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

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.’ 52

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.’ 53

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. 54

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. 55