The FEER Forum

by Jens F. Laurson and George A. Pieler

     When the New York Philharmonic accepted an invitation from the North Korean Government to perform at the East Pyongyang Grand Theatre, commentary either praised the move as a savvy act of cultural diplomacy or condemned it as a public relations ploy for one of the world’s worst tyrants.

     When the United States’ first orchestra takes the stage on Feb. 26, playing to a hall packed with the Politburo’s elite, it will likely be the latter.

     In the best tradition of U.S. cultural diplomacy, this concert showcases the best of American culture. Fine so far, but the New York Philharmonic is wasting a great opportunity to underpin its cultural message with a more significant one about the value of freedom.

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by Joseph Saunders
     Much of the commentary since Suharto’s death on Jan. 27 has focused on his economic legacy. Of late, triumphalist accounts seem to be eclipsing more nuanced assessments, as observers debate whether overall economic growth during his 32-year tenure overshadowed the nepotism and corruption that marred his rule. Suharto’s political and human rights legacy, wrongly pushed to the sidelines, is at least of equal importance in assessing his record and the challenges facing Indonesia today.

     Democracy was already in retreat during the turbulent last years of Sukarno immediately preceding Suharto’s ascension. In 1965-66, Indonesia was in upheaval. While Suharto brought stability, he did so at enormous cost, orchestrating pogroms that killed hundreds of thousands of suspected communists and sympathizers and unleashed broader violence.

     Suharto then proceeded to reshape government in ways that destroyed all hopes of democracy for the entire duration of his rule. While Indonesia is impossibly diverse in ethnic terms and notoriously difficult to govern, Suharto’s approach was to eviscerate the rule of law and make the military his prime instrument of social control. With censorship integral to his rule, he left precious little space even for discussion of his policies. Indonesia has spent much of the past ten years recovering from the consequences.

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by Michael Vatikiotis
    Jusuf Ronodipuro never wore his revolutionary credentials on his sleeve.  The man who first brought knowledge of Indonesia’s freedom to the world’s attention by reading out the proclamation of independence on Aug. 17, 1945, was never one to boast about his role in the country’s colonial struggle. He called himself a “bit player.” Yet Ronodipuro, who died at the age of 88 on Jan. 27, 2008, in Jakarta, was a quiet inspiration for generations of Indonesians who, if they were lucky enough to know him, saw through him the extent to which the ideals and values of nationhood had been squandered and lost.

    Born in Salatiga, in central Java in 1919, Jusuf enjoyed the reasonably privileged upbringing of the Javanese priyayi class. He attended good native schools and found work in Jakarta working for General Motors. When the Japanese invaded the young Jusuf found work as a reporter for the Hoso Kyoko Japanese military radio station. It was here in August 1945 that Jusuf was called upon to broadcast the declaration of independence, which was hastily read out on Aug. 17 by Sukarno.

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by Jeremy Wagstaff

The only time Suharto was seen crying was when his wife, Ibu Tien, died in 1996. As with most the key watersheds in the New Order, the moment is cloaked in mystery. But his tears told us more about the man than anything else he said or did in 31 years of being Indonesia’s president.

    Some time between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. on Sunday, April 28, Ibu Tien had awoken. She slept alone: They had been married 48 years but in recent times had grown apart. She had grown tired of the trappings of power, and had watched as her children’s avarice destroyed the family and as her husband renege on promises to step down. The previous day she had visited her beloved horticultural garden outside Jakarta. None of her family was with her and, to those who accompanied her, it seemed as if she was saying goodbye.
She died on the way to hospital. Word quickly spread and Javanese began to whisper: the spiritual mandate, or wahyu, was with her. Suharto cannot last long without her. Even his own guards talked of it among themselves. Suharto wandered around in a daze as the nation, nursing an affection for her that seemed to transcend the gossip about her dark influence, was swept by mourning. Continue Reading »

(This article first appeared in Edit Page of The Wall Street Journal Asia on Monday, Jan. 28. )
 
by Hugo Restall

Will history treat Suharto kindly? Certainly many of his countrymen today do not. Last year students protested in Jakarta over the government’s decision not to prosecute him for corruption, even as the former Indonesian president lay on his sickbed. Abroad, too, it is fashionable to sneer. Many mention him in the same breath as Mobutu Sese Seko, another officer turned strongman, who plundered Zaire from the mid-1960s to the late 1990s. Suharto is accused of similar avarice over the same period, and vastly inflated estimates of his family fortune are blithely tossed around.
But the pendulum of condemnation has swung too far, and Suharto’s death yesterday should be the impetus for a reappraisal of his legacy. While it is right for the unsavory aspects of the “New Order” government to be remembered, the positive contributions of the man who made Indonesia a respected member of the international community deserve at least equal emphasis.
Consider that when Gen. Suharto came to power after a failed communist coup in 1965, Indonesia was an economic basket case and a troublemaker in the region. The pro-communist populism of President for Life Sukarno had led the country down a dead end. Think of him as the Hugo Chavez of his era. Continue Reading »

by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
     When historians of the future look back on 2007 from a decade or so down the road, what will they single out as the year’s big China story? They’ll certainly have plenty of options to choose from, since the international press has carried a dizzyingly wide range of China headlines lately, dealing with everything from toy recalls to carbon emissions, space exploration to currency controls, Beijing’s Olympic preparations to Pudong getting the world’s tallest skyscraper.
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by William Ratliff
    Development banks, think tanks and other researchers have increasingly compared reforms in East and Southeast Asia with Latin America, almost always noting the far greater successes of the former. But few of these studies ask the basic question, “Why?”

    The discrepancy between the regions is particularly clear in education, where international testing finds Asia’s tigers and dragons consistently at or near the top and those few Latin countries that dare to participate just as consistently near or at the bottom.

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by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
     Several years ago, an astute colleague in a totally different field of history, made a comment that has rattled around in my brain ever since. I’d talked of my fascination with a novel trend in commentaries on Shanghai. It had long been touted as unusually modern for a Chinese city (this idea first circulated between the mid-1800s and 1940s, then regained currency in the 1990s), but now it was often presented as downright futuristic. “If you’re interested in that sort of thing,” he said (or something to this effect), “keep an eye on Dubai.”
     This casual remark led me to modify one of my Web-surfing habits: I’d already been periodically running Google searches for “Shanghai,” just to see what would turn up, but now I began to stick in the word “Dubai” from time to time as well. And recently one such search took me to a reference to Dubai as “Shanghai on Steroids” that stripped away any lingering doubts I had that my colleague had been onto something. The phrase carried special power for me because of the “Faster than a Speeding Bullet” chapter in my new book, “China’s Brave New World—And Other Tales for Global Times,” that focuses on Shanghai’s reputation as futuristic. In it I describe as telling the fact that the phrase “New York on Steroids” may be on its way to displacing “Paris of the East” as the most common shorthand for the metropolis.   Continue Reading »

by James L. Schoff

     What is Yasuo Fukuda, Japan’s latest prime minister, supposed to do about Kim Jong Il and the ongoing “abduction issue”? Many PMs before him have tried and failed to resolve the issue of Pyongyang’s kidnapping of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and ’80s.

Greetings from the Hermit Kingdom (AFP)
     Sadly, it doesn’t look as if Mr. Fukuda will have much success either. Everything seems to be working against the victims’ families in Japan at this point, and it doesn’t appear to be a good time for Japanese politicians to forge a face-saving solution with Kim’s negotiators.
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by Hugo Restall

     The headlines of carnage and poverty in Burma over the last week inspire a natural question: What explains the country’s miserable failure over the 60 years since independence? The roots of the “Burmese Way to Socialism” which destroyed the economy and led to an all-powerful state lie in the final years of British rule. In short, ideas have consequences.

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     Burma fell under the control of the Indian Civil Service, and since India was the crown jewel of the British empire, its administrators tended to be the elite of the Colonial Office, many of them Oxbridge grads. Meanwhile, in the less desirable, piddly little postings in the Far East like Singapore and Hong Kong, the civil servants were more often the products of less prestigious universities, and/or were Scots. This meant that these areas tended to be better run, and the free market ideas of Adam Smith and David Ricardo persisted longer.

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