Asia's Cauldron Read online

  Whereas in Hanoi you are told repeatedly how Vietnam hopes to become a regional power and pivot state, in Saigon you get an actual demonstration of it. Everything is on a bigger scale than in Hanoi, with wide streets lined with gleaming designer stores, luxury auto dealerships, and steel and glass towers. There are swanky wine bars and upscale eateries that retain that French-influenced, vaguely naughty edginess of the old colonial French city. The Continental Hotel, the setting for much of Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, The Quiet American, and a haunt of foreign correspondents during the American War, is—in spite of its spacious white wedding cake aura and neoclassical columns that whisper elegance and scream the past—simply buried amid the new glitz and new brand-name high-rise hotels.

  The American GIs’ Saigon of nearly half a century ago had 2.5 million people and a $180 per capita GDP; now with a population of eight million, the per capita GDP is $2,900. Saigon has one third of the country’s GDP, though only one ninth of the population. One hundred billion dollars eventually will be spent here on a new city center being planned by a Boston firm, featuring a hundred-story building and five new bridges and tunnels. A Japanese firm is building a six-line metro underground system. Officials at the Institute for Development Studies in Saigon told me that they are emphasizing “sustainable” development: a “green” model within a “global-regional” system. Strict zoning will be introduced, as well as limitations on the use of motorbikes and private cars in the various new and old city centers. Yet again, Singapore, Inc. is invoked, with talk of an aesthetically sterile “world-class” city, with a new airport and air cargo hub for Southeast Asia, and a bigger capacity seaport.

  Hanoi is about geopolitical and military pretensions; Saigon the capitalist prosperity without which such pretensions can never be realized. Greater Saigon must become a clone of Singapore in order for Vietnam to hold its own against China, its historic rival and oppressor. That is the message one gets here.

  Of course, Greater Saigon is still a long way from achieving that status. Vietnam is presently in the throes of an economic crisis similar to the one in China: while both communist parties have brought their populations impressive gains in living standards in recent decades, further progress requires deep reforms and political liberalization that will pose greater challenges than ever before.

  In the meantime, Vietnam’s communist leaders are trying to rely on their Prussianness, their ruthlessly capitalistic economic policies, and their tight political control to maintain their state’s feisty independence from China. They know that unlike the countries of the Arab Spring, their nation faces an authentic outside adversary (however ideologically akin), which might help temper the political longing of their people. But like India, they are wary of any formal treaty arrangement with the United States. To be sure, if the necessity of a defense treaty with the United States ever arose, it would indicate that the security situation in the South China Sea region is actually much more unstable than at present. In any case, the fate of Vietnam, and its ability not to be Finlandized by China, will say as much about the American capacity to project power in the Pacific in the twenty-first century as Vietnam’s fate did in the twentieth.

  CHAPTER IV

  Concert of Civilizations?

  A boom town of oil and gas revenue erupts out of the compressed greenery; colored glass and roaring steel curves define buildings that are like rocket launch pads located near lakes the hue of algae and mud. I sip a pink cocktail beside a brightly lit rooftop swimming pool at night—glowing balloons float at the surface—and look out at the cityscape. The comic book futurism of Batman and Gotham City comes to mind. Palm trees crowd in on overpasses. Despite the unceasing stacks of high-rises, there is a naked, waiting-to-be-filled-in quality to the landscape of spiky blue-green mountains and coiling rivers: where a hundred years ago tin and rubber were beginning to be extracted in large amounts. This was a time when the capital of Kuala Lumpur was little more than the “muddy confluence” for which it is named. An archipelago of trading posts and river outlets, Malaysia and the Malay world are supposed to conjure up the short stories of W. Somerset Maugham. They don’t anymore. Maugham’s vast sprawl of uninterrupted, sweaty jungle, with its intimate and heartrending family dramas played out in colonial plantations, is long gone. And yet there is an oppressive fecundity in everything I see. Though it is now other writers to which I must refer as a result of the cutting-edge panorama that lies before me.

  Indeed, the upscale malls of Kuala Lumpur, dedicated as they are to fetish and fantasy, raise consumerism to the status of an ideology. Observing the rushing crowds and thick exotica of a mall inside the Petronas Towers—Malay Muslim women, their hair hidden underneath tudongs in every primary color, Indian women in equally stunning saris, Chinese women in Western clothes—my whirling thoughts drift in succession to Thorstein Veblen, V. S. Naipaul, Ernest Gellner, Clifford Geertz, and Samuel P. Huntington, philosophers all, though none was classified as such.

  In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen, one of America’s most brilliant and quirky social critics, wrote over a century ago about the consumerist hunger for useless products, brand names, and self-esteem through shopping sprees. He may have coined the term “conspicuous consumption,” which he identified with city dwellers because people in close contact with large numbers of other people tend to consume more as a mark of social prestige.1 I thought the very fact that contemporary Malaysian Muslims conform to Veblen’s generalizations about turn-of-the-twentieth-century Americans shows that Muslims are individuals much as everybody else, no different from us. There is no otherness to Islamic civilization, in other words. Of course, this runs counter to what V. S. Naipaul, the novelist and literary traveler, wrote in his 1981 book, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, in which he noted the “casualness of the Malays” and “the energy of the Chinese.… The difference between the old and the new was the difference between Malay and Chinese.”2 That might still be the case, but certainly much less so now than when Naipaul made his observation (as Naipaul himself briefly alludes to in his 1998 sequel, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples).3 There is also Ernest Gellner, the late French-Czech social anthropologist who cast such a microscopic eye on Muslim culture. Gellner observes that Islam, unlike Christianity, was not born “within an empire,” that of Rome, but “outside two empires, one of which [Eastern Rome, or Byzantium] it promptly overran, and the other [Sassanid Persia] it conquered in the end.” Thus Islam, Gellner goes on, “had not corroded an earlier traditional civilization, nor lived on as its ghost. It made its own empire and civilization.” And as its own “complete and final” civilization, Islam provides—much more so than Judaism and Christianity—an unarguable blueprint for social order.4 But if that is still the case, how come Veblen made the same observations about Americans in the 1890s as I was making about Malaysian Muslims now? Wouldn’t that civilizational otherness show up in some way at the mall? What had changed in the Malays? I asked myself.

  I was helped in my answer by a passage in the late American anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures, in which he says that while the reality of a foreign culture is not simply a prejudice on the part of the observer, at the same time, there was such a thing as the “basic unity of mankind.”5 Thus, too much of an emphasis on culture and civilization could obscure the reality of human nature itself. And what I was seeing at the mall was human nature unleashed, in the form of naked materialism.

  Yet despite the mall’s glossy, one-world imagery, different civilizations and races there still were. Geertz himself observes that the Malaysian civilizational confection comprises races that at least in the relatively recent past bore a mutual “suspicion and hostility that would make the Habsburg Empire seem like Denmark or Australia.”6 While that might be an exaggeration, Malaysia does constitute an experiment—particularly as it concerns the acceptance of the ethnic Chinese in this predominantly Muslim region: an experiment that if it is successf
ul, would constitute at least one proof against Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory.7 The mall, at least on one basic level, seemed to ease the concerns of the late Harvard professor.

  Of course, one could not tell what was going on in the minds of the shoppers. For the very process of modernization, as Huntington and others have theorized, can also lead to ethnic conflict, as previously isolated groups come into contact with each other as a result of urbanization, strengthening rivalries between them, especially if some groups advance faster than others. To wit, as economic growth here registered 25 percent between the late 1950s and 1970, Chinese and Indian incomes rose faster than those of the Malays, one reason for the intercommunal riots of that era.8

  But as a friend of Huntington, I knew how fascinated he would have been by this spectacle. For the sight of masses of Muslims, Chinese, and Indians all together signified Malaysia’s position “at the heart of the world’s trading networks,” between the Middle East and China: a place that in the nineteenth century was within three days sail of China and three weeks sail from Arabia. Malaysia, embracing both the Malay Peninsula and the northwestern coast of the island of Borneo, acts as a funnel for the shipping routes of the South China Sea passing into the Indian Ocean. Its once bustling commercial port of Malacca lay at the confluence of two great monsoonal systems: the southwest monsoon bringing ships from the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent to the Far East, and the northeast monsoon bringing ships from the Far East to the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent.9 The “funnel” of Malaysia lay at the point of exchange between these routes and the civilizations they indicated.10 As such, Malaysia is one of the few places in the world where Chinese ceramics, Islamic coins, and South Indian bronze can be found at the same archaeological sites. The mall was a twenty-first-century demonstration of this historical fact: of Malaysia’s location at the developing world’s very nerve center. Here was the heart of Asia—and, after a fashion, of the globe. The mall signified the former Third World’s newly won postindustrial prosperity, which would not at all have surprised Huntington, who wrote that “fundamental changes” in the “balance of power among civilizations” meant that the power of the West would in relative terms “continue to decline.”11

  Truly, Malaysia is a pulsating demographic and economic microcosm of maritime Asia: a worthy successor to medieval and early modern Malacca, the queen of entrepôts located in the southwest of the Malay Peninsula. Of Malaysia’s 28 million people, 60 percent are Muslim Malays and bumiputras (indigenous non-Malay and non-Muslim peoples in the Malaysian part of Borneo, such as Ibans, Murats, and Kadazans). The ethnic Chinese, mainly Hokkien from Fujian and other parts of southeastern China, who came as indentured laborers, account for 23 percent of the population. Indians, mainly Tamils from southeastern India, make up another 9 percent. Then there are several million migrants and illegals from poverty-stricken Indonesia and Bangladesh. For Malaysia is the most affluent large state in Southeast Asia, according to the United Nations Human Development Index (2011). Only the statelets of Singapore and Brunei rate higher; the former an enclave dominated by the overseas Chinese, the latter the product of oil wealth.

  Wealth translates into urbanization and embourgeoisement, and that, in turn, means not only consumerism, but a “negotiated tension” between the races, says Rita Sim of the Centre for Strategic Engagement in Kuala Lumpur. The rush to the cities has not only brought different groups together as participants in a single, materialist global culture, but has also introduced to them such phenomena as global Islam, which drives Muslim Malays apart from the other groups. The visual rebuke to Huntington that I experienced at the mall was a first impression only. As I spent weeks in Malaysia meeting with scholars and other experts, they revealed to me a more complex and intricate portrait of intercommunal relations that actually confirmed Huntington’s thesis—at least the more nuanced elaboration of it in his book, which followed the famous Foreign Affairs article.12

  Proximity might have brought a measure of understanding among the communities, but it hadn’t necessarily brought harmony. Nationalism can certainly emerge out of multiethnic cosmopolitanism within a defined geographic space; but Malaysia, according to everyone I met here, said it had not quite reached that stage, and thus its diverse peoples might never be able to experience true patriotism. Perhaps Malaysia was too physically and communally varied to be psychologically cohesive—that is, to constitute one solidarity group. There was the Chinese-dominated island city of Penang in the northwest of the peninsula, and the veritable Islamic state of Kelantan in the northeast (which, because of its informal ways, allowed gambling and prostitution). And this was to say nothing of the indigenous non-Malay bumiputras who inhabited the isolated regions of Sarawak and Sabah. The truth was that communal tensions in this ambiguous country with a highly ambiguous geography—composed of the Malay Peninsula and northwestern Borneo—subverted the development of Malaysian nationalism: so that the anti-China sentiment, which, for example, is apparent in highly nationalist and uni-ethnic Vietnam, simply does not exist here.

  In explaining their relatively benign attitude toward China, Malaysians frequently talk about the intimate relations between the Ming dynasty and the medieval and early modern port of Malacca. But the deeper truth is that this country is too subsumed by its own contradictions to focus on an outside threat, especially one that is rather vague. A rising China is convenient for ethnic Chinese Malaysians, just as a rising India is convenient to ethnic Indians here. Meanwhile, the majority Malays, because of a certain insecurity linked to a rising China, have oriented themselves increasingly to a wider Arab-Muslim world. They have escaped from the China problem, in other words.

  This diffuse, unfocused sense of national identity is helped by the fact that peninsular Malaysia, never mind Sabah and Sarawak in Borneo, was not united even under the British. The British at the end of the nineteenth century ruled the Federated Malay States of Selangor, Perak, Sembilan, and Pahang. In 1946, they added the Straits Settlements of Malacca, Penang, Dinding, and Singapore. This was in addition to the nine Malay sultanates in the archipelago. Every piece of geography occupied its own silo, remarked Chandra Muzaffar, the head of a nongovernmental organization here. Identity centered around the village and town. It was only the British-led military response to a communist guerrilla insurgency that centralized the state apparatus in the first decades of independence during the early Cold War period.

  But the heart of the Malaysian story as it exists today is the move to the cities, Liew Chin Tong, a member of Parliament, told me. In the 1950s, the different ethnic communities inhabited separate rural settings. Members of one group rarely saw members of another. Politics was delegated to village and town elites, often British-educated, who engaged in political horse trading in Kuala Lumpur. Compromises were made at the top and so the rural era, which lasted into the 1970s, constituted a classic patronage system. In 1969, as Tong told me, Kuala Lumpur was an ethnic Chinese city; the still rural Malays would come only later as a form of affirmative action took hold. The Malays that were in Kuala Lumpur back then often lived in slums, out of sight of the Chinese middle class. But by the second decade of the twenty-first century, 70 percent of Malaysia’s population was urban, 50 percent were under twenty-five years of age, and Malaysia boasted one of the highest percentages of Facebook users in the world. Half the country was now middle class, with another 40 percent in either the lower middle or upper middle class, according to the Asian Development Bank.

  The country’s social transformation centered on the majority Malays. Malay-ness into the late colonial period came to be associated with rural kampung (village) life, even as this easy prejudice masked the fact that many Malays were merchants and artisans.13 Nevertheless, the Malay ideal was still a potent one. In the words of Australian historian Anthony Milner, it summoned up images of archipelagic pirates, songket textiles, and the “scattered arrangement of houses (and the ever-present coconut trees)” in a kampung. It wa
s a “fragmented and fluid” region, without a central polity, until the emergence of Kuala Lumpur in the last decades of the twentieth century, so that here was an ambiguity linked to the one about Malaysian nationalism later on.14 Malays had heaps of tradition, helped by their archipelagic location at the confluence of the Sinic and Indian worlds, even as they lacked, or rather were not burdened by, the immense accumulation of a hydraulic, material culture that in nearby Java was symbolized by the great Buddhist monument of Borobudur.15

  In his definitive study of the Malay world, Leaves of the Same Tree, University of Hawai’i historian and area specialist Leonard Andaya writes that the term “Malayu” is only used when one is confronted by a distinct other, such as the Javanese, Siamese, or the Portuguese. In all other cases, he goes on, Malays “are associated” only with a specific locale, such as “men of Melaka” or “men of Johor.” A common Malay identity in Andaya’s view was formed less by blood than by a “pattern of interaction” throughout a “voyaging corridor” that stretched across maritime Southeast Asia.16 Malay identity, indistinct and flexible as it was, thus made itself ripe for its integration with Islam.

  It was Indian Muslim traders arriving by sea in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries who are thought to have originally brought Islam to the Malay Peninsula. “The relationship between ethnicity and religion,” writes the scholar Joseph Chinyong Liow, “is so intimate that the popular term for having converted to Islam, masuk melayu, means having ‘become a Malay.’ ” More than any single factor perhaps, it was the robust seafaring trade that Malay Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra, conducted with Islamic kingdoms in India and the Greater Middle East in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bringing Islamic scholars to the region, that cemented Malay identity to Islam long before modern Malaysia was ever thought of.17 And because the various sultanates in the peninsula now no longer carry the weight they once did, “Islam’s role at the core of Malay identity is more salient than ever.”18