John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia, characterized in a traditional role by a local magazine after the military intervention in the Soloman Islands.

As East Asia and the Pacific reach out towards the
global economy, the region is still struggling with
democracy. Rowan Callick takes stock.

When the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) met on the Indonesian island of Bali in August, it announced plans to bring its 500 million people within a single economic market by 2020, to stimulate growth and keep up with China.

But these grandiose plans were eclipsed. Before the meeting, Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad had warned that, because its military junta continued to jail the democratically elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, ASEAN might be forced to expel Burma. Instead, ASEAN leaders – four of whom lead governments not directly elected by the people – congratulated Burma’s generals on their latest ‘road map’ towards ultimate democracy. The next ASEAN leaders’ summit will take place in mid-2004 in Burma’s capital, Rangoon, after which Burma will take over ASEAN’s chair.

Stories like this illustrate how democracy in East Asia is still an evolving concept. But, somewhat surprisingly, the region could still look forward to a 2004 in which democracy is affirming itself, in all its often-ungainly varieties, as the preferred East Asian system of government.

The most closely watched elections in 2004 will be in the world’s third-biggest ‘democracy’, Indonesia. Direct presidential elections will follow those for Indonesia’s increasingly assertive parliament, which now operates in a lively environment that has produced a thriving non-governmental sector and hyperactive media.

President Megawati Sukarnoputri will take some stopping. Her popularity has been boosted by aggressive military intervention, started in April last year against independence fighters in the westernmost province of Aceh. Despite the death toll of over 1,100, this intervention should hold Megawati in good stead in a staunchly nationalistic republic. Among her more popular challengers is former army commander General Wiranto – widely blamed internationally for the deadly mayhem of Indonesia’s last days in East Timor.

Philippines President Gloria Arroyo – who, like Megawati, is the daughter of a President – is set to stand again in May. By then she appears unlikely to have much of a platform left. The civil war with Muslim separatists in the south continues. Kidnappings terrify the business community nationwide. In addition, the economy compares badly with that of its neighbours.

The successor in Malaysia to 77-year-old enfant terrible Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who stepped aside in October after 22 years as Prime Minister, is Abdullah Badawi. The election due there in 2004 is intended to provide him with a mandate of his own.

Thai elections are set to reinforce the supremacy of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who has presided over an economic boom while taking on the braggadocio of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi.

South Korea and Taiwan are heading for the polls. And Hong Kong, now a special administrative region of China with its own local government, is also holding elections next year. These could well underline the challenge to the Beijing-appointed chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa. On 1 July there was a protest march against legislation aimed at criminalizing pro-independence activities. It attracted more than half a million people (almost 10 per cent of Hong Kong’s population) forcing the shelving of the legislation and the resignations of two ministers.

However, the 1.3 billion people of China – more than a quarter of the world’s population – still have no vote for their national government. And it is the rise of their country towards world dominance that underlies virtually every story in the Asia-Pacific Region in 2003.

China’s one-party government is now beginning to box its weight diplomatically and culturally as well as economically. Its economic growth surged well past seven per cent in 2003, as its exports continued to boom and its domestic consumption also soars. Instead of being mainly a competitor for the same markets, China is now starting to rival the US as the most important market for goods from the rest of Asia, which will considerably boost its regional influence.

At the end of 2003 Washington inched towards a trade war with China, complaining that its currency was too low, and so were the prices of many of its exports. But other countries in the region were keeping their currency rates down to maintain their trade competitiveness, so the US has gained scant support in the region.

The US was also forced to rely heavily on Beijing’s unique influence over North Korea to bring its eccentric hereditary leader, Kim Jong-il, to the negotiating table. His government’s insistence on developing nuclear weapons remains its only effective claim to economic support and respect from the West.

The Chinese Government’s continuing vulnerability to unexpected setbacks was illustrated by the emergence in its prime industrial dynamo – the southern province of Guangdong – of the deadly Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The disease spread to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Toronto. The discovery of SARS, just as China’s ‘fourth generation’ of Communist Party leaders was assuming office, proved very awkward. But the new leaders – Hu Jintao as party chief and President, Wen Jiabao as Premier – ultimately handled their challenge effectively, sacking the health minister, whose first instinct had been to deny SARS’ existence. Serious questions remain about China’s health system, relying as it does on user payments that many rural people cannot afford: many die, undiagnosed, from curable or infectious ailments.

The development and governance challenges in the rural areas of the region remain unresolved, not least in the tiny island nations of the Pacific. During 2003 the Solomon Island Government asked for outside assistance to restore law and order. The move, later endorsed by its Parliament, handed powers of arrest to security forces sent in from other countries. Following a Pacific Island Forum of Foreign Ministers on 30 June, a ‘co-operative intervention’ force of 2,000 troops from Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa and elsewhere in the region was swiftly despatched to the Solomon Islands.

Australian military deployments to Iraq and East Timor are responses to its concern about regional security after 11 September, the 2002 Bali bombing and the Marriott Hotel bombing in Jakarta in August 2003, which killed 12 people. Together with the coups in Fiji and the Solomon Islands in mid-2000, the ‘arc of instability’ fringing Australia’s northern shores has encouraged a new approach. Previously, Australia stood back and offered financial aid. Now it is prepared to send in the troops.

Prime Minister John Howard has moved on to the next major target: Australia’s own former colony, Papua New Guinea. Some 300 Australian police will be despatched there early in 2004 to function in hands-on roles. And 200 lawyers, economists, accountants and administrators will be deployed to help the public service regain its efficiency and impartiality.

Like many of his regional contemporaries, John Howard also faces an election in 2004. He has never resiled from his ‘Pacific Solution’. A wave of boat-people washed through Indonesia in an attempt to land in Australia, only to be repulsed by the Australian Navy and then escorted to guarded camps on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus island. This appears to have won votes at the 2001 Australian election, but remains a very divisive issue. The new Pacific Solution, using what Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer calls ‘co-operative intervention’, has been more widely endorsed.

In July, Howard flagged a future in which Australia will lead interventions in other Pacific nations. ‘Our friends and neighbours in the Pacific are looking to us for leadership, and we will not fail them,’ he said. This commitment will be tested by the type of support that Australian governments make available to their Pacific neighbours in the coming decade: the balance that is adopted between armed intervention, and concrete offers of technical and financial support.

Rowan Callick is the Asia-Pacific editor
of The Australian Financial Review.