A Continent's Promise

A Continent's Promise
Will this be the "Pacific century"? Only if freedom spreads throughout Asia.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Monday, September 10, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

Some folks favor reading the future in tea leaves, some use computers. But in looking toward Asia's next quarter century, I have at hand a better guide. It's a tattered red flag, which I picked up in Beijing at dawn on the morning of June 4, 1989, as the last protesters were forced at army gunpoint out of Tiananmen Square.

This flag has remained in my keeping solely because I doubt China's current government would honor its return. But it belongs to the Chinese people, who in 1989 told the world it was high time they had democracy. It belongs to the many who silently believe the same today. It stands for a force that over the past quarter century has helped Asia advance, but that most of the region still needs in much greater measure. That force is freedom. If Asia is to continue to move forward, the driving philosophy of the next quarter century has got to become liberty and justice for all.

"Western values" is the phrase many of Asia's ruling elites still use to dismiss such ideas. But during the years I traveled in Asia, from 1986 to 1993, I sure heard a lot of ordinary Asians talking about how much they valued freedom, and--where they didn't have it--how deeply they wanted it. I heard it from South Korean pig farmers, from Chinese shopkeepers, from demonstrators in Bangkok, from scholars in Indonesia, from Vietnamese boat people who had risked their lives even to get to the refugee holding pens of Hong Kong. I saw it summed up in Beijing on the night of May 30, 1989, when students surrounded by a rapt crowd labored in Tiananmen Square to build a statue of liberty. Lest I miss the point, a young Chinese doctor in that crowd turned to me, and like many others during that brief season of truth-telling in China, said bluntly, "We want democracy."

For the past quarter-century, the region's biggest story has been economic development--"the Asian miracle." What sped this along was not some eccentric bit of luck; it was greater freedom in markets. In every place that began to creak open--Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and eventually China, to name a few--we saw ordinary people seize any chance to prosper. In every country that stayed shut--at the extreme, Burma, North Korea, Vietnam--poverty still rules. There can be no doubt by now that from the noodle stalls of Beijing to the circuit boards of Bangalore, Asians given the slightest opening will find ways to do business. We all get richer.

But the rise of political freedom has in most places lagged behind economic development. That's no surprise. As the former Soviet Union has discovered, political freedom is not simply a matter of removing repression. It also requires the building of democratic institutions. That takes time and needs leaders. But it is vital. The framework of democracy is more than just a luxury desired here and there by flag-waving radicals. Political liberty, with its free flow of information and full array of individual rights, responsibilities and legal recourse, is necessary for the smooth working of markets. Which goes far to explain why it's the year 2001 and we have not quite reached that tantalizing Pacific Century.

When I arrived in Hong Kong in 1986to work at The Asian Wall Street Journal, Asia was in midmiracle. Japan was No. 1. Market analysts in Tokyo were calculating that the value of the Imperial Palace grounds would soon exceed the net worth of everything else on the planet. And the fast growth of markets had set off a chain reaction of demands for democracy. In the Philippines, a population wanting its rightful share of the Asian boom had just deposed crony-capitalist dictator Ferdinand Marcos. In 1987, after mass protests by a growing middle class, South Korea's dictatorship gave way to real elections. That same year, Taiwan lifted martial law and began the evolution toward what is today the first Chinese democracy.

But beyond that, political reform--and the Asian miracle--began to bog down. Demands for freedom were spreading, but the willingness of despots to resign and bureaucrats to bow out was not. In Burma in 1988, liberal protesters were gunned down in the streets of Rangoon, and the democrats later elected to Parliament were never allowed to take their seats. In China in 1989, the Communist Party answered the Tiananmen Square protests with bullets and tanks.

In Japan, the industrial planners just couldn't leave business alone, and it turned out they were no substitute for a freer, more flexible market system. Not only did the bubble burst, but the story this past decade has been mostly one of political paralysis and economic stagnation. Vietnam's hot bid to become the next Asian tiger turned out to be a bust--thanks to a Communist Party that still won't let go. And though there's a lot of talk about China emerging as the new Numero Uno, it's worth recalling that right up to its 1991 collapse, the Soviet Union was regarded by many as a superpower. Certainly China has a more functional economy than did the U.S.S.R. But without political freedom, even countries that look like strong bets can be heading for disaster.

Take Indonesia. In 1987, after a reporting trip to Jakarta, I wrote a piece headlined "Indonesia at the Crossroads," arguing that "whether Mr. Suharto eventually ends his long career in honor or in chaos depends greatly on whether he now follows his better instincts--which were clearly in show when he noted, eight years ago, that freedom and development go together." Mr. Suharto ignored his own wisdom and stuck around as dictator. Finally, in 1997, along came the Asia crisis. In 1998, Mr. Suharto was dumped with dishonor. Indonesia, sapped by years of rotten rule, got chaos.

Dictatorship, communism, massive state bureaucracies that strangle commerce--all these things need to become yesterday's news. They aren't "Asian values." From the former Soviet Union to Africa to big chunks of Latin America, they have been recipes for stagnation, poverty and the awful stifling of human promise. Asian values are what went into creating the first step of the Asian miracle: the desire for richer, freer lives that given a chance could yet make this the Asian century. What a story that could be. And what a delight to finally return that Chinese democracy flag to its rightful home.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. She was editorial page editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal, 1986-93.