Asia's Cauldron Page 11

  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.

  CHAPTER V

  The Good Autocrat

  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.

  At the end of history there is somnolence: that is the lesson of Singapore. Pragmatism carried to the furthest degree may not inspire the Western humanist mind, but it has been the only way for Singapore to survive as a physical speck of a city-state at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, whose location is coveted by the great powers. Singapore’s inner logic follows from its geographical vulnerability.

  Singapore occupies a natural, deep-water port at the narrowest point of the funnel that is the Strait of Malacca—the most important maritime choke point in the world. Throughout history, this little island has been both violated and fought over. The ancestors of the people of Singapore belonged to ethnic and tribal groups that lived off the high seas and especially piracy—Chinese, Indians, Siamese, Riaus, Javanese, and Malays. Singapore always belonged to someone else’s empire or kingdom. The fact that it has been an independent city-state since the last third of the twentieth century constitutes something unique in history.

  Singapore, according to a senior serving official, emerged as an embattled state purely because of philosophical reasons. It was thrown out of a Malay-dominated federation in the 1960s because Singapore’s leaders insisted on a multiethnic meritocracy. Thus, Singapore found itself alone amid a newly constituted and hostile Malaysia, which controlled Singapore’s access to freshwater, while a pro-communist Indonesian demographic behemoth was breathing down Singapore’s neck.1 Singapore was as small and alone in its region as Israel was in its; it was no irony that Israel played a large role in training Singapore’s armed forces. The Singaporean business model would decades later be an argument in favor of soft power, but some Singaporean officials despise the term. One Singaporean after another told me: Soft power is only relevant after you have developed hard power. The Israelis would concur.

  Whereas in the West the concept of balance of power is often seen as a cynical term, reeking, as it seems to, of coldhearted realism, Singaporeans equate the balance of power with freedom itself. Because of great powers all around, only a proper balance of power between these large states can allow for the independence of such a small state like Singapore, which, unlike Brunei, has no oil.

  “We have no sovereign waters, even as we are located at the world’s most critical naval choke point,” one serving diplomat told me. “Independent and secure sea lines of communication are an existential requirement for us.” Indeed, freedom of navigation in the South China Sea means that maritime trade of $750 billion annually accounts for three times Singapore’s GDP, whereas it is only a third of GDP for neighboring states.

  But Singapore faces a particular challenge that is best summed up in the language of political science: while China is a geographical fact, the United States at least in Asia is merely a geopolitical concept. Translation: China is close by and therefore threatening; whereas the United States does not necessarily have to be present in the region to the extent that it is were its foreign policy to undergo a fundamental shift. “China is big, we’re small,” a high-ranking military officer told me. “China says that it is a status quo power. But its economic and military growth for decades changes the status quo.” Another lesson of Singapore is that it is helpful to be a little paranoid.

  And yet Singaporean officials are relieved by their long memories. They are not really worried about the United States reducing its forces in Asia, despite budget woes in Washington. They remember much darker times: the end of the Vietnam War, when quasi-isolationism in the United States regarding Asia was a real possibility; and the presidency of Jimmy Carter, when an attempt was made to withdraw American forces from South Korea, an idea that struck people in Singapore as—to say the least—wildly naive.

  In fact, no foreign policy and security elite in the world struck me as quite so cold-blooded as that of Singapore’s. Example: though the Philippines, like Singapore, is enthusiastic about countering Chinese power, the Filipinos, in the Singaporean view, “are emotional and unstable and thereby make the security situation worse.” The Singaporeans are more comfortable with serious adversaries than they are with unserious friends. One Singaporean summed it up this way: “At the end of the day, it is all about military force and naval presence—it is not about passionate and well-meaning talk.” Typically, everybody I met in the various Singaporean ministries insisted that frank conversations must be off the record: public diplomacy, in their view, is overrated, and is another thing they have no illusions about.

  Singapore’s independence began less with a declaration of such than with the building of a formidable military. “Spider-Man needs a suit to make him strong; we needed an outsized armed forces,” explained a defense official. While Singapore has only 3.3 million citizens, it boasts an air force the same size as Australia’s, whose population is 23 million. “Like the Israelis, the Singaporeans believe in air superiority. They pay their pilots well. They have AWACS,” a defense official from a neighboring country told me. In addition to its one hundred or so fighter jets, Singapore has twenty missile-carrying ships, six frigates, and, notably, six submarines—an extraordinary number given that far more populous countries in the region like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam each have fewer. “Nobody can squeeze us through a blockade.”

  It is not enough that Singapore has these air and sea platforms. For it is deadly serious about using them effectively. Because Singapore lacks empty space for military training, it regularly has four air squadrons training in the United States, ground troops training in Taiwan, and helicopter crews training in Australia. It allots sixty-five days a year for army maneuvers with leopard tanks. “We will not be hemmed in by our neighbors.” Too, Singapore has a conscript military. Said the same defense official: “There are only three developed countries in the world that are very serious about national service—South Korea, Israel, and us.”

  But the vast latent power of China still unsettles the Singaporeans, so much so that they feel they have no choice but to rely directly on the United States. As another diplomat told me: “We see American hard power as benign. The U.S. Navy defends globalization by protecting the sea lanes, which we, more than any other people, benefit from. To us, there is nothing dark or conspiratorial about the United States and its vast security apparatus.”

  In 1998,
the Singaporeans built Changi Naval Base solely to host American nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines. “We designed the piers to meet the dimensions of American warships,” a high-ranking military man here told me, in order to lure American naval platforms to Singaporean waters. “It’s kind of like, if you serve good coffee and tea, people will come.” Indeed, in 2011 there were 150 American warship visits to Singapore. Then there were the three American littoral combat ships that, it was announced in 2011, would be stationed in Singapore.

  Finally, beyond military might, there is the power of diplomacy. Singapore externalizes its security not only through the American navy and air force, but through an alliance like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. ASEAN is about “socializing other states to a set of core values.” Those core values revolve around the independence of small and medium-sized states banding together in the face of a rising great power like China, even though no diplomat in the region will ever say that on the record.

  Whenever I met with senior civil servants in Singapore they were accompanied by younger colleagues who were present throughout our conversations. This was in order that the younger generation, as I was told, could learn from “our governing philosophy” and thus “carry on the tradition.” In fact, the more visits I made to Singapore, the more it occurred to me that despite their differences and remaining inequalities, the various ethnic groups of this city-state—Chinese, Indian, and Malay—talked and acted alike: as though a philosophical principle could erase ethnic differences. Well, of course, it could. For this was what the United States was all about with its Protestant Creed that American Catholics, Jews, and others subscribed to. But maybe because of Singapore’s small size, the expression of the same phenomenon here seemed that much more intense and noticeable. It was as though I were inside a version of Plato’s Republic, with a reigning philosopher king.