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

Admiration for Anwar is not confined to Malaysia. ‘He represents what the generation of my age would like to see as the new set of values for the future … Anwar Ibrahim does not fit into the stereotypes of Asean today because of the generation gap,’ says Adi Sasono, secretary general of the Moslem Intellectuals Society of Indonesia. (Known by its Indonesian initials ICMI, the society is an Indonesian government sponsored think-tank which is attempting, like Anwar, to reconcile Islam with the needs of a modern, high-technology society.) Nowhere was the need for a generational leadership change more acutely felt than Indonesia, where the seventy-six-year-old Suharto had ruled for three decades and left his people guessing about who would succeed him. ‘The main political factor in this country is Suharto,’ said Sasono shortly before Suharto’s overthrow. ‘He represents the old value of power, authority. Well, the society is changing rapidly, so after Suharto the political situation will change quite radically.’ 56

The imminent handover of power from one generation to another at the top of south-east Asia’s governments, along with the continued growth of the middle class, will have profound implications in every country in the region. It is true that the young idealists waiting in the wings are bound to have their enthusiasm blunted by the realities of government. As one eminent proponent of Asian values said of Anwar: ‘His book is a collection of motherhood statements that no one can disagree with … You’ve got to judge a man by his deeds, so you wait and see. I would expect that when he takes over he will govern Malaysia as Dr Mahathir does.’ 57 But official attitudes to politics, social norms, business practices and environmental policies are likely to change, as popular attitudes already have. The results – albeit with many stops and starts – will be a gradual loosening of central government control over politics and the media, a slow unravelling of the webs of corrupt connections between politicians and businessmen, and the imposition of stricter environmental controls. To this one could add a more relaxed official approach to personal and social matters such as leisure, homosexuality and pre-marital sex, although in Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei liberalization could be delayed or even temporarily reversed by the strong Islamic lobby. The probable effect – already visible in some cities such as Jakarta – would be an increase in the number of people living double lives. As in the Gulf states, many wealthier Moslems would publicly obey the strict religious tenets decreed by the authorities while privately drinking alcohol and visiting prostitutes when abroad.

‘Asian values’, meanwhile, are likely to fade from view. Several years ago, a group of south-east Asian academics, bankers and former ministers produced a document called Towards a New Asia; it advocated democracy within the rule of law and, while paying tribute to the importance of economic growth, suggested that Asia should ‘move to higher ground’ and ‘become a greater contributor to the advancement of human civilization’. 58 These sentiments reflect one of the great ironies of the debate: south-east Asia’s leaders are often attacked by their fiercest critics not for being too ‘Asian’ but for importing the worst aspects of western societies – consumerism, materialism, pollution – and labelling them ‘Asian values’. As one Malaysian artist said of Mahathir: ‘Everything he’s doing is western – the assembling of cars, privatization, the “multimedia corridor”, everything. This drive for market-driven development is a very western concept.’ 59 Sondhi Limthongkul, a Thai businessman who tried to build an Asian media empire, is equally scathing. ‘The problem of most emerging nations in Asia-Pacific is always the absolute worship of economic growth rather than the quality of life,’ he told a conference in Hawaii. ‘It’s very unfortunate that we have learned and inherited so well from the West.’ 60

If they are interested in formulating any ‘Asian values’ at all, southeast Asia’s next generation of leaders will want to do so by injecting ideas they see as genuinely Asian into a body of beliefs they accept as universal and which seem inevitably to permeate any society that has undergone an industrial revolution. ‘The Asian world and Asian civilization cited so often of late have their origins not deep in the past but in modernization this century in an Asia in contact with the West,’ wrote playwright and professor Masakazu Yamazaki. Modernization, he said, had affected the entire fabric of Asian societies, leading to the rise of industry, the formation of nation states under legitimate institutions and the secularization of ethics and mores. ‘Members of the Association of South East Asian Nations have nearly reached consensus on such fundamentals as the separation of politics from religion, one-man – one-vote representation, and public trial. When it comes to social welfare, women’s liberation, freedom of conscience, access to modern healthcare, and other social policies, almost all the countries of the region now speak the same language as the West.’ 61 Kim Dae-jung, the Korean politician who has fiercely opposed ‘Asian values’ and the suggestion that Asians are by nature undemocratic, once noted that ‘moral breakdown is attributable not to inherent shortcomings of Western cultures but those of industrial societies; a similar phenomenon is now spreading through Asia’s newly industrializing societies’. 62 A dissident who spent his life opposing authoritarian rule in his own country, Kim was elected President of South Korea in December 1997, vowing to promote democracy and transparency and bring an end to the collusion between government and big business.

Even the supporters of ‘Asian values’ accept that their countries will be more democratic and less authoritarian in the future, although they differ on the form democracy should take and on how long it will be before their people are ‘ready’ for the rough and tumble of genuine democratic debate. To speak of unambiguous ‘Asian values’ appears increasingly eccentric as the new millennium approaches. There was something bizarre, for instance, about the sight of Edward Heath, the former British prime minister, arguing on television with Martin Lee, the Hong Kong pro-democracy campaigner, about the political implications of the passing of the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping on the day his death was announced. There was the westerner Heath espousing ‘Asian values’ and insisting that Chinese and Asians did not need democracy as understood in the West (‘The Asiatic countries have a very different view’); and Lee, the Asian, saying that Deng himself had accepted the inevitability of political reform and arguing that Asians wanted democracy as much as anybody else (‘I do not agree that there is such a thing as Asian values’). 63

The heyday of ‘Asian values’ seems to have passed. In Singapore, opposition politicians say Lee Kuan Yew talks less about Asian values and Confucianism than he used to. Mahbubani has toned down his comments as well, declaring in 1997 that Asians want good governance, open societies and the rule of law. 64 In Malaysia, Mahathir still denigrates the West from time to time. But he is as likely to mention the threats and opportunities of globalization – a more inclusive view of change – as to declare the superiority of the ‘Asian Way’. Societies and cultures are changing so fast in south-east Asia that it hardly makes sense to attribute fixed values to them and try to preserve them intact from an imaginary western enemy. The argument that modernization leads to inevitable changes that are both good and bad is accepted throughout the region. Western governments may have learned something too. They can no longer lecture Asia about human rights and morality without having their own embarrassing failings – crime being the most obvious example – thrown back in their faces by their well-educated and well-travelled Asian interlocutors. In south-east Asia, however, the battles over social change and political reform are only just beginning. The campaign for ‘Asian values’ will come to be seen in the years ahead as a pragmatic interlude, during which Asian leaders briefly sought to justify authoritarian rule before losing power to the middle class they themselves had helped to create by managing their economies for so long with such success.