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

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СКАЧАТЬ now tower over the capital Kuala Lumpur. In Thailand, nine tenths of the population live in homes with television; in the Bangkok metropolis, the figure is 97 per cent. If you visit one of the new shopping malls in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, only the faces of the shoppers and the occasional sign in Bahasa Indonesia betray the fact that you are in Asia rather than Europe or America; there are ‘cybercafés’ serving refreshments and access to the Internet, McDonald’s burger bars, cinemas showing Hollywood films and shops selling the same brand-name clothes you can find in Paris or New York.

      The reasons behind south-east Asia’s success – ‘probably the most amazing and beneficent revolution in history’, as one author called the whole east Asian experience¹ – are now generally agreed. Governments adopted sensible economic policies and promoted exports; most of them also provided a reasonably stable political environment which allowed growth to proceed unhindered; ordinary people worked hard and saved a high proportion of their earnings, permitting investment in education and in further industrial expansion; foreign countries helped too, principally by opening their markets to imports from south-east Asia (in the case of the US), and by investing heavily in industry (in the case of Japan). In the 1980s, the end of the Cold War – which had pitted ‘pro-western’ nations such as Thailand against the communist states of Indochina – provided an additional boost to the regional economy. South-east Asia’s success was all the more remarkable because it was not foreseen, and because other parts of the world failed where south-east Asia appeared to have triumphed. Gunnar Myrdal, a Nobel Prize-winning Swedish economist, has become the butt of jokes among Asia experts as a result of his gloomy predictions about south-east Asia in a three-volume, 2,700-page book in the 1960s.² Another academic wrote in 1962 of the ‘desperate, and in most cases to date, the losing race to achieve economic growth in the face of consistently mounting population pressure on already inadequate resources’; he also lamented the failure of south-east Asia’s ruling elites to show ‘any notable capacity to solve the problems involved’ in modernizing politics and society.³ Today, much of Africa is afflicted by war, poverty and disease. Latin America has only recently begun to recover from a long period of stagnation. The Middle East continues to struggle with political instability. Yet south-east Asian countries, after as many as thirty years of strong economic growth, have been extraordinarily successful and – until the crisis that began in 1997 – increasingly self-confident.

      Their economic triumphs – preceded by the success of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong and accompanied by that of China – led to a flurry of predictions about the rise of Asia and the relative decline of the West. The twenty-first century, it was argued, would be the ‘Pacific Century’. Extrapolating recent economic growth rates far into the future, Asians and foreigners forecast – triumphantly, gloomily or with a shrug depending on their point of view – that such and such a group of Asian countries would overtake Europe or the US in the year 2025 or 2020 or 2015. The dangers of extrapolation are well known. In the 1950s the World Bank had made optimistic predictions about both Burma and the Philippines, because they seemed to have the best skills and resources for economic expansion, but they turned out to be among the worst performing south-east Asian economies. Likewise both assumptions on which the ‘Pacific Century’ calculation was based – that Asia would continue to grow and that the West was stagnating or declining – were doubtful; the US and Europe may do better than expected, and Asia may do worse. Two other important points were forgotten in the euphoria over Asia’s performance. First, Asian economies were simply catching up the ground lost to the West in the previous two centuries – and it is easier and quicker to catch up than to take the lead. In 1820 Asia accounted for about 58 per cent of the world economy, a figure which fell steeply to 19 per cent in 1940 after the western industrial revolution before rising again to about 37 per cent in 1992. Even before the crisis of 1997 it was assumed that Asia’s share of the global economy would reach 57 per cent only in the year 2025 – back where it was near the beginning of the industrial age. Second, some of Asia’s economic growth has simply been the result of a temporary ‘bulge’ in the number of people of working age as a proportion of the total population – a typical quirk of modern industrial revolutions. Better healthcare and the fact that death rates fell quickly while birth rates initially remained high mean that there are now large numbers of Asians of working age supporting relatively few elderly dependants. This demographic ‘gift’ to the region’s economies will eventually disappear as the ‘bulge’ moves up the age scale. It will then become a burden as birth rates decline, populations age, and the number of young people in work starts to fall as a proportion of a country’s inhabitants.⁴

      South-east Asia’s political leaders, and many of the region’s businessmen, had a completely different explanation for their success: it was, they said, the result of ‘Asian values’. Chapter 1 looks at the rise of the ‘Asian values’ philosophy and why it is being discredited. According to its proponents, Asians are different from westerners in that they are hardworking and have a greater respect for education, family, community and government. The people of Singapore or Burma are thus more concerned about collective rights than individual rights and will therefore not necessarily demand the same things as westerners did at the various stages of economic development: free trade unions, liberal democracy, an independent judiciary, religious and sexual freedom and so on. Strong, even authoritarian governments – the argument goes – have meanwhile delivered both economic growth and political stability for the benefit of all. They should continue to do so unimpeded by meddling foreigners or domestic dissidents who want to impose alien values on Asians. The argument has struck a chord for some American and European politicians and business executives, who not only agree that it is right for Asia but believe that some of its tenets should be applied in western countries afflicted by chaotically inefficient democracy, violent crime and moral decay. But the ‘Asian values’ theory has been dismissed as nonsense by its critics in Asia and the West. They say it is merely an excuse for authoritarian governments to stay in power, depriving their subjects of rights which are not ‘western’ but universal. They also point out that it is bizarre suddenly to attribute south-east Asia’s recent success to Asian culture, when for centuries western intellectuals put the opposite case: that Asia’s economic backwardness was the fault of supposedly Asian cultural traits such as laziness and lack of enterprise. By 1997, support for the idea of attributing the region’s success to ‘Asian values’ was in decline, eroded by economic and environmental disasters in southeast Asia and by growing evidence of a popular desire for democracy. Yet much damage had already been done. Blinded by pride in their new Asian identity, south-east Asian leaders had failed to prepare for the political, social and commercial crises about to erupt in front of them.

      Political upheaval in the region, the subject of chapter 2, is proving to be as exciting and unsettling as the slow rise of liberal democracy in industrial Britain. Greater wealth has swollen the middle class in countries such as the Philippines and Thailand, and these well-educated people quickly lose patience with heavy-handed governments. The crowds of pro-democracy demonstrators in Bangkok who helped to bring down a military-led Thai government in 1992 (after a coup d’état the previous year) were notable for the number of young professionals – stockbrokers, lawyers, university professors – carrying mobile telephones. Five years later, that process led to the formulation of a new, more liberal constitution for Thailand. Granted, middle-class activism is not automatic. As long as governments are delivering stability and economic growth, the more prosperous citizens of countries such as Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia will happily forgo political liberties while they enjoy the benefits of a modern consumer society. Indeed, they are frightened of losing what they have already gained. But such conservatism is fragile, because it depends on the belief that the existing regime is better for economic growth and political stability than any alternative. The systems of patronage binding politicians and businessmen are fragile too, because the deals on everything from road-building contracts to the allocation of cheap shares in privatized telephone companies are all built on the assumption of rapid and continued economic growth. What happens when the gravy train stops? In Indonesia, the СКАЧАТЬ