Southeast Asia in United States policy fell from a region of high priority during the Vietnam war to become, after the fall of Indochina, an area of relatively minor interest. For the United States, Southeast Asia evoked memories of misperception, intensified over-commitment, and simplistic assumptions that characterized the American effort to defeat local Vietnamese national communism. Since the formulation of the Nixon doctrine of disengagement in 1969, United States policy towards Southeast Asia has been undergoing a process of long-term readjustment in recognition of the exaggerated significance that the region had assumed in American thinking. The fall of Saigon in April 1975 was a major stimulus to this readjustment as it gave the Americans compelling reasons to anticipate a reassertion of Soviet influence in the region. Successive American administrations attempted to place the region in a wider global context to avoid the dangers of extreme reaction to local national communism while developing the flexibility to coordinate a response to the Soviet Union at a global level. The main concern of American policy was to remove the basis for direct United States involvement in the region in a way that would satisfy post-Vietnam war public and congressional opinion and the demands of strategic planners for greater freedom of manoeuvre against the Soviet Union.

The following papers were presented at a session of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Region of the Association of Asian Studies held in Pittsburgh, 22–24 October 1982. The countries that are discussed (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka) have a number of fundamental structural characteristics in common. All are open economies — i.e. foreign trade is a key element in their economic structure. All are still heavily dependent on the export of primary products, although light manufactures currently account for a small but increasing share of total exports. All have agricultural systems based on monsoon rice culture. All became politically independent after World War II. Three of the four are free enterprise economies while the fourth (Sri Lanka) shifted from a socialist to a free enterprise venue a few years ago. All possess enterprising populations with literacy rates that fall somewhere between 60 and 90 per cent — uniformly high by less developed country (LDC) standards. The importance of personal relationships and a profound sense of individualism permeate these cultures, and the establishment of a modern bureaucracy is a relatively recent phenomenon.

During the 1970 decade the Indonesian economy grew at unprecedented high rates after a long period of relative stagnation. It is commonly assumed that this significant improvement in growth performance is largely explained by the rapid growth of oil exports from 1971 to 1978, during which period petroleum's share in total export earnings rose from 39 per cent to 64 per cent. During this period, petroleum exports (in dollar value) rose at an average annual rate of 43 per cent, compared to 30 per cent for non-petroleum exports. Thus, even during the period of rapid petroleum export earnings growth, other exports also grew at a rate far above their long-term trend.

Malaysia's recent economic indicators are fairly positive, despite the impact of the global recession. Yet the country's complex and volatile ethnic and religious divisions are such that one might easily expect both political turmoil and economic chaos. That has not occurred in the recent past (not, indeed, since the riots of 1969), and is not likely to happen in the near future. This paper will attempt to explain this apparent paradox.

The Philippine society confronts formidable longer-term economic problems. The exhaustion of the land frontier suitable for production of present crops under existing techniques, which is compounded by degradation of the environment by wasteful harvesting of forestry resources and over-exploitation of inshore fisheries is an obvious problem. A comparable problem arises in the inertia built into the age structure of the Philippine population. In 1970, those under 15 years of age accounted for 45.6 per cent of all Filipinos and estimated population growth in the 1970s was 2.7 per cent, a rate more than double the “zero-growth rate”. If the growth rate should fall to the “zero-growth rate” tomorrow, the Philippine population would continue to grow for the better part of a century and would virtually double as cohorts of Filipinos entering the reproductive age group would continue to increase for many years.

While Sri Lanka is geographically closer to India, there are greater similarities in economic structure with many Southeast Asian countries. Sri Lanka is a small open economy. Foreign trade has always played a pivotal role in the functioning of the economy. Politically the country has exhibited a preference for democratic parliamentary forms of government, which are compatible with an underlying cultural individualism. There are important differences, however, in both the tempo and direction of economic growth over the past two decades, and these differences, along with the underlying policy strategies that produced them, are potentially instructive in any consideration of economic performance in the region.

This paper aims to discuss the issue of problem-solving at the national level by focusing on the concept of social discipline. The development of a new nation-state, i.e. contemporary Singapore, will provide the empirical basis for the analysis.

The paper is divided into three sections. The first section deals briefly with relevant conceptual approaches to the solution of social problems, and the definition of social discipline. The second section presents an illustration of social discipline in action. The final section attempts a critical assessment of the approach used in Singapore for the solution of social problems.

This paper examines the role of the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) in the evolution of organisation modes developed by the Chinese community in Malaya to regulate its social, economic, and political affairs. It advances two assertions: firstly, that the MCA was the vehicle that bridged the divide between traditional and modern modes of community regulation, and secondly, that the MCA linked the political concerns of the Chinese community, which hitherto had been largely China-orientated, with the mainstream development of Malayan nationalism and the emerging Malayan nation state during the years 1949–57.

The purpose of this article is to gain insights into the relationship between individual and society in contemporary Thailand and Java by investigating how this relationship is seen by the most creative Thai and Javanese authors of modern Thai and Indonesian serious fiction. These authors have been selected because competent local informants thought them to be the best writers of socially relevant novels and short stories. It is expected that the comparative dimension of this article may be conducive to gain a finer understanding of the relationship between individual and society in two culturally related societies than would be possible to achieve by the study of each of them in isolation. Moreover, such comparison may help to control the observer's bias by raising questions that are not necessarily related to the latter's cultural or academic background.

The Japanese occupied the Philippines in 1941, and Burma and Indonesia in 1942. French Indochina, then called Futsuin by the Japanese, continued to remain in French hands until 9 March 1945. It seemed to present a contrasting picture vis-à-vis Japanese policies in other Asian countries and to contradict the declared policy as expressed in the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” (in Japanese Dai-Tōa-Kyoei-Ken). On 9 March, however, this was reversed by the Japanese military action, which disarmed the French Indochinese Army. This action has come to be known as the Meigo Sakusen (Meigo [bright moon] Action).

From at least the early sixteenth century, when Tomé Pires acclaimed the marvels of Malacca, Westerners have evinced an interest in the cities of Southeast Asia, though for different reasons and from varying perspectives. Travellers like Cesare Fredrici, Ralph Fitch, and Gasparo Balbi were generally impressed with what they saw and compared it favourably in many respects with Europe of the 1580s. In the course of the two hundred years, however, this appreciation altered markedly. Western authors after the late eighteenth century took a less sanguine view and tended to describe towns and cities rather disparagingly as little more than collections of villages. During the late 1920s, the panorama made possible by the advent of air travel in Southeast Asia distinguished clearly between rural and urban areas, but showed the latter as thoroughly Europeanized enclaves. In the popular aerial photographs of the day, these cities appeared slick in their new tropical-colonial architectural style and uncomplicated by large or even particularly visible non-European populations.

The Anglo-Burmese administrator, ostensibly another Anglo-Indian administrator and traditionally perceived as such, must be viewed as a special case. He served Company and Crown in a milieu and under circumstances that differed sharply from those known to his counterparts in the subcontinent. Burma was in a unique position in that it was a part of both the Indian and British Empires. The administrator in Burma found himself at the end of a chain of command that extended from London via Calcutta to Rangoon. London tended to view the remote province with an eye to diplomatic and mercantile considerations. Calcutta concentrated on local priorities and imposed a rigid economy that accorded with Indian priorities. Little attempt was made to understand the alien culture with its differing needs. To the Anglo-Burmese administrator fell the difficult task of governing the ancient land under the aegis of Calcutta and the eyes of London.

When King Chulalongkorn surveyed his realm on his second coronation in 1873 to mark the termination of the five-year regency at his coming of age, he saw much that was in need of reform. The king's assessment was that the monarch was but a figurehead; the existing framework of government was actually run by the leading nobility, foremost of whom were the regent and his family who wielded power based on their long dominance over the key administrative posts and the economic benefits that accrued from their official positions. From Chulalongkorn's viewpoint, the regent's family, which reached the pinnacle of its power during the regency of Chuang Bunnag (1868–73), dominated the bureaucracy, in effect controlled the administration of the country, and enriched itself with great facility at the expense of the king and the country. Through the political patronage that they extended to the tax farmers, the officials had assumed control of the tax farming system, the most pervasive method of revenue collection that was employed in the kingdom since the Third Reign. The germ of King Chulalongkorn's historic reform of the administrative system, restructured along rational, functional lines, thus lay in his desire to regain control over the government and economy, which had been gradually slipping out of the Crown's grip since the reign of his father, King Mongkut. The king was determined not to allow the situation to persist where substantial revenue from the tax farms was being channelled into the coffers of the leading noble families and the tax farmers themselves, to the detriment of the state.

When Joseph Conrad sailed on the Vidar from Singapore harbour tothe small coastal trading stations on the eastern coast of Borneo, the round trip took three weeks. The most difficult part of the journey occurred at the estuary of the Berau River where the Vidar would have run in, past the shifting bar and mud flats, and followed slowly up the mangrove-lined banks of the main branch to a settlement almost forty miles inland. It was here in 1887 that Conrad encountered the trader Charles Olmeyer whose existence in this remote place provided such an enduring focus for Conrad's imagination. In his first novel, Almayer's Folly, Conrad drew a portrait of Almayer (Olmeyer) as an exile, living on the banks of the Berau River in a sullen recoil both from the wilderness that gripped the settlement in its green immensity, and from the customs and values of those with whom he shared almost the entire course of his adult existence. Drawn to the outermost reaches of the earth by greed, Almayer's life, as conceived by Conrad, was the very symbol of rootlessness and alienation.

In two recent review articles, I.W. Mabbett summarizes the prehistoric and historic sources bearing on the question of “Indian influence on the development of Southeast Asian societies”. Asimilar review was undertaken by Paul Wheatley in “Satyantra in Suvarnadvipa” and more recently by Ken Hall. Each of these authors make similar points: that there are essentially three major hypotheses that have been advanced over the years to account for the spread of “Indian influence” (the Brahmana, Ksatriya, and Vaisya respectively, to which we will return); and that evidence on which to decide amongst these hypotheses is lacking. After a “brief outline of the sources on ‘Indianization’ which is practically complete”, I.W. Mabbett concludes that:

It is unlikely that prolongation of the catalogue of possible sources would add much to what has already been gleaned — more Indian trade goods, more inscriptions recording the activity of pious Hindu or Buddhist rulers, more unreliable Chinese second-hand accounts of Indian priests and Indianized “kingdoms”. The purpose in extending the catalogue this far had been twofold. In the first place, it is to make quite clear that the actual process of “Indianization” is nowhere reliably portrayed; what is portrayed by the earliest evidence is the operation of kingdoms already Indianized; and therefore the various theories that have been offered are speculation. One may seem more plausible or attractive than another, but none has been established.