Poodle patting in int'l relations: An Asian experience (2)

This is the second of two articles on an Indonesian friend of our correspondent Harvey Stockwin who once taught him something relating to the present Asian crisis.

HONG KONG (JP): I was in South and Southeast Asia at the time, reading what was being written by China-watchers in Hong Kong about the great upheaval then developing throughout China. It was already clear -- and of course became clearer with the passage of time -- that immense chaos and suffering was once again being imposed upon Chinese by Chinese. What shocked me then, and still angers me today, were the Western commentators and analysts, academics and journalists, who dug deep into their capacity for rationalization and pronounced the GPCR a wonderful event, a revolutionary blessing, or a great start for the New China.

It was poodle-patting of the highest order. The poodle patters did not seek out truth from the facts of the situation, such as they were at the time, and then let the analytical chips fall where they may. Instead, they tried to justify an event in the best possible light, in the process frequently attacking those who did deal in hard facts for being "anti-China".

Had an event as horrendous as the GPCR taken place in the United States or in Europe, these same people would probably not have hesitated to denounce and expose it. But the GPCR was in 'mysterious', 'wonderful', or 'revolutionary' China -- the China which the west had mistreated and abused for so many years -- so the development simply had to be justified.

Of course it didn't really matter what China's poodle-patters said at that time. China effectively embarked upon a civil war and there was nothing the world could do about it. The China apologists were merely grist to Beijing's propaganda machine.

But, just possibly, fewer Chinese would have died, and China would have come to its political senses sooner had the "friends of China" been true to their intellectual heritage, and told it like it was.

Any mention of poodle-patting and China inevitably leads to the broader question of the romanticism with which China is viewed in the wider world, and which plays an unending role in the relations which most major nations develop with the Middle Kingdom. Sufficient to note that poodle-patting can often be a two-way street. Soepomo didn't think of things in that way -- but, as with dogs, so with humans, some poodles do like to be patted.

This is why I am remembering Soepomo and the folly of poodle- patting at this particular time. In a nutshell, poodle-patting lies at the heart of the current Asian economic financial and political crisis.

One way in which the West has been exceedingly unhelpful to Southeast and to East Asia has been in the promulgation by Western academics, journalists, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and assorted politicians of the dubious thesis concerning the so-called Asian "economic miracle".

Without going into all the arguments now, this was and is singularly inappropriate terminology.

The far more relevant concept is that Asian nations have been valiantly, though sometimes belatedly, combating tremendous population pressures, deeply ingrained poverty, woefully weak infrastructure, high levels of illiteracy, and profound social and ethnic divisions with a modest degree of success and many failures. Economic statistics said there was great progress, but that "miracle" was seldom, if ever, registered on the ground in the face of all these profound problems.

There has been nothing truly miraculous about the degree of progress achieved, especially as countries like China (under Mao), Indonesia (under Sukarno) and the Philippines (under Marcos) -- to name only three examples -- had earlier wasted decades on ruinous political diversions, during which they went backwards, not forwards.

East and Southeast Asia are only now beginning to catch up with their problems. They have a long way to go.

For the West to dub the limited achievements so far as "a miracle" was either disdainful, patronizing or naive, at best, carrying distinct overtones of what my friend Soepomo rejected -- quite rightly -- as poodle-patting.

At worst, it was racial poodle-patting, based, perhaps subconsciously, on the racist assumption that it was "miraculous" that Asians were reacting to the challenge of modernity like the white folks once did.

After all, no one ever called it the "British Miracle" when the industrial revolution was invented. No one termed it "the American economic miracle" when the United States overtook Britain, and went on growing from them until the present day.

The biting irony has been that the word "miracle" was particularly inappropriate for developing Asia, since it injected into an already strongly religious environment an element of the supernatural or the mystical, in relation to what should always be seen impersonally as the complex mechanics of economic and political progress.

If the West was wrong to accept and propagate the "Asian Miracle" idea, Asians have been equally at fault in adopting the concept as a bolster to their post-colonial pride.

This is where poodle-patting became a two-way street. On the one hand, in relation to the Asian economic miracle concept, there were those who were flatterers. It is equally relevant to find fault with those who succumbed to the flattery -- and then made the additional error of believing their own propaganda.

Sure enough, as this first great truly regional crisis has seeped through Southeast and East Asia, it has been all too easy for political leaders imbued with false ideas of a miracle to assume that it is in their stars, rather than themselves, that they have become underlings. The religious "miracle" concept has bred irresponsibility, as well as complacency, and has also subverted Asia's innate capacity for crisis management.

Today yet another misleading spin-off from the mistaken belief in the "Asian economic miracle" is observable among both flatterers and flattered. Simply because past achievements were exaggerated, so possible present and future failures are now being over-emphasized, too. Spoken at a similar moment of crisis, President Franklin Roosevelt's injunction that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" seems as relevant today as it was in 1933.

So I remember how, way back in 1959, Soepomo reminded me of the essence of modernity: avoid all forms of poodle-patting, and, as the poet says, when faced with triumph or disaster, "treat those two impostors just the same".

I have asked several friends over the years to trace Soepomo for me but they have never managed to do so. Wherever you are, my friend, I am sure you are still striving for true equality, and keeping your critical faculties at the service of mankind. Wherever you are, I miss you -- but thanks for a precious memory.