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

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