THE
TROUBLE
WITH
TIGERS

The Rise and Fall of South-East Asia

VICTOR MALLET

For Michele

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Preface

Introduction: A miracle that turned sour

ONE: The rise and fall of ‘Asian values’

TWO: The new democrats

THREE: Sex, drugs and religion: Social upheaval in the 1990s

FOUR: The day of the robber barons

FIVE: Nature in retreat: South-east Asia’s environmental disaster

SIX: Enemies outside and in: The ‘Balkans of the Orient’ and the great powers

SEVEN: Ten troubled tigers: The nations of south-east Asia

BURMA: Democracy delayed

THAILAND: The smile that faded

LAOS: No escape from modernity

CAMBODIA: The slow recovery from ‘Year Zero’

VIETNAM: Victorious but poor

MALAYSIA: Vision 2020 and the Malay dilemma

INDONESIA: Fin de régime – and end of empire?

SINGAPORE: Brutal efficiency

BRUNEI: Sultan of swing

THE PHILIPPINES: Chaotic democracy

EIGHT: After the crash: The unfinished revolution

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map

Preface

Asia can be disconcertingly modern for a westerner. One day a couple of years ago I was reverently approaching the centre of the ancient temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia – apparently alone as I admired this 900-year-old work of art – when I heard a strange, high-pitched burbling noise. I soon found the cause. A Cambodian woman was sitting in the centre of the temple playing furiously with her hand-held electronic Game Boy. Perhaps I should not have been surprised. Europeans and Americans, not to mention Asian tourist boards, are still guilty of ‘Orientalism’, the practice of portraying eastern lands as exotic, sensual and mystical, rather than as part of the modern world. Asians themselves, meanwhile, have been taking part in the fastest industrial revolution in history, completing in a few decades a modernization that took 150 years or more for the first such revolution in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And they have been doing so at a time when technology has advanced far beyond steam engines to computers and electronics, allowing them to leapfrog whole stages of the industrial revolutions experienced by others. It is not uncommon for Asian men and women to move straight from working in the family’s paddy fields to a factory producing microchips.

The world was rightly fascinated by this post-war transformation of agrarian Asian societies into fast-growing, industrial exporters, a process which came to be called the ‘Asian miracle’. Much has been written about the economics behind Asia’s success in the last four decades. But there is less literature on the risks presented by the extraordinary social and political upheavals accompanying this ‘miracle’ – risks that were vividly illustrated by the financial crash of the late 1990s. That is a gap I hope to fill. Likewise, there have been many books of general interest published about Japan and China, but not enough about the countries of south-east Asia. Indonesia – the fourth most populous nation and the largest Moslem one – has been correctly described as the most under-reported country on the globe.

I hope this book, by addressing these issues, will help to explain the financial crisis which erupted in Thailand in mid-1997, spread to the rest of Asia and eventually disrupted economies as far away as South Africa and Latin America. I trust it also shows that the continuing confrontation between the Malaysian government and its opponents and the Indonesian popular uprising in 1998 were not isolated events triggered solely by the crash of Asian markets, but part of a pattern of political reform throughout the region.

There has been no slackening in the pace of Asia’s industrial revolution in recent months. South-east Asian economies began to recover in 1999, although (as discussed in the final chapter) there are doubts about whether they will return to the high growth rates of the past. Over-reaction has been a consistent theme of short-term foreign investment in Asia, to the detriment of the investors as well as the recipients of the money. In the 1980s and early 1990s, over-optimistic investors thought south-east Asian economies could do no wrong. In 1997 and 1998, they withdrew their money in a pessimistic panic, consigning hundreds of companies to bankruptcy and millions of diligent workers to unemployment. Then they regained their confidence in the first half of 1999, pumping money back into the region in spite of warnings that governments had failed to tackle the ‘crony capitalism’, corruption and poor banking practices that had precipitated the crisis in the first place.

Politicians have been busy, too. In Indonesia, President B.J. Habibie, the interim leader who succeeded the deposed Suharto, allowed the country to hold its first democratic election in nearly half a century in June 1999. The party of Megawati Sukarnoputri, a former opposition leader, won the most votes, but it was Abdurrahman Wahid, the ailing Moslem leader, who was later elected president. Still more remarkable was the Habibie government’s decision to grant the people of East Timor – brutally invaded by Indonesia in 1975 – the chance to secede. A referendum on independence was held under UN auspices in August 1999, amid frequent outbreaks of violence in East Timor itself and other far-flung parts of the Indonesian archipelago. The East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence, but pro-Indonesian militiamen backed by the security forces immediately unleashed a campaign of terror on the largely defenceless population.

In Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, the reformist deputy prime minister and heir apparent to Mahathir Mohamad, was sacked by Mahathir, expelled from the ruling party, arrested on charges of sodomy and corruption and beaten in detention. He was sentenced to six years in jail. Mahathir also imposed controls on the flow of short-term capital for a year and declared that ‘the free market system has failed’. But Anwar’s supporters took to the streets with the same cries of ‘Reformasi!’ (‘Reform!’) that helped bring down Suharto in Indonesia, and Anwar’s wife Wan Azizah Wan Ismail formed a new opposition party ahead of a general election. A couple of other south-east Asian governments broke with a tradition of polite noninterference to condemn publicly Mahathir’s treatment of his former deputy.

In Cambodia, the main political parties reached a compromise to end a violent dispute over the outcome of the 1998 election, in which Hun Sen’s ruling party won the biggest share of the vote with the help of widespread intimidation of voters. In Burma, the military junta sought once again to crush its opponents with hundreds of arrests. In Vietnam, tensions increased within the Communist Party over corruption and the need for political reform. Joseph Estrada, the action movie star who became president of the Philippines, was criticized for allowing the rehabilitation of business cronies of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

This book is about the ten countries which are regarded – and which regard themselves – as ‘south-east Asia’, the region lying between India to the west and Japan and China to the east and north. In alphabetical order they are Brunei, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. All ten are members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean), an organization originally established as a security umbrella at the time of the Vietnam war but which now focuses on trade as well. This is a region with more than 500 million inhabitants and a plethora of cultures and languages; where France, the US and China all came to grief fighting in Vietnam; where Pol Pot murdered more than a million people in Cambodia; which produces much of the world’s opium; which has inflicted on itself some of the worst traffic jams and most polluted rivers; which has (briefly) the tallest buildings on earth in Malaysia; and which boasts in Singapore one of the most computerized cities on the globe. The ten countries are at very different stages of development, but they see themselves as a distinct group with common interests and they are all undergoing industrial revolutions. All have been affected, to a greater or lesser degree, by the region’s financial crisis, and all have undergone convulsive change since World War II.

Some of the changes of the past decades, good and bad, would be familiar to nineteenth century Americans or to the English of the eighteenth century: the migration of men and women from the countryside to the cities in search of factory work, increased crime and pollution and the rise of ‘robber barons’ or ‘gangster capitalists’. But nowadays the process is much faster and there are many new factors: the rapid spread of television and computers; the growth of consumerism; imports of foreign films and music; the use of drugs such as heroin and Ecstasy; new sexual habits; and much else besides. It is hardly surprising that Asians feel bewildered as well as elated by the changes in their lives as they enter the new millennium.

Nor is it surprising that Asian leaders, especially south-east Asian ones, became more assertive on the international stage as they became wealthier and more powerful in the 1990s. The last European colonies in Asia have been handed back to China (Britain returned Hong Kong in 1997, and Portugal was due to leave Macao at the end of 1999). Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore, and Mahathir of Malaysia both remember the colonial era and attribute their economic success since independence to ‘Asian values’. They argue that Asians work hard and respect their families and communities, in contrast to individualistic, liberal and decadent westerners. Opponents of the ‘Asian values’ school, on the other hand, say the argument is a false one deployed merely to justify authoritarian Asian governments.

I have devoted space to this lively debate because it explains much about what went wrong with south-east Asia’s ‘tiger’ economies, and because its outcome should make it easier to predict the region’s future. One of the few benefits of the financial crisis is that it has prompted Asians to ask questions about their own societies. How much of what is happening is peculiarly ‘Asian’ and how much is merely ‘modern’? Do richer and better educated citizens always demand more democracy and better human rights? What is the point of all this economic growth if our quality of life is getting worse?

Few of the answers are simple, but my conclusion is that industrialization itself has proved to be a much more powerful force for change than any particularly ‘Asian’ values. The industrial revolutions of south-east Asia have remarkably similar effects to those that have gone before in Britain, America and Japan. It could be argued that as a western-educated person, it was inevitable that I would come to this conclusion, just as it was inevitable that Francis Fukuyama of the US would assert the primacy of liberal democracy as a political system in The End of History and the Last Man. I do not believe the languages and cultural traditions of south-east Asia will suddenly disappear, any more than they have in France, Germany or Britain. But I was surprised by how few ordinary Asians – and I asked the question of almost everyone I met while researching this book – subscribed to the theory of ‘Asian values’ as voiced by Asian political leaders and millionaires, and by some western business executives too.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, south-east Asia will resume the race to catch up with the industrialized world. In the process more and more of its inhabitants will enjoy the benefits of prosperity – better education and healthcare, more material goods and more leisure. But this time around, as they emerge from the humbling experience of the economic crash, they will also be more inclined to tackle the challenges of industrialization: pollution, crime, social disorder, cultural confusion and the urgent need to build effective political institutions. In places as different as Burma, Vietnam and Malaysia, lifestyles are changing rapidly and democrats are already demanding a say in the way their countries are run. The revolution in Indonesia was not the first in the region, and it will not be the last.

Victor Mallet

September 1999

Introduction: A miracle that turned sour

Bangkok in the early 1990s was an extraordinarily energetic city. The peaceful chaos of the streets, where Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs jostled with motorcycles and three-wheel tuktuks for hire, where hawkers cooked noodle soup next to newly-constructed skyscrapers, epitomized the south-east Asian economic boom. When I first set foot in Thailand in 1991, I was impressed not just by the energy but by the easy mixing of new and old, rich and poor, western and Asian. On Ploenchit Road outside my office, a statue of the Buddha, wreathed in incense and garlands of flowers, sat only yards away from a slightly bigger, plastic statue of Colonel Sanders outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken store. On the crowded pavements, foreign backpackers dodged between Thai businessmen talking stock prices into their mobile telephones and disabled women selling lottery tickets to passers-by.

South-east Asia’s dynamism was seductive for a journalist accustomed to other continents. Europe seemed almost lethargic by comparison, and the sense of purpose in Asia’s cities was a refreshing change from the despair in much of Africa and the Middle East. Books about the east Asian economic ‘miracle’ proliferated. It was impossible not to be impressed.

But from the beginning I had doubts – both about the supposedly miraculous nature of what was happening and about how long it could be sustained. I do not claim to be alone in this, for my doubts were sparked and then fuelled by the south-east Asians I met and interviewed throughout the region. Most governments and many business executives were supremely confident, but opposition politicians, academics and others repeatedly warned of the dangers ahead: governments were authoritarian or corrupt or both and would be challenged by their subjects; many Asian businesses were successful not because they were well managed but because they were in league with the same corrupt governments; the environment was being destroyed; and the societies and cultures that seemed so stable were actually in the throes of an enormous upheaval. I confess that my scepticism about the ‘miracle’ soon began to waver in the face of accusations that I and some of my journalistic colleagues were too pessimistic and were mistakenly viewing events through ‘western’ eyes. Several more years of rapid economic growth made our doubts seem even more unreasonable.

Then came the financial crash of 1997. This book was conceived in 1996, so neither the region-wide economic crisis nor the overthrow of President Suharto in Indonesia came as a shock to me or to those Asians who had long advocated political and economic reform. But these events – particularly the abrupt end of the economic boom – did come as a nasty surprise to many south-east Asians and foreign investors. They had assumed that rapid economic growth would continue indefinitely, although they argued about the precise rate of expansion. In the mid-1990s, if you asked anyone in a southeast Asian city a casual question about how things were going, it was surprising how often the reply was a cheerful ‘7.6 per cent’, ‘9 per cent’ or some similarly precise number. Europeans or Americans usually know if their economy is doing well or badly, but most would struggle to remember a recent estimate for the growth of their gross domestic product. For Malaysians, Thais and Singaporeans, however, economic expansion had become an obsession.

There were good reasons for this. The rapid economic growth these countries had enjoyed in the previous three decades had a palpable effect on people’s lives, whether they were cabinet ministers or factory workers; an economy growing at 8 per cent a year doubles in size in nine years, and most people have correspondingly more money to spend and save. South-east Asia’s success – one of the great achievements of the second half of the twentieth century – was also a source of pride to politicians and ordinary citizens alike. The ten countries of south-east Asia have been involved in the most rapid industrial revolution in history. For the half a billion people who live there, this means being catapulted out of traditional and largely rural societies into the new world of big cities, factories, offices, cars, telephones and mass entertainment. Much has been written about the economic causes of this ‘miracle’. This book is about its effects on the people of south-east Asia, and about how it went wrong.

Many of the results of rapid industrialization are self-evidently good: people now live longer, and they live better. But some of the leaders who supervised south-east Asia’s industrial revolution became arrogant. They began to believe that their societies were imbued with special ‘Asian values’, and were therefore immune to the political and social pressures that had accompanied previous industrial revolutions. They failed to deal with increasing demands for democracy; the spread of crime and drugs; the ultimately disastrous rise of a class of businessmen better at making friends with politicians than at managing their balance sheets; the destruction of the region’s environment and natural resources; or the need to fend for themselves diplomatically and militarily after the end of the Cold War.

Whether or not south-east Asia recovers economically – as most economists believe it will after the recent financial crisis – the need to manage these challenges will make the bare statistics of growth seem much less important in the early years of the twenty-first century than they did in the 1990s. Most of the challenges are new to the region, but not to the world. As people become educated, they tend to become more vocal in defending their interests and confronting unrepresentative governments. As they move out of villages into impersonal cities, they loosen the ties to families and small communities. Politics, social life, religion, culture and business are all transformed. But south-east Asia’s industrial revolution has been much more rapid than those that went before in Europe, the US and Japan. The result is a delay of many years between the superficial changes – the arrival of television and mobile telephones – and the more profound shifts in the way people think about their families, their communities, their governments and their gods. South-east Asian leaders made a mistake. Instead of seeing this time lag for what it was, they interpreted the continuing weakness of their political opponents and the strength of social traditions as signs that Asia was different and that they would be spared the trauma of modernization.

It was an oversight they would later regret. But even after the collapse of confidence in the region’s developing economies in 1997, there is plenty to boast about in the scale and extent of the south-east Asian ‘miracle’. One country, the city state that is the island of Singapore, has completed the industrial revolution, in the sense that it has caught up with other industrialized nations and even started to overtake them. The average Singaporean is already richer than the average Briton. Singaporeans live in an efficient and highly computerized urban society, eat at expensive restaurants, buy expensive clothes and travel widely, just like their fellow consumers in Japan, the US or Italy.

In Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Burma, on the other hand, the revolution has hardly begun. Most people in these countries are still peasant farmers barely able to subsist on what they grow. But even here the trappings and habits of modern life – motorcycles, tarred roads, televisions, discotheques, tall buildings, toilets, shampoo, banks, advertising, passenger aircraft – are spreading fast. As recently as 1992, the Vietnamese capital Hanoi was a quiet town of elegant but dilapidated French villas where the swish of bicycle tyres was only occasionally drowned by the noise of an army truck; peasant women defecated openly on the pavements. There were no taxis and hardly any cars. The few simple restaurants that existed in what was then a typically dour, communist-run city rarely had names – they were known by their street numbers. Today, the city seethes with noisy activity; the streets are crowded with new motorcycles, cars and taxis, and they echo to the sound of construction as new hotels and office blocks spring up alongside bars and karaoke parlours. In northern Cambodia, far from the capital Phnom Penh, villagers watch videos at night on black and white televisions powered by twelve-volt car batteries which are recharged each day in the nearest town. In communist Laos, young women play cheap, handheld computer games on the banks of the Mekong river.

Halfway up the ladder come Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. They have a large middle class of relatively wealthy, well-travelled and well-educated citizens living in the big cities; but also millions of poorer people, urban and rural, who are able to enjoy only some of the fruits of the continuing revolution. Malaysia, once known for its plantations of rubber and palm-oil trees, has become the world’s biggest exporter of air conditioners; the world’s tallest buildings, originally designed for Chicago, now tower over the capital Kuala Lumpur. In Thailand, nine tenths of the population live in homes with television; in the Bangkok metropolis, the figure is 97 per cent. If you visit one of the new shopping malls in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, only the faces of the shoppers and the occasional sign in Bahasa Indonesia betray the fact that you are in Asia rather than Europe or America; there are ‘cybercafés’ serving refreshments and access to the Internet, McDonald’s burger bars, cinemas showing Hollywood films and shops selling the same brand-name clothes you can find in Paris or New York.

The reasons behind south-east Asia’s success – ‘probably the most amazing and beneficent revolution in history’, as one author called the whole east Asian experience¹ – are now generally agreed. Governments adopted sensible economic policies and promoted exports; most of them also provided a reasonably stable political environment which allowed growth to proceed unhindered; ordinary people worked hard and saved a high proportion of their earnings, permitting investment in education and in further industrial expansion; foreign countries helped too, principally by opening their markets to imports from south-east Asia (in the case of the US), and by investing heavily in industry (in the case of Japan). In the 1980s, the end of the Cold War – which had pitted ‘pro-western’ nations such as Thailand against the communist states of Indochina – provided an additional boost to the regional economy. South-east Asia’s success was all the more remarkable because it was not foreseen, and because other parts of the world failed where south-east Asia appeared to have triumphed. Gunnar Myrdal, a Nobel Prize-winning Swedish economist, has become the butt of jokes among Asia experts as a result of his gloomy predictions about south-east Asia in a three-volume, 2,700-page book in the 1960s.² Another academic wrote in 1962 of the ‘desperate, and in most cases to date, the losing race to achieve economic growth in the face of consistently mounting population pressure on already inadequate resources’; he also lamented the failure of south-east Asia’s ruling elites to show ‘any notable capacity to solve the problems involved’ in modernizing politics and society.³ Today, much of Africa is afflicted by war, poverty and disease. Latin America has only recently begun to recover from a long period of stagnation. The Middle East continues to struggle with political instability. Yet south-east Asian countries, after as many as thirty years of strong economic growth, have been extraordinarily successful and – until the crisis that began in 1997 – increasingly self-confident.

Their economic triumphs – preceded by the success of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong and accompanied by that of China – led to a flurry of predictions about the rise of Asia and the relative decline of the West. The twenty-first century, it was argued, would be the ‘Pacific Century’. Extrapolating recent economic growth rates far into the future, Asians and foreigners forecast – triumphantly, gloomily or with a shrug depending on their point of view – that such and such a group of Asian countries would overtake Europe or the US in the year 2025 or 2020 or 2015. The dangers of extrapolation are well known. In the 1950s the World Bank had made optimistic predictions about both Burma and the Philippines, because they seemed to have the best skills and resources for economic expansion, but they turned out to be among the worst performing south-east Asian economies. Likewise both assumptions on which the ‘Pacific Century’ calculation was based – that Asia would continue to grow and that the West was stagnating or declining – were doubtful; the US and Europe may do better than expected, and Asia may do worse. Two other important points were forgotten in the euphoria over Asia’s performance. First, Asian economies were simply catching up the ground lost to the West in the previous two centuries – and it is easier and quicker to catch up than to take the lead. In 1820 Asia accounted for about 58 per cent of the world economy, a figure which fell steeply to 19 per cent in 1940 after the western industrial revolution before rising again to about 37 per cent in 1992. Even before the crisis of 1997 it was assumed that Asia’s share of the global economy would reach 57 per cent only in the year 2025 – back where it was near the beginning of the industrial age. Second, some of Asia’s economic growth has simply been the result of a temporary ‘bulge’ in the number of people of working age as a proportion of the total population – a typical quirk of modern industrial revolutions. Better healthcare and the fact that death rates fell quickly while birth rates initially remained high mean that there are now large numbers of Asians of working age supporting relatively few elderly dependants. This demographic ‘gift’ to the region’s economies will eventually disappear as the ‘bulge’ moves up the age scale. It will then become a burden as birth rates decline, populations age, and the number of young people in work starts to fall as a proportion of a country’s inhabitants.⁴

South-east Asia’s political leaders, and many of the region’s businessmen, had a completely different explanation for their success: it was, they said, the result of ‘Asian values’. Chapter 1 looks at the rise of the ‘Asian values’ philosophy and why it is being discredited. According to its proponents, Asians are different from westerners in that they are hardworking and have a greater respect for education, family, community and government. The people of Singapore or Burma are thus more concerned about collective rights than individual rights and will therefore not necessarily demand the same things as westerners did at the various stages of economic development: free trade unions, liberal democracy, an independent judiciary, religious and sexual freedom and so on. Strong, even authoritarian governments – the argument goes – have meanwhile delivered both economic growth and political stability for the benefit of all. They should continue to do so unimpeded by meddling foreigners or domestic dissidents who want to impose alien values on Asians. The argument has struck a chord for some American and European politicians and business executives, who not only agree that it is right for Asia but believe that some of its tenets should be applied in western countries afflicted by chaotically inefficient democracy, violent crime and moral decay. But the ‘Asian values’ theory has been dismissed as nonsense by its critics in Asia and the West. They say it is merely an excuse for authoritarian governments to stay in power, depriving their subjects of rights which are not ‘western’ but universal. They also point out that it is bizarre suddenly to attribute south-east Asia’s recent success to Asian culture, when for centuries western intellectuals put the opposite case: that Asia’s economic backwardness was the fault of supposedly Asian cultural traits such as laziness and lack of enterprise. By 1997, support for the idea of attributing the region’s success to ‘Asian values’ was in decline, eroded by economic and environmental disasters in southeast Asia and by growing evidence of a popular desire for democracy. Yet much damage had already been done. Blinded by pride in their new Asian identity, south-east Asian leaders had failed to prepare for the political, social and commercial crises about to erupt in front of them.

Political upheaval in the region, the subject of chapter 2, is proving to be as exciting and unsettling as the slow rise of liberal democracy in industrial Britain. Greater wealth has swollen the middle class in countries such as the Philippines and Thailand, and these well-educated people quickly lose patience with heavy-handed governments. The crowds of pro-democracy demonstrators in Bangkok who helped to bring down a military-led Thai government in 1992 (after a coup d’état the previous year) were notable for the number of young professionals – stockbrokers, lawyers, university professors – carrying mobile telephones. Five years later, that process led to the formulation of a new, more liberal constitution for Thailand. Granted, middle-class activism is not automatic. As long as governments are delivering stability and economic growth, the more prosperous citizens of countries such as Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia will happily forgo political liberties while they enjoy the benefits of a modern consumer society. Indeed, they are frightened of losing what they have already gained. But such conservatism is fragile, because it depends on the belief that the existing regime is better for economic growth and political stability than any alternative. The systems of patronage binding politicians and businessmen are fragile too, because the deals on everything from road-building contracts to the allocation of cheap shares in privatized telephone companies are all built on the assumption of rapid and continued economic growth. What happens when the gravy train stops? In Indonesia, the urban elite, including ethnic Chinese business magnates and Indonesian yuppies, quietly supported President Suharto’s leadership for decades while the economy expanded. But by the time south-east Asian financial markets crashed in 1997 they were understandably nervous about whether the economy could sustain the corruption, nepotism and cronyism to which Indonesia was particularly prone. In 1998 Suharto was ousted after pro-democracy demonstrations and outbreaks of looting in which hundreds of people were killed. Investors who had done deals with the president’s children and friends began to regret their alliances with discredited people who only months before had been the most influential business contacts in Indonesia.

It is not only the middle classes who are pushing for change. The poor have benefited from the industrial revolution, but not nearly as much as the rich. Throughout south-east Asia, peasant farmers and the urban underclass have started to complain about the widening gap between them and their richer compatriots. In Thailand, hundreds of peasants camped repeatedly outside parliament in Bangkok in the 1990s demanding redress for a range of grievances: low crop prices, for example, and the government’s failure to pay compensation for land submerged by reservoirs for hydro-electric dams. In Indonesia, people have staged demonstrations against the building of supermarkets; big new shops are said to be of use only to the rich and to put local traders and hawkers out of work. Such protests often take on disturbing religious or ethnic overtones, and there are plenty of real or imagined grievances for people to seize on as an excuse for violence. Most big businessmen in south-east Asia are ethnic Chinese, so it is usually the Chinese who build the supermarkets and suffer the consequences if shops are destroyed or looted. Rioters frequently burn down churches in Indonesia, too, identifying them with the minority Christians in a country where most people are Moslems. Neither the rural nor the urban poor feel they can hope to taste the fruits of industrialization that the rich – with their big cars, private schools, foreign travel, expensive night-life and mobile telephones – so ostentatiously relish. The situation is bearable when the economy is growing fast, unemployment is low and wages are rising faster than inflation – in other words when even the poor feel that this year is better than last. But the hitherto remarkable equanimity of the underclass could easily vanish in a real economic recession. (Until 1997 south-east Asia became so accustomed to rapid growth that ‘recession’ was loosely used in the region – it could mean annual growth of 5 per cent rather than an actual contraction of the economy.)

Another reason to expect political change is that a handover from one generation of leaders to the next is imminent. Those who experienced British, French or Dutch colonial rule and fought or campaigned for independence – such as Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, the elderly communists of Vietnam and Laos and ex-President Suharto of Indonesia – have sought to differentiate themselves from their former colonial masters. They inherited parliaments, courts and civil services (or, in the case of the communists, imported their models from the Soviet Union), but they moulded them to suit their own ambitions, suppressing dissent and arguing that strong government was essential for nationbuilding. Younger citizens, including the new generation of politicians, tend to be more liberal. From Burma in the west to Vietnam in the east, there was intense public interest in news of the South Korean trial of the former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and his successor Roh Tae-woo; the two generals, quintessential Asian authoritarians who pursued economic growth with ruthless determination, were condemned to death and prison respectively (though both were subsequently pardoned and released) for their corrupt and brutal rule of South Korea in the 1980s and early 1990s. The question asked in south-east Asia, sometimes openly, sometimes sotto voce, was: ‘Will there not come a time when we can do the same in our country to bring our leaders to account and usher in a better society?’

All three of the forces for political change mentioned above – the rise of the middle class, the resentment of the poor and the arrival of a new generation of politicians – were as significant in previous industrial revolutions as they are in south-east Asia’s. But there is a fourth phenomenon which is particularly relevant in the world of today: the speed with which information and ideas can be transmitted around the globe, even to the remotest corners of rural Burma or Borneo. It has become very difficult for governments, however dictatorial, to suppress news and views from abroad, as the trial of South Korea’s former leaders showed. Burmese villagers listen to the BBC or Voice of America on their radios, learning not only about international affairs but also about events in their own country that the military authorities have chosen to suppress or distort. Indonesian students download information from the World Wide Web via telephone lines in Jakarta – that is, if they are not pursuing their studies at American or Australian universities. Thai accountants watch satellite television. Singaporean computer engineers can afford to travel abroad and get access to any information they please. Nevertheless most governments in south-east Asia (Thailand and the Philippines are the notable exceptions) do try to restrict what their citizens can see, hear and read. They win the occasional battle with the help of censorship or lawsuits, but they are slowly losing the information war. They are overwhelmed both by the supply of information and by the demand for it from their citizens as the cost of information technology falls and the sophistication of readers and viewers increases. Already people can watch live television discussions with all their unpredictable consequences, participate in free-for-all Internet debating forums and choose from an array of new magazines in English and vernacular languages covering every subject from fashion to foreign policy.

The unprecedented speed of south-east Asia’s industrial revolution has not just affected politics. It has had a dramatic – some would say devastating – effect on societies and cultures. Chapter 3 looks at how tastes, habits, languages, religious beliefs and more are being reshaped, leaving people bewildered, broken – and occasionally happy. Proponents of ‘Asian values’ argued that south-east Asia would be spared the criminality and family breakdowns that normally accompany the migration of millions of people from small villages to impersonal towns during industrial revolutions. The evidence suggests otherwise. Drug abuse is just one example of the modern ills that south-east Asian societies now have to face. Even authoritarian governments admit the region has a serious drugs problem. Not only does it produce much of the world’s heroin – derived from the poppy fields of Burma and Laos and exported with the connivance of powerful businessmen and officials through Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam – it has also become a big consumer of drugs. Teenagers sniff glue in the Lao capital Vientiane; truck drivers take amphetamines to keep themselves awake on the roads of Thailand; heroin addicts have multiplied in Malaysia and Vietnam, where the drug is sold at the base of Lenin’s statue in central Hanoi; and the children of the new rich pop Ecstasy pills or snort cocaine in the discotheques of Bangkok and Jakarta. Alcoholism is a problem too, even among Moslems for whom alcohol is forbidden by the Koran. The reasons given for crime and drug-taking, and the tales of how each feeds on the other, rarely seem particularly ‘Asian’. In fact they would be wearisomely familiar to newspaper readers in the US or Europe. Heroin addicts and ‘street-children’, the youngsters who beg, shine shoes or prostitute themselves to earn a living, speak of broken homes and the despair of those who are left out of the economic race. The richer kids who hang around shopping malls in Malaysia or race their motorcycles around the lakes in Hanoi complain about the ennui of modern city life and the inability of their parents to understand them. Concerned governments in Vietnam and Malaysia have mounted strident campaigns against ‘social evils’, but they have met with cynicism from their teenage targets, who fail to see why governments are more concerned about youthful misdemeanours than corruption in high places.

Not all social changes are the object of outright condemnation. Some are welcomed, others are merely controversial. The most visible aspects of the social revolution are the goods and services that people have started to consume. In the cities, they drink wine and eat take-away pizzas as well as local food and drink. Irish theme pubs have sprung up in Phnom Penh, Hanoi and Bangkok. People shop at 7–11 corner stores and in shopping malls (‘I went malling’, said one Filipina recently when asked what she had done at the weekend) as well as at market stalls. They watch soccer on television, and play golf in addition to badminton. They drive Toyotas and Volvos. They go to Michael Jackson concerts in Bangkok and listen to Hootie and the Blowfish in Jakarta. They watch dubbed or subtitled Hollywood movies. They work and live in concrete buildings indistinguishable from those in London, Frankfurt or Oklahoma, and inside them they use computers with software made by Microsoft. They sit on modern toilets manufactured by American Standard or its Japanese rivals. Even in the countryside, farmers drive Honda motorcycles and watch televisions made by Mitsubishi. It is true that each Asian market remains distinctive, that very few Asians watch television programmes in English, and that a truly global sense of culture lies far in the future: Thais do not become American just because they go to American fast food outlets, any more than the inhabitants of San Francisco adopt Thai habits after eating a Thai meal. Still, cultures are heavily influenced by the increasing contact between south-east Asia and the rest of the world. Languages absorb words from America just as they used to co-opt the Dutch, French and English vocabulary of the colonial powers. Modern south-east Asian music, architecture and fashion often draw on the traditions of both east and west.

Family relationships and attitudes to sex are changing too, although at a much slower pace than shopping habits. Loyalty to an extended family of cousins and in-laws is gradually giving way to the nuclear family of mother, father and children more typical of modern cities. Single men and women independent of spouses or parents are beginning to make an appearance on the radar screens of market research companies, even if most people continue to live with their parents until marriage. The anonymity of city life and the availability of contraceptives have removed most of the impediments to pre-marital and casual sex. For liberals, this is all good news. Young people enjoy more freedom and are no longer constrained by the old-fashioned customs of their ancestors. Women are less likely to be regarded as subordinate to men, and some are beginning to shine as bankers, businesswomen and politicians. Homosexuality is more widely accepted, too.

But there is a bad side to these new-found freedoms. The young feel insecure because they can no longer rely on numerous relatives to look after them, find them jobs or lend them money when times are hard. The old begin to worry that their offspring will not provide for them in old age (hence the Singaporean law of 1995 – the Maintenance of Parents Act – making it compulsory for children to support needy parents in old age). Divorce rates are rising in several countries in the region. Worse, there is evidence in Indonesia and elsewhere that young girls, amoral and materialistic, have begun to engage in casual prostitution with older men in order to buy the designer clothes they could not otherwise afford, a phenomenon previously noticed in Japan. Professional prostitution, meanwhile, continues to flourish in the region on a grand scale, while gigolos in Bali ply their trade with foreign women much as Tunisian men do at the beach resorts of North Africa. Some sociologists argue that what they call ‘contractual sex’ has always been an integral part of life in, say, Thailand and Vietnam.⁵ Yet the increased mobility within and between countries that is the inevitable result of the industrial revolution has raised some new and disturbing issues. The disease AIDS is wreaking silent havoc in countries where both intravenous drug abuse and casual sex are common. Paedophiles from the West and from other Asian countries such as Taiwan have Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines high on their list of destinations. Pornographic videos are widely distributed in Indochina. Rape is common. Such problems afflict other countries where half the population has moved from villages to cities. But the Asian leaders who have convinced themselves that these issues are ‘western’ in origin rather than simply modern are finding them particularly difficult to solve.

Rapid modernization is affecting people’s spiritual lives as well as their personal relationships. Religion is the subject of two contradictory trends: on the one hand, religious observance often declines as the young loosen their ties to the traditions of their forefathers and spend their time on the two activities into which life is divided in the modern mind – work and leisure; on the other hand, people feel so insecure when they see the collapse of the customs which previously framed their lives that they seek the solid comfort of religious dogma and even of fundamentalism. Both trends are evident, sometimes in the same country or even the same family. Indonesians, for example, are struggling to explain the simultaneous increase of both decadence and religiosity among Moslems in Jakarta. Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Taoism (ancestor worship) are the principal religions of south-east Asia, but they often thrive alongside – or in combination with – older forms of superstition and animism. In 1994 I stumbled on the sacrifice of a dog in an Akha hill-tribe village in northern Thailand. In all, a dog, two chickens and two pigs had been killed, and grains of rice and freshly cut leaves piled near the dog’s bleeding corpse in the hot afternoon sun. It turned out to be a routine sacrifice. Some villagers in the community of Paka Sukjai had fallen sick, and they paid a spirit-man fifty-two baht (in those days about two US dollars) to perform a ceremony to cure them. Elsewhere in Thailand, the Thais, like the Romans of old and many pre-industrial civilizations the world over, believe in household gods; almost every home and office has a small ‘spirit house’ to which offerings of food and incense are made. People pray to statues of the Buddha in the hope of winning the lottery; and occasionally they pray for fertility at shrines of great wooden phalluses.

In terms of numbers, Islam is south-east Asia’s dominant religion. It has long been asserted that Islam in Asia is ‘milder’ and less troublesome as a political force than it is in the Middle East, partly because many of Indonesia’s millions of Javanese Moslems have a more mystical and less rigid interpretation of Islam than their coreligionists. Yet the religion does loom large in political calculations, posing as it does a dilemma for governments which see it both as an enemy of modernization and a friend of moral, non-western ‘Asian values’. In Indonesia, Islamic separatists are confronting the government in Aceh in northern Sumatra, and Javanese Moslems regularly burn down Christian churches. Malaysia banned a fundamentalist Islamic sect called al-Arqam in 1994. Moslem guerrillas in southern Thailand and the southern Philippines, where they are minorities in predominantly Buddhist and Christian countries respectively, have fought sporadic battles against their rulers for years. The Indonesian and Malaysian governments – like their counterparts in the Middle East – have been forced to perform tricky balancing acts to defuse any Moslem opposition to their rule. They crack down hard on those they regard as extremists, but they also try to co-opt Moslems by making concessions and by appearing more religious themselves. As the ruling families and politicians of the Gulf states and Egypt have discovered, this can be a dangerous game. Once you have introduced a law that satisfies devout Moslems, it is very difficult to repeal or relax it without being condemned as an irreligious backslider. There is no question that Islam is the religion that has the most difficulty accepting the social and economic changes that appear to accompany every modern industrial revolution. But Malaysians such as Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister who was an Islamic firebrand in his youth, are convinced that they can forge a society that is simultaneously Moslem, democratic and technologically advanced⁶. If they succeed, they believe they could become a model for other Islamic countries, which find themselves in a state of turmoil and decline 1,000 years after the time when they were at the forefront of science and civilization.

Even when south-east Asians agree on the need for a moral compass, however, there is no agreement on which way it should point. Like Europeans and Americans, Asians are tempted by the trivial, the sensational and the material. But the same governments which rail against the West for infecting Asia with liberalism and decadence are accused by their fiercest domestic opponents of being too ‘western’ themselves. Particularly among the region’s intellectuals, there is mounting disgust with the crude materialism of south-east Asia’s political leaders and their often boorish business associates. What was the point of all those magnificent economic growth statistics if the quality of life is not improved, if the poor simply swap rural misery for its urban equivalent, if the rich are stuck in traffic jams in their BMWs, if the great new cities of Asia are ugly and polluted, and if art and language are bastardized by quasi-American global culture? As in the Victorian England of Charles Dickens, there is a nostalgia for good things lost and a fear of recently created evils – as well as pride in the new prosperity and power.

The ‘Asian values’ argument is thus being turned against its creators. South-east Asian political leaders, their critics say, are guilty of taking the worst aspects of westernization and industrialization (materialism and consumerism) while ignoring the best (political reform, social idealism and philanthropy); at the same time they are keeping the worst aspects of the old order (authoritarianism and institutionalized corruption) while abandoning the best (the village sense of community, harmony with nature and traditional artistic sensibilities). Politicians are sensitive to such criticisms. Singapore’s leaders speak openly of the need to file down the rough edges of the coarsely materialistic nouveaux riches. They mount campaigns to promote the arts, protect the environment and encourage good table manners. The region’s poorer inhabitants, meanwhile, have their appetite for unaffordable consumer goods whetted by advertising and by the lifestyles portrayed in television soap operas. Parents in the hills of northern Thailand still sell their children for cash to brokers who send them into prostitution in the big cities. Moralizing does not suit south-east Asia’s leaders or its elders. When teenagers are criticized by their governments or their parents for their taste in music or their lax morals, they are able to point out bitterly that many of the politicians and entrepreneurs who should be their role models are at best amoral and opportunist and at worst drug-traffickers and gangsters.

The extraordinary influence of big business in the running of southeast Asia in the past three decades is examined in chapter 4. Close connections between unscrupulous businessmen and governments are not unprecedented at times of headlong economic growth: Britain and America also had their capitalist ‘robber barons’ in the heyday of industrialization, and they and their descendants were soon cloaked with respectability. Indonesian, Malaysian and Thai tycoons – starting with the sale of agricultural commodities such as rice and tapioca, moving through the manufacture of industrial products such as cars and computers and on to services such as retailing and airlines – have never been afraid to use the money they make to buy political influence and a comfortable place in high society. They make alliances with army generals and presidents’ children; indeed, sometimes they are army generals and presidents’ children. They have been involved in everything from drug-trafficking and illegal logging to lucrative and corrupt infrastructure projects for roads and telephone lines. In the early days, the businessmen can be openly thuggish, as they were in Cambodia in the early 1990s. But before long the drug barons and gangsters are dressed in Savile Row suits, their children are educated overseas, the family business is engaged in banking and finance and the past is all but forgotten.

The fate of business in south-east Asia is inseparable from the fate of the various ethnic Chinese communities which dominate trade and industry. Although some of the Chinese in south-east Asia suffered grievously at the hands of the invading Japanese during the Second World War, they quickly re-established themselves after the war and soon occupied the commercial territory abandoned by the departing colonial powers. Chinese minorities run the biggest conglomerates in Indonesia, the smallest shops in Cambodia and much in between. Needless to say, they are often resented. If they invest too much of their profits in their home markets, they are accused of dominating local business; if they invest overseas, in mainland China for example, they are accused of disloyalty to their adopted country. In Indonesia, where tens of thousands of Chinese were murdered in anti-communist massacres in the mid-1960s, some of the wealthiest Chinese businessmen threw in their lot with Suharto and his relatives. This ensured favourable treatment for a time, but leaves them vulnerable now that Suharto has been forced out of the presidency. The Malaysian government, alarmed by clashes between Chinese and Malays which left scores of people dead after an election in 1969, adopted a deliberate policy of favouritism called the New Economic Policy designed to transfer wealth, opportunity and skills to Malays; in Malaysia, it is the Chinese who feel resentment, although even Malays think the discriminatory policies may have outlived their usefulness. Thailand has taken a different approach, slowly assimilating the Chinese over hundreds of years to the extent that many of them think of themselves as Thai. In the Philippines, the ethnic Chinese share the upper reaches of society with another elite – the professionals and business families of Spanish descent.

However much the ‘indigenous’ – or, more accurately, non-Chinese – peoples of south-east Asia succeed in improving themselves, ethnic Chinese business will remain crucial for economic progress in the foreseeable future. But businesses will need to change fast if south-east Asia is to resume the spectacular economic growth of earlier years. That is because many of them are old-fashioned organizations. They can make money at the early stages of an industrial revolution, when they are able to exploit unregulated markets in natural resources and cheap labour, create domestic monopolies and make products for the local market behind a protective barrier of high import duties. But they are ill equipped for genuine competition in the modern global economy. Frequently they are centralized, family-run businesses that have made money the easy way, initially using government connections to win road-building or other infrastructure contracts or to gain logging concessions in virgin forests, before graduating to joint ventures or franchise agreements with foreign companies from car manufacturers to pizza parlour managers (the foreign companies provide the technical expertise and the local companies contribute their political influence and local knowledge). Finally, they buy land and become property speculators and developers. In spite of all the praise heaped on south-east Asian economies for their liberal economic policies and their successful penetration of export markets, many of the region’s own markets remain protected in reality if not by law. Foreigners cannot just buy a house in Thailand or set up a bank in Singapore or sell noodles in Indonesia, although the recent economic upheaval and the need for foreign capital has forced several countries to liberalize protectionist regulations.

The limitations of rough and ready pre-modern capitalism are quickly becoming apparent. Investments made by south-east Asian companies in the more competitive markets of Europe and America often run into trouble. But such failures have been dwarfed by the problems at home. The currency and stock market crisis which affected Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia in particular in 1997 and 1998 showed that these economies, and many of the businesses in them, were managed by people who were too complacent, over-dependent on short-term borrowings and more reliant than they should have been on government largesse. Fortunately for south-east Asia, a new generation of entrepreneurs is eager to meet the challenge. Many of them are the sons of old-fashioned capitalists, but they are often educated at universities and business schools in the US or elsewhere in the West. They have learned modern management methods and they know that south-east Asia is quickly losing the advantage of cheap labour as wages increase; they are starting to believe in creativity and innovation, backed by higher spending on research and development, instead of copying something done elsewhere and trying to do it cheaper; and they know that trade liberalization in the region and internationally will expose their businesses to more competition than ever.

One of the depressing results of industrialization, population growth and the success of businesses greedy for growth has been the destruction of the natural environment, the subject of chapter 5. Such damage is by no means unique to south-east Asia, but the speed and scale of the abuse since the 1960s is unparalleled. Governments insist, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that it is cheaper to get rich first and use the money to repair the environmental damage later. And they suggest – or at least Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia does – that foreign environmentalists are motivated by foolish sentimentalism or by a protectionist desire to weaken Asia’s economies. But the situation is so severe that even unsentimental locals are starting to take notice. Filthy, noisy and congested metropolitan cities such as Manila, Jakarta and Bangkok have become nightmarish for the poor and difficult even for the rich. Countryside that was once lush and green has become scarred and barren.

The damage is done in many ways. Population growth and indiscriminate tree-felling have shrunk south-east Asia’s forests to a fraction of their former size. Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand complain that they are not given recognition for having set aside vast areas of their territory as national parks. It is true that such legally protected areas are much larger than those in most developed countries. But legal protection does not always mean real protection. In Cambodian national parks, soldiers with chainsaws can be seen today happily cutting down trees. Some of Thailand’s ‘forest areas’ are actually devoid of trees. In Indonesian and Malaysian Borneo logging continues on such a large scale that even government officials admit it is unsustainable. With the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam already devastated, Asian logging companies have moved on to Cambodia, Laos and Burma or further afield to South America, where their rapacity is as controversial as it is at home.

Wild animals have had their habitats destroyed, and the survivors are hunted down so that their body parts can be incorporated into Chinese medicines and aphrodisiacs. The tiger became a symbol of the economic strength of east Asia, but these ‘tiger economies’ have few real tigers left. Likewise, the elephant has long been associated with the traditions of Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, but wild elephants are increasingly rare. There is little sentimentality about the loss of wild creatures which kill farm animals and damage crops, any more than Europeans mourned the disappearance of wolves and bears. Nor is there much concern about ‘biodiversity’. But millions of people suffer too: deforestation has contributed to soil erosion, landslides, droughts and devastating floods. The sea has fared no better than the land. Fishermen, like their counterparts in Europe and North America, have overfished their waters. They poach in their neighbours’ fishing grounds, prompting armed clashes and frequent seizures of fishing boats – and arrests of fishermen – by the governments concerned. The coastal mangrove forests where fish and shrimp once bred have been uprooted by property developers and commercial prawn farmers, while coral reefs are killed by sewage or blown apart by fishermen using dynamite to catch the few remaining fish.

Neither the depredation of land and sea nor the pollution typical of the early stages of industrialization have received much attention from wealthy city-dwellers. They are much more concerned with the critical state of their cities. The air is thick with dust and toxic gases generated by the trucks, cars, factories and building sites that are the accompaniments to economic success; pedestrians in Manila or Bangkok vainly hold handkerchiefs to their noses and mouths to try to filter out the filth. To call rivers and canals polluted is an understatement; they are black and empty of life. Drivers sit for so long in traffic jams that some have bought portable toilets and office equipment for their cars. Elegant old buildings are torn down and green spaces paved over to make way for unremarkable office blocks and apartment buildings. The urban rich react to this assault in the time-honoured way – by moving out to the suburbs.

A backlash against environmental destruction has begun, although there is still more talk than action. Pressure groups have appeared. Businesses declare their green intentions. Governments have set up environment ministries. Politicians campaign, and sometimes win elections, by espousing green issues. And although most of the region’s big cities remain dirty, noisy and ugly, the most economically advanced – Singapore – has cleaned up its principal river, resurrected old buildings and started to boast of its green credentials. Some economists and environmentalists have calculated that a substantial proportion of south-east Asia’s impressive economic growth in the past three decades can be attributed to a one-off fire-sale of natural resources, which means that it may be harder for economies to grow so fast when the trees, the fish and the soil are all depleted. For the individual Indonesian or Thai citizen there are more personal concerns. They remember fishing in a river or drinking from a stream as a child. They see its poisonous waters today and regret what they have lost.

Wealth has not only made south-east Asia dirtier. It has also made it more powerful. Chapter 6 looks at the uncertain state of regional security after the end of the Cold War. Several countries have bought weapons from the US, Europe and Russia, including American F-16 and Russian MiG-29 jet aircraft; Indonesia bought most of the old East German navy. There has been talk in academic journals and the media of ‘a regional arms race’. But the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) is striving to present a united front to the world. It has quickly embraced Burma and the former communist states of Vietnam and Laos and is expected to incorporate Cambodia shortly to bring its final complement to ten. Asean, founded by five countries in Bangkok in 1967, is a motley collection of rich countries, poor countries, liberal democracies, not-so-liberal democracies, communist states, a military junta and a sultanate, and it has begun to exert its influence on everything from world trade negotiations to security policy. In 1993, it founded the Asean Regional Forum to bring together all the countries concerned with maintaining peace in Asia, including China, Russia and the US.

A prominent part of the Asean agenda hitherto has been to promote the so-called ‘Asian value’ of consensus. In foreign relations, this approach means compromise rather than confrontation. But the agenda is starting to look dangerously out of date. Consensus is not easy to reach with an increasingly assertive China which, like Asean, is translating its new-found economic muscle into increased military might. In the past few years China has made repeated naval incursions into Vietnamese offshore oil exploration zones (and it invaded Vietnam by land as recently as 1979); it has also occupied disputed atolls of the Spratly Islands off the Philippines, again in pursuit of its claim to almost the whole of the South China Sea; and it has alarmed Asean members such as Thailand and Singapore, as well as India, by developing close military and commercial ties with the Burmese junta. Asean was forced to confront the Chinese over the South China Sea incursions with un-Asean directness: they told the Chinese to stop. Asean members, especially the vulnerable island of Singapore, have had to acknowledge their continuing dependence on the security umbrella provided by the US, however unpalatable American views on democracy may be.

Asean has also espoused the ‘Asian value’ of communal (as opposed to individual) rights. It has rejected western complaints about human rights abuses or environmental damage on the grounds that political stability and economic growth for all are more important to developing Asian countries than the complaints of a few dissidents. But the populations of the Asean countries become more sophisticated with every year that passes, and younger Asians can no longer be relied upon to accept their governments’ definitions of right and wrong. Siding with Burma’s notorious military junta against the West in the interests of Asean solidarity is enough to test the diplomatic skills of even the most hardened adherent of ‘Asian values’. Asean thus risks being seen as a complacent clique of governments whose main aim is to keep themselves in power, a sort of ‘regime survival club’. Meanwhile, there are plenty of real dangers for the organization and its member states to avert if they want to proceed smoothly down the path of modernization. There are the problems on the fringes of Asean – the stand-off between North and South Korea, the assertiveness of China, the dependence of the whole area on oil and gas imported from the Middle East – as well as conflicts within it over secession movements, drug-trafficking, border disputes, piracy at sea, and the over-exploitation of natural resources. The south-east Asian states are quickly discovering that wealth and power do not merely confer the right to push forward one’s own views; the powerful must also share the burden of keeping the peace.

Chapter 7 looks at the ten countries in turn and analyses the part played by each in the modernization of politics and society. Like central America or southern Africa, south-east Asia sees itself, and is increasingly seen by others, as a distinct region. But it contains an exceptionally wide variety of races, religions, colonial experiences and styles of economic development. Each country is affected by the industrial revolution in different ways.

Modernization and the prosperity that comes with it, chapter 8 concludes, have nevertheless made life better for the overwhelming majority of south-east Asia’s 500 million people. Some have yet to benefit, a few are worse off than before, but many have moved from a hand-to-mouth existence in the countryside to the financial security of paid employment in the towns. South-east Asia today is no longer simply a place of golden temples and rice-farmers in emerald-green paddy fields. Those images are slowly being replaced by the modern reality of factories and city streets. Asian nations are becoming part of the industrialized world. To have this happen in one country is an achievement; to have it happen in ten neighbouring countries simultaneously is nothing less than extraordinary. But there is a long way to go. Some governments have convinced themselves that Asian political violence and social decay exist only in the imagination of jealous western observers, but they are wrong. More and more Asians recognize that there are big obstacles to overcome if the next twenty years are to be as successful as the last twenty. The biggest mistakes their leaders made in the 1990s were to try to suppress the popular urge for political and social change while boasting about their economic achievements in a mood of premature triumph.

ONE The rise and fall of ‘Asian values’

Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad has asked Malaysians not to accept western-style democracy as it could result in negative effects. The prime minister said such an extreme principle had caused moral decay, homosexual activities, single parents and economic slowdown because of poor work ethics.

– Voice of Malaysia radio, 29 May 1993.

Some people have the illusion that things are different in Asia because the spirit of feudalism still prevails and peasants are politically inactive. This is not true. Asians and Vietnamese are changing. They are desperate for democracy, freedom and development. Nothing can restrain them any longer and it is only a matter of time before the situation erupts. The political stability which appears to exist in Vietnam at the moment is a fake.

– Bui Tin, a former Vietnamese army officer and self-exiled dissident.¹

For centuries, Europeans regarded Asia with a mixture of horror and jealous fascination. Schooled since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to believe in the power of reason and discipline, Europeans saw Asia as exotic, irrational, unreliable and decadent. To them, Asia was a world of cruelty and sensuality, of despots and harems. The real Asia was often submerged in the European mind by the fears and feverish imaginings of the Europeans themselves. These delusions later became known collectively as ‘Orientalism’ – a word used to describe the western habit of simultaneously glamorizing and demonizing the east.² This is not to deny that the countries of Asia were very different from those of post-Enlightenment Europe, both socially and politically. Asians themselves – whether in power or in opposition – often sought to modernize their societies by emulating the commercial, administrative and social practices of the colonial powers with which they came into contact; King Chulalongkorn of Thailand, for example, is credited with turning his country into a modern bureaucratic state, complete with railways, roads and canals, during his rule from 1868 to 1910.

But in the 1980s and 1990s Asian leaders, especially in south-east Asia, decided to turn the tables on the West. Independence from the European powers had been won three decades before, and had been followed by a period of rapid economic growth in much of east Asia. Men like Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore declared that Asia was indeed different from the West. But this time it was the Asians who were disciplined, hardworking and moral, while the West was a place of unreason – a morass of crime, decadence and loose sexual habits. By the early 1990s a lively debate was under way in east Asia and among politicians and academics in the US and Europe.³

Supporters of the concept of ‘Asian values’ argued that east Asians, although ethnically diverse, shared certain core beliefs. They were loyal to their families and communities, whereas westerners were obsessed with the rights of individuals to the extent that their societies were starting to fall apart. Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore, its prime minister from 1959 to 1990 and now with the title of senior minister, told an interviewer in 1994 that he liked the informality and openness of American society. ‘But as a total system, I find parts of it totally unacceptable: guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy, unbecoming behaviour in public – in sum the breakdown of civil society,’ he said. ‘The expansion of the right of the individual to behave or misbehave as he pleases has come at the expense of orderly society. In the East the main object is to have a well-ordered society so that everybody can have maximum enjoyment of his freedoms. This freedom can only exist in an ordered state and not in a natural state of contention and anarchy.’⁴

The philosophy of ‘Asian values’, developed principally in Singapore and Malaysia, is much more than a set of abstruse social theories. From Burma to China and beyond, it has a direct bearing on everything from attitudes towards human rights abuses and film censorship to international trade negotiations and deforestation. After three decades of political stability and extraordinarily rapid economic expansion, some of Asia’s leaders feel that they have earned the right to run their countries according to their own rules. They have had enough of being lectured on how to run their political systems, look after the rights of their factory workers and protect their tigers and elephants by former colonial powers such as England and France, and by a United States made arrogant by its victory over communism in the Cold War. The coming century, they believe, will be the ‘Pacific Century’ – an era in which confident Asians will finally be able to discard the western baggage left behind by the colonial era.

Such emotions are most deeply felt by the older generation of leaders who remember colonial rule and who still hold sway in much of the region. Mahathir, the septuagenarian Malaysian prime minister who has led the country since 1981, has courted Japan in his efforts to advance the cause of ‘Asian values’, both because of Japan’s present influence as an economic superpower and because of its historical role in sweeping aside the colonial powers in south-east Asia during the Second World War. Although the British, the French and the Dutch returned after Japan’s defeat in 1945, the mystique of the all-powerful European was shattered for ever, and they soon departed again, leaving behind the newly independent countries of Asia.⁵ The forthright Mahathir has found favour in Japan by urging the Japanese to stop apologizing for the war and to take pride in the resurgent Asia of the late twentieth century. In 1995 he co-authored The Asia that can say No: a Card against the West with the right-wing Japanese politician Shintaro Ishihara, and in it he laid out the basic tenets of the new Asian philosophy: the West is suffering from ‘moral degeneration’ and hedonism in the form of incest, cohabitation, sensual gratification, avarice and lack of respect for family or religion; Asia is in the ascendant economically and morally; and the jealous West is therefore trying to stifle Asia’s growth. ‘Fearing that one day they will have to face Asian countries as competitors, some western nations are doing their utmost to keep us at bay,’ he wrote. ‘They constantly wag accusing fingers in Asia’s direction, claiming that it has benefited from unacceptable practices, such as denial of human rights and workers’ rights, undemocratic government, and disregard for the environment.’ For Mahathir, Asian values were not just different, they were better. The West ‘should accept our values, not the other way round’. Ishihara joined in with enthusiasm along similarly anti-western and anti-liberal lines. Among other declarations, he made the controversial assertion that westerners sought depraved sex and child sex in south-east Asia while Japanese visitors just wanted normal sex with prostitutes. More significantly, he aired the idea of ‘a new economic co-prosperity sphere’ for Asia, echoing the wartime Japanese concept of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ which justified Japan’s invasion of other Asian lands.⁶

All this harked back to Japanese Second World War propaganda about undesirable Anglo-American values – individualism, liberalism, democracy, hedonism and materialism – that should not be allowed to pollute the pure spirit of Japan.⁷ But the memories of Japanese atrocities against both prisoners-of-war and civilians meant that a new ‘Asian Way’ so closely associated with Japan was never going to be popular in south-east Asia, let alone China. Mahathir said the Japanese troops in Malaya had done nothing ‘improper’, but other Asians of his generation – including Filipinos and Chinese – remember all too well the gruesome massacres, rapes, torture and other atrocities committed by Japanese troops. Lee Kuan Yew has repeatedly mentioned the dark days of the Japanese occupation of Singapore and used it to warn his people of the need for constant vigilance. The idea of an ‘Asian Way’ for the 1990s with Japan taking the lead was further impeded by the reluctance of Japanese politicians more cautious than the swashbuckling Ishihara to antagonize their American allies.

Another way for east Asian leaders to cement ‘Asian values’ into a coherent philosophy was to summon the help of Confucius. The Chinese sage, who lived 2,500 years ago and whose thoughts on government and morality are recorded in The Analects, at first seemed ideally suited to the task of uniting east Asians behind a common value-system. Like modern east Asians, he revered the power of education and preached filial piety. As early as 1977, the University of Singapore hosted a symposium on Asian Values and Modernization. Academics bemoaned the rise of juvenile delinquency and the increasing divorce rate and suggested that western values should be inspected – as if by customs officials – before being imported. They discussed the need to build an ethos based on supposedly Asian values such as ‘group solidarity’, ‘community life’ and the belief in extended families.⁸ By 1983, Singapore had established the Institute of East Asian Philosophies. Sponsored by Lee’s ruling People’s Action Party, it was designed to revive Confucianism and adapt it to modern life, and was explicitly aimed at countering the westernization of Singaporeans. A new theory of government based on harmony and consensus was outlined: debate and criticism would not take place in public but among members of the government behind closed doors. As one western academic put it in 1996, in Indonesia and Singapore ‘consensus means conformity with the wishes of the regime’.⁹

The appeal of Confucian conservatism is understandable, particularly in societies with pre-existing Confucian traditions such as Vietnam and among the minority ethnic Chinese communities widely spread throughout south-east Asia. At a time of tumultuous social and political change, Confucianism seems to offer clear guidelines for maintaining civilized values. ‘Criminality is on the rise, opium and drugs are on the rise too and morality is in decline – such things as would make the hair of the ancestors stand on end,’ says Huu Ngoc, a Vietnamese writer living in the capital Hanoi. For him, the chaos caused by modernization is damaging a community spirit based on the co-operative cultivation of rice – a spirit which he sees as spreading out in concentric circles from family to village to nation. The result, he says, is that ‘Confucianism – which is the basis for this community solidarity of family, village and state – is breached.’¹⁰

By the late 1990s, however, it was clear that Confucianism was an unsuitable glue for holding east Asians together in the name of ‘Asian values’. There were three main reasons for this. First, the non-Chinese who form the majority of south-east Asians could not identify with an essentially Chinese philosophy; just as Singaporeans found it impossible to espouse an ‘Asian Way’ linked to Japanese wartime imperialism, so Malays and Indonesians – who sometimes fear China as an external power and resent the Chinese communities in their midst – were unable to accept one so explicitly connected to China.

Second, it emerged that Confucianism was an exceptionally weak card for Asians to play against the West in order to proclaim Asian supremacy. This was because both western and Asian thinkers had for a century or more been blaming traditional Confucian values, with their rigid respect for hierarchy and disdain of commerce, for the failure of Asia to make economic progress following the European industrial revolutions. It was absurd for Asian leaders suddenly to attribute their success to Confucius when it had long been argued that he was one of the causes of Asia’s relative economic decline in the previous 1,000 years. For Max Weber, the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German sociologist, Asian values were inimical to economic success because they discouraged innovation and competition; it was the northern Europeans, with their ‘Protestant Ethic’, who were succeeding. Kishore Mahbubani, permanent secretary at the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs and one of the most forceful proponents of Asian values, is convinced that the region fell behind because Asian minds became ‘ossified’. ‘After centuries of inertia resulting from oppressive feudal rule,’ Mahbubani wrote, ‘the work ethic is coming back in full force in most East Asian societies.’¹¹

The third, and perhaps most important, reason why Confucius was confined to the sidelines is that a close reading of Confucian texts reveals a philosophy not quite as politically convenient for present-day south-east Asian leaders as previously thought. It was not merely his dismissal of women, his snobbish disdain for manual labour or his anti-commercial instincts; neo-Confucianists had in any case embraced business from the sixteenth century. It was much worse. Although it was true that Confucius and his followers, such as Mencius, encouraged respect for authority, it turned out that they also insisted on good government and social justice and sometimes accepted the need for subjects to rebel against unjust rulers. Confucianism quickly became less popular with several east Asian governments.

But some of south-east Asia’s rulers still felt the need to unite their peoples behind a common set of ‘Asian values’, partly to promote stability in their own multi-ethnic region and partly to confront outsiders with a coherent philosophy that explains their actions and arguments when they are engaged in international negotiations. In 1993, Tommy Koh, a senior Singapore diplomat, outlined ten basic ‘Asian values’ in 1993 that still hold good for adherents to the ‘Asian Way’ today. They are: an absence of extreme individualism; a belief in strong families; a reverence for education; frugality; hard work; ‘national teamwork’ between unions and employers; an Asian ‘social contract’ between people and the state, whereby governments provide law and order and citizens behave well in return; a belief in citizens as ‘stakeholders’, for example through home-ownership – this only applied to some Asian countries; moral wholesomeness; and a free but responsible press. ‘Taken together,’ Koh wrote, ‘these ten values form a framework that has enabled societies in East Asia to achieve economic prosperity, progress, harmonious relations between citizens and law and order.’¹²

It is perhaps not surprising that many south-east Asian leaders should believe in a set of values that simultaneously justifies their own forms of government and suggests that they are culturally different from – if not superior to – westerners. What is remarkable is how many westerners agree. In a book urging European businesses to become more involved in the then fast-growing markets of south-east Asia, Corrado Letta, an Italian business consultant, drew up a table comparing ‘cultural values’ in Europe and Asia. Europeans were characterized by ‘reluctance to learn’, Asians by ‘willingness to learn/respect for learning’; Europeans had ‘complacency’, while Asians had ‘creativity’; Europeans liked ‘taking it easy’, whereas Asians preferred ‘hard work’; Europe was full of ‘doom and gloom’, but Asia enjoyed ‘booming confidence’; and so on.¹³ Letta is not alone. It is common to hear both westerners and Asians declare that Asians are more hardworking than Africans; more concerned about losing ‘face’ than Americans; or more gentle than Europeans. ‘Asians,’ wrote one western commentator bluntly, ‘believe in consensus.’¹⁴ This is about as meaningful as the nineteenth-century Orientalist generalization that Asians enjoy cruelty, and most such hard-and-fast cultural distinctions can be dismissed as neo-Orientalist.¹⁵

A more realistic view is that the people of south-east Asia – because they have only recently undergone or are still undergoing their rapid industrial revolutions – still retain some of the values of an earlier, pre-industrial age. Like many Asians today, Europeans and Americans used to live in extended families, work hard, show respect for their elders and live by stern moral codes. Western politicians often play to ordinary people’s nostalgia about this aspect of their past, and declare that there is much westerners can learn from those Asian societies which appear to be both prosperous (in a modern way) and law-abiding (in an old-fashioned way). This is why Margaret Thatcher was enthusiastic about ‘Victorian values’ and why Tony Blair, within weeks of becoming prime minister, invited Lee Kuan Yew to his office at Downing Street in London to discuss such matters as welfare reform and education. It is also why it was – in political terms, at least – so ill-advised of President Bill Clinton to take up his human rights cudgels on behalf of Michael Fay, an eighteen-year-old American sentenced in Singapore in 1994 to be flogged with a rattan cane for various acts of vandalism, including spray-painting cars. US administration officials and several American newspaper columnists expressed outrage at the punishment, which can leave permanent scars. But many ordinary Americans, fed up with crime in their own country, thought Singapore was taking the right approach and told the Singaporeans – in the words of at least one caller to a US radio phone-in programme – to ‘whip his butt’. The Michael Fay affair played straight into the hands of Asian leaders who reject the idea that the US has anything to teach them about human rights. Lee Kuan Yew responded to US criticism by saying that America might be rich but it was also chaotic, and neither safe nor peaceful. ‘If you like it that way, that is your problem,’ he said. ‘But that is not the path we choose. They always talk about human rights. I think it is just a convenient slogan.’¹⁶

But only the most stubborn defenders of ‘Asian values’ would argue that they are immutable. Brigadier-General Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s deputy prime minister and the son of Lee Kuan Yew, commented recently on the failure of western policies on welfare and crime and the spread of social problems to countries such as Taiwan, and said: ‘If we do not watch the way we go we could become like the West.’ He said Chinese, Malays and Indians (the three main ethnic groups in Singapore) did have a different ‘world view’ from westerners. But when asked whether values could not change dramatically from generation to generation as they do in the West, he replied: ‘The answer is we don’t know. They are not unchanging. They will evolve, but if we can’t preserve the essence of them into the next generation then we think we are finished.’¹⁷

In the eyes of certain Asian leaders, ‘Asian values’ are not immutable but have a cultural basis – representing a different world view – and are worth defending in the name of social cohesion. Some of the ten values listed by Tommy Koh are unremarkable, and are accepted as good whether or not they are actually adopted in the rest of the world as well: frugality and hard work, for example. Others are more controversial. They suggest curbing the rights of the individual in the interests of society as a whole; they hint at tame trade unions and an uncritical press; and they support the idea of strong government. These are not just theories. They are put into practice by the authoritarian governments of south-east Asia. In Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Burma, independent trade unions and newspapers have been restricted, tamed or banned. Political systems are designed and controlled so that opposition parties can exist to preserve the image of democracy but not actually take power. Few of the region’s governments are embarrassed when challenged on these points. On the contrary, they cite ‘Asian values’ to support restrictions on individual freedoms. Economic growth and political stability, which benefit all citizens, take priority over failed ‘western’ concepts of individual rights, they say, especially during the early stages of industrialization when a smaller proportion of the population is educated sufficiently to take on the responsibility of voting. They also compare Russia to China, condemning Russian governments since the collapse of communism for causing chaos and poverty by democratizing politics before liberalizing the economy, and praising China for embarking on economic reform while maintaining firm political control. This kind of analysis often finds favour outside Asia as well. The corruption and poverty of African countries following independence from the colonial powers were held up by African authoritarians, and their supporters in the West, as reasons not to impose western-style democratic institutions on alien cultures where people are supposedly ‘not ready’ for democracy.

However, just as it is easy to find Europeans or Americans who sympathize with the concept of ‘Asian values’ because they bemoan the problems in their own societies, it is notable that there are plenty of Asians who bitterly oppose the whole idea. For these people, the ‘Asian Way’ is an elaborate fraud which does not stand up to serious analysis and whose main purpose is to provide authoritarian governments with a rationale for staying in power indefinitely. In south-east Asia, it is the leaders of Malaysia and Singapore who have talked loudest about ‘Asian values’. Others, including the governments of Burma and Vietnam and individual politicians and businessmen throughout south-east Asia, have followed suit with varying degrees of enthusiasm. But in the Philippines and Thailand – the two most democratic countries in the region – many influential people scoff at ‘Asian values’ and the people who espouse them.

The Philippines, which was one of the most advanced Asian economies after the Second World War, is the favourite target of authoritarians; they say it has lagged behind its neighbours and fallen prey to poverty and crime largely because of the government’s inability to take hard decisions – to raise fuel prices, for example, or enforce tax collection – in a US-style democracy notable for bickering, lobbying and countless legal challenges. Unlike the orderly streets of Singapore, those of Manila are congested by overloaded and unroadworthy vehicles belching black smoke. Instead of Singapore’s neat, high-rise housing estates, filthy slums sprawl around the city and its garbage dumps. Law and order scarcely exist: patrons of bars and restaurants are urged by signs to leave their ‘deadly weapons’ at the front desk, and policemen have been among those implicated in the frequent kidnappings of ethnic Chinese businessmen and their relatives. Perhaps it is not surprising that Alfredo Lim, the mayor of central Manila who cracked down on drug-dealers and cleared Manila’s streets of overt prostitution and go-go bars (they moved to another district of the Manila metropolis), is an admirer of Lee Kuan Yew.¹⁸ George Yeo, Singapore’s Minister for Information and the Arts, uses the Philippines as a salutary example of how things can go wrong without strong government to ‘keep the body politic whole’. He said:

Look at the Philippines – a few decades of mismanagement and what happens? Their womenfolk are being sent to the Middle East, to Hong Kong, to Singapore, to Malaysia. They become domestic maids – highly educated, very intelligent people – why? Because their own country, their own economy, cannot make use of the value they are able to add to the whole economy so they end up choosing other jurisdictions. It’s an absurd situation. I think all of us see that, all of us do not want to be like the Philippines of a few years ago. And they [were like this] despite the fact that after the war they were the most educated, the most literate, the best founded of any of the nation states newly independent in south-east Asia.¹⁹

Filipino democrats cannot dispute the facts. The Philippines has been badly mismanaged and its people do suffer the humiliation of going overseas as migrant workers. But they bitterly reject the Singaporean analysis that democracy is in some way to blame. The real problem, they say, is not democracy but the years of dictatorship they suffered under the late Ferdinand Marcos, who favoured his business cronies and entrenched protectionism and corruption in the economy. When Lee Kuan Yew himself came to the Philippines and told a meeting of Filipino business executives that their country needed discipline more than democracy, President Fidel Ramos – under whose leadership the economy had started to recover – had a tart reply: ‘This prescription fails to consider our ill-fated flirtation with authoritarianism not so long ago.’²⁰ Corazon Aquino, who preceded Ramos as president after leading the democratic uprising which overthrew Marcos in 1986, was once so incensed by one of Lee’s lectures that she was heard muttering: ‘That arrogant bastard, I feel like kicking his shins.’²¹

Such feelings are not confined to the Philippines. When Suharto was president of Indonesia, he was happy to benefit from the increased international legitimacy afforded to authoritarian governments by the ‘Asian values’ argument without making any significant public contributions to the debate himself. ‘Indonesia,’ says Rizal Sukma, a researcher at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, ‘has become some sort of free rider in this debate.’ But he adds: ‘Among young intellectuals there is resentment about why the Singaporeans and Malaysians want to be spokespersons for the whole region. Not everyone agrees with Lee Kuan Yew’s formula.’

The disagreement extends to the ordinary citizens of Singapore and Malaysia as well. ‘It’s mind-boggling this Asian values thing. What are Asian values?’ asks Hishamuddin Rais, a Malaysian filmmaker and political dissident who has lived in exile but recently returned home after negotiations with the authorities. Rais – with his brown felt hat, beard and long hair in a bun – is a far cry from the typical Malaysian factory worker or bureaucrat. He accepts that there are cultural differences between Asians and westerners, but says ‘Asian values’ have become an excuse for totalitarianism and the stifling of free expression. ‘They say, “we want to develop economically first”, but this is a danger – develop until when? Have we started sowing the seeds of free debate? … Have you created a fertile ground, a field where ideas can grow? No, you haven’t.’²² As he was making these comments to the author outside a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, two men from the Malaysian police special branch were seen unobtrusively taking photographs of the meeting.

When the debate heated up in the 1990s, each side accused the other of misrepresenting their arguments. As Mahbubani of the Singapore foreign ministry complains: ‘The caricature of the Asian value position is that “Oh, this is purely a sophisticated way of justifying authoritarian governments. This is a very sophisticated way of saying the Asians are not ready for democracy, the Asians like to be ruled by dictators and so on.” That’s a caricature of what it’s all about. It reflects a western tendency to believe that Asians cannot have supple philosophical minds … in fact I would say a fair amount of thought is going into the “Asian values” position.’ Mahbubani says the ‘Asian values’ argument arose partly as a reaction to western arrogance after the collapse of communism. ‘At the end of the Cold War there was a sense – as part of the mood of triumphalism in the West – that history had ended and that the rest of the world would grow up and become copies of western societies. And that was basically what the Asian values debate was all about – to say … they might evolve into the kinds of societies that may not necessarily be clones or copies of what you find in the West.’²³

For liberals, Asian and western, this explanation is itself a misrepresentation. The point for them is not whether they should have particular kinds of political or electoral systems, but whether governments are legitimate and people are treated justly. Certain rights, in other words, are neither western nor eastern but universal. As Marsillam Simandjuntak, an Indonesian political activist and former medical doctor, puts it: ‘If I want some kind of justice, being an Asian, isn’t that an Asian value? … I demand it because I need justice, not because it’s similar to what there is in the West.’²⁴

An important weakness of the ‘Asian values’ argument is the difficulty of drawing sensible distinctions between ‘Asian’ and ‘western’ cultures, particularly during a period of rapid modernization in Asia. ‘Those people who said “let’s reject western values” said it while playing golf,’ comments Marsillam drily. ‘The problem with Lee Kuan Yew,’ adds Ammar Siamwalla, a political analyst at the Thailand Development Research Institute in Bangkok, ‘is that he’s not saying it’s a Singapore way; it’s an Asian way. The very term [Asia] was handed to us by the bloody Europeans!’²⁵ Asians may be different from Europeans, but then the Thais are very different from the Vietnamese, just as the French are from the English. In fact there is more variety within the vast expanse of Asia than within Europe. The Indonesian archipelago alone is 5,000km from end to end and is home to about 200 million people. There are few similarities between a tribesman wearing a penis sheath in Irian Jaya and a businessman in a suit in Jakarta. Many of the nation states of Asia are recent creations, and a large number of their inhabitants are as likely to identify themselves with a clan, region, religion or ethnic group as with their countries – let alone a continent.

The same objection can be raised against the use of the words ‘West’ and ‘western’ to define the type of society which is supposedly the antithesis of ‘Asian values’. For the ‘Asian values’ argument to work well, it helps to believe in a homogeneous ‘West’ in social and political decline and apparently unable to reform itself. This means using state-controlled media to emphasize the bad, especially crime and poverty, while playing down the good – and gathering the bad news, it need hardly be said, from the independent western media in much the same way as Soviet anti-western propaganda operated during the Cold War. Thus Major Hla Min, a spokesman for the Burmese military junta, is able to compare Burmese housing policy favourably with the situation in the US. ‘There are people living in the United States in cardboard boxes,’ he says.²⁶ That is the truth, but not the whole truth. And it is easy to demonize the thinking behind liberalism as well as its effects. In the words of Mahbubani: ‘To any Asian, it is obvious that the breakdown of the family and social order in the US owes itself to a mindless ideology that maintains that the freedom of a small number of individuals who are known to pose a threat to society (criminals, terrorists, street-gang members, drug-dealers) should not be constrained (for example, through detention without trial), even if to do so would enhance the freedom of the majority. In short, principle takes precedence over people’s well-being.’²⁷ Many Americans would find the words ‘mindless ideology’ an offensive way to describe their belief in individual rights, especially when they are engaged in painful debates about how to improve a society which almost all admit has serious flaws.

Gloomy Americans and Europeans – harking back to a mythically crime-free, pre-industrial past – are almost as eager as south-east Asian leaders to condemn the social ills afflicting the West. Yet not all the news is bad. According to statistics on labour strikes from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, industrial conflict in the western industrialized countries fell in 1996 to its lowest level for more than fifty years.²⁸ By 1998, the US was enjoying its seventh consecutive year of uninterrupted economic growth, and unemployment was at its lowest for twenty-five years. Again in the US, drug abuse seems to have stabilized; deaths from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) have started to fall for the first time since the epidemic began in 1981; and serious and violent crime has been declining for five years. Americans are far from being complacent about such trends; one newspaper even had the headline ‘Major Crime Falls Again, But Why?’.²⁹ In the longer term, sociologists believe that the West will benefit from a reduction in crime because of lower birth rates and the consequent increase in the average age of its populations – a characteristic of prosperous industrial societies – while south-east Asia may for a few decades suffer the opposite; the obvious reason for this is that it is the young, not the elderly, who tend to break the law. In short, it is as foolish for Asian leaders today to stereotype western societies as crime-ridden and amoral as it was for Europeans in the past to dismiss Asians as ‘sensual’ and ‘cruel’. As Edward Said wrote, ‘the answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism’.³⁰

Even the proponents of ‘Asian values’ have difficulties explaining what they mean. Almost as soon as the term came into popular use in the 1980s and 1990s, their arguments were plagued by inconsistencies which seemed to be more than the growing pains of a new philosophy. ‘Flexibility’ and ‘pragmatism’, for instance, are supposed to be among the advantages of Asian societies in both politics and business. So whereas a western business person would insist on contractual obligations, an east Asian would rely on personal contacts and informal relationships that would allow the deal to be done quickly. Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether the informality is simply left over from an earlier age when business was less complicated, this notion was seized upon in various south-east Asian countries to justify the kind of ‘informal’ contacts which are otherwise recognizable as corruption. Westerners are told not to inquire too closely into ‘Asian’ business practices: they cannot possibly understand them because of their different cultural background. A Thai army colonel, quoted in a ground-breaking independent academic survey of corruption in Thailand, justified the frequent exchanges of favours between military officers, politicians and businessmen by saying that ‘in our society we are not so individualistic like westerners. Thai people live together like relatives. Favour requires gratitude in return. Today we help him, in future days he helps us. It may not be proper in the whole process. But it is necessary.’³¹

Such self-serving interpretations of ‘Asian values’ do not go unchallenged. Anand Panyarachun, a former Thai prime minister who has been active in both business and politics, recently lamented the decline of ethical standards in Asia and what he called the ‘grim’ role models presented to the public: ‘Military figures negotiating business deals, narcotics traffickers serving as parliamentarians, respected business personalities consorting with shady characters, professors offering snake-oil remedies to age-old problems, clerics caught under the covers – laughable, were it all not so deplorable.’ Anand went on to heap scorn on ‘the current wave of support for our so-called Asian values’. He said: ‘As if a long-hidden treasure-trove had suddenly been discovered, Asian values are the fashionable topic of the day. Without specifying what, precisely, is being referred to, political leaders region-wide have grasped this fashionable term as a useful rhetorical device. They have used it to champion special interests, to oppose foreign competition, to curry favour with an all-too-often gullible public.’³² Anand proposed his own set of ‘Asian values’ – good governance, ensured by visionary, vigorous and responsible leadership; moral integrity; and service to others. There was nothing about ‘flexibility’ or curbing the press.

Another problem with ‘Asian values’ is the very different characters of the people who espouse them. In politics, for example, it would be hard to find two people more different than Malaysia’s Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore – the two best-known voices of the ‘Asian Way’. They are rivals, not friends. Mahathir is dynamic but erratic and given to emotional outbursts, boasting of the superior qualities of Asians and particularly Malaysians when things are going well, but bitterly blaming foreigners for conspiring against Asia when they go badly – as he did during the south-east Asian financial crisis of 1997. Lee is much more calculating. In the 1950s, when he was pressing Britain to end its colonial occupation of Singapore, he said: ‘If you believe in democracy, you must believe in it unconditionally. If you believe that men should be free, then, they should have the right of free association, of free speech, of free publication.’³³ After taking power, he and his followers carefully modified their views as they slowly built the edifice of the ‘Asian Way’. They emphasized the importance of cultural differences between peoples, stressing the need for Asian governments to be respected rather than suffer the noisy and unproductive harassment typical of debates in the West. Unconditional democracy was out. But Lee, a lawyer by profession, reads more widely and thinks more deeply than the energetic but unreliable Mahathir. He and other Singaporean government ministers do not take simplistic anti-western postures, and are usually ready to give credit where they feel it is due. They openly praise the US for having opened its markets to Asian exporters after the Second World War, an action which was a vital contribution to the Asian economic ‘miracle’. And, without embarrassment, they publicly support a continued US military presence in the region to ensure security.

For all the debate in Malaysia, Singapore and the rest of south-east Asia, there is little chance that a coherent value-system will emerge. The historical and cultural arguments for ‘Asian values’ are weak, and there is little popular support for a philosophy that seems to be the narrow preserve of governments. When the authoritative Far Eastern Economic Review published a series of profiles of its more influential readers to mark its fiftieth anniversary in 1996, it was remarkable how many Asians – business people, academics, bureaucrats – cited ‘Asian values’ as the greatest cliché about Asia before going on to say why they thought it was nonsense.³⁴ And yet ‘Asian values’ still exert a powerful influence in south-east Asia, not just in the politics of individual countries (where these values are used to underpin the authority of particular governments) but also in the region as a whole: it is significant that the members of Asean pursue a coordinated foreign policy based largely on ‘Asian values’.

Asean foreign policy is supposed to operate on the basis of the ‘Asian values’ of consensus, by which it is meant that differences between member states should not be aired in public but resolved by governments behind closed doors; communiqués and public statements thus tend to be exceptionally bland, even by the anodyne standards of international meetings the world over. The search for consensus, however, does not apply to relations between Asean and the outside world. For Asean is eager to confront what its members see as foreign interference in the way they run their countries. The governments object to being told how to run their domestic politics and how to formulate laws on labour rights and environmental protection. In 1993, Asian governments, including Asean, even went so far as to qualify the notion of universal human rights. At a meeting in Bangkok before the UN World Conference on Human Rights, they implied that the UN standards to which most countries, including themselves, had formally subscribed were ‘western’. They argued that more attention should be given to an ‘Asian’ interpretation of human rights, which stressed economic growth and political stability for the benefit of whole communities more than individual freedom. Lee Kuan Yew endorses this view, belittling the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the grounds that it was drawn up by the victorious powers after the Second World War and that neither China nor Russia believed in the document they signed.³⁵ The growing confidence of Asean governments in the early 1990s, and their desire to protect each other from challenges to their authority, made work increasingly difficult for local pressure groups on issues such as human rights and the environment. These groups, known as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), had never been popular with the governments they challenged; but now they found their meetings banned or restricted if they attempted to discuss human-rights abuses in another Asean member state. This occurred even in Thailand and the Philippines, the two most democratic Asean members and the two with the greatest respect for freedom of speech, when NGOs tried to discuss the Indonesian occupation of East Timor – a territory abandoned by Portugal, invaded by Indonesia with great brutality in 1975 and forcibly incorporated into Indonesia the following year. Just as China tries to force other Asian countries to refuse entry to the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, Indonesia, the largest Asean member, does not hesitate to put pressure on other member governments to suppress embarrassing meetings. In 1994, angered by a planned conference on East Timor in Manila, Indonesia temporarily withdrew from an economic co-operation programme with the Philippines and suspended its efforts to mediate between the Philippine government and Moslem rebels.³⁶

The attempts by Asean governments to monopolize debate do not go unchallenged. NGOs, liberal politicians and academics in all Asean countries have vigorously re-asserted their belief in minimum universal standards of human rights and continued to protest against everything from poor factory conditions to environmental abuses in the region. In a car park outside a hotel hosting an Asean meeting in Bangkok in 1994, Cecilia Jimenez, a human-rights lawyer from the Philippines, complained about the Thai government’s decision to disrupt a human-rights meeting taking place in the city at the same time and bitterly condemned the Asean governments for ‘cultural relativity’. She said: ‘I think that’s so racist, so insulting to say that we Asians deserve less human rights than you guys from the West … The Philippines and the Thai government are under tremendous pressure from the Indonesian government. That’s why we object to the bully tactics of the Indonesian government.’³⁷

The biggest test of Asean’s unity, however, is not Indonesia but Burma. It is one thing to use the concept of ‘Asian values’ to defend the rights of, say, Singapore and Malaysia to restrict personal freedoms in the interest of economic growth and political stability: such countries have been labelled ‘soft authoritarian’ by political scientists. But Burma is by no means soft. It is ruled by a military junta which has tortured and killed hundreds of its opponents, and which has condemned what should be one of Asia’s wealthiest countries – fertile, rich in minerals, attractive to tourists and home to fifty million people – to poverty and oppression. The junta was so out of touch with its own people that it was convinced it would win a democratic election it organized in 1990. When it was resoundingly defeated at the polls, the generals ignored the result and continued to rule. Meanwhile they kept Aung San Suu Kyi, one of the founders and leaders of the National League for Democracy, the party that won the election, under house arrest for six years. She won the Nobel Peace Prize. They eventually freed her, but went on to arrest many of her allies and soon re-imposed restrictions on her movements that were almost as effective as house arrest. All of this was hard for south-east Asian leaders to justify, even with the most extreme interpretation of ‘Asian values’.

Asean nevertheless welcomed Burma as a member in 1997, overcoming the reluctance of some of its own members, including Thailand and the Philippines, and overruling the objections of western governments and both Asian and western human-rights movements. (One Asian NGO, meanwhile, distributed a colourful poster asking the question ‘Should Asean welcome Slorc [the junta]?’ in six southeast Asian languages. It showed a fat, beaming Burmese military officer being greeted by obsequious officials of other Asean countries, all standing on a plinth made out of the Asean symbol, a stylized sheaf of rice stalks; a couple of the Asean officials were frowning as they looked down to where Burmese soldiers were standing guard over manacled prisoners and kicking a woman with a baby.) There were three main reasons for Asean’s decision to grant Burma membership. The most pressing was the need to counter the growing Chinese influence in Burma. The Chinese have been developing both military and commercial links with Burma’s military rulers. Second, the Asean governments, and particularly the Malaysians who were hosting the 1997 summit, wanted to expand Asean to include all ten south-east Asian countries to give the organization added authority in international negotiations – only Cambodia was excluded and this was at the last minute because of a coup d’état. Third, Asean wanted to help protect the increasing investments being made in Burma by both state-controlled and private south-east Asian companies.

Even Asean leaders who supported Burma’s entry into their organization, such as Mahathir, could not pretend that all was well inside the country. They therefore declared that they recognized the need for economic and political reform in Burma and would work quietly behind the scenes to achieve it. With unconscious irony, they labelled their policy ‘constructive engagement’. This was the phrase used by the US and Britain in the 1980s to describe their dealings with the white minority government of South Africa at a time when others – including developing countries in Asia – were demanding economic sanctions against Pretoria. ‘Constructive engagement’ was just as controversial when applied to Burma as it was when applied to South Africa.³⁸ One Burmese man in Rangoon – whose punishment for being elected as a member of parliament for Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD was to be jailed in a ten foot by ten foot cell with several others – eloquently expressed the bitterness felt by Burmese democrats towards the junta’s regional allies after his release from prison. Asking to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, he spoke of his party’s regret about the rapprochement between Burma and such countries as Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. ‘Constructive engagement is not constructive,’ he said. ‘It’s destructive opportunism. We are in a time of trouble. When the government is oppressing its own people, they shouldn’t do it.’³⁹ Another Burmese intellectual declared: ‘There’s no Asian way. There’s totalitarian ways and democratic ways.’⁴⁰ Singapore, as a big investor in Burma, a supplier of weapons and above all a public defender of authoritarianism, is particularly loathed by Burmese liberals. ‘Singaporeans are all set to make money,’ says Kyi Maung, an elderly and shrewd NLD leader and confidant of Suu Kyi. ‘They have no moral conscience at all.’⁴¹

Singapore’s defence against these accusations is twofold. It repeats that Singapore and Asean are in fact trying to introduce reforms in Burma, albeit through gentle persuasion rather than confrontation with the regime. Second, it deploys the ‘Asian values’ argument in favour of strong government: this means that the army is an appropriate institution to run the country because Burma is ethnically diverse and would be in danger of disaster under any other system. ‘Imagine what happens in Burma if you dismantle the tatmadaw [Burmese army],’ says George Yeo of the Singapore government. ‘What you have left will be like Cambodia in “year zero” [when the Khmers Rouges took over] because there is no institution in Burma which can hold the whole country together.’⁴² There is no question that Burma has problems with ethnic divisions – two dozen different ethnic guerrilla armies have fought against the central government since independence in 1948 – but there are doubts about the long-term effectiveness of the junta’s political strategy. The guerrilla armies fighting the regime have been either defeated by military force or persuaded to sign peace deals in exchange for the right to continue operating as drug barons in their own territories. Reconciliation and real national unity still seem a long way off. So the ideal solution for Singapore and Asean would be for Burma to combine political reform with continued military control. Under this so-called ‘Indonesian’ method (discussed in more detail in chapter 2), democratic-looking institutions are introduced and the army withdraws into the background while still retaining much of its influence.

Unfortunately for the supporters of ‘Asian values’, there have been few signs that the Burmese junta has any inclination to embark on even the mildest of reforms. Instead, they have turned Asean’s support for authoritarian governments to their own advantage, using it to justify the continuation of their regime. Major Hla Min of the Burmese defence ministry explained that the countries of south-east Asia understood Burma well because they had had military governments in the past and in some cases still had them. ‘Even Singapore – it’s a police state,’ he said. ‘Everybody admits it’s a police state.’⁴³ This is hardly a ringing endorsement of the ethics of the ‘Asian Way’. But until now Asean, and Asian governments as a whole, have been surprisingly successful in promoting ‘Asian’ versions of human rights in international forums – or at least in stopping western countries imposing their versions on Asia. The reasons for the West’s diffidence are all too obvious. As Asian economies continued to grow, western governments and companies became ever more reluctant to jeopardize their commercial interests for the sake of their liberal principles. This often obliged them to adopt postures in favour of human rights at home for domestic political purposes, while appeasing Asian governments overseas. Confusion and hypocrisy were the inevitable result. ‘When they come here they [western politicians] talk about the environment, human rights and democracy in public,’ says Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, the former Indonesian minister responsible for the environment. ‘But in private they talk business … so we listen politely to their exhortations and then we do our own thing. Some of them are very insincere.’⁴⁴ In the case of Burma, Asean governments rightly point out that it is hypocritical of the US to impose economic sanctions on Burma, which has a small and relatively unimportant economy, because of its human rights abuses, while simultaneously turning a blind eye to similar abuses in China because it has a very large economy. To which the honest, if unedifying, response from a senior US diplomat is: ‘Being a superpower means we don’t have to be consistent.’⁴⁵

So successful were Asian authoritarians in promoting their own version of human rights that they almost turned the tables on the western countries they had accused of bullying them. Chris Patten, the last colonial governor of Hong Kong, said shortly before the territory was handed over to China in July 1997 that he believed the West should pursue both its commercial and political objectives energetically, but as separately as possible: trade, in other words, should not be a political lever. He added a warning: ‘If we are not to mix them up, then we should not permit Asian countries to play the same game in reverse, threatening that access to their markets can be allowed only to the politically correct, to those prepared to be muzzled over human rights. We should not allow ourselves to be demeaned in this way – with Europe played off against America and one European country played off against another, and with all of us treading gingerly around the sensitivities of one or two countries, deferring to the proposition that open and vigorous discussion should be avoided at all costs.’⁴⁶ It is not only westerners who feel uncomfortable about the use of ‘Asian values’ in foreign policy. Asean defends its members’ human-rights policies – or lack of them – on the basis of supposedly distinctive Asian cultural traditions, but Thai and Filipino diplomats have complained that they do not share in these purported traditions: on the contrary, they regard their own democratic values to be at least as valid as the authoritarian ones of Singapore or Indonesia.

In 1993, at the height of the ‘Asian values’ debate, it was pointed out that one reason for doubting the widely-held view that the twenty-first century would be a ‘Pacific Century’ was the lack of a genuine Asian value system with international appeal. ‘A strong economy is a precondition for domestic health, military strength, and global influence,’ wrote Morton Abramowitz, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a perceptive analysis of Asian hubris. ‘But in an interdependent world, those that aspire to lend their name to centuries must also have political strengths and value-systems that enable them to project influence persuasively. Economic power without acceptance of the responsibilities and burdens of leadership ultimately engenders divisiveness and hostility.’⁴⁷ For all the speeches and articles extolling ‘Asian values’, there is little sign of an emerging Asian ethic that appeals to the peoples of Asia, let alone the outside world. However, the search for a stronger value system, whether it is labelled ‘The Asian Way’ or something else, will doubtless continue. Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani says the debate has only just begun, and will continue for another hundred years or more. Anand Panyarachun, who was twice prime minister of Thailand in the 1990s, bemoans the greed and consumerism of present-day south-east Asia but has not given up the search for something better. ‘Asian values today appear to be glorifying personal interest,’ he said. ‘Yet the essential objective of any ethical society must be the realization of public aspirations. In that quest, ethics cannot be divorced from good governance.’⁴⁸

When governments pursue immoral or foolish policies cloaked in specious ethics, it is not just nasty. It may be dangerous for the countries concerned. Take the environment debate in south-east Asia. In 1994, Christopher Lingle, an American professor at the National University of Singapore, responded to a rather triumphalist article by Mahbubani that extolled the virtues of Asia and belittled Europe for its inability to extinguish the ‘ring of fire’ on its borders caused by political upheavals. Lingle thought this image more appropriate for south-east Asia because – as he pointed out in his article – Singapore and parts of Malaysia and Indonesia were at that moment choking from the smoke from Indonesian forest fires raging out of control. More significant than the fires themselves was the refusal of south-east Asian governments to do anything about them or the consequent pollution affecting their citizens because members of Asean are not supposed to interfere in each others’ affairs. ‘These Asian states seem more interested in allowing fellow governments to save face than in saving the lives of their citizens or preserving the environment,’ he wrote.⁴⁹ He went on to discuss the dangers of not having a free media. As it happened, Lingle fled from Singapore because he was taken to court over the same article for questioning the independence of the judiciary. But his comments on the forest fires proved prophetic. Three years later, the fires – an annual occurrence typically started by logging companies, plantation developers and slash-and-burn farmers – were so severe that vast areas of southeast Asia were shrouded in smoke and some people suffered serious breathing difficulties. In Sarawak, one of the Malaysian territories on the island of Borneo, visibility was reduced to a few metres, airports, offices and schools were closed and the government declared a state of emergency. President Suharto of Indonesia apologized, but there was no immediate sign of a change of attitude among the proponents of ‘Asian values’; according to them, neither foreigners nor environmental groups within south-east Asia have any business interfering with the rights of governments and their business partners to cut down forests at an unsustainable rate and sell the wood.

The myopia of ‘Asian values’ theorists is not confined to environmental issues. Tommy Koh of Singapore visited Cambodia in 1996 and returned, he wrote, ‘with fewer criticisms than other recent observers’. He acknowledged that Cambodia had a long way to go on the journey to democracy and the rule of law, but implicitly criticized Michael Leifer of the London School of Economics for saying that Cambodia had regressed politically since a UN-organized election in 1993 and for calling the Cambodian government ‘a strong-arm regime that intimidates opponents and lets unscrupulous foreign interests exploit natural resources’.⁵⁰ Yet Leifer was right. That is exactly what the regime was doing. And just over a year later, the Cambodian leader Hun Sen demonstrated the truth of Leifer’s assertions by staging a coup d’état to seize power fully and remove his co-prime minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh, whose party had won the biggest share of the vote in the election. Some of Hun Sen’s opponents were murdered, others fled. Asian timber companies continued to cut down Cambodian forests.

A worse shock for south-east Asia’s leaders than the Cambodian coup – which for them simply meant an embarrassing delay in admitting Cambodia to Asean – was the regional economic crisis which began in mid-1997. South-east Asian stock markets and currencies plunged after Thailand floated its currency, the baht, and its value fell sharply. There were unremarkable economic reasons for this chain of events. In Thailand itself, they included a stagnation of exports, too much short-term foreign borrowing by Thai companies, an overpriced property market with too many new buildings, too much debt and not enough buyers, and inadequate regulation of the plethora of finance companies which sprang up in Bangkok when the economy was booming. (The business aspects of this are discussed in chapter 4.) Instead of accepting that they had to address their economic problems, however, many south-east Asian leaders instinctively assumed that they were doing a fine job – it was well known, after all, that they were in charge of an economic ‘miracle’ – and that therefore the problems must be the work of outside conspirators. Asean foreign ministers even issued a communiqué blaming ‘well coordinated efforts to destabilize Asean currencies for self-serving purposes’.⁵¹ Such statements, especially the vigorous condemnations and threats coming from Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia, made matters worse, convincing international speculators, currency traders and stock market investors that their money would be safer elsewhere.

The financial crisis, the misunderstandings about events in Burma and Cambodia and the environmental crisis over Indonesia’s forest fires brought to light some of the dangers of ‘Asian values’ as applied in south-east Asia in the 1990s. Sometimes politicians cynically used ‘Asian values’ to justify their own shortcomings; sometimes – overwhelmed by the attentions of foreign investors as their economies grew at 8 per cent a year or more – they actually believed what they were saying. Triumphal assertions of Asia’s superiority blinded them to failings and difficulties which in reality affect industrializing Asian countries as much as European or American ones: a reluctance to offend Asian neighbours meant that even if a government recognized a problem it was reluctant to raise it in public; and even if it did so, government attempts to control the media in much of the region limited the free debate which might elsewhere produce a solution. It will probably not be long before south-east Asia’s social problems – widespread drug abuse, for example – begin to tarnish its shiny self-image as surely as the economic crises and environmental damage of recent years have already done.

This is not to say that south-east Asian leaders are inflexible or incapable of learning from their mistakes. In the midst of the financial crisis, Thai politicians and bureaucrats were forced to acknowledge their economic weaknesses and strike a deal with the International Monetary Fund. Having insisted that Malaysia’s big infrastructure projects would not be affected by the crisis, Mahathir did a U-turn and suspended some of his most prized projects – including the huge Bakun dam in Borneo and a new capital city – to rescue the Malaysian currency and the Kuala Lumpur stock market. After Indonesia’s apology for its forest fires, Malaysia sent 1,200 firefighters to Sumatra to help tackle the blazes. Circumstances – in this case, smoke so thick that Malaysians were ending up in hospital on respirators – obliged south-east Asian governments to accept that they had a regional problem and do something about it, even if it meant breaking the Asean taboo on interfering in the affairs of neighbouring countries. This doctrine of non-interference had always been shaky in any case; regional ‘consensus’ quickly dissolves when national or religious interests are at stake. Thailand has spent decades interfering in Burma and Cambodia by supporting rebels on its borders. Malaysia, which sees itself as a champion of Moslem causes, was happy to remain silent about the Burmese junta’s persecution of its predominantly Buddhist people but protested when thousands of Burmese Moslems fled into Bangladesh in 1992 with tales of forced labour, torture, rape and killings at the hands of Burmese troops.

The more prudent supporters of ‘Asian values’ say that while the past three decades of economic growth have revitalized Asia after centuries of stagnation – and given Asian countries some much-needed confidence and hope after the colonial era – there is still plenty of thinking to be done. ‘It would be very dangerous for Asian societies to adopt any sort of triumphant mood,’ says Mahbubani. ‘We have a long way to go. Asian societies … have lots of major questions to address themselves, what kind of society they want to have, what kind of political system will work for them, what kind of social environment they want, how do they arrive at the checks and balances every society has to evolve and so on.’ He continues: ‘I think in private there isn’t the sense of absolute confidence that “Hey, we’ve arrived”. I don’t get that sense at all. What you do get a sense of is “Hey, maybe we can make it”, whereas twenty years ago if you had come to this region, or ten years ago, there wasn’t the sense of confidence that societies in this part of the world could become as developed or as affluent as those you find in western Europe or north America. Today the realization is coming in, “Maybe we can do it”, and that’s the psychological change that has taken place.’⁵²

A change of generations is also imminent. Suharto has already been ousted. And the remaining south-east Asian leaders brought up in the colonial era – including Ne Win in Burma, Mahathir in Malaysia, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and the elderly politburo members in Vietnam – will not last for ever. Their thinking was shaped by the region’s struggles for independence and by the urge to differentiate their new countries from the old world that used to dominate them. This has been the impetus behind many aspects of the ‘Asian values’ debate, including the rejection of ‘western’ human rights and environmental standards. As Mahathir put it in a speech to university students in Japan: ‘Having lost their globe-girdling colonies, the Europeans now want to continue their dominance through dictating the terms of trade, the systems of government and the whole value-system of the world including human rights and environmental protection.’⁵³

But the up-and-coming generation of Asian politicians brought up after independence lack their elders’ obsession with colonialism. They believe they have more freedom to pursue policies on their merits – regardless of the provenance of those policies. Many of the views expressed by Anwar Ibrahim, Mahathir’s former deputy, would be endorsed by those who pour scorn on ‘Asian values’ as defined by south-east Asian governments. In the preface to his book The Asian Renaissance – a collection of his speeches and articles – Anwar says he detects a resurgence of art and science as well as an economic revival. But he rejects ‘cultural jingoism’ whether from the West or the East. ‘Asians too, in their xenophobic obsession to denounce certain Western ideas as alien, may end up denouncing their own fundamental values and ideals. This is because in the realm of ideas founded upon the humanistic tradition, neither the East nor the West can lay exclusive claim to them.’ He goes on:

If the term Asian values is not to ring hollow, Asians must be prepared to champion ideals which are universal. It is altogether shameful, if ingenious, to cite Asian values as an excuse for autocratic practices and denial of basic rights and civil liberties. To say that freedom is Western or unAsian is to offend our own traditions as well as our forefathers who gave their lives in the struggle against tyranny and injustice. It is true that Asians lay great emphasis on order and societal stability. But it is certainly wrong to regard society as a kind of deity upon whose altar the individual must constantly be sacrificed. No Asian tradition can be cited to support the proposition that in Asia, the individual must melt into a faceless community.⁵⁴

Anwar is a living example of how quickly south-east Asian societies are changing. In his youth, he was regarded as an Islamic firebrand and was detained without trial by the government after leading a demonstration. By the time of the financial crisis in 1997, Anwar – as deputy prime minister and finance minister – was the government figure who reassured foreign investors and sought to limit the damage done by Mahathir’s anti-foreign outbursts and threats of exchange controls. His supporters express disgust at the abuse of the term ‘Asian values’ to justify corrupt connections between politicians and businessmen, and draw explicit contrasts between Anwar’s contemporaries and the older generation of south-east Asian leaders. ‘We reached maturity after independence,’ says Abdul Rahman Adnan, director of the Institut Kajian Dasar (Institute for Policy Research), a think-tank in Kuala Lumpur which pushes forward Anwar’s agenda. ‘Everything was already Malaysian. You can’t really blame the nasty colonial power for all the ills of society.’ Adnan and others like him believe that Malaysians are now sufficiently educated to be allowed a more energetic and independent press and more say in how their country is run. ‘They expect the government to be more accountable,’ he says.⁵⁵

Admiration for Anwar is not confined to Malaysia. ‘He represents what the generation of my age would like to see as the new set of values for the future … Anwar Ibrahim does not fit into the stereotypes of Asean today because of the generation gap,’ says Adi Sasono, secretary general of the Moslem Intellectuals Society of Indonesia. (Known by its Indonesian initials ICMI, the society is an Indonesian government sponsored think-tank which is attempting, like Anwar, to reconcile Islam with the needs of a modern, high-technology society.) Nowhere was the need for a generational leadership change more acutely felt than Indonesia, where the seventy-six-year-old Suharto had ruled for three decades and left his people guessing about who would succeed him. ‘The main political factor in this country is Suharto,’ said Sasono shortly before Suharto’s overthrow. ‘He represents the old value of power, authority. Well, the society is changing rapidly, so after Suharto the political situation will change quite radically.’⁵⁶

The imminent handover of power from one generation to another at the top of south-east Asia’s governments, along with the continued growth of the middle class, will have profound implications in every country in the region. It is true that the young idealists waiting in the wings are bound to have their enthusiasm blunted by the realities of government. As one eminent proponent of Asian values said of Anwar: ‘His book is a collection of motherhood statements that no one can disagree with … You’ve got to judge a man by his deeds, so you wait and see. I would expect that when he takes over he will govern Malaysia as Dr Mahathir does.’⁵⁷ But official attitudes to politics, social norms, business practices and environmental policies are likely to change, as popular attitudes already have. The results – albeit with many stops and starts – will be a gradual loosening of central government control over politics and the media, a slow unravelling of the webs of corrupt connections between politicians and businessmen, and the imposition of stricter environmental controls. To this one could add a more relaxed official approach to personal and social matters such as leisure, homosexuality and pre-marital sex, although in Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei liberalization could be delayed or even temporarily reversed by the strong Islamic lobby. The probable effect – already visible in some cities such as Jakarta – would be an increase in the number of people living double lives. As in the Gulf states, many wealthier Moslems would publicly obey the strict religious tenets decreed by the authorities while privately drinking alcohol and visiting prostitutes when abroad.

‘Asian values’, meanwhile, are likely to fade from view. Several years ago, a group of south-east Asian academics, bankers and former ministers produced a document called Towards a New Asia; it advocated democracy within the rule of law and, while paying tribute to the importance of economic growth, suggested that Asia should ‘move to higher ground’ and ‘become a greater contributor to the advancement of human civilization’.⁵⁸ These sentiments reflect one of the great ironies of the debate: south-east Asia’s leaders are often attacked by their fiercest critics not for being too ‘Asian’ but for importing the worst aspects of western societies – consumerism, materialism, pollution – and labelling them ‘Asian values’. As one Malaysian artist said of Mahathir: ‘Everything he’s doing is western – the assembling of cars, privatization, the “multimedia corridor”, everything. This drive for market-driven development is a very western concept.’⁵⁹ Sondhi Limthongkul, a Thai businessman who tried to build an Asian media empire, is equally scathing. ‘The problem of most emerging nations in Asia-Pacific is always the absolute worship of economic growth rather than the quality of life,’ he told a conference in Hawaii. ‘It’s very unfortunate that we have learned and inherited so well from the West.’⁶⁰

If they are interested in formulating any ‘Asian values’ at all, southeast Asia’s next generation of leaders will want to do so by injecting ideas they see as genuinely Asian into a body of beliefs they accept as universal and which seem inevitably to permeate any society that has undergone an industrial revolution. ‘The Asian world and Asian civilization cited so often of late have their origins not deep in the past but in modernization this century in an Asia in contact with the West,’ wrote playwright and professor Masakazu Yamazaki. Modernization, he said, had affected the entire fabric of Asian societies, leading to the rise of industry, the formation of nation states under legitimate institutions and the secularization of ethics and mores. ‘Members of the Association of South East Asian Nations have nearly reached consensus on such fundamentals as the separation of politics from religion, one-man – one-vote representation, and public trial. When it comes to social welfare, women’s liberation, freedom of conscience, access to modern healthcare, and other social policies, almost all the countries of the region now speak the same language as the West.’⁶¹ Kim Dae-jung, the Korean politician who has fiercely opposed ‘Asian values’ and the suggestion that Asians are by nature undemocratic, once noted that ‘moral breakdown is attributable not to inherent shortcomings of Western cultures but those of industrial societies; a similar phenomenon is now spreading through Asia’s newly industrializing societies’.⁶² A dissident who spent his life opposing authoritarian rule in his own country, Kim was elected President of South Korea in December 1997, vowing to promote democracy and transparency and bring an end to the collusion between government and big business.

Even the supporters of ‘Asian values’ accept that their countries will be more democratic and less authoritarian in the future, although they differ on the form democracy should take and on how long it will be before their people are ‘ready’ for the rough and tumble of genuine democratic debate. To speak of unambiguous ‘Asian values’ appears increasingly eccentric as the new millennium approaches. There was something bizarre, for instance, about the sight of Edward Heath, the former British prime minister, arguing on television with Martin Lee, the Hong Kong pro-democracy campaigner, about the political implications of the passing of the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping on the day his death was announced. There was the westerner Heath espousing ‘Asian values’ and insisting that Chinese and Asians did not need democracy as understood in the West (‘The Asiatic countries have a very different view’); and Lee, the Asian, saying that Deng himself had accepted the inevitability of political reform and arguing that Asians wanted democracy as much as anybody else (‘I do not agree that there is such a thing as Asian values’).⁶³

The heyday of ‘Asian values’ seems to have passed. In Singapore, opposition politicians say Lee Kuan Yew talks less about Asian values and Confucianism than he used to. Mahbubani has toned down his comments as well, declaring in 1997 that Asians want good governance, open societies and the rule of law.⁶⁴ In Malaysia, Mahathir still denigrates the West from time to time. But he is as likely to mention the threats and opportunities of globalization – a more inclusive view of change – as to declare the superiority of the ‘Asian Way’. Societies and cultures are changing so fast in south-east Asia that it hardly makes sense to attribute fixed values to them and try to preserve them intact from an imaginary western enemy. The argument that modernization leads to inevitable changes that are both good and bad is accepted throughout the region. Western governments may have learned something too. They can no longer lecture Asia about human rights and morality without having their own embarrassing failings – crime being the most obvious example – thrown back in their faces by their well-educated and well-travelled Asian interlocutors. In south-east Asia, however, the battles over social change and political reform are only just beginning. The campaign for ‘Asian values’ will come to be seen in the years ahead as a pragmatic interlude, during which Asian leaders briefly sought to justify authoritarian rule before losing power to the middle class they themselves had helped to create by managing their economies for so long with such success.

TWO The new democrats

You’ll be left behind. Then in twenty, thirty years’ time, the whole of Singapore will be bustling away and your estate, through your own choice, will be left behind. They’ll become slums. That’s my message.

– Singapore prime minister Goh Chok Tong, warning voters before the January 1997 election that their housing estates would be denied government renovation funds if they elected opposition members of parliament. The ruling People’s Action Party won 81 of the 83 seats available.¹

Golkar [the Indonesian ruling party] officials calculated as far back as last year that they would win precisely 70.02 per cent of the vote on polling day.

– Financial Times, 24 May 1997. Golkar went on to win 74 per cent of the vote.²

In Singapore you have a one-party system. You have several parties, but it’s all artificial.

– Somsanouk Mixay, editor of the Vientiane Times, a state-controlled newspaper in communist Laos, discussing south-east Asian politics.³

The fact that the political parties are not functioning does not mean that people are not politicking. People do not stop breathing just because you shut the windows.

– Dewi Fortuna Anwar, Indonesian political analyst.⁴

Elections in Singapore and Indonesia are very different affairs, but for decades they had the same outcome: the government won.

The 1997 election across Indonesia’s sprawling archipelago was both colourful and violent. President Suharto’s children joined the election campaign, officially labelled a ‘festival of democracy’ complete with parades and musical entertainment, on the side of the ruling Golkar party. His son Bambang Trihatmodjo, a wealthy businessman, appeared on stage with a popular singer who belted out catchy numbers such as ‘Golkar, my sweetheart’. Throughout the country, the rival parties dressed up lampposts, vehicles and supporters in their party colours; in the remote eastern territory of Irian Jaya, tribesmen were persuaded to swap their traditional brown penis sheaths for new ones in bright, Golkar yellow.

Political competition, however, was a sham. There were three parties decreed by the government. Golkar was the one that was destined to win, as it had done for the previous quarter of a century. The United Development Party, known as the PPP from its Indonesian initials, was supposed to represent Islamic opposition and used the colour green. And the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) – red – brought together opponents of the left. These last two had the task of creating a semblance of democracy by disagreeing with the government without causing it serious embarrassment: they were in effect licensed opposition parties. In the 1997 election, though, it all went wrong. Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of the charismatic late President Sukarno, became leader of the PDI and seemed likely to win too many votes from Golkar. Even worse, the government feared she would break an unwritten understanding about the sanctity of President Suharto and stand against him in the forthcoming presidential election. In a move which provoked riots in the Indonesian capital Jakarta and elsewhere, she was removed by the government – which blatantly interfered in the running of the PDI – and replaced with a more compliant leader. Many of her supporters deliberately spoiled their ballot papers or stayed away from the polls in the subsequent general election and the PDI vote collapsed to a humiliating 3 per cent of the total from the previous 15 per cent. The PPP’s Moslem supporters were not happy either, although their party increased its share of the vote to 23 per cent. They accused the government and Golkar of cheating. During political protests in Borneo rioters set fire to a shopping mall, killing 130 people who happened to be trapped inside, and destroyed dozens of other buildings. To add to the government’s chagrin, some PPP voters carried banners in support of Megawati; she had nothing to do with the Islamic party but had come to be seen as a generalized symbol of opposition to the government. The conclusion was obvious: Indonesia’s carefully structured but patronizing electoral system was no longer an adequate channel for the political aspirations of an increasingly sophisticated population. It was in fact falling apart, as subsequent events demonstrated. Instead of a picture of democracy that included a confident Golkar and tame minor parties, there was a beleaguered ruling party facing a strident Islamic opposition; and outside the official framework were a growing number of extra-parliamentary pressure groups which rejected the whole notion of state-sponsored pseudo-democracy. In 1998, as Indonesians felt the pain of the south-east Asian financial crisis and protested in the streets against the corruption of their leaders, Suharto himself was ignominiously forced to resign as president, leaving his hand-picked successor B. J. Habibie, his relatives and political allies to an uncertain future.

Elections are much more peaceful in the prosperous city state of Singapore. In the campaigning before the poll in January 1997, there were some noisy opposition rallies at which Singaporeans cheered every attack on the humourless and ruthlessly efficient People’s Action Party which has run the country since independence. But the overall winner of the election was never in doubt, because the opposition parties left enough seats uncontested to ensure a parliamentary majority for the PAP. In doing so, they hoped to encourage cautious Singaporeans to vote for the opposition as a protest against the PAP while remaining secure in the knowledge that the PAP would continue to run the country.

Worried by the prospect of a reduced majority, Goh Chok Tong, the prime minister, and other PAP leaders pulled out all the stops in an attempt to crush their opponents. Goh famously threatened to deprive areas which voted against the PAP of state-financed housing upgrades; most Singaporeans buy apartments in government-built housing estates and can therefore benefit financially from such renovation schemes as well as enjoying the improved amenities.⁵

Nor was that all. Goh, Lee Kuan Yew and others deluged their opponents with lawsuits before and after the election, a practice they had employed before but rarely with such ferocity. In the most prominent case, the popular lawyer Tang Liang Hong, who had joined forces with J. B. Jeyaretnam of the Workers Party in a hotly contested, five-seat constituency, was sued by a dozen leaders of the PAP – including Goh and Lee – for calling them liars. In the statement that prompted this flurry of legal activity, Tang was responding to their accusations that he was a ‘Chinese chauvinist’ who opposed English-speakers and Christians. He pointed out that he spoke Malay, had a Christian daughter and was standing for election with an Indian Christian. This declaration of the facts was not enough to save him: Tang fled the country shortly after the election, saying the PAP was trying to bankrupt him, and was eventually ordered by a Singapore court to pay the equivalent of S$8.08 million (the equivalent of more than US$5 million) in damages to PAP leaders, although the amount was reduced to S$4.53 million (US$3 million) on appeal. Jeyaretnam was ordered to pay much smaller damages in a related defamation case brought by ten PAP members. The Tang case was notable for causing a serious diplomatic row between Singapore and neighbouring Malaysia. (In an affidavit, Lee Kuan Yew had expressed astonishment that Tang should have fled for safety to the Malaysian city of Johor, ‘notorious for shootings, muggings and car-jackings’; Lee, lambasted by the Malaysian government and by government-sponsored demonstrators who gleefully insulted him as ‘stupid’ and ‘senile’, was forced to apologize.)⁶ Singaporean ministers also became the object of international ridicule for pursuing opposition politicians through the courts for expressing thoughts that elsewhere would be part of the normal cut and thrust of democratic debate. The justice system was criticized too. But PAP leaders expressed no regrets, insisting repeatedly that they had to protect their reputations. They also won the election, halving the number of their elected opponents from four to two and leaving the opposition weaker and considerably poorer than before.

The most important feature that the 1997 elections in Singapore and Indonesia had in common was the absolute determination of governments to stay in power. ‘Asian values’ were receding into the background as a philosophical underpinning for authoritarian rule, but the authoritarian governments in south-east Asia were not about to yield willingly to their liberal opponents. In the continuing debate about the future of Asian politics, one side argues that economic growth leads to the education and empowerment of a middle class that demands, and achieves, democracy; the other insists that economic growth provides legitimacy for those in power and therefore prevents democratization. Both of these conflicting tendencies are visible in south-east Asia. But the evidence already shows that Asian countries, including those in south-east Asia, are either becoming more democratic or are under pressure from their citizens to become so. Taiwan and South Korea have progressed from authoritarian rule to democracy. A popular uprising in the Philippines in 1986 restored democracy there by overthrowing the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Thais took to the streets of Bangkok in 1992 and 1997 to oppose the involvement of the armed forces and of old-fashioned, ‘Godfather-style’ politicians in their parliament. Of course there have been numerous setbacks for the supporters of democracy, such as the failure of the Burmese military junta to recognize the 1990 election of Aung San Suu Kyi. Additionally, in Cambodia nearly 90 per cent of those eligible went to the polls in 1993 in a UN-organized election after years of civil war; but four years later, after a period of uneasy coalition government, the former Khmer Rouge commander Hun Sen ousted his co-prime minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh in a coup d’état, even though Ranariddh’s party had won the most seats in the election.

In spite of such attempts to hold back democracy, the arrival of peace in south-east Asia and the region’s rising prosperity have been accompanied by an increasing public awareness of political issues, much greater openness to international influences and a steady erosion of the authority of governments. As José Almonte, head of the Philippine National Security Council under President Ramos, has remarked, the contrast between the south-east Asia of today and of three or four decades ago could hardly be more striking. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were then becoming embroiled in the Indochina conflict, in which communists would triumph over the Americans and their allies. General Suharto had manoeuvred Sukarno out of power in Indonesia after the massacres of hundreds of thousands of people, including communists and ethnic Chinese. ‘In this country [the Philippines] Senator Ferdinand Marcos had just been overwhelmingly elected President – an ironic beginning to the Filipino descent into authoritarian rule. In Thailand the military rule of Marshal Sarit Thanarat was passing to his closest associate, General Thanom Kittikachorn. And General Ne Win was just closing down Burma in what would be a hermetic isolation lasting thirty years.’⁷

The south-east Asia of today is clearly very different, although at first glance it seems as hard to make generalizations about the region’s politics now as it was in the 1960s. What conclusions can be drawn about ten countries that include a military dictatorship in Burma, an Islamic Sultanate in Brunei, a noisy, American-style democracy in the Philippines, a one-party, communist system in Vietnam and Laos and a variety of democratic or quasi-democratic systems among the rest? Yet they do have more in common with each other than mere geography. First, they all acknowledge the importance of foreign investment and global trade and are committed – in word if not in deed – to modern market economics. Second, they are all embroiled in conflicts between old-fashioned authoritarians (who are usually in power), and younger, more liberal politicians (who are mostly confined so far to the opposition, or to the fringes of the ruling parties).

In both the Philippines and Thailand, voters can and do change their governments by means of elections. But truly representative democracy is only just beginning. In each country politicians tend to come from a small elite of landed gentry or business families – or the military. In 1997, the then president of the Philippines (Fidel Ramos) and one of the Thai prime ministers of that year (Chavalit Yongchaiyudh) were both former generals. Politics in Thailand has long been influenced, too, by powerful local businessmen – often gangsters involved in everything from drug-smuggling and illegal logging to gambling and property speculation – who sell their ability to deliver their local votes to a bewildering array of ‘national’ parties. Vote-buying (a vote can be bought for the equivalent of a few dollars) is so rampant in the poorer parts of the countryside that it is taken for granted even by the liberal media. ‘The parties work for the private gain of their sponsors rather than for the good of the society at large or even for the people who elect the party candidates,’ wrote two Thai academics in a survey of corruption in Thailand in 1994. ‘None of the existing political parties have started from grass roots support. Rather, they originated as interest groups of influential people and businessmen.’⁸ Only now are more idealistic politicians, supported by the more sophisticated voters of the Bangkok metropolis, starting to break into politics and trying to build political parties with some kind of ideological content. Liberals and others who want to modernize the country’s politics are more optimistic than they have ever been, although they acknowledge that it is only in Bangkok that people vote for parties without necessarily knowing the name of their member of parliament, as often happens in the West; in the Thai provinces, the opposite remains true – people know the name and reputation of their MP but are unlikely to know to which party he belongs this year. Ammar Siamwalla, the Thai political scientist and commentator, says that for the last half a century Thais have concentrated on their headlong lunge for economic development and largely ignored the need to modernize their politics while the armed forces and cliques of businessmen fought it out in a series of elections and coups d’état. Now that is changing. Public protests led to the formation of a constitutional panel; the constitution it produced in 1997 (Thailand’s sixteenth since the abolition of the absolute monarchy in 1932) was aimed largely at ending what south-east Asians call ‘money politics’. As Ammar says: ‘To me that’s a great step forward. We are engaged in political debates. We are trying to solve problems. It is very Bangkok-centred, but people are beginning to learn how to govern themselves.’⁹ The old-style politicians are not giving up easily – both Chavalit and his predecessor as prime minister Banharn Silpa-archa fall into this category – but Thais are no longer tolerating their leaders’ inability to manage a modern economy that faces global competition and needs to be run through solid institutions rather than backroom deals. (It was perhaps significant that the man who formed a new coalition government after the Thai economic crisis erupted was Chuan Leekpai of the Democrat Party. He is a mild-mannered man who likes to do things methodically and legally, although some of the politicians he was obliged to draw into his coalition were members of the old-fashioned and corrupt political class.) Both the rural poor and the urban elite have regularly demonstrated in the streets to air their grievances. ‘In the last few years we have been very good at throwing the rascals out,’ says Ammar. ‘Of course we have been getting the rascals in too. The first step is to throw the rascals out without having the tanks running around the streets. The next step is to stop the rascals coming in.’¹⁰

Throughout south-east Asia, names and personalities are often as important as policies. The children of the region’s leaders seem to be drawn inexorably towards power. In Burma, Suu Kyi took the unusual step of prefixing her name with her father’s – Aung San, who brought the country to the brink of independence before he was assassinated – to announce her origins in a country where family names are not normally used. In Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew’s son Lee Hsien Loong, known as BG Lee because of his military rank of Brigadier-General, is deputy prime minister. Before he was forced to step down, President Suharto had groomed his children – who had previously been more interested in business – to play a political role in Indonesia, while Megawati Sukarnoputri in opposition drew on the memory of her father Sukarno. In the Philippines, Corazon Aquino became President in 1986 largely because she was the widow of Benigno Aquino, the assassinated opponent of Marcos. And the winner of the Philippine presidential election in 1998 was a swashbuckling B-movie film star named Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada; his vice-president is Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, daughter of a respected former president. ‘We have no idea of power in the abstract,’ says Alex Magno, one of the leading political commentators in the Philippines. ‘The ordinary Filipino does not talk about the presidency. He talks about Cory [Corazon Aquino] or Ramos.’ Magno, who writes in both English and Tagalog, the local lingua franca, says his readers in Tagalog complained that he was inventing words when he thought up a word for ‘presidency’ – ‘pangulohan’, derived from ‘pangulo’ (president). According to Magno, Asian politics is about personalities and pragmatism. He is regularly asked to teach a course on Asian political theory, but says he cannot because there is none.¹¹

But the focus on personalities is not a particular Asian phenomenon. Similar tendencies can be found in Latin America or Africa. The Philippines has a peculiar political system closely modelled on the US, where film stars – Ronald Reagan is the best-known example – are also influential. More importantly for south-east Asia, the attention given to individuals instead of their policies is a characteristic not just of developing Asia but of many pre-modern, pre-industrial political systems. And the situation is changing. South-east Asian countries have become richer and their inhabitants more educated and demanding, a transformation underlined by the criticisms of younger observers such as Magno himself. As President, Ramos came across as a forceful figure who liked to be seen chomping a big cigar, but he and his supporters repeatedly emphasized the success of his policies rather than his personality. His nickname, dull by Filipino standards, was ‘Steady Eddie’. He compared his own achievements in restoring the Philippine economy, reviving its industrial competitiveness and attracting foreign investors to the failures of his predecessors: the nice Cory Aquino, who represented the restoration of democracy but allowed the economy to languish; and Ferdinand Marcos, who espoused a ‘crony capitalism’ in which corruption was rife and local industries were protected from foreign competition.

The democracies of the Philippines and Thailand are gradually moving towards a more modern form of democracy where policies count as much as personalities. At the other end of the political spectrum, the military junta in Burma and the communist regimes in Vietnam and Laos are also under pressure to modernize their political systems. From the inside, there are demands from middle-class citizens and students who want more representation. From the outside (particularly in the case of Vietnam, with its large exile community in the US), there is additional pressure for change as governments seek to encourage foreign investment and open their economies to the outside world.

Inevitably, political progress is slow. The middle class in these three countries remains small and weak; the average per capita income in Vietnam, Laos and Burma is less than a tenth of the figure in Thailand, whose inhabitants are themselves less than one fifth as rich as those of the United States. Furthermore, the Burmese generals and the communist rulers of Vietnam and Laos are no different from any other totalitarians: serious dissent is crushed, quickly and brutally. But political change is coming and the three governments know it. In Burma, the generals have tried to engineer a constitution which will allow them to continue controlling the country while they withdraw into the background behind a ‘democratic’ façade, but they have so far been stymied by an almost total lack of popular support.

In Vietnam, the statue of Lenin still stands tall in the centre of the capital Hanoi, with its broad avenues and crumbling French villas. The apparatus of communism remains intact. But since the government has embraced capitalism, the ideological basis for the party’s rule has disappeared. This has put party leaders in a quandary. A few years ago they allowed the idea to be floated that the communist party might transform itself into a broad-based nationalist front and even permit the formation of opposition parties. Phan Dinh Dieu, a mathematician and former member of the National Assembly, became a sort of licensed dissident who was permitted to spell out the contradictions of the Vietnamese system. ‘When the Communist party declared its acceptance of the free market economy, it meant that the party is not truly a communist party. They have dropped the communist system,’ he said in the presence of one of the government interpreters and ‘minders’ who routinely arrange government interviews for foreign journalists. ‘The result is that the party is transformed from a communist party into a party of power.’¹² By 1997 the government seemed to regret its brief period of openness and Dieu’s views were no longer welcome. Vietnamese officials seek to justify their continued control of the country by talking of socialism leavened with the ‘thoughts of Ho Chi Minh’, just as the Chinese speak of socialism ‘with Chinese characteristics’. But the contradictions between a communist power structure ideologically committed to destroying bourgeois capitalism and an increasingly free-market economy have not gone away. The confusion is bad for the economy, because bureaucrats still favour poorly run state companies at the expense of private enterprise; and bad for politics, because the debate needed to resolve Vietnam’s numerous problems is stifled. For the time being, Vietnam’s leaders have settled for some uneasy compromises, mounting campaigns against corruption in high places, allowing increasingly outspoken criticism of government ministers in the National Assembly and increasing the number of non-communist (but still vetted) candidates for elections to the Assembly. ‘The goal is socialism. But what is socialism?’ asks one dissident in Hanoi. ‘According to the authorities, it is so that people can be richer, the country stronger and society just and civilized – that’s very vague. I don’t understand the leaders of Vietnam. They are tangled up in contradictions and they can’t get out, or they don’t want to. On the one hand they have their beliefs, on the other hand they have the material profits. Maybe that’s why they don’t want to get out.’

So much for the democracies and the old-fashioned dictatorships. What of those in between? Political systems in Asia have been neatly placed in three categories: ‘elite democracies’ such as the Philippines; ‘market Stalinism’, as in Vietnam; and the ‘veiled authoritarianism’ of Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia.¹³ This last group is of particular significance. It includes two countries – Malaysia and Singapore – that have combined outstanding economic success with political stability under broadly unchanged governments for most of the last three decades. And it is to the ‘veiled authoritarians’, also known as ‘soft authoritarians’, that the leaders of newly developing countries such as Vietnam and Burma are looking for a political model that will allow them to retain power while still promoting economic growth. Even in the Philippines and Thailand, there are people who yearn for the apparent stability of strong government in place of the political bickering that plagues their democracies.

These ‘soft authoritarian’ governments are the political embodiment of ‘Asian values’. They argue that the government of a developing country cannot afford to tolerate the confusion and disruption resulting from free speech and liberal politics as understood in the West. This is especially true in the early years of nationhood and of economic growth, when people are less educated, less conscious of their national identity and more liable to be drawn into violent ethnic conflicts by unscrupulous politicians. Central to the thinking of Mahathir, for example, are the riots of 1969 in which Malays rioted and killed scores of their ethnic Chinese fellow-citizens after an election. For Mahathir, there are more dangers in what he calls ‘democratic extremism’ than in authoritarianism.¹⁴

Rather than attempting to justify their rule, the authoritarians believe their best tactic is to denigrate democracies and point out their obvious weaknesses. They often compare India, Bangladesh, the Philippines and now Cambodia to stronger Asian economies and blame democracy for their relatively poor economic performance. Even under the reforming Fidel Ramos, the Philippine administration and the country’s businesses have had to fight to implement the simplest economic decisions in the face of the country’s US-style political system. The Supreme Court and a Congress beholden to numerous lobbies and to fickle public opinion repeatedly intervened to block decisions that would go unchallenged elsewhere in southeast Asia. In 1997, for example, the Supreme Court cancelled a government contract to privatize the Manila Hotel after years of negotiations on the grounds that the winning consortium was led by a foreign company and the hotel was part of the national patrimony. And as in the US, it is extremely difficult for a government to raise fuel taxes or allow fuel prices to rise – however compelling the fiscal or environmental arguments for doing so – without angering the public and so losing public support. In the Philippines, the Supreme Court even intervened to prevent oil companies raising their prices to reflect the higher cost of oil imports after the mid-1997 south-east Asian financial crisis and sharp devaluation of the peso; it did so in spite of the fact that the local oil sector had been deregulated earlier in the year.

But perhaps the most common comparison made by the authoritarians is between Russia and China, an illustration particularly relevant for the communist states of Vietnam and Laos but frequently applied to other authoritarian states in the region as well. The argument is that Russia (or the Soviet Union as it was under Mikhail Gorbachev) liberalized its politics first and its economy later, causing poverty, chaos and a precipitate decline in gross domestic product; while China, under the late Deng Xiaoping, liberalized its economy but maintained firm political control, to the extent of shooting pro-democracy demonstrators after the occupation of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square by protesters in 1989 – with the result that the Chinese economy has enjoyed double-digit economic growth along with social order and greater prosperity for most of its people. The counter-argument is that China has merely delayed the inevitable. ‘Deng was widely congratulated not long ago for having avoided the Soviet “mistake” of putting political ahead of economic reform,’ wrote one commentator. ‘Now this is becoming a matter of reproach: the absence of democracy is assigned central responsibility for the dark side of the economic miracle.’¹⁵ That dark side includes civil-rights abuses at home and an aggressive foreign policy. Nevertheless the Russia-as-failure and China-as-success argument is among the most commonly used ammunition in the arsenal of south-east Asia’s authoritarians. In the same vein, they leap at the chance to blame democratization for any sign of political instability or economic difficulty in South Korea or Taiwan, while attributing the economic success of those countries to their authoritarian heritage.

An important feature of Asian ‘soft authoritarian’ governments such as those of Singapore and Malaysia is that they use one-person, one-vote political systems similar in form (but not in substance) to those in the West. This is partly because they inherited these systems from the colonial powers, and the leaders who used them to come to power would find it embarrassing openly to undermine them. ‘Our most precious inheritance in Singapore is the fact that we have kept going British institutions of great value to us,’ says the government’s George Yeo, mentioning parliament, the judicial system and the English language. The combination of strong government and a democratic façade was justified in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s by the need to oppose Asian communism; it was this search for a bulwark against communism that brought together the founders of Asean in 1967. The appearance of democracy remains valuable in the 1990s to satisfy domestic public opinion and to defuse any international criticism.

But there is no question of the opposition being allowed to win power in a national election. Witness the violent events in Indonesia surrounding Megawati’s challenge to Suharto and Goh’s threats to voters in Singapore. (‘Do you think we could have done even half of what was achieved in the last thirty years if we had a multiparty system and a revolving-door government?’ Goh once asked. ‘Do you think we could have done just as well if we had a government that was constantly being held in check by ten to twenty opposition members?’¹⁶) Then there have been Mahathir’s furious campaigns in Malaysia to bring errant states to heel – including the withholding of federal financial support – when they elect opposition parties. Just before the 1990 elections in Malaysia, Joseph Pairin Kitingan, chief minister of the somewhat disaffected state of Sabah in Borneo, withdrew his PBS party from the Barisan Nasional, the ruling national coalition led by Mahathir’s Umno (the United Malays National Organization), and went on to win in Sabah. As the writer Rehman Rashid recounts, those who were with Mahathir at the time of the PBS pullout had never seen the prime minister so angry: ‘The squeeze began,’ writes Rashid. ‘Sabah’s timber export quota was lowered, decimating the state’s principal source of revenue. Tourism was tacitly discouraged; domestic air fares were raised. (For [neighbouring] Sarawak, however, there were affordable package deals.) Domestic investment was redirected; foreign investment put on hold. (Sabah was “politically unstable”.) The borders grew even more porous to illegal immigration from the Philippines and Indonesia. The local television station was abandoned. Sabah was denied permission to have on its territory a branch of a Malaysian university, as Sarawak did. Pairin was charged with three counts of corruption. Kota Kinabalu became a funereal town.’¹⁷ The point about immigration was that most of the newcomers were Moslems, rather than the Christian Kadazans who formed the bedrock of PBS support, and they could therefore be drawn into Umno. The central government demonstrated it would do almost anything to bring Sabah into the fold again. In 1994 the state was back in central government hands after four years of opposition.

For years, people have struggled to define and analyse these kinds of authoritarian governments and explain their success. On the face of it, they are not one-party states, so the term ‘dominant party politics’ has come to be used. One of the best definitions to describe the combination of elections and unchallenged rule by a government party is Samuel Huntington’s ‘democracy without turnover’. Another analyst notes that the democratic system and the law are regarded by such governments as resources to exploit rather than restrictive frameworks within which they must operate; it is the people who are accountable to the government – in the sense that they must lose investments or bus routes or housing upgrades if they vote for the opposition – rather than the government which is accountable to the people.¹⁸

Yet neither Singapore, nor Malaysia, nor Indonesia can comfortably be labelled totalitarian. They are not usually brutal in governing their own people (Indonesia’s war of conquest in East Timor in the mid-1970s is the obvious exception), which is why they have come to be known as ‘soft’ authoritarians. They allow their opponents to speak and to organize, albeit within certain limits. Although they use the security provisions inherited from their former colonial masters to detain or otherwise restrict opponents without trial, they do not normally use them to an extreme extent. The authoritarian policy of permitting limited dissent – while forbidding opposition parties to become too strong, let alone win – is rarely admitted in explicit terms, but is no secret. Asked why south-east Asian leaders bothered with the trappings of democracy when they believed so fervently in the importance of strong government, Juwono Sudarsono of Indonesia’s National Defence Institute, one of Indonesia’s foremost political analysts and a minister in the dying days of Suharto’s rule, accepts that there is a level of ‘tolerable dissent’. ‘You devise systems which allow some degree of dissent,’ he says. ‘All south-east Asian countries do that, simply because it’s practical.’ Opposition parties and other groups critical of the government are seen as sparring partners. ‘Sparring partners are not supposed to win.’¹⁹

Coercion – sometimes outright force – remains a vital part of government tactics throughout south-east Asia. In its crudest manifestations, this means arresting and torturing government opponents; more subtly, it can mean that opposition leaders will mysteriously find it impossible to get work in government institutions (if they are teachers or doctors, for example) or to win government contracts (if they are in business). Even before Hun Sen overtly seized control of Cambodia in his 1997 coup d’état, members of parliament were all too aware of the dangers of speaking freely about the rampant corruption in their government. ‘We are limited in our activities,’ said Ahmed Yahya, an MP for the royalist Funcinpec party and a member of Cambodia’s Cham Moslem minority. ‘If I dare to speak up, I will feel lonely and a lot of people will hate me and I will get a bullet in my chest or my head or my hand, so I have to keep quiet.’²⁰ Shortly after he said this, fifteen people were killed when grenades were thrown at opposition leader Sam Rainsy, a pro-democracy campaigner and former finance minister. Hun Sen’s followers were strongly suspected of being the perpetrators. Both Rainsy and Yahya subsequently went into temporary exile overseas.

There are other, less obviously violent methods by which governments maintain control. One is to restrict the rights of industrial workers and to ban free trade unions. (Sam Rainsy was particularly unpopular with the government and Asian investors because he championed the rights of Cambodian textile factory workers being paid as little as US$30 a month.) Vigorous and independent trade unions are the exception rather than the norm in south-east Asia, in spite of the universal tendency of workers to organize themselves as a country industrializes. In Malaysia, trade unions have been banned in the electronics industry, which is vital to Malaysian export growth. In Indonesia, the Suharto government harassed and arrested leaders of the free trade union SBSI and promoted a pro-government union called the SPSI. In Singapore and Vietnam, unions are closely linked to the government. Even in democratic Thailand, unions are weak and face various legal restrictions, some harking back to the struggle between the authorities and their communist opponents in the 1960s and 1970s. However, such restrictions are not always as controversial in south-east Asia itself as they appear to international labour rights campaigners. Many factories and workshops do have grim health and safety records and industrial employees do work long hours with fewer benefits than in the West. There are frequent worker protests at factories in the poorer countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia. But conditions in modern factories, particularly those owned by foreign multinationals with international images to maintain, are usually nothing like as appalling as they were in the textile mills of the English industrial revolution. Wages have been rising sharply, too. One of the biggest headaches for employers in the Malaysian electronics sector is not worker activism but job-hopping for higher pay. In Thailand, it was notable that when a left-wing British magazine sought to expose conditions in the troubled textile industry in Bangkok, it illustrated the article with a photograph of a happily smiling Thai seamstress. Wages were low and hours long, the article said. But it added: ‘The most surprising feature of Bangkok is the absence of conflict between workers and owners. There is nothing of the smouldering hatreds of Jakarta, or the concealment of Dhaka. Neither side appears to see the relationship as exploitative.’²¹ In the more developed southeast Asian economies, the combination of globalization, fast-growing economies and rising wages has helped to defuse the employer-worker conflict that has hitherto been an inevitable part of industrial revolution.

But the suppression of trade unions is only one aspect of authoritarianism in practice in south-east Asia. Much more sinister are the decline of the rule of law, the erosion of the independence of the judiciary and the increasingly explicit role of the police and security forces as agents of those in power rather than defenders of law and order. Some countries – Burma and Cambodia, for example – have been under authoritarian rule for so long that the young have no experience at all of a justice system in which courts and judges function independently of the regime’s wishes. In other countries, there has been a gradual decline in the professionalism of the legal system and an increase in government interference since independence. Courts in most of south-east Asia routinely support the government in political cases, labour disputes and environmental challenges to government-backed projects; when they do not, both sides in the case are usually surprised – and such decisions are overturned on appeal. The issue of the rule of law, vital for honest business executives and humble peasants alike, comes up again and again in interviews across the region. People usually regard the right to be treated fairly as more important even than the right to vote. The concept and practice of the rule of law existed long before the European Enlightenment and continue to exist in non-western societies.²² Even if one can label liberal democracy as a ‘western’ demand, the same is not true of the rule of law.

For the Malaysian journalist Rehman Rashid, the government’s decapitation of the Supreme Court in the 1980s was the last straw that drove him into voluntary exile. Mahathir had sharply criticized the judiciary after a number of cases in which judges had upheld freedom of speech and challenged a controversial government road contract. After the Lord President of the Supreme Court had protested about the government interference, he and two other Supreme Court judges were dismissed. ‘Malaysia’s judiciary was decimated,’ wrote Rashid. ‘Great gaping holes had been blown on the highest bench, and they would be filled by the premature promotions of the definitively inexperienced. Moreover, these jurists would know they owed their elevation to political forces, and their consciences would never command the respect of Malaysia’s legal fraternity. To peer over the bench and see nothing but contempt at the Bar – how would that impact upon the discharge of their duties? The Malaysian judiciary would be a beleaguered and fearful shadow of what it had been.’²³ At first the concern was focused on political matters. But by the 1990s there were fears that large, well-connected Malaysian companies were using the courts for purely commercial advantage. ‘Complaints are rife that certain highly placed personalities in Malaysia, including those in the business and corporate sectors, are manipulating the Malaysian system of justice,’ said Mr Param Curaswamy, a lawyer and special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers for the UN Commission on Human Rights.²⁴

Other countries have similar problems. In Indonesia, the independence of the judiciary was undermined by the fact that most senior posts in the Justice Ministry and the High Court were filled by graduates of the military law academy.²⁵ Thailand’s justice system is affected by bribes paid to prosecutors, judges and the police.²⁶ Philippine courts are subject to corruption too. By one estimate, only about seven in every fifty judges were honest. ‘Certainly the crooked judges live lives way beyond the means of their income,’ said Senator Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who went on to become vice-president.²⁷

It has become increasingly difficult to discuss such matters openly in south-east Asia. Critics fear they will be found in contempt of court by the very courts they are criticizing. This is what happened to Lingle, the American professor working at the National University of Singapore. In 1994, he wrote an article in the International Herald Tribune responding to an earlier commentary, critical of the West, written by Kishore Mahbubani of the Singapore foreign ministry. Without mentioning any particular country, Lingle said some Asian governments relied on a ‘compliant judiciary to bankrupt opposition politicians’. The prosecutor in Singapore asserted that this must be a reference to Singapore, where Lee Kuan Yew and his PAP colleagues indeed had a record of suing opposition politicians for defamation. Lingle (who had fled the country), and the editor, publisher, printer and distributor of the newspaper (which has one of its printing sites in Singapore) were ordered to pay enormous fines and costs for contempt of the Singapore judiciary. The offence was not to say that the government bankrupted its opponents, but to call the courts ‘compliant’. Lingle vividly described the unusual experience – for a mild-mannered university professor – of suddenly finding himself being interrogated by the police for expressing unremarkable opinions. He ran away – fearful until his plane was airborne that he would be arrested – leaving behind his job and most of his possessions. He has since become one of the most cogent critics of Singapore, comparing it unfavourably to South Africa in the apartheid era, when he says he openly denounced the regime without fear of repression. Subsequently, Singapore’s leaders continued to sue their opponents – notably Tang and Jeyaretnam in 1997.²⁸ The fact that both men are lawyers is a reflection of the traditions of independence that the judiciary once boasted of: the law was one of the few professions where people felt far enough removed from government patronage and influence to practise opposition politics. That no longer seems to be so. Tang, like other opposition figures before him, fled overseas.

Singapore’s ministers are adamant that they must defend the reputation of the country and its leaders. They deny that they have become absurdly litigious (a habit which Asians frequently mock as an American disease) and believe that courts in the West are too liberal in allowing apparently defamatory attacks on important people. ‘I don’t think Singapore can exist if ministers and national leaders are placed on the same level as second-hand-car dealers,’ says George Yeo. ‘It would be a disaster. How can we run the place like that?’ Some Singaporeans insist that whereas westerners – out of respect for individual rights – say it would be better for a guilty person to go free than to convict an innocent one, Asians prefer the innocent person to be convicted if that will help the common good.²⁹ But there is an unresolved contradiction in the attitudes of south-east Asian authoritarians. They defend their right to have a different, non-liberal, non-western system of justice, but at the same time governments can insist – on pain of legal action – that they have not in any way undermined the independence of their judiciaries.

Some authoritarian governments in south-east Asia deploy soldiers to break up demonstrations. They sometimes suppress labour movements and sometimes manipulate the courts. For the region’s more sophisticated authoritarians, however, coercion alone is not a satisfactory method either of developing the country or of keeping power indefinitely. The repeated use of force alienates the population, antagonizes foreign governments and makes overseas investors uneasy; it is, in short, politically destabilizing. A much more effective solution is to co-opt the government’s potential opponents, leaving coercion as a last resort to bring into line the few intransigents who refuse to be brought into the fold. Why crudely censor the media, for example, when you can persuade editors and journalists to censor themselves? Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong, deputy prime minister and son of Lee Kuan Yew, acknowledges the role played by co-option in south-east Asian politics. For him and his government colleagues, it is essential that the government should be allowed to govern while planning and legislating for the future without being pulled this way and that by various pressure groups. ‘If people continually make such suggestions which make sense we will soon have him in our system, rather than keep him outside and throwing stones at us or criticizing us, because if he’s making sense we will bring him in and use him,’ says Lee. ‘We don’t believe that it is a good thing to encourage lots of little pressure groups, each one pushing its own direction and the outcome being a kind of Ouija board result rather than a considered national approach.’³⁰

South-east Asian governments devote much time and effort to this task of co-opting their citizens and forging a sense of national purpose – a purpose for which only the government or the ruling party, it is understood, are qualified to succeed. It is not only the region’s communist states that run Orwellian propaganda campaigns. The Burmese authorities organize crude pro-government rallies which usually end, according to the official media, with ‘tumultuous chanting of slogans’.³¹ Suharto’s Indonesia practised a form of guided democracy based on the vague ideology of ‘pancasila’, the five principles of belief in one God; humanism; nationalism; popular sovereignty; and social justice. Suharto was called the ‘Father of Development’. Singapore is famous for its government campaigns. An agency once called the ‘psychological defence unit’ of the information ministry and now renamed the ‘publicity department’ has promoted patriotism through singing, starting with the early hit song ‘Stand up for Singapore’ in the mid-1980s. Other campaigns have urged Singaporeans to have more or fewer babies, depending on the population growth rate and demand for labour; to defend their country; to flush the toilet; to turn up at weddings on time; and not to be too greedy at hotel buffet lunches. Richard Tan Kok Tong, a former head of the Psychological Defence Unit – and one of those Singaporeans who met his wife through the official match-making service of the Social Development Unit – says people respond to such campaigns partly because they feel vulnerable in a small, multiracial city state surrounded by the large Moslem populations of Indonesia and Malaysia. ‘We have a background where the people are told you’re here as migrants and we either pull together or we get hanged together,’ he said. ‘It’s against this sort of precondition that people can accept this sort of propaganda.’³²

Such propaganda, however, is not enough to ensure the support of the more sophisticated members of society. In most of south-east Asia, patronage – the conferring of favours in exchange for loyalty – is also an essential part of the political system. It is of course true that neither political patronage nor corruption are confined to Asia, or to authoritarian governments. In Thailand, Banharn became a member of parliament and then prime minister largely because he was adept at directing the government’s budget to the projects he favoured. His constituency of Suphanburi became famous for its excellent roads and facilities – and was nicknamed ‘Banharn-buri’. In the Philippines, senators and members of the House of Representatives are expected to dispense largesse by sponsoring weddings, buying trophies for village athletics competitions and writing letters of recommendation to possible employers for people they have never met. Such patronage is typical of old-fashioned political systems in which personal loyalties are prized and institutions are weak; it can also be risky for both sides, because shifting political alliances and regular elections mean that those who are powerful today will not necessarily have influence tomorrow.

But in an authoritarian state, the existing government is the only reliable source of patronage; and it usually intends to remain so. The result in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia has been an exceptionally close relationship between government and big business. Selected companies benefit from large infrastructure projects initiated or funded by the state – roads, power stations and so on – and from government licences to exploit natural resources such as timber. In return, businesses are expected to be politically loyal and to provide financial support – sometimes for government purposes and sometimes for individuals. In Indonesia, the involvement of President Suharto’s children and a handful of his longstanding ethnic Chinese associates in big industrial and infrastructural projects and in trading monopolies was notorious. In Malaysia, where the government has had an explicit policy of favouring Malays over the Chinese who previously dominated business, the web of connections between corporations and the ruling Umno party has been extensively documented.³³

In Cambodia, there has been an open exchange of favours and cash between Hun Sen’s government and the coarse but powerful businessman Theng Bunma. One of the more bizarre manifestations of Cambodian patronage has been the building of hundreds of ‘Hun Sen schools’ around the country; the businessmen pay and Hun Sen supposedly wins the admiration of an education-starved populace. Meanwhile the education ministry can barely pay its teachers, let alone build schools, because it is starved of funds by the Hun Sen government – which neglects the collection of formal taxes from big businesses. One senior member of Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party explained the country’s patronage system by saying that if a businessman wanting a concession offered money to Hun Sen in the ‘Asian way’, Hun Sen would say, ‘Build me a school’; if offered flowers, he would say, ‘I don’t want flowers. Give me food and fish and noodles for the army.’³⁴ In few countries are the ties between politicians and businessmen as unsubtle as in Cambodia, but the symbiosis of the two is common throughout the region. The extent to which companies rely on governments for their profits has obvious economic and commercial implications which are discussed in chapter 4. Politically, it simply means that big businessmen tend to identify closely with governments and publicly support their aims.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the south-east Asian model of authoritarian politics seemed remarkably successful. Economies grew at 6 per cent, 8 per cent, 9 per cent, even 12 per cent a year. Businesses were expanding at breakneck speed. The poor got less poor. The rich got richer. Ethnic differences were apparently buried. Governments and their business allies began to boast of the success of ‘Asian values’ and to formulate theories that justified their authoritarianism and rejected ‘western’ democracy. There was little sign that the newly enriched elites wanted to rock the boat by opposing their governments just when they were starting to lead comfortable, even luxurious, lives. They enjoyed working for banks, stockbrokers or industrial conglomerates in Jakarta or Bangkok, shopping for brand-name clothes and travelling overseas just like their counterparts in London or New York. Privately, they mocked the simplistic slogans of their governments, but few took part in any serious opposition movements. As Malaysian businessman David Chew puts it: ‘More and more people now are stakeholders in the country; and if you’re stakeholders you’ll want to preserve what you have … Maybe this is the better brand of democracy. Of course, it’s a little bit more autocratic.’³⁵

As confidence grew, so too did talk of exporting successful authoritarian political models to newly developing countries in south-east Asia. Indonesia was regarded as a particularly useful model for Burma and Vietnam because it had developed a quasi-democratic system of government in which the armed forces are given explicit political privileges (by being allocated seats in the national assembly, for example), and in which they play an even more influential role behind the scenes. In all three countries the soldiers believe they have a right to a role in national politics because of their involvement in the struggle for independence from foreign powers, and – in the cases of Indonesia and Burma – in maintaining order and keeping fractious ethnic minorities in the national fold after independence. The idea of exporting this model – known in Indonesia as dwifungsi (dual function) because it grants the armed forces a sort of guardian role in politics and society in addition to their normal security function – is not without difficulties. Indonesia’s generals are anxious not to be associated too openly with Burma’s military junta for fear of discrediting the whole dwifungsi concept. They fear that Burmese soldiers might again commit some internationally-condemned atrocity against their own people, and they are uneasy about the seeming inability of the Burmese generals to relinquish control and retire elegantly behind the scenes. Whereas in Indonesia the management of the economy was successfully delegated to the western-educated economists known as the Berkeley mafia, the generals in Burma tried to run the economy themselves – with predictably disastrous results.

Another difficulty for authoritarians is that the legitimacy that a government or an army earns from an independence war or a fight to restore domestic order is soon diminished by generational change; most Vietnamese today were born after the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. ‘In our time of rising popular expectations,’ said José Almonte, who was national security adviser to former Philippine president Fidel Ramos, ‘authoritarian governments are essentially fragile – no matter how commanding they may appear to be. Because they rule without popular consent, their claim to legitimacy depends on their ability to restore stability and to develop the economy. And, once civil order is restored, authoritarian governments in developing countries are undermined by both their economic failure and their economic success.’ Economic failure obviously makes them unpopular, while ‘economic growth unavoidably generates social change that multiplies people’s demands for political participation and respect from their rulers.’³⁶

Aristides Katoppo, a senior Indonesian journalist and head of the Sinar Harapan publishing company, predicted before Suharto was forced to resign that a more demanding electorate would eventually oblige the Indonesian government to modify its authoritarian stance. ‘I think they [the people] don’t mind a strong executive government, but it must be more just and less arrogant. Rule of law is the issue.’ He acknowledged that the reduction of military influence in government and the erosion of the power of the authorities would take time, but he had no doubt about the way things were going. ‘The direction,’ he said, ‘is very clear.’³⁷ South-east Asian liberals are beginning to make their voices heard. They affirm the need for justice, whatever a country’s political system. They reject the idea that democracy is ‘un-Asian’, pointing to various democratic – or at least consultative – village traditions. And they have begun to pick holes in some of the favourite arguments of the authoritarians.

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