prime minister, and other PAP leaders pulled out all the stops in an attempt to crush their opponents. Goh famously threatened to deprive areas which voted against the PAP of state-financed housing upgrades; most Singaporeans buy apartments in government-built housing estates and can therefore benefit financially from such renovation schemes as well as enjoying the improved amenities.5
Nor was that all. Goh, Lee Kuan Yew and others deluged their opponents with lawsuits before and after the election, a practice they had employed before but rarely with such ferocity. In the most prominent case, the popular lawyer Tang Liang Hong, who had joined forces with J. B. Jeyaretnam of the Workers Party in a hotly contested, five-seat constituency, was sued by a dozen leaders of the PAP – including Goh and Lee – for calling them liars. In the statement that prompted this flurry of legal activity, Tang was responding to their accusations that he was a ‘Chinese chauvinist’ who opposed English-speakers and Christians. He pointed out that he spoke Malay, had a Christian daughter and was standing for election with an Indian Christian. This declaration of the facts was not enough to save him: Tang fled the country shortly after the election, saying the PAP was trying to bankrupt him, and was eventually ordered by a Singapore court to pay the equivalent of S$8.08 million (the equivalent of more than US$5 million) in damages to PAP leaders, although the amount was reduced to S$4.53 million (US$3 million) on appeal. Jeyaretnam was ordered to pay much smaller damages in a related defamation case brought by ten PAP members. The Tang case was notable for causing a serious diplomatic row between Singapore and neighbouring Malaysia. (In an affidavit, Lee Kuan Yew had expressed astonishment that Tang should have fled for safety to the Malaysian city of Johor, ‘notorious for shootings, muggings and car-jackings’; Lee, lambasted by the Malaysian government and by government-sponsored demonstrators who gleefully insulted him as ‘stupid’ and ‘senile’, was forced to apologize.)6 Singaporean ministers also became the object of international ridicule for pursuing opposition politicians through the courts for expressing thoughts that elsewhere would be part of the normal cut and thrust of democratic debate. The justice system was criticized too. But PAP leaders expressed no regrets, insisting repeatedly that they had to protect their reputations. They also won the election, halving the number of their elected opponents from four to two and leaving the opposition weaker and considerably poorer than before.
The most important feature that the 1997 elections in Singapore and Indonesia had in common was the absolute determination of governments to stay in power. ‘Asian values’ were receding into the background as a philosophical underpinning for authoritarian rule, but the authoritarian governments in south-east Asia were not about to yield willingly to their liberal opponents. In the continuing debate about the future of Asian politics, one side argues that economic growth leads to the education and empowerment of a middle class that demands, and achieves, democracy; the other insists that economic growth provides legitimacy for those in power and therefore prevents democratization. Both of these conflicting tendencies are visible in south-east Asia. But the evidence already shows that Asian countries, including those in south-east Asia, are either becoming more democratic or are under pressure from their citizens to become so. Taiwan and South Korea have progressed from authoritarian rule to democracy. A popular uprising in the Philippines in 1986 restored democracy there by overthrowing the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Thais took to the streets of Bangkok in 1992 and 1997 to oppose the involvement of the armed forces and of old-fashioned, ‘Godfather-style’ politicians in their parliament. Of course there have been numerous setbacks for the supporters of democracy, such as the failure of the Burmese military junta to recognize the 1990 election of Aung San Suu Kyi. Additionally, in Cambodia nearly 90 per cent of those eligible went to the polls in 1993 in a UN-organized election after years of civil war; but four years later, after a period of uneasy coalition government, the former Khmer Rouge commander Hun Sen ousted his co-prime minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh in a coup d’état, even though Ranariddh’s party had won the most seats in the election.
In spite of such attempts to hold back democracy, the arrival of peace in south-east Asia and the region’s rising prosperity have been accompanied by an increasing public awareness of political issues, much greater openness to international influences and a steady erosion of the authority of governments. As José Almonte, head of the Philippine National Security Council under President Ramos, has remarked, the contrast between the south-east Asia of today and of three or four decades ago could hardly be more striking. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were then becoming embroiled in the Indochina conflict, in which communists would triumph over the Americans and their allies. General Suharto had manoeuvred Sukarno out of power in Indonesia after the massacres of hundreds of thousands of people, including communists and ethnic Chinese. ‘In this country [the Philippines] Senator Ferdinand Marcos had just been overwhelmingly elected President – an ironic beginning to the Filipino descent into authoritarian rule. In Thailand the military rule of Marshal Sarit Thanarat was passing to his closest associate, General Thanom Kittikachorn. And General Ne Win was just closing down Burma in what would be a hermetic isolation lasting thirty years.’7
The south-east Asia of today is clearly very different, although at first glance it seems as hard to make generalizations about the region’s politics now as it was in the 1960s. What conclusions can be drawn about ten countries that include a military dictatorship in Burma, an Islamic Sultanate in Brunei, a noisy, American-style democracy in the Philippines, a one-party, communist system in Vietnam and Laos and a variety of democratic or quasi-democratic systems among the rest? Yet they do have more in common with each other than mere geography. First, they all acknowledge the importance of foreign investment and global trade and are committed – in word if not in deed – to modern market economics. Second, they are all embroiled in conflicts between old-fashioned authoritarians (who are usually in power), and younger, more liberal politicians (who are mostly confined so far to the opposition, or to the fringes of the ruling parties).
In both the Philippines and Thailand, voters can and do change their governments by means of elections. But truly representative democracy is only just beginning. In each country politicians tend to come from a small elite of landed gentry or business families – or the military. In 1997, the then president of the Philippines (Fidel Ramos) and one of the Thai prime ministers of that year (Chavalit Yongchaiyudh) were both former generals. Politics in Thailand has long been influenced, too, by powerful local businessmen – often gangsters involved in everything from drug-smuggling and illegal logging to gambling and property speculation – who sell their ability to deliver their local votes to a bewildering array of ‘national’ parties. Vote-buying (a vote can be bought for the equivalent of a few dollars) is so rampant in the poorer parts of the countryside that it is taken for granted even by the liberal media. ‘The parties work for the private gain of their sponsors rather than for the good of the society at large or even for the people who elect the party candidates,’ wrote two Thai academics in a survey of corruption in Thailand in 1994. ‘None of the existing political parties have started from grass roots support. Rather, they originated as interest groups of influential people and businessmen.’8 Only now are more idealistic politicians, supported by the more sophisticated voters of the Bangkok metropolis, starting to break into politics and trying to build political parties with some kind of ideological content. Liberals and others who want to modernize the country’s politics are more optimistic than they have ever been, although they acknowledge that it is only in Bangkok that people vote for parties without necessarily knowing the name of their member of parliament, as often happens in the West; in the Thai provinces, the opposite remains true – people know the name and reputation of their MP but are unlikely to know to which party he belongs this year. Ammar Siamwalla, the Thai political scientist and commentator, says that for the last half a century Thais have concentrated on their headlong lunge for economic development and largely ignored the need to modernize their politics while the armed forces and cliques of businessmen fought it out in a series of elections and coups d’état. Now that is changing. Public protests led to the formation of a constitutional panel; the constitution it produced in 1997 (Thailand’s sixteenth since the abolition of the absolute monarchy in 1932) was aimed largely at ending what south-east Asians call ‘money politics’. As Ammar