The Trouble With Tigers: The Rise and Fall of South-East Asia by Victor Mallet.
Pub: Harper Collins, London, UK, 2000. Pp. 346. Pbk UK£8.99.
By Abd Rahman Koya
[Crescent International, August 1-15, 2000.]
Before the economic boom and subsequent crisis took the south-east Asian nations by storm in the early 1990s, little was known outside about the region. During these boom years, however, the world began to take interest in south-east Asian affairs. Western nations in particular salivated at the prospect of their goods and services gaining vast new markets. Criticisms of unpopular regimes and leaders in the region, such as Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand, began to fade away, being replaced by praise for the way these countries’ governments boosted their economies. More than the people of the region itself, it was the western governments and financial communities who were mesmerised by the economic growth of south-east Asia, to an extent that some of them coined the word "tiger economy" to describe the "rising economic powers" of the twenty-first century.
Such admiration, particularly from the west, was understood by the "west-bashing" leaders of Malaysian and Singapore as the triumph of what they called "Asian values" over western values. Asian values — however they may be defined — were suddenly hyped as a key to progress for non-western countries. This is of course nonsensical when one remembers that the region has the highest concentration of Muslims in the world. The Asian values that these leaders expound have little to do with the lifestyles of more than half of the region’s population, who have little more in common with non-Muslim Asians than westerners.
In any case, the west’s love affair with the region proved to be temporary; it ended with the end of the economic boom, with many western commentators effectively describing the region as completely destroyed. This mistake is also repeated by Victor Mallet in his work Trouble with Tigers, subtitled ‘The Rise and Fall of South-East Asia’. The tendency to equate an economic setback with the region’s demise as a whole is a typically materialistic notion of what prosperity is all about. The obsession with the language of economics and the stock market is a western import, and had once been alien to the people of the region. But when the ‘boom’ came, Asian nations also began to indulge in "stock market" economics, in which growth and prosperity calculations are based on the value of stock markets rather than real life economic indicators. Of course, by this argument, one might as well brush aside all the hype about either the "rise" or the "fall" of these economies, which make no sense to anyone except politicians and industrial tycoons. In fact, it is these sectors of society that affect the lives of ordinary people more than the so-called "growth rate" or stock market indices.
Malaysia and Indonesia, two major Muslim countries in the region, are the best examples of how economic jargon obscured the realities on the ground. In Indonesia, for example, millions have suffered even during the boom because of the country’s wealth (oil, timber and public services) being monopolised by Suharto and his family. In Malaysia, corruption and cronyism were (and still are) a widespread disease brought about by the Mahathir regime that has been in power since the early 1980s. So what difference does it make to the masses if the "GDP" grows by 8 percent? Today, Suharto is one of the world’s richest men, while Mahathir’s three sons control more than 200 major companies.
What really collapsed with the economic crisis was the so-called political stability of the region. During the currency crisis, the most worried man in the region was Suharto, whose fall coincided with the devaluation of the country’s rupiah. People took to the streets after finding out that they had been comprehensively robbed. In Malaysia, the tendency to take to the streets started even before they were completely robbed: Anwar Ibrahim’s dismissal brought Malays coming into the streets in unprecedented numbers, bravely chanting anti-government slogans.
Mallet deals with ten countries which make up the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), namely Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Each country is dealt with separately, in chapters of very different lengths, and covering issues ranging from religion, social upheaval, politics and economics. The trouble with most books by westerners on Asia is that they are almost all written within the same economic (or capitalist) framework, but Mallet has at least managed to free himself from economic jargon, paying more attention to the sociological and political impact that the economic crisis has had on the region. His book is thus more a social commentary than an economic one.
Mallet’s main criticism of south east Asian countries is that they have learnt hardly anything from similar experiences of boom years in other parts of the world, particularly Europe. He could have gone further, pointing out that while Europe could still reap the fruits of its growth many years after its decline began, in Asia any benefits that the economic growth had had all vanished together with the 8 percent annual growth rate. Apart from skyscrapers, the other main legacy of economic growth has been the form of environmental disasters resulting from overlogging and chemical polution.
Mallet gives considerable space to "Asian values", and the west-bashing leaders of Singapore and Malaysia who most often appeal to them. It is not clear whether or not these leaders themselves believe in "Asian values", which they claim were the secret of "their" success. In this respect, Mallet has accurately described the hypocrisy involved - on the one hand the idea of valuing discipline, the family and honesty, and on the other hand using these ideas to justify the corruption and nepotism endemic among the leaders, their family members and friends.
Mallet also does not fail to mention the hypocrisy of the western capitalists who poured money into the region during the boom years, taking advantage of the cheap labour as well as of the authoritarian nature of the regimes there — American oil companies operating in Aceh are a good example, and then accused the same regimes of practising closed market economics when things turned out bad.
Mallet of course sees the whole problem from the eyes of a western journalist, with all the limitations that involves. On several occasions, the word fundamentalism appears without definition to indicate the rise of Islamic awareness and activities in the region. His range of interviewees could also have been more representative of the societies, instead of being confined to a circle of alienated secular writers and political activists. Unfortunately, Mallet appears to have chosen mostly to rely on a small circle of friends whose English may have been easy for him to understand, but who appear to have been ill-equipped to talk of the real issues in the region. Certainly this was the case in Malaysia and Indonesia.
A final disadvantage is the timing of the book’s publication. Had it appeared when the currency crisis was at its peak two years ago, or even when the region was experiencing the apparent "miracle" of unrestrained growth, it would have appeared a more profound, and a lot wiser, than it does now.