RiceHadleyGates, advising American businesses on how to navigate these countries’ often opaque systems. Whether in the halls of power or traveling India and China’s back roads, she brings the perspective of one as steeped in culture as she is in policy.

Her stories are vivid and offer insight into early influences on future leaders. She writes that when Xi Jinping was a 14-year-old, Red Guards “accosted his father,” making a lasting impression on the future president of China. She recounts that during Indira Gandhi’s reign, Narendra Modi disguised himself as a Sikh “with turban, full beard and sunglasses,” to continue “distributing banned opposition pamphlets.” And when she describes the Western-friendly anticorruption czar Wang Qishan, she notes that he “hardens visibly” when he talks about purifying the Communist Party “so it can rule for another century.”

Manuel also takes the reader deep into the slums of India, where people live in corrugated iron huts with no plumbing or sewage, and “make their living by scrounging through a trash dump three football fields high.” She reports, surprisingly, that the slum “streets were spotless, polished clean with the swing of hundreds of broom strokes a day.”

In China, she describes the life of the workers who assemble our smart phones and tablets, and who live in a dorm room with “eight bunk beds covered in polyester blankets. ... It smells of Chinese noodles and inexpensive room freshener.”

Her eyewitness accounts are particularly valuable because they are transfused with her deep knowledge of the history and the politics of the region. Each story is used to illustrate the challenges China and India still face on their way to world power status, and how they are overcoming them.

The narrative remains lively and accessible throughout the book, even when Manuel covers such subjects as how colonialism in India, China’s “unequal treaties” and each country’s turbulent modern history shape their leaders’ worldviews. She explores the ways in which each government might deal with the twin challenges of inequality and corruption. And she outlines what it will take to clean up rotting rivers and smog-filled cities. Finally, she addresses the menacing arms buildup in the region, as Chinese submarines creep along India’s coasts.

Manuel makes a convincing case that China and India will each have a dramatic impact on American economic, security and political interests over the next decade. In our current public discourse, she says, we worry about China and largely ignore India. We may be wrong about both.

She argues that India will be the most important country outside of the West to influence China’s course, and maintains that we must create positive relations with both countries to ensure our own prosperity. Throughout, Manuel shows us that an optimistic path is possible: We can bring China and India along as partners rather than alienating one or both. In choosing the former path, we can create a world that works for all of us.

Many articles and books have been written about Asia — with a narrower focus and perhaps more detail — but readers looking for an astute, fast-paced overview should not miss “This Brave New World.”

This Brave New World

India, China, and the United States

By Anja Manuel

(Simon & Schuster;

368 pages; $27)