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Wild animals have had their habitats destroyed, and the survivors are hunted down so that their body parts can be incorporated into Chinese medicines and aphrodisiacs. The tiger became a symbol of the economic strength of east Asia, but these ‘tiger economies’ have few real tigers left. Likewise, the elephant has long been associated with the traditions of Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, but wild elephants are increasingly rare. There is little sentimentality about the loss of wild creatures which kill farm animals and damage crops, any more than Europeans mourned the disappearance of wolves and bears. Nor is there much concern about ‘biodiversity’. But millions of people suffer too: deforestation has contributed to soil erosion, landslides, droughts and devastating floods. The sea has fared no better than the land. Fishermen, like their counterparts in Europe and North America, have overfished their waters. They poach in their neighbours’ fishing grounds, prompting armed clashes and frequent seizures of fishing boats – and arrests of fishermen – by the governments concerned. The coastal mangrove forests where fish and shrimp once bred have been uprooted by property developers and commercial prawn farmers, while coral reefs are killed by sewage or blown apart by fishermen using dynamite to catch the few remaining fish.

Neither the depredation of land and sea nor the pollution typical of the early stages of industrialization have received much attention from wealthy city-dwellers. They are much more concerned with the critical state of their cities. The air is thick with dust and toxic gases generated by the trucks, cars, factories and building sites that are the accompaniments to economic success; pedestrians in Manila or Bangkok vainly hold handkerchiefs to their noses and mouths to try to filter out the filth. To call rivers and canals polluted is an understatement; they are black and empty of life. Drivers sit for so long in traffic jams that some have bought portable toilets and office equipment for their cars. Elegant old buildings are torn down and green spaces paved over to make way for unremarkable office blocks and apartment buildings. The urban rich react to this assault in the time-honoured way – by moving out to the suburbs.

A backlash against environmental destruction has begun, although there is still more talk than action. Pressure groups have appeared. Businesses declare their green intentions. Governments have set up environment ministries. Politicians campaign, and sometimes win elections, by espousing green issues. And although most of the region’s big cities remain dirty, noisy and ugly, the most economically advanced – Singapore – has cleaned up its principal river, resurrected old buildings and started to boast of its green credentials. Some economists and environmentalists have calculated that a substantial proportion of south-east Asia’s impressive economic growth in the past three decades can be attributed to a one-off fire-sale of natural resources, which means that it may be harder for economies to grow so fast when the trees, the fish and the soil are all depleted. For the individual Indonesian or Thai citizen there are more personal concerns. They remember fishing in a river or drinking from a stream as a child. They see its poisonous waters today and regret what they have lost.

Wealth has not only made south-east Asia dirtier. It has also made it more powerful. Chapter 6 looks at the uncertain state of regional security after the end of the Cold War. Several countries have bought weapons from the US, Europe and Russia, including American F-16 and Russian MiG-29 jet aircraft; Indonesia bought most of the old East German navy. There has been talk in academic journals and the media of ‘a regional arms race’. But the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) is striving to present a united front to the world. It has quickly embraced Burma and the former communist states of Vietnam and Laos and is expected to incorporate Cambodia shortly to bring its final complement to ten. Asean, founded by five countries in Bangkok in 1967, is a motley collection of rich countries, poor countries, liberal democracies, not-so-liberal democracies, communist states, a military junta and a sultanate, and it has begun to exert its influence on everything from world trade negotiations to security policy. In 1993, it founded the Asean Regional Forum to bring together all the countries concerned with maintaining peace in Asia, including China, Russia and the US.

A prominent part of the Asean agenda hitherto has been to promote the so-called ‘Asian value’ of consensus. In foreign relations, this approach means compromise rather than confrontation. But the agenda is starting to look dangerously out of date. Consensus is not easy to reach with an increasingly assertive China which, like Asean, is translating its new-found economic muscle into increased military might. In the past few years China has made repeated naval incursions into Vietnamese offshore oil exploration zones (and it invaded Vietnam by land as recently as 1979); it has also occupied disputed atolls of the Spratly Islands off the Philippines, again in pursuit of its claim to almost the whole of the South China Sea; and it has alarmed Asean members such as Thailand and Singapore, as well as India, by developing close military and commercial ties with the Burmese junta. Asean was forced to confront the Chinese over the South China Sea incursions with un-Asean directness: they told the Chinese to stop. Asean members, especially the vulnerable island of Singapore, have had to acknowledge their continuing dependence on the security umbrella provided by the US, however unpalatable American views on democracy may be.

Asean has also espoused the ‘Asian value’ of communal (as opposed to individual) rights. It has rejected western complaints about human rights abuses or environmental damage on the grounds that political stability and economic growth for all are more important to developing Asian countries than the complaints of a few dissidents. But the populations of the Asean countries become more sophisticated with every year that passes, and younger Asians can no longer be relied upon to accept their governments’ definitions of right and wrong. Siding with Burma’s notorious military junta against the West in the interests of Asean solidarity is enough to test the diplomatic skills of even the most hardened adherent of ‘Asian values’. Asean thus risks being seen as a complacent clique of governments whose main aim is to keep themselves in power, a sort of ‘regime survival club’. Meanwhile, there are plenty of real dangers for the organization and its member states to avert if they want to proceed smoothly down the path of modernization. There are the problems on the fringes of Asean – the stand-off between North and South Korea, the assertiveness of China, the dependence of the whole area on oil and gas imported from the Middle East – as well as conflicts within it over secession movements, drug-trafficking, border disputes, piracy at sea, and the over-exploitation of natural resources. The south-east Asian states are quickly discovering that wealth and power do not merely confer the right to push forward one’s own views; the powerful must also share the burden of keeping the peace.

Chapter 7 looks at the ten countries in turn and analyses the part played by each in the modernization of politics and society. Like central America or southern Africa, south-east Asia sees itself, and is increasingly seen by others, as a distinct region. But it contains an exceptionally wide variety of races, religions, colonial experiences and styles of economic development. Each country is affected by the industrial revolution in different ways.

Modernization and the prosperity that comes with it, chapter 8 concludes, have nevertheless made life better for the overwhelming majority of south-east Asia’s 500 million people. Some have yet to benefit, a few are worse off than before, but many have moved from a hand-to-mouth existence in the countryside to the financial security of paid employment in the towns. South-east Asia today is no longer simply a place of golden temples and rice-farmers in emerald-green paddy fields. Those images are slowly being replaced by the modern reality of factories and city streets. Asian nations are becoming part of the industrialized world. To have this happen in one country is an achievement; to have it happen in ten neighbouring countries simultaneously is nothing less than extraordinary. But there is a long way to go. Some governments have convinced themselves that Asian political violence and social decay exist only in the imagination of jealous western observers, but they are wrong. More and more Asians recognize that there are big obstacles to overcome if the next twenty years are to be as successful as the last twenty. The biggest mistakes their leaders made in the 1990s were to try to suppress the popular urge for political and social change while boasting about their economic achievements in a mood of premature triumph.

ONE The rise and fall of ‘Asian values’

Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad has asked Malaysians not to accept western-style democracy as it could result in negative effects. The prime minister said such an extreme principle had caused moral decay, homosexual activities, single parents and economic slowdown because of poor work ethics.

– Voice of Malaysia radio, 29 May 1993.

Some people have the illusion that things are different in Asia because the spirit of feudalism still prevails and peasants are politically inactive. This is not true. Asians and Vietnamese are changing. They are desperate for democracy, freedom and development. Nothing can restrain them any longer and it is only a matter of time before the situation erupts. The political stability which appears to exist in Vietnam at the moment is a fake.

– Bui Tin, a former Vietnamese army officer and self-exiled dissident.¹

For centuries, Europeans regarded Asia with a mixture of horror and jealous fascination. Schooled since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to believe in the power of reason and discipline, Europeans saw Asia as exotic, irrational, unreliable and decadent. To them, Asia was a world of cruelty and sensuality, of despots and harems. The real Asia was often submerged in the European mind by the fears and feverish imaginings of the Europeans themselves. These delusions later became known collectively as ‘Orientalism’ – a word used to describe the western habit of simultaneously glamorizing and demonizing the east.² This is not to deny that the countries of Asia were very different from those of post-Enlightenment Europe, both socially and politically. Asians themselves – whether in power or in opposition – often sought to modernize their societies by emulating the commercial, administrative and social practices of the colonial powers with which they came into contact; King Chulalongkorn of Thailand, for example, is credited with turning his country into a modern bureaucratic state, complete with railways, roads and canals, during his rule from 1868 to 1910.

But in the 1980s and 1990s Asian leaders, especially in south-east Asia, decided to turn the tables on the West. Independence from the European powers had been won three decades before, and had been followed by a period of rapid economic growth in much of east Asia. Men like Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore declared that Asia was indeed different from the West. But this time it was the Asians who were disciplined, hardworking and moral, while the West was a place of unreason – a morass of crime, decadence and loose sexual habits. By the early 1990s a lively debate was under way in east Asia and among politicians and academics in the US and Europe.³

Supporters of the concept of ‘Asian values’ argued that east Asians, although ethnically diverse, shared certain core beliefs. They were loyal to their families and communities, whereas westerners were obsessed with the rights of individuals to the extent that their societies were starting to fall apart. Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore, its prime minister from 1959 to 1990 and now with the title of senior minister, told an interviewer in 1994 that he liked the informality and openness of American society. ‘But as a total system, I find parts of it totally unacceptable: guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy, unbecoming behaviour in public – in sum the breakdown of civil society,’ he said. ‘The expansion of the right of the individual to behave or misbehave as he pleases has come at the expense of orderly society. In the East the main object is to have a well-ordered society so that everybody can have maximum enjoyment of his freedoms. This freedom can only exist in an ordered state and not in a natural state of contention and anarchy.’⁴

The philosophy of ‘Asian values’, developed principally in Singapore and Malaysia, is much more than a set of abstruse social theories. From Burma to China and beyond, it has a direct bearing on everything from attitudes towards human rights abuses and film censorship to international trade negotiations and deforestation. After three decades of political stability and extraordinarily rapid economic expansion, some of Asia’s leaders feel that they have earned the right to run their countries according to their own rules. They have had enough of being lectured on how to run their political systems, look after the rights of their factory workers and protect their tigers and elephants by former colonial powers such as England and France, and by a United States made arrogant by its victory over communism in the Cold War. The coming century, they believe, will be the ‘Pacific Century’ – an era in which confident Asians will finally be able to discard the western baggage left behind by the colonial era.

Such emotions are most deeply felt by the older generation of leaders who remember colonial rule and who still hold sway in much of the region. Mahathir, the septuagenarian Malaysian prime minister who has led the country since 1981, has courted Japan in his efforts to advance the cause of ‘Asian values’, both because of Japan’s present influence as an economic superpower and because of its historical role in sweeping aside the colonial powers in south-east Asia during the Second World War. Although the British, the French and the Dutch returned after Japan’s defeat in 1945, the mystique of the all-powerful European was shattered for ever, and they soon departed again, leaving behind the newly independent countries of Asia.⁵ The forthright Mahathir has found favour in Japan by urging the Japanese to stop apologizing for the war and to take pride in the resurgent Asia of the late twentieth century. In 1995 he co-authored The Asia that can say No: a Card against the West with the right-wing Japanese politician Shintaro Ishihara, and in it he laid out the basic tenets of the new Asian philosophy: the West is suffering from ‘moral degeneration’ and hedonism in the form of incest, cohabitation, sensual gratification, avarice and lack of respect for family or religion; Asia is in the ascendant economically and morally; and the jealous West is therefore trying to stifle Asia’s growth. ‘Fearing that one day they will have to face Asian countries as competitors, some western nations are doing their utmost to keep us at bay,’ he wrote. ‘They constantly wag accusing fingers in Asia’s direction, claiming that it has benefited from unacceptable practices, such as denial of human rights and workers’ rights, undemocratic government, and disregard for the environment.’ For Mahathir, Asian values were not just different, they were better. The West ‘should accept our values, not the other way round’. Ishihara joined in with enthusiasm along similarly anti-western and anti-liberal lines. Among other declarations, he made the controversial assertion that westerners sought depraved sex and child sex in south-east Asia while Japanese visitors just wanted normal sex with prostitutes. More significantly, he aired the idea of ‘a new economic co-prosperity sphere’ for Asia, echoing the wartime Japanese concept of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ which justified Japan’s invasion of other Asian lands.⁶

All this harked back to Japanese Second World War propaganda about undesirable Anglo-American values – individualism, liberalism, democracy, hedonism and materialism – that should not be allowed to pollute the pure spirit of Japan.⁷ But the memories of Japanese atrocities against both prisoners-of-war and civilians meant that a new ‘Asian Way’ so closely associated with Japan was never going to be popular in south-east Asia, let alone China. Mahathir said the Japanese troops in Malaya had done nothing ‘improper’, but other Asians of his generation – including Filipinos and Chinese – remember all too well the gruesome massacres, rapes, torture and other atrocities committed by Japanese troops. Lee Kuan Yew has repeatedly mentioned the dark days of the Japanese occupation of Singapore and used it to warn his people of the need for constant vigilance. The idea of an ‘Asian Way’ for the 1990s with Japan taking the lead was further impeded by the reluctance of Japanese politicians more cautious than the swashbuckling Ishihara to antagonize their American allies.

Another way for east Asian leaders to cement ‘Asian values’ into a coherent philosophy was to summon the help of Confucius. The Chinese sage, who lived 2,500 years ago and whose thoughts on government and morality are recorded in The Analects, at first seemed ideally suited to the task of uniting east Asians behind a common value-system. Like modern east Asians, he revered the power of education and preached filial piety. As early as 1977, the University of Singapore hosted a symposium on Asian Values and Modernization. Academics bemoaned the rise of juvenile delinquency and the increasing divorce rate and suggested that western values should be inspected – as if by customs officials – before being imported. They discussed the need to build an ethos based on supposedly Asian values such as ‘group solidarity’, ‘community life’ and the belief in extended families.⁸ By 1983, Singapore had established the Institute of East Asian Philosophies. Sponsored by Lee’s ruling People’s Action Party, it was designed to revive Confucianism and adapt it to modern life, and was explicitly aimed at countering the westernization of Singaporeans. A new theory of government based on harmony and consensus was outlined: debate and criticism would not take place in public but among members of the government behind closed doors. As one western academic put it in 1996, in Indonesia and Singapore ‘consensus means conformity with the wishes of the regime’.⁹

The appeal of Confucian conservatism is understandable, particularly in societies with pre-existing Confucian traditions such as Vietnam and among the minority ethnic Chinese communities widely spread throughout south-east Asia. At a time of tumultuous social and political change, Confucianism seems to offer clear guidelines for maintaining civilized values. ‘Criminality is on the rise, opium and drugs are on the rise too and morality is in decline – such things as would make the hair of the ancestors stand on end,’ says Huu Ngoc, a Vietnamese writer living in the capital Hanoi. For him, the chaos caused by modernization is damaging a community spirit based on the co-operative cultivation of rice – a spirit which he sees as spreading out in concentric circles from family to village to nation. The result, he says, is that ‘Confucianism – which is the basis for this community solidarity of family, village and state – is breached.’¹⁰

By the late 1990s, however, it was clear that Confucianism was an unsuitable glue for holding east Asians together in the name of ‘Asian values’. There were three main reasons for this. First, the non-Chinese who form the majority of south-east Asians could not identify with an essentially Chinese philosophy; just as Singaporeans found it impossible to espouse an ‘Asian Way’ linked to Japanese wartime imperialism, so Malays and Indonesians – who sometimes fear China as an external power and resent the Chinese communities in their midst – were unable to accept one so explicitly connected to China.

Second, it emerged that Confucianism was an exceptionally weak card for Asians to play against the West in order to proclaim Asian supremacy. This was because both western and Asian thinkers had for a century or more been blaming traditional Confucian values, with their rigid respect for hierarchy and disdain of commerce, for the failure of Asia to make economic progress following the European industrial revolutions. It was absurd for Asian leaders suddenly to attribute their success to Confucius when it had long been argued that he was one of the causes of Asia’s relative economic decline in the previous 1,000 years. For Max Weber, the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German sociologist, Asian values were inimical to economic success because they discouraged innovation and competition; it was the northern Europeans, with their ‘Protestant Ethic’, who were succeeding. Kishore Mahbubani, permanent secretary at the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs and one of the most forceful proponents of Asian values, is convinced that the region fell behind because Asian minds became ‘ossified’. ‘After centuries of inertia resulting from oppressive feudal rule,’ Mahbubani wrote, ‘the work ethic is coming back in full force in most East Asian societies.’¹¹

The third, and perhaps most important, reason why Confucius was confined to the sidelines is that a close reading of Confucian texts reveals a philosophy not quite as politically convenient for present-day south-east Asian leaders as previously thought. It was not merely his dismissal of women, his snobbish disdain for manual labour or his anti-commercial instincts; neo-Confucianists had in any case embraced business from the sixteenth century. It was much worse. Although it was true that Confucius and his followers, such as Mencius, encouraged respect for authority, it turned out that they also insisted on good government and social justice and sometimes accepted the need for subjects to rebel against unjust rulers. Confucianism quickly became less popular with several east Asian governments.

But some of south-east Asia’s rulers still felt the need to unite their peoples behind a common set of ‘Asian values’, partly to promote stability in their own multi-ethnic region and partly to confront outsiders with a coherent philosophy that explains their actions and arguments when they are engaged in international negotiations. In 1993, Tommy Koh, a senior Singapore diplomat, outlined ten basic ‘Asian values’ in 1993 that still hold good for adherents to the ‘Asian Way’ today. They are: an absence of extreme individualism; a belief in strong families; a reverence for education; frugality; hard work; ‘national teamwork’ between unions and employers; an Asian ‘social contract’ between people and the state, whereby governments provide law and order and citizens behave well in return; a belief in citizens as ‘stakeholders’, for example through home-ownership – this only applied to some Asian countries; moral wholesomeness; and a free but responsible press. ‘Taken together,’ Koh wrote, ‘these ten values form a framework that has enabled societies in East Asia to achieve economic prosperity, progress, harmonious relations between citizens and law and order.’¹²

It is perhaps not surprising that many south-east Asian leaders should believe in a set of values that simultaneously justifies their own forms of government and suggests that they are culturally different from – if not superior to – westerners. What is remarkable is how many westerners agree. In a book urging European businesses to become more involved in the then fast-growing markets of south-east Asia, Corrado Letta, an Italian business consultant, drew up a table comparing ‘cultural values’ in Europe and Asia. Europeans were characterized by ‘reluctance to learn’, Asians by ‘willingness to learn/respect for learning’; Europeans had ‘complacency’, while Asians had ‘creativity’; Europeans liked ‘taking it easy’, whereas Asians preferred ‘hard work’; Europe was full of ‘doom and gloom’, but Asia enjoyed ‘booming confidence’; and so on.¹³ Letta is not alone. It is common to hear both westerners and Asians declare that Asians are more hardworking than Africans; more concerned about losing ‘face’ than Americans; or more gentle than Europeans. ‘Asians,’ wrote one western commentator bluntly, ‘believe in consensus.’¹⁴ This is about as meaningful as the nineteenth-century Orientalist generalization that Asians enjoy cruelty, and most such hard-and-fast cultural distinctions can be dismissed as neo-Orientalist.¹⁵

A more realistic view is that the people of south-east Asia – because they have only recently undergone or are still undergoing their rapid industrial revolutions – still retain some of the values of an earlier, pre-industrial age. Like many Asians today, Europeans and Americans used to live in extended families, work hard, show respect for their elders and live by stern moral codes. Western politicians often play to ordinary people’s nostalgia about this aspect of their past, and declare that there is much westerners can learn from those Asian societies which appear to be both prosperous (in a modern way) and law-abiding (in an old-fashioned way). This is why Margaret Thatcher was enthusiastic about ‘Victorian values’ and why Tony Blair, within weeks of becoming prime minister, invited Lee Kuan Yew to his office at Downing Street in London to discuss such matters as welfare reform and education. It is also why it was – in political terms, at least – so ill-advised of President Bill Clinton to take up his human rights cudgels on behalf of Michael Fay, an eighteen-year-old American sentenced in Singapore in 1994 to be flogged with a rattan cane for various acts of vandalism, including spray-painting cars. US administration officials and several American newspaper columnists expressed outrage at the punishment, which can leave permanent scars. But many ordinary Americans, fed up with crime in their own country, thought Singapore was taking the right approach and told the Singaporeans – in the words of at least one caller to a US radio phone-in programme – to ‘whip his butt’. The Michael Fay affair played straight into the hands of Asian leaders who reject the idea that the US has anything to teach them about human rights. Lee Kuan Yew responded to US criticism by saying that America might be rich but it was also chaotic, and neither safe nor peaceful. ‘If you like it that way, that is your problem,’ he said. ‘But that is not the path we choose. They always talk about human rights. I think it is just a convenient slogan.’¹⁶

But only the most stubborn defenders of ‘Asian values’ would argue that they are immutable. Brigadier-General Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s deputy prime minister and the son of Lee Kuan Yew, commented recently on the failure of western policies on welfare and crime and the spread of social problems to countries such as Taiwan, and said: ‘If we do not watch the way we go we could become like the West.’ He said Chinese, Malays and Indians (the three main ethnic groups in Singapore) did have a different ‘world view’ from westerners. But when asked whether values could not change dramatically from generation to generation as they do in the West, he replied: ‘The answer is we don’t know. They are not unchanging. They will evolve, but if we can’t preserve the essence of them into the next generation then we think we are finished.’¹⁷

In the eyes of certain Asian leaders, ‘Asian values’ are not immutable but have a cultural basis – representing a different world view – and are worth defending in the name of social cohesion. Some of the ten values listed by Tommy Koh are unremarkable, and are accepted as good whether or not they are actually adopted in the rest of the world as well: frugality and hard work, for example. Others are more controversial. They suggest curbing the rights of the individual in the interests of society as a whole; they hint at tame trade unions and an uncritical press; and they support the idea of strong government. These are not just theories. They are put into practice by the authoritarian governments of south-east Asia. In Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Burma, 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.