Democratization, Civil Society, and Illiberal Middle Class Culture in Pacific Asia

Democratization, Civil Society, and Illiberal Middle Class Culture in Pacific Asia Author(s): David Martin Jones Democratization, Civil Society, and Illiberal Middle Class Culture in Pacific Asia

A prevailing understanding in the study of political and economic development holds that economic modernization creates an irresistible pressure for liberal democratic political change. Authoritarian rule may offer the initial stability necessary for economic growth, but, as fully developed modernity approaches, it becomes increasingly redundant and reluctantly withers away. Depending on one's theoretical preference, the overt or covert hand promoting this change is an articulate, urban, and self-confident middle class. In the argot of development studies, the presence of this new socioeconomic phenomenon intimates both liberalization and democratization.

After thirty years of sustained economic growth, we would expect to find the high performing Asian economies of South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Taiwan metamorphosing into polyarchic democracies with Asian characteristics. Indeed, a growing literature traces the inexorable rise of bourgeois democracy and civil society in Pacific Asia. After nineteen eighty-seven South Korea, we are told, spawned an increasingly self-confident middle class that terminated an "authoritarian cycle" of rule. In Taiwan the middle class has become so "politicized and powerful" it has forged the "first Chinese democracy." Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia growing democratic "revolt" in Malaysia stems from "a type of middle class politics." In Singapore the burgeoning confidence of an educated middle class constitutes an "extremely important precondition for political liberalization," while in Indonesia a "middle class has grown larger and is demanding more public information." From this perspective it would seem that "the middle class transforms society. Some elements of that class start to demand those effete and nonmaterial things which are associated with western lifestyles and philosophies. The items include political participation, multi-party politics, an end to corruption, a freer press, environmental clean up. Already these things and others can be seen emerging on the East Asian scene."

Observers of this phenomenon in East Asia concede, nevertheless, that the role played by the new middle class is curious. In South Korea Dong Won Mo finds the middle class highly sensitive "to a stable social order." In Taiwan the middle class between nineteen sixty and nineteen ninety was either "intolerant" or largely "apolitical." Meanwhile, in less developed and therefore more authoritarian Southeast Asia Harold Crouch considers the middle class to have "ambiguous political consequences," operating both as democratizing agents and supporters of continuing authoritarian rule. In Indonesia Robison analogously finds that the emerging middle class contradictorily both threatens "the pact of domination" that maintained the Suharto regime and supports the Indonesian equivalent of a "Bonapartist state." Even more curious and generally unremarked is the fact that the only political entity to generate the type of autonomous civic activity consistent with the middle class model is Hong Kong, a notably dynamic economy that has flourished under a liberal but problematically colonial administration.

Moreover, not only is the political conduct of this emerging middle class ambivalent, but its explanatory utility also becomes increasingly redundant. For, if the middle class is both central to the continuity of an illiberal politics and the agent of liberal democratization, it is conceptually incoherent. This inconsistency in both the behavior of the class and the application of the term emanates from the prevailing understanding of the relationship between political and economic development.

Broadly, we can identify two not necessarily incompatible schools of thought. The first, associated with Seymour Martin Lipset's pioneering work in political sociology, presents the emergence of an educated and self-assured middle class as an important precondition of the transition to democracy. The second more circumspectly views the middle class as playing a progressive role after an authoritarian regime initiates the democratization process. This process assumes that a ruling elite liberalizes in order to decompress social tension, thereby opening civil society to autonomous organization. As the infant civil society strengthens, the associative life of the middle class facilitates the transition to full democracy.

Yet neither the precondition nor process model adequately accounts for the seemingly incoherent behavior of the new middle class in Pacific Asia. It is clearly inadequate for a discipline that infers causal connections between otherwise discrete social, economic, and political phenomenon in contingently situated units of rule to consider such regionally incoherent behavior "aberrant" or to explain it away by some neo-Marxist sophistry concerning the structure of class coalitions. What, we might ask, is the actual character of this new middle class, and how does it affect its political role? How do the incumbent ruling arrangements in newly industrialized Pacific Asia respond to or manage this emerging social phenomenon? Finally, what light, if any, does the pattern of political change in Pacific Asia shed upon the process of democratization?

The Dependency Culture in Contemporary Pacific Asia

Reporting the East Asian miracle, the World Bank found that the high performing Asian economies "are unique in that they combine rapid, sustained growth with highly equal income distributions." The most significant social phenomenon produced by this growth is a materialistic, urbanized middle class. While economic growth, according to Kuznets, classically entails increasing income disparities between rich and poor and town and country, a distinctive feature of the economies of Pacific Asia has been their ability both to distribute increasing wealth equitably and to telescope the historical time taken to modernize. The Gini coefficient covering the period nineteen sixty-five to nineteen ninety shows "rapid growth and declining inequality have been shared virtues" among the high performing Asian economies. As a consequence, the Pacific Asian states of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and, to a lesser extent, Indonesia have become middle class polities.

Commentators concur that this economic transformation owes nothing to constitutional democracy and little to neoclassical economic policy. In fact, successful government-planned, export-led growth ultimately legitimated the autocratic generals of "quasi-Leninist political parties that governed postcolonial Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Their model is one of planned development where no aspect of social, economic, and political life is left to chance.

Between nineteen sixty and nineteen ninety-five these economies achieved growth rates in excess of seven percent per annum. To secure the political stability integral to planned development, the technocratic elites increasingly entrusted with industrial policy selectively reinvented Asian traditions of deference, bureaucracy, and consensus. In fact, a growing band of Asian commentators now contends that Asian values of legalistic bureaucracy and Confucian deference in emerging South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore and traditional practices of cooperation and consensus building in Indonesia and Malaysia explain both Pacific Asian economic dynamism and the capacity to industrialize without incurring undue social dislocation.

In other words, planned development informed by traditional values shaped the modernization process in Pacific Asia. This conclusion should not seem particularly surprising if modernizing cultures necessarily adapt customs to the demands of modernization. Indeed, when Pan-Asian nationalists like Kishore Mahbubani and Mahathir Mohamad assert the superiority of local customary practice over the liberal individualist alternative, they appear merely to polemicize what Lucian Pye identified, more dispassionately, as distinctive psychological and cultural traits that impinge critically upon contemporary Pacific Asian social and political practice.

It is important to emphasize, however, that the customary values that modified development in Pacific Asia have been largely reinvented for the ideological purpose of channeling popular energy to collectively achievable economic targets. Significantly, the first generation leaders who assumed power in the unstable world of postcolonial Pacific Asia viewed the recovery of lost tradition, whether of Confucian, Buddhist, Hindic, or Islamic provenance or in a variety of syncretic amalgamations, with considerable skepticism. Committed to building new nations, they believed traditional hierarchical practice had failed either to prevent the indignity of colonization or to promote the capacity to modernize. Custom appeared incidental to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang in attempting to revive the waning nationalist cause in Taiwan after nineteen forty-nine, to Syngman Rhee in confronting internecine strife in Korea in the nineteen fifties, and to those in Southeast Asia riding the tiger of political and economic instability in the early nineteen sixties. In fact, a continuing theme of East Asian political discourse between nineteen fifty and nineteen sixty-five concerns the extent to which tradition impeded a "positive creed" and "active belief" in building new national communities from otherwise problematic "trays of loose sand."

The activist character of postcolonial self-determination in Pacific Asia, therefore, initially deterred the revival of traditional practice. Nevertheless, the emerging postcolonial identity, while nominally democratic and populist, remained suspicious of liberalism, a doctrine associated both with deracinating individualism and European colonial exploitation. Consequently, in Malaysia the emerging postcolonial identity necessitated a new political vocabulary to cover concepts like "state," "nation," and "politics." In Indonesia liberation and the creation of Indonesia Raya required both an imaginative leap as well as a new language, while in Singapore, expelled from the Malaysian Federation and surrounded by "a sea of Malay peoples," the ruling People's Action Party sought pragmatically to forge a multicultural amalgam of East and West. Meanwhile, in Northeast Asia the Kuomintang's blend of Sun Yat-sen's "scientific reinterpretation of Confucianism" and ideas derived from Chiang Kai-shek's German National Socialist advisers in the nineteen thirties demanded the suppression of indigenous Taiwanese culture. Ironically, the postwar Communist threat further sustained authoritarian personalities like Chiang and Syngman Rhee. Constituting Communism as an external "other" offered the matrix for a new identity and unity.

Only during the period of sustained growth and rapid urbanization after nineteen sixty did traditional understandings come to play an integral role in the nation-building process. As a number of commentators observed at the time, swift modernization in these late developing economies generated identity confusion at both a personal and a national level. In nineteen sixty-five Soedjatmoko contended that the "dynamics of ... developmental values might only come to life in a wider structure of meaning" and wondered whether "the progressive breakdown of traditional social structures with their established customs and the difficulty of relating to emerging new ones" created growing "uncertainty and anxiety leading in some case to a genuine crisis of identity." Indeed, such a "brooding preoccupation with the national self" was widely considered an "unavoidable phase in a nation's adjustment." To resolve the seemingly unpatterned desperation generated by the shock of the new and the deracinating transition from an agrarian to an urban order, governments turned increasingly to traditional understandings of relationship and order, now centrally disseminated through the media of television, school, and press, to reconstitute in the burgeoning modern Asia city the values fast disappearing from the rural hinterland.

Consequently, after nineteen sixty-five and the bloody instauration of Suharto's New Order Indonesian commentators observed a renewed emphasis upon paternalistic guidance and musyawarah (deliberation) leading to mufakat (consensus) in a spirit of non-conflictual cooperation. In Singapore the transmission of shared Asian values became a matter of educational and political urgency only in the nineteen eighties, while in the same decade the United Malay National Organization in Malaysia sought to revitalize and purify traditions drawn from the golden era of the Malacca sultanate, but amended to support an "untraditionalistic leader" devoted to building "Malaysia Incorporated." In South Korea, somewhat differently, the claim to have inherited a Confucian legacy dating from the end of the Yi dynasty substantiated the Republic of Korea's claim to be the legitimate vehicle of the Korean nation. Yet only during General Park Chung Hee's era of state-managed industrialization (nineteen sixty-one to nineteen seventy-nine) did official ideology come to emphasize a nation ruled not by laws but by superior men. In this context, the Samil Dongnip Undong movement inculcated "a national spirit ... more fundamental than the national spirit of modern nationalism." It "hit responsive chords" among both government bureaucrats and the rural peasantry. In Taiwan, more problematically, scientific Confucian education after nineteen eighty-eight had to pay increasing attention to indigenous cultural practice. Nevertheless, official education policy still remains officially committed to mandarinization and, as Yun Han-chu observes, the KMT has been peculiarly successful "through its exclusive control over the socialization agents, the schools, and mass media" in constructing an "ideologically underestimated popular coalition where all members of society believe the KMT embodies the interest of all classes."

Significantly, the World Bank maintains that the efficient provision of primary and secondary education was a crucial factor in creating the disciplined work force necessary to sustain economic growth in the high performing Asian economies. Its report, however, neglects to mention the values actually promoted by state education. Yet since the nineteen seventies the educational bureaucracies of these countries have sedulously attended to the role of public schooling in creating loyal and efficient citizens. The more confucianized polities of Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea require state schools to inculcate nation-building values like filial piety and conformity, while in Indonesia an awareness of Pancasila ideology and in Malaysia of Rukun Negara became significant features of the school curriculum. This schooling, moreover, occurs in an educational context of intensely competitive public examination, rote learning, and mechanical obedience. Officially controlled or state-licensed newspapers and television, often contractually obligated to promote national development, reinforce the school's socialization message.

As these states educated and trained their populations, culture, which "once resembled the air men breathed and of which they were seldom properly aware," became visible. The literate, mobile, urban, and formally equal lifestyle of the East Asian miracle contrasts radically with the stable, immobile, and discontinuous cultural practices of the relatively recent past. Yet in the process of this transformation a national culture, officially promulgated through centrally supervised, specialized educational agencies, came to constitute the admission card to employability and citizenship. "The Age of Nationalism," as Gellner explains, "arrives." Modernizing elites rediscover in tradition a resource against the anxiety sublimated at the collective and individual level by very rapid industrialization. Indeed, reinvented Confucian and modified Islamic practice teaches habits that facilitate collective mobilization toward developmental targets and provide technocratic planners with an invaluable resource. But this national culture is no longer invariant custom. Instead, tradition, centrally disseminated, metamorphoses into a set of ritual practices, inculcating "certain values and norms of behavior by repetition." These norms, moreover, no longer seek to revive a past golden age but instead, as one Singapore National Day song expresses it, guide the building of a "better tomorrow."

Not without political significance the middle classes are both the material beneficiaries of the East Asian miracle and the class most exposed to national values. The reinvented values, inculcated through state education and mass media campaigns, emphasize community rather than autonomy and moral certainty rather than tolerance. The middle class product of the state educational system subsequently enjoys state employment and patronage and is expected to respond positively to official calls for greater unity.

In Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea the middle class consists mainly of professionals, civil servants, and businessmen with bureaucratic connections. In Singapore the "work force accounted for by administrators, executive and managers, as well as professionals and technicians," rose from seven percent in nineteen fifty-six to almost twenty-five percent by nineteen ninety. In Taiwan Hung Mao-tien claims the middle class forms "one-third of the total adult population." It includes "owners of small and medium sized enterprises, managers in public and private banks and corporations. KMT and government bureaucrats, elected representatives, teachers, and professionals." In South Korea scholars generally distinguish between a "new middle class" of white collar workers in both private and public institutions and an "old" middle class of small owner-managers. Hagen Koo, on the basis of available survey data, maintains that by nineteen eighty the new middle class comprised about seventeen point seven percent of the entire middle class which constituted a third of the population. Koo further identifies a "mainstream middle class" with an economic interest in a stable capitalist order from a peripheral middle class consisting primarily of "highly politicized" university lecturers.

The graduates produced in growing numbers by the tertiary education sector in Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, moreover, continue to find employment in the expanding public or semipublic sectors. State education followed by bureaucratic training inculcates a respect for expert knowledge and a lack of interest in wider political issues. Specialization, defense, and a professional code of status group conformity facilitate social practices that have significantly illiberal political implications. In Singapore these factors favor a middle class identity founded on political indifference mixed with high anxiety. Its most significant manifestation is the local cultural practice of kiasuism. Kiasu behavior is premised on the belief that if "you are not one up you are one down" and condones otherwise antisocial activity provided the progenitor succeeds in achieving collectively desired but scarce social goods while maintaining conformist anonymity. The selfishness central to kiasu behavior emanates from an all-pervasive fear of failure in a competitive and highly regulated society.

The government-controlled media are notably ambivalent in their response to displays of Singaporean kiasuism. Significantly, The Straits Times considers it "synonymous with Singapore's famous competitiveness," while the newspaper's editor interprets it as "a duty to care." In fact, the middle class anxiety that kiasuism reflects responds positively to the ruling People's Action Party's claim to technical, rational, and managerial guidance. Incontrovertible rationalistic certainty provided by state experts consoles the neurotic parvenu who recoils at the prospect of free choice. This lack of confidence, therefore, welcomes the activist and interventionist PAP style of rule.

In Taiwan the ruling KMT in its various guises as government employer, political machine, and entrepreneur remains the major source of middle class employment. Prior to nineteen eighty-six its stable, tutelary rule encouraged the guanxi (connections) through which the middle classes attained the socioeconomic security that their Confucian education in moral certitude required. Significantly, like their Singaporean counterparts, arriviste Taiwanese are "not always able to express themselves adequately." Inadequacy, allied with deference, found assurance in a political "culture of intolerance." Thus, "whatever its size, the middle class has yet to find a single political voice. It does, however, have certain traits in common with middle classes in other Asian countries; it is politically pragmatic with an overriding interest in preserving the status quo."

Consequently, the continuing erosion of the KMT's capacity to wield paternalistic authority after nineteen eighty-seven has important ramifications for middle class political behavior. Growing political uncertainty has actually amplified middle class political and social insecurity. The rise of autonomous social movements, the growth of the opposition Democratic People's Party, and the articulation of dissent within the KMT therefore constitute growing sources of anxiety for a middle class that is largely unimpressed by the polymorphous joys of pluralism. Although some commentators argue that political liberalization has fostered the emergence of a more tolerant, open, yet still Confucian civic culture, others note a growing dependence upon factional connections in both local and national politics. In fact, attachment to a faction offers a way of avoiding the unwanted consequences of political liberalization. Consequently, a middle class worried by the uncertainty of democratic change continues to seek reassurance in the technocratic guidance of the KMT.

Like its counterpart in Singapore and Taiwan, the South Korean middle class also finds solace in an intolerant social conformity. The military-backed authoritarian regimes of Generals Park, Chun, and Roh actively promoted the virtue of conformity. Combined with a Confucian allegiance to moral rule, it has engendered in the Korean middle class a respect for ch'ijo, or an inflexible stand on matters of principle. The practice of clientelism intensified this respect for intolerant commitment. In particular, President Park's regime strategically cultivated regional bonds of kinship, training, and personal contact (inmaek) in order to maintain political dominance. Since nineteen eighty-seven regional factions have formed the basis of the constitutionally tolerated political parties. Consequently, "political parties especially are notable for their factional strife, for parties in truth are collectivities of individuals who have banded together to enable a leader to attain and maintain power." In a society that exhibits such regard for group loyalty premised upon intolerant commitment, the open discussion of different views and the possibility of political compromise offers little persuasive appeal.

If the blandishments of pluralistic civil society seem ill-suited to the insecure, inarticulate arrivistes of Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore, how are they received in moderately Islamized Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur?

Once again, a pattern of middle class dependence asserts itself. This pattern is most evident in multiethnic Malaysia. Here, the bumiputera, or indigenous Malay, middle class is the direct creation of post-seventy-one government intervention in the economy. In the aftermath of ethnic riots in nineteen sixty-nine the UMNO-dominated Barisan Nasional coalition government introduced a new economic policy designed to promote the indigenous Malay interest. In the course of Dr. Mahathir Mohamad's premiership since nineteen eighty-one, UMNO has attempted both to manage communal difference and to forge a new Malay national consciousness through an assertively bumiputera affirmative action policy. UMNO policy successfully expanded not only the size of the middle class, but also the bumiputera element within it. The Malay middle class, as former UMNO representative Tawfik Tun Ismail explains, is largely "a creation of the government." By nineteen eighty-eight the middle class comprised thirty-six percent of the total population, while bumiputera ownership of corporate equity rose from two point three percent in nineteen seventy to twenty point three percent in nineteen ninety. While Chinese entrepreneurs have been politically neutralized, the bumiputera middle class has either actively supported Mahathir Mohamad's attempt to create a centralized one party state or remained politically apathetic. Its political position is hardly surprising, as the state bureaucracy and businesses with UMNO links constitute the primary source of Malay middle class employment. UMNO, in other words, offers them a political and economic "crutch."

Consequently, the Malaysian nouveaux riches "do not have the same reasons for contributing to politics or speaking out because they would rather not change the system so long as they are the beneficiaries." It is "snob appeal that motivates the middle class" and reinforces a traditional Malaysian pattern of deference, hierarchy, and consensus. Traditionally, bonds were to feudal rulers; now they are to the party and its new men of prowess. State largesse facilitates UMNO's rule, and patron-client relations within UMNO and the wider business community negate the possibility of open disagreement or public debate. UMNO's press control, patronage, judicious manipulation of the constitution, and "money politics" have consequently augmented the state management of politics, business, and a fortiori the middle class.

In Indonesia the middle class grew together with the state bureaucracy after the traumatic transition to President Suharto's New Order in nineteen sixty-five. The middle class, moreover, most obviously benefits from the bureaucratic "management of the nation's affairs. It has a stake in the economic and social progress that has been achieved, it has a stake in the status quo, in continuity." Significantly, the New Order has vastly increased the size of the civil service, which after nineteen sixty-seven grew faster than the population as a whole. Together with a regular salary, the bureaucracy provides its four million middle class employees "with rice, housing, transport to and from work, and comprehensive medical care." In return, the government expects loyal conformity.

This arrangement fortuitously corresponds to traditional Javanese understandings of "self-control and lack of initiative seeking." The corporate management of New Order society characteristically cultivates dependency through reinvented tradition. A syncretic blend of technocratic development and traditional deference has made New Order rule increasingly exclusionary rather than participatory. This development, nevertheless, suits a docile, pessimistic, and dependent middle class. Indeed, a survey for the recently banned Editor magazine found in nineteen ninety that the "better off the middle class were, the more reluctant they were to go onto the political stage." This result reinforces the view that the new class is politically "barren."

Thus, as the major economic and social beneficiaries of thirty years of economic growth the new middle class in Pacific Asia is highly dependent upon state patronage. Its defining characteristic is the deracinated anxiety of the parvenu and the consequent search for ties that guarantee stability and certainty. In return for reassurance, ruling elites expect their middle class dependents to demonstrate commitment toward the latest government-sponsored "nation-building" initiative. Mere acquiescence is insufficient. Traditional high culture, whether Islamic, Javanese, or Confucian, centrally promulgated for mass consumption, reinforces the view that the only alternative to a bureaucratically determined consensus is unwanted conflict between right and wrong. From this perspective, political pluralism appears disturbingly anarchic.

The managerial techniques of contemporary corporate capitalism further reinforce this illiberal political culture. Pacific Asian technocracy postulates an economic rationalism in which management, entrepreneurialism, and administration develop the population as a resource. Instead of an urban bourgeoisie that forges an autonomous sphere of civil activity out of an otiose authoritarianism, the middle class produced by the developmental state is effectively in its thrall. What are the implications of this culture for political change?