Looking back on East Asian politics in 1994 ...

The Jakarta Post Asia Correspondent Harvey Stockwin takes a look backward at the political developments, or lack of them, during 1994 in the following article. And in another article below he looks at the prospects in 1995 in the uncertain arena of international relations.

HONG KONG (JP): The year 1994 was the one in which China stood still, Japan inched along, Taiwan finally took off, and Korea looked in danger of slipping back.

China stood still? But surely this was the year when the Chinese economy continued to take off, and the world's largest nation in terms of population moved inexorably towards superpower status?

Perhaps this was so. Yet it is equally relevant to assert that 1994 was just one more year in which, for mysterious and often irrational reasons, "China fever" once again gripped the Western world, including Japan. The fever even swayed tough-minded realists like Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and Singapore Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew.

The world has been periodically gripped by such spasms for the last several centuries. In 1994, the World Bank dreamed up a new way of increasing the size of the Chinese economy by a system of statistical double-counting. President Bill Clinton abandoned all thought of pressuring, and even considered visiting, the men he once referred to as the "Butchers of Beijing". Businessmen everywhere dreamed of unprecedented profits if only 1.2 billion Chinese were allowed to buy their products.

The pattern varies but essentially remains the same. No one now thinks of selling oil lamps to China. But China sees more profit and advantage in running up a large trade surplus in the vast and open U.S. market rather than allowing foreigners equally free and easy access to China's vastness.

As foreign investors rush to place untold billion dollar bets within China, it surely says something highly significant that those with wealth in China are trying to place their ill-gotten or properly-attained gains outside the Middle Kingdom.

Of course the Chinese inside China know full well that all is uncertain as one personal dynasty within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) drifts towards its end. They do not have to be told that China is standing still politically. That is what always happens when dynasties end.

So, as 90-year-old paramount leader Deng Xiaoping languished, there was no political reform whatsoever within China, and precious little economic reform either, a fact underlined at year's end as China failed to immediately get foundation-member status in the new World Trade Organization.

True to form the Middle Kingdom had demanded that it be admitted on its own terms, and, for once, was rebuffed by hard- headed trade negotiators.

So, amid the continuing political stalemate, the ranks of new computers bought by China were underutilized or not used at all because the regime could not possibly allow the free flow of information on which success in the computer age depends.

The dwindling ranks of Chinese dissidents, at year's end, were receiving even more severe sentences than those tried in the wake of the Beijing Massacre. Wei Jinsheng, China's best known democrat, completed a lengthy sentence awarded for the Tiananmen Troubles, only to disappear again after daring to meet a U.S. Assistant Secretary for Human Rights.

Romanticism over China's economic growth meant that no major world leader even asked the Chinese what they had done with Wei, leave aside pressured them not to do it.

As China stood still politically, CCP Secretary-general and Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Prime Minister Li Peng seemed to take some limited political advantage from the hiatus. They had clearly demonstrated, after all, that it paid to take a tough line with foreigners. Amid western and Southeast Asian appeasement of China, those arguing that China had to make many of the political and economic changes which foreigners were also urging, simply had not got a leg to stand on. Their day will come.

Japan is a country which likes to formally announce the beginning or the end of things. Bureaucrats in the meteorological office customarily announce the official end of the rainy season around June. Usually the rain does not dare to disobey by returning for a final downpour. This year the Economic Planning Agency (EPA) announced the official date for the end of the recession. After the long period of stagnation following the bursting of the bubble economy, it seemed too soon to be sure that the economy would comply with the bureaucratic assertion.

So far no Japanese bureaucrat and certainly no politician has been bold enough to pronounce the Completion of Political Reform (CPR). Technically the task is complete. It took three prime ministers to do it but finally a new electoral system plus some bills on campaign financing were passed by the House of Representatives. These are supposed to make politicians more policy-minded, more open in their ways and more capable of taking charge of the bureaucracy. It is supposed to make politics less corrupt, less factional and less devious.

Yet the politicians of all parties spent most of the year inarticulately closeted in smoke-filled back rooms. The bureaucrats continued to draft speeches and policies, bills and budgets, and generally obstructed faster, much-needed deregulation of the Japanese economy since that would diminish their power base. So hope faded that the long-awaited CPR really added up to meaningful change.

In mid-year, the reformists first fell out among themselves, thereby bringing the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) back to power, though the LDP had to appoint a left-wing socialist as prime minister in order to accomplish this. By the time the reformists united to inaugurate a New Frontier Party (Shinshinto) late in the year, many Japanese voters were understandably disillusioned. The high peak of hope in mid-1993, when Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa came to power, had long since dissipated. The year 1994 gave no real indication when or if it would be revived.

Everyone assumes that Taiwan has already taken off economically. This was the year when it did the same politically. The people at last got a chance to elect the mayors of the two largest cities --Kaohshiung and Taipei -- and the governor of Taiwan. Even more important the presidency of the Republic of China on Taiwan will also be elected on the basis of one-man, one-vote, as a result of additional reforms instituted by the government of President Lee Teng-hui during the year.

Taiwan took off in other ways, too. As one of its members was elected mayor of Taipei, the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, with its pro-independence stance, previously better known for its fisticuffs in parliament, gained power and responsibility. But the long ruling Kuomintang belatedly began to re-emphasize Taiwan's separate identity along with its commitment to eventual reunification. This contrary stress has so far enabled it to retain its grip on power. China naturally detests the directions in which democracy may lead -- but presumably appreciates the fact that Taiwan has been using its freedom to invest heavily on the mainland.

Elsewhere in the region, South Korea continued to move forward along the democratic path, but the Korean Peninsula threatened to slip back towards conflict. The American-led plan to bribe North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program was put in place -- but whether it will work was left very much in doubt.

Vietnam began to attract the same degree of euphoria which businessmen have previously directed at China. While the Philippines and Thailand stuck firmly though not always productively to the democratic road, Singapore and Malaysia became even more committed to the authoritarian path. India saw the first clear electoral signs that the Indian National Congress's current grip on power was weakening and there were not lacking those who thought it is time to give a political role to Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi's widow, hoping once again that the Nehru Dynasty would restore flagging Congress fortunes.

Altogether it was a year in which East Asia continued to economically advance but remained politically retarded in many crucial ways.

Window: 1994 was one more year in which, for mysterious and often irrational reasons, "China fever" once again gripped the Western world and parts of Asia.