Читать книгу The Trouble With Tigers: The Rise and Fall of South-East Asia - Victor Mallet - Страница 7

Bangkok in the early 1990s was an extraordinarily energetic city. The peaceful chaos of the streets, where Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs jostled with motorcycles and three-wheel tuktuks for hire, where hawkers cooked noodle soup next to newly-constructed skyscrapers, epitomized the south-east Asian economic boom. When I first set foot in Thailand in 1991, I was impressed not just by the energy but by the easy mixing of new and old, rich and poor, western and Asian. On Ploenchit Road outside my office, a statue of the Buddha, wreathed in incense and garlands of flowers, sat only yards away from a slightly bigger, plastic statue of Colonel Sanders outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken store. On the crowded pavements, foreign backpackers dodged between Thai businessmen talking stock prices into their mobile telephones and disabled women selling lottery tickets to passers-by.

South-east Asia’s dynamism was seductive for a journalist accustomed to other continents. Europe seemed almost lethargic by comparison, and the sense of purpose in Asia’s cities was a refreshing change from the despair in much of Africa and the Middle East. Books about the east Asian economic ‘miracle’ proliferated. It was impossible not to be impressed.

But from the beginning I had doubts – both about the supposedly miraculous nature of what was happening and about how long it could be sustained. I do not claim to be alone in this, for my doubts were sparked and then fuelled by the south-east Asians I met and interviewed throughout the region. Most governments and many business executives were supremely confident, but opposition politicians, academics and others repeatedly warned of the dangers ahead: governments were authoritarian or corrupt or both and would be challenged by their subjects; many Asian businesses were successful not because they were well managed but because they were in league with the same corrupt governments; the environment was being destroyed; and the societies and cultures that seemed so stable were actually in the throes of an enormous upheaval. I confess that my scepticism about the ‘miracle’ soon began to waver in the face of accusations that I and some of my journalistic colleagues were too pessimistic and were mistakenly viewing events through ‘western’ eyes. Several more years of rapid economic growth made our doubts seem even more unreasonable.

Then came the financial crash of 1997. This book was conceived in 1996, so neither the region-wide economic crisis nor the overthrow of President Suharto in Indonesia came as a shock to me or to those Asians who had long advocated political and economic reform. But these events – particularly the abrupt end of the economic boom – did come as a nasty surprise to many south-east Asians and foreign investors. They had assumed that rapid economic growth would continue indefinitely, although they argued about the precise rate of expansion. In the mid-1990s, if you asked anyone in a southeast Asian city a casual question about how things were going, it was surprising how often the reply was a cheerful ‘7.6 per cent’, ‘9 per cent’ or some similarly precise number. Europeans or Americans usually know if their economy is doing well or badly, but most would struggle to remember a recent estimate for the growth of their gross domestic product. For Malaysians, Thais and Singaporeans, however, economic expansion had become an obsession.

There were good reasons for this. The rapid economic growth these countries had enjoyed in the previous three decades had a palpable effect on people’s lives, whether they were cabinet ministers or factory workers; an economy growing at 8 per cent a year doubles in size in nine years, and most people have correspondingly more money to spend and save. South-east Asia’s success – one of the great achievements of the second half of the twentieth century – was also a source of pride to politicians and ordinary citizens alike. The ten countries of south-east Asia have been involved in the most rapid industrial revolution in history. For the half a billion people who live there, this means being catapulted out of traditional and largely rural societies into the new world of big cities, factories, offices, cars, telephones and mass entertainment. Much has been written about the economic causes of this ‘miracle’. This book is about its effects on the people of south-east Asia, and about how it went wrong.

Many of the results of rapid industrialization are self-evidently good: people now live longer, and they live better. But some of the leaders who supervised south-east Asia’s industrial revolution became arrogant. They began to believe that their societies were imbued with special ‘Asian values’, and were therefore immune to the political and social pressures that had accompanied previous industrial revolutions. They failed to deal with increasing demands for democracy; the spread of crime and drugs; the ultimately disastrous rise of a class of businessmen better at making friends with politicians than at managing their balance sheets; the destruction of the region’s environment and natural resources; or the need to fend for themselves diplomatically and militarily after the end of the Cold War.

Whether or not south-east Asia recovers economically – as most economists believe it will after the recent financial crisis – the need to manage these challenges will make the bare statistics of growth seem much less important in the early years of the twenty-first century than they did in the 1990s. Most of the challenges are new to the region, but not to the world. As people become educated, they tend to become more vocal in defending their interests and confronting unrepresentative governments. As they move out of villages into impersonal cities, they loosen the ties to families and small communities. Politics, social life, religion, culture and business are all transformed. But south-east Asia’s industrial revolution has been much more rapid than those that went before in Europe, the US and Japan. The result is a delay of many years between the superficial changes – the arrival of television and mobile telephones – and the more profound shifts in the way people think about their families, their communities, their governments and their gods. South-east Asian leaders made a mistake. Instead of seeing this time lag for what it was, they interpreted the continuing weakness of their political opponents and the strength of social traditions as signs that Asia was different and that they would be spared the trauma of modernization.

It was an oversight they would later regret. But even after the collapse of confidence in the region’s developing economies in 1997, there is plenty to boast about in the scale and extent of the south-east Asian ‘miracle’. One country, the city state that is the island of Singapore, has completed the industrial revolution, in the sense that it has caught up with other industrialized nations and even started to overtake them. The average Singaporean is already richer than the average Briton. Singaporeans live in an efficient and highly computerized urban society, eat at expensive restaurants, buy expensive clothes and travel widely, just like their fellow consumers in Japan, the US or Italy.

In Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Burma, on the other hand, the revolution has hardly begun. Most people in these countries are still peasant farmers barely able to subsist on what they grow. But even here the trappings and habits of modern life – motorcycles, tarred roads, televisions, discotheques, tall buildings, toilets, shampoo, banks, advertising, passenger aircraft – are spreading fast. As recently as 1992, the Vietnamese capital Hanoi was a quiet town of elegant but dilapidated French villas where the swish of bicycle tyres was only occasionally drowned by the noise of an army truck; peasant women defecated openly on the pavements. There were no taxis and hardly any cars. The few simple restaurants that existed in what was then a typically dour, communist-run city rarely had names – they were known by their street numbers. Today, the city seethes with noisy activity; the streets are crowded with new motorcycles, cars and taxis, and they echo to the sound of construction as new hotels and office blocks spring up alongside bars and karaoke parlours. In northern Cambodia, far from the capital Phnom Penh, villagers watch videos at night on black and white televisions powered by twelve-volt car batteries which are recharged each day in the nearest town. In communist Laos, young women play cheap, handheld computer games on the banks of the Mekong river.

Halfway up the ladder come Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. They have a large middle class of relatively wealthy, well-travelled and well-educated citizens living in the big cities; but also millions of poorer people, urban and rural, who are able to enjoy only some of the fruits of the continuing revolution. Malaysia, once known for its plantations of rubber and palm-oil trees, has become the world’s biggest exporter of air conditioners; the world’s tallest buildings, originally designed for Chicago, 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 urban elite, including ethnic Chinese business magnates and Indonesian yuppies, quietly supported President Suharto’s leadership for decades while the economy expanded. But by the time south-east Asian financial markets crashed in 1997 they were understandably nervous about whether the economy could sustain the corruption, nepotism and cronyism to which Indonesia was particularly prone. In 1998 Suharto was ousted after pro-democracy demonstrations and outbreaks of looting in which hundreds of people were killed. Investors who had done deals with the president’s children and friends began to regret their alliances with discredited people who only months before had been the most influential business contacts in Indonesia.

It is not only the middle classes who are pushing for change. The poor have benefited from the industrial revolution, but not nearly as much as the rich. Throughout south-east Asia, peasant farmers and the urban underclass have started to complain about the widening gap between them and their richer compatriots. In Thailand, hundreds of peasants camped repeatedly outside parliament in Bangkok in the 1990s demanding redress for a range of grievances: low crop prices, for example, and the government’s failure to pay compensation for land submerged by reservoirs for hydro-electric dams. In Indonesia, people have staged demonstrations against the building of supermarkets; big new shops are said to be of use only to the rich and to put local traders and hawkers out of work. Such protests often take on disturbing religious or ethnic overtones, and there are plenty of real or imagined grievances for people to seize on as an excuse for violence. Most big businessmen in south-east Asia are ethnic Chinese, so it is usually the Chinese who build the supermarkets and suffer the consequences if shops are destroyed or looted. Rioters frequently burn down churches in Indonesia, too, identifying them with the minority Christians in a country where most people are Moslems. Neither the rural nor the urban poor feel they can hope to taste the fruits of industrialization that the rich – with their big cars, private schools, foreign travel, expensive night-life and mobile telephones – so ostentatiously relish. The situation is bearable when the economy is growing fast, unemployment is low and wages are rising faster than inflation – in other words when even the poor feel that this year is better than last. But the hitherto remarkable equanimity of the underclass could easily vanish in a real economic recession. (Until 1997 south-east Asia became so accustomed to rapid growth that ‘recession’ was loosely used in the region – it could mean annual growth of 5 per cent rather than an actual contraction of the economy.)

Another reason to expect political change is that a handover from one generation of leaders to the next is imminent. Those who experienced British, French or Dutch colonial rule and fought or campaigned for independence – such as Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, the elderly communists of Vietnam and Laos and ex-President Suharto of Indonesia – have sought to differentiate themselves from their former colonial masters. They inherited parliaments, courts and civil services (or, in the case of the communists, imported their models from the Soviet Union), but they moulded them to suit their own ambitions, suppressing dissent and arguing that strong government was essential for nationbuilding. Younger citizens, including the new generation of politicians, tend to be more liberal. From Burma in the west to Vietnam in the east, there was intense public interest in news of the South Korean trial of the former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and his successor Roh Tae-woo; the two generals, quintessential Asian authoritarians who pursued economic growth with ruthless determination, were condemned to death and prison respectively (though both were subsequently pardoned and released) for their corrupt and brutal rule of South Korea in the 1980s and early 1990s. The question asked in south-east Asia, sometimes openly, sometimes sotto voce, was: ‘Will there not come a time when we can do the same in our country to bring our leaders to account and usher in a better society?’

All three of the forces for political change mentioned above – the rise of the middle class, the resentment of the poor and the arrival of a new generation of politicians – were as significant in previous industrial revolutions as they are in south-east Asia’s. But there is a fourth phenomenon which is particularly relevant in the world of today: the speed with which information and ideas can be transmitted around the globe, even to the remotest corners of rural Burma or Borneo. It has become very difficult for governments, however dictatorial, to suppress news and views from abroad, as the trial of South Korea’s former leaders showed. Burmese villagers listen to the BBC or Voice of America on their radios, learning not only about international affairs but also about events in their own country that the military authorities have chosen to suppress or distort. Indonesian students download information from the World Wide Web via telephone lines in Jakarta – that is, if they are not pursuing their studies at American or Australian universities. Thai accountants watch satellite television. Singaporean computer engineers can afford to travel abroad and get access to any information they please. Nevertheless most governments in south-east Asia (Thailand and the Philippines are the notable exceptions) do try to restrict what their citizens can see, hear and read. They win the occasional battle with the help of censorship or lawsuits, but they are slowly losing the information war. They are overwhelmed both by the supply of information and by the demand for it from their citizens as the cost of information technology falls and the sophistication of readers and viewers increases. Already people can watch live television discussions with all their unpredictable consequences, participate in free-for-all Internet debating forums and choose from an array of new magazines in English and vernacular languages covering every subject from fashion to foreign policy.

The unprecedented speed of south-east Asia’s industrial revolution has not just affected politics. It has had a dramatic – some would say devastating – effect on societies and cultures. Chapter 3 looks at how tastes, habits, languages, religious beliefs and more are being reshaped, leaving people bewildered, broken – and occasionally happy. Proponents of ‘Asian values’ argued that south-east Asia would be spared the criminality and family breakdowns that normally accompany the migration of millions of people from small villages to impersonal towns during industrial revolutions. The evidence suggests otherwise. Drug abuse is just one example of the modern ills that south-east Asian societies now have to face. Even authoritarian governments admit the region has a serious drugs problem. Not only does it produce much of the world’s heroin – derived from the poppy fields of Burma and Laos and exported with the connivance of powerful businessmen and officials through Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam – it has also become a big consumer of drugs. Teenagers sniff glue in the Lao capital Vientiane; truck drivers take amphetamines to keep themselves awake on the roads of Thailand; heroin addicts have multiplied in Malaysia and Vietnam, where the drug is sold at the base of Lenin’s statue in central Hanoi; and the children of the new rich pop Ecstasy pills or snort cocaine in the discotheques of Bangkok and Jakarta. Alcoholism is a problem too, even among Moslems for whom alcohol is forbidden by the Koran. The reasons given for crime and drug-taking, and the tales of how each feeds on the other, rarely seem particularly ‘Asian’. In fact they would be wearisomely familiar to newspaper readers in the US or Europe. Heroin addicts and ‘street-children’, the youngsters who beg, shine shoes or prostitute themselves to earn a living, speak of broken homes and the despair of those who are left out of the economic race. The richer kids who hang around shopping malls in Malaysia or race their motorcycles around the lakes in Hanoi complain about the ennui of modern city life and the inability of their parents to understand them. Concerned governments in Vietnam and Malaysia have mounted strident campaigns against ‘social evils’, but they have met with cynicism from their teenage targets, who fail to see why governments are more concerned about youthful misdemeanours than corruption in high places.

Not all social changes are the object of outright condemnation. Some are welcomed, others are merely controversial. The most visible aspects of the social revolution are the goods and services that people have started to consume. In the cities, they drink wine and eat take-away pizzas as well as local food and drink. Irish theme pubs have sprung up in Phnom Penh, Hanoi and Bangkok. People shop at 7–11 corner stores and in shopping malls (‘I went malling’, said one Filipina recently when asked what she had done at the weekend) as well as at market stalls. They watch soccer on television, and play golf in addition to badminton. They drive Toyotas and Volvos. They go to Michael Jackson concerts in Bangkok and listen to Hootie and the Blowfish in Jakarta. They watch dubbed or subtitled Hollywood movies. They work and live in concrete buildings indistinguishable from those in London, Frankfurt or Oklahoma, and inside them they use computers with software made by Microsoft. They sit on modern toilets manufactured by American Standard or its Japanese rivals. Even in the countryside, farmers drive Honda motorcycles and watch televisions made by Mitsubishi. It is true that each Asian market remains distinctive, that very few Asians watch television programmes in English, and that a truly global sense of culture lies far in the future: Thais do not become American just because they go to American fast food outlets, any more than the inhabitants of San Francisco adopt Thai habits after eating a Thai meal. Still, cultures are heavily influenced by the increasing contact between south-east Asia and the rest of the world. Languages absorb words from America just as they used to co-opt the Dutch, French and English vocabulary of the colonial powers. Modern south-east Asian music, architecture and fashion often draw on the traditions of both east and west.

Family relationships and attitudes to sex are changing too, although at a much slower pace than shopping habits. Loyalty to an extended family of cousins and in-laws is gradually giving way to the nuclear family of mother, father and children more typical of modern cities. Single men and women independent of spouses or parents are beginning to make an appearance on the radar screens of market research companies, even if most people continue to live with their parents until marriage. The anonymity of city life and the availability of contraceptives have removed most of the impediments to pre-marital and casual sex. For liberals, this is all good news. Young people enjoy more freedom and are no longer constrained by the old-fashioned customs of their ancestors. Women are less likely to be regarded as subordinate to men, and some are beginning to shine as bankers, businesswomen and politicians. Homosexuality is more widely accepted, too.

But there is a bad side to these new-found freedoms. The young feel insecure because they can no longer rely on numerous relatives to look after them, find them jobs or lend them money when times are hard. The old begin to worry that their offspring will not provide for them in old age (hence the Singaporean law of 1995 – the Maintenance of Parents Act – making it compulsory for children to support needy parents in old age). Divorce rates are rising in several countries in the region. Worse, there is evidence in Indonesia and elsewhere that young girls, amoral and materialistic, have begun to engage in casual prostitution with older men in order to buy the designer clothes they could not otherwise afford, a phenomenon previously noticed in Japan. Professional prostitution, meanwhile, continues to flourish in the region on a grand scale, while gigolos in Bali ply their trade with foreign women much as Tunisian men do at the beach resorts of North Africa. Some sociologists argue that what they call ‘contractual sex’ has always been an integral part of life in, say, Thailand and Vietnam.⁵ Yet the increased mobility within and between countries that is the inevitable result of the industrial revolution has raised some new and disturbing issues. The disease AIDS is wreaking silent havoc in countries where both intravenous drug abuse and casual sex are common. Paedophiles from the West and from other Asian countries such as Taiwan have Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines high on their list of destinations. Pornographic videos are widely distributed in Indochina. Rape is common. Such problems afflict other countries where half the population has moved from villages to cities. But the Asian leaders who have convinced themselves that these issues are ‘western’ in origin rather than simply modern are finding them particularly difficult to solve.

Rapid modernization is affecting people’s spiritual lives as well as their personal relationships. Religion is the subject of two contradictory trends: on the one hand, religious observance often declines as the young loosen their ties to the traditions of their forefathers and spend their time on the two activities into which life is divided in the modern mind – work and leisure; on the other hand, people feel so insecure when they see the collapse of the customs which previously framed their lives that they seek the solid comfort of religious dogma and even of fundamentalism. Both trends are evident, sometimes in the same country or even the same family. Indonesians, for example, are struggling to explain the simultaneous increase of both decadence and religiosity among Moslems in Jakarta. Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Taoism (ancestor worship) are the principal religions of south-east Asia, but they often thrive alongside – or in combination with – older forms of superstition and animism. In 1994 I stumbled on the sacrifice of a dog in an Akha hill-tribe village in northern Thailand. In all, a dog, two chickens and two pigs had been killed, and grains of rice and freshly cut leaves piled near the dog’s bleeding corpse in the hot afternoon sun. It turned out to be a routine sacrifice. Some villagers in the community of Paka Sukjai had fallen sick, and they paid a spirit-man fifty-two baht (in those days about two US dollars) to perform a ceremony to cure them. Elsewhere in Thailand, the Thais, like the Romans of old and many pre-industrial civilizations the world over, believe in household gods; almost every home and office has a small ‘spirit house’ to which offerings of food and incense are made. People pray to statues of the Buddha in the hope of winning the lottery; and occasionally they pray for fertility at shrines of great wooden phalluses.

In terms of numbers, Islam is south-east Asia’s dominant religion. It has long been asserted that Islam in Asia is ‘milder’ and less troublesome as a political force than it is in the Middle East, partly because many of Indonesia’s millions of Javanese Moslems have a more mystical and less rigid interpretation of Islam than their coreligionists. Yet the religion does loom large in political calculations, posing as it does a dilemma for governments which see it both as an enemy of modernization and a friend of moral, non-western ‘Asian values’. In Indonesia, Islamic separatists are confronting the government in Aceh in northern Sumatra, and Javanese Moslems regularly burn down Christian churches. Malaysia banned a fundamentalist Islamic sect called al-Arqam in 1994. Moslem guerrillas in southern Thailand and the southern Philippines, where they are minorities in predominantly Buddhist and Christian countries respectively, have fought sporadic battles against their rulers for years. The Indonesian and Malaysian governments – like their counterparts in the Middle East – have been forced to perform tricky balancing acts to defuse any Moslem opposition to their rule. They crack down hard on those they regard as extremists, but they also try to co-opt Moslems by making concessions and by appearing more religious themselves. As the ruling families and politicians of the Gulf states and Egypt have discovered, this can be a dangerous game. Once you have introduced a law that satisfies devout Moslems, it is very difficult to repeal or relax it without being condemned as an irreligious backslider. There is no question that Islam is the religion that has the most difficulty accepting the social and economic changes that appear to accompany every modern industrial revolution. But Malaysians such as Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister who was an Islamic firebrand in his youth, are convinced that they can forge a society that is simultaneously Moslem, democratic and technologically advanced⁶. If they succeed, they believe they could become a model for other Islamic countries, which find themselves in a state of turmoil and decline 1,000 years after the time when they were at the forefront of science and civilization.

Even when south-east Asians agree on the need for a moral compass, however, there is no agreement on which way it should point. Like Europeans and Americans, Asians are tempted by the trivial, the sensational and the material. But the same governments which rail against the West for infecting Asia with liberalism and decadence are accused by their fiercest domestic opponents of being too ‘western’ themselves. Particularly among the region’s intellectuals, there is mounting disgust with the crude materialism of south-east Asia’s political leaders and their often boorish business associates. What was the point of all those magnificent economic growth statistics if the quality of life is not improved, if the poor simply swap rural misery for its urban equivalent, if the rich are stuck in traffic jams in their BMWs, if the great new cities of Asia are ugly and polluted, and if art and language are bastardized by quasi-American global culture? As in the Victorian England of Charles Dickens, there is a nostalgia for good things lost and a fear of recently created evils – as well as pride in the new prosperity and power.

The ‘Asian values’ argument is thus being turned against its creators. South-east Asian political leaders, their critics say, are guilty of taking the worst aspects of westernization and industrialization (materialism and consumerism) while ignoring the best (political reform, social idealism and philanthropy); at the same time they are keeping the worst aspects of the old order (authoritarianism and institutionalized corruption) while abandoning the best (the village sense of community, harmony with nature and traditional artistic sensibilities). Politicians are sensitive to such criticisms. Singapore’s leaders speak openly of the need to file down the rough edges of the coarsely materialistic nouveaux riches. They mount campaigns to promote the arts, protect the environment and encourage good table manners. The region’s poorer inhabitants, meanwhile, have their appetite for unaffordable consumer goods whetted by advertising and by the lifestyles portrayed in television soap operas. Parents in the hills of northern Thailand still sell their children for cash to brokers who send them into prostitution in the big cities. Moralizing does not suit south-east Asia’s leaders or its elders. When teenagers are criticized by their governments or their parents for their taste in music or their lax morals, they are able to point out bitterly that many of the politicians and entrepreneurs who should be their role models are at best amoral and opportunist and at worst drug-traffickers and gangsters.

The extraordinary influence of big business in the running of southeast Asia in the past three decades is examined in chapter 4. Close connections between unscrupulous businessmen and governments are not unprecedented at times of headlong economic growth: Britain and America also had their capitalist ‘robber barons’ in the heyday of industrialization, and they and their descendants were soon cloaked with respectability. Indonesian, Malaysian and Thai tycoons – starting with the sale of agricultural commodities such as rice and tapioca, moving through the manufacture of industrial products such as cars and computers and on to services such as retailing and airlines – have never been afraid to use the money they make to buy political influence and a comfortable place in high society. They make alliances with army generals and presidents’ children; indeed, sometimes they are army generals and presidents’ children. They have been involved in everything from drug-trafficking and illegal logging to lucrative and corrupt infrastructure projects for roads and telephone lines. In the early days, the businessmen can be openly thuggish, as they were in Cambodia in the early 1990s. But before long the drug barons and gangsters are dressed in Savile Row suits, their children are educated overseas, the family business is engaged in banking and finance and the past is all but forgotten.

The fate of business in south-east Asia is inseparable from the fate of the various ethnic Chinese communities which dominate trade and industry. Although some of the Chinese in south-east Asia suffered grievously at the hands of the invading Japanese during the Second World War, they quickly re-established themselves after the war and soon occupied the commercial territory abandoned by the departing colonial powers. Chinese minorities run the biggest conglomerates in Indonesia, the smallest shops in Cambodia and much in between. Needless to say, they are often resented. If they invest too much of their profits in their home markets, they are accused of dominating local business; if they invest overseas, in mainland China for example, they are accused of disloyalty to their adopted country. In Indonesia, where tens of thousands of Chinese were murdered in anti-communist massacres in the mid-1960s, some of the wealthiest Chinese businessmen threw in their lot with Suharto and his relatives. This ensured favourable treatment for a time, but leaves them vulnerable now that Suharto has been forced out of the presidency. The Malaysian government, alarmed by clashes between Chinese and Malays which left scores of people dead after an election in 1969, adopted a deliberate policy of favouritism called the New Economic Policy designed to transfer wealth, opportunity and skills to Malays; in Malaysia, it is the Chinese who feel resentment, although even Malays think the discriminatory policies may have outlived their usefulness. Thailand has taken a different approach, slowly assimilating the Chinese over hundreds of years to the extent that many of them think of themselves as Thai. In the Philippines, the ethnic Chinese share the upper reaches of society with another elite – the professionals and business families of Spanish descent.

However much the ‘indigenous’ – or, more accurately, non-Chinese – peoples of south-east Asia succeed in improving themselves, ethnic Chinese business will remain crucial for economic progress in the foreseeable future. But businesses will need to change fast if south-east Asia is to resume the spectacular economic growth of earlier years. That is because many of them are old-fashioned organizations. They can make money at the early stages of an industrial revolution, when they are able to exploit unregulated markets in natural resources and cheap labour, create domestic monopolies and make products for the local market behind a protective barrier of high import duties. But they are ill equipped for genuine competition in the modern global economy. Frequently they are centralized, family-run businesses that have made money the easy way, initially using government connections to win road-building or other infrastructure contracts or to gain logging concessions in virgin forests, before graduating to joint ventures or franchise agreements with foreign companies from car manufacturers to pizza parlour managers (the foreign companies provide the technical expertise and the local companies contribute their political influence and local knowledge). Finally, they buy land and become property speculators and developers. In spite of all the praise heaped on south-east Asian economies for their liberal economic policies and their successful penetration of export markets, many of the region’s own markets remain protected in reality if not by law. Foreigners cannot just buy a house in Thailand or set up a bank in Singapore or sell noodles in Indonesia, although the recent economic upheaval and the need for foreign capital has forced several countries to liberalize protectionist regulations.

The limitations of rough and ready pre-modern capitalism are quickly becoming apparent. Investments made by south-east Asian companies in the more competitive markets of Europe and America often run into trouble. But such failures have been dwarfed by the problems at home. The currency and stock market crisis which affected Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia in particular in 1997 and 1998 showed that these economies, and many of the businesses in them, were managed by people who were too complacent, over-dependent on short-term borrowings and more reliant than they should have been on government largesse. Fortunately for south-east Asia, a new generation of entrepreneurs is eager to meet the challenge. Many of them are the sons of old-fashioned capitalists, but they are often educated at universities and business schools in the US or elsewhere in the West. They have learned modern management methods and they know that south-east Asia is quickly losing the advantage of cheap labour as wages increase; they are starting to believe in creativity and innovation, backed by higher spending on research and development, instead of copying something done elsewhere and trying to do it cheaper; and they know that trade liberalization in the region and internationally will expose their businesses to more competition than ever.

One of the depressing results of industrialization, population growth and the success of businesses greedy for growth has been the destruction of the natural environment, the subject of chapter 5. Such damage is by no means unique to south-east Asia, but the speed and scale of the abuse since the 1960s is unparalleled. Governments insist, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that it is cheaper to get rich first and use the money to repair the environmental damage later. And they suggest – or at least Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia does – that foreign environmentalists are motivated by foolish sentimentalism or by a protectionist desire to weaken Asia’s economies. But the situation is so severe that even unsentimental locals are starting to take notice. Filthy, noisy and congested metropolitan cities such as Manila, Jakarta and Bangkok have become nightmarish for the poor and difficult even for the rich. Countryside that was once lush and green has become scarred and barren.

The damage is done in many ways. Population growth and indiscriminate tree-felling have shrunk south-east Asia’s forests to a fraction of their former size. Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand complain that they are not given recognition for having set aside vast areas of their territory as national parks. It is true that such legally protected areas are much larger than those in most developed countries. But legal protection does not always mean real protection. In Cambodian national parks, soldiers with chainsaws can be seen today happily cutting down trees. Some of Thailand’s ‘forest areas’ are actually devoid of trees. In Indonesian and Malaysian Borneo logging continues on such a large scale that even government officials admit it is unsustainable. With the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam already devastated, Asian logging companies have moved on to Cambodia, Laos and Burma or further afield to South America, where their rapacity is as controversial as it is at home.

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.