The Trouble With Tigers: The Rise and Fall of South-East Asia

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.