Furthermore, the Burmese generals and the communist rulers of Vietnam and Laos are no different from any other totalitarians: serious dissent is crushed, quickly and brutally. But political change is coming and the three governments know it. In Burma, the generals have tried to engineer a constitution which will allow them to continue controlling the country while they withdraw into the background behind a ‘democratic’ façade, but they have so far been stymied by an almost total lack of popular support.
In Vietnam, the statue of Lenin still stands tall in the centre of the capital Hanoi, with its broad avenues and crumbling French villas. The apparatus of communism remains intact. But since the government has embraced capitalism, the ideological basis for the party’s rule has disappeared. This has put party leaders in a quandary. A few years ago they allowed the idea to be floated that the communist party might transform itself into a broad-based nationalist front and even permit the formation of opposition parties. Phan Dinh Dieu, a mathematician and former member of the National Assembly, became a sort of licensed dissident who was permitted to spell out the contradictions of the Vietnamese system. ‘When the Communist party declared its acceptance of the free market economy, it meant that the party is not truly a communist party. They have dropped the communist system,’ he said in the presence of one of the government interpreters and ‘minders’ who routinely arrange government interviews for foreign journalists. ‘The result is that the party is transformed from a communist party into a party of power.’12 By 1997 the government seemed to regret its brief period of openness and Dieu’s views were no longer welcome. Vietnamese officials seek to justify their continued control of the country by talking of socialism leavened with the ‘thoughts of Ho Chi Minh’, just as the Chinese speak of socialism ‘with Chinese characteristics’. But the contradictions between a communist power structure ideologically committed to destroying bourgeois capitalism and an increasingly free-market economy have not gone away. The confusion is bad for the economy, because bureaucrats still favour poorly run state companies at the expense of private enterprise; and bad for politics, because the debate needed to resolve Vietnam’s numerous problems is stifled. For the time being, Vietnam’s leaders have settled for some uneasy compromises, mounting campaigns against corruption in high places, allowing increasingly outspoken criticism of government ministers in the National Assembly and increasing the number of non-communist (but still vetted) candidates for elections to the Assembly. ‘The goal is socialism. But what is socialism?’ asks one dissident in Hanoi. ‘According to the authorities, it is so that people can be richer, the country stronger and society just and civilized – that’s very vague. I don’t understand the leaders of Vietnam. They are tangled up in contradictions and they can’t get out, or they don’t want to. On the one hand they have their beliefs, on the other hand they have the material profits. Maybe that’s why they don’t want to get out.’
So much for the democracies and the old-fashioned dictatorships. What of those in between? Political systems in Asia have been neatly placed in three categories: ‘elite democracies’ such as the Philippines; ‘market Stalinism’, as in Vietnam; and the ‘veiled authoritarianism’ of Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia.13 This last group is of particular significance. It includes two countries – Malaysia and Singapore – that have combined outstanding economic success with political stability under broadly unchanged governments for most of the last three decades. And it is to the ‘veiled authoritarians’, also known as ‘soft authoritarians’, that the leaders of newly developing countries such as Vietnam and Burma are looking for a political model that will allow them to retain power while still promoting economic growth. Even in the Philippines and Thailand, there are people who yearn for the apparent stability of strong government in place of the political bickering that plagues their democracies.
These ‘soft authoritarian’ governments are the political embodiment of ‘Asian values’. They argue that the government of a developing country cannot afford to tolerate the confusion and disruption resulting from free speech and liberal politics as understood in the West. This is especially true in the early years of nationhood and of economic growth, when people are less educated, less conscious of their national identity and more liable to be drawn into violent ethnic conflicts by unscrupulous politicians. Central to the thinking of Mahathir, for example, are the riots of 1969 in which Malays rioted and killed scores of their ethnic Chinese fellow-citizens after an election. For Mahathir, there are more dangers in what he calls ‘democratic extremism’ than in authoritarianism.14
Rather than attempting to justify their rule, the authoritarians believe their best tactic is to denigrate democracies and point out their obvious weaknesses. They often compare India, Bangladesh, the Philippines and now Cambodia to stronger Asian economies and blame democracy for their relatively poor economic performance. Even under the reforming Fidel Ramos, the Philippine administration and the country’s businesses have had to fight to implement the simplest economic decisions in the face of the country’s US-style political system. The Supreme Court and a Congress beholden to numerous lobbies and to fickle public opinion repeatedly intervened to block decisions that would go unchallenged elsewhere in southeast Asia. In 1997, for example, the Supreme Court cancelled a government contract to privatize the Manila Hotel after years of negotiations on the grounds that the winning consortium was led by a foreign company and the hotel was part of the national patrimony. And as in the US, it is extremely difficult for a government to raise fuel taxes or allow fuel prices to rise – however compelling the fiscal or environmental arguments for doing so – without angering the public and so losing public support. In the Philippines, the Supreme Court even intervened to prevent oil companies raising their prices to reflect the higher cost of oil imports after the mid-1997 south-east Asian financial crisis and sharp devaluation of the peso; it did so in spite of the fact that the local oil sector had been deregulated earlier in the year.
But perhaps the most common comparison made by the authoritarians is between Russia and China, an illustration particularly relevant for the communist states of Vietnam and Laos but frequently applied to other authoritarian states in the region as well. The argument is that Russia (or the Soviet Union as it was under Mikhail Gorbachev) liberalized its politics first and its economy later, causing poverty, chaos and a precipitate decline in gross domestic product; while China, under the late Deng Xiaoping, liberalized its economy but maintained firm political control, to the extent of shooting pro-democracy demonstrators after the occupation of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square by protesters in 1989 – with the result that the Chinese economy has enjoyed double-digit economic growth along with social order and greater prosperity for most of its people. The counter-argument is that China has merely delayed the inevitable. ‘Deng was widely congratulated not long ago for having avoided the Soviet “mistake” of putting political ahead of economic reform,’ wrote one commentator. ‘Now this is becoming a matter of reproach: the absence of democracy is assigned central responsibility for the dark side of the economic miracle.’15 That dark side includes civil-rights abuses at home and an aggressive foreign policy. Nevertheless the Russia-as-failure and China-as-success argument is among the most commonly used ammunition in the arsenal of south-east Asia’s authoritarians. In the same vein, they leap at the chance to blame democratization for any sign of political instability or economic difficulty in South Korea or Taiwan, while attributing the economic success of those countries to their authoritarian heritage.
An important feature of Asian ‘soft authoritarian’ governments such as those of Singapore and Malaysia is that they use one-person, one-vote political systems similar in form (but not in substance) to those in the West. This is partly because they inherited these systems from the colonial powers, and the leaders who used them to come to power would find it embarrassing openly to undermine them. ‘Our most precious inheritance in Singapore is the fact that we have kept going British institutions of great value to us,’ says the government’s George Yeo, mentioning parliament, the judicial system and the English language. The combination of strong government and a democratic façade was justified in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s by the need to oppose Asian
