Asia's Cauldron (15 page)

The Western media wants heroes it can applaud or villains it can vilify. The real world is different. There is no unity of goodness. A great leader can come with hideous faults. That is the lesson of Mahathir. Mahathir put Muslim-dominated Malaysia on the map, giving the somewhat artificially conceived state a national identity, especially within the Muslim world, and as a consequence he pushed back at the West. Malaysia's very dynamism under his rule constituted a part of the epic story behind the West's relative decline.

The style of Mahathir's rule demonstrated that, in the words of the Australian scholar Harold Crouch, “the sharp dichotomy between ‘democracy' and ‘authoritarianism' does not seem to apply.” And this distinctly mixed or “ambiguous” regime has led to a “degree of coherence that has provided the foundation for a remarkably stable political order,” despite Malaysia's deep ethnic and civilizational cleavages, and recent political unrest. Mahathir's regime, reflecting a category all its own, became at once “more repressive and more responsive” to people's needs. It solved problems even as it clamped down on dissent. The electoral system grossly favored the government at the expense of the opposition, even as elections were vigorously contested and members of the regime faced stiff fights to keep their seats. Mahathir reduced poverty by half during his tenure. But
because of “crosscutting communal cleavages” that threatened stability, the evolution of a modern middle-class structure, liberating in its own right, did not result in full democracy. The regime's dilemma was that the new middle class remained firmly divided along ethnic lines.
²⁵
Again, there was no unity of goodness.

There have been military emergency laws, detentions without trial, and press and trade union restrictions. Nevertheless, as Crouch wrote in 1996, “in a society in which the possibility of violence is ever-present, both the Malay and non-Malay elites, as well as much of the population, tend to value stability more than further democratization.”
²⁶
(What argues against interracial violence are the political divisions within ethnic Malay society: between secular and less secular elements.) For beyond the communal splits, there is the unsettling memory of Muslim Malay society being divided among nine sultanates, not to mention the former colonial Straits Settlements of Malacca and Penang and the eastern states of Sabah and Sarawak in Borneo: a politically unstable setup that hampered the Malay independence movement against the British and finds expression in today's highly federalized system.

Malaysia is thus the ultimate postmodern society. “Politically, we don't have a Malaysian identity, divided as we are by communalisms,” explained former minister Zaid Ibrahim. “When politicians declare that we do, in fact, have such an identity that in itself is a sign of insecurity. We are merely communities living peacefully and separately.” Malaysia, in his view, is already beyond nationalism without having ever experienced it. And the explosion of Islamic and other private schools, along with the teaching of English, creates even more of a global society here.

The military modernization that Malaysia has pursued is less an expression of nationalism than of “keeping up with the Joneses” in regard to Singapore, according to a Malaysian defense official. “It is Singapore's arms purchases that have spurred our own.” Malaysians fear that in a war Singapore's air superiority would make Malaysia capitulate in “six to ten hours.” Of course, when you ask people here what the motive would be for such Singaporean aggression they have
no answer. There is none, and Malaysians know it. Malaysians do not feel under threat. And this, too, dilutes their sense of nationalism.

The military itself splits Malaysian public opinion. The uniformed ranks are filled mostly with Malays, so the armed services are less popular among the Chinese and Indian communities. Likewise, the Malaysian military finds support from the political establishment that governs the country, but is much less popular among the political opposition, which itself is comprised heavily of Chinese and Indians.

Malaysia, unlike hyper-nationalistic Vietnam, wants nothing of the conflict with China, even as it is implicitly protected against Chinese power by fifty visits per year by American warships, up from six in 2003; and by 280 American warship visits per year throughout Southeast Asia. American nuclear submarines have visited Malaysian ports in Borneo. American forces have trained with Malaysians, and the Pentagon has provided Malaysia with tens of millions of dollars of radar equipment for use in the South China Sea under the guise of the global war on terrorism. Bilateral military ties between Malaysia and the United States are extremely close, in fact. The last three chiefs of the Malaysian navy are graduates of the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. “We are very comfortable with China because we know the United States is there to safeguard the region,” the same defense official told me. Thus, America helps give Malaysia the luxury of its national ambiguity.

After Singapore, postnational Malaysia, with all of its Islamic pretensions, is America's most reliable—albeit quietest—ally around the South China Sea (though Vietnam may soon surpass Malaysia in this regard). Malaysia is careful to station its two French-Spanish submarines at Teluk Sepanggar naval base in Sabah, close to the Spratlys, in order to keep China honest. Malaysia's military, particularly its air force, is now doing more contingency exercises in Borneo in order to defend its garrisons in the Spratlys. (Malaysia claims twelve features in the Spratlys, of which it maintains a presence on five rocks, including a landing strip for C-130s on Swallow Reef.
²⁷
) “We emphasize deterrence and readiness vis-à-vis China—we're not looking for a fight,” said Dzirhan Mahadzir, a consultant specializing in defense
matters. Still, Malaysian military officials have never forgotten that China supported mainly ethnic Chinese communist insurgents in the northern jungles of peninsular Malaysia through the 1970s.

But it is mainly within defense and security ranks that Malaysian nationalism is vibrant. Because domestic challenges and intercommunal complexities may leave too little energy to engage in outside conflict, Malaysia might yet do its bit to mitigate military rivalries in the South China Sea.

“The nation-state is actually a very recent phenomenon here” compared to the sprawling, archipelagic Malay community, which spans different countries, Khaldun Malek, the Muslim intellectual, told me. Indeed, Malaysia was cobbled together within the areas of the Malay Peninsula and Borneo administered by Great Britain: an area south of the kingdom of Thailand and north and west of the Dutch East Indies, which became Indonesia. Malaysia is not a historic state to the degree of China, Thailand, Vietnam, and even Burma with all its ethnic militia problems. This is why, according to Khaldun, Islam has been able to partially replace nationalism.

Such internal weaknesses play into the country's political fragility. “For it is no longer possible to run the country paternalistically,” as Mahathir did, says Zaid Ibrahim. The ruling party, UMNO, in power for more than half a century, may well lose future elections. The main competition, he continued, will be between UMNO and PAS (Parti Islam se-Malaysia, or Pan-Islamic Malaysian Party). Indeed, it is the Islamic party, seen as free of corruption, that will loom increasingly larger in Malaysian politics, even as governing majorities are bound to get narrower in a post-UMNO era. “The days of UMNO's two-thirds majorities [which allowed Mahathir the political space to economically develop the country] are over.” All this, as the population is harder to satisfy, because now people (thanks to a global media) have the basis of comparison with other peoples. Power must at some point pass to the opposition. And if it does so peacefully, then, rather than discredit Mahathir's rule as experts both inside and outside Malaysia will no doubt claim, it will in a historical sense vindicate his partially unsavory accomplishments.

All these “negotiated tensions” were brought into perspective by my visit to Penang. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Arabs, Armenians, Hokkien Chinese, Indians from Gujarat, and Malays from Aceh on Sumatra were drawn to this island off the northwest of the Malay Peninsula, on account of the free trade policy of the British, coupled with the security that they provided. The sea routes from Penang led to Siam and Burma across the Bay of Bengal, and to Fujian in southeastern China across the South China Sea. It was these traders from throughout the East, coalescing in Penang, who helped finance the burgeoning tin mines in the Malay Peninsula at the turn of the twentieth century. Penang was mainly a Chinese affair, though. And in recent decades the Muslim Malaysian government, watchful of the Chinese, and seeking to centralize economic power in Kuala Lumpur as a hedge against separatist tendencies elsewhere, deliberately marginalized Penang, so that the local harbor trade these days is predominantly from within Malaysia.

Trying to recapture this bygone cosmopolitan ambience of previous decades and centuries, I went down to the old quarter of Penang, which is dominated by a sixty-foot-tall, dazzling white clock tower with a Moorish dome—erected in 1897 in honor of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee. The tower soars into the sky, even as it is utterly diminished by immense new high-rises in the distance. Likewise, the adjacent early nineteenth-century Fort Cornwallis, from which the British ruled Penang, is equally diminutive. But it is old Penang's shuttered and balconied commercial streets, grubby and battered in their single and double stories, with their potted plants and exposed electric wires, that make one realize just how everything was on such a smaller, more intimate scale back then. It took me only little more than half an hour to walk old quarter Penang from one end to the other. Technology, as we know it, was not required to unite this British-ruled city with its mainly Chinese subjects, and thus there was nothing virtual about this community: it was real. But as the distant high-rises made clear, politicians in Malaysia had now to satisfy a
mass of strangers living in inhumanly sized apartment blocks. And because politics here has become less personal—less retail—it requires more potent symbolism, and thus it runs the risk of descending into ideology. Thus, in the future, one cannot rule out extremism, whether emanating from the Middle East or elsewhere—one danger that colonialism, eminently practical and often cruel as it was, usually lacked.

How to be a mass democracy in an age of high technology, while existing at the unstable crossroads of different civilizations? Malaysia, in terms of its political development, may turn out to be among the most revealing countries on earth.

In the heart of Singapore, along the Singapore River, near to the perfectly engineered design statement that is the Asian Civilizations Museum, stands a diminutive and elegant monument to the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Deng was arguably among the greatest men of the twentieth century, because he dramatically lifted the living standards of close to a billion people throughout East Asia by introducing a version of capitalism to the Chinese economy. No man in history improved the quality of life for more people in a shorter time than Deng. But Deng elicits mixed feelings in the West. He was a ruthless authoritarian, who was the driving force behind the massacre of perhaps thousands of protesting students at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. Only in Singapore would he be so openly honored—at so appropriate a measured level, and for the right reasons. “Singapore has raised pragmatism to the level of a philosophy,” explained retired local diplomat Tommy Koh, whose idea it was to erect the monument
to Deng. Singapore, he told me, stands against the beauty of ideas in favor of what works.

Standing next to the monument to Deng, I looked out at downtown Singapore: a dull grayish and blue-slate corporate park built on the scale of a megacity, the product of a meticulous mind, with sharp puzzle pieces of skyscrapers all neatly fitting together, maddening in their mathematical logic. At work was the abstract genius of the Chinese, who understand the conceptual utility of empty spaces; as opposed to the Indianized Malay mind, which is more at home in the world of thickly colored and deliciously cluttered textiles, with their floral and cartouche patterns (as evidenced by the displays in the nearby museum). But to call Singapore cold and impersonal is too easy a judgment. For everywhere there is civilizing greenery, starting with the dazzling bougainvillea bushes that line the road from the airport. Singapore is the only place in the Indo-Pacific, other than Japan, where traffic stops voluntarily for pedestrians.