After its deadliest and costliest political crisis that claimed 89 lives, more than 1,800 injuries and the torching of Bangkok’s gleaming shopping malls and run-down shop houses, Thailand appears no closer to peace and stability than when the protesting red shirts took to the streets two months ago. The relative calm in Bangkok is a needed reprieve but it belies more turbulence and tumult unless reconciliation and reform efforts are undertaken to address the grievances of both sides of the deepening divide.

The post-mortem so far does not bode well. Polarised stakeholders have taken away what they wanted to hear and see. Ordinary Bangkokians are haunted by the charred remains of Central World, one of Southeast Asia’s largest shopping malls, as much as the rank-and-file reds from the North and Northeast regions and their underclass brethren in Bangkok have bemoaned their fallen. Government-run and army-owned television and radio stations have played up the arson and looting of downtown Bangkok, while the reds’ alternative media and tens of thousands of local websites critical of government responses and army operations are closed. International media are castigated by English-enabled Bangkokians for an alleged bias in covering the reds’ grievances, whereas the domestic media appear tame and one-sided.

To be sure, the reds’ riots and army suppression in Bangkok are not new. After the reds protested and rampaged in April 2009, the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva promised reconciliation and reform. The consequent parliamentary recommendations for constitutional amendments made little headway. Abhisit catered to his patrons in the Bangkok establishment, and antagonized and alienated the reds to the extent that they retook the streets of Bangkok. He had the entire year in 2009 to bridge Thailand’s rural-urban divide and structural disparity and to bring the red shirts on side, but the result was the opposite. The Abhisit government has become a tainted source of Thailand’s problems rather than its way forward. As he is a principal party to the conflict, Abhisit’s stewardship of reconciliation and reform is suspect from the outset.

For the reds, nothing has changed. They rioted twice in the past two years. Their extremists are a disgrace for burning central Bangkok. But the grievances of ordinary reds remain unaddressed. Their claims of systematic injustice and disenfranchisement that featured judicial dissolutions of their poll-winning parties twice, the banning of their elected politicians, the street-based ouster of their elected governments in 2008 by opposing yellow shirts, and the army’s brokerage of the Abhisit government in the barracks still persist. Unless these claims are considered on their own merits, as opposed to being lumped into the wicked manoeuvres of convicted former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the reds may well resort to underground activities, including a potential armed insurgency, and establish their own Thailand away from Bangkok in enclaves of the North and Northeast.

What the reds need is an alternative leadership away from Thaksin and his lieutenants in the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD). As ordinary reds have nowhere to turn, such an alternative leadership can be found by allowing the 220 banned politicians from May 2007 and December 2008, excluding Thaksin, to re-enter the fray and contest in the next round of polls. Most of these politicians are old-style, pork-driven vested interests. But a fraction of them are capable and can manage Thailand in a competitive world economy and challenging geopolitical environment. The military-supported constitution of 2007 must also be amended to do away with clauses that weaken political parties and restore the one-voter, one-vote principle. The ‘guided democracy’ model whereby rules are rigged and outcomes are shaped by judicial manipulation must be abandoned.

After all this turmoil, Abhisit should go through the electoral test at an earliest opportunity. He has withdrawn the early election offer, and set up panels for constitutional amendments and investigations into the death toll only to be headed by pro-government individuals critical of the reds’ movement. The efforts of these two panels in promoting reconciliation appear doomed from the start because they do not represent the interests of one side of the divide. Yet these efforts will buy time for the Abhisit government to roll out more populist measures to placate the reds and for the army and state agencies to conduct pacification campaigns in the countryside using royalist symbols. As these policies and campaigns were not enough to stop the reds last year, their prospects are similarly dim this time around.

The longer Abhisit waits for new polls, the more the reds’ seething fury will fester. The longer it takes to open up and level the electoral field, the more Thaksin can manipulate the reds to regain his confiscated wealth and power. If ordinary reds’ grievances are accepted as genuine, the way forward is to provide them with alternative leadership, fair rules and referees, and a new contest. Otherwise they may well reappear in greater rage and rampage.

Thailand stands in uncharted territory. Its ailing and aging monarch presides over a convulsive body politic. The rigidly constructed Thai identity based on a monarchy-centered socio-political hierarchy is coming loose at its seams as development, democratization and globalization seep in from below and the side. As the core weakens, the peripheries run amok. The Malay-Muslim insurgency in Thailand’s southern border provinces has been one deadly manifestation. Another could be a rural-based insurgency aimed at Bangkok unless recognition and accommodation take place.

The reds rank-and-file need to dissociate from Thaksin’s corruption and manipulation, and Abhisit’s patrons and backers should accept ordinary reds as democratic aspirants for opportunities and upward mobility. It requires concessions and reforms of the established order in the coming years but it is the best course for Thailand’s future. A country famous for its compromising ways has the capacity to navigate out of its democratic dead end. A self-enlightened establishment as fronted by Abhisit that can embrace and bargain with ordinary reds and their alternative leadership to reject Thaksin is Thailand’s way forward. Otherwise the topsy-turvy violence and mayhem seen recently may lead to an implosion of a once-vibrant democracy in the developing world.

What’s wrong with Thailand? It’s the education system, economy and environment, stupid.

That, at least, is Kurlantzick’s assessment, and I have to say I largely agree with him. But I would add that at a more fundamental level, the real problem is the cynicism of a ruling class that can’t come to terms with a legacy of lies that they helped to perpetuate.

Thailand’s moneyed elite find it hard to accept that anyone could ever buy into Thaksin’s twisted conception of “democracy” without being bought off first, but refuse to acknowledge that the inexplicable gullibility of the masses is a product of decades of dedicated myth-making. Thailand has long believed itself to be uniquely blessed with a wise and benign monarch, and has invested heavily in the notion that he is the fount of all that is good in the Kingdom. This fiction has been propagated by generations of rulers who found it convenient to let the king worry about “social welfare” while the rich got on with the business of getting richer–largely by exploiting a nation of docile, grateful royal subjects.

The trouble is that with the monarch’s mortality looming large in almost everyone’s minds, this fairy tale has begun to unravel.

Thaksin, the opportunist extraordinaire, had the foresight to see that a large swathe of the population was looking for someone who would look out for them, and started usurping the role of the king as the people’s savior. Conditioned by a lifetime of royal paternalism, many of the poor fell for his populist policies, which have proven to be neither more nor less effective than all the Royal Projects out there in raising them out of their station in life.

The trouble is that Thaksin didn’t honor the other side of the bargain–providing the rich with a buffer between themselves and the rest of the country. They began to fear, in fact, that Thaksin intended to make them pay for his election-winning schemes by forcing them to cough up more in taxes. And so there was a showdown.

(Thailand’s rich, it should be said, are not entirely averse to ponying up for the underprivileged. But they prefer to do it on a voluntary basis, and through the right channels–namely, by donating to the royal family. This way they can remain rich and–almost as important–retain their aura of self-righteousness.)

When we watch a movie, read a novel, or ponder a poem, we try to enter the world of another person’s imagination. We allow that person to decide what the rules of the universe are going to be, asking only for some semblance of verisimilitude (and sometimes not even that). Then, after we’ve been captivated a while, we return to our conventional reality, and must decide for ourselves if it is indeed more real than what we have just witnessed.

To my mind, literary art is most effective when it keeps us suspended in this state long enough to open us up to the possibility that “conventional reality” is, in fact, the ultimate fiction, and what we really need is to go beyond it and the multitude of lesser lies that we live by to realize our true state of being.

When I asked Yeni if he had seen the article, we joked about the use of the word “émigrés” to describe the Irrawaddy gang. We agreed that it sounded rather romantic–as if we were sitting around cafes in Paris, and not in an office in Chiang Mai.

Here is the paragraph in question, which turns to the subject of the recent spate of privatizations in Burma:

In another change the junta has started a remarkable if stealthy process of selling state assets: ports, buildings in Yangon vacated by its shift of capital in 2005, petrol stations, telecoms firms and a share in the national airline. This is hardly a gesture to economic reform—the sales are cooked-up deals benefiting junta cronies. But nor does it seem just the desperation of a cash-strapped regime. Rather, in the analysis of Yeni, of the Irrawaddy, a magazine published by émigrés in Thailand, it is the “formal transfer of the nation’s wealth into the hands of an entrenched elite”, ahead of an election and the implementation of a new constitution which, in theory, should allow greater competition for assets. This elite is “pre-emptively buying up everything in sight”. It has a similar attitude to competition of the democratic kind.

By Joshua Kurlantzick  |  February 7, 2010

During his trip to Asia in November, Barack Obama seemed strangely mute. Unlike Bill Clinton, who criticized China’s human rights record in front of then-president Jiang Zemin, Obama largely avoided the topic of rights. In Singapore, despite pressure from human rights activists, the president deferred to pressure to not release a statement calling for the freeing of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. In Japan, the president worked valiantly to massage local sentiments, bowing deeply to Emperor Akihito – and drawing flak back in the United States from conservative critics for appearing weak.

More than any recent American president, Obama displayed deep deference to his Asian counterparts. He did so, in part, because, like many Americans, he has become convinced that this will be Asia’s century, and that the United States must begin to accommodate itself to this stark new geopolitical fact. A recent report by the US National Intelligence Council concluded that the world is witnessing the rise of “major global players similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th century and a powerful United States in the early 20th century…[and they] will transform the geopolitical landscape.” Major media outlets covered the president as if he was some kind of Dickensian vagrant, appealing to his increasingly powerful creditors in China for leniency. “Obama’s trip reveals a relationship with a strangely lopsided quality to it,” wrote longtime China specialist Jonathan Fenby, in one typical example of the coverage.

Over the past two years, some of the most important foreign policy thinkers have chronicled America’s decline, and argued that Asia is rising to preeminence. Parag Khanna’s “The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order” landed on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, while Fareed Zakaria’s “The Post-American World” became a bestseller. Meanwhile, the influential former Singaporean ambassador Kishore Mahbubani, who helped spark the “Asian values” debate of the 1990s, released “The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.” Martin Jacques, a prominent columnist for The Guardian, took the idea one step further. In his book “When China Rules the World,” he contends that China’s rise will have a greater impact on the globe than the emergence of the United States as an international power in the 20th century.

Yet predictions of America’s decline are vastly overstated. Asia is indeed increasing its economic footprint in the world, but it still lags far behind the United States in military might, political and diplomatic influence, and even most measures of economic stability. Asia’s growth, the source of its current strength, also has significant limits – rising inequality, disastrous demographics, and growing unrest that could scupper development. Nationalism in Asia will prevent the region from developing into a European Union-like unified area for the foreseeable future, allowing regional conflicts to continue, and preventing Asia from speaking, more powerfully, with a unified voice.

The future of American power is a vital question. America’s foreign policy choices will be directed by judgments about the United States’ staying power, and how the United States, like Britain before it, should adapt to new powers emerging on the scene. If, as Jacques argues, America’s influence will naturally fade while Asia’s grows, Washington should adopt policies similar to Britain’s in the mid-20th century – ceding influence over large portions of the world while working to ensure that it remains an important player on a few key issues. American leaders would have to radically shift their style, adopting a new humility while selling the US public on a diminished global role, a major comedown for a superpower.

Conversely, if it is not to be Asia’s century, Washington’s strategy would be radically different. No concessions of fading glory: Though the United States might not be the only superpower, it could assume that, for the near future, it would remain the preeminent power, allowing Washington to dictate the terms of everything from climate change negotiations to global talks on nuclear weapons.

The idea of American power giving way to a rising Asia has been building for two decades. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many in the United States predicted that Japan, which then seemed to have a hyper-charged economy, would rule the world. But Japan’s economy, built on a real estate bubble, imploded, and Japanese leaders never truly matched their economic power with political might; limited by a pacifist constitution, Japan did not fight in the first Gulf War and wound up merely paying the check for much of the battle.

But now China has assumed the mantle. Next year, China will become the world’s second-largest economy, according to a study by the China Policy Institute of the University of Nottingham. The global financial crisis has badly dented the Western model of liberal capitalism, leaving Asia as the world’s growth engine, and main banker – China alone holds some $800 billion in American treasury securities. The chief economist of the Asian Development Bank, a regional organization, declared in September, “Developing Asia is poised to lead the recovery from the worldwide slowdown.” China and India likely will grow by more than 7 percent this year, compared to minimal growth in the West, and other leading Asian nations, like Indonesia and Vietnam, are also predicted to post high growth rates in 2010.

At the recent Copenhagen climate summit, two of Asia’s most powerful leaders, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, showed this newfound confidence. Meeting in a back room, they pointedly tried to exclude Obama from their negotiations. Obama ultimately had to burst into the closed-meeting like a kind of diplomatic party crasher.

Asia’s new swagger has caused a crisis of confidence in the West that makes the fear of Japan in the late 1980s look like a mild tremor. In the late 1980s it was only one Asian giant growing powerful, and at that time Europe, newly united after communism, looked boldly to the future. Today many of Asia’s nations are getting stronger, and not one major Western nation can be confident about its future growth.

The belief in Asia’s rise has sparked this mini-industry of books on the Eastern renaissance. In the most apocalyptic of the bunch, such as Jacques’, the authors focus on how Asia’s powers, from China to Malaysia to Singapore, are taking the final step from rising power to global hegemon – using state-directed economic policies to dominate industry after industry, while delivering what Mahbubani calls “modernity” – good governance, growth, and the rule of law, without the messiness of Western liberal democracy. In fact, Mahbubani suggests that this “modernity” ultimately may be more appealing than Western democracy, which has not helped produce growth in Africa, Latin America, or many other democratic regions. Other authors, like Zakaria, focus more on American decline.

Yet there are many good reasons to think that Asia’s rise may turn out to be an illusion. Asia’s growth has built-in stumbling blocks. Demographics, for one. Because of its One Child policy, China’s population is aging rapidly: According to one comprehensive study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, by 2040 China will have at least 400 million elderly, most of whom will have no retirement pensions. This aging poses a severe challenge, since China may not have enough working-age people to support its elderly. In other words, says CSIS, China will grow old before it grows rich, a disastrous combination. Other Asian powers also are aging rapidly – Japan’s population likely will fall from around 130 million today to 90 million in 2055 – or, due to traditional preferences for male children, have a dangerous sex imbalance in which there are far more men than women. This is a scenario likely to destabilize a country, since, at other periods in history when many men could not marry, the unmarried hordes turned to crime or political violence.

Looming political unrest also threatens Asia’s rise. China alone already faces some 90,000 annual “mass incidents,” the name given by Chinese security forces to protests, and this number is likely to grow as income inequality soars and environmental problems add more stresses to society. India, too, faces severe threats. The Naxalites, Maoists operating mostly in eastern India who attack large landowners, businesses, police, and other local officials, have caused the death of at least 800 people last year alone, and have destabilized large portions of eastern India. Other Asian states, too, face looming unrest, from the ongoing insurgency in southern Thailand to the rising racial and religious conflicts in Malaysia.

Also, despite predictions that Asia will eventually integrate, building a European Union-like organization, the region actually seems to be coming apart. Asia has not tamed the menace of nationalism, which Europe and North America largely have put in the past, albeit after two bloody world wars. Even as China and India have cooperated on climate change, on many other issues they are at each other’s throats. Over the past year, both countries have fortified their common border in the Himalayas, claiming overlapping pieces of territory. Meanwhile, Japan is constantly seeking ways to blunt Chinese military power. People in many Asian nations have extremely negative views of their neighbors – even though they maintain positive images of the United States.

More broadly, few Asian leaders have any idea what values, ideas, or histories should hold Asia together. “The argument of an Asian century is fundamentally flawed in that Asia is a Western concept, one that is not widely agreed upon [in Asia],” says Devin Stewart, a Japan specialist at the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs.

Even as Asia’s miracle seems, on closer inspection, less miraculous, America’s decline has been vastly overstated. To become a global superpower requires economic, political, and military might, and on the last two counts, the United States remains leagues ahead of any Asian rival. Despite boosting defense budgets by 20 percent annually, Asian powers like India, China, or Indonesia will not rival the US military for decades, if ever – only the Pentagon could launch a war in a place like Afghanistan, so far from its homeland. When a tsunami struck South and Southeast Asia five years ago, the region’s nations, including Indonesia, Thailand, and India, had to rely on the US Navy to coordinate relief efforts.

America also has other advantages that will be nearly impossible to remove. With Asian nations still squabbling amongst themselves, many look to the United States as a neutral power broker, a role America plays around the world. German writer and scholar Joseph Joffe calls the United States today the “default power”: No one in the world trusts anyone else to play the global hegemon, so it still falls to Washington.

Even in the economic realm, the United States remains strong. As Zakaria admits, the United States accounted for 32 percent of global output in 1913, 26 percent in 1960, and 26 percent in 2007, remarkably consistent figures. The United States remains atop nearly every ranking of economies according to openness and innovation. While Asia’s centrally planned economies can build infrastructure without worrying about public opposition – China has built impressive networks of airports and highways – they are less successful at nurturing world-beating companies, which thrive on risk-taking and hands-off government. Compared to Intel, Google, or Apple, China’s major companies still are state-linked behemoths that do little innovation of their own. The leading corporations in most other Asian nations (with the exception of Japan and South Korea) also are either giant state-linked firms or trading companies that invest little in innovation. And censorship or tight government controls alienate the most innovative firms – Google is now threatening to pull out of China entirely.

As Asia throws up barriers to immigration, in the United States immigration helps ensure long-term economic vitality. Chinese and Indian immigrants accounted for almost one-quarter of all companies in Silicon Valley, according to research by AnnaLee Saxenian at the University of California-Berkeley. According to the most comprehensive global ranking of universities, compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, American schools, powered by immigrants and flush with cash, dominate the top 100, with Harvard ranked first. Asia has no schools in the top 10.

Most important, the United States is a champion of an idea that has global appeal, and Asia is not. During the opposition protests in Iran, demonstrators look to the United States, not China or Indonesia or even India, to make a statement. In a reversal of the Iranian regime’s rhetoric, some protestors even chant “Death to China” because of Beijing’s support for the repressive government in Tehran. As long as protestors in places like Iran, or Burma or Ukraine, call out for the American president, and not China’s leader or India’s prime minister, the United States will remain the preeminent power.

To be the global hegemon requires military, economic, and political might, but it also means offering a vision for the world. As Mahbubani admits, during Britain’s imperial period, elites in places like Malaya, India, or the Caribbean wanted to study in England, or read British authors and philosophers, because they believed that the ideas Britain had imparted – the rule of law, the Westminster political system, an idea of fair play, a meritocratic civil service, evidence-based scientific exploration – had merit for the entire world. Even men and women who, ultimately, became some of the biggest thorns in Britain’s side, like Jawarhal Nehru, cherished their British studies and their links to British culture.

So, too, since World War II the United States has been, for many foreign publics, the nation looked up to in this way. Even at the worst moments, such as the period after 9/11 in which the Bush administration created the prison at Guantanamo Bay and allowed torture and other questionable tactics, I have rarely met anyone, in any country, who wanted to move to China, or India, or even Japan, rather than the United States. Foreigners may want to spend a few years in China or India or Indonesia, to see the dynamism of these places, but few, if any, have plans to become Chinese, Indian, or Indonesian citizens. Perhaps one day China or Indonesia or India will draw these migrants, who would come seeking the same dreams and openness as they do today in the United States. But it won’t be soon – and it might not even be this century.

Joshua Kurlantzick is a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/02/07/dazzled_by_asia/

Myanmar Is Reported to Sentence 2 to Death

BANGKOK — A court in Myanmar has sentenced a retired military officer and a Foreign Ministry official to death for leaking details of a secret trip to North Korea by top government officials, according to news reports that cited lawyers in the country.

There has been no mention in the official media in military-run Myanmar of the court decision, which was said to have been handed down Thursday and was first reported on The Irrawaddy, an exile news Web site based in Thailand that covers Myanmar.

Another Foreign Ministry official received 15 years in prison for a related offense, according to The Irrawaddy and Reuters.

The case appeared to highlight the repressive government’s concern about a number of leaks and lapses in recent years, including the publication of minutes of high-level military meetings and photographs of extensive tunnel systems reportedly built by North Korean engineers in the country’s administrative capital, Naypyidaw.

“Clearly there are leaks,” said Win Min, an expert on Myanmar at Payap University in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand. “It’s a sign that there are a lot of people even within the military who do not like the government, and they’re trying to protest in different ways.”

The three men sentenced Thursday were reported to have been arrested in July after photographs and documents of a visit to North Korea by Gen. Thura Shwe Mann, the third-highest-ranking officer in the junta, appeared on Web sites run by critics of the government living abroad.

The extensive collection of photographs showed General Shwe Mann visiting military facilities, including a factory for Scud missiles.

North Korea has a nuclear program, and experts believe that Myanmar, formerly called Burma, has been seeking to establish a nuclear program as well. They say, however, that the government lacks the technical ability to develop a sophisticated program.

“It is not clear if North Korea is involved in any nuclear activities in Burma,” said Bertil Lintner, who has written extensively on both Myanmar and North Korea. “What we know with certainty is that North Korea and Burma have established a secret alliance and that North Korea has delivered military-related equipment to Burma.”

Reuters identified the two men sentenced to death as Maj. Win Naing Kyaw, who is retired, and U Thura Kyaw, a Foreign Ministry clerk; they were charged under a broad law that covers threats to national security. The third person sentenced was identified by The Irrawaddy as U Pyan Sein, who was convicted of violating an act covering the use of illegal electronic devices.

The sentences reflect what many experts describe as the paranoia of Myanmar’s senior general, Than Shwe, who appears continually concerned about threats to his power. Five years ago he moved the seat of government from Yangon, formerly Rangoon, to Naypyidaw, a more remote location, in part to defend against potential outside attacks.

General Than Shwe recently confirmed that elections would take place this year — the first in two decades. The death sentences may be a warning to potential dissenters, analysts said.

“He doesn’t have a choice — he has to call elections because he already announced they would go ahead,” Mr. Win Min said. “But he is still worried about threats from within.”

Death sentences in Myanmar are often commuted to life in prison, but the court decision remains a potent reminder for those thinking of stepping out of line, Mr. Win Min said.