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.
