Asia's Cauldron (19 page)

But such rulers are rare in the Middle East. Truly, the place where benevolent autocracy has struck deep and systematic roots is Asia. Any discussion of whether and how democracy can be successfully implemented might, because of the current headlines, begin with the Middle East, but the answers such as there are, will, nevertheless, ultimately come in Asia. It is in places like China, Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam where good dictators have produced economic miracles that, in turn, have led to the creation of wide-ranging personal freedoms, even as these leaders have on a grand scale compelled people against their will. Aristotle speaks of a regime “midway” between oligarchy and democracy, even as he calls democracy the most “moderate” kind of regime, toward which one should strive.
³¹
Lee and Mahathir may have governed in the spirit of Aristotle, with their mixed regimes that prepared the way to democratic rule.

The ideology by which Asian autocrats both challenge and support the likes of Mill and Berlin goes vaguely under the rubric of Confucianism. Confucianism is more a sensibility than a political doctrine. Even Mahathir, with all of his Islamic pretensions, absorbed elements of it. Confucianism stresses traditional authority, particularly that of the family, as the sine qua non of political tranquillity.
The well-being of the community takes precedence over that of the individual. Morality is inseparable from one's social obligation to the kin group and the powers that be. The Western—and particularly the American—tendency is to be suspicious of power and central authority; whereas the Asian tendency is to worry about disorder. Thus, it is in Asia, much more so than in the Middle East, where autocracy can give the Western notion of freedom a good run for its money. The fact that even a chaotic democracy is better than the rule of a Gaddafi or an Assad proves nothing. But is a chaotic Middle Eastern democracy better than the rule of Chinese, Singaporean, Malaysian, and Vietnamese autocrats who have overseen growth rates in GDP of 10 percent annually for significant periods over the past three decades? Here the debate gets interesting.

Indeed, as I indicated at the start of this chapter, probably one of the most morally vexing realizations in the field of international politics is that Deng Xiaoping, by dramatically raising the living standard of hundreds of millions of Chinese in such a comparatively short space of time—which, likewise, led to an unforeseen explosion in personal (if not political) freedoms across China—was, despite the atrocity of Tiananmen Square that he helped perpetrate, one of the great men of the twentieth century. Deng's successors in Beijing, as repressive of political rights as they have been, have hewn to his grand strategy of seeking natural resources anywhere in the world they can find them, caring not with which despots they do business, in order to continue to raise the living standards of their people. These Chinese autocrats govern in a collegial fashion, number many an engineer and technocrat among them: this is all a far cry from the king of Saudi Arabia and the deposed leader of Egypt, sleepy octogenarians both, whose skills for creating modern middle-class societies are for the most part nonexistent.

Lee Kuan Yew in particular holds out the possibility, heretical to an enlightened Western mind, that democracy may not be the last word in human political development. What he has engineered in Singapore is a hybrid regime: capitalistic it is, even as consultations between various factions are ongoing, but it all occurs in a quasi-authoritarian
setting. Elections are held, but the results for decades were never in doubt. Only recently have Singaporeans expressed dissatisfaction at the polls with the ruling People's Action Party.

Of course, Singapore is a city-state with no hinterland. And it is a hinterland—continental in size as in the case of China—that produces vastly different local conditions with which a central authority must grapple. And such grappling puts pressure on a regime to grant more rights to its far-flung subjects; or, that being resisted, to become by degrees more authoritarian. Lee never had to face this challenge. So Singapore will remain an oddity. Elsewhere in Asia, political Confucianism is messier.

Here is the dilemma. Yes, a social contract of sorts exists between these peoples and their regimes: in return for impressive economic growth rates the people agree to forgo their desire to replace their leaders. But as growth rates continue unabated—to say nothing if they collapse or slow down as of late—this social contract must peter out. For as people become middle-class, they gain access to global culture and trends, which prompts a desire for political freedoms to go along with their personal ones. This is why authoritarian capitalism may be just a phase, rather than a viable alternative to Western democracy. Because Singapore is an oddity, we will have to wait until China's GDP growth slows down for years on end, or, failing that, continues, until enough Chinese have more access to global culture: only then can we begin to draw conclusions about whether democracy represents the final triumph of reason in politics.

“Progress includes Order,” Mill writes, “but Order does not include Progress.”
³²
Middle Eastern despots too often supplied only Order; Asian ones brought Progress, too. Leo Strauss, University of Chicago political philosopher of the mid-twentieth century, in his analysis of Xenophon's
Hiero or Tyrannicus
, writes that the tyrant knows all men are his enemies, that the tyrant is deprived of true honor, and that the tyrant cannot abdicate for fear of punishment.
³³
Whereas that description fits Middle Eastern despots, it fails in the case of Lee and Mahathir—for whom the population was not hostile and for whom leaving office brought few risks. But Mill also notes
that even the best despotisms are only good if they are temporary. Thus, the political future of South China Sea societies will write the final legacies for their generation of enlightened autocrats. If Singapore and Malaysia truly evolve into stable democracies, where the historic governing parties easily cede power to democratic oppositions, then that will signal the final triumph of Mahathir bin Mohamad and Lee Kuan Yew.

Whenever I think of the Philippines my eyes revert to
The Manila Shawl
by Henri Matisse, painted in 1911 upon the French artist's return from a two-month trip to Spain. Matisse had purchased the shawl in Seville, and draped it around a model whom he depicted in the pose of a flamenco
bailaora
. The embroidered silk shawls were a popular treasure brought to Europe by Spanish galleons sailing from the Philippines across the Pacific to New Spain (Mexico), from where the shawls were shipped to Spain itself. Showy, garish, with glittering splashes of red, orange, and green oil paint in floral designs, Matisse's
Shawl
is the image I associate with the tropical grandeur and sensuality of the Philippine Islands, and with their occupation by Spain, by way of Mexico, for nearly three and a half centuries beginning in 1556.

For the Philippines are not only burdened with hundreds of years of Spanish colonialism, which, with its heavy, pre-Reformation
Roman Catholic overtones, brought less dynamism than the British, Dutch, and Japanese varieties experienced elsewhere in the First Island Chain, but they are doubly burdened by the imprint of Mexican colonizers, who represented an even lower standard of modern institutional consciousness than those from Spain.

Hence the shock the visitor experiences upon arrival here after traveling elsewhere in East Asia: a shock that has never dissipated for me after four lengthy trips to the Philippines within a decade. Instead of gleaming, stage-lit boulevards with cutting-edge twenty-first-century architecture that is the fare of Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and coastal China (not to mention Japan and South Korea); and instead of the beehive pace of human activity evident in Vietnam, whose French Catholic colonizers stayed for less than a hundred years (even as they brought education and development in their wake), the cityscape of the Philippine capital of Manila is, by comparison, one of aesthetic and material devastation.

Bad roads, immense puddles of rainwater because of poor drainage, beggars at stop lights, neon nightclub signs with letters missing, crummy buildings with the look of broken crates bearing no architectural style and none matching with any other, old air-conditioning units sticking out of this and that window like black eyes, jumbles of electric wires crisscrossing the twisted palm trees: these are the visual facts that impress one upon arrival. Amidst the sparkling, watery sunlight diffused through the mist and monsoon clouds there is a near-total lack of an identifying aesthetic. Whether it is the chrome jeepneys with their comic book designs or the weather-stained building facades with their occasional garish colors, there is an amateurish, just-put-together feel to many a surface, as if this entire cityscape—minus the old Spanish Quarter and the upscale malls—is held together by glue. Whereas Vietnamese cities (which have their own economic problems) are frenetic, Manila, despite the dense crowds, is somnolent and purposeless by comparison. Weeds and crumbling cement dominate. The sprawl beyond downtown is not that of suburban houses but of slums with blackened, sheet-metal roofs and peaks of garbage.

Private security guards, whose epaulets and insignias remind me of those in Mexico, guard five-star hotel lobbies and fast food restaurants with sniffer dogs and sawed-off shotguns. The interiors of government buildings are rendered bleak by the dead light of fluorescent tubes. Of course, there is the large and consequential splatter of up-to-date, middle-class shopping centers and chain restaurants. But what becomes apparent after several days is that despite what the guidebooks claim, there really isn't any distinctive Filipino cuisine beyond fish, pork, and indifferently cooked rice. This is a borrowed culture, without the residue of civilizational richness that is apparent at the archaeological sites in places like Vietnam and Indonesia, to say nothing of China or India. And of course, in such a culture, prominent are the luxury, gated communities, inside which the wealthy can escape the dysfunctional environment through life-support systems.

Asian dynamism, born in the 1970s, is something so palpable that it is felt in everything from Chinese and Taiwanese bullet trains, to the manic construction boom of Vietnam and Malaysia, to the perfectly pruned verges of the roads in Singapore. But by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Asian dynamism had, at least so far, bypassed the Philippines.

“This is still a bad Latin American economy, not an Asian one,” a Manila-based Western economist told me. “It's true that the Philippines was not much affected by the global recession of 2008, but that's only because it was never integrated into the global economy in the first place. What you have,” he went on, is admittedly steady economic growth, lately over 6 percent per year, undermined by population growth of 1.7 percent, unlike other Pacific Rim economies that have churned ahead by almost a third higher that amount for decades, and without commensurate increases in population. Crucially, a “staggering” 76.5 percent of that GDP growth in recent years went to the forty richest Filipino families.
¹
It's the old story, the Manila elite is getting rich at the expense of everyone else.

Whereas the Asian tiger economies have strong manufacturing bases, and are consequently built on export, in the Philippines exports account for only 25 percent of economic activity as opposed to
the standard Asian model of 75 percent. And that 25 percent consists of low-value electronic components, bananas, and coconuts mainly. The economist pulled out a cheat sheet and rattled off statistics: the Philippines ranks 129 out of 182 countries, according to Transparency International, making it the most corrupt major Asian economy, more corrupt than Indonesia even; according to the World Bank's ease-of-doing-business indicator, the Philippines ranked 136 out of 183; in every list and in every category, the Philippines—with the world's twelfth largest population—was the worst of the large Asian economies.

No one can deny the situation is improving. The World Economic Forum in Switzerland recently moved the Philippines to the top half of its rankings on global competitiveness.
²
Nevertheless, corruption, restrictions on foreign ownership, and endless paperwork make the Philippines the most hostile country in maritime Asia for the foreign investor. No country in Asia, with the possible exceptions of Myanmar, Cambodia, and Indonesia, has weaker, more feckless institutions. The Philippines is where an objective, statistical reality is registered in the subjective first impressions of the traveler.

Perhaps no other large country in the world has seen such a political, military, and economic investment by the United States for decades on end. Perhaps nowhere else has it made so little difference.

America's entry into the Philippines began at dawn May 1, 1898, when Commodore George Dewey's nine ships, having passed Corregidor Island off the Bataan Peninsula under cover of darkness, entered Manila Bay and destroyed a larger Spanish flotilla. Like so many signal episodes in history, Dewey's victory was both the culmination of vast political and economic forces and an accident of circumstance that might easily have not occurred, for it was not instigated by events in the Pacific at all, but by those in the Caribbean, where Spain's repression of Cuba led President William McKinley—urged on by expansionists including assistant secretary of the navy Theodore Roosevelt—to declare war on the Spanish Empire.