but people are beginning to learn how to govern themselves.’9 The old-style politicians are not giving up easily – both Chavalit and his predecessor as prime minister Banharn Silpa-archa fall into this category – but Thais are no longer tolerating their leaders’ inability to manage a modern economy that faces global competition and needs to be run through solid institutions rather than backroom deals. (It was perhaps significant that the man who formed a new coalition government after the Thai economic crisis erupted was Chuan Leekpai of the Democrat Party. He is a mild-mannered man who likes to do things methodically and legally, although some of the politicians he was obliged to draw into his coalition were members of the old-fashioned and corrupt political class.) Both the rural poor and the urban elite have regularly demonstrated in the streets to air their grievances. ‘In the last few years we have been very good at throwing the rascals out,’ says Ammar. ‘Of course we have been getting the rascals in too. The first step is to throw the rascals out without having the tanks running around the streets. The next step is to stop the rascals coming in.’10
Throughout south-east Asia, names and personalities are often as important as policies. The children of the region’s leaders seem to be drawn inexorably towards power. In Burma, Suu Kyi took the unusual step of prefixing her name with her father’s – Aung San, who brought the country to the brink of independence before he was assassinated – to announce her origins in a country where family names are not normally used. In Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew’s son Lee Hsien Loong, known as BG Lee because of his military rank of Brigadier-General, is deputy prime minister. Before he was forced to step down, President Suharto had groomed his children – who had previously been more interested in business – to play a political role in Indonesia, while Megawati Sukarnoputri in opposition drew on the memory of her father Sukarno. In the Philippines, Corazon Aquino became President in 1986 largely because she was the widow of Benigno Aquino, the assassinated opponent of Marcos. And the winner of the Philippine presidential election in 1998 was a swashbuckling B-movie film star named Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada; his vice-president is Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, daughter of a respected former president. ‘We have no idea of power in the abstract,’ says Alex Magno, one of the leading political commentators in the Philippines. ‘The ordinary Filipino does not talk about the presidency. He talks about Cory [Corazon Aquino] or Ramos.’ Magno, who writes in both English and Tagalog, the local lingua franca, says his readers in Tagalog complained that he was inventing words when he thought up a word for ‘presidency’ – ‘pangulohan’, derived from ‘pangulo’ (president). According to Magno, Asian politics is about personalities and pragmatism. He is regularly asked to teach a course on Asian political theory, but says he cannot because there is none.11
But the focus on personalities is not a particular Asian phenomenon. Similar tendencies can be found in Latin America or Africa. The Philippines has a peculiar political system closely modelled on the US, where film stars – Ronald Reagan is the best-known example – are also influential. More importantly for south-east Asia, the attention given to individuals instead of their policies is a characteristic not just of developing Asia but of many pre-modern, pre-industrial political systems. And the situation is changing. South-east Asian countries have become richer and their inhabitants more educated and demanding, a transformation underlined by the criticisms of younger observers such as Magno himself. As President, Ramos came across as a forceful figure who liked to be seen chomping a big cigar, but he and his supporters repeatedly emphasized the success of his policies rather than his personality. His nickname, dull by Filipino standards, was ‘Steady Eddie’. He compared his own achievements in restoring the Philippine economy, reviving its industrial competitiveness and attracting foreign investors to the failures of his predecessors: the nice Cory Aquino, who represented the restoration of democracy but allowed the economy to languish; and Ferdinand Marcos, who espoused a ‘crony capitalism’ in which corruption was rife and local industries were protected from foreign competition.
The democracies of the Philippines and Thailand are gradually moving towards a more modern form of democracy where policies count as much as personalities. At the other end of the political spectrum, the military junta in Burma and the communist regimes in Vietnam and Laos are also under pressure to modernize their political systems. From the inside, there are demands from middle-class citizens and students who want more representation. From the outside (particularly in the case of Vietnam, with its large exile community in the US), there is additional pressure for change as governments seek to encourage foreign investment and open their economies to the outside world.
Inevitably, political progress is slow. The middle class in these three countries remains small and weak; the average per capita income in Vietnam, Laos and Burma is less than a tenth of the figure in Thailand, whose inhabitants are themselves less than one fifth as rich as those of the United States. 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