The Spirit of Democracy, page 28
Beneath the impressive facade, however, the state is quick to suppress challengers and to discipline its insecure elite. Repression is highly selective, often covert, and carefully targeted—what the Singaporean journalist and academic Cherian George calls calibrated coercion—and therefore exerts its control largely out of public and international view.4 Political prisoners in the classic sense are rare. More common are blocked professional opportunities, lawsuits, and even, some allege, institutionalization. “They put people in mental institutions all the time,” said a foreign observer who has lived in Singapore for several years. “A person was discovered writing anti-Lee graffiti in an HDB [Housing Development Board] block, and he was put away.”5 With such a smooth but unshakable grip on power, Singapore has become a model pseudodemocracy for dictators around the globe to emulate.
It is no accident that the PAP has, in five of the last six elections, won almost all parliamentary seats with only about two-thirds of the votes. Through government-linked companies, the regime controls all television stations and almost all radio stations; “two companies own all of the newspapers in the city-state: one is government-controlled, and the other has close relations to the government.”6 Political films are banned, and in the 2006 elections, “political parties were not allowed to use the internet as a video platform” or to send e-mail chain letters, thus cementing the PAP’s media dominance.7 There are fears (unfounded but nevertheless consequential) that the vote—which is compulsory for all eligible citizens—is not secret because each ballot carries a serial number. The boundaries of voting districts are typically not delimited until shortly before an election, and most are “group representation constituencies” that award all six district seats to the party that wins a plurality. The government insists these multiseat districts ensure racial balance, since candidate slates must include at least one member of the Malay or Indian minorities, but the districts also greatly magnify the winner-take-all character of elections. Moreover, a majority of seats in three of the last four elections have been uncontested because of the high financial deposits required from candidates, a lack of access to the media, and the threat of ostracism or financial ruin.
Three outspoken opposition politicians, J. B. Jeyaretnam, Tang Liang Hong, and Chee Soon Juan, have been sued into bankruptcy by PAP elites who claimed defamation for criticisms of Singapore’s government and of them personally. Bankrupt individuals are not allowed to sit in parliament; this forced Jeyaretnam to surrender his seat and Chee to relinquish future runs for office.8 They can also be barred from traveling internationally, as Chee was in 2006 when he tried to attend the World Movement for Democracy conference in Istanbul, Turkey. Tang felt compelled to go into exile after the 1997 elections, when he faced numerous defamation suits from PAP ministers and MPs after he called them liars for labeling him as dangerous, anti-Christian, and a Chinese chauvinist.9
Yet Chee—a neuropsychologist whose career was ended in his early thirties when the regime engineered his dismissal from National Singapore University—continues undaunted. With each arrest for speaking in public without a permit or handing out a party newspaper, he serves longer sentences, in worse conditions, following judicial proceedings that are (as he describes them) ever more peremptory and biased. “I am already bankrupt,” he told me in a bare walk-up apartment that serves as his party headquarters. “I don’t know how they can make me more bankrupt. Every time they move against me, it makes me more determined.”10 Like few other critics, Chee has gotten under Lee’s skin. An astute observer of Singapore explained that Chee “is the type of person they would have recruited. He is articulate and focuses on issues they are vulnerable on, like income disparities.”11 In addition, Chee directly challenges the government’s prized image of honesty and openness, urging Singaporeans to protest the Orwellian limits on public assembly and speech.
For Lee Kuan Yew, who won massive defamation suits against both Chee and Jeyaretnam, this is too much. “He is an opportunist. He is mad,” the minister mentor told me in 2006. “If he is mad,” I asked, “why bother with him?” Because, Lee said, “that is not the kind of opposition we want to encourage.” But it became clear during our conversation that there was something more at issue—the way Chee repeatedly attacked the regime’s ethics on managing public funds. Chee had compared the regime to the National Kidney Foundation, a charity that got embroiled in a 2005 scandal for its lack of transparency and misuse of donated funds. Mentioning the allegations, Lee said, with visible agitation, “He is a liar. . . . We guard our reputation as incorruptible people jealously. What is wrong with that?” Lee fondly recalled the days, after the PAP defeated the Right and the Communists in the mid-1960s, when “we got an opposition that behaved.” He continued, “You behave like a first-world opposition and we will treat you like that. You try to destroy the system, and we will respond in kind.”12
Lee’s protective stance toward the system exposed the nature of Singapore’s regime: an incestuous intertwining of party and state and a penetration of the state into nearly every corner of society. While Singapore is hailed as one of the world’s freest economies, in reality, government-linked corporations control much of it. The National Trade Unions Congress (to which almost all unions are affiliated) is headed by a government minister. Although most Singaporeans own their apartments, they do so with levels of state assistance that establish what is effectively massive public housing—leveraging political dependence. Constituencies that reward the ruling party at election time are themselves rewarded with “housing upgrades.” Civil society has been cowed and contained. Even some critics of the ruling party recognize that its communitarian ideology fits well with the predominant Confucian culture, while its responsiveness to social needs gives it legitimacy and staying power.13 As a result, “the PAP is nowhere; the PAP is everywhere.”14 The party is the system.
In many ways, Singapore has become the face of Asian exceptionalism, the most confident and persistent advocate for a different path than “Western” liberal democracy. What happens in Singapore in the coming years as its founding leadership leaves the scene will have a powerful influence, out of all proportion to the country’s size, on the future of democracy in Asia. Singapore’s political stability could foreshadow a resilient form of capitalist-authoritarianism in China, Vietnam, and elsewhere in Asia. But the expected imminent passing of Singapore’s founding generation has sown growing doubts that its authoritarian system can survive. And there is a larger question: does the developmental success of one pseudodemocracy in a small city-state offer a model for the world’s biggest dictatorship, China?
THE TRUE ASIAN EXCEPTION
With the coming generational change in leadership and the visible reality of growing inequality, the Singapore model has begun to fray. The PAP’s strategy has been to cater to the welfare of all citizens. As the regime recruits top talents and rewards them handsomely—some senior ministers earn salaries over one million dollars a year—the economy appears less fair, undermining Singapore’s communitarian ethos.15 Another growing issue is the government’s lack of transparency. While it is considered one of the world’s least corrupt governments, it is also one of its more opaque. As Chee Soon Juan stresses, scant information is available about how the regime invests its massive foreign reserves (more than $100 billion), how it manages the Central Provident Fund (its comprehensive pension savings system), and precisely what it pays its top officials.16 And while the regime has forged a national consciousness across the Chinese/Malay/Indian divide, it also remains obsessed with racial fissures in a way that unwittingly perpetuates them. The promotion of Singaporean pride also exacerbates the alienation of the country’s one million noncitizen residents, who mainly fill marginal jobs, including as maids and prostitutes. These support workers make up a quarter of Singapore’s population and over time could equal or outnumber the indigenous population.
Overbearing state management and even subtle repression have their costs. There is significant desire among citizens for greater accountability and political pluralism of the parliamentary and party systems. About a third of Singaporeans can be classified as “pluralists” in this respect, while only a quarter are stout defenders of the system. Moreover, it is the highly educated who most want liberalizing change (nearly half of university graduates do), while the least educated and lowest in income and occupational status are most likely to support the status quo.17 This suggests that as education and income levels continue to rise, pressure will mount to free the press, make the electoral system fairer and more competitive, and reform the authoritarian “mindset, ideology, and hierarchy” of the ruling party, which may constitute the most essential and most difficult reform of all.18 This evolving range of sentiments among Singaporeans reflects a larger diversity, in attitudes, preferences, and behaviors, across the region.
Of course, no region of the world exhibits greater variation in regimes than does Asia. It contains the most populous democracy in the world (India) and the most populous dictatorship (China); two of the freest democracies of the former developing countries (Taiwan and South Korea); and the two most successful and self-confident pseudodemocracies (Singapore and Malaysia). The most economically dynamic dictatorships (China and Vietnam) are flanked by the most stagnant and isolated (Burma and North Korea). More than any other region, Asia will determine the global fate of democracy in the next two to three decades.
Unfortunately, democratic prospects seem to be receding in Asia, after an extended period of hope and progress. Democracy is institutionalized and stable in Japan and India, but even where democracy is most liberal, such as in Taiwan and Korea, it has come under stress. In the Philippines, democracy has descended into crisis. In Bangladesh, elections and elected government have been indefinitely suspended by a military-backed emergency government. In Sri Lanka, democracy has been seriously diminished and human rights badly abused by the twenty-year-long ethnic civil war that flared up in 2006 and has claimed over sixty-five thousand lives.19 East Timor’s fledgling democracy has struggled with the destabilizing legacy of “destruction, dispossession, and physical and socio-psychological trauma—and an associated sense of injustice—brought about by Indonesia’s 1975 invasion and almost 25-year occupation.”20 Dramatically—and with great stakes for the West—the prospects for stabilization, not to mention democracy, have dimmed in Afghanistan, as security has deteriorated amid widespread corruption, state incapacity, obstructed development, warlordism, and the resurgence of the Taliban and the drug trade.21 The country’s decline underscores a lesson of all postconflict reconstruction: before there can be a democratic state, there must first be a state, with an effective monopoly over the means of violence.
This rather bleak picture holds across other countries, as well. More than seven years after the October 1999 coup, Pakistan continues to be dominated by General Pervez Musharraf, who refuses to yield his dual military and civilian leadership positions. In Thailand, the generals who in 2006 overthrew the elected government seem in no hurry to leave power, and a growing number of Thais have come to doubt the military’s willingness to restore full democracy. In Singapore and Malaysia, authoritarian ruling parties continue to generate economic growth and maintain political stability—and secure their power. The dictator Hun Sen and his (former Communist) Cambodian People’s Party appear equally entrenched, propped up by generous foreign aid despite extensive corruption and repression. Even more naked and repressive dictatorships seem unshakable in North Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Laos, and China.
But if this is a discouraging story, it is not the whole story. Democracy has taken hold in several surprising areas of Asia. In Indonesia, democracy is finally gaining ground, and it survives in a rather liberal form in Mongolia, one of Asia’s poorest and most isolated countries. In Nepal, King Gyanendra’s clumsy attempt in 2006 to reestablish monarchical rule in the form of a “guided democracy” collapsed amid massive street protests that sparked a peaceful nationwide uprising. Nepalese may even vote to terminate the monarchy altogether, and with an agreement between democratic parties and Maoist rebels to end the country’s deepening civil war, the country has a real chance to get back to what was, during the heady days of the 1990s, an unlikely but promising democracy.22 Civil society and opposition parties have mounted growing protests against the perpetuation of authoritarian rule in Pakistan, catalyzed anew in March 2007 when General Musharraf ousted the country’s chief justice “out of fear that the judge would raise questions about what appears to be his ambition to be re-elected president while remaining army chief.”23 Four months later, in a stunning and widely popular rebuke to Musharraf, the Pakistani Supreme Court voted overwhelmingly to reinstate the chief justice. At the societal level, there are growing signs of readiness, if not yet demand, for political change in Singapore and China. Beneath the booming economy and self-confident leadership, the Chinese system is roiled by deep contradictions that I believe portend a turn to democracy within a generation.
Finally, the mass public in much of Asia expresses considerable support for democratic values, undermining the claim of Asian exceptionalism. A majority of Asian respondents—about six in ten both in East Asia (as surveyed in 2001–3) and in South Asia (2004)—think democracy is the best system of government. Asians have generally positive views of democracy and how it works. They are not more likely than citizens of Western democracies to demand respect for authority. Particularly in the more economically developed countries—Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea—they reject illiberal fears of pluralism and deference to authority that have been presumed to be core, distinct “Asian values.”
To be sure, Asian public attitudes toward democracy are complex, changing, and vary across countries, sometimes in surprising ways. The most economically developed and Western-oriented of the new Asian democracies, Taiwan and South Korea, show ambivalence in their publics’ commitments to democracy. Preference for democracy over any other kind of government has risen in Taiwan from 41 percent in 2001 to 48 percent in 2006, but this is still low compared to other Asian countries. In South Korea, the preference for democracy fell from 69 percent, just before the 1997 East Asian financial crisis, to 54 percent in 1998 and 45 percent in 2001, before rebounding to 58 percent in 2004.24 Protracted political polarization also led to a drop in the preference for democracy in the Philippines (from 64 to 51 percent between 2001 and 2006) and Thailand (from 83 to 71 percent). In contrast, two-thirds of Japanese and 54 percent of respondents in China said democracy is always preferable.25
If we examine other dimensions of support, East Asians appear even more committed to democracy. Majorities in all the democracies of the region think democracy is “suitable” for their country. This sentiment has risen from 59 to 67 percent in Taiwan (2001 to 2006), from 64 to 79 percent in South Korea (1997 to 2007), and it has remained at or over 80 percent in Thailand and Mongolia through 2006.26 Two-thirds of East Asians in the six democracies surveyed think democracy can effectively solve the problems of their society. In most of East Asia, large majorities reject the authoritarian alternatives of military rule, one-party rule, and getting rid of parliament and elections in favor of a strong leader.27 In fact, during the first half of the 2000s, the proportion rejecting all three of these alternatives rose from 56 to 69 percent in Taiwan, from 71 to 77 percent in South Korea, and from 46 to 54 percent in Thailand.28 In the 2005 and 2006 surveys, at least three-quarters in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan and two-thirds in Thailand rejected an authoritarian strong leader.
In South Asia, public opinion toward democracy is somewhat different. While support for democracy in principle is strong, resistance to authoritarian rule is not. Only in India does a majority reject getting rid of parliament in favor of a strong leader—and then only 52 percent do. Surprisingly, almost half the public in Pakistan does so as well, but only a quarter or less in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.29 Large proportions in India as well as Sri Lanka and Nepal (both of which are struggling to resolve long and draining civil wars) oppose military rule, but only about two in five Pakistanis and Bangladeshis do. That proportion appears to be growing in Pakistan, however, as the public wearies of General Musharraf’s rule.
The new democracies of Asia face challenges similar in many respects to those faced in Latin America and postcommunist Europe: they must find ways to govern better and improve the quality and capacity of their institutions. As we have seen, the leaders in Singapore have developed a highly effective authoritarian rival to democracy, one that is appealing to its public not because of unique Asian values but because of its ability to deliver, for example, booming development, political stability, low levels of corruption, affordable housing, and a secure pension system. That success poses one of the most interesting challenges for democracy in the world.
DEMOCRACY UNDER STRESS
Since their democratic transitions in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Taiwan and South Korea have made striking progress in expanding societal freedom, imposing civilian control over the military, and dismantling the national security state. Taiwan is now one of the most vigorous democracies in Asia and witnessed a historic transition of power with the presidential victory of the longtime opposition party in 2000. South Korean voters have alternated between political parties and factions, and in 1997 elected longtime dissident Kim Dae Jung to the presidency. Early in its adoption of democracy, South Korea increased governmental and banking transparency, purged the authoritarian military and intelligence cliques, expanded parliamentary oversight, decentralized power, and established direct election of provincial governors and city mayors.30 In the wake of the 1997 financial crash, the country implemented significant reforms to increase competition and rein in crony capitalism, which resulted in rapid economic recovery and vigorous growth.
