Asian intellectuals

From Foreign Policy a list of the top 100 global public intellectuals. Of those 16 are Asians - 7 of them Indian, 5 of them Chinese. Here are their biographies/profiles, mainly from Wikipedia.

It is somehow telling that those of the Chinese are either very short or entirely missing.






Indian or Indian-born

Ramachandra Guha, historian
Ashis Nandy, political psychologist
Sunita Narain, environmentalist
V.S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist
Salman Rushdie, novelist
Amartya Sen, development economist
Fareed Zakaria, journalist, author

Chinese

Fan Gang, economist
Hu Shuli, journalist
Minxin Pei, political scientist
Wang Hui, political theorist
Yan Xuetong, political scientist

Other Asians

Aitzaz Ahsan, Pakistan, lawyer and politician
Anies Baswedan, Indonesia, university president, political analyst
Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore, politician, national patriarch
Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh, microfinancier, activist

These are from the 2008 list, some of whom were also on the 2005 list. Here are a few more from the 2005 list who are not on the 2008 list.

Indian or Indian-born

Jagdish Bhagwati, economist

Chinese

Gao Xingjian, novelist, playwright
Ha Jin, novelist
Wang Jisi, foreign-policy analyst
Zheng Bijian, political scientist

Other Asians

Shintaro Ishihara, Japan, politician, author
Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore, author, diplomat
Kenichi Ohmae, Japan, management theorist
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia, writer, dissident

Of all those only one, Kenichi Ohmae, is a business intellectual. He is on the Accenture top 50 list from 2002 as well, which also includes two Indian management gurus - the only three Asians on that list.

Sumantra Ghoshal
C. K. Prahalad

On the subject of business, globalization and diplomacy a few more Indians who are not on the lists should be mentioned - of course, there are more than these three, as well as many other Asians. Maybe they will make it onto some future list.

Nayan Chanda, editor of YaleGlobal Online
Tarun Khanna, professor at Harvard Business School
Shashi Tharoor, author, diplomat