Shepherds of the People

The politics of compulsory land acquisition in post-Suharto Indonesia was contentious and complex. During the five-year period that led to the promulgation of a Land Procurement for Development in the Public Interest Law in 2012, the key political battles were waged not in public contests between the executive and the legislature, and much less in debates between civil society groups and the state, but rather in debates within the state, often in closed-door sequestrations of civil servants from various agencies. Once the law was passed by the legislature, further bureaucratic debates took place, leading to what was the most important part of the law, an implementing regulation called Presidential Regulation 71/2012 that laid down the specific rules governing the process. Thereafter, the politics of land acquisition moved into the field and sparked a contest between regulators in Jakarta, traditional adat land managers in the provinces, and the local courts that mediated compensation issues.

In studying politics in Asia or elsewhere, we are prone to look at legislative or electoral battles first. Yet the politics that matters often takes place outside of the limelight of the legislature and centers on bureaucrats, executives, courts, and local governments. A large part of politics involves how public policies are proposed, elaborated, implemented, and revised within the state. Legislatures typically pass only enabling statutes that leave the most important policy decisions to the administrative and regulatory functions of the bureaucracy and its governance networks. Indeed, often those statutes have been largely written by bureaucratic experts themselves, leaving very little scope for legislative influence.

The State of Pardons

While traveling through the Far East in 1892, the British adventurer Henry Norman happened upon a dusty square in the Chinese city of Canton (today Guangzhou), where he witnessed the public execution of fifteen men. As the condemned were led into position, Qing dynasty magistrates carefully removed from each of their pigtails a long piece of paper that had been held in place by a stick of bamboo on which their crimes and death warrants were written. Then, without ceremony, the executioner’s sword was raised. “Chop, chop, chop – the heads roll off one after another in as many seconds,” Norman wrote. After each stroke, the crowd roared its approval with a hearty “Hao!” (roughly “Great!”). “The place is ankle deep in blood, the spectators are yelling with delight and frenzy, the heads are like bowls on a green, the horrible headless bodies are lying about in ghastly grotesque attitudes, the executioner is scarlet to the knees and his hands are dripping.” Although reeling from the spectacle, Norman could not resist thrusting several banknotes into the executioner’s hands in return for his drenched sword: “It hangs on my wall today,” he wrote, “a valuable antidote to much that I read about the advancing civilization of China.”

Today, in the early twenty-first century, the death penalty continues to be legal and practiced not only in China but in a large number of Asian states. Only Cambodia and the Philippines have officially abolished it (although the latter wavers constantly), while Laos, South Korea, and Myanmar have not committed executions since the 1980s. As for the other nine states, the death penalty continues to be both legal and practiced to varying degrees, representing a quarter of the countries in the world where this is the case. In the 2000s, China executed more people than any other country in the world, while Singapore executed more people per capita than any other country in the world.

Profit and Honor

Around the year 1400, a dispossessed Sumatran prince fled his home at the tip of the Malay Peninsula to establish a new kingdom farther north along the narrow strait that connects the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean. The new settlement was named after the melaka trees that grew abundantly along the estuarial rivers of the region. The calm and fine port, with its favorable winds, moderate temperatures, a well-protected harbor, and expansive flat land, soon attracted traders. Within a decade of its founding, Malacca contained 6,000 people.

Malacca stood at the confluence of several great and enlightened kingdoms of early modern Asia. On the western periphery was the resplendent and enlightened new Mughal empire of India. To the south was the declining but still impressive Javanese Majapahit kingdom. To the northwest was the powerful new Ayutthaya, or Siam, kingdom of the Thais. And looming over the northeast was the culturally confident new Ming dynasty of China, which would lead a resurgence of Asia’s cosmopolitan and oceanic traditions.

Big, Fast Results

In 2010, Malaysia launched a new public policy initiative that it called “Big, Fast Results.” The idea was to turn public policy into a more entrepreneurial and strategic process that both served large constituencies (not small ones) and created immediate, visible results. As a government brochure put it: “It aims to rid the public of a ubiquitous concern – that the government simply is unable to execute and deliver on programs that otherwise sound great in theory. It’s about ensuring that the initiatives put in place will do what they aim to do, and that they get done.” The program, formally known as the Economic Transformation Program, was managed by a new agency of government – the Performance Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU), under the prime minister – that initiated the strategic (“30,000-foot” level) public policy decisions and then handed them over to the implementing and management (“3-foot” level) departments. In its first two years of operations, the program committed $63 billion to various projects in infrastructure, finance, crime prevention, health, and education.

In Chapter 5, we looked at the processes of governance and policy making – the question of how government works. In this chapter, we turn to outcomes – the question of what government achieves. A key theme of the Big, Fast Results program was an emphasis on creating opportunities, services, and infrastructure for everyone rather than entitlements and spoils for particular claimant groups. And unlike most megalomaniacal Third World transformation projects, this one was carefully managed with a battery of scorecards, agreed-upon-procedures, and continual improvement panels that would make any management enthusiast squirm with joy. We have already seen in Chapter 4 how a “rights of the majority” discourse shapes democracy in Asia. It is no surprise that this translates into public policies that aim to have a broad impact. The nature of public policy in Asia is to favor inclusive, growth-oriented aims rather than exclusive, distributional aims. To borrow the terms used by philosopher John Rawls, it is the expansion of “primary social goods” – things that everyone could use in greater quantities, such as income, wealth, opportunity, social respect, and freedoms – rather than their distribution that motivates public policies. As Cheung puts it: “Developmentalism is still the foundation of East Asian public policy discourse.”

The Spinning Kingdom

The Second World War was a time of opportunity for Wu Ho-su. Born in 1919 into a poor household in northern Taiwan, Wu took a job with a Japanese-owned cloth distributor in the capital, Taipei, in 1935, where he first worked as a dockhand and then as a salesman. By 1939, at age twenty, he was appointed by the Japanese owner to comanage sales of a new cloth company. When war came, Wu took advantage of the shortages caused by Allied bombing raids (Taiwan had been under Japanese occupation since 1895) to make profitable purchasing trips to Japan and to buy up properties in Taipei from fleeing residents.

Japan was defeated in 1945, and Wu found himself in control of the Taiwan side of the business, which he renamed the Shinkong (xinguang), or New Bright, Company. Although he invested money to produce goods that were in short supply, like tea, sugar, and coal, his heart remained in the rag trade. But business conditions for a native Taiwanese entrepreneur deteriorated sharply with the retreat to the island in 1948 and 1949 of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) government that had lost China’s civil war. Besides establishing three state-owned textile factories, the KMT’s new Taiwan Production Board gave preference for cotton imports to seven textile companies from Shanghai that had fled China with the regime.

New Orders in Old Bottles

Since the 1980s, Asian politics has been transformed by the spread of democracy. Understanding democracy in the region requires understanding the long historical trajectories in which it is embedded. For that purpose, there is no better case than Indonesia, the region’s second biggest country after China.

The borders of Indonesia were roughly outlined by the great Majapahit kingdom of Java, which extended its influence over much of the contemporary country from about 1300 to about 1500 before breaking up into several kingdoms and sultanates. A hundred years later, those same boundaries became the target of the Dutch, who began their conquest with a trading post at the eastern Java town of Bantam in 1602 and continued to reclaim control over the Majapahit region until Bali was finally conquered on the eve of World War I.

While the power of the various sultans and indigenous rulers was subordinated under colonial law, the Dutch left most of those sultans and rulers in place and outi tted them with the apparatus of a modern state. The traditional conceptions of power and propriety that had arisen in the Javanese and Sumatran kingdoms of the Malay archipelago from the 600s to the 1500s remained remarkably resilient in the face of European colonization. If anything, Dutch rule tended to reinforce these conceptions, which were reinvented as what Kingsbury called “an authoritarian parody of traditional style.” What later became “Indonesian tradition” was largely an invention of colonialism.

While visiting Indonesia in 2011, the premier of China proclaimed: “We are witnessing the all-round rise of Asia and a great rejuvenation of Oriental Civilization.” The claim was notable but not because of the first part. The “rise,” or “awakening,” of Asia has been anticipated or announced with regularity since Japan defeated Russian forces in a series of skirmishes on land and sea in 1904 and 1905. That event ushered in a period in which both Asians and non-Asians alike argued that the region was in the ascendance. The rise of Asia is an old story, and it is a reasonably accurate one as well.

Rather, it was the second part of the declaration that was interesting: the definition of an “Oriental Civilization” that spans the eastern half of Asia from Beijing to Jakarta. In the early 1900s, this region was considered the core of Asia. China’s premier seemed to be saying that whatever divergences it witnessed during the twentieth century, it was again converging on a common Asiatic heritage. It was a claim that the region, which is often referred to as Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia, or just East Asia, is both internally coherent and globally distinctive. Peking Man and Java Man, those ancient human ancestors whose lineages begat the peoples of the East Asia, were making common cause.