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

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.