The Trouble With Tigers: The Rise and Fall of South-East Asia. Victor Mallet
independent trade unions and newspapers have been restricted, tamed or banned. Political systems are designed and controlled so that opposition parties can exist to preserve the image of democracy but not actually take power. Few of the region’s governments are embarrassed when challenged on these points. On the contrary, they cite ‘Asian values’ to support restrictions on individual freedoms. Economic growth and political stability, which benefit all citizens, take priority over failed ‘western’ concepts of individual rights, they say, especially during the early stages of industrialization when a smaller proportion of the population is educated sufficiently to take on the responsibility of voting. They also compare Russia to China, condemning Russian governments since the collapse of communism for causing chaos and poverty by democratizing politics before liberalizing the economy, and praising China for embarking on economic reform while maintaining firm political control. This kind of analysis often finds favour outside Asia as well. The corruption and poverty of African countries following independence from the colonial powers were held up by African authoritarians, and their supporters in the West, as reasons not to impose western-style democratic institutions on alien cultures where people are supposedly ‘not ready’ for democracy.
However, just as it is easy to find Europeans or Americans who sympathize with the concept of ‘Asian values’ because they bemoan the problems in their own societies, it is notable that there are plenty of Asians who bitterly oppose the whole idea. For these people, the ‘Asian Way’ is an elaborate fraud which does not stand up to serious analysis and whose main purpose is to provide authoritarian governments with a rationale for staying in power indefinitely. In south-east Asia, it is the leaders of Malaysia and Singapore who have talked loudest about ‘Asian values’. Others, including the governments of Burma and Vietnam and individual politicians and businessmen throughout south-east Asia, have followed suit with varying degrees of enthusiasm. But in the Philippines and Thailand – the two most democratic countries in the region – many influential people scoff at ‘Asian values’ and the people who espouse them.
The Philippines, which was one of the most advanced Asian economies after the Second World War, is the favourite target of authoritarians; they say it has lagged behind its neighbours and fallen prey to poverty and crime largely because of the government’s inability to take hard decisions – to raise fuel prices, for example, or enforce tax collection – in a US-style democracy notable for bickering, lobbying and countless legal challenges. Unlike the orderly streets of Singapore, those of Manila are congested by overloaded and unroadworthy vehicles belching black smoke. Instead of Singapore’s neat, high-rise housing estates, filthy slums sprawl around the city and its garbage dumps. Law and order scarcely exist: patrons of bars and restaurants are urged by signs to leave their ‘deadly weapons’ at the front desk, and policemen have been among those implicated in the frequent kidnappings of ethnic Chinese businessmen and their relatives. Perhaps it is not surprising that Alfredo Lim, the mayor of central Manila who cracked down on drug-dealers and cleared Manila’s streets of overt prostitution and go-go bars (they moved to another district of the Manila metropolis), is an admirer of Lee Kuan Yew.18 George Yeo, Singapore’s Minister for Information and the Arts, uses the Philippines as a salutary example of how things can go wrong without strong government to ‘keep the body politic whole’. He said:
Look at the Philippines – a few decades of mismanagement and what happens? Their womenfolk are being sent to the Middle East, to Hong Kong, to Singapore, to Malaysia. They become domestic maids – highly educated, very intelligent people – why? Because their own country, their own economy, cannot make use of the value they are able to add to the whole economy so they end up choosing other jurisdictions. It’s an absurd situation. I think all of us see that, all of us do not want to be like the Philippines of a few years ago. And they [were like this] despite the fact that after the war they were the most educated, the most literate, the best founded of any of the nation states newly independent in south-east Asia.19
Filipino democrats cannot dispute the facts. The Philippines has been badly mismanaged and its people do suffer the humiliation of going overseas as migrant workers. But they bitterly reject the Singaporean analysis that democracy is in some way to blame. The real problem, they say, is not democracy but the years of dictatorship they suffered under the late Ferdinand Marcos, who favoured his business cronies and entrenched protectionism and corruption in the economy. When Lee Kuan Yew himself came to the Philippines and told a meeting of Filipino business executives that their country needed discipline more than democracy, President Fidel Ramos – under whose leadership the economy had started to recover – had a tart reply: ‘This prescription fails to consider our ill-fated flirtation with authoritarianism not so long ago.’20 Corazon Aquino, who preceded Ramos as president after leading the democratic uprising which overthrew Marcos in 1986, was once so incensed by one of Lee’s lectures that she was heard muttering: ‘That arrogant bastard, I feel like kicking his shins.’21
Such feelings are not confined to the Philippines. When Suharto was president of Indonesia, he was happy to benefit from the increased international legitimacy afforded to authoritarian governments by the ‘Asian values’ argument without making any significant public contributions to the debate himself. ‘Indonesia,’ says Rizal Sukma, a researcher at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, ‘has become some sort of free rider in this debate.’ But he adds: ‘Among young intellectuals there is resentment about why the Singaporeans and Malaysians want to be spokespersons for the whole region. Not everyone agrees with Lee Kuan Yew’s formula.’
The disagreement extends to the ordinary citizens of Singapore and Malaysia as well. ‘It’s mind-boggling this Asian values thing. What are Asian values?’ asks Hishamuddin Rais, a Malaysian filmmaker and political dissident who has lived in exile but recently returned home after negotiations with the authorities. Rais – with his brown felt hat, beard and long hair in a bun – is a far cry from the typical Malaysian factory worker or bureaucrat. He accepts that there are cultural differences between Asians and westerners, but says ‘Asian values’ have become an excuse for totalitarianism and the stifling of free expression. ‘They say, “we want to develop economically first”, but this is a danger – develop until when? Have we started sowing the seeds of free debate? … Have you created a fertile ground, a field where ideas can grow? No, you haven’t.’22 As he was making these comments to the author outside a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, two men from the Malaysian police special branch were seen unobtrusively taking photographs of the meeting.
When the debate heated up in the 1990s, each side accused the other of misrepresenting their arguments. As Mahbubani of the Singapore foreign ministry complains: ‘The caricature of the Asian value position is that “Oh, this is purely a sophisticated way of justifying authoritarian governments. This is a very sophisticated way of saying the Asians are not ready for democracy, the Asians like to be ruled by dictators and so on.” That’s a caricature of what it’s all about. It reflects a western tendency to believe that Asians cannot have supple philosophical minds … in fact I would say a fair amount of thought is going into the “Asian values” position.’ Mahbubani says the ‘Asian values’ argument arose partly as a reaction to western arrogance after the collapse of communism. ‘At the end of the Cold War there was a sense – as part of the mood of triumphalism in the West – that history had ended and that the rest of the world would grow up and become copies of western societies. And that was basically what the Asian values debate was all about – to say … they might evolve into the kinds of societies that may not necessarily be clones or copies of what you find in the West.’23
For liberals, Asian and western, this explanation is itself a misrepresentation. The point for them is not whether they should have particular kinds of political or electoral systems, but whether governments are legitimate and people are treated justly. Certain rights, in other words, are neither western nor eastern but universal. As Marsillam Simandjuntak, an Indonesian political activist and former medical doctor, puts it: ‘If I