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(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
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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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’).
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#ulink_0e0cd331-1ea3-51b3-91bd-92b3ae0ddc06)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
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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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
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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.
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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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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?’
(#litres_trial_promo)) 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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.’
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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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) Thailand’s justice system is affected by bribes paid to prosecutors, judges and the police.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
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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’.
