The ability of Asia’s strategically consequential states to effectively manage and mitigate endemic security threats and resulting dilemmas depends on numerous factors, but few are as important as modifying political transition trajectories and overcoming deeply rooted political cultures. Other regions also confront endemic political problems as evinced by the convulsions that have erupted across the Middle East and in some Gulf states after the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011 or the vicious combination of internal conflicts, failed governance, terrorism, and extremely weak political institutions in select sub-Saharan African states. But in Asia, the confluence of various stripes of authoritarian regimes, failed states with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), potential regime collapse and its attendant consequences, problems associated with consolidating democracies (or reversing rollback and regression), and above all, China’s future paths means that the region is going to confront some of the biggest political hurdles well into the 2020s and beyond.
The fact that Asian states face significant political hurdles shouldn’t negate in any way the successful institutionalization of democracy and peaceful transfers of power in Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, and, more recently, Indonesia.1 Nevertheless, Asia confronts a panoply of political quandaries that will have key consequences for managing security challenges, such as the power of nationalism and how it could be exploited by each of the region’s strategically consequential states, as well as the penchant for preserving regime security that could lead to more disruptive foreign and defense policy choices.
Asia’s Political Kaleidoscope
Although characterizing the spectrum of political challenges confronting Asia cannot but result in widely divergent definitions, symptoms, causes, and consequences, four major clusters can be identified with regional, or in certain instances even global, repercussions. To begin with, the contours of China’s domestic politics and key foreign and security policy choices are going to influence all levels of international politics, including the critical U.S.-China relationship, China’s interactions and linkages with its major Asian neighbors, and the strategies and policies China is likely to assume in major crises such as possible regime collapse in North Korea. As China prepares to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2021, President Xi Jinping is more determined than ever to ensure the party’s enduring monopoly on power and to lock in China’s growing posture in world affairs. Nevertheless, all major Asian countries are facing variations of a deepening “China dilemma,” or exploiting the benefits arising from closer ties with China while maintaining safety nets so that even as China’s gravitational pull becomes stronger, they will still be able to sustain a more or less independent orbit. Moreover, for those countries that have crucial security and economic ties with the United States (Japan, South Korea, and Australia and more recently Vietnam and India) and that have strengthened strategic ties with the United States, their respective China dilemmas are likely to intensify in the years and decades ahead. Their challenge is to ensure that they will be able to maintain ties with both the United States and China without adversely affecting their core national interests.
Uncertain and Volatile Transitions
Although China looms at the apex of Asia’s political landscape, other major political developments are going to occur. Among them: possible transitions in critical failed or very fragile states such as Pakistan and North Korea that pose serious security challenges, and obstacles in other authoritarian states such as Myanmar, which is in the midst of transitioning from more than half a century of military rule to a quasi-democratic regime. While the Indo-Pakistani strategic rivalry is qualitatively different from the inter-Korean competition given that South Korea does not possess nuclear weapons, there are similarities such as the growing gap in economic capabilities between India and Pakistan and between South and North Korea.
Owing to a combination of factors such as entrenched security perceptions, the powerful role of the armed forces as key political institutions, and their strategic rivalries with states that are much more developed economically, Pakistan and North Korea have turned increasingly to augmenting their asymmetrical capabilities. In the case of North Korea, where the military serves as the backbone that sustains the regime, the focus has been placed on nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, special operations forces, and, more recently, cyberwarfare capabilities. In Pakistan’s case, the emphasis has been placed on the funding and training of militants and terrorist groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has mounted terrorist attacks on India. At the same time, Pakistan has served as a sanctuary for Lashkar-e-Omar, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Sipah-e-Sahaba, and other terrorist groups. For many Indians, the November 2013 Mumbai terrorist attack that killed 166 people is considered to be India’s equivalent of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Lashkar-e-Taiba is an Islamic extremist group that was founded in 1986 with state support from Pakistan and has carried out numerous terrorist attacks against India.2 To be sure, Pakistan has also been the target of multiple terrorist attacks including suicide bombers. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal website, between January 2003 and November 2015, terrorism fatalities in Pakistan totaled 59,507, including 20,805 civilians, 6,360 security force personnel, and 32,342 terrorists and insurgents.3 But so long as the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Pakistani army provide support for terrorist and extremist groups in an effort to destabilize India, Pakistan’s ability to control or even contain these groups in any meaningful way is going to be weakened. In an astounding but unsurprising revelation, former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf stated in a television interview on February 13, 2015, that during his term in office, Pakistan tried to undermine Afghanistan’s former government under Hamid Karzai because the Afghan president was working against Pakistan’s interests.4 Musharraf also stated that after 2001, Pakistan’s ISI cultivated the Taliban because the Karzai government included a majority of non-Pashtuns who favored India and that “obviously we were looking for some groups to counter this Indian action against Pakistan.” He continued, “That is where the intelligence work comes in. Intelligence being in contact with Taliban groups. Definitely they were in contact, and they should be.”5
Throughout the 1960s and well into the 1980s, North Korea relied on terrorist attacks and bombings as well as assassinations to foment unrest in the hopes that a highly destabilized South Korea buttressed by North Korean agents and pro–North Korean sympathizers in the South would be able to start a homegrown revolution. Attacking the presidential compound in January 1968, drilling tunnels under the 38th parallel in the 1970s, killing seventeen high-level South Korean officials during an official presidential state visit in Rangoon, Burma, in 1983, and bombing a Korean Air passenger jet in 1987 are some of the more well-known North Korean tactics.
In March 2010, a North Korean midget submarine sank the South Korean naval vessel, the Cheonan, killing 46 sailors, and in December 2010, North Korea fired artillery shells on Yeonpyeong Island—the first artillery attack on South Korea since the end of the Korean War. Since the 2000s, North Korea has built up a significant cyberwarfare capability, which gained notoriety in November 2014 when U.S. government authorities pinpointed North Korean cyberagents for hacking Sony Pictures Entertainment as it prepared to roll out a slapstick fictionalized movie about the assassination of the North Korean leader. In December 2014, the FBI stated that “as a result of our investigation, and in close collaboration with other U.S. government departments and agencies, the FBI now has enough information to conclude that the North Korean government is responsible for these actions.”6
For all its problems, Pakistan is a functioning democracy albeit one where the army plays a preponderant security role and society is confronting deeply rooted socioeconomic-sectarian cleavages. It is also a country imbued with weak and fractious civilian institutions. In North Korea, the regime has survived the tumultuous downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989–1991, the disastrous man-made famine of the mid-1990s, and two dynastic successions in 1998 and 2012. And since 2006, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has successfully developed nuclear weapons. Kim Jong-un, the country’s leader, insists he will achieve what his father and grandfather failed to do: making North Korea a nuclear-weapon state while it simultaneously attains economic prosperity. But as Sung Kim, the U.S. special representative for North Korea policy and a former ambassador to South Korea, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in January 2015, “North Korea will not achieve security, economic prosperity, and integration into the international community while pursuing nuclear weapons.”7 (Emphasis added.) In more ways than one, transition paths and likely political evolutions in Pakistan and North Korea deserve much closer scrutiny given the enormous impact of domestic politics and regime transformations in these two strategically important outliers. Both face immense sociopolitical and socioeconomic challenges, compounded by the fact that each is armed with nuclear weapons and increasingly sophisticated delivery vehicles.
Organizing Political Asia
Asia has made significant political progress, including more peaceful and institutionalized transfers of power, greater attention to human rights, easier access to information, improved governance, and more active civil societies. But Asia is also home to a wide range of political systems and regimes, including mature democracies such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and new democracies such as Indonesia, as well as regressing ones such as Thailand, which has been ruled by a military junta since 2014. Although Myanmar has been moving toward a more open political system and the army seems poised to transfer power to a civilian government since it first gained power in a military coup in 1962, the army will continue to remain the most powerful institution with direct control over Myanmar’s security apparatuses. In comparing democracy scores of thirteen Asian countries cutting across the political spectrum from 1980 to 2014, Freedom House ranked Myanmar among the least free (see figure 3).
Asia is also home to so-called hybrid regimes, or governments that combine democratic rule with quasi-authoritarian practices or regimes that have also been referred to as illiberal democracies, quasi- or pseudo-democracies, and even “competitive authoritarian” regimes. According to Freedom House’s annual democratization assessments, sixteen of 39 countries in the Asia-Pacific region were classified as free (41 percent), fifteen as partly free (38 percent), and eight as not free (21 percent).8 By comparison, of the 195 countries worldwide, 88 were classified as free (45 percent), 59 as partly free (30 percent), and 48 as not free (25 percent).9 Among the ten countries that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), five were deemed to be not free (Cambodia, Brunei, Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar) while Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines were classified as partly free.10 In East Asia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were listed as free; in South Asia, India was classified as free, and Pakistan and Bangladesh were classified as partly free.11
Indexes that measure levels of democracy, freedom, and even human rights are inherently imprecise and open to wide-ranging interpretations. Cultural, historical, and social heritages and legacies are critical in understanding particular political traits and institutions, and Asia is no exception. Bruce Gilley argued that “in order to understand what is distinctive about Asia as a developing region that was colonized by the West, we need to compare it mainly to other developing regions that were colonized by the West, not to the West itself.”12
A theory of Asian politics should be Asian. Asia has long been prone to interpretations from the West (just as the West has been prone to interpretations from Asia) that are essentially contrastive and used for self-reflection and strengthening. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it is liable to exaggerate differences, if not mislead altogether. When we call Asia “illiberal” or “communal” or “developmental” or “market-driven,” we are often reflecting more on Western experiences and debates than on Asian realities. While these concepts are indispensable, the aim should be to properly describe the reality of Asia rather than to set up neat contrasts with the West, or with any other region for that matter.13
Commenting on the importance of cultural traits in the perception and use of power, Lucian Pye stressed that “not until modern times, and so far only to a limited extent in any Asian country, has power been seen as primarily utilitarian, useful for tasks more precise than just sustaining the social order.”14 Yet commensurate with Asia’s accelerated economic and social development since the 1960s and 1970s and even with significant challenges to democratization as assessed in greater detail below, democratization in Asia over the longer term is likely to be sustained owing to the combination of key factors that Brian Joseph identified as “economic growth, including the movement of goods, services and people, and rising educational levels; rapid urbanization and the emergence of mega-cities; wide-spread use of information communication technology; and the emergence of diverse and broad-based civil society movements and independent media.”15
Writing back in 2008, Joshua Kurlantzick asserted in Current History that many countries in South and Southeast Asia have “papered over major flaws” and “few have established effective methods of probing state corruption or electoral fraud. Despite holding elections and writing constitutions, many Asian nations have never assimilated a central premise of democracy—the idea that once a party loses it must respect the system by serving as a loyal opposition, working within the established political framework and honoring constitutional rules.”16 In a study published by the Council on Foreign Relations in May 2014, Kurlantzick lamented the sliding of democracy in Southeast Asia. Specifically, he pointed to the return to military rule in Thailand and the regression of democracy in Malaysia “with the long-ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition cracking down on dissent and trying to destroy what had been an emerging, and increasingly stable, two-party system. Singapore’s transition toward contested politics has stalled. In Cambodia and Myanmar, hopes for dramatic democratic change have fizzled.”17 In particular, he stressed the importance of strengthening democracy in Thailand and Malaysia since they are among the wealthier and populous countries that democratized relatively recently and because “they are looked to by countries in Asia and in other parts of the world as potential examples—of progress or regression. Regression in countries as wealthy as Thailand and Malaysia, which have a per capita [gross domestic product] more than ten times that of the average sub-Saharan African nation, would bode poorly for the fate of democracy throughout the developing world.”18 (Emphasis added.)
The Future of Hybrid and Mature Democracies
According to the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2014, Japan, India, and South Korea were referred to as either constitutional or parliamentary democracies. Countries that are considered to be functioning democracies although not necessarily liberal democracies such as Singapore are classified as being “partly free” by Freedom House. The 2014 State Department report noted that Singapore was a “parliamentary republic” and furthermore that the 2011 general and presidential elections were “viewed as open and free, with the major opposition party winning the contested seat.”19 At the same time, however, the report stated that “the government has broad powers to limit citizens’ rights. The government could and did censor the media (from television shows to websites) if it determined that the content would undermine social harmony or criticized the government.”20
As for Malaysia, the report noted that it has a “parliamentary system of government selected through periodic, multi-party elections” but that “the most significant human rights problems included obstacles preventing opposition parties from competing on equal terms with the ruling coalition; restrictions on freedoms of speech, assembly, association, and religion; and restrictions on freedom of the press, including media bias, book banning, censorship, and the denial of printing permits.”21 In the May 2013 general election, Malaysia’s ruling coalition, the Barisan Nasional actually lost the popular vote and won a narrow margin of 133 seats out of 222, but “given the close finish as well as reports of electoral irregularities, not to mention the long-standing complaints about Malaysia’s electoral process being unfair, the results continue to be contested, with many questioning the legitimacy” of Prime Minister Najib Razak’s government, according to political science professor Bridget Welsh.22
The Weakening Status Quo in Malaysia
Subsequently, in February 2015, the Malaysian Supreme Court upheld a five-year prison sentence for opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who had been sentenced by an appeals court that overturned his acquittal on a sodomy charge in 2013. The government maintained that the court’s verdict was handled totally independently of the government, and a spokesman for the government stated that “Malaysia has an independent judiciary and there have been many rulings against senior government figures.”23 Pro-government officials such as Shahril Hamdan, chairman of the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) Youth’s Young Professional Bureau, retorted that “Anwar failed to galvanise the opposition behind a solid and common ideological cause except to merely oppose everything that Barisan Nasional does” and that the legacy he left behind is “a coalition and party in tatters, unsure of whom to turn to for future leadership, with a policy platform that remains tenuous and flimsy. A coalition whose reason for existence was to merely be anti-government with a crusade to make Anwar prime minister.”24 However, the Asia spokesman for Human Rights Watch lambasted the court’s decision, telling the Guardian newspaper that “Prime Minister Najib Razak’s government has persisted in its politically motivated prosecution of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim at the expense of democratic freedoms and the rights to non-discrimination and privacy for all Malaysians… . Allowing this travesty of justice to stand will further undermine respect for rights and democracy in Malaysia.”25 In essence, John Esposito and John O. Voll wrote, what is at stake is Malaysia’s image as a key example of a progressive, moderate, economically vibrant Muslim-majority country.
At a time when the world is confronting violent and regressive movements in parts of the Muslim world, Malaysia could be a shining example of what is possible when Muslims focus on rebuilding the tradition of scholarship, technology, and pluralism that is present throughout the history of Islamic civilisation. While the prime minister has made positive remarks about the need for a “movement of moderates” in the Muslim world, the actions of his party at home belie his intentions.
The continuing efforts to use the judicial system against opposition political leaders will undermine Malaysia’s leadership role in regional and global affairs as well as weaken Malaysia’s traditions of political openness and democracy.26
More recently, Malaysian politics has been in a tailspin since Najib has been accused of receiving almost $700 million through a complicated money-laundering scheme linked to the troubled state sovereign fund, the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).27 The 1MDB accumulated some $11 billion in debt through poor overseas investments according to investigations by the attorney general’s office in Kuala Lumpur. A story carried by the Sarawak Report on July 2, 2015, stated that “a total of US$681,999,976 (RM2.6 billion) was separately wire transferred from the Singapore branch of the Swiss Falcon private bank owned by the Abu Dhabi fund Aabar into the Prime Minister’s private AmBank account in Kuala Lumpur, in March 2013, just in advance of the calling of the General Election.”28 Former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad has publicly called on Najib to resign and according to Free Malaysia Today may have been instrumental in providing information since he has accused Najib of corruption for several years.29 Given that Malaysia under Najib has drawn closer to the United States and that Washington perceives Malaysia “as a bulwark against China’s growing territorial ambitions in the South China Sea,” as reported by the Wall Street Journal, the scandal has drawn significant attention in the United States.30
Singapore After Lee Kuan Yew
Many commentators have argued that because of the extent of the diversity of politics across greater Asia, it is unfair to assess Asia’s political challenges almost wholly from the viewpoint of democratization given the salience of other key variables such as the importance of delivering good governance, social welfare infrastructure, and medical and healthcare systems, as well as providing basic nutrition and education. While Singapore fares poorly in rankings for democratization and freedom of the press, it is at the very top in clean government and other indexes such as global competitiveness and globalization (see figure 4). Indeed, even Japan scores lower on transparency than Singapore. However, and notwithstanding Singapore’s accelerated economic development and the city-state’s transformation into one of Asia’s leading financial and business hubs, the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), which has governed Singapore without interruption since independence in 1965, is in the midst of what Elvin Ong and Mou Hui Tim called an “emergence of a ‘new normal’—a new political climate where the dominant and authoritarian PAP must face more frequent and robust challenges to its policies from the citizenry and opposition parties.”31
In a surprising development, the PAP handily won a general election that was held on September 10, 2015, by winning 83 of 89 seats (compared to only 6 seats for the opposition), or 69.96 percent of votes, an increase of 9.72 percent compared to the 2011 election.32 While the opposition had hoped to win more seats based on its very strong showing in the 2011 election, analysts remarked that Singaporeans expressed their support for the PAP in the first election that was held after the passing of Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew in March 2015. The New York Times wrote that regaining the seats the PAP lost to the opposition in the previous election was the “ultimate benchmark” for the PAP, and that “voters in Singapore delivered a resounding mandate on Friday to the governing party, which had been working to overcome its worst showing ever in an election four years ago.”33 At the same time, opposition leader Kenneth Jeyaretnam of the Reform Party stated that the election result wasn’t a surprise considering “what you do when you control everybody’s housing, you control their savings, you control their jobs because you’re the major employer, you control all the media and there’s no independent elections department.”34
In the May 2011 general election, however, the PAP received 60.1 percent of the popular vote, its lowest level since the general election of 1968, and the opposition Workers’ Party (WP) won an unprecedented eight seats in Parliament—the highest number of seats won by the opposition since 1968.35 Social activist and political commentator Alex Au noted that “what people are looking for is a change in the PAP’s style, attitude and their fundamental policy assumptions—such as the primacy of economic growth over distribution,”36 and the Wall Street Journal also reported at that time that “the PAP, which has dominated politics in the city-state since 1959, has faced in recent years rising complaints over high living costs, infrastructure shortcomings, immigration, and a widening gap between rich and poor. Those concerns remain despite measures taken after the ruling party’s slimmest-ever general election win in May 2011, when its vote share fell 6.5 percentage points from the 2006 poll to 60.1%.”37 However, the PAP’s victory in the September 2015 election showed that the party learned its lessons from its shaky performance in the 2011 election, and a majority of Singaporeans opted to reward it.
On March 23, 2015, Singapore passed a major milestone with the death of Lee Kuan Yew—the founding father of modern Singapore and Asia’s last remaining political giant. It is highly unlikely that any future Singaporean leader, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (the eldest son of Lee Kuan Yew), will be able to dominate Singaporean politics like Lee Kuan Yew. As prime minister from 1959 to 1990, Lee transformed Singapore into one of Asia’s leading financial and business hubs and retained considerable clout as senior minister and later as minister mentor until he stepped down from all official positions in 2011. Although it will take many more years before a more objective assessment can be made of Lee’s legacies, Nicole Seah, a Singaporean expat living in Thailand, perhaps best captured the feelings of many Singaporeans when she wrote that “to me, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew’s biggest legacy is not the gleaming albeit sterile landscape he left behind, or the ‘mud-flat to metropolis’ narrative that has been forced down our throats. Rather, it is the idea that there was someone who fought so bloody hard for us because he genuinely wanted to help make the country work.”38 In a eulogy he penned for the Washington Post, former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger wrote that:
A great leader takes his or her society from where it is to where it has never been—indeed, where it as yet cannot imagine being… . It did so by adhering to an extraordinary pragmatism: by opening careers to the best talents and encouraging them to adopt the best practices from all over the world… . As the decades went by, it was moving—and inspirational—to see Lee, in material terms the mayor of a medium-size city, bestride the international scene as a mentor of global strategic order.39
There is little doubt that Singapore prospered under the tutelage of Lee Kuan Yew’s ironhanded leadership not unlike the legacies bequeathed by other Asian leaders such as South Korea’s Park Chung-hee and China’s Deng Xiaoping, who engineered their respective countries’ accelerated economic takeoff. But the downsides of the authoritarian developmental state model cannot be ignored. As the New York Times editorialized after Lee Kuan Yew’s death, Lee did transform Singapore into an economic powerhouse, but “he was also an autocrat who silenced critics and sent opposition leaders to jail, suppressing dissent and intimidating the press.”40 The newspaper also noted that:
[Lee Kuan Yew] has been far more successful at turning Singapore into a developed nation than other strongmen in neighboring Malaysia and Indonesia. Nevertheless, he and his protégés in the ruling People’s Action Party … maintained tight control over politics and speech long after other fast-growing Asian nations like South Korea and Taiwan became competitive democracies, and long after Singapore had achieved the kind of prosperity that Mr. Lee had cited as a reason to limit free expression and multiparty democracy.41 [Emphasis added.]
In the final analysis, democracy is inseparable from Asia’s future, and the story of Asia’s rise would be fundamentally incomplete without emphasizing the critical importance of democratic institutions, practices, and norms. Even though ruling political parties in Singapore and Malaysia have built-in advantages flowing from decades of incumbency, it is unlikely that either the UMNO or the PAP will be able to stem the tide of greater accountability, transparency, democratization, and freedom of expression. As exemplified by the transition from authoritarian politics to robust democratization in Taiwan and South Korea, Asia can be wealthy and free. Writing two decades ago in Foreign Affairs in a famous response to Lee Kuan Yew’s adamant defense of Asian values, former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung emphasized that Asia’s destiny lay with democracy. Kim’s remarks are as relevant today as they were back in 1994:
Instead of making Western culture the scapegoat for the disruptions of rapid economic change, it is more appropriate to look at how the traditional strengths of Asian society can provide for a better democracy… . Asia should lose no time in firmly establishing democracy and strengthening human rights. The biggest obstacle is not its cultural heritage but the resistance of authoritarian rulers and their apologists. Asia has much to offer the rest of the world; its rich heritage of democracy-oriented philosophies and traditions can make a significant contribution to the evolution of global democracy. Culture is not necessarily our destiny. Democracy is.42 [Emphasis added.]
Aging Democracies: Japan and South Korea
Although a number of scenarios can be analyzed in depth to project Asia’s future political landscapes, one undeniable driver that will influence the face of Asian governance, politics, and key policies into midcentury and beyond is demographic transformation. The mature democracies that are also advanced economies (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) are already considered to be rapidly aging societies, while Singapore and Hong Kong confront similar demographic trends. According to estimates by the United Nations (UN), the world’s population is going to increase by some 2.1 billion between 2013 and 2040, of which 1 billion will be in Asia. But Asia’s total population is expected to reach its peak at about that time and progressively decline.43 In a region so varied, there will be exceptions, such as India, which is expected to add 500 million people by 2050. China, Japan, and South Korea, however, face net population declines (see table 4).
Based on the UN’s 2012 revised population projections and assuming the status quo in future fertility rates, Japan’s population is slated to decline from 127 million in 2013 to 108 million by 2050 and down to 84 million in 2100. Even more startling are the projections made by Japan’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. Based on medium fertility and mortality projections, Japan’s population is estimated to decline to 75.9 million in 2070, 65.8 million in 2080, 57.2 million in 2090, 49.5 million in 2100, and 42.8 million in 2110.44 If these numbers hold, Japan’s population will shrink by 84.2 million people over the next hundred years. Such a development will affect every facet of Japan as a modern nation-state, including a precipitous decline in its international standing, fundamental constraints on how much hard power it can generate, substantially weakened leverage in Asia, and, perhaps most important in the context of geostrategy, the inability to reorient or to even distance itself from an increasingly powerful Sinocentric orbit.
As a result, wealthier Asia is going to become progressively smaller in population and much older. Based on the United Nations 2012 revised population projections, some 469 million Asians were aged sixty and older, with the number expected to increase to 1.2 billion by 2050 and 1.5 billion by 2100.45 The fastest-aging societies in Asia are Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, where the ratio of the older population (sixty-five and older) to the working-age population (aged fifteen to sixty-four) is slated to be between 58 and 70 percent by 2050.46 In Japan, those who are sixty-five and older in 2050 are going to make up 36.5 percent of the total population—a phenomenon that’s going to be replicated in the developed economies of Asia. By 2050, those who are aged sixty-five and older will be 34.9 percent of the population in South Korea, 28.9 percent in Singapore, and 23.9 percent in China, but only 15.8 percent in Indonesia and 12.7 percent in India.47 There is also going to be an onslaught of retired workers by 2050: a little more than 70 out of 100 persons in Japan, 67 out of 100 in South Korea, 39 out of 100 in China, and 47 out of 100 in Singapore.48 A rapidly aging population means that government outlays for social welfare, pensions, and healthcare are going to increase significantly across Asia, especially in Japan, South Korea, and China (see table 5). By midcentury, developed Asia is going to spend much more on pensions and healthcare, with unprecedented political, economic, and even military implications.
For example, Seongho Sheen has argued that Asia’s coming clash is going to be defined by a competition for resources for national security or social security.49 As government spending for social security continues to increase in the midst of a slowing economy, Sheen emphasized, “Japan may find it increasingly difficult to maintain its current defense spending of 1% of GDP. South Korea and China will soon find themselves under similar pressure. Even worse, China and South Korea, unlike Japan, may have to face rapid aging before becoming widely affluent.”50 States often pursue national security policies based on a confluence of factors including internalization of key external threats, the extent of a country’s dependence on alliances and security assurances, and augmentation of domestic political goals. That said, given the demographic drivers that are going to be faced by Asia’s key security players (China, Japan, and South Korea) into the 2020s and beyond, the tension between social welfare and national security resources is going to become, at a minimum, a major feature of domestic politics.
Falling Birthrates and Security Implications
According to the South Korean government’s “Basic Defense Reform Plan, 2014–2030,” South Korea’s armed forces are slated to be reduced from a current level of 633,000 to 522,000 by 2030, or a reduction of 111,000 personnel given that lower birthrates will affect the number of eligible conscripts. If South Korea’s 1.19 birthrate remains steady, the military is going to a face a manpower deficit of 120,000 by 2050.51 While the army leadership has so far dodged virtually every effort at downsizing its unnecessarily top-heavy force structure, additional delays in restructuring the armed forces could have major consequences. Some defense analysts have suggested that South Korea should transition to a volunteer force structure to compel the armed forces to accept a fundamentally different manpower paradigm. Nevertheless, even though the army leadership deserves to be criticized for rejecting key defense reforms, transitioning to a volunteer force can’t be driven primarily by demographic considerations given that so long as South Korea confronts an array of military threats from the North, it can ill afford to fundamentally alter its military manpower posture. Moreover, if South Korea were to adopt a volunteer force structure, it is estimated that at least $8 billion in additional funding would be required for higher labor costs, which would mean significant budgetary reductions for defense research and development and for weapons modernization programs.
Changing demographics will also affect Japan’s security and defense planning postures. Like South Korea, the number of males in the twenty to twenty-five age group is estimated to decline from 32.7 million in 2010 to 27.3 million in 2030 and to 17.6 million in 2060, which means that the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) are going to face key manpower shortages.52 Some analysts have suggested that since the SDF is a volunteer force and assuming that Japan doesn’t shift to conscription as some have proposed, lower birthrates and a slowing economy may actually mean that more men and women will opt to join the SDF.53 But Japan’s rapid demographic decline is also likely to lead to greater competition for Japanese youths in the private and public sectors, and because SDF benefits and salaries are going to be lower than in the private sector, the SDF could face significant manpower deficits just as China begins to assume a more assertive military posture.54
For Japan and South Korea, the phenomenon of hyper-aging and demographic decline is all the more relevant given that it cannot be corrected midstream when rapid demographic transitions are well in place and most likely irreversible. Much slower and stagnant economic growth, significantly higher social welfare spending, and a sharp decline in working-age populations cannot but adversely affect South Korean and Japanese political landscapes, including their ability to assume greater defense cost sharing with the United States. But from a broader perspective, a sharp drop in Japan’s total population by 2050 will adversely affect Tokyo’s relative world position considering that in 1950, Japan had the world’s fifth-largest population. It fell to tenth place in 2010 and is expected to fall further, to sixteenth place by 2050.55
As noted above, under worst-case fertility and mortality rates, Japan’s population is going to decline to approximately 76 million by 2070 and further down to 50 million by 2100. If these projections withstand the test of time, Japan is going to enter the twenty-second century as a middle power with a truncated population and a much smaller economic profile. Although demographic projections alone can’t be construed as a sufficient condition in projecting Japanese and South Korean foreign policy futures, the fact that the closest U.S. military and political allies in Asia are entering into negative demographic transitions means that at the very least, alliance management has to take into consideration the impact of demographic trends in Japan and South Korea on their respective budgetary choices, revenue bases, economic competitiveness, and ability to maintain very modernized armed forces.
China’s Political Trajectories
Among all the political hurdles that Asia faces, however, none is as challenging, vexatious, and important for China, Asia, and the world as China’s political transitions in the next two to three decades. How China’s political system is going to evolve remains in the realm of guesstimates, most likely even for those who are directly responsible for ruling and managing the world’s most populous nation. By any yardstick, the enormous tasks that confront China’s political leadership today and well into midcentury are without precedent. India is another titan that faces unparalleled socioeconomic challenges with equally daunting but different obstacles given its depth of poverty, a strong federal structure that constrains the workings of the central government, and the complexity of managing the world’s largest democracy. But the CCP leadership believes not only that the party has earned the right to rule China but also that only the party can continue to maintain political power and preserve social stability.
Historically, dynasties were ruled under a supreme celestial authority—the mandate of heaven—that was bestowed upon the reigning emperor. Of course, in practice, the mandate of heaven was taken away and licensed anew through more pedestrian and often bloody mechanisms such as succession struggles, palace coups, assassinations, invasions, or wars. Despite the Chinese Communist Party’s adherence to Marxist-Leninist ideology and the thoughts of Chairman Mao Zedong, the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and as the protector of the masses, the party has morphed into a classical dynasty: a massive and powerful political body whose most important goal is ensuring its monopoly on power. To achieve this fundamental goal, the party recruits, nurtures, and tests the best and the brightest from its nearly 88 million membership (as of June 2015 or just 3 million short of Vietnam’s total population of 91 million) and propels them into carefully selected leadership roles throughout all levels of government. Indeed, the CCP monopolizes leadership posts in the party, the bureaucracy, and the intelligence and security apparatuses. While it discarded the command economy model once reforms began in earnest and a de facto free market blossomed in China, the party maintains a strong grip on the economy, state enterprises, and even major private firms. No entity is free from the ironclad vise of the CCP. Thus, over time, the party’s core leadership has become China’s virtual vertebrae that permeates every facet of life and society. In turn, this nationwide web is backed up by the world’s largest domestic security, policing, and surveillance system designed to monitor, control, deter, and detain citizens who are deemed to be dangers to the state and the party.
Palace intrigue persists as evinced by the push and pull of contending factions at the apex of the party leadership. But the party has quashed, and will continue to quash, any and all forces deemed a threat to its monopolization of power. According to chapter 1, article 1 of the constitution, as amended in March 2004, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.” Chapter 1, article 3 states that “the State organs of the People’s Republic of China apply the principle of democratic centralism,”56 and chapter 1, article 5 states that “the People’s Republic of China governs the country according to law and makes it a socialist country under rule of law.”57 Notwithstanding the truly transformative changes that have occurred since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were launched at the end of 1978, China today remains very much a “people’s democratic dictatorship.”
A Very Different Kind of Party
A major reason that the CCP leadership believes that the party has earned the right to exercise a monopoly of power is that in a span of just three and a half decades, China has been totally revamped from a poor, backward, agrarian economy into the world’s second-largest economy. In purchasing power parity terms, China’s GDP is already slightly higher than the U.S. GDP. Jonathan Fenby has argued that the regime can claim three reasons for legitimizing its rule since 1949: unparalleled material improvement for the vast majority of the Chinese people; the ability to maintain domestic stability given earlier calamities such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; and the restoration of Chinese pride and place on the international stage.58
Yet even as China and the CCP can rightly celebrate unprecedented socioeconomic progress, the party has become an icon of development and progress but also one of oppression and regression. The Chinese Communist Party is a party without historical parallel. It is the world’s largest Communist Party with the most expansive surveillance system that oversees a police state, but it is also a party that engineered the world’s biggest socioeconomic revolution by providing the Chinese people with the highest standard of living in Chinese history. And by fusing the world’s largest and most powerful Leninist party with the world’s biggest de facto market economy, the CCP has become a truly hybrid Communist Party: the party that simultaneously celebrates Big Brother and Gucci. But even though the CCP stresses its sacred mission of safeguarding Communism and upholding socialist values as enshrined in China’s constitution and by renewed ideological education and enforcement of party doctrine, it is no longer in the business of perpetuating the Communist ideal. Instead, the party’s main business is centered on ensuring that it stays in power, cultivating a constant cadre of next-generation leaders among its 88 million members, and suppressing and defeating all threats to its monopolization of power. As Richard McGregor wrote in his elucidating work on the CCP:
“Our Party’s organizational working resources have no equal with other political parties in the world,” internal documents boast. The system is replicated in China at each of the remaining levels of government. To simplify a complicated system, the centre supervises appointments in the provinces; the provincial organization departments supervise the cities, and so on, right down to the lowest tier of government, at the township level. In practice, the party secretary at each level retains a huge amount of power over appointments in the area over which he or she rules.59
The CCP continues to speak the language of social revolution and Communist doctrine, but it is a language that is geared wholly toward the party faithful. Like its predecessors prior to the collapse of Imperial China in 1911, the CCP has become another dynasty. Only this time, it is under the banner of the Communist Party, which has engineered the biggest socioeconomic revolution in Chinese history. The CCP will bristle at the charge that it has become another imperial dynasty, but, as Frederic Wakeman Jr. put it, the “notion of a dynastic cycle was the primary political concept of the Chinese,” and after a major transfer of power, a “new dynasty once more began the ancient cycle of imperial rule.”60 Seen from such a perspective, the CCP is but the latest reincarnation of imperial dynasties, albeit with key modifications in the post-Deng era such as installing an emperor with a ten-year term limit.
How China’s latest dynasty, which has been reincarnated in the form of the CCP, is going to ultimately fare remains unknown. But as the party prepares to celebrate crucial twin anniversaries in 2021—the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the CCP and the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China—the party is facing challenges that it has never before encountered: the rising costs of and complications arising from maintaining ironfisted rule in an era of unparalleled openness and opportunities for the Chinese people. It is fitting to recall that when economic reforms were being institutionalized in the 1990s, they were matched by incremental optimism among Chinese but especially Western observers that China would perhaps also adopt more liberal and even maybe democratic principles or, at a minimum, transform the political system to one that Freedom House envisioned as “less repressive, more tolerant of criticism, and more subject to the rule of law.”61 As its 2014 annual report noted:
Despite official rhetoric about fighting corruption, improving the rule of law, and inviting input from society, the new Chinese Communist Party leadership under President Xi Jinping has proven even more intolerant of dissent than its predecessors. After intellectuals and other members of civil society called in early 2013 for the party to adhere to China’s constitution and reduce censorship, the authorities responded with campaigns to intensify ideological controls. New judicial guidelines expanded the criminalization of online speech, confessions and “self-criticisms” reminiscent of the Mao era reappeared on television screens, and police arrested dozens of activists affiliated with the New Citizens Movement who had advocated reforms including asset disclosures by public officials.62
China’s New Security Law
On July 1, 2015, the PRC enacted a broad national security law covering everything from national sovereignty to information technology systems. According to Reuters, “A core component of the law, passed by the standing committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), is to make all key network infrastructure and information systems ‘secure and controllable.’”63 The passage of this law wasn’t a surprise since China under Xi Jinping has mounted what the Wall Street Journal described as an intensifying campaign on activism and dissent “featuring repression of civil-society groups, heightened monitoring of social media, and sharpened warnings against the spread of Western ideas and influences.”64 On May 7, 2015, the NPC released the second draft of the national security law for public comment, and in November 2014 China passed the Counterespionage Law, which replaced the National Security Law of 1993.65 The NPC Standing Committee passed the measure with 154 votes in support, none against, and one abstention. The new law is sweeping in the areas that it covers. For example, the official news agency Xinhua reported that “a national security review and regulatory system and relevant mechanisms would be set up to censor items that have or may have an impact on national security, including foreign investment, particular materials and key technologies, network and information technology products and services, projects involving national security.”66
The new law also defined national security in the broadest terms possible: “the country’s state power, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity; its people’s wellbeing; its sustainable economic and social development; and other major interests are comparatively in a state of being in no danger and free of any threat from both within and without, and that the aforementioned state can be constantly guaranteed.”67 Xinhua quoted Zheng Shuna of the Legislative Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee as stating that the law was necessary owing to China’s unprecedented security challenges and furthermore that “we are under dual pressures… . Externally speaking, the country must defend its sovereignty, security and development interests, and internally speaking, it must also maintain political security and social stability.”68 But as the Economist noted, China’s new national security law is truly draconian in its sweep:
The law is a dense 6,900 characters of party-speak, with little in the way of detail (not even any specific punishments), but plenty of obligations such as to “defend the fundamental interests of the people” and take “all measures necessary” to protect the country. Many countries, including America and India, have laws on national security. But the variety of concerns covered in China’s is striking, as is the vagueness of its language (an exception is that April 15th will henceforth be observed as National Security Education Day). It may be followed by detailed regulations later. But it is unlikely that its key terms will ever be defined more precisely. To Mr Xi, vagueness is a useful weapon.69
The new national security law means that for all intents and purposes, the party has legalized what it has long practiced, that is, that anything the party says is harmful to national security is actually harmful. Moreover, the new national security law specifically stated that Hong Kong and Macau “must fulfill responsibilities to safeguard national security.” In other words, since the law also covers crimes of subversion and inciting rebellion, the very foundations of the “one country, two systems” that China agreed to in 1997 when Hong Kong reverted to China cannot but weaken Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy, which has been progressively undercut by Beijing.70
China’s Red Nobility
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was able to maintain its grip on power owing to four key elements: an unmatched internal security apparatus led by the ironfisted KGB at all levels of Soviet society and backed up by gulags; dispensing of incentives to the party elite; a pervasive agitation and propaganda network; and a military and police force that was subservient to the CPSU. But the CCP is stronger, more resilient, and more legitimate than the CPSU ever was, since the CCP can rightfully take credit for China’s total economic renewal. The Soviet Union was a superpower by virtue of its nuclear parity with the United States, backed up by a formidable Red Army but with a backward economy. Unlike the CPSU, the CCP’s hold on power has been buttressed by a much more refined and deeper knowledge of the global economy and crucial linkages with the international system—in short, the CCP talks the language and walks the footsteps of globalization. Over the past four decades, the party has championed an unusual governing model that blends high economic growth as a platform for performance legitimacy, increasing socioeconomic and cultural freedoms so long as they do not pose a threat to the political supremacy of the party, and piecemeal political reforms, but again, as long as they are kept in check by the party leadership. Party leaders can be justifiably proud of the enormous challenges the party has overcome for nearly a century. But in more ways than one, the CCP’s biggest obstacles and trials are just beginning to surface.
Throughout its existence, the CCP has gone through various iterations such as the mighty shield during the civil war against the Guomindang (more widely known as the Kuomintang, or the KMT) and the war against Japan; as a state-forming organization with the founding of the PRC in 1949; as the ideological spear that launched the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (known in full as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) at the height of Mao Zedong’s reign; as the engine of unparalleled economic growth under the tutelage of Deng Xiaoping; as a Leninist party that brutally suppressed the pro-democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in June 1989; and most recently, as the embodiment of a globalized China that is on the cusp of becoming an equal power with the United States.
But China’s remarkable economic growth and the CCP’s dependence on sustained economic development has come at steep costs. Economic inequality has accelerated over the past three decades; according to official Chinese data released in January 2013, China’s 2012 Gini coefficient was 0.474, slightly lower than 0.491 in 2008.71 According to Statista, China’s Gini coefficient reached a peak in 2008 at 0.491 and dropped in 2014 to 0.469, a figure that parallels the government’s 2013 data.72 However, Peking University’s Institute of Social Science Survey found that the poorest quarter of Chinese citizens owned just 1 percent of China’s wealth and that China’s Gini coefficient was 0.45 in the mid-1980s and rose sharply to 0.73 by 2012.73
Along with income inequality, one of the most important challenges for the party is its knee-deep immersion in the “red market,” or crony capitalism with Chinese characteristics. There is little doubt that the unleashing of economic reforms since the late 1970s has created an entirely new breed of Chinese entrepreneurs with a tectonic shift in the global corporate balance of power. Based on Fortune magazine’s Global 500 ranking of the world’s largest corporations by revenue, 40 percent of the Global 500’s largest companies in 2004 were in North America, followed by Western Europe. In just one decade, the ground has turned completely. Asia today accounts for more companies in the Global 500 than North America and Western Europe combined, with China alone accounting for 95 firms—more than Germany, England, and France. Three of the world’s top ten companies are based in China: Sinopec Group (third), China National Petroleum (fourth), and State Grid Corporation of China (seventh).74 From 2004 to 2014, the net change in the number of companies listed in the Global 500 was truly startling: a gain of 80 in China, followed by much smaller rises in the number of South Korean, Russian, Indonesian, and Taiwanese firms but with a net loss of 25 firms in Japan and 61 in the United States.75
Nevertheless, even though the party has allowed companies of all stripes and sizes to flourish since the era of reforms, it has been beset with the web of corruption that has been fostered by privileged networks including the princelings or offspring of powerful party, government, and military officials as well as extended families and business associates who have key ties with high-level officials. Indeed, the red market has grown to such a degree that it compelled President Xi Jinping to launch an unprecedented anticorruption drive as soon as he came into power. In October 2012, the New York Times reported that relatives and close business associates of Wen Jiabao, the prime minister at the time, controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion.76 As reported by the party’s Central Commission for Discipline, which is the primary anti-graft unit, more than 182,000 party officials were investigated or punished in 2013 and 31 high-level officials were under investigation in January 2014.77 Assessing the actual depth of corruption in China or in other countries with limited transparency and independent data is extremely difficult, although efforts have been made by such groups as Transparency International, whose annual corruption index measures perceived levels of corruption in 175 countries. China ranked 100 out of 175 countries in the Corruption Perceptions Index (2014), 27 out of 28 countries in the Bribe Payers Index (2011), and in the 33 percentile ranking in the Control of Corruption Index (2010).78
According to a major study conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that was released in January 2014, close relatives of China’s elites have held secret offshore companies in tax havens that distort the actual level of hidden wealth. The ICIJ study noted that nearly 22,000 offshore clients had addresses in mainland China and Hong Kong. Its findings were based on a cache of 2.5 million leaked files from two firms, Portcullis TrustNet, which is based in Singapore, and Commonwealth Trust Limited, based in the British Virgin Islands, that help clients establish offshore companies, trusts, and bank accounts.79 The ICIJ asserted that a “parallel economy” coexisted with the official one that allowed the powerful and the well-connected in China and Hong Kong to move their assets overseas, and “by some estimates, between $1 trillion and $4 trillion in untraced assets have left the country since 2000.”80
For the time being, the anticorruption drive is also strengthening Xi’s grip on power, unseen since the days of Deng Xiaoping. However, Xi’s anticorruption drive poses a major catch-22 because the more Xi cracks down on party corruption including the inner sanctums of the nomenklatura, the more the party’s leadership will feel threatened. And in turn, Xi may end up curtailing his in-house purges since no secretary general of the CCP is going to sacrifice the party’s top-down legitimacy—and its self-given mandate of heaven—by cutting off the very hand that feeds it. Indeed, one of the key issues that is bound to have political repercussions is the extent to which the “red nobility,” or elites who are tied by marriage or blood to the apex of the Chinese leadership, feel threatened by Xi’s anticorruption campaign. The ICIJ took note of Xi’s dilemma.
Since taking over as the Communist Party’s top official in 2012, Xi has sought to burnish his image with an aggressive anti-graft campaign, promising to go after official corruption involving both low-level “flies” and high-level “tigers.” Yet he has crushed a grassroots movement that called for government officials to publicly declare their assets. Wen Jiabao, who stepped down as premier in 2013 after a decade-long tenure, also styled himself as a reformer, cultivating an image of grandfatherly concern for China’s poor.81
The arrest of Zhou Yongkang, the once all-mighty head of China’s domestic security apparatus, led to his expulsion from the Communist Party in December 2014. He was the first active or retired member of the Politburo Standing Committee—the apex and most powerful organ of the party—to be arrested. The People’s Daily, the official CCP newspaper, commented after Zhou’s arrest that “we need to advance the anti-corruption drive through the investigation of Zhou’s serious violations of Party discipline. We must stick to the attitude of no tolerance, the resolve of strong treatment, the courage to scrape poison from the bones, and the measure of severe punishment.”82 Since Zhou’s arrest and the continuing crackdown, the party has stressed the principle of equality before the law and the fact that “there is no restricted area in fighting corruption, no privilege in obeying the law, and no exception in carrying out the discipline.”83 In June 2015, Zhou was sentenced to life on charges of taking a paltry sum of 731,000 yuan (or about $118,000) in bribes and leaking six classified documents, which suggested that the closed-door hearing and sentencing were pre-determined by directions from the party.84 According to a New York Times investigation that was published in April 2014, the documented wealth of Zhou’s family was listed as $160 million, and even this amount was a conservative figure since it didn’t include bank accounts, real estate, and assets held by proxies.85
About the same time that Zhou was being arrested, Chinese investigators announced the arrest of retired General Xu Caihou of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), who had been vice chairman of the CCP’s Central Military Commission, the most powerful military organ of the party. A number of senior PLA officers have been arrested for massive corruption, and while the PLA has so far supported Xi’s efforts, it’s also a risky venture because, as Andrew Wedemen has written, “if the drive cuts too deep … Xi could face resistance and even pushback that could force him to rein in efforts and leave in place some who have benefited from corruption.”86 As a result, fighting corruption is a perilous double-edged sword for Xi and the party leadership. As Minxin Pei has noted, “corruption might destroy the Party, but fighting corruption will definitely destroy the Party.”87 In January 2015, President Xi pledged to sustain his anticorruption drive and ordered absolute loyalty to the CCP.88 However, Joseph Fewsmith wrote, as “political reform lagged behind economic reform, there was a tendency for corruption to be ever more closely tied to the abuse of power and to networks of local officials, and to become more deeply embedded.”89 As Aaron Friedberg has written, Xi’s anticorruption drive, if taken to logical extremes, will mean the undermining of the party’s very power base, which Xi and other powerful party leaders simply can’t afford.
Without transparency, checks on governmental power, an independent judiciary, and police and prosecutors who follow the rule of law rather than the dictates of their political bosses, corruption can never be controlled, let alone eradicated. At some point Xi will want to declare victory in his war on corruption and turn to other issues. But corruption is not going away. Having highlighted its existence and declared his intention to eradicate it, Xi has set the stage for deepening cynicism and perhaps for growing discontent. Future historians may well judge that he weakened the foundations and shortened the lifetime of the system he was trying to save.90
Cybersovereignty and Cyberpolicing
Even as the leadership copes with the devastating consequences of high-level corruption, it has been fighting a war on another front: information warfare against ideas, values, and norms that are deemed to be against the founding principles of socialism and that, most important, pose a threat to the ideological superglue that holds the party together. On December 1, 2014, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television announced a new program reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, that is, sending artists to grassroots communities to learn from the masses on the “correct view on art.”91 As part of this effort, various scriptwriters, directors, and actors working on films and TV shows will be sent to the countryside and to key areas of China’s revolutionary past. This policy bears a striking resemblance to Mao’s admonishment during the Yan’an Talks in 1942 that arts and literature must not only be close to the masses but that it must also learn from the masses. For example, Mao stated that “China’s revolutionary writers and artists, writers and artists of promise, must go among the masses … [and] they must for a long period of time unreservedly and wholeheartedly go among the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers, go into the heat of the struggle, go to the only source, the broadest and richest source, in order to observe, experience, study and analyze all the different kinds of people, all the classes, all the masses, all the vivid patterns of life and struggle, all the raw materials of literature and art. Only then can they proceed to creative work.”92 The impetus for streamlining arts and literature in China has a long tradition under the PRC, but Xi’s speech on October 14, 2014, was the main trigger when he provided guidelines during a forum on literature and art work, as reported by Xinhua.
Literature and art must reflect well the people’s wishes; it must persist in the fundamental orientation of serving the people and serving Socialism. This is a basic requirement of the Party for the literature and art front, and is the crux that decides the future destiny of our country’s literature and art undertaking… . The broad literature and art workers must carry forward the banner of the Socialist core value system, reflect the Socialist core value system in their literature and art creation vividly, vigorously and in a lifelike manner… . We must make patriotism into the main melody of literature and art creation, guide the people to establish and uphold correct views of history, views of the nation, views of the country and views of culture, and strengthen their fortitude and resolve to be Chinese.93 [Emphases added.]
State control of the arts and literature is hardly new to the PRC. But commensurate with China’s accelerated economic development and today’s influx of information at unprecedented volumes and speed, the Internet is a blessing and a curse. On top of the gargantuan surveillance apparatus it has created, the CCP maintains an unparalleled media and information censorship system ranging from softer approaches such as media guidelines and self-censorship to jailing dissident journalists, shutting down entire publications, massively distorting information, and maintaining the world’s biggest firewall to block users from accessing certain content on the Internet. Quiqing Tai talked with experts and concluded that the party has created a “strong but fragmented system of media regulation” composed of three key elements: the tendency to ban news that directly threatens the legitimacy of the CCP or the regime; constant and almost instant monitoring of the Internet to regulate the dissemination of news, videos, and other digital content that is deemed harmful to stability; and local leaders, who are more likely to hide negative news within their jurisdictions compared with central leaders who exploit the media to identify misconduct among local subordinates.94
Of late, the party has become much more aggressive and assertive in clamping down on what it perceives as Internet contamination. To this end, it blocks websites, censors content, and tracks users within its borders. The International New York Times reported in late 2014 that China’s Internet control czar Lu Wei “has ratcheted up restrictions in what is already the world’s most sophisticated system of online censorship.”95 More recently, it has become virtually impossible to use Gmail in China, and China’s state censors have also mounted vigorous attacks on virtual private networks, which enabled millions of Chinese to circumvent the state’s cyberpolice. A cofounder of Greatfire.org, which tracks censorship in China, suggested to the New York Times that the state’s attacks on virtual private networks are “just a further, logical step” and that “the authorities are hellbent on establishing cybersovereignty in China.”96 The CCP is determined to maintain cybersovereignty through more than a dozen government bodies that review and enforce myriad laws and regulations that stem, block, and cleanse information flows into and out of China. The most powerful organization is the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department, which maintains control over the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television, which is entrusted with ensuring that contents abide by party doctrine.97
Policing China’s exploding Internet is becoming an increasingly arduous task. In 2014, China had an estimated 641 million Internet users with a 46.0 percent Internet penetration rate.98 Given the size of China’s population, this means that 21.9 percent of the world’s Internet users are Chinese. According to a 2013 report furnished by Beijing News, China had some 2 million “public opinion analysts”—in reality, censors—who work for the party’s Central Propaganda Department, tracking and policing online public opinion.99 On March 1, 2015, the Cyberspace Administration of China began enforcing sweeping regulations that require registration with real names for “users of blogs, microblogs, instant-messaging services, online discussion forums, news comment sections and related services” that, in effect, covers every facet of Internet usage.100 The state-run China News Service stated in a report that China was facing growing “username chaos” and that fake accounts “polluted the Internet ecology, harmed the interests of the masses, and seriously violated core socialist values.”101 The new regulations ban nine categories of user names including names that are deemed to harm national security, involve national secrets, fan ethnic discrimination or hatred, or harm national unity in addition to other immoral usages.102
The CCP has been partially successful in building a censorship regime that allows for just enough media freedom and access such as “permitting journalists to report aggressively on low-level malfeasance in order to improve governance, but constantly adjusting the amount of reporting in order to avoid giving discontented citizens enough information to be certain about whether a revolt would receive sufficient support to be worthwhile,” according to Peter Lorentzen.103 What the party is creating is the most extensive, subtle, and sophisticated intranet system, or a parallel Internet, that allows enough information to flow in and out from its own system so long as the party is the ultimate arbiter of the information. China’s cyberregime allows for some types of independent investigative reporting so that grievances and corruption can filter their way to the top of the information pyramid and help to “co-opt groups that might otherwise stand in opposition to the regime, giving them just enough stake in the status quo to keep them docile,” Lorentzen wrote.104 In the main, however, the party is going to tighten its grip on information control given that party leaders believe that unfiltered and free-flowing information is one of the biggest threats to party control.
No Flowers Can Bloom Without the Party
Central to the party’s efforts in controlling and molding information is clamping down on so-called intellectual pollution at China’s universities. In September 2014, the Communist Party committees of three leading universities in China—Peking, Fudan, and Sun Yat-sen—published separate statements in the party journal Qiushi entitled “How to Carry Out Ideological Work at Universities Under New Historical Conditions.” Peking University noted that “in recent years, some people with ulterior motives have added fuel to the flames on the Internet [that were] ultimately targeting the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist system, which has had a negative impact on online public opinion and social consensus.”105 In May 2013, Zhang Xuezhong, who taught law at the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, posted on Sina Weibo that professors at the university were briefed on subjects they should avoid teaching. Among them were universal values, press freedom and civil liberties, judicial independence, and the CCP’s past errors, which were quickly referred as the “qibujiang,” or “seven unmentionables.” That very phrase was subsequently banned on search engines.106 In December 2013, Zhang was dismissed from his post when he refused to apologize for his writing and stated in a telephone interview with the New York Times that “I told them [the authorities] I had made no mistakes whatsoever,” adding “I’m just a university faculty member who expresses his own opinions, thoughts and proposals, which is absolutely my right. This is an out-and-out witch hunt.”107 Or as the Economist wrote in February 2014, China’s modernization “has meant that students are more open to Western influences and have more social and economic freedoms than ever before… . The Communist Party, concerned that it is losing control, has issued a number of political directives banning liberal topics in the classroom.”108
The leadership’s commitment to strengthening ideological education at Chinese universities was emphasized during Xi Jinping’s speech on higher education in December 2014 when he stressed, “Enhancing CCP leadership and Party building in the higher learning institutions is a fundamental guarantee for running socialist universities with Chinese features well.”109 Xi underlined the importance of universities since they “shoulder the important tasks of studying, researching and publicizing Marxism, as well as training builders and successors of the socialist cause with Chinese characteristics.”110 In January 2015, Minister of Education Yuan Guiren released new rules that restrict the use of Western textbooks at universities based on guidelines demanding that universities prioritize ideological education that stresses loyalty to the party, Marxism, and Xi Jinping’s ideas.111 According to Xinhua, Yuan said that “materials touting Western values are forbidden inside our classrooms” and that “remarks that slander the leadership of the Communist Party of China, smear socialism or violate the country’s Constitution and laws must never appear or be promoted in college classrooms.”112 The Ministry of Education also announced it would select twenty projects of excellence from among 145 societies and 141 universities and colleges for superior cyberculture education in the hope that they can “inspire students to join cyber culture societies as they would have a guiding role in upholding socialist core values.”113
How far the CCP is going to succeed with its efforts at strengthening ideological education and instilling socialist values remains unclear, although the party is becoming increasingly concerned at the pace and depth of information contagion. When the democratization protests that were referred to widely as the Umbrella Movement and Occupy Central began in Hong Kong in September 2014, Beijing was concerned about the local government’s ability to defuse the unrest, but much more important, it was worried that the protests could spread into the mainland. The CCP is extremely sensitive to contagion on the mainland, and since Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012, Agence France-Presse reported, “the party has arrested scores of activists, journalists, academics, lawyers and others it sees as a threat to its rule, in what rights groups say is the harshest such crackdown in decades.”114
Although Beijing wants to avoid a major crisis in Hong Kong akin to Tiananmen in 1989, neither can the party afford to loosen its grip on Hong Kong. The mainland’s top official in Hong Kong, Zhang Xiaoming, issued a warning on February 4, 2015, that “we could not allow any attempt to reject the central authority’s jurisdiction over Hong Kong under the pretext of a high degree of autonomy, to advocate Hong Kong independence, or even to overtly confront the central government through illegal ways.”115 Zhang also said that Beijing was going to refocus its efforts on strengthening patriotic education in Hong Kong, even though previous efforts had backfired. More important, one can assume that demonstrations in Hong Kong only emboldened Beijing to become even more convinced of the need to introduce so-called state security legislation in Hong Kong, including anti-sedition acts, to ensure that democracy advocates and supporters there and in Macau would be deterred and punished. Indeed, the 2015 national security law specifically calls upon the two special administrative regions to perform their duties in upholding national security.
The government’s crackdown on academic freedom across Chinese universities is going to persist especially as the number of Chinese students studying overseas increases in addition to the growing web of academic linkages with Western institutions of higher learning. To shape the international academic discourse and to strengthen China’s soft power, Beijing has spearheaded the proliferation of the Confucius Institute program since 2004. Participating educational institutions are sponsored by the Chinese Ministry of Education and geared toward enhancing academic exchanges, language training, and cultural promotion, not unlike Britain’s British Council, France’s Alliance Française, and Germany’s Goethe-Institut. Nevertheless, concerns have been expressed over the Confucius Institute’s lack of independence. American professors have complained that Chinese instructors stress China’s positive attributes, including state-approved visions of China, and, the Associated Press reported, “are trained to avoid discussion of sensitive subjects such as Tibet and the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.”116 But commensurate with China’s growing economic clout and the importance of attracting Chinese students across the world, direct foreign responses relating to China’s crackdown on intellectual freedom at Chinese universities are likely to be curtailed.
Preventing the “Gorbachev Syndrome”
The CCP’s growing emphasis on strengthening ideological education is just one element in the party’s overarching goal of maintaining stability at virtually all costs. Short of war, nothing is more anathema to the party than losing its ability to preserve stability. In his succinct analysis of the prospects for political reform in China, Boston University’s Joseph Fewsmith noted that at the onset of reforms in the late 1970s, senior leaders such as Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun (one of the key party elders and an early supporter of reforms) believed that “the key to economic development was political stability, and the key to political stability was strong and stable relations at the top of the system and regularization of the party system below.”117
Ever since the epic events of 1989–1991 including the downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Chinese leadership has been adamant in its determination not only to avoid the fate of the USSR but also to ensure that its hold on power becomes even stronger. Conversely, Susan Shirk at the University of California, San Diego, has maintained that despite the aura of invincibility that the party tries to project, unparalleled economic progress has come at a steep price: growing domestic fragility within China and the party’s declining ability to monitor its citizens, much less control them.118
Although China is a one-party dictatorship, Chinese leaders since Mao have not been absolute dictators since they have been chosen through a carefully choreographed political process. Shirk refers to this process as similar to the relationship between the pope and the Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals. While the CCP and the Catholic Church are fundamentally different, Shirk noted that Chinese leaders have to win the support of the “selectorate,” or the Central Committee, and that the members of the Politburo, the Politburo Standing Committee (the highest decisionmaking body), and the general secretary are locked in a “reciprocal accountability” power-sharing structure.119
Over time, the CCP has introduced a variety of mechanisms including limited local elections, anticorruption campaigns, and efforts at enhancing governance capabilities of the party cadres, especially at the local levels. But the party has never really undertaken fundamental political reforms since doing so would unleash consequences the leadership would never allow, or much more important, effectively control. The CCP has examined the downfall of Communism in the Soviet Union from all possible angles, particularly with respect to the negative consequences that were unleashed by the “Gorbachev syndrome,” i.e., enacting political liberalization and reforms in the naive and mistaken belief that such efforts would actually strengthen and rejuvenate the party. At the heart of the dilemma that the CCP faces is that the party leadership is deathly afraid of relinquishing any meaningful power. As Fewsmith has written:
China has pursued political reform with very limited results for more than a decade. During this time, mass incidents have grown in number, scale, and intensity… . Can China continue to follow the path of fitful and mostly unsuccessful political reform and emerge, perhaps in another decade or so, as a more open and democratic (in whatever sense of the word) polity? Probably not. The only consistent concern running through the implementation of the various political reforms has been that they must not get out of control. This is one reason that they have mostly been implemented in smaller and more out-of-the-way places. As tensions rise in Chinese society, it will become increasingly difficult to pursue political reform precisely because the odds of experiments spinning out of control will increase.120 [Emphasis added.]
Notwithstanding China’s spectacular economic growth since reforms began in the late 1970s and genuine recognition of and support for what the party has managed to engineer, the CCP, like other authoritarian parties, has already crossed a crucial tipping point: namely, when the regime allocates as many resources, if not more, to ensure that it stays in power versus the allocation of resources for managing the normal affairs of state. Over time, however, the costs of policing its own citizens continuously are going to result in two major structural consequences: first, imbalances in resource allocation that will progressively worsen owing to the regime’s growing sense of vulnerability that will require even more resources to strengthen the already extensive police state; and second, growing mistrust in and among competing power centers and factions.
No two authoritarian regimes are the same given the interplay of numerous forces and contrasting political histories, organizational culture, and efficacy of the overarching security apparatus, but China is in a category of its own. Unlike previous Communist states such as the former Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe, the PRC is convinced that it has charted its own third way, where it is absolutely logical for a market economy and a one-party dictatorship to coexist. The CCP leadership believes that through a system of “consultative authoritarianism,” China will be able to restrain the arbitrary use of power, increase the participation of the local elite, and have some oversight over spending, but in the end, in Fewsmith’s opinion, “these features do not make it democratic, nor do they suggest a trend in that direction. On the contrary, to the extent that the system enhances intra-elite legitimacy, it still reinforces authoritarian, if less abusive, power.”121 And as Minxin Pei has argued:
The most serious threat to the viability of China’s gradualist approach, however, is the weakness of the institutions critical to the functioning of a market economy. Such institutions include, among other things, a modern legal system and a constitutional order that can protect private property rights and enforce contracts, as well as a political system that enforces accountability and limits state opportunism.122
Such assertions are obviously disputed by the CCP and leading advocates of the Communist Party such as Eric X. Li, who has written that Western notions of democracy are not fit for China and that it is nearly impossible for the West to see the resilience of the CCP and its governing institutions. Li contended that in addition to managing China’s challenges, “the country’s leaders will consolidate the one-party model and, in the process, challenge the West’s conventional wisdom about political development and the inevitable march toward electoral democracy. In the capital of the Middle Kingdom, the world might witness the birth of a post-democratic future.”123 (Emphasis added.) Li asserted that China’s particular system of pragmatic socialism has problems but stressed that the penchant for democracy and electoral systems in the West doesn’t necessarily lead to good governance and that “instead of producing capable leaders, electoral politics have made it very difficult for good leaders to gain power.”124 Finally, Li extolled the virtues of the Chinese development and political model, although it is unlikely to be duplicated outside of China.
The significance of China’s success, then, is not that China provides the world with an alternative but that it demonstrates that successful alternatives exist. Twenty-four years ago, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama predicated that all countries would eventually adopt liberal democracy and lamented that that the world would become a boring place because of that. Relief is on the way. A more interesting age may be upon us.125
What is abundantly clear is the fact that China isn’t going to adopt a more liberal political order given that such a move would mean the beginning of the end of the CCP. A far more important question that the party has to be prepared for is how it is going to produce and maintain political legitimacy when sustained high economic growth will no longer be the norm. In other words, while performance legitimacy has enabled the party to withstand political criticism by providing economic security and an increasingly higher standard of living for many of its citizens, the very foundation of performance legitimacy is going to become progressively weaker as China’s economy matures and its population ages. China is confronting a series of systemic problems and challenges that it hasn’t faced before. Since 2010, China has spent more money on domestic security than on its military budget, and, Tiancheng Wang wrote, “As of 2011, the PRC government was funneling more money toward the task of order-keeping at home than it spent on health care, foreign relations, and banking and securities regulation combined. This level of expenditure has been so stressful for local governments in poorer regions of the country that in 2009 Beijing had to adopt cost-sharing measures under which it pays up to 90 percent of the public-security tab in parts of central and western China.”126 While the Chinese government stopped releasing data on the number of domestic disturbances, Beijing reported 8,709 incidents in 1993. The figure jumped to 87,000 incidents by 2005, and Chinese academic sources have mentioned that there were some 180,000 incidents in 2010.127
Jonathan Walton has noted that “the lack of systemic reform in governance, accountability, and dispute resolution has also meant that Chinese policing institutions must bear an ever-increasing burden when it comes to preserving social stability, and there is no solution yet on the horizon.”128 The key problem for China is not that the regime is going to implode anytime in the near future but that state-society relations will become increasingly strained as accelerated growth rates begin to decline. Walton pointed out that as China’s growth rate declines, social tensions will increase, posing a major quandary for the Chinese leadership.
The real questions for China’s public security officials and reformers, then, are how difficult need this process be, how many people need suffer, and how much social disruption and chaos need occur before China emerges as a developed country? The preparations and organizational structures that Chinese leaders put in place now—including, one hopes, significant political reforms enacted by the central government—will go a long way toward making the process either easier or more difficult for everyone involved, average citizens and police alike.129
The Resilience Trap
In a December 1980 speech, Deng Xiaoping underscored the importance of maintaining the “Four Cardinal Principles” of upholding the socialist road, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the CCP, and Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought. Among these four principles, Deng emphasized that the most important one was maintaining leadership by the Communist Party.
We have said many times that without leadership by the Party a big country like China would be torn by strife and incapable of accomplishing anything. Whether inside or outside the Party, all tendencies towards weakening, breaking away from, opposing or liquidating leadership by the Party must be criticized. The individuals involved should be educated or, if necessary, struggles should be waged against them. Leadership by the Party is the key to the success of the four modernizations and of the current readjustment.130 [Emphasis added.]
During a meeting with visiting former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere on November 23, 1989, just two weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Deng was adamant that China would never allow “bourgeois liberalization,” which he argued was responsible for the rapid collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Deng was absolutely committed to China’s socialist path and stated that “China’s determination to adhere to socialism will not change… . We shall never deviate from this strategy. No threat can daunt us. Our Party was born amid threats and matured amid threats… . So long as socialism does not collapse in China, it will always hold its ground in the world.”131 Deng also asserted that the Tiananmen Square crackdown was inevitable and that China would never allow Western liberalization.
The turmoil that arose in China this year also had to come sooner or later. We ourselves were partly to blame. As you know, two of our General Secretaries fell because of their failure to deal with the problem of bourgeois liberalization. If China allowed bourgeois liberalization, there would inevitably be turmoil. We would accomplish nothing, and our principles, policies, line and three-stage development strategy would all be doomed to failure. Therefore, we must take resolute measures to stop any unrest. Whenever there is unrest in future, we must stop it, so as to maintain stability.132 [Emphases added.]
Since the founding of the PRC in 1949 and particularly in the aftermath of the devastating Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, maintaining social and political stability have remained at the heart of Communist rule in China. The premium on maintaining the CCP’s monopolization of power has always been perceived as being symbiotic with domestic stability, although the leadership was badly shaken by the tumultuous Tiananmen Square events of June 1989 that resulted ultimately in the CCP’s and the PLA’s brutal and bloody suppression of China’s short-lived democratization movement. The party has devoted tremendous energy to near-perfection of the system of weiwen, or stability maintenance, but scholars remain divided as to how long it can afford to maintain stability at all costs. As Xi Chen has noted, “The all-encompassing weiwen system—which includes everything from secret-police agencies to courts and petition-receiving offices that can be used to press popular claims—is good at responding to challenges in the short term, but creates many serious long-term problems along the way.”133
One of the many painful lessons that the party learned in the aftermath of Tiananmen was the need to reassert its firm control over public and semipublic agencies and to emphasize the party’s direct control over the People’s Congress, labor unions, other mass organizations, and the media.134 Since 1989, the party has become increasingly paranoid by clamping down on perceived or real dangers to its one-party rule since the party hasn’t been able to stem the increasingly powerful role of capital and technology as culture carriers. Particularly since the ascent of Xi Jinping, the party has intensified ideological education, strengthened China’s “Great Firewall” of the Internet, clamped down on dissidents, and compelled universities to crack down on supposedly dangerous Western thoughts on democratization and freedom of speech. Xi has attacked liberal thinking as a key threat to the party and a major source of unwanted contamination that must be eradicated. He has stated, the New York Times reported, that the party will “never allow singing to a tune contrary to the party center… . Never allow eating the Communist Party’s food and then smashing the Communist Party’s cooking pots.”135 Xi’s consolidation of power has had key repercussions within China, but it also serves external purposes because the last thing China wants is to be perceived by the outside world as a weak giant. Deng decreed as much as he was preparing to step down from all official positions in September 1989, and it is a perspective that continues to resonate today.
There are many people in the world who hope we will develop, but there are also many who are out to get us. We ourselves should maintain vigilance. We should safeguard our reputation for acting independently, for keeping the initiative in our own hands and for refusing to be taken in by fallacies or to tremble in the face of danger. And under no circumstances should we show any weakness. The more afraid you are and the more weakness you show, the more aggressive others will be. They will not be kind to you because you are weak. On the contrary, if you are weak, they will look down upon you. What are we afraid of? We are not afraid of war. We don’t think there will be a world war, but even if there were, we would not be afraid. Anyone who dared invade China would never get out again. China has a wealth of experience in resisting foreign aggression. We would first defeat the invaders and then start reconstruction.136 [Emphasis added.]
So long as the CCP remains in power, its leaders will adhere to the mantra of gradualism as the cornerstone of sustaining stability. They are very confident that with the right mixture of economic performance, just enough personal freedoms, greater accountability of officials, surging national pride, and China’s resurgence as a superpower, the CCP is going to remain fully in power well into the foreseeable future. Even the most ardent supporters of eventual democratization in China would probably agree that the regime is unlikely to implode akin to the former Communist regimes in Eastern Europe or even the USSR.
However, although it goes against virtually everything the party has called and stood for, China’s steadfast adherence to gradualism at virtually all costs may end up accelerating, rather than delaying, critical political reforms. For example, Tiancheng Wang, CEO of the National Committee of the Democratic Party of China and former lecturer of law at Peking University who was imprisoned for five years because of his dissident activities, has written that a democratic transition in China is likely to be activated under two conditions: first, the Communist Party can no longer afford the costs of maintaining control of Chinese society, and second, a triggering event shows the weakness of the outwardly strong regime that leads to mass unrest although the armed forces refuse to shoot citizens.137
As the CCP seeks to further strengthen its rule at home, it has also looked actively for similar models abroad. One model that it has singled out is Singapore, “and the main reason for this obsession with Singapore is that China’s authoritarian leaders are trying to avoid the ‘modernization trap’ for authoritarian regimes unwilling to democratize,” Stephan Ortmann and Mark R. Thompson wrote.138 In large part, Chinese officials have touted the so-called Singapore model since it has largely bucked the trend of other wealthy Asian states such as South Korea and Taiwan that have transitioned from authoritarian politics to successful democratization. For Beijing, Singapore provides key lessons on ideology and governance that fortifies one-party rule as part of a process of “illiberal adaption” that could be transferred to China.139 During the twenty-year period after diplomatic ties were established in 1990, China sent some 22,000 officials to Singapore on various study missions.140 Some of the key lessons that have been gleaned from Beijing’s “learning-from-Singapore,” according to Ortmann and Thompson, include the city-state’s “successful management of corruption, its professionalization of the one-party state with an emphasis on meritocracy and formalization of powers, and its growing responsiveness to the citizenry through community outreach mechanisms and by holding ‘authoritarian elections.’”141 But the Singaporean model is highly unlikely to strengthen the CCP’s rule at home given Singapore’s own changing political landscape with more open and competitive elections and the Pandora’s box that has been opened with the passing of Lee Kuan Yew. Moreover, unlike China, Singapore is a multicultural and a strongly Westernized society with a highly effective legal system that simply won’t be duplicated in China.142
Given that the CCP would never agree to competitive multiparty elections, some Chinese scholars have argued that if China emphasized the rule of law and intraparty democratization, such moves could be tantamount to setting into place meaningful political reforms without disrupting social stability. But as previous authoritarian-to-democratic transitions have shown in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia, it is impossible to control the pace of democratization once the bottle of freedom is uncorked. The essence of gradualism and incremental political reform in the Chinese context is very clear: so long as the CCP remains in charge and dictates the pace and terms of reform, it will also be able to roll back reforms if they get out of hand. However, even though the CCP is going to continue to tinker with incremental political reforms, it is unlikely to deviate from the parameters laid down by a consultative authoritarian system. Thus, the existential threat to the long-term staying power of the CCP doesn’t lie in the infiltration of anti-socialist ideas and values, external security threats, or factional strife and corruption, although these are important factors. The real peril to the CCP’s staying power lies in the hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens who have never been so educated, better-off materially, more internationalized, and freethinking than in the entire history of Chinese civilization. These empowered Chinese from all walks of life are the real dangers to the CCP’s iron grip on power—an epic irony and the unplanned legacy bequeathed by Deng Xiaoping’s pathbreaking reforms. Writing in the New York Times, the historian Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom took note of the contradictions.
One of Chairman Mao’s favorite words was “contradictions,” and today’s China is riddled with them: rule by a party that is nominally Communist, but embraces consumerism and welcomes entrepreneurs into its ranks; widespread unease about the environmental, social and even moral consequences of growth; deep insecurity in the ranks of a party that outwardly brims with confidence. The dark side of the Chinese dream—the negative fantasy that haunts China’s psyche—explains why Mr. Xi, the strongest Chinese leader since Deng, is so skittish, so ready to jump at shadows.143
Asia’s Dangerous Outliers
Thinking about Chinese futures rightly deserves critical attention given the profound ramifications foremost for China but also for Asia and the rest of the world. But Asia also faces several layers of political complications, including prospects for regime stability in key failed states such as North Korea and Pakistan, and the central role of the armed forces in sustaining regime security. More broadly, the militaries in Myanmar and Thailand illustrate the influence of the armed forces in shaping the politics in these two critical Southeast Asian states. Key hurdles are also present in the established democracies of India, Japan, and South Korea and in regimes such as Singapore that are transitioning to more liberal political orders. As important as democracy is, however, it is not a panacea for mending all or even most of Asia’s diverse political challenges given the distinctiveness and breadth of the region’s political deficits. But crucially, Asia’s overarching political deficits can be truly mitigated, and over the longer term overcome, only when democratic governance, the rule of law, basic human rights, freedom of conscience, a free press, and a robust civil society take hold. And without institutionalized democracy that guarantees civil rights and political freedoms to the greatest extent possible, Asia’s diverse, deep, and divisive political problems won’t be overcome but merely postponed, and ultimately they will worsen.
Progress and Relapses in Political Asia
According to Freedom House’s annual freedom ratings, among the twenty countries that make up South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia, four were regarded as “free” and nine as “partly free” so that 65 percent were considered to be at least “partly free,” while a minority of seven countries, or 35 percent, were considered to be “not free” (see table 6 and figure 5). Of the world’s 55 countries that were classified as not free, a dozen countries and territories were designated as the “worst of the worst” with the highest negative scores for both political rights and civil liberties given to North Korea, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tibet (although the latter was annexed by China in 1957). China and Laos were included in the next grouping of seven countries and territories that were deemed to be slightly better than the worst of the worst. In sum, three Northeast and Southeast Asian countries—North Korea, China, and Laos—were categorized as being in the worst or near-worst grouping of states with the lowest ratings for political rights and civil liberties.144
Notable progress has been made in the spreading of democracies in Asia since the late 1980s such as the reversion to democratic rule in the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia. Traditionally, the militaries in these four countries dominated national politics, but the armed forces have remained in the barracks since the restoration of democracy and have accepted full civilian control. In particular, the consolidation of democracy in Indonesia, which is the world’s third-largest democracy after India and the United States, exemplifies the misconceptions of “Asian values” that often highlight inherent Asian “limitations” in accommodating and institutionalizing democracy—an argument that continues to be made by the Chinese government and other semiauthoritarian states. With respect to Indonesia, the 1999 presidential election was the first that was held after the downfall of the Suharto regime (1967–1998). Since then, Indonesia has successfully undergone four peaceful transfers of power including the latest presidential election of July 2014, when Joko Widodo won the presidency with 53 percent versus Prabowo Subianto, who received 47 percent.
In another unexpected development, Sri Lanka’s election of January 8, 2015, resulted in the ouster of Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was in power for a decade in what many perceived to be an increasingly authoritarian presidency until his defeat by opposition candidate Maithripala Sirisena.145 As mentioned, however, the military continues to play a central political role in key countries such as Thailand where two successive democratically elected governments were overthrown by military coups in September 2006 and May 2014. And despite unprecedented changes in Myanmar including the release of pro-democracy leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest in 2010, the release of some 200 political prisoners, and the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) that won a landslide victory in the November 2015 parliamentary election—taking 390 seats out of 664 in the upper and lower houses—Myanmar is still governed by a nominally civilian government but one that is dominated by the military.146 A quarter of the seats in the parliament are reserved for the military, and three key security portfolios—interior, defense, and border affairs—must be held by the military. The army pays lip service to a more liberal political order, but it is still an order that is defined and guarded by the armed forces.147 In the absence of a neutral military that remains firmly under civilian control, Myanmar’s transition toward democracy is going to be rocky and uneven. Indeed, for Myanmar, and also Thailand, Pakistan, and even North Korea (although the latter is in a category all its own), the depoliticization of the armed forces in these countries is the sine qua non of viable political transformations. Of course, North Korea’s and Pakistan’s political transitions are complicated immensely by the fact that they are both failed states armed with nuclear weapons.
Failed States and Security Threats
Among the wide spectrum of political challenges existing in Asia in the 2010s, how Pakistan and North Korea evolve over the next ten to twenty years stands out as a major security challenge. Although the two countries have widely divergent political histories and cultures, any major fallout from endemic political crises (such as regime collapse in North Korea and loss of effective control of the nuclear arsenal or virtual breakdown of governance in Pakistan) could have critical repercussions and consequences for stability on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia, and in the Indian subcontinent.
Measuring, labeling, and characterizing regimes, governments, and states almost always entails heated debates, wide-ranging caveats, and imprecise and contentious definitions, and use of the term “failed states” is no exception. The term “failed states” was popularized with the publication of the Failed States Index by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine in 2005 to accentuate the challenges posed by states that came under increasing threats from their inability to cope adequately with twelve key indicators: demographic pressures, refugees and internally displaced persons, group grievances, human flight and brain drain, uneven economic development, poverty and economic decline, state legitimacy, public services, human rights and rule of law, security apparatus, factionalized elites, and external intervention. In 2014, the Failed States Index was renamed the Fragile States Index to highlight the fact that “fragile states” was a more broadly acceptable term. While acknowledging a distraction over the original name, the Fund for Peace noted that “over the last nine years, the Index has become the preeminent list assessing the pressures on states that affect their citizens on a range of social, environmental, economic, political, and security issues.”148 The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development also began to publish States of Fragility reports beginning in 2005 with a focus on addressing the vicious cycle triggered by absolute poverty, weak institutions, and greater vulnerabilities stemming from socioeconomic and environmental shocks and disasters.149
Detractors such as Michael Mazarr rightly pointed out that the term “failed states” lacks conceptual rigor owing to inexact terminologies and measurement indexes that can be highly subjective. As a result, Mazarr argued that policy prescriptions have also suffered with wide-ranging consequences. “This basic methodological flaw would distort state-building missions for years, as outside powers forced generic, universal solutions onto very specific contexts,” he wrote.150 In addition, Stewart Patrick noted in 2006 that “what is striking is how little empirical evidence underpins these assertions and policy developments. Analysts and policymakers alike have simply presumed the existence of a blanket connection between state weakness and threats to the national security of developed countries and have begun to recommend and implement policy responses.”151
These and other criticisms are well deserved since understanding the phenomenon of failed states is complicated by imprecise and subjective measurements in addition to other equally contentious terminologies such as “rogue regimes” and “pariah states” that are also often used. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding key shortcomings, the term “failed states” is used here to denote a condition in which the state’s ability to provide basic services and security for its citizens is progressively diminished. More important, the combination of a state that is both failed and is highly repressive and aggressive cannot be perceived as anything other than a critical security threat. Scholars who have pioneered the study of failed states say that the term “rogue states” should be used for a small group of states that are the most repressive and aggressive, that is, what Robert I. Rotberg called “aggressive repressors,” or “those nation-states that both immiserate their own citizens and also act belligerently and in a destabilizing manner toward the rest of the world.”152
All repressive states, by definition, greatly abuse their own citizens. They prey on them. They deny all or virtually all fundamental human rights and civil liberties; eschew or make mockery of democracy; use the mailed fist to compel obedience and achieve compliance with the demands (even whims) of their rulers or ruling juntas; obliterate the rule of law and instead follow the law of the jungle; assassinate opponents and take political prisoners; favor collective punishment of families, groups, and lineages; often are capricious in their policies and actions; totally command their economies; inhibit individual prosperity; are seriously corrupt; operate patrimonially, with fawning clients; build a personality cult while otherwise minimizing ideology; and often manage over many years to create a culture of dependency and conformity. In some cases, these repressive regimes even starve their followers, withholding food rations from most citizens while their rulers live luxuriously.153
North Korea: Gulags and Potemkin Reforms
Most of the attributes cited by Rotberg are evident in a number of repressive states. Rarely, though, does a country exhibit all the characteristics of a truly repressive as well as an aggressive state with the notable exception of North Korea. There have been abundant historical examples, such as the USSR under Stalin, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and Germany under Hitler. What makes North Korea stand out in the pantheon of repressive states is that it has been armed with nuclear weapons since 2006, is the world’s sole Communist dynasty, continues to be a major threat to all its neighbors, and yet persists as a regime that is supported economically and politically, and to a much lesser extent, militarily, by the PRC and tangentially, by Russia. On top of its nuclear-weapon capabilities, North Korea has demonstrated its ability to wage unconventional warfare, terrorist attacks, and military provocations. And despite its failed economy, North Korea manages to spend some 22 percent of its GDP on defense and maintains a 1.2 million-strong military. As C. Christine Fair cogently noted, “Pakistanis and analysts of Pakistan have long remarked, with more truth than hyperbole, that while generally countries have armies, in Pakistan, the army has a country.”154 In much the same vein, the same could be said about North Korea, but perhaps even more so, given the heightened level of militarization that permeates every level of North Korean society and the indispensable role of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) in maintaining regime security.
Ironically, however, with the exception of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, who fought guerrilla campaigns during the period of Japanese colonization, neither his son Kim Jong-il, who succeeded him after his death in 1994, or Kim Jong-il’s son, Kim Jong-un, who became the paramount leader after Kim Jong-il’s death in 2011, had any meaningful military experiences. Stephan Haggard, Luke Herman, and Jaesung Ryu observed, “Despite—or because of—his lack of military experience, Kim Jong Il turned to the military for support, and the militarization of the regime became even more pronounced. This militarization was formalized with the introduction of the so-called ‘military-first politics’ (songun) in 1998.”155 Although it is difficult to pinpoint the extent to which North Korea’s continuing militarization is likely to affect key national security choices, they contended that part of the reason Kim Jong-un retains power is by fine-tuning constant purges and changes in the military and security apparatus while also providing the military with a leading role in forging key national policies.
The announcement in early 2013 of the so-called byungjin line (a call for the simultaneous pursuit of nuclear weapons and economic development) was interpreted by some as a subtle departure from military-first politics. But in fact the byungjin line explicitly enshrined the country’s commitment to nuclear weapons, and as a result hardly seems like a strategic turn. The reliance on the military no doubt influences North Korea’s foreign and defense policy, characterized by particular assertiveness from the successful satellite-cum-missile test of December 2012 through the third nuclear test of February 2013, as well as the subsequent tensions on the peninsula that ensued following the imposition of further U.N. sanctions.156
Outside of North Korea, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has demonstrated its willingness to wage war against its own citizens as illustrated by the more than 400,000 casualties in the civil war. But North Korea’s approach to domestic repression and external aggression differs substantially from Syria’s. North Korea is the world’s most controlled society with the most extensive and brutal domestic surveillance and monitoring system, which enables the state to track virtually every citizen. In short, North Korea is the world’s remaining Orwellian state. Andrei Nikoaevich Lankov, In-ok Kwak, and Choong-Bin Cho described an existence for North Koreans unlike that of citizens anywhere:
Thanks to OL [organizational life] structures, for decades every adult North Korean has been involved in mutual surveillance, indoctrination, and coproduction activities. No other Leninist regime ever succeeded in achieving such a level of penetration—in fact, it is likely that no Leninist regime ever seriously considered such a goal, being satisfied with influencing the activist minority who were seen as future potential cadres of the bureaucracy as well as opinion leaders. This unusual totality of the system contributes to its efficiency as a regime-maintenance tool, as a way to ensure that North Koreans will make desirable conclusions from what they know—or think they know—about the world and society.157
Although sharp divisions exist in South Korea and the United States on how best to cope with the North Korean conundrum—engagement, sanctions, or a middle-of-the-road approach that encompasses both elements—there is perhaps a wider consensus over the fact that North Korea is, for all intents and purposes, a failed state. As Andrei Lankov has noted, “By all rational measures, North Korea is the model of a ‘failed state.’ The country is the poorest in East Asia, with a populace that struggles to survive on an annual income between some $500 and $1,200 … but Pyongyang has consistently outmaneuvered its more powerful adversaries while keeping its starving populace docile. The survival strategy followed by the North Korean regime rests upon a simple but effective imperative: control information at all costs.”158
North Korea maintains such information control not only through a pervasive surveillance system, but also through brutal suppression of imagined threats to the regime through purges, executions, torture, and the running of vast political concentration camps. According to the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights, in a report released in February 2014, “The inmate population has been gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labour, executions, torture, rape and the denial of reproductive rights enforced through punishment, forced abortion and infanticide. The commission estimates that hundreds of thousands of political prisoners have perished in these camps over the past five decades.”159 (Emphasis added.) In clear and concise language, the report noted that the North Korean regime remains in power through a systematic reign of terror:
The police and security forces of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea systematically employ violence and punishments that amount to gross human rights violations in order to create a climate of fear that pre-empts any challenge to the current system of government and to the ideology underpinning it. The institutions and officials involved are not held accountable. Impunity reigns… . As a matter of State policy, the authorities carry out executions, with or without trial, publicly or secretly, in response to political and other crimes that are often not among the most serious crimes. The policy of regularly carrying out public executions serves to instill fear in the general population.160 [Emphases added.]
North Korea’s total disregard for even a modicum of basic human rights and the record of massive killings through the past five decades prompted the report to declare that “the commission finds that the body of testimony and other information it received establishes that crimes against humanity have been committed in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, pursuant to policies established at the highest level of the State.”161 It furthermore noted that “these crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.”162 The Washington Post noted in a February 19, 2014, editorial that:
[The] report says North Korea’s camps and methods of political repression rival the worst of the 20th century’s totalitarian crimes: Hitler’s concentration camps and Stalin’s prison system. This is happening not in the 1940s or 1950s but in our own time. [The] report says the world has a “responsibility to protect” the victims, but the response has been inadequate. We agree: North Korea’s leaders must be held accountable.163
Although the UN report was a milestone in addressing North Korea’s crimes against humanity, some key aspects of human rights abuses were not part of the commission’s mandate. For example, the report did not fully investigate the critical issue of forced slave labor, particularly those who are involved in the North Korean nuclear program and overseas forced laborers, “since their suffering is tied to the issue of nuclear proliferation and how the regime funds its activities,” as noted by the scholars Shin Chang-Hoon and Go Myong-Hyun.164 The International Network for the Human Rights of North Korean Overseas Labor estimates that the North Korean government’s annual profit from overseas forced laborers amounts to $1.2 billion to $2.3 billion.165 Some 50,000 North Korean workers are forced to work overseas in some 45 countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, with the highest numbers concentrated in Russia (20,000) and China (19,000). Rampant abuse of these forced laborers includes the absence of standardized labor contracts. Though workers “volunteered,” they did so under the impression that they would earn considerably higher wages; only 10–20 percent of their total wages was given as stipends to the workers, while the rest was collected by the local North Korean companies for transfer to North Korea.166
Going Against the Tide of History
The major reason Asia and the rest of the world must be concerned with what’s happening inside North Korea is that the repression there is the long version of Cambodia’s killing fields under the Khmer Rouge’s bloody reign of terror from 1975 to 1979. Equally important, North Korea will continue to be a major security threat to its neighbors unless fundamental political change occurs within North Korea. How the regime is going to evolve under Kim Jong-un is difficult to gauge, but despite the fact that Kim has espoused the “byungjin nosun,” or a parallel track, under which he can strengthen the economy while simultaneously beefing up his nuclear-weapon arsenal, prospects for genuine economic reforms akin to the openings in China and Vietnam are highly unlikely. The major barrier to systematic economic reforms is that the moment Pyongyang begins to seriously introduce market principles and policies, it would trigger a range of political and social consequences that the regime won’t be able to control.
Since the 1990s, engagement proponents have maintained that North Korea was on the verge of enacting economic reforms but that it was thwarted by worsening external security environments, specifically, increasingly stringent economic sanctions and the hardline and so-called hostile policies advocated by conservative governments in the United States (the George W. Bush administration) and in South Korea (the Lee Myung-bak administration), or for that matter, even under the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama. But the bottom line has always been that if North Korea were genuinely interested in implementing wide-ranging reforms, its leadership certainly had the political power to do so and ultimately chose not to. Active political and economic engagement during the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations in Seoul didn’t result in any meaningful political or strategic change in North Korea. Indeed, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in 2006 during the height of South Korea’s Sunshine Policy era to engage the North in peaceful coexistence.
Kim Jong-il instituted some economic changes to elevate his son’s popularity in the eyes of North Koreans, beginning with the currency reform measure of November 2009. But this proved to be disastrous for the North Korean economy. Since 2014, however, the debate has intensified on whether North Korea has embarked on meaningful economic reforms under Kim Jong-un. For example, on May 30, 2014, North Korea announced plans to provide greater freedom to its farmers, such as enabling them to keep 60 percent of their total harvest while the state takes the rest, and giving greater flexibility to factory managers.167 The Economist reported in February 2015 that one of the biggest changes that was happening in North Korea’s collectivized farms was that farmers were now allowed to retain 30 percent of a new quota on production and to keep any excess harvest above the quota.168 The Economist’s account noted that North Korea was responding to, rather than taking the lead in enacting economic reforms:
The collapse of the public distribution system, through which the command economy used to apportion goods, including food, was both a cause and consequence of the famine. Informal trading and smuggling networks, and black markets for food, sprang up as a result of it. The state has on occasion tried to suppress these markets, but has no more succeeded than with its attempts to reinstate the distribution system. Today, three-quarters of what most people earn probably comes from an unregulated private economy.169
North Korea has also earned hard currency through natural resource extraction deals with Chinese companies, has created a number of special economic zones (although none that is fully operational), and has granted de facto permission to conduct private trade. Prospects for meaningful reforms, however, remain limited.170 And in any case, key structural problems exist: massive, institutionalized corruption, immense resource allocation into the defense sector, and a pervasive fear of persecution and purges, among others. Moreover, as Christopher Green has written, “the country’s economy is bound to struggle unless an influx of seed capital can be secured to generate sustainable economic growth. In North Korea, that kind of outcome still seems very distant.”171 As Marcus Noland of the Peterson Institute for International Economics put it, “The regime wants the country to be modern, wants it to be prosperous, but it wants these things on its own terms.” He added, “The government is attempting to tweak or improve the efficiency of the existing socialist or state-dominated system but it is not pursuing any fundamental reform.”172
North Korea’s future trajectories are going to be affected by a combination of forces including the subtle but growing pushback to decades of unrelenting, crushing, and unparalleled repression; the growing disconnect between the ruling elites and the nomenklatura with the citizens they purportedly are looking after; the flourishing of corruption at every level of the party, government, and security apparatuses; decades of economic mismanagement and structural de facto famine; and a state that garners the least amount of credibility in the international community. By any measure, a regime with such traits wouldn’t last very long. North Korea has been able to do so by the unmatched depth and extension of suppression, terror, and unprecedented culture of fear that permeate every sector of society, and vital external assistance. Yet if history serves as a guide, once the curtain of fear is lifted on despots and dictators whose grip on power seemed to be ironclad, even the most brutal regimes can collapse. Witness the fate of Nicolae Ceauşescu, the longtime dictator of Romania who was ousted and ultimately executed on December 25, 1989. As for Pyongyang, Bruce W. Bennett and Jennifer Lind wrote, “No one knows when the government in North Korea might collapse, and indeed the country may limp along for another few decades. But even if one believes that a North Korean government collapse is unlikely, the magnitude of the problems that it might cause makes this contingency worth studying.”173
On December 13, 2014, North Korea announced the execution of Kim Jong-un’s uncle Jang Song-thaek, who was considered to be one of the most powerful figures in the North Korean political hierarchy and who played a key role in engineering Kim Jong-un’s rise to power. Jang was accused of “anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional acts” and every other accusation and was then summarily executed.174 According to South Korean press reports, Jang’s sister Jang Kye-sun and her husband, Jon Yong-jin, who was North Korea’s ambassador to Cuba, and Jang Yong-chol, who was Jang Song-thaek’s nephew, among others, were also executed.175 Kim Jong-un may have been prodded by the growing power of Jang’s supporters including alleged competition with Kim Jong-un’s cronies for hard-currency earnings or ensuring his grip on power by demonstrating his willingness and ability to kill those who were closest to him and the Kim dynasty. But whatever the motive, the execution of Jang may well be remembered as the beginning of the unraveling of the Kim dynasty. In May 2015, it was revealed by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service that then North Korean defense minister Hyon Yongchol was executed by antiaircraft fire for disloyalty and being disrespectful to Kim Jong-un.176 Kim Jong-un’s reign of terror has persisted since he came to power in early 2012, but a rising number of high-level defectors to South Korea suggests that Kim’s unpredictable leadership, combined with constant purges, is resulting in growing challenges to regime stability. In July 2015, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported that an official in charge of Office 39, which handles hard-currency operations for Kim Jong-un, had defected to South Korea in addition to General Pak Jae-gyong, who had served as vice defense minister.177 A South Korean newspaper, the Donga-Ilbo, reported that General Pak Seung-won defected to South Korea via Moscow in April 2015. He was well known to South Korean authorities since he served as the deputy head of delegation to the first South-North Defense Ministers’ Talks in 2000 and previously was defense attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Moscow.178
The Pakistani Quagmire
If North Korea is the worst of the worst as a failed state that is also truly oppressive and aggressive, Pakistan is also a failed state that poses a major security threat. But its political environments and challenges are considerably different than North Korea’s. On a more positive note, Pakistan passed a critical milestone in 2013 when an elected civilian government completed its full five-year term and after more than fourteen years in the political wilderness, two-time Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was elected to an unprecedented third term.179 Moreover, the passage of the eighteenth constitutional amendment relegated the presidency to a ceremonial post with the transfer of power to the prime minister and also provided the provinces with greater autonomy.
Pakistan registered a 2.9 percent GDP growth rate from 2008 to 2013 but did much better in 2014 with 4.1 percent growth, and the economy is slated to expand by 4.2 percent in 2015, according to estimates made by the Asian Development Bank.180 Nevertheless, Pakistan faces significant hurdles that constrain an economic takeoff like its archrival India or the newly emerging economies in Southeast Asia. For example, Pakistan’s annual population growth is 2 percent with a population of nearly 190 million, and it is expected to have one of Asia’s largest population expansions over the next two to three decades that will place severe pressures on already highly insufficient energy and social welfare infrastructures. As the Economist noted in February 2014, “Thanks to a stagnant economy, millions of young Pakistanis are without jobs or regular incomes, especially in the burgeoning cities. Poverty and bleak prospects must surely be contributing to the extremist violence that daily rocks the country.”181
According to the Heritage Foundation’s 2015 Index of Economic Freedom, Pakistan’s economic freedom score was 55.6 (of a maximum score of 100), ranking 121 out of 178 countries. Although Pakistan has made some progress in such areas as greater investment freedom and monetary freedom, these gains have been outweighed by the challenges facing Pakistan given that “large sections of the population live in poverty and survive through subsistence agriculture [and] inefficient regulatory agencies inhibit business formation.”182 The report also noted that Pakistan’s biggest challenges stem from a collusion of systematic problems.
Corruption, lack of accountability, and lack of transparency continue to pervade all levels of government, politics, and the military despite some improvements in democratic processes. Oversight mechanisms remain weak. Property rights are not protected effectively. The functioning of the higher judiciary has improved, but delays, corruption, intimidation, and political interference are endemic in the broader justice system.183
Understanding the depth and magnitude of the challenges confronting Pakistan is hardly an easy task. But reduced to their essential form, Pakistan’s obstacles can be likened to multiple and crisscrossing conveyor belts that reinforce and in many ways, perpetuate, the innate problems contained in each of the conveyor belts. The net result is the creation of an immense vortex comprising the following forces: the perennial struggle between the army and a divided and weak civilian political elite coupled with fragile democratic institutions; deeply embedded conflicts between different ethnic groups concerning participation and autonomy after independence; the optimal balance of the role of religion in state and society; immense dislocation between the governing elites and masses; harsh geopolitical realities and the enmity fueled by deep-seated vitriolic animosity toward India; very fragile economic, educational, and cultural institutions that inhibit the creation and maintenance of robust civil society; and the growing problem of self-created but also externally driven terrorism.184
Although Pakistan is a de facto democracy, it is an anemic one that is constantly plagued by the preponderant role of the armed forces, and that is highly unlikely to change. While nominally under civilian control, Pakistan’s armed forces have overthrown governments it deemed to be unworthy of the national trust; in many ways, the armed forces are much stronger and more resilient than the Pakistani state. For example, during heated demonstrations against the government of Nawaz Sharif in the summer of 2014 over disputes about the May 2013 election, Pakistan’s overwhelmingly powerful army stated publicly that it was “committed to playing its part in ensuring security of the state,” while in reality it ordered the government to settle its political problems promptly. The army statement emphasized its “serious concern” over the seeming deterioration of the government’s ability to control events and said that the situation “should be resolved politically without wasting any time and without recourse to violent means.”185 As C. Christine Fair has noted:
Even if Pakistan were to undergo a permanent democratic transition in which civilians shape foreign and domestic policies … it does not obviously follow that the civilians would abandon the policy of persistent revisionism with respect to India. This is because of the deep presence of the army’s strategic culture, based on the ideology of Islam and the two-nation theory, within Pakistan’s civil society, political culture, and bureaucracies. It is certainly reasonable to posit that such a democratic transition is a necessary but insufficient condition for Pakistan to move away from its persistent revisionism, but a democratic transition is unlikely to lead to a change in the preferred policies of the state without a fundamental evolution in the ideology of Pakistan.186
Notwithstanding the importance of consolidating democracy and related institutions and norms in Pakistan, an equally daunting challenge is reforming the army’s strategic culture and the poisonous distinction between “good” terrorists who attack India and the “bad” terrorists or Taliban who attack Pakistan.187 Pakistan often justifiably asserts that it was forced to assume the role as a critical front line in the fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1988, only to be left in the lurch after a bloodied Soviet Union withdrew in May 1988. Consequently, the resulting political vacuum and high uncertainty in Afghanistan forced Pakistan to absorb unprecedented numbers of Afghan refugees during and after the Soviet occupation. And when Pakistan was again asked by the United States after the September 11 attacks to become a key staging ground for the fight against the Taliban and other extremist forces, Islamabad agreed. But one of the fundamental problems confronting Pakistan was summed up by then U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton in 2011 when she observed that it was dangerous to breed poisonous snakes in your backyard and expect them to bite only your neighbors, given that more than 50,000 Pakistanis had died in terrorist attacks since 2001.188 In essence, C. Christine Fair wrote, “the army’s arrogation of the responsibility for defending the ideology of Pakistan means that it defines the threat from India in ideational and civilizational as well as military terms. For the army, acquiescing to India is tantamount to accepting that the two-nation theory is illegitimate or defunct, thus undermining the founding logic of Pakistan itself.”189
Breaking Out of the Sisyphean Cycle
Can Pakistan extricate itself from this vicious cycle? This central question is going to depend on whether some of the most regressive conveyor belts mentioned above can be stopped, such as the army’s insistence on rigid national security constructs and its core belief that it has the moral duty to guide Pakistan. It also remains highly uncertain whether the Pakistani army will be able to effectively eradicate or substantially weaken homegrown terrorist and militant groups. Crucially, any major improvement in Pakistan’s external security environment, however, is contingent on recalibrating its decades-old strategic rivalry with India and removing the army and intelligence agency’s direct and indirect support for militants in Pakistan and in the border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It goes without saying that Pakistan has to implement comprehensive and long-term socioeconomic and political programs to alleviate deep pockets of poverty and allocate significant investments and resources into public education. Addressing Pakistan’s chronic poverty is arguably the most important national development agenda given the implications of Pakistan’s rapidly increasing population and how a growing population could influence Pakistan’s security environment.
Business Monitor International’s 2014 Pakistan report emphasized that together with other regional countries such as Afghanistan and Bangladesh, Pakistan has one of the highest total fertility rates: 3.2, which is well above the replacement level of 2.1. Assuming that this trend holds, Pakistan’s population surge is going to result in severe strains on already stretched resources, limited prospects for creating vast numbers of jobs for the growing segment of unemployed and underemployed youths, and the need to pay greater attention to realistic antipoverty schemes.190 Pakistan already registered a nearly fourfold increase in population, from 45 million in 1950 to about 174 million in 2010. According to the United Nations’ 2012 revised population projection data and based on a medium rate of fertility, Pakistan’s population is expected to increase further, from 174 million in 2010 to 203 million in 2020, 231 million in 2030, 254 million in 2040, and 271 million in 2050.191 But if one projects Pakistan’s population growth based on a high fertility variant, the population surges from 174 million in 2010 to 244 million in 2030 and topping 308 million by 2050.192
Based on standard or medium variant fertility projections, the Population Council estimates that Pakistan’s population will grow from 174 million in 2010 to 302 million in 2050, but this projection is based on the assumption that fertility will drop sharply over the next two to three decades owing to some strengthening of Pakistan’s family planning program.193 However, assuming a freeze in family planning investments, the fertility rate could be half a birth higher so that under such a scenario, Pakistan’s population could increase to 342 million by 2050. Conversely, if extensive investments are made in family planning, the future fertility trajectory could be half a birth below the medium variant so that Pakistan’s population will grow to 266 million by 2050.194 Again, these projections clearly illustrate the overwhelming importance of preventive investments in family planning, education, healthcare, and social welfare if Pakistan is to overcome the virtually unending vicious cycle between poverty and extremism. But such an overhaul won’t be possible unless and until the power elites in Pakistan—in particular, the military—are willing to implement far-reaching reforms beginning with the army’s self-imposed withdrawal from the political arena.
Pakistan’s overarching quagmire is arguably the result of a combustive action-response cycle that has become progressively more difficult, if not practically impossible, to overcome. The significant drawdown of U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) combat forces from Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate Pakistan’s own sense of insecurity that has triggered Islamabad to pressure the Taliban to conduct direct negotiations with the government in Kabul. General Raheel Sharif, the Pakistani army chief of staff, is believed to have led the Pakistani delegation in secret talks with leaders in the Afghan government led by President Ashraf Ghani and passed on the message that the Taliban were willing to conduct negotiations in the near future. As the New York Times reported, “If true, that would be a sharp reversal both for the insurgents, who have fought a deadly 13-year campaign against the government, and for the Pakistani military, which has long been accused of nurturing the Afghan Taliban as proxies.”195 Whether such talks will actually happen and, more important, result in a fundamental shift in the Taliban’s strategy remains highly uncertain given key unknowns such as the decision that will be made after the death of the Taliban’s reclusive religious leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, the ability of the Ghani government to maintain security primarily by its own forces, and the Pakistani army’s long-term commitment to forging a new relationship with Afghanistan.
But if the past is any guide, a fundamental rapprochement between the Ghani government and the Taliban seems quite unlikely, not to mention the equally dim prospects for the Pakistani army’s support for “good” militants, or those who have attacked India and Afghanistan in the belief that such actions would sow instability in India and thereby constrain New Delhi’s options vis-à-vis Islamabad. But key militant groups that received support from Pakistani intelligence, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group that carried out the deadly 2008 attacks in Mumbai, continue to function in Pakistan. “Not only does its leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, who has a $10 million United States government bounty on his head, live openly in the eastern city of Lahore, but he has also built a public profile as a media personality,” the New York Times reported.196 His brother-in-law Hafiz Abdul Rehman Makki gave a sermon in which he accused NATO of infiltrating terrorists into Pakistan disguised as Muslims and then intimated that India was behind the December 16, 2014, Peshawar massacre where 132 schoolchildren were killed by Tehreek-e-Taliban militants.197 And in the final analysis, the New York Times said, “Once anger over the Peshawar massacre has dissipated, the debate over militancy will once again be clouded in confusion and obfuscation—which, as recent years have shown, offers an ideal moment for the Taliban to strike again.”198
Authoritarianism’s Many Shades
How Pakistan and North Korea evolve into the 2020s and beyond will have profound repercussions for regional security given that they both lie at the epicenter of Asia’s most volatile and potentially explosive powder kegs. The future paths of these two distinct but also similar states matter because each of them opened its own Pandora’s box, unleashing ramifications that are still occurring. For Pakistan, the various militant groups that its army supported over the years to destabilize India and Afghanistan have come full circle since the army can no longer contain, if it ever could, those very terrorist networks it promoted within and outside of Pakistan. For North Korea, the amassing of WMD, including nuclear weapons, which is regarded as the capstone of Kim Jong-il’s reign and one that his son, Kim Jong-un, remains fully committed to, has resulted in the hardening of all its neighbors’ responses. And so long as North Korea retains and even strengthens its nuclear arsenal, Kim Jong-un’s options are going to progressively narrow, rather than widen. But at the same time, Seoul has to understand that Pyongyang will never give up its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles through negotiations unless those negotiations include the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea and the de facto termination of the alliance between South Korea and the United States.
As noted above, Pakistan’s and North Korea’s nuclear-weapon programs had different roots and evolutionary paths. But despite key political and strategic differences, both countries have also been trapped by the increasingly distorted worldviews of their respective leaderships and their militaries. Specifically, Islamabad and Pyongyang share the following traits. The first is the inability to accept the profoundly different trajectories pursued by their archrivals that have enabled India and South Korea to rise as Asia’s third- and fourth-largest economies, respectively. Second is the allocation of immense resources to maintain their respective armed forces and security apparatuses at the direct expense of social, economic, and cultural development. The third attribute is the dominance of political and military elites driven by an extreme personality cult in North Korea and the cult of the military as the sacred guardian of an Islamic state and corresponding national identity in Pakistan. Fourth is that they attempt to maximize concessions and assistance from key outside actors based on threats that they self-engineer while continuing to depend on China as their only viable patron. And the fifth trait is that they prioritize regime survival and security as the highest national goal while sacrificing the welfare of their own citizens and thwarting (in the case of Pakistan) and brutally oppressing (in the case of North Korea) all forces that are perceived to be enemies of the state. But as long as the Kim dynasty remains in power in Pyongyang and the military remains the predominant institution in Islamabad, prospects for genuine reforms are going to remain more in the realm of great expectations and misconstrued assumptions about regime behavior in North Korea and Pakistan.
Staggering Toward Reforms in Myanmar
If North Korea and Pakistan are in a political class all to themselves based on their nuclear weapons and ballistic missile partnership that was forged through the A. Q. Khan network, other Asian countries such as Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand face important political challenges and transitions albeit with significantly different political cultures and environments. All three are core members of ASEAN with significant economic, political, and military capabilities. Vietnam has the largest population (92 million), followed by Thailand (67 million) and Myanmar (55 million), while Thailand has the largest economy with a GDP of $645 billion in purchasing power parity (PPP) followed by Vietnam ($320 billion) and Myanmar ($89 billion). Militarily, Vietnam has the largest standing army with 482,000 troops, followed by Myanmar with 406,000 and Thailand with 305,000. Myanmar remains the least developed economically given that the late Burmese strongman Ne Win, who led the country from 1962 to 1988, imposed a Burmese version of socialism that effectively cut off Burma from the rest of the world. While Myanmar has opened up under the quasi-military but nominally civilian government headed by President Thein Sein, expectations of wide-ranging reforms seemed to peak with his groundbreaking visit to Washington in May 2013. Myanmar has made important transitions such as the November 2010 parliamentary election in which opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD won a resounding 43 of the 44 contested seats in the lower house, but the government has been dragging its heels on democratic reforms.199
Aung San Suu Kyi’s decisive victory in the November 2015 parliamentary election propelled her to the forefront of Myanmar’s political landscape, and President Thein Sein stated after the election that “as the government, we will respect and obey election results and transfer power peacefully.”200 But Aung San Suu Kyi faces key hurdles because under the 2008 constitution that was crafted by the military (referred to traditionally as the Tatmadaw), the military is guaranteed 25 percent of the seats in parliament and, as Hunter Marston wrote, “guards murky constitutional rights to seize political power in the event of a national emergency.”201 Furthermore, article 59 stipulates that families of candidates must “not owe allegiance to a foreign power, not be a subject of a foreign power or a citizen of a foreign country,” which rules out Aung San Suu Kyi since her two sons are British citizens. Equally problematic is article 436, which requires a 75 percent vote in the parliament to amend the constitution, but since the army automatically retains 25 percent of the seats in parliament, constitutional changes are virtually impossible unless major antidemocratic articles are repealed.202
In the aftermath of the NLD’s stunning triumph with 78 percent of all electable seats in both houses of parliament, the party is theoretically able to amend key provisions of the constitution.203 However, Aung San Suu Kyi has to balance her desire to exercise real political power with assuring the armed forces that she is prepared to work with them. A few days before the election, she declared that regardless of the constitutional provisions that currently bar her from becoming president, “I will be above the president,” adding “I will run the government, and we will have a president who will work with the policies of the NLD.”204 On November 23, 2015, Myanmar’s powerful commander in chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, said that he was prepared to discuss any topic with Aung San Suu Kyi, although he did not clearly say whether he was in favor of repealing key amendments. When asked if the military could promise to abide by the election results, he responded, “Our election was free and fair. The president already agreed to the transition of government. This is the right thing, and we [plan to] follow our president.”205
More worrisome than the ongoing political transition in Myanmar is the specter of rising communal violence against Muslim communities. Human Rights Watch’s 2014 report stressed that “the condition of the displaced Rohingya Muslim minority in northern Arakan State remained precarious in 2013, even with a considerable international humanitarian response. At time of writing, an estimated 180,000 people, mostly Muslims, remained in over 40 IDP [internally displaced person] camps throughout Arakan State, many living in deplorable conditions.”206
Although the military realizes that it cannot stop the transition to gradual civilian rule, the more important issue is whether the army is prepared to give up its entrenched grip on the country’s intelligence and security organs in addition to a myriad network of companies that are either run by the military or by its cronies. Moreover, given that the military dictatorship has suppressed the growth of independent political and economic institutions since the early 1960s, even as Myanmar transitions to de facto democratic rule under civilian leadership, it may well take several decades to empower key institutions.
Overcoming Fifty Years of Oppression
As evinced by the uneven pace of political and economic reforms in the former Communist states in Eastern Europe and indeed, the wholesale deterioration of political conditions and the growing evisceration of civil liberties in Russia under Vladimir Putin’s regime, countries that have been ruled under decades of dictatorship with very weak civil societies, feeble institutions, and perfunctory rule of law traditions face inordinate challenges on the road toward more liberal political processes. Myanmar has traveled down similar pathways, and the military was able to maintain power for half a century by adroitly exploiting three major structural weaknesses. The first was, as Priscilla A. Clapp described it, the enduring perception that Myanmar’s diverse ethnic groups were “fragile and could disintegrate at any moment. This fear kept the young Burmese democracy from delivering peace and prosperity to its people.”207 Second was the manipulation of significant political and economic gaps between upper and lower Myanmar such as the fact that cease-fire agreements signed with different insurgent groups have also resulted in greater local autonomy but the central government neglected development in the most remote areas so that lower Myanmar was much more developed economically.208 And the third weakness was the dearth of independent political institutions and decades of repressive military rule that have all but prevented the growth of a new group of leaders, particularly in the opposition. The upshot is that the army was able to dominate not only in the political arena but also in the economic realm, which was permeated by top officers in the armed forces or their business cronies.
Despite the lifting of international sanctions and the implementation of some economic reforms, military leaders and their families continue to own major holding companies and key economic organizations such as the Myanmar Economic Corporation and the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Limited. Moreover, the latter still had investments in more than 50 diversified companies in 2013. Most important, neither of these two companies or their directly owned companies paid taxes.209 Thus, Myanmar is a prototypical case of what Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson referred to as the phenomenon of extractive political institutions that stymies genuine economic growth:
There is strong synergy between economic and political institutions. Extractive political institutions concentrate power in the hands of a narrow elite and place few constraints on the exercise of this power. Economic institutions are then often structured by this elite to extract resources from the rest of the society. Extractive economic institutions thus naturally accompany extractive political institutions. In fact, they must inherently depend on extractive political institutions for their survival. Inclusive political institutions, vesting power broadly, would tend to uproot economic institutions that expropriate the resources of the many, erect entry barriers, and suppress the functioning of markets so that only a few benefit.210
As a result, the structurally skewed Burmese economy that was wrecked by half a century of a socialistic planning dominated by military-backed state companies and their cronies is unlikely to be reformed anytime in the near future. Moreover, unless the mutually reinforcing relationship between the army and the economic and business elites is broken up by a bottom-up social revolution, meaningful economic reforms such as guaranteeing property rights, transparency and accountability in business transactions, contractual and legal mechanisms, and open transmission of information aren’t likely to be institutionalized. Indeed, so long as the elites continue to extract critical benefits from the system, there is no incentive to change it. Moreover, as Acemoglu and Robinson noted, “The resources these economic institutions generated enabled these elites to build armies and security forces to defend their absolutist monopoly of political power. The implication of course is that extractive political and economic institutions support each other and tend to persist.”211
In the final analysis, the future of reforms in Myanmar is going to depend critically on the military’s ability to remove itself as the ultimate guarantor of the Burmese state and, equally importantly, on the degree to which the military can extricate itself from decades of built-in economic incentives.212 Clearly, Myanmar isn’t North Korea as evinced by the political changes triggered in the aftermath of Aung San Suu Kyi’s November 2015 political tsunami and the beginning of meaningful political changes. If the military ultimately agrees to constitutional amendments that would allow Aung San Suu Kyi to assume the presidency, such a move would pave the way for a genuine reconciliation. Yet, as long as the armed forces retain their grip on power, Myanmar’s transition toward greater democratization, rule of law, and a strengthened civil society is likely to be a work in progress with volatile speed bumps.
Going Backward in Thailand
As in Myanmar where the military looms over the political landscape, the biggest impediment toward genuine democratization in Thailand rests with the Thai military. It, too, regards itself as the final guarantor of the state. Since the end of absolute monarchy in Thailand in 1932, the country has had 29 governments; Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, a retired general, is Thailand’s twelfth military strongman to hold the post. Thailand also has had eighteen military coups. More important, in the context of Thai politics, military coups have gained a semblance of legitimacy only because there have been so many and, the Economist pointed out, the fact that “the monarchy has endorsed all successful coups, including one in May 2014 that ousted Yingluck Shinawatra, who had won a landslide victory in a general election in 2011.”213
The current military regime and the rubber-stamp parliament impeached Yingluck, banned her from politics, and also accused her of criminal activities.214 Earlier, in September 2006, the Thai military removed Thaksin Shinawatra (Yingluck Shinawatra’s brother) as prime minister. He had come into office in January 2001 on a populist platform and was reelected in a landslide in February 2005 after his government introduced health and credit policies for the rural poor. Over the past three decades, Thailand’s economy has been transformed from a predominantly agricultural country to a significant industrial player. As noted earlier, its GDP is larger than the combined output of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam, and that accounts for Thailand’s position as the most powerful economy in Indochina. Nevertheless, more than a decade of intense and deepening political rivalries and divisions between Thailand’s rural and urban populations and between populist political leaders and the city elites who have generally stood behind the military-backed anti-Thaksin coalition have had negative consequences for Thailand’s economic performance. The Economist drew attention to the country’s immense shadow economy.
Thailand’s record since 1997 in improving its citizens’ standards of living has been unimpressive, fuelling political divisions. Many explanations have been proposed for this sluggish performance: a “middle-income trap”, a turf war among Thai elites over resources, an ageing population and a broken education system. What the official figures ignore are incomes from Thailand’s massive shadow economy, which, as a share of GDP, is bigger than any other in Asia. According to the World Bank, only half of all income shows up in Thailand’s national-accounts data.215
On January 26, 2015, visiting U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel R. Russel remarked during a speech at Chulalongkorn University that despite the long-standing alliance between Thailand and the United States, the relationship “has been challenged by the military coup that removed a democratically-elected government eight months ago… . We believe it is for the Thai people to determine the legitimacy of their political and legal processes. But we are concerned about the significant restraints on freedoms since the coup, including restrictions on speech and on assembly.”216 Russel also stated that the Thai government’s decision to impeach Yingluck Shinawatra and to bring criminal charges against her was happening when the democratic process and institutions were interrupted and that the international community was going to be left with the impression that those steps were politically driven.
As the most senior U.S. official to visit Thailand since the May 2014 coup, Russel also called on Thai authorities to lift martial law and stated that “Thailand is losing credibility in the eyes of its international friends and partners by not moving more quickly to end martial law, to restore civil rights and to ensure that this effort to engineer a new constitution and hold elections is not purely a top-down affair.”217 The Thai government strongly protested Russel’s speech and his “intervention in domestic politics,” and Deputy Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai conveyed Bangkok’s official “disappointment” to the U.S. chargé d’affaires, W. Patrick Murphy. The Thai official also remarked that “democracy does not mean only elections. There are many related elements essential to lead the nation to sustainable development. Although the present government was not elected and is a military one, it does everything in the national interest.”218
The Challenges of Consolidating Democracy
Ensuring that democratic institutions, processes, and values continue to thrive is always a work in progress, and the most symbolic and important deterioration has occurred in Thailand. “From the standpoint of Asian politics, where democratic transitions follow modernization and are initiated by state actors, the most surprising failed consolidation is Thailand,”219 Bruce Gilley observed. In addition to the military’s determination to step in and run Thailand if it’s displeased with the sitting civilian government, Thailand’s traditional ruling elites, whose nature is inherently conservative, were shocked at the wave of popular support that Thaksin was able to generate, according to Thongchai Winichakul, a longtime observer of Thai politics. Moreover, he said that “the rise of a new urban, formerly rural, sector—this kind of social structural change is in conflict with the existing political system. People who are newly urban become charged with energy for electoral democracy, in conflict with the political system where the network of the monarchy is kind of dominant within the elite, which never trusts electoral democracy.”220 But according to Andrew MacGregor Marshall, the ruling elites and the military “have failed to grasp that if they keep removing elected governments they will face a popular uprising by Thais who refuse to accept their rights being repeatedly denied and their votes routinely ignored. The people of twenty-first-century Thailand will not allow democracy to be taken away without a fight.”221
Despite the regression of Thai democracy and every indication that the military junta is determined to ensure the supremacy of the armed forces, even the army won’t be able to stem or stop structural changes in Thai society. In assessing prospects for longer-term change in Thailand, Marshall wrote that “the most extraordinary change of the past decade is that Thailand’s poor have developed sophisticated political consciousness and become aware of what is wrong with their country. They understand the games the ruling class has played throughout history, and they are no longer willing to play. They want real democracy and they want their rights to be respected. They will not take no for an answer.”222 In the end, the very situation that the military wanted to excise from Thai politics, that is, a government led by a populist leader with a deep connection to ordinary Thais, may be one that the military simply cannot prevent. As Joshua Kurlantzick of the Council on Foreign Relations put it:
When Thailand eventually returns to elections, Thaksin’s party almost surely will win again, no matter how the military tries to rig the political system to reduce Thaksin’s power. That popularity alone will ensure Thaksin’s relevance, and the crown prince surely knows this. In addition, Thaksin also has built personal links to several of the key military men in the coup government, who could eventually take seats on the crown prince’s Privy Council.223
Vietnam’s Experiment With “Coexistence 2.0”
Since Vietnam adopted the policy of Doi Moi (renovation) during the Sixth National Party Congress of the Vietnam Communist Party (VCP) in 1986, Vietnam has been transformed from a primarily agricultural to a newly industrializing economy with one of the fastest growth rates in Asia since the 2000s. From 2000 to 2013 Vietnam averaged 6.6 percent annual growth with a robust 5.6 percent spurt in 2014, and most economic analysts expect Vietnam to maintain similar growth rates over the next decade. If Hanoi is able to sustain this level of economic growth, there is every indication that Vietnam is going to emerge as a significant economic player in Southeast Asia in the 2020s and beyond. On the heels of its rapid economic growth, Vietnam’s official poverty rate fell from 58 percent in 1993 to 17 percent in 2012.224 Although Vietnam remains firmly under the grip of the VCP and the party has expanded its crackdown on dissidents and severely tightened media censorship, Vietnam continues to espouse the policy of a market economy with socialistic characteristics not unlike China’s path to economic development since the late 1970s.
As in China, the growing disconnect between a one-party dictatorship, a flourishing de facto market economy, and a population that has greater access to information than ever before is becoming increasingly visible in Vietnam. As Dana Wagner wrote in the Atlantic: “In one-party Vietnam, the pace and breadth of internet connectivity is astounding. The online population is the world’s eighteenth largest and Vietnam is Facebook’s fastest growing country, according to market researcher We Are Social.”225 Vietnam’s Internet penetration rate in 2013 was estimated to be 36–44 percent, or the fifth-highest Internet penetration rate in Southeast Asia, although this number has continued to grow so that nearly 40 million Vietnamese were online in 2014.226 According to a 2014 Global Connected Consumer Study, 80 percent of Vietnamese households have a mobile phone, 76 percent get access to the Internet through smartphones, 93 percent search for information on the Internet, and 69 percent search the Internet for information on products.227 However, for the VCP, all this unprecedented connectivity has both positive and negative consequences. The party understands the core benefits of the information revolution and a growing need to expand Internet access. But it has also clamped down on, as the National Endowment for Democracy put it, “vaguely worded, catchall laws and decrees to control content on the Internet” that are opposed to the party, threaten national security and social order, and sabotage national fraternity, or in reality, whomever the party designates as engaging in such activities.228 Or as was reported in the Atlantic article back in March 2013:
Vietnamese bloggers tasted internet freedom over the last decade as online access grew, but social media is no game changer in a paranoid state. With a mix of insecurity and strength, the Communist Party is gagging dissent in Vietnam with a strategy that entails promoting self-censorship, defaming the swelling ranks of imprisoned dissidents, deploying anonymous pro-Party influencers and holding showcase purges amid a stalling economy… .
When life in jail can be authorized at a whim, it takes a person of rare strength and daring to openly criticize the state.229
According to Jonathan London, one of the most astute foreign observers of developments in Vietnam, state repression persists, but at the same time it is dissipating. He suggested that the growing degree of openness in Vietnam’s political culture is a reflection of an “evolving sentiment, resignation and even pride within party ranks that reliance on repressive means is an undesirable path for Vietnam … [and] it is conceivable that real political change could occur within five years. Talented and motivated people within and outside the party are finding a voice. At the very least, with its increasingly open political discourse, Vietnam’s political development has entered a new stage.”230 Although it remains to be seen just how far the party is willing to tolerate increasing demonstrations of defiance through the Internet and beyond, London asserted that the underpinnings of discontent among the masses have been triggered by a desire for much more substantive institutional reforms and the indisputable fact that the Vietnamese people are finding their voice. “They are demanding change, from diverse quarters. The voices are increasingly independent and in the open. And it appears they will not soon be silenced.”231
There is no doubt that Vietnam faces considerable political challenges, but the VCP, like its much larger neighbor, the CCP, harbors no illusions about enacting significant political reforms in the party and is determined to remain in power as long as possible. The VCP doesn’t face any meaningful institutional challenge and has been more than willing to crack down on anyone who challenges the legitimacy and supremacy of the party. But the VCP isn’t just driven by ideology as evinced by a much more nuanced and pragmatic foreign policy, including a significant improvement in relations with its former enemy, the United States. On July 2, 2013, Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang made an official visit to the United States and launched the U.S.-Vietnam Comprehensive Partnership covering political and economic cooperation, trade, science and technology, war legacy issues, defense and security, and promotion and protection of human rights. In a joint statement, Sang and Obama emphasized, in part, that Vietnam and the United States “agreed to continue the U.S.-Vietnam Defense Policy Dialogue and the bilateral Political, Security, and Defense dialogue as opportunities to review the defense and security relationship and discuss future cooperation.”232 But as a Center for Strategic and International Studies study noted, the defense relationship is a work in process despite the growing importance of responding to China’s rising military power.
Due to Vietnam’s long history of entanglement in great power competition and its geographic proximity to China, leaders in Hanoi believe that military engagement with the United States should focus on strengthening Vietnam’s defense posture. They want U.S. efforts in the region to advance regional stability rather than worsen existing regional tensions. Hanoi therefore recognizes the value and added leverage that working more closely with Washington offers, especially with regard to Beijing… . [But] U.S. officials are also aware that there is a ceiling to the relationship. Vietnam prefers to remain independent and does not wish to establish any type of formal military alliance or arrangement with a foreign power under certain circumstances.233
Tran Dai Quang, a Politburo member and Vietnam’s minister of public security, came to the United States on March 15–20, 2015, in what was the first such visit by the commander of Vietnam’s security forces responsible for maintaining regime security. The Vietnamese media reported that the purpose of the trip was to prepare for a visit by General Secretary of the Communist Party Nguyen Phu Trong—the most tangible sign of the warming of bilateral ties that began with then secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s visit to Hanoi in July 2012.234 Trong’s subsequent visit to the United States on July 6–8, 2015, was a milestone in bilateral ties. Hoang Binh Quan, the chairman of the Central Committee’s Commission for External Relations, wrote on the eve of the visit that “few nations have changed the course of their relationship as profoundly as Vietnam and the United States have . . . and over the past 20 years, we have progressed from an embargo to fuller diplomatic relations, a bilateral trade agreement and a comprehensive partnership.”235 He also noted that:
Our security cooperation has improved, and the Obama administration has partially lifted the U.S. embargo on the sale of lethal arms… There is no doubt that Hanoi and Washington will not suddenly fully agree on each other’s view of good government. But by inviting a Communist Party general secretary, a position that has no equivalent in the American system of governance, Washington has shown a fuller respect for Vietnam’s political regime.236
U.S. Senator John McCain, who was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War and played a key role in the normalization of U.S. ties with Vietnam two decades ago, stated that “Vietnam is an important emerging partner with which the United States shares strategic and economic interests, including strengthening an open regional trading order, maintaining a favorable balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region, and upholding long-standing principles of world order, such as freedom of the seas and peaceful resolution of international disputes.”237 During Trong’s visit to Washington, the United States and Vietnam issued a Joint Vision Statement that stressed the range of issues on which the two countries were cooperating, among them trade, regional stability, the conclusion of a nuclear energy agreement, and high-level political exchanges.
The United States and Vietnam reaffirm continued bilateral cooperation in defense and security, as outlined in the United States - Vietnam Joint Vision Statement on Defense Relations. Both countries underscore their commitment to collaborating on, among other issues, addressing non-traditional security threats, cooperation in maritime security, maritime domain awareness, defense trade and information sharing, search and rescue, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and defense technology exchange. Both countries welcome joint efforts to address war legacy issues, including the humanitarian mission of missing in action (MIA) recovery, the clearance of unexploded ordinance and dioxin remediation, and further assistance for these humanitarian efforts.238
For now and into the foreseeable future, closer ties between the United States and Vietnam have been driven by the convergence of economic and political interests. The Joint Vision Statement acknowledged that none is more prominent than the “emergence of a common security threat. Beijing’s maritime expansion in the South China Sea has changed the strategic calculus for both Hanoi and Washington. Facing an enormous challenge from China, Vietnam and the United States are now prepared to downplay their ideological disagreements to focus on common strategic interests.”239 Vietnam also realizes that it has to tread carefully vis-à-vis China because Vietnam simply doesn’t have the military capacity to be engaged in prolonged tensions with its most powerful and assertive neighbor. But it is precisely this gap that Vietnam is trying to augment by fostering security cooperation with the United States—one of the most significant changes in Asian security since the end of the Cold War and a profoundly different relationship Hanoi and Washington have chosen to forge despite the bitter and deeply rooted legacies of the Vietnamese conflict.