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

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.’7

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.’8 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.’9 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.’10

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.11

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.’12 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.13 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.14

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.’15 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?’16) 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.’17 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.18

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.’19