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

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(#litres_trial_promo) Suharto’s Indonesia practised a form of guided democracy based on the vague ideology of ‘pancasila’, the five principles of belief in one God; humanism; nationalism; popular sovereignty; and social justice. Suharto was called the ‘Father of Development’. Singapore is famous for its government campaigns. An agency once called the ‘psychological defence unit’ of the information ministry and now renamed the ‘publicity department’ has promoted patriotism through singing, starting with the early hit song ‘Stand up for Singapore’ in the mid-1980s. Other campaigns have urged Singaporeans to have more or fewer babies, depending on the population growth rate and demand for labour; to defend their country; to flush the toilet; to turn up at weddings on time; and not to be too greedy at hotel buffet lunches. Richard Tan Kok Tong, a former head of the Psychological Defence Unit – and one of those Singaporeans who met his wife through the official match-making service of the Social Development Unit – says people respond to such campaigns partly because they feel vulnerable in a small, multiracial city state surrounded by the large Moslem populations of Indonesia and Malaysia. ‘We have a background where the people are told you’re here as migrants and we either pull together or we get hanged together,’ he said. ‘It’s against this sort of precondition that people can accept this sort of propaganda.’

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

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

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In Cambodia, there has been an open exchange of favours and cash between Hun Sen’s government and the coarse but powerful businessman Theng Bunma. One of the more bizarre manifestations of Cambodian patronage has been the building of hundreds of ‘Hun Sen schools’ around the country; the businessmen pay and Hun Sen supposedly wins the admiration of an education-starved populace. Meanwhile the education ministry can barely pay its teachers, let alone build schools, because it is starved of funds by the Hun Sen government – which neglects the collection of formal taxes from big businesses. One senior member of Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party explained the country’s patronage system by saying that if a businessman wanting a concession offered money to Hun Sen in the ‘Asian way’, Hun Sen would say, ‘Build me a school’; if offered flowers, he would say, ‘I don’t want flowers. Give me food and fish and noodles for the army.’

(#litres_trial_promo) In few countries are the ties between politicians and businessmen as unsubtle as in Cambodia, but the symbiosis of the two is common throughout the region. The extent to which companies rely on governments for their profits has obvious economic and commercial implications which are discussed in chapter 4. Politically, it simply means that big businessmen tend to identify closely with governments and publicly support their aims.

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

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

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

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Aristides Katoppo, a senior Indonesian journalist and head of the Sinar Harapan publishing company, predicted before Suharto was forced to resign that a more demanding electorate would eventually oblige the Indonesian government to modify its authoritarian stance. ‘I think they [the people] don’t mind a strong executive government, but it must be more just and less arrogant. Rule of law is the issue.’ He acknowledged that the reduction of military influence in government and the erosion of the power of the authorities would take time, but he had no doubt about the way things were going. ‘The direction,’ he said, ‘is very clear.’

(#litres_trial_promo) South-east Asian liberals are beginning to make their voices heard. They affirm the need for justice, whatever a country’s political system. They reject the idea that democracy is ‘un-Asian’, pointing to various democratic – or at least consultative – village traditions. And they have begun to pick holes in some of the favourite arguments of the authoritarians.