Cultural claims on the new world order: Malaysia ... - Perdana Library

The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) was established as an autonomous
organization in 1968. It is a regional research centre for scholars and other
specialists concerned with modern Southeast Asia, particularly the many-faceted
issues and challenges of stability and security, economic development, and political
and social change.
The Institute's research programmes are Regional Economic Studies (RES,
including ASEAN and APEC), Regional Strategic and Political Studies (RSPS),
and Regional Social and <strong>Cultural</strong> Studies (RSCS).
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nominees from the Singapore Government, the National University of Singapore,
the various Chambers of Commerce, and professional and civic organizations.
An Executive Committee oversees day-to-day operations; it is chaired by the
Director, the Institute's chief academic and administrative officer.

edited by
YAO SOUCHOU

Published by
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace
Pasir Panjang
Singapore 119614
Internet e-mail: publish@iseas,edu.sg
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© 2001 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore
The responsibility fir facts and opinions in this publication rests exclusively
with the editor and contributors and their interpretations do not necessarily reflect
the views or the policy of the Institute or its supporters.
ISEAS Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
House of glass : culture, modernity, and the state in Southeast Asia / edited by Yao
Souchou.
1. Asia, Southeastern—<strong>Cultural</strong> policy.
2. Mass media—Political aspects—Asia, Southeastern.
3. Mass media—Social aspects—Asia, Southeastern.
4. Nationalism—Asia, Southeastern.
I. Yao, Souchou.
HM101 H84 2001
ISBN 981-230-074-0 (soft cover)
ISBN 981-230-075-9 (hard cover)

Contents
Preface
Contributors
Introduction
Yao Souchou
Part One
Local desire and global anxieties
1 Desperately guarding borders: media globalization,
"cultural imperialism" and the rise of "Asia"
Ien Ang
2 Modernity and Mahathir's rage: theorizing state discourse
of mass media in Southeast Asia
Yao Souchou
3 Representing state desire and the sins of transgression
Ray Langenbach
4 McNationalism in Singapore
Lee Weng Choy
Part Two
Identity, the state, and post-modernity
5 National identity, diasporic anxiety, and music video
culture in Vietnam
Ashley Carruthers

vi
6 The post-modernization of Thainess
Kasian Tejapira
Part Three
State power, development, and the spectre of nation-building
7 <strong>Cultural</strong> <strong>claims</strong> on the new world order:
Malaysia as a voice for the Third World?
Loong Wong
8 (De)constructing the New Order: capitalism and the
cultural contours of the patrimonial state in Indonesia
Mark T. Berger
9 The state and information in modern
Southeast Asian history
T.N, Harper
Part Four
Representational strategies and politics of the popular
10 Representing the Singapore modern: Dick Lee, pop music,
and the "New" Asia
CJ.W.-L Wee
11 Pictures at an exhibition: re-presenting the sugar industry
at the Negros Museum, Philippines
Marian Pastor Roces
12 Stars in the shadows: celebrity, media, and the state
in Vietnam
Mandy Thomas & Russell H. -K. Heng
13 On the expressway, and under it: representations of
the middle class, the poor, and democracy in Thailand
James Ockey
Index
Contents
150
173
191
213
243
270
287
313
338

Preface
The idea of this book was first explored in a two-day symposium organized
at the Institute of Southeast Asia Studies, Singapore, in 1994 with
financial support from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. The purpose
of the symposium — entitled "Problematizing Culture: Media, Identity,
and the State in Southeast Asia" — was to examine the nature of
media representation and politics of identity in the various nation-states
in the region. However, by the end of the symposium, it became clear
that two key issues had emerged as the central preoccupations of the
participants: the predominant role of the state in the cultural and discursive
realms, and the deployment of post-modern and post-structuralist
theorizing in analysing local processes. I took the idea — and the
inspirations — with me when I moved to the University of vSydney in
October 1996, and commissioned additional contributions from among
my new colleagues. On the whole, I have tried to maintain the critical
vision as formulated in the symposium. The 1997 financial meltdown
in Southeast Asia forced most of us to do another round of revisions to
reflect recent developments.
The strength and insight of the book owe much to the contributors,
and their goodwill and humour in graciously accepting my editorial
suggestions and demands. I would also like to thank Chua Beng Huat,
Ariel Heryanto, Michael Van Langenbach, and Sharrad Kutton for their
stimulating input; and David Birch and Brian Shoesmith, who first
planted in my mind the seed of a Southeast Asian <strong>Cultural</strong> Studies project-
In Sydney, Mark Berger, Ien Ang, Helen Grace, and Richard Basham
have been invaluable "fellow travellers". I am most grateful to Ashley

viii Preface
Carruthers and Phillip Mar for their editorial assistance and companionship,
and Akaash, Neena, and Simryn for their patience. This project
was funded by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, where
I was a fellow from 1993 to 1996.
Yao Souchou
Editor

Contributors
Ian Ang is Professor of <strong>Cultural</strong> Studies and Director of the Institute for
<strong>Cultural</strong> Research at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Among
her major publications are Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic
Imagination (1985), Desperately Seeking the Audience (1991),
Living Room Wars (1996), and On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between
Asia and the West (2001).
Mark T. Berger is Senior Lecturer in International History and Development
Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University
of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He has published articles in
a number of international journals, including Third World Quarterly,
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique,
Latin American Perspectives, Journal of Latin American Studies, and
Alternatives: Social Transformation and Humane Governance, His research
interests include the history of colonialism, nationalism, decolonization,
the Cold War, and the history of U.S. foreign policy with a focus on
Southeast Asia, the Asia-Pacific, and Latin America.
Ashley Carruthers is Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies, National
University of Singapore. His thesis "Exile and Return:
Deterritorialising National Imaginaries in Vietnam and the Disapora"
examines the transformation of national imaginaries in Vietnam and
the diaspora in the post-Cold War context. He has published in journals
such as the Australian Journal of Anthropology, Media International
Australia, and the Australian Journal of Communication,

X
Contribute
T.N. Harper is Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and Lectu
in History. He is the author of The End of Empire and the Making
Malaya (1998). His research interest is in the post-colonial history
Southeast Asia, and his publications have appreared in journals inch
ing Modern Asian Studies, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and Sou
east Asian Affairs. He is currently completing a general history of
British Empire.
Russell H.-K. Heng is presently Senior Fellow at the Institute of Sou
east Asian Studies, Singapore. Russell received his Ph.D. degree fr
the Australian National University in 2000. His research was on
relationship between media and the state in Vietnam. Prior to his
search career, he was a practising journalist in Singapore.
Kasian Tejapira is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Thama
University in Bangkok, Thailand. His recent publications include "I
agined Uncommunity: The Lookjin Middle Class and Thai Offi
Nationalism", in EssentialOutsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Tr
formation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe (1997), and "Signifi
tion of Democracy", in Thammasat Review (1996). He is also a no
newspaper columnist and was formerly a radical activist and gueri
fighter in the jungle of northeast Thailand. |
Ray Langenbach has lived and worked in Southeast Asia since 19
He headed the Sculpture Department at Universiti Sains Malay
(1988-92), and taught Art Theory and Digital Imaging at the I
tional Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological Univeri
Singapore (1993-96). A conceptual artist, he has performed and|
hibited installations and videos in museums and galleries in A
Australia, Europe, and the United States. His various writings on
and culture have been published in the journals Afterimage, Air
Asia Pacific, Artlink, Asian Art News, Commentary, Dialogue, 'lat
The Journal of Culture and Education, and World Art. He is currci
a Ph.D. candidate at the School of <strong>Cultural</strong> Histories and Futu
University of Western Sydney, Australia.

Contributors xi
Lee Weng Choy is an arc critic based in Singapore, He has written for
various art journals, books, and catalogues, including ART AsiaPacific,
Contemporary Visual Art, Sculpture, Nine Lives: 10 Years of Singapore
Theatre, Singapore: Views on the Urban Landscape, The Third Asia-Pacific
Triennial of Contemporary Art (Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane), and
Flight Patterns (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). Lee has a
B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, and an
M.A. in English Literature from Mills College, California. He is presently
an Artistic Co-Director at The Substation arts centre in Singapore.
Jim Ockey is Senior Lecturer at Canterbury University in Christchurch,
New Zealand. He has written numerous articles on aspects of Thai politics,
including political parties, leadership, congested communities, crime
and politics, and "the middle class".
Marian Pastor Races is a critic and independent curator working in
Manila, Philippines. Her numerous articles on art criticism have appeared
in Art + Text, Visual Art and Culture, CoNNect, and other places.
Her recent exhibition project is "Sheer Realities; Power and Clothing in
19th Century Philippines" held at the Asia Society, New York.
Mandy Thomas is a social anthropologist and ARC post-doctoral fellow
at the Institute of <strong>Cultural</strong> Reseach, University of Western Sydney,
Australia. Her research interests are diasporic identity, popular culture,
and cultural politics in Vietnam. Her recent publications include the
book Dreams in the Shadows: Vietnamese-Australian Lives in Transition
(1999), and "Fantasia: Transnational Flows and Asian Popular Culture
in Australia" in Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media
and Popular Culture (2000).
C.J.W.-L, Wee teaches English literature at the Nanyang Technological
University, Singapore. His major research interests arc national identity,
cultural politics, and the discourse of Asian modernity in Singapore.
His publications include articles in Public Culture, positions: east asia
cultures critique, and SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia.

xii Contributors
Loong Wong lectures in the School of Business, University of Newcastle.
Previously he taught at Monash and Deakin universities in Australia
and also in Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. He has published
widely on the issues of post-colonial states and maintains an interest in
food, music, the Internet, international relations (including international
businesses), social movements, environmental politics, and business practices.
His publications have appeared in the Journal of Contemporary
Asia, Interdisciplinary Peace Research, Critical Sociology, among others.
Yao Souchou is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology,
University of Sydney, Australia, and was a fellow at the Institute of Southeast
Asian Studies, Singapore, from 1993 to 1996. His research interests
are the cultural politics of Southeast Asia and identity formation of the
Chinese diaspora. He has carried out field-work in Hong Kong, Sarawak,
East Malaysia, and Singapore. His publications include articles in Parallex,
Journal of Asian Communications, Journal of <strong>Cultural</strong> Critique, and Australian
Journal of Anthropology. His book Confucian Capitalism: Discourse,
Practice and the Myth of Chinese Enterprise is to be published by Curzon
Press, London (2001).

Introduction
YAO SOUCHOU
My life was as straight as a piece of wire pulled taut, without twists and turns.
... And now it was not just bent, but tangled. And I could not see how I
could unravel the tangle. Everyday I feel my throat in the tighter and tighter
grip of an outside power...
I would now have to be on the lookout, like looking for a needle in a pile
of paddy stalks. The needle must be found, even the paddy stalks have to be
destroyed. All this even though it was a small piece of pure steel, without the
rust of evil, except for that speck of idealism, that history of love of people
and country, chat seed of patriotism and nationalism whose final flowering
could not yet be clearly seen. And chat you are careful chat you are not pricked
by that needle yourself. For the government and I as its instrument, must,
however, look upon such idealism as criminal. (Toer 1992, pp. 50—53)
Thus begins Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer's magisterial
meditation on the fate of one living under the spell of the colonial state
in his House of Glass (1992).The time was 1912; the place, Netherlands
East Indies, The narrator Jacques Pangemanann is a former Commis-
sioner of Police. Educated in Lyon, France, he is indeed like Conrad's
Kurtz, a flower of European civilization. But what confronts his heart of
darkness is an enterprise far more insidious than those of economic plun-
der and military conquest by colonialism. He has been asked by the

2
Yao Souchou
Dutch colonial authorities to investigate the "textual activities" of the
anti-colonial radicals:
My new assignment was to study the writings of the Natives that were being
published in the newspapers and magazines, Analyse them. Interview the
authors. Compare them. And make some conclusions about their calibre,
the direction of their thinking and their attitude towards the Government of
the Netherlands Indies. (Toer 1992, p. 52)
These "texts" are not merely trails which Pangemanann follows assiduously
to monitor the growth of anti-colonial activities. As he carries out
his masters deed, such "texts" offer the oppressive possibility of betrayal.
In the hands of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, texts and textual production
are to have a crucial existential significance. As it gives central voice to
Pangemanann, House of Glass charts his complex desire as he confronts
the seduction of — and his inner contempt for — his own authority
and a secret admiration for his nemesis, the Islamic revolutionary Minke.
Betrayal and secrecy, however, are not the only fate of text. As a
radical and a writer, Pramoedya cannot help but invest a crucial emancipatory
potential in text and its production. What gives House of Class
its ambivalence are the circumstances in which the work was written: on
the prison island of Buru in eastern Indonesia where Pramoedya was
imprisoned without trial for fourteen years until his release in 1979.
The oppressive inner world of Pangemanann becomes a spatial metaphor
for the island prison. In this inner world and on the island, words
are whispered in secret. The title of the novel must have been a literal
rendering of the conditions of the prison: the policing and surveillance
of inmates, the division of day and night, secrecy and openness, what is
allowed and what is forbidden. In these horrendous conditions, textual
production became for Pramoedya, a desperate act of resistance. However,
if writing is a personal act of defiance in the Buru Island prison
house, it is also through the contemplation of text, Pramoedya reminds
us, that the narrator Pangemanann is able to accomplish his task for the
colonial authorities. In this sense, the ultimate fate of text might lie
precisely in its fragile promise of release. For textual production is as
much about emancipation and liberation, as it is an enterprise to which
the state turns to realize its hegemonic aims.

Introduction 3
Theory and the politics of representation
This book examines the relationship between discursive practices, modernity,
and state power in Southeast Asia. For such a project, it is irresistible
to begin by drawing on Pramoedya's bitter contemplation of the
ambivalence of text. If the metaphor "house of glass" has served
Pramoedya in describing his paradoxical feeling about the potency and
futility of writing, it also foregrounds our major analytical concern and
sense of unease in this project. The contributors have, for the most part,
turned their attention to the discursive and representational realms of
state processes. For some, the moving away from political economy as a
site of intellectual engagement has been, at the most immediate level,
something to do with the excitement of reading and writing "theory" in
vSoutheast Asia. The contributors in this volume are either located in or
have worked for a long period in the region. This has been an enabling
factor in our attempt to subject local state processes to the theoretical
scrutiny of, mostly notably post-modernism and post-structuralism, Of
course, the idea of "writing theory" in/from Southeast Asia may already
raise a difficult question: one about its feasibility in a social-cultural
context in which the "traditional", colonial, and pre-colonial pasts still
demand reckoning. In the first planning workshop for this volume, held
at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, in November 1994,
the feasibility of a Southeast Asian <strong>Cultural</strong> Studies was brought up in
the discussion. We could not but note the irony of the fact that our
discursive engagement, with all its nuances of post-colonial resistance,
still draws on theoretical formulations developed in the "West" — out
of the post-1968 crisis of French Marxism, out of the Western disillusionment
with the Enlightenment and Hegelian dialectics (Young 1990,
chap. t). How can such theorizing be deployed in Southeast Asia, with
its different histories, its different locations in the structure of global
capitalism? The question is — we have all read Aijaz Ahmad s classic In
Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992) -—difficult to resolve. Nonetheless,
one thing seems certain; that in Southeast Asia, as elsewhere,
knowledge of theory and the ability to write it are unevenly distributed,
even among university academics. Writing theory— Foucault, Derrida,
and Lacan — in Southeast Asia is one of the markers of academic

4 Yao Souchou
cosmopolitanism, which is for us at once empowering and selfmarginalizing.
1
If "doing cultural studies" in the local context indeed has a different
resonance from similar activities in the West, our major interest goes
beyond that which comes from engaging in new innovative interpretive
practices. It also lies in the subversive potential of deconstruction, which
puts the ideological orthodoxy of the state under a new and less alluring
light. That the state in Southeast Asia has invested much energy in selfrepresentation
and in the active production of its discourses is a fact that
underlines the common concerns of the contributors to this volume. It
is conventional theoretical wisdom that the discursive realm is never
purely "representational", but has emerged from and consolidated into
real power by legislative framing and legal enforcement. Our position is
one that views texts and representational events as inseparable from the
conditions of their production and reception in a particular historical
juncture. Discursive practices form a part of the complex processes of
the making of culture. If cultural meaning is, in the final analysis, political
meaning, then struggle in the field of text becomes highly significant.
The struggle for the certainty of meaning is the struggle for the
right to evaluate the past and present, and the right to remember things
that we, as subjects of nation-state, are obliged to forget (Renan 1990).
In this sense, cultural politics in Southeast Asia and elsewhere is about
the all-important prerogative to imagine differently, and to "envision"
an alternative political future, a prerogative for which lives and limbs
have been lost, and personal and civil liberties curtailed.
Two faces of state power
1. Globalization, capitalist development, and the nation-state
In Southeast Asia the nation-state is, except for Thailand, a fairly recent
phenomenon, existing only since World War II. As McVey notes, "only
recently have Southeast Asians grown to adulthood entirely within the
ambience of the national state, though among those of family, kindred,
and religion" (McVey 1984, p. 3). In spite of their recent histories,
nation-states in Southeast Asia—of both the socialist and liberal democratic
kinds — are endowed with awesome coercive power to impose

Introduction 5
their iron will on their societies. In this context, state power is not merely
an abstract entity but a sharp reality which permeates everyday experiences.
From the time we pick up the morning paper, the moment we
turn on the radio or television, the state is there with its busy pronouncements
of another achievement of economic and national development,
of another victorious crushing of political dissent which threatens national
security or misleads the public about the doing of the government."
Thus, those of us in Southeast Asia may be forgiven for overstating,
out of experience and habit, the totalizing and systematic quality of
the state and its power. In so doing, we are not unmindful of the warning
of Guha (1989, p. 283), who speaks of the "spurious hegemony" of
the (colonial) state as a "fabrication". It is bourgeois nostalgia, Guha has
argued, which grants state power a coherent and transcendental attribute,
giving it an "abstract force" and invulnerability in the ordering of daily
life (see also Stoler 1992).
Be that as it may, it is surely equally "spurious" to think of state
power as fragmentary and always precariously exposed to subversion
and resistance by the subaltern. If neither "spurious hegemony" nor "fragmentation"
captures all the fluid qualities of the state and the different
modalities of power under its command, what is needed is an approach
that captures the tangible and yet fluid processes of state power as we
experience them in Southeast Asia, it is an approach premised on the
possibilities of state power in a social totality without being subsumed
under it, or separating them from specific historical conditions. 3
State
power, I argue, is characterized by a comprehensive structure of
hegemonic, design, just as it is frequently marked by significant structural
weakness and ideological crisis. In this book, some contributors
are inclined to focus on representation as a moment in the articulation
of state power and desire, while others direct their analyses to the intricate
interlocking of power and ideological uncertainty. Nonetheless, the
differences belie a unifying vision which denies an absolute demarcation
of the "mask" and the practices of power (Abraham 1988). It is a
vision which sees the state as always marked by the dialectical qualities
of strength and vulnerability, domination and dependence, qualities
brought into even sharper relief in the context of globalization.
In the Southeast Asian context, such a conception of the state is

6 Yao Souehou
necessary to take account of the remarkable — and at times tragic —
historical experiences that the region has undergone since national independence,
In the first place, a singular focus on the brutal absolutism
of the state is a matter of doing justice to history, of accounting for what is
happening at the local societies. We recall here that two state-sponsored
programmes of killing of genocidal proportion after World War II took
place in Southeast Asia: in Indonesia and in Cambodia. Presently, from
Vietnam to Myanmar, from Singapore to Indonesia, beyond their different
political systems, official ideologies, and stages of economic development,
state power has a fundamental presence perhaps not witnessed
in the liberal regimes, East and West. Ray Langenbach's chapter
on Singapore, Mark Bergers chapter on Indonesia, and Loong Wong's
chapter on Malaysia point precisely to the complex ideological and legislative
framework, and effective enforcement, which support and ensure
the state's continuance. These chapters contribute to the discussion
of the massive capability of the state in Southeast Asia and its permeation
of the social, economic, and cultural life in the region. They certainly
complement, for example, Michael Leifer's monumental Dictionary
of the Modern Politics of Southeast Asia (1995), which points out,
somewhat mildly, that "resistance to democratization is a common feature
of many states in the region justified in the name of economic
development and social and political order" (p. 1).
However, if state absolutism is often underlined by structural and
ideological uncertainty, it is the conditions of globalization and
transnationalization which offer the best argument for such a viewpoint.
In his studies of the "post nation-state", Ohmae (1991) predicts the
erosion of state power in the face of the onslaught of economic internationalization
and informational and cultural flows across national
boundaries. According to this kind of thesis, as Linda Weiss summarizes,
"states are now virtually powerless to make real policy choices;
transnational markets and footloose corporations have so narrowly constrained
policy options that more and more states are being forced to
adopt similar fiscal, economic and social policy regimes" (Weiss 1997,
p. 3). The sheer volume of the transnational and transregional traffic of
people, products, cultures, and capital is undeniable even in Southeast
Asia, However, the overall process can be subject to different ideological

Introduction 7
readings. For Ohmae (1991), Reich (1991), and Horsman and Marshall
(1994) among others, transnationalization is the sign of the global convergence
of neo-liberalism and market economy in which locational and
institutional — and thus, national — restrictions are no longer important.
The demise of the nation-state, in short, announces the triumph
of global capitalism. Others, on the other hand, are likely to see diminishing
state power under globalization as providing conditions for democratization
and liberal reform. This tempting vision, espoused particularly
by radical democrats, attributes a political vanguardism to the
rising middle class — the nouveau riches of transnational capitalism —
who are "rational, individualistic, democratic, secular and concerned
with human rights, the environment and the law" (Robison and
Goodman 1996, p. 2), "Democratization" in Southeast Asia, it is argued,
will be brought about by the political demands of a middle class
that puts pressure on the state to achieve its agendas (Anek 1997).
The response to the effects of globalization and transnational capitalism
typifies the ambivalent nature of state processes in present-day
Southeast Asia. However, the fact remains that globalization is not likely
to bring about the weakening of state power in any straightforward way
To be sure, the impact of the rising middle class on liberal democratic
reform has been unpredictable and varied. If the affluent mob mua thue
— the mobile phone mob — of the bloody demonstration of May 1992
brought down the Thai military government, and if students of various
backgrounds had forced the resignation of President Soeharto in Indonesia,
it is notable that the middle classes in other countries are seemingly
directing their energy into massive consumption and/or frequently,
religious fundamentalism. 4
For liberal democrats, the rising middle class
holds the only hope of challenging the awesome power of the state in
Southeast Asia. Working from the fondly held orthodox model of the
role of the middle class in transforming European society since the French
Revolution, Western liberals are likely to suffer impatience at the discovery
that "the new rich in Asia appear as likely to embrace authoritarian
rule, xenophobic nationalism, religious fundamentalism and dirigisme
as to support democracy, internationalism, secularism and free market"
(Robison and Goodman 1996, p. 3).
Other neglected issues in the "post nation-state" argument have been

8
Yao Souchou
the variety of state responses and, more importantly, the different capacities
of the state in responding to the forces of transnationalization.
To quote Linda Weiss again:
... evidence in Japan and the East Asian NIC's [newly industrialized countries]
indicates that strong states — that is, those with fairly firm control over
socio-economic goal setting and robust domestic linkages — are often facilitating
the changes identified as "globalization". Thus, rather than counterposing
nation-state and global market as antinomies, in certain important
respects we find that "globalization" is often the by-product of states promoting
the internationalization strategies of their corporations, and sometimes
in the process "internationalizing" state capacity. (Weiss 1997, p. 4)
In other words, state power and globalizing trends are not simply opposites
in a zero-sum game of influences. In both the domestic sphere and
the international arena, states like Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia
have indeed enhanced their positions in the context of rapid capitalist
development over the last two decades. The "post nation-state" argument
becomes highly circumspect when we are reminded that not only
are these states deeply committed to free market ideology and policies,
but also that their economic fortunes have significantly depended on
the inflow of foreign — largely Western and Japanese — capital and the
global export markets. Turning to the post-1997 economic crisis, it is a
good reminder that easy credit and the lack of rational investment guidelines,
rather than "greedy fund managers", have been the primary reasons
for the current problems in Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
Domestic processes associated with intense speculative activities and frenzied
over-investment in the property sector are more likely explanations
than unruly global movements of currency speculation. Ironically, what
makes such movements possible has been the configuration of state power
itself. In Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, or Bangkok, political leaders selectively
grant commercial privileges to their close associates and loyal supporters,
for whom "political connections" are crucial social capital for acquiring
generous credit from financial institutions both at home and
abroad. Even in the present situation of economic downturn, international
financial bodies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have
been unable to uniformly impose their demand for economic reform
and budgetary restraint on the recipient countries. If Indonesia and Thai-

Introduction 9
land have conceded substantially to IMF pressure, Malaysia has rejected
altogether the IMF rescue package in order to avoid restructuring longstanding
national political framework and ideological priorities. In this
complex scenario, it is only the analytically foolhardy who would unequivocally
predict the withering of state power under international pressure
and global economic forces.
II. Modernity and the culture of national crisis
The relationship between transnationalization and state power is obviously
more diffuse than what the proponents of globalization would have
us believe. Speaking of Southeast Asia, the most tenable conclusion is
that globalization has overdetermined both the states consolidation of
power and its structural and cultural vulnerability. Transnationalization
and regionalization remain a crucial consideration simply because they
have been the major features of state economic policies which saw a
significant change from import-substitution to export-orientation. Predictably
perhaps, it is those rapidly developing economies -— Singapore,
Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and post-dot moi Vietnam — that
have more actively facilitated the overall processes of "opening up". In
this context, if nation-states like Malaysia and Singapore have most substantially
benefited from global and regional markets and foreign capital
inflow, they are also the most exposed to external economic and cultural
forces. Transnationalization is thus a double-edged sword with regard
to the rewards and costs it brings to the local economy and society.
This is the rule of the game of transnationalization, as Thailand, Malaysia,
Indonesia, and perhaps Singapore had discovered in their struggle
to lift themselves out of the economic crisis.
On the issue of cultural impact, it is important to highlight a singular
fact, which is that, besides seeking a greater role in global capitalism
in the international division of labour, the state is also concerned with
the need to find its place in the modern world. The need is primarily
about satisfying a social and cultural desire for the aura — and symbolic
capital — of capitalist modernity. In late nineteenth and early twentieth
century Europe, capitalist modernity constituted a maelstrom of fervent
and yet ambivalent experiences, traceable to a myriad of factors,
including:

10 Yao Souchou
the industrialization of production, which transforms scientific knowledge
into technology, creating new human environments and destroys old ones,
speeds up the whole tempo of life, generates new form of corporate power
systems of mass communication, dynamic in their development, enveloping
and binding together the more diverse people and societies; increasingly
powerful nation states, bureaucratically structured and operated, constantly
striving to expand their powers; ... finally, bearing and driving all
these institutions along an ever expanding, drastically fluctuating capitalist
world market. (Berman 1988, p. 16)
Clearly, there has been something of this whirlwind of changes in Southeast
Asia over recent decades, particularly since the 1980s. Like Berman's
rendering of the life of European modernity, what took place at the
height of the "Asian economic miracle" can be similarly described in
terms of a general experience, a pervasive cultural mood of confidence
and progressivism which infected most people, especially the professional
middle classes. For the men and women among the industrial
workers — many of them foreigners or rural migrants — the abstractive
"Asian economic miracle" would be more simply the ability to find work
and the enjoyment of consumer goods and other services previously not
affordable to them and their families. If the rewards of development
remain unevenly distributed among the poor and disenfranchized, the
culture of Asian modernity is dramatically resolute in other realms: in
the architectural wonder of the Petronas Twin Towers — currently the
tallest building in the world — in Kuala Lumpur, or in Indonesia's helicopter
manufacturing project under the then Minister of Science and
Technology Dr Habibi, to give two examples. Projects like these exude a
magic of high modernity so dramatically described by Berman, yet going
much beyond. What they express is a mixture of narcissistic "Asian
pride" and an anxious desire to "match" Western achievements; thus the
sheer speed, density, and dramatic spectral quality of these urban construction
and industrial projects. The engagement with the Western
Other, as the chapters by Ien Ang, Yao Souchou, and Lee Weng Choy
demonstrate, "incites" much of the discursive and representational energy
of the state in Southeast Asia in an increasing pace of global exchanges.
However, for Berman, the experience of Western modernity propelled
by industrial capitalism has not been all optimism and progres-

Introduction 11
sivism. In the dramatic changes where nothing seems to stand still and
even the most profoundly sacred and traditional "melts into air", the
culture of modernity simply "loses its capacity to organize and give
meaning to peoples lives" (Berman 1988, p. 17). Out of these sea changes,
highly rationalized and routinized bureaucracy emerged as powerful instrument
of the state, State bureaucracy is as much a means of management
of social life as an institutional order for negotiating the promises
and nightmare of modern utopianism. Bureaucratic rationalization, as
Bauman (1989) has so brilliantly argued, is the impeccable logic of
modernity, one which was to find its final realization in the efficiency of
the Jewish holocausts in Nazi Germany.
In Southeast Asia, the ambivalence — and terrifying logic — of
modernity is no less relevant an issue, I am sure. Pol Pot's genocidal
policy to clean the new socialist state of any traces of its past, to restart
the history of the new Maoist state from Year Zero, has all the features
of bureaucratic routinization and state utopianism. What took place in
Pol Pots Kampuchea is an extreme aberration of the massive exercise of
state power. For less spectacular examples of the fetishization of state,
we turn to the liberal regimes in the region. And there, the valorization
of state power is articulated in the more innocuous terms of "political
stability", "internal security", and "regional peace". In Southeast Asia,
these terms have always had a sense of self-evident truth about them,
and there are important historical reasons for this, as we shall see. While
the terrifying scenario of societal chaos may belong to the common social
imaginary, it is also repeatedly featured in the official pronouncements
of the state. Ideologically, the preservation of "societal peace" has
been singularly emphasized by the state as the primary political objective
for providing conditions for the achievement of individual happiness
and national prosperity. And the states magic in the delivery of
personal and national happiness cannot be realized without a significant
degree of fantasy.
The spectre of political chaos and regional instability
The "reality" of national crisis in Southeast Asia is a classic example of
what Zizek has called the "the fetishistic supplement" of the Real (Zizek

12 Yao Souchou
1994, p. 20). For Zizek, the social and emotional appeal of any ideology
does not lie in its mystificatory falsehood, but rather in the very dialectics
between the "spiritual element of corporeality" and the "corporeal
element of spirituality" (ibid., p. 21). The futility of the ontological
distinction between the (historical) real and (ideological) illusion goes
to the heart of what I have called — in relation to the Singapore state —
the ideological model of perpetual crisis (Yao 2000). The spectral supplement
of "the real" is crucial in understanding the other face of the
dialectics of state power in Southeast Asia: its vulnerability and perceived
danger of collapse. The "substance" of this self-imaginary is the
fear which has haunted the region ever since the days of struggle for
national independence. Hall has described Southeast Asia as a region
characterized by "a chaos of races and languages" (Hall 1985, p. 5).
Historically, Southeast Asia lay in the strategic sea route for the southern
movement of peoples, trade, and religions from the two major civilizations
of the northern land mass of India and China and, a thousand
years later, for the diffusion of Islam along the route pioneered by Muslim
spice traders (Withington and Fisher 1963). European designs on
the region began with the need in developing a base for trade links with
China, but from the eighteenth century onwards, the great agricultural,
mining, and entrepot potential of Southeast Asia also became major
interests of European colonial powers. Colonialism — with its policies of
economic extraction and "divide and rule" — created the pre-conditions
for a troubled process of decolonization after World War II — particularly
in French Indochina and Dutch Indonesia, which experienced civil
war and armed separatism, respectively. When Mao came to power in
China in 1949, the Western fear of the eventual spread of communism
southwards produced probably the most salient and dramatic attempt
to contain a perceived political contagion of the region in the Cold War
era — the result being the Vietnam war and its spillover into Laos and
of course Cambodia, with devastating consequences.
The other fear which haunts many Southeast Asian states is ethnic
conflict. In the region, no less than thirty-two ethnolinguistic groups
can be found, and each state contains at least four major ethnic communities.
And

Introduction 13
superimposed on this mosaic of ethnicity is the fact that Southeast Asia is the
host to all the worlds major belief systems, that is, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism,
Christianity and Communism, (Sukhumbhand and Chai-Anan 1984,
p. 30)
One of the major problems here is that many of the ethnolinguistic
groups, particularly the "hilltribes" in northern Thailand and Myanmar
live in areas that extend beyond national boundaries as they stand. Their
failure to negotiate recognition of their ethnic aspirations within the
nation-state often lead to armed-separatist movements which are extended
to the immediate neighbouring state(s). The Karen and Kachin
liberation movements, and Islamic separatism in southern Thailand, for
instance, are built upon the need for ethnic-national independence aided
by friendly states and ethnic communities along the borders. Inter-state
conflict of this nature has been much reduced in recent years through
regional bodies such as ASEAN, which always has, among its agendas,
military and security co-operation among member states.
Within the nation-states themselves, there has been the equally
worrisome problem of communal conflict. Much has been written about
the colonial policy which created major cleavages among ethnic communities
along economic, cultural-religious, and social lines. It is sufficient
here to say that these cleavages were a crucial instrument of "divide
and rule", in which specialization of labour and distinctions between
immigrant and "native communities" were built upon real and imaginary
social-cultural differences. The import of Chinese and Indian labourers
and other immigrants, and subsequent questions about their
status in newly independent nations, have proven to be an entangled
political issue. While the nation-states inherited from European colonialism
a political system that legally guarantees equal citizen rights to all,
few governments in Southeast Asia are able to carry this principle to the
full. Practically all Southeast Asian states "ethnicize" their governance in
one form or another: from the implicit and often informal policy preferences
for one ethnic group to the more extreme structural discrimination
based on legislatively defined "racial categories".
The tragic irony of all this is that the ethnicization of political power
and social and economic policies has always been justified by the state as

14 Yao Souchou
necessary for creating lasting "ethnic peace". Whatever the administrative
logic, it is clear that the continuing fetishization of the colonial
categories of "race" helps to consolidate the class and social-spatial divides
of communities. Rather than being an instrument for achieving
ethnic harmony, ethnic policy sustains the seeds of communal tension.
This is so especially when the state is prepared to tacitly support if not
openly unleash, for its political ends, the outrage of the major community
against what they see as the sources of their social deprivation and
economic backwardness. 5
The 13 May 1969 riots in Kuala Lumpur and
the attack on ethnic Chinese and their properties in Medan and Jakarta
immediately following Soeharto's downfall are just two painfully relevant
examples.
Asian modernity and its betrayal
The nature of the ethnic policies in Southeast Asia thus helps to bring
forth a major point. It is that the legendary regional conflict and societal
instability in Southeast Asia are products of a dramatic mixture of history,
geo-political rivalry, and the states own political strategy and ideological
imaginary. If the spectre of national collapse and regional disintegration
has been the "socially real" that justifies the terrifying posturing
of the state, such a scenario of doom is also a major discursive invention.
By turning the absolute dominance of the state on its head, the
continuous valorization of the idea of "nation under threat" allows the
state to seek and prosecute real and illusionary subversives, ethnic and
religious extremists and, more frequently, opposition parties and progressive
non-government organizations (NGOs). The notion of "nation
under threat", selectively drawing from the tumultuous events over the
last half a century following World War II, creates a unifying history, a
"single ideological base time" (Althusser 1969, p. 105). In this discursive
totality, different histories and different specificities of national struggle
are transformed into a singular and self-serving narrative about a
nations triumphant achievements and its coming of age,
The narrative is being rewritten by the reality of the 1997 economic
meltdown and its after-effects facing many of the newly industrialized
economies (NIEs) in Southeast Asia. Here it is possible to make the
point that a pronouncement like Mahathir's much publicized accusa-

Introduction 15
cion of the international conspiracy of a "Jewish fund manager" wrecking
local economies has all the marks of national sensitivity over uncontrollable
external forces (South China Morning Post, 5 November 1997).
If globalization explains all sources and degrees of national pain, then
state discourses must be staged in a way that helps to manage problems
and anxieties in an age of global exchanges. If in the first decades after
independence it was armed separatism and big power rivalry that plagued
nation-states in Southeast Asia, now it is cultural flow and the secular
trends associated with post-modernity that present an issue of concern
(see the chapter by Yao).
Right from the beginning, however, local responses to transnationalization
have been primarily concerned with the economic (Deyo
1987; Stubbs 1994). They are about finding a greater role for the national
economy in the system of global capitalism. Such an objective has
meant the provision of economic and labour policies which facilitate
capitals pursuit of low costs of production, mass market* and investment
returns. It is, in short, the active courting of transnational capital
and its rewards which explains many state practices. Nevertheless, the
serving of global capital is not to suggest a surrender of national interests
and cultural agendas. Indeed what has emerged, particularly in rapidly
developing Singapore and Malaysia, is the (re)drawing of local and
regional agendas on the wider canvas of globalization. The underlying
assumption has been, as put forward so powerfully by Malaysian Prime
Minister Dr Mahathir and Singapore's Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew,
that industrial modernity is no longer the exclusive domain of Western
achievement, a special purview of Western history. What political leaders
like Dr Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew propose is the vision of an
alternative modernity, an Asian modernity no less, as Wee (1996; also in
this volume) has argued.
The notion of an Asian modernity is always an ambiguous mixture
of local needs and global ambitions, national/communal aspirations and
a desire for their transcendence. Complex and varied discursive efforts
have gone into the making of such a modernity, a theme which underlines
the preoccupation of many of the writers in this volume. What
such an enterprise suggests is the attempt by the state — and some sections
of civil society — to maintain the social and moral integrity of Asian

16 Yao Souchou
national communities while they actively seek the fruits of global capitalism
and find a place in the modern world. For the nation-state, the
pursuit of Asian modernity thus implies several things: economic development,
the consumption of Western goods and services with a cosmopolitan
aura, and seeking a greater profile on the international stage,
among others. However, this modernity too (going back to Berman's
argument outlined earlier) will carry its own betrayal. For what nationstates
in Southeast Asia have been made to realize is the fact that the
fruits of global capitalism will always have their social, cultural, and
financial costs. It is near impossible to execute the agile double move of
harvesting the benefit while selectively shutting out culturally and politically
undesirable influences. Against such a complex background, what
we witness in many Southeast Asian states has been the evocation of
another round of "anti-West cultural imperialism" rhetoric, the common
ideological diet of the Third World in the 1960s, as Ien Ang's
chapter shows. Articulating now different sources of tension, the new
"anti-West" discourse highlights the moral dangers of a range of "Western"
products and values, from Playboy magazine to the Internet, individualism
to consumerism, urban crime to sexual promiscuity. These
are invested with an awesome power of corruption which, if not effectively
controlled, would bring Asian communities to their knees.
It is hard not to recognize the multiple significance and conflicting
desires in this round of "anti-West" struggle. And it is post-modern and
post-structuralist theorizing which enable us in this project to work
through some of the ambiguities and impulses of the state-discursive
activities we describe. Of course, the point is that in the conditions of
post-modernity and transnationalization the foundational premises of
"cultural imperialism" are not no longer tenable — if they were in the
past. The perceived virulent influences of global exchanges come precisely
from the fact of rapid and multi-directional flows of information,
products, values, and peoples, such that the traditional assumptions about
the unilineal hegemonic flow from the West to the East and the passivity
of "Asia" as victim of the West become too simplistic to be readily
acceptable without question. However, the analytical spirit here is not
to give in to the easy temptation of writing out the continuing Western
dominance in many spheres of cultural and economic life, and simulta-

Introduction 17
neously projecting a romantic vision of "Asian resistance". Rather, it is
to engage with the crucial problematic of state discourses which all too
often cast "Asia" against "the West", "Asian victimization" against "Western
perpetration", "Asian moral authenticity" against "Western decadence",
and so on.
The so-called Asian Values debate in recent years offers a perfect
example of the state enterprise of inscribing a notion of "Asian
particularism". Leaving aside its philosophic underpinnings, the discourse
of Asian Values is a Janus-faced effort in the attempt to negotiate the
complex fluidity of post-modernity and globalization. In the first place,
it is about the rewriting of Western liberal priorities —- democracy, human
rights, social justice, and the environment — with a unique "Asian
point of view" (Bartley and others 1993; Mahbubani 1995a, 1995b).
The ideological effect is to present these priorities as those from another
history, another place, priorities not necessarily relevant to an "Asia"
keen to strike out its own path of social and economic development. At
the same time, the Asian Values discourse is as much one of political
instrumentality as a voice of desire. Lodged in the dialectics of power,
the discourse silently recalls the other side of the states absolutism and
domination: its panic in a globalized world and longing for the fruits of
economic development which only Western, including Japanese, foreign
capital can bring. In the final analysis, the notion of "Asian uniqueness"
may be primarily about the pursuit of certainty, and the (re)claiming
of moral authenticity based on tradition and communal solidarity, in
the condition of post-modernity.
In the face of all this, it is useful to remember that the Asian Values
discourse is no mere shadow of state power in the realm of representation.
As the contributors in this volume make clear, discursive enterprises
in this and other instances are carried out against the states might
and the symbolic violence which conceals and euphemizes the severity
of its actions. The discursive and representational energy of the state, its
legislative instruments, and legitimate means of physical violence are
enmeshed in, and emerge from, the same cultural and structural framework.
If the Asian Values discourse has all the credentials of anticolonialism,
of the struggle against the domination of Western agencies
ranging from the media to the IMF, one point is worth stressing. It is

18 Yao Souchou
that the state's rewriting of liberal values also undermines the very
foundational ideas that had been the basis of anti-colonialism and the
struggle of national independence. This must have been the bitter realization
of political dissidents like Pramoedya. For if economic growth
and personal prosperity can only be achieved at the expense of democratic
ideals, then both the political vision of the state and the means by
which it is achieved have to be subject to public debate and analytical
scrutiny. The failure of the nation-state in Indonesia, for someone like
Pramoedya, may lie in its inability to live up to the Western liberal ideals
in providing a legal and ideological framework that delivers a minimum
guarantee of personal freedom and democratic rights against violation
by the state.
Conclusion
The "cultural resurgence" in Southeast Asia, I have argued, is primarily
a state project that celebrates the moral and utilitarian qualities of the
"Asian tradition" of which the contemporary states and their peoples are
the proud inheritors. But such a cultural-ideological enterprise cannot
be seen purely from the view of cynical manipulation by the state, or
that of the mystificatory effects on the individual subject. The consideration
of cultural and structural domination must also take account of
the active participation and tacit complicity of political subjects. Perhaps
for this reason, the contributors to this book have refused to turn
to a form of Occidentalism which constructs highly elaborated contours
of the "West" in order to describe all that is taking place in Asia. If
the dramatic events in the region over the last decade or so can be recast
against the wider canvas of globalization and post-modernity, they also
engage local energies, just as they are "produced" by local demands and
priorities. The local and the global, as the cliche of post-modernism
goes, are not polarized differences which privilege one against the other.
What these chapters have in common is a commitment to a critical
engagement with the seamless narratives of the state regarding its central
ideological visions and representational strategies. The contributors
represent diverse disciplinary backgrounds — cultural studies, anthropology,
political science, sociology, art criticism, and literary studies.
The chapters that follow will attempt to deconstruct the many proc-

Introduction 19
esses and events, the criticality of which has been rewritten and "normalized"
by the state and the public media.
Ien Ang's chapter examines the analytical ambiguities of the "cultural
imperialism" argument as deployed by Malaysian Prime Minister
Dr Mahathir and his then deputy Anwar Ibrahim. By focusing on the
entry of satellite television, Ang suggests that the pan-Asianism expressed
by the state discourse in Malaysia should be seen as an active response to
the "deconstructive effects of global capitalism". Globalization is also a
preoccupation of Yao Souchou's discussion in Chapter 2. Clearly informed
by post-structuralist theorizing, Yao deconstructs Dr Mahathir's
aggressive posture against the West by showing the increasing difficulty
of maintaining systematic and polarized differences between Asia and
the West in the context of globalization. The chapters by Ray Langenbach
and Lee Weng Choy turn to examine specific modalities of state desire
in Singapore. A performance artist, Langenbach charts the reification of
the state by examining its valorization of biologically and economically
productive sexuality The dialectics of this process, he argues, is articulated
in the representation of marginalized Others: women, artists, and
so forth, Lee deals similarly with the states desire in the imagining of an
Other — in his case, the United States - which can help to constitute
Singapore's arrival in the world of capitalist modernity. The problematic
of post-modernity and globalization is examined by Kasian Tejapira and
Ashley Carruthers with reference to, respectively, the processes of identity
formation in Thailand, and among Vietnamese in the homeland
and diaspora. Kasian Tejapira's chapter deconstructs the "desolate semiotics"
of the notion of Thainess as defined by the state. The cultural
flows in contemporary globalized conditions are crucial to Ashley
Carruthers analysis. Focusing on the phenomenon of music video culture,
he shows the uncertain consequences that ensue when exiled Vietnamese
and the state are brought into an uneasy intimacy as a result of
globalization and dot mot (economic and cultural liberalization) In Vietnam.
The next three chapters deal with state power and nation-building,
giving special attention to the issue of the role of culture. Loong Wongs
chapter examines the vocal militancy of Malaysia in the global arena.
He argues that this militancy in the articulation of the post-colonial
concerns of human rights, sovereignty, and culture has to be seen within

20 Yao Souchou
the new social space created by the reconfiguration of post-Cold War
geo-politics. In Mark Bergers analysis, we see how the patrimonial state
in Indonesia has over the past decades experienced both the consolidation
of its power and periodic crises arising as a result of both internal and
external forces, and how the continuous reinvention and re-entrenchment
of Pancasila has been crucial in managing the overall processes, T.N.
Harper, a historian, focuses on state censorship by the colonial regimes
in Southeast Asia in the year immediately following World War II. The
political use of communications technology, Harper argues, is an important
legacy of the media policies of the post-colonial states in the
project of nation-building. That the entangled relationship of state power
and national politics requires a particular representational strategy is
clearly expressed in the final four chapters. Wee is concerned with the
enunciation of a specific sense of "Asian modernity" in Singapore by the
pop singer Dick Lee. Marian Parsor Roces, an art critic and curator working
in the Philippines, tracks the ambiguity in her project: an exhibition
of the sugar industry in the Negros Museum. The chapter by Mandy
Thomas and Russell Heng deals with a new representational object in
the new media culture in Vietnam: pop celebrity. The eager reception of
the media icon, they suggest, constitutes not so much a challenge to
state power as a shift in the ideological landscape — one over which the
state can no longer maintain its dominance. Lastly, James Ockey, a political
scientist, examines the conventional interpretation of the major
role of the middle class in the democracy movement in Thailand, such
as the May 1992 demonstration. He contests such a view by turning to
look at a protest organized by working-class residents against the construction
of an expressway over their community,
Overall, the chapters articulate the different intellectual-disciplinary
positions of the writers. Nonetheless, what unites their efforts has been
a shared sensitivity to the histo rical and regional specificities of the processes
they have described. They highlight the complex recasting of "old"
political concerns and ideological anxieties in the heady conditions of
globalization and capitalist development. In these conditions, the contour
of state power is inscribed by the consolidation of its hegemonic
hold in many spheres of social life. However, this is not the only reality
of the state in Southeast Asia, What is so aptly captured by Pramoedya's

Introduction 21
powerful metaphor — House of Glass — is precisely the central irony
that in the midst of its aggressive posture, the state experiences a crucial
ambivalence and vulnerability as a result of the very conditions that
contribute to its potency, wealth, and political legitimacy. The current
economic crisis in Southeast Asia merely affirms the uncertain rewards
of transnationalization to which the state has — perhaps against its will
—- staked all its commitments. It is in this geography of longing and
resentment, strength and vulnerability, global transactions and local priorities
that we have attempted to re-examine the nature of power and
desire of the state in Southeast Asia.
NOTES
1. We might think of "writing theory" as complicit with Western modernity which
has "universal geographical significance" (Appiah 1997, p. 427). Dirlik (1997) also
expresses scepticism in the feasibility of the project of post-colonial critique.
2. Relative freedom of the press is found in Thailand and the Philippines; see Lent
(1971. 1989).
3. For a most succinct formulation of this position, see Coronil (1997) and Garon
(1997).
4. In Malaysia, for instance, Islamic fundamentalism remains an essentially urbanbased
movement; see Shamsul (1989).
5. For a most succinct analysis of such a situation in Malaysia, see Munro-Kua (1996).
REFERENCES
Abraham, Philip. "Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State". Journal of Historical
Sociology 1 no. I (1988): 56-89. '
Aijax Ahmad. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London and New York; Verso,
1992.
Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Translated by Ben Brewster. London: Allen Lane, 1969.
Anek Laochamacas, ed. Democratization in Southeast and East Asia. Singapore: Institute
of Southeast Asian Studies, 1997.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. "Is the 'Post' in 'Postcolonial' the 'Post' in 'Postmodern'?" In
Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, andPostcolonial Perspectives, edited by Anne McClincock, Aamir Mufti, a
sota Press, 1997.

22 Yao Souchou

Introduction 23

Part One
Local desire
and
global anxieties

Desperately guarding borders:
media globalization, "cultural
imperialism", and the rise of "Asia"
IEN ANG
A few years ago, when the so-called East Asian economic miracle was at
its height, former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim
delivered a speech in which he emphasized the challenges brought about
by Asia's entry into the world of high modernity. Significantly, he saw
the greatest challenges not at the level of economics, but at the level of
culture and intellectual life. Not surprisingly, the role of media and technology,
especially television, loomed large in Anwar's concerns:
In recent years there has been an overwhelming, almost imperialistic diffusion
ofWestern or Western-influenced cultural products. This has been made
possible, and will be further accelerated, by the opening of the skies to satellite
television networks. (Straits Times, 1 February 1994)
What Anwar refers to here is not just a challenge faced in Asia.
During the 1980s a similar worry about the proliferation of transnational
satellite television channels raged across Europe. The image of the threat
evoked was also similar: that of the integrity of a cultural and geographical
space — "our" space — being eroded by the opening up of the
frontierlands of the sky to wayward global explorers such as Ted Turner
(owner of CNN) and Rupert Murdoch (owner of Sky Channel and, in
Asia, Star TV). The resulting electronic invasion from the sky has ex-

28 len Ang
posed the vulnerability of national borders (which conventionally provide
the enclosure of "our" space): with satellite technology, given geographical
boundaries are superceded by the vectors of transmission, which
generally transcend the bounded territorial space of the, any, nationstate.
The idea of a "Television without Frontiers" — the title of a 1984
European Community policy document (Commission of the European
Communities 1984) — was informed precisely by the perceived necessity
of reimagining a new, pan-European electronic image space beyond
national borders, induced by border-eroding new communication technologies
such as satellite television (Robins 1989). The European Commission
argued that a "European audio-visual area" had to be developed
because technological progress had made "a mockery of frontiers", and
because "the day of purely national audiences, markers and channels is
gone" (quoted in Robins 1989, p. 153). In other words, the defence
strategy was not one of giving up borders as such, national or otherwise,
but of the drawing of a more inclusive and grandiose but also more
elusive border, that around "Europe", presumably to protect the European
image space from the "cultural imperialism" of especially American,
but also, as the Commission observed, Japanese and Brazilian corporations.
By the mid-1990s, the skies above "Asia" had become the major
area of exploration for global satellite broadcasters (Asiaweek, 19 October
1994). In Asia, however, as indicated by Anwar's statement, the name
of the "cultural imperialist" was not "American", let alone "Japanese" or
"Brazilian", but, pure and simply, "Western". Rupert Murdoch acquired
Star TV from a Hong Kong company in 1993. Soon after the sale the
Chinese government banned unlicensed satellite dishes. Other governments
in the region also expressed concern that an outsider — that is, a
Westerner — had gained control over such an important channel of
satellite television channel aimed at "Asia". One of the most outspoken
protesters against Murdoch's acquisition of Star TV was Malaysia's Prime
Minister Dr Mahathir, in whose speeches the idea of "Western cultural
imperialism" has been a recurrent, prominent theme (see Yao, in this
volume). "Today they broadcast slanted news," he complained. "Tomorrow
they will broadcast raw pornography to corrupt our children
and destroy our culture." (Asiaweek, 19 October 1994) It should be

I: Desperately guarding borders 29
clear that "they", in Mahathir's discourse, is "the West".
The slippage from "American" to "Western" cultural imperialism in
contemporary concerns about satellite television in countries such as
Malaysia, Singapore, India, and Indonesia signals a long-standing stance
of post- or anti-colonial anti-Westernism. The discourse of cultural imperialism
has dominated critical perspectives on transnational cultural
relations in the last few decades, especially with respect to the overwhelming
dominance of Western (mostly American) media in the rest
of the world (Tomlinson 1991). As an idea, "cultural imperialism" actively
echoes the brutal history of conquest and domination which so
unsettled and disrupted non-Western societies in the process of European
colonial and imperial expansion. Edward Said defines "imperialism"
as "the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan
centre ruling a distant territory", to be distinguished from
"colonialism", which, observes Said, is almost always a consequence of
imperialism through "the implanting of settlements on distant territory"
(Said 1993, p. 8). According to John Tomlinson, the concept of
" cultural imperialism" emerged in the 1960s, in a recently decolonized
world in which newly independent nation-states in the so-called Third
World were struggling to claim their national autonomy (Tomlinson
1991, p. 2). In this sense, the idea of "cultural imperialism" indicated a
colonization by other means in a formally post-imperial world. In radical
intellectual discourse, then, speaking about cultural imperialism generally
evokes a clearly unequal power relationship between a culturally
dominant "West" and a culturally subordinate "Rest" (sometimes also
called, in a different geo-ideological topography, "North" and "South"),
where colonization takes place through symbolic forms of settlement —
through the forced implanting of information, ideas, and images —
rather than a physical one. Such theories generally presume the invasion
and takeover of all "other" cultures, mostly the "Third World", by an
all-powerful, all-consuming culture — that is, "Western" culture (although,
as we have seen, in Europe the enemy is called "American" and
the feared process is one of "Americanization"). In this way, "cultural
imperialism" is seen as a necessary vehicle for the universalization or
globalization of capitalist modernity, which in turn is mechanistically
equated with a wholesale "Westernization" of the world.

30 Ien Ang
Bearing this in mind it is not surprising that talk of "cultural imperialism"
is mostly enunciated in the name of the subordinate side in this
relationship of power, The discourse of cultural imperialism is a discourse
of protest or complaint, a discourse signalling the political or
moral unacceptability of what the enunciator sees as the cultural domination
exerted by a powerful Other. In this sense the discourse of cultural
imperialism has first and foremost been a defensive discourse: a
discourse aimed at warding off cultural intrusion by foreign powers, a
discourse of the powerless to protect their cultural "autonomy".
In the West, such positions have been militantly supported and elaborated
theoretically by vulgar Marxists such as Herbert Schiller (1992).
Schiller, an American media theorist, sees the transnational communications
corporations as the major forces of a process of sheer coercion.
Schiller's theory of cultural imperialism, which he virtually reduces to
media imperialism, is based on a sweeping theory about media manipulation
and ideological domination in which "the notion of 'the system'
becomes reified and operates in a rather crude and rigid 'functionalist'
manner" (Tomlinson 1991, p. 38). The problem with such a theory is
that it is such a totalizing one one in which there is no room for any
other "truth" than the inexorable spread of a homogenizing capitalist
culture, to which more and more parts of the non-Western world are
succumbing courtesy of the media which, comments Schiller, "are
now many more times more powerful and penetrative than in an earlier
time" (quoted in Tomlinson 1991, p. 39). To put it another way, what
this theory suggests is that "culture" is totally and completely reducible
to the "economy" the "logic of capital".
But the current situation in Southeast Asia illuminates the explanatory
limits and limitations of such a one-dimensional, reductionist theory.
To be sure, the widespread concern with satellite television in the region
does echo this preoccupation with the destructive effects of "cultural
imperialism". After all, the economic operation and exploitation of this
communications technology is evidently primarily carried out by big
transnational corporate players, especially "Western" ones. However,
Schiller's assumption that the modern world system is unambiguously
and. indisputably an imposition. of Western capitalism on the rest of the
world makes for a theory which cannot account for the complex
specificities that accompany the globalization of capitalist modernity

1: Desperately guarding borders 31
and the contradictory nature of its cultural consequences. As Marshall
Sahlins has remarked:
The World System is not a physics of proportionate relationships between
economic "impacts" and cultural "reactions." The specific effects of the globalmaterial
forces depend on the various ways they are mediated in local cultural
schemes. (1994, p. 414)
In his capacity to speak from such a local cultural scheme — a capacity
warranted by his privileged position of legitimate representative
of the Malaysian nation-state, Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim,
whom I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, revealed an awareness
of the contradictions involved where he spoke about the "almost imperialistic
diffusion of Western cultural products" (my emphasis). In other
words, Anwar suggested that what is at stake is not quite cultural imperialism.
Indeed, throughout Southeast Asia in the early 1990s there have
been signs of a self-conscious determination to go beyond "cultural imperialism";
buoyed by a new self-confidence instilled by the new economic
prosperity, which allowed Southeast Asians to imagine a future
beyond their seemingly eternal status as nations which were always catching
up with the powerful West, they have begun to develop their own
global cultural aspirations.
In an editorial about the coming of satellite television, the Singapore
newspaper Straits Times expressed a similar desire for influence in a
much more aggressive tone:
Well, instead of Asians complaining about the onslaught of alien values and
getting no farther than the cultural imperialism debate of an earlier age, it is
better for them to get into each new act of the media play and try to reach
fellow Asians in an Asian voice. (Straits Times, 6 January 1994)
Which is exactly what the Singaporean government set out to do with
the establishment of Singapore International Television (SITV), a satellite
television service aimed at a region stretching from northern Australia
to southern China and from Papua New Guinea to the Maldives.
The Straits Times hailed this initiative as "a small step" to counter the
predominantly one-way traffic of transnational satellite broadcasting to
sell Singaporean culture abroad. Note, for the moment, the appeal to a
common "Asianness", to which I shall return.
Anwar, in fact, has expressed a much more "positive" brand of defi-

32 len Ang
ance against Western media hegemony than Prime Minister Dr Mahathir,
who tends to articulate his distrust of Western powers in a much more
impulsive and uncompromisingly resentful way. 1
Anwar's response to
the global challenge posed by satellite television is a case in point. It was
a response that is neither desperate nor defensive, but full of positive
self-confidence, at least in rhetoric. In Anwar's words:
It will not be too difficult for Asian countries to gain control of the communication
technologies to mount a counteroffensive. But this will be meaningful
only if we can offer cultural products that compete successfully for the
free choice of a universal audience. This is a challenge to Asian creativity and
imagination. Asia's increasing prosperity means that it is now in a position to
offer serious alternatives to the dominant global political, social and economic
arrangements. (Straits Times, 1 February 1994)
Thus, when Malaysian or Singaporean government representatives speak
about "cultural imperialism" today, they no longer merely voice a defensive
stance, but a much more self-assertive, forward-looking stance —
at least, this has been the case until the currency crisis of 1997, which
has put a dent on Southeast Asian self-confidence. This voice no longer
speaks from a position of relative powerlessness, but is one which is far
more assured about its own worth and value. "<strong>Cultural</strong> imperialism",
presumably by definition a "Western" vice, is no longer just reprehensible
because it signifies the domination of a powerful "culture" over weaker,
less powerful ones, but also because the less powerful "culture" regards
itself as better than and, in some respects, superior to the imperialist
power. As Anwar puts it in his book The Asian Renaissance:
Not only has Asia to fortify itself against the possibility of negative cultural
bombardment, it has to be able to make a positive and lasting contribution
to a new world civilization which is just and equitable. (Anwar Ibrahim 1996,
p. 97)
As we all know, anti-Western discourse — as undergirded by the
concept of "cultural imperialism" — has generally accompanied the fragile
nation-building efforts of recently decolonized nation-states in Asia and
Africa in the post-World War II period. Today, however, as some of
these post-colonial nation-states have managed to gain some economic
leverage against the very colonial masters of the past — generalized as
"the West" — anti-Western rhetoric still lives on but its inflection and

1: Desperately guarding borders 33
its politics has changed from an anti- or post-colonial to what could be
called a neo-civilizationalist sentiment,
Thus, it is notable that Anwar chose to speak from an unspecified,
generic "Asian" point of view. His speaking position was not explicitly
associated with a particular national position: he did not speak as a
Malaysian, but as an Asian. This eclipse of specific national identification
is a significant move — one that can be seen as a critical reflection
of the transnational construction of "Asia" as a unitary imagined community,
at least in electronic terms, in the footprints of the satellite broadcasters
beaming onto the region. As Brian Shoesmith has remarked, satellite
broadcasting provides "markers of the potential for a new way of
thinking about Asia, both by Asians themselves and by non-Asians"
(Shoesmith 1994, p, 127).
In this sense, the introduction of satellite television in Asia has
brought about similar responses as in Europe: the destabilization of national
boundaries as marking the bounds of cultural identity and sovereignty
is (partially) compensated for by the imagination of a more encompassing,
regional form of cultural boundedness, "Europe" in one
case, "Asia" in the other. But while the long-standing idea of "Europe" is
now being promoted and materialized in policy initiatives underpinned
by the institutional power of the European Commission aimed at protecting
European audio-visual industries (Miller 1993), there has been
no comparable pan-Asian institutional base for a similar deployment of
"Asia", although several governments, including Malaysia, are quite insistent
on the need to develop a satellite industry of their own "to counter
the dumping of information by irresponsible media from the West"
(Straits Times, 5 April 1994), What, however, can "Asian" mean here? To
answer this deceptively simple question, we need to look at the larger,
global, and historical context in which these new, Asian discourses of
"Asia" have emerged.
Now that nation-states such as Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, China,
and Indonesia look set for ever-increasing economic integration through
the promotion of regional free trade, the problematic of "culture", previously
primarily cast within strictly nationnal(ist) terms, is undergoing
rapid transnationalization. As the globe shrinks, the status of "culture"
as a global contested terrain has increased. The logic of these contesta-

34 [en Ang
tions cannot be sufficiently understood in terms of "cultural imperialism",
but must be cast within the framework of what Stuart Hall has
called "the global post-modern" (Hall 1993). The terrain of post-modern
culture as a global formation, says Hall, is an extremely contradictory
space and it is precisely this unruly contradictoriness that I want to emphasize.
The meaning of the ubiquitous term "globalization" figures
prominently in this respect.
As we have seen, the dominant image in the discourse of cultural
imperialism is that of a world irrevocably and unilinearly headed towards
an increasingly homogenized, Westernized global culture controlled
by the logic of a borderless corporate capitalism. Hall has astutely
reversed this narrative of a singular, unitary logic of global capital;
in his view, "the totally integrative and all-absorbent capacities of capital
itself" are a deceptive myth. Instead, he emphasizes that "capitalism
only advances, as it were, on contradictory terrain" (Hall 1993, p. 29).
In order to become global, capitalism has had to incorporate and partly
reflect the differences it encounters in its different sites of expansion. In
other words, capitalism today thrives on difference: it incorporates rather
than crushes differences, and exploits them to suit its own purposes.
Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that global capitalism does not
simply produce a global culture which will become increasingly homogenized
over time, but brings into play a complex and ongoing tension
between simultaneous cultural homogenization and cultural
heterogenization, integration, and fragmentation.
One of the signs of the resulting pluralization of "history" as global
capitalism expands is a gradual decentring of the "West" as prime historical
mover. Many world observers agree on this, and in Asia, in particular,
self-confident, almost self-congratulatory assertions could be
heard, while it lasted. Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani, for
example, could make these remarks in 1993:
When I was posted [in Washington DC] in 1982, I went there with the clear
sense that I was going to the Rome of the 20th century. And it was.... But at
the rate things are moving today, it is doubtful that Washington DC will be
the Rome of the 21st century. ... Banish the thought that answers to global
questions can be found only in New York, London or Paris. They are equally
likely to be found in Shanghai or Tokyo, Jakarta or Bombay, or perhaps even
Singapore, (Straits Times Weekly Edition, 4 September 1993)

1: Desperately guarding borders 35
I am not interested here in whether Mahbubani's prediction will come
true or not. What is more important to consider is the cultural significance
of the frequent expression of such imagined futures in the early
1990s, when the rise of the so-called Asian Tigers was at its height. I will
return to this forceful rhetoric of an "Asian renaissance" shortly.
First, however, we should entertain the prospect of a more radical
change: not just that of a shifting of centres but of a deconstruction of
centres as such. Arjun Appadurai has remarked that we are now faced
with "a new global cultural economy ... which cannot any longer be
understood in terms of existing center-periphery models (even chose
which might account for multiple centers and peripheries)" (Appadurai
1990, p. 6). Instead, the world should be seen as "a complex, overlapping,
disjunctive order" characterized by "certain fundamental disjunctures
between economy, culture and politics" (ibid., p. 6). These disjunctures
arise because the globalization of capitalist modernity has not resulted
in a stable and systematized global order with rigid dependency relations
between "Western" and "non-Western" nation-states, but rather
in an increasingly dynamic and "chaotic" criss-crossing of global flows,
not only of media but also of money, people, technologies, and ideas. It
is the disjunctures between these different flows, both in source and
direction as well as in intensity and effect, which create a situation of
profound uncertainty about the "shape" of the "global culture" at any
point in time. Or, to put it more accurately, since the intersection of
these multi-directional flows at any locality creates differential effects
which cannot be predicted, any certainty of an ordered "system" should
be forever bracketed (Aug 1996). From a more local point of view, too,
this situation brings about more uncertainty and ambiguity: the local
becomes more and more a space of flows rather than a space of places, as
"the actual dynamics of a given territory rely mainly on ... activities and
decisions that go far beyond the boundaries of each locality" (Castells
and Henderson 1987, p. 7). In other words, the local and the global
should not be thought of in terms of their mutual exteriority, because
global flows are not only dependent on local circumstances for their
impact, but are also constitutive of local "identity".
In this process the nation-state plays a double role: on the one hand,
it is the site where an ordered global diversity is officially articulated and

36 Ien Ang
represented (as in a U,N. plenary session); on the other, it is also the site
of power for the containment of proliferating differences at the level of
the local. In other words, the nation-state is the institutional site where
a precarious balance between world homogenization and world
heterogenization is being upheld — for the time being at least. While
globalization does involve, as Appadurai has observed, "the use of a variety
of instruments of homogenization (armaments, advertising techniques,
language hegemonies, and clothing styles)", these homogenizing
forces "are absorbed into local political and cultural economies" and
in that way heterogenized through infinite and contingent processes of
indigenization (Appadurai 1990, p. 160), The unpredictability of such
local potentialities is contained, for an important part, not by global
forces, but through the intervention of intermediate power structures
operative within the local, particularly the agencies of the nation-state.
As the nation-state operates as the legitimate guarantor of cultural
sovereignty and collective identity, the media, such as the press and broadcasting,
serve as vehicles to unify the nation as an "imagined community",
as has been famously proposed by Benedict Anderson (1983). It
is for this reason that many newly independent, post-colonial nationstates,
precisely because they are new nations with weak national identities,
have generally been inclined to forge very intimate, highly regulated
media/state relationships. The assumption that the media are powerful
instruments of creating a national culture has played a constitutive
role here (Karthigesu 1994). Thus, post-colonial nation-states, certainly
those in Southeast Asia, have generally developed ultra-modernist media
policies, based on a strict imagined (and imposed) equivalence of
territorial state, media, culture, and nation. The control of media messages
circulating within the nation, for example, through censorship, or
more positively, through the promotion of national television industries
which it can regulate and oversee, is part and parcel of this desire for the
state to vindicate the cultural solidity of its national boundaries. It is
also within such a context that the deployment of a discourse of cultural
imperialism was ideologically useful, because it identified the "enemy"
as an external force invading the cultural space of the national,
But this modernist scenario has been steadily crumbling, In an increasingly
globalized world the quest for national/cultural self-identity

1: Desperately guarding borders 37
has become increasingly fraught, and increasingly difficult to sustain.
After all, in global capitalism the illusion that the state can be in control
of its own destiny is disappearing; instead, it is now generally accepted
that, as a territorial entity, the status of the state has been reduced to
that of nodal point in a network of ever-shifting, nomadic, global flows.
It is in this sense that "the new territorial dynamics ... tend to be organized
around the contradiction between placeless power and powerless
places" (Castells and Henderson 1987, p. 7). This does not mean, however,
that nation-states are about to give up their cultural nationalist
projects. On the contrary, the inherently contradictory nature of such
projects is coming increasingly to the surface, producing extremely intractable,
contradictory effects which are beyond the states control. As
Appadurai puts it:
States find themselves pressed to stay "open" by the forces of media, technology,
and travel that have fuelled consumerism throughout the world and
have increased the craving, even in the non-Western world, for new commodities
and spectacles. (Appadurai 1990, p. 14)
At the same time, however, these flows are threatening to the nationstate
because they destabilize "the hyphen that links the nation and the
state" (Ibid.).
In a sense, then, the effects of globalization are much more daunting
and elusive than that of imperialism, because the cultural incoherence
brought about by it can no longer be related to a clear external
cause. Instead, it has become endemic — part and parcel of the domestic
life of the nation. Internal cultural contradiction is now the inescapable
fate of all national formations. As Tomlinson says:
The idea of "globalization" suggests interconnection and interdependency of
all global areas which happens in a far less purposeful way [than the term
imperialism implies]. It happens as the result of economic and cultural practices
which do not, of themselves, aim at global integration, but which nonetheless
produce it. More importantly the effects of globalisation are to weaken
the cultural coherence of all individual nation states, including the economically
powerful ones the imperialist powers of a previous era. (Tomlinson
1991, p. 175)
The state, however, does not have the means to adjust effectively to
this new configuration of global power because its mode of operation

38 Ien Ang
remains firmly cast within a modernist framework. After all, the very
operation of the nation-state system rests on the assumption of a closed,
territorially defined space of national culture and a binary opposition
between what does and what does not belong to that national culture, a
clear borderline between the national Self and its Others.
Satellite television is a dramatic case in point. Satellite television
embodies a qualitatively new phase of transnationalization of media flows,
because its powerful extra-territoriality makes it very difficult for territorial
states to control and police. State policies aimed at keeping satellite
television out, for example, by banning satellite dishes, are becoming
increasingly ineffective, especially as satellite dishes will progressively
shrink in size so that their owners will no longer have to have them in
public view (which has made their surveillance possible so far). The
Malaysian Information Ministry Parliamentary Secretary Datuk Fauzi
Abdul Rahman has realized this: "Then whatever laws we introduce
would be impossible to prevent anyone from receiving satellite broadcasts
from every corner of the world." (Straits Times, 9 April 1994). In
this sense, satellite broadcasting has posed a hitherto unseen challenge
to the modernist state/media relationship, because it is a technology
which so blatantly exposes the difficulty of cultural border patrol by the
state. Experience in Europe and elsewhere shows that all attempts by
individual states to accommodate the satellite "invasion" (for example,
by introducing commercial national channels or pay television) will eventually
only dilute the centralized, modernist arrangement of statecontrolled
national(ist) television. 2
For example, it is in recognition of the unstoppability of technological
advances that the ban on satellite dishes in Malaysia was lifted in
1996, although this did not mean the introduction of a laissez-faire policy
towards satellite television reception, Instead, Malaysia decided to launch
its own satellite, Measat (Malaysia East Asia Satellite), and licences for
dishes were restricted to those that could receive signals only from Measat.
But while initially only local television and radio stations would be permitted
to beam programmes using Measat, it was foreshadowed that
foreign programmes would be allowed at a later stage (Straits Times, 21
April 1994). One wonders whether such a "compromising" policy would
not be the beginning of the end of effective state control over Malaysia's

1; Desperately guarding borders 39
audio-visual image space, 3
and how long it would take before Malaysian
audiences would be able to watch Star TV, especially now that the
transnational broadcaster has learnt to "localize" its programming and
to accommodate the sensitivities of the national elites with regard to the
perceived erosion of traditional values by Western programming. This
is reflected in a statement recently made by a Star TV official to the
effect that "there's no money in cultural imperialism". 4
This makes it
disturbingly clear that the struggle over control can no longer be cast in
terms of a clear distinction between inside and outside (the nation),
because the border between the two has become increasingly porous. In
other words, the problem is not one of "invasion", but of "dilution" —
an unintended process often actively encouraged by the ambivalent policies
of the states themselves.
For example, the Indian state broadcaster Doordarshan, for years a
key government tool to keep "the West" out of (post-colonial) India,
made an arrangement to carry MTV, the music video station, on one of
its channels, and recently signed a similar arrangement with Cable News
Network (CNN). All this in light ofa market-driven attempt to counter
the competition of the private Hindi channel Zee-TV and transnational
satellite channels such as Star TV (Far Eastern Economic Review, 5 December
1994). Another example is the Singaporean attempt, in its bid
to become a major information hub in the region, to woo international
news services and broadcasters through attractive financial and
infrastructural incentives. As a result, it has attracted Asia Business News
(a pan-Asian satellite channel with round-the-clock business reports),
Home Box Office Asia, Entertainment Sports Network (ESPN), MTV,
and the Discovery network — all "Western" enterprises — to set up
their headquaters in Singapore. At the same time, the Singaporean government
has remained insistent on the need for tight regulation and
censorship. As Ian Stewart puts it:
Singapore seems torn between an inclination to be at the forefront of informational
and technological change, on the one hand, and a determination to
protect its people from what it sees as Western degradation and unbridled
democracy, on the other, (Stewart 1995, p. 30)
Assuming then that the media are indeed central to the construction
of national identity — an assumption that is worth interrogating

40 Ien Ang
(see, for example, Collins 1990) — the dwindling of state control over
the media would indeed spell danger for the future of nations. This, at
least, is the general mood among many official representatives in the
region. Will the territorial state indeed become powerless in the face of
media globalization? Whether or not that will be the case, the perceived
threat seems to be producing quite militant language. Remember Anwar
Ibrahim's suggestion that Asian countries should "mount a counteroffensive"
by "offer[ing] cultural products that compete successfully for
the free choice of a universal audience". This prospect is echoed by Datuk
Fauzi in his insistence that the best way to counter Western media "dumping"
would be for Malaysia to become a giver, not just a receiver of
programming: "We must get into the satellite industry and have control
of the Asia-Pacific region or at least the ASEAN region". (Straits Times,
5 April 1994) Such an emphasis on export possibilities is not restricted
to the Malaysians: as we have seen, Singaporeans are equally interested
in it, while the relatively strong media industries in India, Hong Kong,
and Japan are already increasingly looking for transnational audiences
within and beyond the Asian region (Iwabuchi 1994),
How to interpret such moves? On the one hand, of course, there is
nothing surprising in the fact that media producers in Asia, too, are
seeking to increase their markets through export and internationalization.
This, after all, only makes economic sense in the age of global
capitalism. On the other hand, however, there is a culturalist residue, as
it were, in discourses such as Anwar's which indicate that there is more at
stake than just economic rationalism. It is a redemptive discourse, a
discourse born of an acute sense of dislocation which post-colonial nationstates
increasingly experience now that they are seriously entering the
globalized, post-modern world. Do Anwar Ibrahim and others really
believe that one day in the next century Western audiences will en masse
watch "Asian" films the way "Asian" audiences now consume Western
films? What would these films look like? And what would "Asian" mean
in the first place? Kungfu films? Bollywood musicals? Canto pop? But
this is not what matters here. What matters — and what we need to try
to understand — is why such a future, the future of an "Asian renaissance",
is being imagined in Asia today (and will not disappear despite
the more or less temporary set-back in economic progress). And I want

1: Desperately guarding borders 41
to suggest now that, in cultural terms, this imagining is not just a sign of
a newly found self-confidence in the region, but also, contradictorily, a
sign of anxiety — a particularly post-modern kind of anxiety,
I noted earlier that Anwar did not speak as a Malaysian, but as an
Asian, This identification with "Asianness" can be interpreted as an attempt
to reinstate a (cultural) border on a much more grandiose,
"civilizational" scale, now that the borders of the nation are becoming
increasingly vulnerable. In some ways it can be seen as a response to the
rapid pace of economic globalization: post-colonial nation-states feel
prematurely launched into the world of post-modern flux, where all
identities, including national identities, are up for grabs, This leads to a
great sense of cultural insecurity, uncertainty, and directionlessness which
needs to be compensated for somehow, A self-orientalizing capitalization
on an "Asian" identity — the cultural currency and imagined viability
of which was reinforced by Western fascination with the success
of "Asian" capitalism in the first half of the 1990s, exemplified most
spectacularly by Australia's official desire to become a "part of Asia" (Ang
and Stratton 1996) — is one such compensatory strategy.
That the "real" significant differences within the region cannot be
easily subsumed within a unifying and unified pan-Asian whole is of
course clear; it is something Western satellite broadcasters were quick to
learn when they realized that there is no such thing as a pan-Asian television
audience. Thus, already in 1994 Murdochs Star TV, one of the
major Western promoters of the pan-Asian ideal, pronounced the ideal
dead when it decided to create separate services for the Mandarin, Hindi,
and Indonesian language groups. As Jonathan Karp remarks, "Because
Asia includes so many cultures, programme suppliers are finding it must
be conquered land-by-land, language-by-language" (Far Eastern Economic
Review, 27 January 1994), In light of this new emphasis on localization
or "globalization" among Western satellite broadcasters (Robertson 1995),
signalling their belated discovery that "Asia" does not exist (at least not from
a marketing point of view), it is ironic that Asian national elites are speaking
increasingly in the name of precisely such a reified, idealized "Asia".
In this sense, I want to conclude that Anwar's discourse can be read
as symptomatic, because it suggests how a sense of crisis over the
deconstructive effects of capitalist globalization is "resolved" in some

42
Ien Ang
Asian circles today by resorting to the fantasy of a kind of reverse, if soft,
cultural imperialism, where it is now "Asia" which will "civilize" the
world by disseminating its "values". Thus, Anwar suggested that "Asia
in the twenty-first century should become a greater contributor to the
advancement of human civilization". And as I have already suggested,
he is by no means alone in imagining the future of a what he has termed
an "Asian Renaissance". 5
There has been a growing chorus of voices in
Southeast and East Asia throughout the 1990s articulating the desire
for a shift to the "East" not only of global economic power, but also of
global cultural authority. Singapore's Minister of Culture George Yeo
has put it this way: "When we were poor, we had no say. Now that we
are less poor, we should begin to assert our own point of view." (Far
Eastern Economic Review, 27 January 1994). And he has asserted squarely
that "the Western dominance of the global media will be contested by
the East" (Straits Times, 6 February 1993).
This self-promotion of an "Asian" civilization as an alternative to
the global hegemony of "the West", this stated desire for "Asia" to make
an impact beyond its own territorial and cultural boundaries — that is,
this desire to raise the status of "Asian" civilization to global prominence
and power — is a form of post-colonial "writing back" with a vengeance
which disrupts, at the level of the imagination, the linear process of
universal modernization implicitly inscribed in the European project of
modernity (Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin 1989). Sometimes, as in the
case of Dr Mahathir, this rhetoric is expressed in terms of a defiant "Asia"
which will give "the West" its come-uppance — a specification of the
controversial "clash of civilizations" premonitioned by influential American
political science Professor Samuel Huntington (1993). At other times,
as in the more idealist discourse of Mathathir's former deputy, Anwar
Ibrahim, what is articulated is the dream for a "civilizational dialogue"
on an equal footing, for "the creation of a global community, formed
neither by the East nor the West, but dedicated to the ideals of both"
(Anwar Ibrahim 1996, p. 41), Either way, the discourse operates to reduce
the sense of disorder and uncertainty created by "the global postmodern"
through the continuation of an East/West divide.
What such a discourse obscures is the fact that "East" and "West"
are not two mutually exclusive, eternally different "civilizations" but that

1: Desperately guarding borders 43
all nations and peoples, despite their obvious differences, now share a
single global order which, despite — or perhaps precisely because of —
its decentred and fragmented, localized nature, is governed by the same
rules, procedures, and requirements — ultimately, those of global capital.
Arif Dirlik has astutely remarked that
what makes something like the East Asian Confucian revival plausible is not
its offer of alternative values to those of EuroAmerican origin but its articulation
of native culture into a capitalist narrative. (Dirlik 1994, p. 51)
In this sense, the ascendancy of "Asia" so strongly banked on and desired
among Asian dikes today cannot be understood in terms of a triumph
of "East" over "West", but more complexly and unrelentingly as
the insertion and mutual entanglement of both in a more comprehensive
but at the same time more fragmented and diversified global capitalist
culture, As Dirlik puts it:
For the first time in the history of capitalism, the capitalist mode of production
appears as an authentically global abstraction, divorced from its historically
specific origins in Europe. (Ibid., pp. 51-52)
Seen this way, the most successful and accomplished form of "Western
cultural imperialism" has been precisely the universalization of capitalist
culture throughout the world. To an important extent, then, the promotion
of "Asia" must be understood within the framework of the abstract
logic of the now globalized capitalist mode of production. Anwar
Ibrahim himself has remarked, as already quoted, that what he has called
an Asian "counteroffensive" "will be meaningful only if we can offer
cultural products that compere successfully for the free choice of a universal
audience". And the Straits Times remarks that "good values do not sell
on television because they are good values but because the programmes
they are communicated through arc good programmes" (Straits Times, 6
January 1994), implying that Singaporean programmes should first of
all develop their entertainment value. The language of capitalism is spoken
loudly and eloquently here: "competition", "free choice", "selling".
So naturalized has the capitalist culture of marketing and commerce
become that what constitutes "Asian" cultural products, apparently, can
only be defined in terms of their career as commodities on the global
market-place — that is, a matter of market positioning, niche marketing.

44 Ien Ang
NOTES
1. These subtle differences between Anwar and Mahathir, with the former being more
conciliatory towards the West, at least in rhetoric, may have contributed to the
formers fall from grace in the Malaysian political hierarchy in 1997, when Mahathir
deposed him as deputy prime minister and as appointed successor to the prime
minister.
2. The rapidity of developments in global communications is signalled by the fact
that while satellite television was the issue of concern in the early 1990s, by the late
1990s the main concern has shifted towards the Internet, which has posed an even
more daunting challenge to the border-guarding aspirations of national governments.
3. It should be added, however, chat such state control was never completely effective
in the first place. For example, despite the ban, people in Sarawak have for years
been able to receive foreign broadcasts using satellite dishes bought on the black
market. Similar infringements of satellite dishes bans are regular practice among
television audiences in places such as southern China and Iran, along the Indian-
Pakistani border, and, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, in East Germany. In
the latter case, cross-border television has commonly been seen as a significant
contributor to the popular uprising that led to the fall of the Wall.
4. This comment was made during a speech in Jakarta in June 1995. I would like to
thank John Sinclair for reporting this to me,
5. Ironically, Anwar's own ill-fated downfall and current imprisonment in Malaysia
may, in the eyes of his supporters, be seen as a definite retreat from the "Asian
renaissance" he himself has aspired to represent.
REFERENCES
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983.
Ang, Ien. "In the Realm of Uncertainty: The Global Village and Capitalist
Postmodernity". In Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern
World. London: Routledge, 1996.
Ang, Ien and Jon Stratton. "Asianing Australia: Notes towards a Critical Transnationalism
in <strong>Cultural</strong> Studies". In <strong>Cultural</strong> Studies 10, no. 1 (1996): 16-36.
Anwar Ibrahim. The Asian Renaissance. Singapore: Times Books International, 1996.
Appadurai, Arjun. "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global <strong>Cultural</strong> Economy". Public
Culture 2, no. 2 (1990).
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffith, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and
Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.
Cas tells, Manuel and Jeoffrey Henderson. "Introduction". In Global Restructuring and

1; Desperately guarding borders 45

Modernity and Mahathir's rage:
theorizing state discourse of
mass media in Southeast Asia
YAO SOUCHOU
I have always loved television. Like many people addicted to the gentle
habit, I have long realized that television viewing is not only pleasurable
but is also good for the nerves. At the end of the day, after putting the
children to bed, with a cold can of beer in my hand and sitting in front
of the television, I am indeed a prince in my private realm. The exhaustion
from the day's toil is imperceptibly dissolved in the realm of desire
and fantasy. My enjoyment of television, however, is always mixed with
a certain feeling of unease. There is often a sense that the pleasure of
mass entertainment may deposit something unsound, something apocalyptic,
that will act upon my consciousness when I am least aware of it.
At the same time, even as I am deeply engrossed, there is a part of my
mind telling me I should be doing something more worthwhile — maybe
reading a book, or writing a letter to a friend. Perhaps it is also a question
of self-image. As ambitious intellectuals we are not likely to openly
confess the secret pleasure we take in watching Wheel of Fortune and the
ideologically dubious Miami Vice, where the good guys and the bad
guys are barely distinguishable in their Gorgio Amani suits and fast cars.
The clumsy reference to my ambiguous feeling towards television
illustrates, if anything, how common is our suspicion of the enjoyment

2: Theorizing state discourse of mass media in Southeast Asia 47
of the mass media. This suspicion in fact can be traced to major philosophic
currents which work to invalidate such "common pleasures". First
is the essentially bourgeois view that the mass media is for the "masses";
it caters to the lowest common denominator of unreflective thoughts
and easy emotions. Television programming, dominated by soap operas,
talk shows, and musical video, it is argued, lacks pedagogic value:
unlike classical arts, it offers neither spiritual enlightenment nor critical
engagement with life's concerns. Popular culture pleases but does not
teach. The failure of popular culture ties precisely in its impotence in
delivering what high culture has promised: to cultivate a refined aesthetic
sensibility and humanistic values, and to act as a prophylactic
against the brutish influences of industrialization and modernization.
The other critique of the mass media comes from Marxism, particularly
through the powerful voice of the Frankfurt School. For Adorno, mass
culture is a powerful cultural product of capitalism (Adorno 1991).
Imbued with the ideological values of capitalism, mass culture is instrumental
in creating fetishizcd sensibilities among consumers who are wont
to accept their conditions under a comprehensive economic and ideological
domination.
The invalidation of the mass media therefore has a powerful intellectual
heritage in the West. Over the past two decades, a similar process
is also taking place in Southeast Asia, one that is specifically played out
against the context of rapid economic development and cultural change.
In the state discourse of Malaysia, for example, the engagement with
the "politics of pleasure" reworks the cultural imperialism argument by
giving it a new and complex ideological register which resonates with
state hegemony and a distinctive posture of "Asian triumphalism". What
emerges is a contradictory blend of anti-West post-colonial concerns
and statist ideology. My discussion will begin by deconstructing the
political currency of such a discourse in Southeast Asia, and then go on
to attempt to theorize the position of the mass media in the context of
the modernizing experience in the region. The central issue which underpins
this discussion is, of course, that of cultural imperialism. Echoing
the conventional formulations of the 1950s and 1960s (Tomlinson
1991; and Ang, this volume), the notion of cultural imperialism voiced
by Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir repeats the fervent critique

48
Yao Souchou
of the control of world media by the West, and the undesirable effects of
the Western media on local societies and cultures. The "cultural harm"
of the Western media is the key feature of dominant state discourses in
many countries in Southeast Asia.
There is, however, an interesting irony in all this. For the perception
of cultural vulnerability by many Southeast Asian states is taking place
at a time of emerging political and economic confidence in the region
— confidence which may be tempered but not written off by the 1997
economic difficulties, as many observers have argued (Holloway et al.
1997). In any case, the route to economic recovery is likely to ever more
gready depend on flows of information and technology from the capitalrich
West — and Japan. However, the significance of the mass media
and information technology in general lies not only in their economic
importance or instrumental value. For Southeast Asian states on a path
of rapid development, they— together with many other items of urban
consumption such as mobile phones and designer goods — are the index
of modernity itself. The mass media — the very act of setting up a
television station — is as much an instrument for disseminating politically
contingent information for nation-building, as it is a sign of a nation's
arrival in the modern world. For this reason the relationship of
developing nations with the mass media is always an uneasy one. For
what is implied is not only the impact of mass entertainment or even a
relatively facile social issue like that of television violence, but an ambivalence
towards the fruits of modernity themselves. In articulating the
unease of this ambivalence, the discourse of the mass media in Southeast
Asia becomes a crucial voice in the dialogue with Western modernity.
The voice is often rhetorical and overstated. But it is not without a
note of the tragic when it insists on the integrity of local national and
cultural concerns, and the need to resist Western economic and cultural
hegemony in a globalizing world. Writing from Southeast Asia — Singapore,
specifically—I find it necessary to develop a discursive position
which engages with, sympathetically and critically, both local concerns
for the effects of globalization and the specific ideological agendas implicit
in the critique ofWestern hegemony". For the state discourse on
the media is often highly effective in galvanizing national feelings and
passions. This effectiveness draws on and feeds into the new posture of

2; Theorizing state discourse of mass media in Southeast Asia 49
Southeast Asia in the post-colonial world. The dramatic pace at which
globalization and Westernization are taking place reshapes the quality
of the modernization process far beyond the scope and conceptions of
post-war developmentalism. Though economic development always
brings about changes in traditional communities, globalization and Westernization
— it is feared — are taking the process further apace in a way
that threatens the cultural and existential centres of local societies. The
discourse on mass media in Southeast Asia is a significant articulation of
this fear while it resists the very sources that have brought about the —
real and imagined — conditions of vulnerability.
Thus, what I have called the "politics of pleasure" directly raises
doubts about the "authority" of Western hegemony generally. In putting
Western political and economic domination to a local cultural scrutiny,
the state discourse brings to the surface and deploys the historical antagonism
between the colonizing West and the colonized East. However,
the othering of the West, the casting of the "non-East" to the space
of its historical colonial representations, is problematic in the world of
global restructuring. In such a world, the West is no longer the familiar
entity with which the developing nations can easily pit their passion
against the world. The Southeast Asian discourse on mass media, I argue,
has to be seen as an active response to, and an attempt to manoeuvre
in, the fluid conditions of global exchanges which have brought about
considerable uncertainty in any representational enterprise. By continuously
structuring a systematic difference between us and them in a world
that is increasingly coming together, the enunciation of "Asian concerns"
is caught within its own ambivalence and desire. It is a desire that inscribes
a double move of othering and appropriating in relations with
the West. In this terrain of attraction and repulsion, the West is no
longer simply "there", but comes to inhabit the centre of our wishes:
and it is this repositioning of the West in Asia which invites the
deconstructive move that follows.
Asianizing the mass media
It is not easy to give shape to the complex process of rewriting an Asian
agenda in mass media in Southeast Asia. On the one hand, there is
undoubtedly a recognition that the proliferation of mass media is a natural

50 Yao Souchou
consequence of the flow of information and the spread of advanced
telecommunication technologies. All this is viewed as somewhat inevitable
and even beneficial. As one writer puts it, "There is no way that
governments can stop the flow of information from entering their countries
because of the wide prevalence of satellite technology" (Jussawalla
1993, p. 128), and the best that Asian governments can do is to harness
the new technologies for economic development. However, the lure of
economic promises is mixed with a feeling of uncertainty at the massive
impact of the media such as Star TV and other satellite broadcasting on
local societies. In Southeast Asia, Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir
has been the most fervent critic of the Western media. His colourful
remarks about the workings of the "Western media help to articulate the
anxiety many Southeast Asian nations feel about the dramatic changes
their societies are undergoing. Indeed, his forceful view of the working
of the media is enmeshed in his "Asian model" of development, which
argues that authoritarian government is a condition — and necessary
political price — for achieving economic growth. It is a model endorsed
by Malaysia's neighbours from Singapore to Indonesia. For example,
the New Light of Myamnar, the major English daily of Yangon, in an
article on 14 September 1993, upheld the Malaysian Prime Minister as
an Asian leader "who warned of the Western news agencies' activities to
destabilize individual countries in Asia ... [in order] to achieve an economic
domination of the region" (Straits Times, 16 September 1993).
Leaving aside the complex specificities of the responses of Southeast
Asian states, it is clear that Dr Mahathir's various pronouncements echo
the concetns of many governments in the region, and help to constitute
the central positions of an Asian approach to mass media. Our discussion
may fruitfully begin by examining his remarks in detail.
Since coming to power in July 1981, Dr Mahathir has consistently
attempted to assume a distinctively "anti-West" international posture
which reinforces Malaysia's profile as a spokesperson for the "East". The
"Look East" campaign in his early administration, for example, hoped
to shift Malaysia's political, economic, and cultural interests towards
Asia, specifically Japan and South Korea, whose disciplined work-force
and economic growth provided, to his thinking, a better model for
Malaysia than the declining West, Over the years, he has consistently

2: Theorizing state discourse of mass media in Southeast Asia 51
built upon this agenda, and has presented himself as an Asian leader
who is prepared to "talk back to the West". Many of Dr Mahathir's
moves are exquisitely orchestrated — for example, his "Buy British Last"
policy in protest against the raising of British university fees for foreign
students. Later in 1994, he engaged in a row with the English press over
a report in the London Sunday Times of his taking of bribes, leading to
the banning of English companies from tendering for Malaysian government
projects. In post-colonial times, when the resonance of a Western
imperial past has barely settled, Dr Mahathir's action takes on something
of a radical gesture: it is an attempt of the colonized subject to
demand its ex-colonial masters to answer for their sins. His criticism of
the Western media is highly provocative: in striking a relatively independent
posture against the West, and in offering the West still burdened
by a memory of colonialism and imperialism an opportunity for
redemption. This is a rich field for analysis, and I turn to an event in
1993 as an illustration.
In July 1993, global media magnate Rupert Murdoch bought a 63.6
per cent controlling interest in Hutch Vision Ltd., the parent company
of the Hong Kong-based Star TV which broadcasts music video, sports,
and news to thirty-eight countries in Asia and the Pacific. Star TV began
with three channels in 1990, including an English sports channel, a
music channel, and a Mandarin channel offering Chinese soap operas
and variety shows. In the following year, BBC (British Broadcasting
Corporation) news and documentary and family entertainment channels
were added to the package. As advertising revenue was a major
source of income for Star TV in its initial years, its programme signals
then were not scrambled so that they could be received by television via
a simple decoder and a satellite dish. The penetration of Star TV had
been spectacular. Despite measures by some governments to discourage
access, by early 1993 the number of Star TV households reached 11
million in twelve nations, its most successful markets being Israel and
Taiwan, followed by Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, and India
(Wang 1993).
The purchase of Star TV by Rupert Murdoch gave rise to strong
objections from Dr Mahathir. In his three-day visit to Brunei in August
1993, he raised the rhetorical question, "Why has Mr Rupert Murdoch

52 Yao Souchou
brought 64 per cent stake of Star TV for US$500 million? If he is not
going to control news that we are going to receive, then what is it?" He
wanted to know why the media tycoon was "paying such a fantastic
price for a network that has never shown any profit" (Straits Times, 4
August 1993). These remarks have to be seen in the context of his general
distrust of the Western media, and his criticisms are directed at
three levels. Firstly, the Western media is powerful and amoral. In Dr
Mahathir's words:
We can wacch murder as it is being committed in all the gory details, but at
the same time the TV can have us dancing while watching Michael Jackson
during his moonwalk.
Clearly the people who decide what we should see and hear hold terrible
power. They can have us dancing in the streets or they can have us rioting
with firebrands in our hands, burning, looting and killing, (Star, 14 October
1993)
Secondly, the mass media distort the truth about Asia. They "have not
been fair and they black out anything good" about developing countries.
They are thus destabilizing and work against "Asian interests":
There is no Asian newspaper for Asians, only Western newspapers published
in the name of Asian countries. ... Their [foreign media's] main idea is how
to create friction and instability, so that if we are unstable they can compete
with us. (Straits Times, 4 August 1993)
Last is the idea that the Western media disrupt and threaten Asian societies
and their traditional values. In spite of the immense commercial
opportunities of satellite television, Dr Mahathir is emphatic about the
need to prevent open channels like Star TV from importing "undesired
elements" to Asian communities: "We want the media to inform people.
We don't want the media to destroy their culture." (Straits Times, 7
October 1993). It is in response to remarks like this that Rupert
Murdoch's News Corporation replied: "We are conscious of the Asian
way of life and its unique cultural, historical and religious heritage. We
would not presume to intrude into the domestic affairs of any country."
(Straits Times, 6 August 1993),
The Prime Minister's remarks are a mixture of personal indignation,
offended national sensibilities, and political over-reactions. Assuming
a passionate "Asian voice", these remarks speak directly to the West-

2: Theorizing state discourse of mass media in Southeast Asia 53
ern Other. Dr Mahathir's dramatic rhetorical style constitutes a highly
effective dialogic performance of the type described by Bakhtin (1981).
By talking about the worlds media as controlled by "a very few people
in the West" ("the Big Brothers" of whom Rupert Murdoch and New
York-based Dow Jones & Co. which publishes the Far East Economic
Review are obvious members), the discourse assumes a kind of "common
sense" among developing countries under the assault of the Western
media. In his address at the 48th U.N. General Assembly on 1 October
1993, he reportedly devoted twelve paragraphs in his ftfty-sixparagraph
speech to the international media, something that was considered
"unprecedented"; as Bernama, Malaysia's official news agency
remarks, "This is especially so as most leaders would normally voice
concern about world politics in their addresses at the United Nations"
(Sunday Times, 2 October 1993). To the audience on this and other
occasions, his criticism of the West and the Western media always borders
on the breaking of established diplomatic protocol. Indeed, the
almost self-conscious breaching of the established rules of conduct marks
the speaker as different from those for whom the protocol is normally
prescribed. By refusing to play the game according to the rules, the rhetoric
expresses much more than a suspicion of the West, but constitutes a
language of "post-colonial resistance".
The West as Other
Dr Mahathir, however, is not alone in the condemnation of the Western
media and his insistence on Asia's vulnerability and moral uniqueness.
Singapore too, for example, through the compelling voice of its then
Minister for Information and the Arts, Brigadier-General George Yeo,
had called on Southeast Asian nations to "go on the offence" in regulating
Western broadcasting and in "promot[ing] our own values and way
of life" (Straits Times, 20 December 1993). In a similar vein, Thailand
had reproached the London-based publisher of the popular Longmans
Dictionary of English Language and Culture for describing the Thai capital
Bangkok as a city "famous for its temples ... and where there are a lot
of prostitutes" (Straits Times, 7 July 1993). The Thai government had
protested that such an entry would "project: a negative image of Thailand
... [and) erode the general moral standard of Thai/ (Straits Times,

54 Yao Souchou
7 July 1993). Post-doi moi Vietnam too introduced a national campaign
for purging "social evils", "blaming [them] on Western influences
that have returned to the country since [Vietnam] began its economic
reforms" (Straits Times, 17 May 1994). In support of the authorities'
efforts in checking bars and karaoke bars, the writer Huu Ngoc was
quoted as saying: "This is our third war of resistance. The first two were
armed resistance — this is a peaceful war to fight materialistic domination
of life that threatens to destroy our cultural identity." (Straits Times,
17 May 1994). Such activities of the state affirms the prevailing perception
— among government circles and some sections of civil society —
of a Southeast Asia under assault by Western culture's aggressive global
movements. In such a perception the complex problems associated with
the mass media — its social impact, its use and abuse, and its mode of
management and control — are seen as primarily about its "Western
origin" and harmful effects. Asian viewers are perceived as victims of
Western cultural imperialism, and the West an entity that Asia, morally
and culturally, is not. In post-structuralist terms, the process is one of
displacement: a disavowal by the author of the discourse of his own
desire and will to power by constructing another space "out there", among
"the Other", in which to hide himself. The question we have to ask here
is not so much if the Western media actually distort news about Asia, or
if there are real grievances with regard to mis-reporting by the Western
media. These questions cannot be settled by simply deciding on their
truth or falsehood. Instead, we have to turn to the "desire" inserted in
this construction of a systematic difference between East and West, us
and them. This focus enables us to bring forth all that beguiles an Asian
subject like Dr Mahathir: his anxieties, resistance, and existential strategies.
However, if I am taking the discussion to this theoretical path, it is
not to belittle the Asian complaint that local events ate often misrepresented
in the Western media. For example, there is no doubt that Western
media coverage of events such as the Tiananmen incident or Nixon's
visit to China in 1972 is highly selective in a way that reflects the deepseated
values of individual freedom and liberal democracy in the West
(Wang 1991). Nonetheless, it is useful to remember that news events
are never simply objective facts which the media can simply take and

2: Theorizing state discourse of mass media in Southeast Asia 55
present to the world. What is reported is always filtered through the
editorial and ideological decisions of the media in question. But the
point is that if the media in general distorts, it is not always clear that
such a distortion is predictably directed at any target in the East (or the
West, for that matter). The issue of media credibility is too complex a
question to be settled here. If some Western newspapers tend to be overcritical
of the East, as expressed by Dr Mahathir, they are just as likely to
find fault with their own governments and societies. It is because reporting
by the Western media does not assume a single coherent position
with regard to the East that we have to direct attention to the concerns
and authorial desire of the Asian approach to mass media in conditions
of modernity.
Our discussion, therefore, directs attention to the crucial dualism
in such an approach. This dualism in fact posits a series of differences in
terms of East and West, us and them, truth and distortion, tradition
and modernity, and so on. These oppositions are cultural constructs;
their effect is to give the West and Western media — and thus the East
itself — a formal quality, and the appearance of separate and identifiable
entities. What do we make of the constitutive principle that characterizes
the discursive formation? The most immediate answer is
totalization: the cutting across many diverse and conflicting notions about
the West, Asia, the mass media and their social effects, and placing them
under a set of structural categories with which these ideas are explained
and explained away. Totalization is a strategy that employs homogenization
and an all-encompassing framework under which all the multiple
and dispersed processes associated with the mass media can be subsumed.
Through this process, the West is constructed as an object that articulates
something of our desire and anxiety in the modern world. If the
Western perception of Asia is never innocent, neither is our understanding
of the West. We too build agendas in our enterprises. These agendas, as
I shall explain, are about asserting an Asian voice in the post-colonial
world. They have, at least in the hands of Southeast Asian states like
Singapore and Malaysia, come out of the attempt to wrestle the centre
of hegemonic influence from the West. The East or "Asia" now emerges
as a sovereign subject while marking the West as the Other residing in

56 Yao Souchou
the foreign space, possessing all the qualities we are not, or that we wish
to have. The West is the Other discursive space in which Asia can find
its new destiny.
It is perhaps useful to think of the discourse as engaging in a kind
Occidentalism, an Orientalism in reverse. Both employ totalization and
othering in the inscription of truth and knowledge. If the (imperial)
West had created the Orient out of its own imagining and will to power,
Asia can also give rein to the force of desire by totalizing the West in a
counter-deployment in which Asia alone speaks the master voice. It is
the principle that follows the rule of, as Dr Mahathir remarks concerning
his meeting with Rupert Murdoch, "What he does to me, I will do
to him" (Sunday Times, Singapore, 3 October 1993). It is as if by employing
the same strategy as the West, the Asian voice merely wishes to
settle the account with the West. It is prudent, however, not to stretch
too far this inference of Asian discourse as an opposite of Orientalism.
Certainly it would be misleading to put them together on the same
plane as they do not have the same history nor do they occupy the same
position in the international hegemonic order of global capitalism. Nonetheless,
Said's classic argument is useful here because it reminds us of the
importance of social and political conditions in which the construction
of knowledge and power takes place. What is brought to light is not
only discursive deployment itself, but also the very conditions of "speaking".
In so far as Southeast Asian discourse on mass media is counterhegemonic,
it is an operation that attempts to reconstruct the West by
inscribing the diverse social and cultural spaces it inhabits under the
"Sign of the West". The strategy hopes to reverse the privileged pole in
the opposition between East and West. Casting the West to the outside,
and putting in place instead Asia as the sovereign subject in the new
global exchange, the strategy signals Asia's coming of age. Dr Mahathir's
remarks, by emphasizing Asia's victimization by the West, struggle to
express an undeniable (from a historical perspective) natural justice in
supplanting the dominant voice of the West. His Occidentalism <strong>claims</strong>
the prerogative of contestation, of playing the same discursive game as
the West, thus articulating and harnessing the knowledge and power
that are invariably involved.

2: Theorizing state discourse of mass media in Southeast Asia 57
Politics, difference, and the desire to be modern
In one way, the game is a beguilingly simple one of post-modern politics
(Yeatman 1991). As the global order begins to shift, as power increasingly
flows beyond the traditional spheres that made the world, the
future is taking shape through the struggles of the disinherited nations
to claim a place in the narrative of progressive nations. These struggles
engage new voices and new rules for the game. There is nothing more
evident of this than the current rewriting of the narratives of democracy,
human rights, and the environment from the "Asian point of view"
(Bartley et al. 1993). Politics in post-modern conditions identifies and
draws on two sources of tension. Firstly, there is what Lyotard (1984)
calls the crisis of narratives, the scepticism of the grand modernist stories
about objective and universally achievable Truth, Justice, and
Progress. If there cannot be a consensus about the ultimately transcendental
grounds for these ideas, they become chronically "contextualized"
and some other ways of seeing and operationalizing them have to emerge
(Yeatman 1991, p. 116). The result, as Dr Mahathir instinctively understands,
is to cast doubt on the moral, economic, and cultural superiority
of the West. Secondly, post-modern politics refocuses attention
from the hegemonic order in its macro-structural location to the
marginalized sites where subaltern voices are crying to speak. These are
not necessarily revolutionary moves, but are more about the insistence
by those at the border (in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, and locality)
of their right to construct their own subjectivities and rewrite their own
histories. Asian discourse on mass media can be seen within this context
in which the agendas of Western modernity grounded in European Enlightenment
ideals-—democracy, individual freedom, and human rights
— are being questioned, The discourse in fact reassesses and reformulates
the understanding of the value and purpose of mass media from an
alternative "Asian perspective". The move is counter-hegemonic in that
it insists on a different reading of the "truth" about mass media and the
right to script a new agenda.
Post-modern politics, in the way I have outlined, is a major move to
break away from the Marxist totalization of the relation between base
and superstructure, and from the conception of the economic "at the

58 Yao Souchou
last instance" (Althusser 1971, 1977). But in the rejection of essentialism
and teleology, there is a great temptation for post-modern politics
to turn into a game of difference or opposition without a discernible
and realistic objective of struggle. As we have seen, the writing of an
Asian discourse on mass media precisely involves the speaking of "an
alternative voice", and the making of a new and different sovereign subject
from that of the West. The "politics of opposition" can at times take
on a seemingly elementary logic in the discourse about the Western
media. If the power of Rupert Murdoch is to be questioned because he
is a Westerner, then Malaysian tycoon Robert Kuok's control of the Hong
Kong English daily South China Morning Post is defensible because he is
Malaysian. If the Western-controlled mass media distorts Asian news
and corrupts Asian values, then the "Asianized media" would hopefully
achieve where the Western media fail. This crude system of opposition
and antagonism is possible only because the Asian subject's locating of
himself in the exact reflection of the Western Other. By positioning
itself as a reaction against the injustice committed by the West, the discourse
invariably subscribes to the one-sided instrumentalist conception
of hegemony as something the dominant West does to the dominated
East. Homi Bhabha criticizes Said's Orientalism thus:
(It) is difficult to conceive of the process of subjectificatian as a placing within
Orientalist or colonial discourse for the dominated subject without the dominant
being strategically placed within it too. There is always, in Said, the
suggestion that colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the coloniser,
which is a historical and theoretical simplification. The terms in which
Said's orientalism is unified — the intentionality and unidirectionalicy of
colonial power — also unify the subject of colonial enunciation. (1983, pp.
24-25, quoted in Mutman 1992/93, p. 174)
The Asian approach to mass media suffers from a similar methodological
fallacy — of bracketing itself out, of implying an immunity, from its
enunciation of the West. Following Bhabha, we have to see the Asian
subject as strategically implicated in a discourse that invents both the
East and the West.
What Bhabha points to is the impossibility of erasing difference
through the simple tactics of opposition. Differences cannot be annulled
because the unconscious desire that produces the subject cannot be an-

2: Theorizing state discourse of mass media in Southeast Asia 59
nulled. This rupturing of distinctions, of the duality of the Other, is for
our analysis a decisive deconstructive manoeuvre. What is at stake is not
simply whether it is valid to locate the sources of our woes in the West,
but rather the contour of our wishes which makes necessary such a denunciation
in the first place. In the realm of discourse, if the difference
between the East and West is really an invention, and if in the construction
of the West the East also creates itself, then we need a term to
express this play of difference inscribed by the working of desire, for
example, a term such as that which Derrida calls differance, which he
defines simultaneously in two senses. The first;
to take recourse consciously or unconsciously, in the temporal and temporizing
mediation of a detour chat suspends the accomplishment or fulfilment of
"desire" or "will", and equally effects this suspension in a mode that annuls or
tempers its own effects ... The other sense ... is the more common and
identifiable one; to he not identical. (1982, p. 8)
Derrida's notion of difference drives home the difficulty in the making
of a simple and reified difference between East and West in the imaginary,
quite apart from what takes place in the socially and economically
real Speaking from the terrain of psychical manoeuvre, the making of
difference by an Asian political leader like Dr Mahathir is the ingenious
working of the unconscious will to create a screen upon which to project
itself. The West becomes a construction that deflects the Asian subjects
existential concerns in a globalized world.
Globalization, modernity, and the West
The response of Southeast Asian to Western modernity is thus immensely
subtle. The need for economic development has meant an open courting
of the benefits of modernity: Western education, technology, and
foreign capital (not to mention nationalism and parliamentary democracy).
At the same time, governments also attempt to seal off their societies
from what they see as undesirable imports from the West, of things
ranging from foreign newspapers and journals to girlie magazines and
occasionally rock music and Hollywood films. Such a closure has not
proved to be easy in the condition of globalization. With the rapid flow
of goods, capital, people, information, ideas, and cultures across nations
and societies, globalization simply means the opening up of societies

60 Yao Souchou
whose values and traditions are now subject to external influences and
scrutiny. Along with this tendency there is also in accordance with Weber's
classic argument, the increasing rationalization of institutions and
their functions under modernization. In the condition of modernity,
theoretically at least, political, economic, and religious institutions are
separate, and what we do may not necessarily be related to what we are,
Institutional rationalization means that it is no longer possible to confine
moral meanings, institutional functions, and private acts within
the principles that define communal boundaries in the first place. Globalization
adds a new dimension to "the primacy of functional differentiation"
under modernity (Beyer 1990, p. 384). With diminishing spatial
separation between communities and cultures, globalization exacerbates
a society's boundary maintenance problem on a scale it did not
have to deal with before. In the words of Beyer:
The resultant global tendencies of societies have radically altered the conditions
under which the moralising solution is still possible on the level of
society on a whole, because the group now includes everyone. (Ibid., p. 384,
emphasis added)
Theoretically, we are now moving far away from the immediate concern
of Asian leaders like Dr Mahathir. But as a more general problem
of modernity, functional differentiation and openness have to be singled
out as crucial tension behind much of the Malaysian Prime Minister's
rage against the West. And in a way he is not wrong: modernity/
modernization can be said to bring about a moral decline in Asian societies
simply because moralizing standards can no longer rely on institutionally
supported judgements (for example, by kin groups and religious
institutions) about what we do and who we are. Religious credentials,
for example, now operate in competition with the pulls of secular
achievements and attractions like education, financial and professional
success, and ownership of the status symbols of urban consumption.
Globalization, on the other hand, creates the conditions in which
those who used to be outsiders now live among us. In a world of global
communications, we lose much of our choices in selecting our neighbours.
Outsiders among our midst are a profound contradiction. They
are especially so at a time when traditional moral standards and institutions
are being undermined by the onslaught of modernization. Out-

2: Theorizing state discourse of mass media in Southeast Asia 61
siders in our midst create significant problems in affirming outside/
inside, enemies/friends distinctions that are crucial in constructing the
Evil Other to show the possibility of God and salvation. Meeting him
face to face not only makes the Evil Other appear less than what he is
imagined to be; in the world of transnational capitalism, we find that
we have to deal with him because he is essential for realizing our own
political and economic ambitions. The West as the Evil Other is a powerful
imaginary which constitutes the history of the present, as Foucault
might put it, that reveals not so much the past as the very nature of the
making of an and-West posture outside the West. Such a posture draws
from the anti-colonial past, and came into being by totalizing the varying
political needs and aspirations of the societies of the non-West. For
this reason, any attempt to enclose a discourse within, say, a distinctively
Asian position — for instance, in regard to Western cultural imperialism,
Third World environmentalism or feminism — is fraught
with methodological problems: the discourse of Asianized mass media
is only one articulation of these.
The difficulties in casting out the West are especially acute when we
are reminded of the position of transnational capitalism itself. In the
global economy, the industrialized West (which rightly includes Japan)
still remains the world's centre of technologies, industrial expertise, and
financial capital. The more astute of the economists in Southeast Asia
are wont to see the 1997 financial and economic crisis in Asia as resulting
in ever greater dependence on the West for its resources and further
"rescue packages". In a similiar fashion, the slow rate of growth in Western
economies is likely to be seen as an outcome of industrial restructuring
rather than as evidence of long-term economic decline. Consequently,
while the sediments of anti-colonialism might keep alive an "anti-West"
political stance, the urgent task of modernization and economic recovery
would have us invite the West back simply because success depends
on its technologies and participation. Mass media and telecommunications
are a part of the crucial resources. However, more than anything,
the mass media and information technology in general signify —- and
warn of — the coming together of the East and the West and other
worlds. What I am concerned with here is the nature of this double
move: the inscribing of a culturally significant posture in order to cast

62 Yao Souchou
the West to the other side while we seek economic and industrial spaces
to assist and accommodate its return. There are further ironic loopings
to this. The arriving of the West among us would further energize the
othering of the West, making it even more necessary to bring all the
historical antagonisms to the fore in order to put him in his place. Contrary
to what Dr Mahathir would suggest, global communication does
not so much facilitate Western cultural invasion as reconfigure the relationship
between the East and the West, who are now centrally implicated
as both subject and object, us and them, friend and enemy. All
this creates significant ambivalence not only with regard to Asia's relationship
with the West but also towards the experience of modernity
itself. It is in this ambiguous terrain of attraction and repulsion, need
and resentment, that the ambivalence of Asian discourse on mass media
is located.
The West as stranger: uncertainty and Westoxication
When the Western Other is continuously in our midst, he is no longer
our enemy; he becomes a stranger. Enemies are essential, in fact useful,
because they help to say something about what we — ourselves and
friends — are not, and do not wish to be. Enemies offer the comfort of
symmetry: without enemies there can be no friends, and friends only
exist because there are enemies beyond the boundaries of friendship.
Friends and foes can be spatially set apart, but the stranger makes us see
the illusion of this symmetry because he is neither friend nor enemy or
he can be both. The stranger, in Bauman's elegant reworking of Simmel,
refuses the smug antagonisms of conflict and difference (Bauman 1990,
p. 143). For both Bauman and Simmel, the role of the stranger is charged
with a profound significance derived precisely from his propensity to
break the pristine boundaries which divide friends and enemies, us and
them, inside and outside the community. Always already "here" among
us, the stranger has the unique position of "the man who comes today
and stays tomorrow" (Simmel 1971, p. 143). The stranger is disruptive
because he refuses to stay securely on one side, the site of the friend, or
the site of the enemy; he thrives on the contradiction as the enemy
living in our community, By breaking the neat spatial, social, and cog-

2: Theorizing state discourse of mass media in Southeast Asia 63
nitive divisions of friends against enemies, the stranger threatens the
certainty of knowing and thus threatens the social order itself (Bauman
1990; Douglas 1966).
The idea of the West as Simmel's stranger "who comes today and
stays tomorrow" makes good sense when we consider the restless movement
of the West in the geography of modernity in Southeast Asia. In
the global flow of information and cultures, and the restructuring of the
transnational economy, the West no longer gives comfort as the Other,
and as the enemy. Of course, both the enemy and the stranger are threatening
by the fact of their not being friends and by the quality of uncertainty
they evoke. While they both may represent grids of possibilities
from which real and imaginary threat might come, the nature of the
damage that can come from the stranger is immensely greater and more
awesome. It is so because by being neither a friend nor an enemy the
stranger denies us the ability to respond; we cannot act because we have
no way of knowing which is the case. From this point of view, we can
think of the Asian discourse of the West as an attempt to give him shape
from the shadow of uncertainty, to bring him under the light of
decidability. All the moral qualities — or the lack of them — invested
in the West thus unambiguously place him in a "determined" place, and
in the process transform him from a stranger to an enemy.
If globalization and modernization confuse the status of the enemy
by bringing him to our home grounds, the discursive strategy of an
Asian leader like the Malaysian Prime Minister is always to move the
West to the territory of exile. Asian discourse of the Western media is a
move which forever resists the deployment of the West as a stranger by
constantly reversing the processes of coming together, by restoring his
status as an enemy/other.
Contrary to the <strong>claims</strong> and wishes of the state and some intellectuals
in Southeast Asia, modernization is invariably tied in with Westernization.
From the view of Simmel's brilliant analysis, the potential of the
West to destabilize "Asian social order" becomes very real indeed. Out
of the difficulties in resolving the ambiguous status of the West, the
Asian subject figures him into a phantasmatic product of desire. If modernity
brings not only social progress and economic development but

64 Yao Souchou
also Westernization and thus threat to our bounded communities, then
the fate of modernity may be too terrible to contemplate. Displacement
and disavowal are the logical route for desire to bypass the necessity of
confrontation with itself. "Westoxication", to use a term of Beyer (1990),
represents a spectrum of this deployment. The West, such as the proclamation
of the Aliran (a spiritual revivalist movement in Malaysia) would
have it, is the land of the Fallen Angel, infested with a myriad of social
and moral ills. Chandra Muzzafar, then its president, helpfully provides
a list:
Problems arising from unlimiting [sic] production, unending consumption,
an anarchic fiscal situation, the erosion of absolute values, an antagonistic
relationship between individual and community, the loss of both discipline
and love within the family, the decline of a sense of sacred in man — man
and man [sic] —and nature relationship ... (Muzzaffar 1985, pp. 25-26)
The complaint of "Westoxication" is a powerful expression by the non-
West of its ambivalence towards modernity, and the urgent need to build
a long-term separation of Westernization from modernization. The reshaping
of the West as transcendental evil — "the West as Satanic Empire"
— gives a clear signal to a return to some fundamental formulation
that is capable of communicating distinctively Asian (or any non-
Western) values and aspirations. Such a call is as much a nostalgic yearning
for some untainted past of traditional communities as a powerful response
to globalization and modernization which have brought about,
as it continues to do so, major conflicts between regions in the world,
and between needs and desire within ourselves.
The Asian discourse on mass media is just one of the many endeavours
which attempt to manage and resist the restless movement of the
West in the social, cultural, and political landscapes of the world. If the
particular construction of the West expresses something of Asia's vulnerability,
then such a construct is as an illusion as it is real when we use
it to formulate an understanding of the world, to build a basis to undermine
the forces of Westernization. The exiling of the stranger, the imprisoning
of the Western Other in the opposite space, is a crucial move
to protect our home ground. A home cannot admit strangers. But by
securing the stranger as enemy, we create in the West a site in which we
find respite from our feeling of uncertainty.

2: Theorizing state discourse of mass media in Southeast Asia 65
Postscript: cultural authenticity,
pleasure, the politics of signs
Mass media in the globalizing world is a complex domain implicating a
wide range of issues. My attempt to theorize the complex processes involved
has barely touched some of these issues. As a way of conclusion,
the following are probably useful remarks of preliminary observation;
1. The discourse on mass media in Asia requires a conception of local
culture as authentic, charged with fundamental qualities that give
sense to a unique Asian culture and identity (in the singular). Essentialism
is an important aspect of this discursive strategy. But
authenticity is also a burden; for its conception as a set of historically
enduring values and practices also creates the conditions of
cultures vulnerability. Purity invites corruption; it is a state that
carries the seed of disorder and the danger of moral collapse, as
Mary Douglas (1996) has suggested. Yet the conception is necessary
in order to create the equally essentialist opposites in the Western
Other, Only by seeing Asia as traditional/authentic/communal can
we understand the West as anarchic/impure/individualistic, Ironically,
as Said reminds us, the East as tradition-bound, sentimental,
and ruled by emotion is also an Orientalist construct of a Western
imperialistic discipline. The ambition of the Asian discourse of mass
media as a counter-hegemonic thrust is problematic,
2. My analysis bypasses the question of cultural imperialism which
post-structuralist criticism would reject for its totalization and determinism,
as Ien Ang (in this volume) has emphasized. But another
problem of the argument is the denial of the specificity of
peoples — mostly positive — experiences of the mass media. It is a
fault which this analysis to some extent shares. When we talk about
a medium such as television, viewers pleasure is the grounded reference
point, the indisputable reason why they watch it. This, and
thus the fecund issue of the politics of pleasure, are ignored by the
Asian approach to mass media and by my analysis. Can people insist
on the right to watch television (or films, videos) simply because
it is pleasurable? The impact of a medium such as television, and
even the emotional issues of television violence, are not conclusive.

66 Yao Souchou
Counterpoised against rhe doom and gloom of what Fowles (1992)
called the "television prigs school" are two basic points. Firstly, television
can be good for you because the fantasies of television dramas
allow viewers to rework and thus diffuse tensions and contradictions
in real life. Critics like Fowles have used this proposition to
explain the uneven relationship between a relatively crime-free Japanese
society and television violence in Japan, which is significant,
even by U.S. standards.
3. A more effective defence of the politics of pleasure in regard to television
is offered by post-structuralism via semiotics. This approach
stresses the constitution of meaning by individuals through encoding,
the structuring of new "system of reference" between signs and
signifieds. The process in fact suggests that there is no objective
referent of purely semantic (dictionary) meaning, and furthermore,
encoding is always a double or triple overlaying of meaning because
all referents are already encoded by other agencies in other linguistic
situations. Content analysis of television programmes, for instance,
only makes sense if we know how viewers interpret what
they watch with reference to their social and cultural experiences.
We think of the complex play of gender, ethnicity, economic status,
culture, and indeed Western cultural hegemony in constituting the
popularity of say Michael Jackson in Southeast Asia. With regard to
items of any urban consumption like pop music and Coca-Cola,
there seems to be no single objective ground from which we can
derive an authoritative meaning out of context. A semiotic approach
effectively rescues the social significance of mass culture from the
cultural imperialism proposal. Soap opera, for instance, the easiest
target of attack as mindless Hollywood-inspired fantasy, has been
shown to present a powerful feminist critique of patriarchy by highlighting
the endless troubles and conflicts in perfect bourgeois households
in programmes like Dallas and Falcon Crest (Ang 1991, p. 83).
4. The deployment of a post-structuralist critique has the merit of
destabilizing state discourse which powerfully constructs a systematic
difference between East and West. Writing from Southeast Asia,
such destabilizing constitutes a political move because of the investment
of the state in the fixity of meaning in the first place. Post-

2: Theorizing state discourse of mass media in Southeast Asia 67
sructuralism operates by inserting itself between the distinctions, by
tracing them to the operations of unconscious wishes. The method
also brings to light the pitfalls of determinism. This is a theoretical
position as much as a personal faith, which sees individuals as capable
of writing their own texts, of creating their own meanings, with
regard to the mass media. My field-work observations in Hong Kong
and Sarawak seem to confirm that local cultures, rather than being
simply "destroyed" by the mass media, are able to appropriate television
images, turning them into something that makes sense on
fishing boats in the South China Sea or in the East Malaysian jungle.
5. Post-structuralist criticism thus gives viewing subjects a degree of
freedom from and even resistance to the powerful influences of the
mass media. It is a strategy of deferral, where the final meaning is
never settled but always lies one step ahead of the endless looping of
encoding and decoding. The politics of this is immensely subtle,
but only one aspect of it concerns me here. Is it possible to make
definite ethical and political judgements about the effects of the
mass media? There seem to be two issues here. Firstly, the mass media
and telecommunications can and do have an effect on behaviour
by their ability to carry and duplicate information globally.
From Iraq to Somalia, "crisis situations of low-level conflict" are
constructed visually and instantly transmitted for the world's consumption.
When anti-Shah revolutionaries copied and distributed
millions of audio-cassettes of the speeches of Ayatollah Khomeini
even before his return to Teheran from exile in Paris, they effectively
influenced the outcome of the event. The social impact of the mass
media cannot be easily dismissed. A second issue can be raised regarding
the politics of representation. The production of media
images has become a contested area. Minority or marginal groups
are resisting stereotyping and demanding a representation that reflects
their sense of dignity and self. How post-structuralist criticism
can contribute to this form of media politics is a crucial concern
for any analyst. Some agendas of social responsibility have to
be written into the analysis. But such a project would be quite distinct
from any policy measures based on the easy acceptance of the

68 Yao Souchou
NOTE
effect of television violence, and the instant solution of censorship
and denial of access by the state as frequently witnessed in South-
east Asia. Post-structuralist refusal of foreclosure is useful here in its
forever breaching of the subject, and carving up a space for interro-
gating the representations of local cultures and social aspirations
sponsored by the state.
Some of the issues discussed in this paper have been explored in my article "The Predicament
of Modernity: Mass Media and the Making of the West in Southeast Asia"
(Yao 1994, pp. 33-51).
REFERENCES
Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited with
an introduction by J.M, Bernstein. London: Routledge, 1991.
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy. London: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
.. For Marx. London: Verso, 1977.
Ang, Ien. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. Translated by
Delia Couling. London: Methuen, 1991.
Bartley, Robert, Chan Heng Chee, Samuel P. Huntington, and Shijuro Ogata. Democracy
and Capitalism: Asian and American Perspectives. Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, 1993.
Bauman, Zygmunt. "Modernity and Ambivalence". In Global Culture: Nationalism,
Globalization and Modernity, edited by Mike Featherstone. London: Sage, 1990.
Beyer, Peter F. "Privatization and the Public Influence of Religion in Global Society".
In Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, edited by Mike
Featherstone. London: Sage, 1990.
Bhabha, Homi K. "The Other Question". Screen 24, no. 6 (1983): 18-36.
Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge, 1966.
Fowles, Jib. Why Viewers Watch: A Reappraisal of Television's Effects. New York: Sage,
1992.
Holloway, Nigel et al. "Cassandras Confounded". Far Eastern Economic Review, June
1997.
Jussawalla, Meheroo. "Information Technology and Economic Development in the

Representing state desire
and the sins of transgression
RAY LANGENBACH
Yellow and white ate wise, red and black are stupid; yellow and white are
rulers, red and black are slaves; yellow and white are united, red and black are
scattered. (Tang Caishang [1867-1900], quoted in Sautman 1995, p. 211)
In his short essay, "Ten Years and a Billion Dollars", William
Burroughs describes "The Walk Exercise" that he gives to his writing
students:
The original version ... was taught me by an old Mafia Don in Columbus,
Ohio: seeing everyone on the street before he sees you. Do this for a while in
any neighborhood, and you will soon meet other players who are doing the
same thing. Generally speaking, if you see other people before they see you,
they won't see you. I have even managed to get past a whole block of guides
and shoeshine boys in Tangier this way, thus earning the Moroccan moniker:
"El Hombre Invisible". (Burroughs 1982, p. 49)
Burroughs invisibility is a function of his obviousness and transparency.
His strategy of "covert spectacle" combines a poignantly imperial act
(the king who vacates his throne to pass unrecognized in his realm) with
the petty megalomania of a bourgeois expatriate-on-smack. This notion
of a visible "invisibility" recalls Michael Rogin's 1993 musings on the
American Pentagon and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter":

3: Representing state desire and the sins of transgression 71
The chief hides the purloined letter, by placing it in plain sight. His theft is
overlooked because no attempt is made to conceal ic. The crimes of the
postmodern American empire ... are concealed in the same way. Covert operations
actually function as spectacle. (Rogin 1993, p. 499)
The "covert spectacle" is an integral component of contemporary
state-craft and the mass commodification of late capitalism, as revealed
in the functions of censorship and mass media propaganda. While censorship
paradoxically works to make the invisible (the unnoticed) visible
through its erasure, displacing original authorship with the signature
of the state, in the spectacle of propaganda, the state is reified as
this displacing meta-self. In a charismatic state this meta-self is found in
the performance of a (usually male) progenitor/leader/hero, hailing and
informing the people. In an administrative state, such as Singapore since
1990, the bureaucracy, ruling elite or party arc seen to be the alphaperformer.
This chapter posits propaganda as the reified (fetishized) reperformance
of interpellation, that is, the re-performance of the ideological
recognition or hailing of the people by the state, in such a way
that the state cannot be repaid, cannot be hailed or recognized in return,
simply because there is no one there to hail... only the evacuated
spectacle of interpellation as state dramaturgy.
Both censorship and propaganda, by discursively intervening into
the systems of agreement and cultural semiotics, freeze the populace in
a circuitry of futile receptivity, in which "power belongs to the one who
can give and cannot be repaid" (Baudrillard 1986, p. 129). Local struggles
between communities, ethnic groups, or classes are suppressed or
elided under this fascinating drama of state dissemination, A culture or
an economy, iterated and produced through interpellation, is thus reiterated,
and reproduced (propagated) through the spectacle of propaganda.
This chapter cues the uppercase "State" to a usage by Singapore
sociologist, Chua Beng Huat, in his 1995 book, Communitarian Ideology
and Democracy in Singapore, but deriving from Gramscis theorization:
"the entire complex of practical and rfieoretical activities with which
the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages
to win the active consent of those over whom it rules" (Gramsci

72 Ray Langenbach
1971, p. 244) as in the famous equation, "State = political society + civil
society in other words, hegemony protected by the armour of coercion 1
(ibid., p. 263). I his chapter uses the lower-case "state" to refer to a
specific government, a ruling party, a group of leaders, distinguishable
from civil society, State, then, refers to not only a combination of civil
and political society, but also the means by which a ruling Mite maintains
and extends its hegemony ~ and it is these means which are the subject of
this chapter — while a "state' would be the agency which, at a particular
moment in history, would deploy means to maintain or extend its
particular hegemonic configuration. Seen as "strategic means for maintaining
power", the state is never a "steady-state" or "status quo" for
long, but is incessantly under negotiation, a vortex of relationships, and
struggle... unpredictable, chaotic, and transitional, simultaneously coalescing,
dismembering — a site of incessant strategy and tactics.
One such strategic means is Burroughs "first seeing", a pre-emptive
panoptic strike, pre-formative rather than performative; an expropriation
of agency that is designed to produce the illusion of a status quo of
pre-defined and predetermined relations, without negotiation. We recognize
this strategy in colonial relations, where the colonized subject,
Fanon's "native", finds himself/herself trussed in the colonizers displaced
subjectivity. The goal of che exercise is to ensure that citizens will not
question che motives or legitimacy of the ruling elite, who must appear
selfless, so that the citizens will selflessly transfer their loyalty, labour,
and devotion to the state's benefit, convinced that "Everything is within
the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State" (ibid., p,
261).
This evacuation, displacement, and transference actually amounts
to a planning and realization of formalized relationships — much like
the aesthetic manipulations of "formal relationships" performed by a
painter on a canvas or a conceptual artist, working in four dimensions,
although most politicians would not admit to being glorified designers,
It is at this conjunction of ideology, real politics, and aesthetics where
we must look for the representations of State desire in Singapore.
State desire is articulated through the functions of government, law,
city planning, and social engineering, while its "negative" circulate!
through the depiction of the "Other" in the representations of the

3: Representing state desire and the sins of transgression 73
marginalized bodies: women, homosexuals, transvestites, artists, and the
"low-educated". Their problematic "nature" is inflected with economically
unproductive pleasures of ephemeral aesthetic ritual, non-reproductive
sexual acts, or unproductive labour. These groups are assigned a negative
role by the state in the national dramaturgy (a subversive "antinational"
role), because their sins of transgression — namely, their "subversive"
heterogeneity — can then serve to positively heroicize and reify
the struggle for continued power by a ruling patriarchy. To extend its
hegemony, the government inscribes these groups as "infestations" which
threaten to disrupt a construction of a seamless continuity, underpinning
the political and monetary economy.
This chapter will use the lens of the Artists General Assembly (AGA)
at the beginning of 1994 to focus on certain aspects of che states
"meritocratic ideology" 1
(Blum 1984, p. 84) which was (and remains)
buttressed by an uncritical evocation of two strongly contested and ideologically
inflected colonial sciences (or pseudo-sciences), biometrics —
the categorization of races through the quantification of biological characteristics,
and eugenics — the study of methods for enhancing inherited
racial characteristics.
These scientific discourses were evoked by the ruling Peoples Action
Party (PAP) to rationalize governance by a ruling elite of first- and
second-generation leaders, through a representation of che ruling elite
as the paragon of a meritocratic organization of power relations. This is
achieved by scientifically naturalizing chat meritocratic hierarchy, thereby
justifying the party's continued hegemony (into the second, third, and
fourth decades of their control over the organs of state). In other words,
through these processes, the PAP produced a cybernetic feedback loop
— a moebius strip — in which che contingent and arbitrary discourses
of governmentality were deployed to rationalize and inculcate a scientifically
essentialized meritocratic framework, diathetically carrying an
assumption of genetic inevitability, which, once accepted by the populace,
leads inexorably to the conclusion that those carrying out this operation
were genetically endowed to do so.
To put ic in discursive terms, an arbitrary, contingent, and imaginative
State discourse, arbitrated and constituted itself as a scientific and
statistical fact of nature, thereby camouflaging its arbitrary, contingent,

74 Ray Langenbach
and imaginative character.
That an obsession with ideal replication in the register of the imaginary can
lend itself to somatic literalization — transformed through acts of state power
into a large-scale social project of biological reproduction — is the disturbing
subtext of one of the most tenacious and formidable of state narratives constructed
in Singapore's recent history, with consequences yet proliferating at
the time of this article. (Heng and Devan 1992, p. 344)
The Artists' General Assembly (AQA)
In 1994 a week-long Artists' General Assembly (AGA) was held at Fifth
Passage Gallery, organized jointly by two progressive artists' groups: Artists'
Village and Fifth Passage Artists Ltd. The two groups were instrumental
in the advancement of performance art, installation art, alternative
music, gender and identity issues, and the development of new aesthetic
forms. Problems began when three video tapes scheduled into the
Video Fest were banned, with a number of others receiving substantial
cuts by the Board of Film Censors. Tongues Untied by Marlon Riggs
(United States), a black, gay conscientizing tape, was banned because "it
promoted a homosexual lifestyle" (New Paper, 30 December 1993), Game
of the Year by Ellen Pau (Hong Kong), a parodic send-off of a speech by
Chinese Premier Li Peng concerning the Tiananmen Square crackdown,
was banned for its political content, and a performance tape by Thai
artist, Vasan Sithiket, was banned for its depiction of a scatological act.
The censorship board erased the tapes (submittets have the choice of
having their banned tapes erased or shipped out of the country); and
the AGA organizers decided to show them to the public in their erased
state, so as to not "censor the censors". Some artists presented performances
in front of the video monitors as a critical response to the censorship
on 29 December.
The following day, the tabloid English-language press, the New Paper,
a paper of the government-controlled Singapore Press Holdings, 2
ran a story on the video screenings and the performances. A number of
artists became increasingly agitated by what they considered to be inaccurate
and sensationalized reporting by the New Paper. On the final
night of the festival, Josef Ng and Shannon Tham performed as part of
a twelve-hour New Year event, including numerous other performances,

3: Representing state desire and the sins of transgression 75
poetry readings, and music, Ng's performance, "Brother Cane", reflected
critically on the recent arrest and exposure in the press of twelve men for
allegedly gay activities, six of whom pleaded guilty and were given jail
and caning sentences. Tham's performance responded to the tabloid press
coverage by incinerating a page from the New Paper, swallowing the
ashes and regurgitating into a barrel.
On 3 January, the New Paper again went on the offensive, carrying
articles on the performances of Josef Ng and Shannon Tham, and sensationalizing
a short interval of each performance. Press photos showed
Ngs partially naked back, his briefs partially lowered, revealing the tops
of his buttocks, in the act of cutting his pubic hair, and other photos of
Shannon Tham, burning and consuming the ashes of the New Paper.
The National Arts Council, under the Ministry of Information and the
Arts, with a mandate to distribute funds to artists and art groups, released
a statement to the press on 5 January;
The National Arts Council (NAC) noted with consternation the report (in
the press) yesterday (3.1.94) of two artists putting on so-called performance
art: One snipped off his pubic hair while the other vomited, both publicly in
protest against allegedly unfair reports by the press,
NAC finds che acts vulgar and completely distasteful which deserve public
condemnation. ...
Asked whether such acts should be allowed, NAC said that this Is a matter
for the Police to decide.
(New Paper, 5 January 1994)
Two weeks later, the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Information
and the Arts issued a joint statement to the public stating
that they were
... concerned that new art forms, such as "performance art" and "forum
theatre" which have no script and encourage spontaneous audience participation
pose dangers to public order, security and decency and much greater
difficulty to the licensing authority.
The performances may be exploited to agitate the audience on volatile
social issues, or to propagate the beliefs and messages of deviant social or
religious groups, or as a means of subversion.
(Straits Times, 22 January 1994)
They barred Josef Ng and Shannon Tham from performing (a ban that
continues today), and 5th Passage from presenting unscripted perform-

76 Ray Langenbach
ances in the future and from receiving any state funding. The artist,
Josef Ng and the 5th Passage manager, Iris Tan, were arrested, charged,
and after court proceedings found guilty of their respective charges —
committing an obscene act in public for Ng, holding a performance
after the expiration of a Public Entertainment Licence for Tan. These
events have been discussed in greater detail elsewhere. 3
What is relevant
for this discussion was the significance of the video, Tongues Untied, its
censorship and the relationship of this state performance to the biological
engineering programme carried out by the previous PAP administration,
under the then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.
But first, there are two difficulties associated with a return to the
issue of biological engineering in Singapore, now in 1999. These are
firstly, the tendency of writers to treat the Singapore State as a monolithic
concentration of power; and secondly, the problem of the complicity
of artists and intellectuals in the reproduction of State desire.
With regard to the first difficulty, the discursive treatment of the
State as a monolithic concentration of power has gone the way of other
singular, monovalent meta-discourses of gender, race, genius, authority.
Polyvalent governmentality, with a combination of power between and
within the state and civil society, is now the price of entry into State
discourse. This is a particularly sensitive issue in Singapore political and
cultural debates. Chua Beng Huat, among others, has made a strong
case for viewing Singapore as a site of polyvalent, negotiated
governmentality, based on his Gramscian reading of the state as an ideological
hegemony or consensus.
Singapore is not simply an authoritarian state. The legitimacy and longevity
of the PAP government, from 1959 to the present, is built on a strong ideological
consensus with the people around 'economic pragmatism'. (Chua 1995,
p, viii)
... PAP's popularity lies significandy in its ability to develop an ideological
system which was able to crystallise and reflect, relatively accurately, the underdeveloped
material condition of the island population at the time of independence.
This enabled it to provide the leadership which united the population
behind its developmental policies, which in turn delivered material
returns to the governed. The success of PAP's authoritarianism is thus itself
to be explained by its acceptability to or at least toleration by the population
through the presence of an ideological hegemony or consensus. (Ibid., p. 10)

3: Representing state desire and the sins of transgression 77
Throughout his writings, Chua maintains that there are very real limits
to the PAP's consensus-building and coercive activities, following directly
from his contention that the PAP or the "leadership" is not equivalent
to the Singapore State, but is merely a part of a much larger complex of
civil and political society, requiring incessant negotiation and adaptation.
Chuas position raises interesting questions concerning consensusbuilding
in a one-party state. A one-party system is far more capable of
"stimulating" (Huntington and Moore 1970) consensus in the populace
than a multi-party system, and that "stimulating" relies on intervention,
discipline, and the monopolization of coercion (Chua 1995, p. 17).
So, Chuas position, in the absence of a consideration of the oneparty
state as spectacle (Dcbord), appears to lead into a vicious circularity;
while the government obtains its legitimacy from consensus, it also
actively reinforces that consensus through the application of coercive
means, and the aggressive elimination of competing pro to-hegemonic
agencies, thereby "destroying all the other organisations or ... incorporating
them into a system of which the party is the sole regulator"
(Gramsci 1971, p. 265). It may be that without an analysis of the states
"spectacle" (that is, the states incessant commodification of itself as an
economic realm developing for itself— at once a faithful mirror held up to
the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers
(Debord 1994, p. 16), its military organization, and its propaganda representations
(the subject of this chapter), an accurate picture of the nature
of consensus in a one-party state cannot be rendered.
Another problem with a narration of the "strong state" is that things
have changed in the past decade. Again, Chua among others have pointed
to the desire and strategies employed by the PAP, particularly under the
second-generation leaders, to show "itself to be responsive to pressure
and demands from the electorate, in spite of being a single-party dominant
government with scant political opposition in parliament" (Chua
1995, p. x). This is a picture of the state as, in Gramscis words, "not
only the apparatus of government, but also the private apparatus of
'hegemony or civil society ... which does not intervene, which trails
behind, events" (Gramsci 1971, p. 261). Once again, this is a complex
situation which requires a discussion of the initiatives of civil society
and its relationship to traditional cultures, local culture, and globalism,

78 Ray Langenbach
which this chapter cannot address. Nonetheless, it is the claim of this ;chapter that while the confrontational politi
been somewhat ameliorated in recent years, an "essentialized" meritocratic
framework remains, now distributed throughout the various organs of
the state, most obviously in housing, the law, arts, and education.
So, while it is certainly problematic (and pervasive in Western and
Asian liberal humanist circles), to considet the Singapore state as simplistically
monolithic and autocratic, it is equally problematic (and a
convenient fantasy of the conservative international business and diplomatic
communities) to view the Singapore state as a textual realm, devoid
of real-politic, characterized simply by the circulation of a purely
pragmatic discourse of global trade and efficient governance, as this is
precisely the representation desired and carefully promulgated by the
state. Government in Singapore lies somewhere between these poles,
close to Gramscis interventionist 4
state or disciplinary rigime, a bureaucracy
conflated with the military, in which the military act as reserves of
... order and conservation (ibid., p. 215), and indistinguishable from the
bureaucracy. It should also be said that, although a parliamentary system,
Singapore governance is one still under the charismatic shadow of
a paradigmatic modernist "man of destiny" (ibid., p. 210).
The second difficulty in returning to the deployment of social engineering
in Singapore is that, in practice, instruments of social engineering
are generally devised and carried out by governments hoping to extend
their hegemony, with the able assistance of some intellectuals and
academics. Modernity abounds with examples of artists and scientists
willing to side with a political regime to the detriment or demise of their
colleagues, due to jealousy, fear, complacency, or to ensure that their
own theory may make it into the spotlight of historical application.
From the view of intellectuals, successful politicians may often get the
theoretical details wrong, but they have the means to make things happen.
Pierre Bourdieu has analysed the relationships of intellectuals to
state power:
All the evidence suggests chat, at a given level of overall autonomy, intellectuals
are, other things being equal, proportionately more responsive to the seduction
of the powers that be, the less well endowed they are with specific
capital,

3: Representing state desire and the sins of transgression 79
The struggle in the field of cultural production over the imposition of the
legitimate mode of cultural production is inseparable from the struggle within
the dominant class... to impose the dominant principle of domination (that
is to say — ultimately — the definition of human accomplishment). In this
struggle, the artists and writers who are richest in specific capital and most
concerned for their autonomy are considerably weakened by the fact that
some of their competitors identify their interests with the dominant principles
of hierarchization and seek to impose them even within the field, with
the support of the temporal powers,
(Bourdieu 1993, p. 41)
Bourdieu's distinction between autonomous producers and bourgeois
artists does not hold up in Singapore, where most, if not all, artists
derive from bourgeois origins. The period immediately following the
AGA did, however, offer an insight into the competition for symbolic
capital that Bourdieu describes, as a bevy of artists, dramatists, and writers
joined the government in condemning not only the artists involved
in the controversy but also the art forms they were introducing, apparently
never imagining that they could be curtailing the possibilities of
their own future expression or formal development. Sharaad Kuttan discussed
the issue in an article for the journal Commentary in 1994;
Artists are also called on to act as partners in the administration of censorship.
Censorship is no longer the firing line on which the state and artist
meet. For the practitioner, "self-censorship" is the extension of this logic,
wherein censorship is an act of social and professional responsibility and rational
calculation, (Kuttan 1996, p. III)
This issue also requires a long discussion, but suffice to say here that
it is problematic to present a picture that places political production at
one end of the State, and cultural production at the other in simplistic
opposition. Rather, a complex notion of a synergistic State allows for
micro discourses writing of polyvalent tactics, strategies, and influences.
"Gifted" In Singapore
In Asian colonies, biometrics was introduced as phylogeny, craniometry,
morphology, and I.Q. testing, that is, as the application of Enlightenment
"ratio" to the colonized body and brain from the eighteenth
through the twentieth centuries. Darwinian natural selection and

80 Ray Langenbach
Linnaean binominal categorization justified European colonialism outside
Europe, naturalized the dominion of the European aristocracy, and
later, the "inevitable" dominance of the bourgeoisie, over the industrial
proletariat.
Understanding the developmental stages of intelligence and civilization
provided the rationalization for colonial statesmanship, and the
charitable protection of"... sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child."
(Kipling) "caught" at an earlier stage of human evolution. This metaphor
of underdevelopment was used, for example, to justify American
imperialism in the Philippines and elsewhere:
... modern science had shown that races develop in che course of centuries as
individuals do in years, and that an undeveloped race, which is incapable of
self-government, is no more a reflection on the Almighty than is an undeveloped
child who is incapable of self-government. The opinions of men who in
this enlightened day believe that the Filipinos are capable of self-government
because everybody is, are not worth considering. (Strong 1900, p. 310)
Since the eighteenth century, the same dismissive paternalistic analogy
has been used inside the United States to justify the slaughter of Native
Americans, the enslavement of Africans, and later to reiterate preconceptions
of intelligence and moral development in welfare debates.
While discussing the recent book, The Bell Curve, Richard Lynn,
one of the principal proponents of the use of I.Q. testing to discriminate
human subjects, imagined a grim Euro-American future;
... the black underclass is growing in numbers, partly as a result of high
fertility and partly through immigration. ... One of the major divisions will
be between those who are sufficiently intelligent to work and an underclass
lacking the requisite intelligence. The underclass will turn more and more to
crime because it has little to lose.... There is one thing the underclass is good
at, and that is producing children. These children tend to inherit their parents'
poor intelligence and adopt their sociopathic lifestyle, reproducing the
cycle of deprivation from generation to generation, The underclass has more
children than the rest of society. This is another reason why it will expand in
numbers and become increasingly troublesome. (Lynn 1995a)
Lynns apocalyptic fantasy reveals a great deal about his fears and desires
— those of a hegemonic class faced with the anxiety of its displacement
by an underclass that the capitalist system both relies on and would just
as soon do without.

3: Representing state desire and the sins of transgression 81
For the last two hundred years in America, monolithic whiteness
has produced a body of literature that left very little room for other
discourses, But the rising profile of black culture in the United State
over the past three decades has had a profound impact on national culture
as a whole, and has brought to the surface the long-suppressed
spectacle of African-American subjectivity as a complex field, defined
by relations and struggles over race, ethnicity, cultural histories, local
cultures, class, and sexuality. The film, Tongues Untied, created by poet,
film-maker, and performer, Marlon T. Riggs, in 1989. signified an important
artistic development in that it pointed to the centrality of the
contribution of black gay men to the overall struggles of African-American
culture and gay culture in the United States.
In her review of the film, the black critic Valerie Smith described
the film as an interweave of
... personal narrative with songs, interviews, dance, and performance pieces
in an exploration of gay black male subjectivity in contemporary US culture.
The film shows how homophobia among black and non-black heterosexuals,
racism among white gays, and the AIDS epidemic have combined to silence
the voices of black gay men. (Smith 1992, p. 62)
In the film, the HIV-positive Riggs presented himself, in his own words,
as "black, gay, gifted and proud". The uncanny word here is "gifted". It
runs counter to over three hundred years of stereotyping the "Negro" in
white Western discourse, making this manifesto in film so unequivocally
powerful in the United States, where it was banned from one hundred
local public broadcasting stations for its "glorification of the deviant"
(Berger 1992, pp. 36-39),
In Singapore, the Film Censorship Board, the only Singaporeans to
view the film, apparently also understood the films message to be subversive.
The tape was banned in accordance with two laws: the obscenity
law, covering material with a "tendency ... to deprave and corrupt"
for its depiction of male nudity and love-making (Chan 1996, p. 106);
secondly, in accordance with Sections 377 and 377A of the Singapore
Penal Code 5
(inherited from the days of British colonialism) for the
tapes "promoting [of a) homosexual lifestyle".
Through this act of censorship, the African-American body, this
time by virtue of its association with gay culture, found itself yet again

82 Ray Langenbach
in the position of the abject. Although African-American culture is largely
received as cultural trope or figure of speech in Singapore via music,
television, and scholastic comparisons in the press, gay culture in Singapore
is now far more than a Western trope, with increased visibility in
civil society over the last decade, despite punitive laws and regulations.
Gay sexuality is often portrayed as a sign of Western decadence and a
threat to national discipline. Geraldine Heng and Janadas Devan speculate
that the "dream of a timeless paternal essence ... splendid, transcendent,
immortal" in the psyche of the patriarchal government underpins
the PAP's vision of perennial patriarchal power, economic stability,
and national integrity. But their Utopian vision of a reified state is
haunted by the fear of feminine pollution:
Whether represented by actual women ... or "other" races and cultures whose
identifying characteristics are implicitly feminized —whether, that is, it is a
sexual, or a social body that haunts and threatens — the figure of threat,
auguring economic and social disintegration ... (Heng and Devan 1992,
p. 356)
This fear of feminine pollution informs "narratives of national crisis",
which are deployed by post-colonial governments in order "to reenact
periodically the state's traumatic if also liberating separation from colonial
authority" (ibid., p. 356) by the State's "founding fathers", the firstgeneration
leaders. The discourse of national origins, to an extraordinary
degree, is emptied of feminine agency, and the birth of the nation
is narrated as a male parthenogenic rite of separation and incorporation.
Heng and Devan's articulation of state strategy is astute;
... by repeatedly focusing anxiety on the fragility of the new nation, its ostensible
vulnerability to every kind of exigency, the state's originating agency
is periodically re-invoked and ratified, its access to wide-ranging instruments
of power in the service of national protection continually consolidated. (Ibid.,
p. 343)
As far back as 1969, then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew issued the apoca-
lyptic warning that chaos and social infection were leaking in from the
West:
In the interest of all, we cannot and will not allow this permissive, escapist,
drug-taking, self-indulgent, promiscuous society (in America and Western

3: Representing state desire and the sins of transgression 83
Europe) to infect our young. Those who try to introduce these habits do so at
their own peril, for we shall take immediate antiseptic measures to prevent
and scotch any such infection or affectation. The choice before us is constant
vigilance or a complacent slide to perdition. (Josey 1968, p. 527; emphases
added)
The germ metaphor was recently revived to express the perceived negative
influence of the Internet on Singapore society. HIV-like information
assaults on the nations immune system have replaced the threat of
drugs, long hair, and wild clothes, the Trojan horses of the 1960s and 1970s:
Every society creates immune systems to defend its own key organs and we
must have the immune system in Singapore [sic]. Otherwise, by slow increments,
we allow these organs to be infected-and degraded. And that is not
good for us, it is not good for the health of the whole society. (Straits Times,
27 July 1994, p. 3; emphases added)
This narrative of assault and infection is a "first seeing", in which a
collective spectacle of fear obscures the actuality of State desire; collective
paranoia is first generated through the mass media and then transmuted
into rationalist policy. Once "pollution" becomes the frame
through which human differences are interpreted, the potential of democratic
governance is replaced by an interminable shuttling between fears
of unstable pluralism, "material transmogrification — growth, alteration,
difference, the transformations wrought by an undisclosed, nevercertain
future" (Heng and Devan 1992, p. 350).
"Adding to the assets"
Historically bound together, 6
ethnic, feminine, cultural, and information
pollution form a synergistic threat to the power — that meta-self
who musters a totalized state response to dynamic and relativistic social
phenomena. Beginning in the late 1960s and still continuing today, the
Singapore state sought to promulgate a series of population policies which
would normalize heterosexual productivity among the educated and the
talented citizenry.
1967
Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew suggested that 5 per cent of the population
are "more than ordinarily endowed physically and mentally", and

84 Ray Langenbach
that it is on them that "we must expend our limited and slender resources"
(Selvan 1990, p. 48). By 1969 this percentage of the population
"with leadership potential" had narrowed in government pronouncements
to 2 per cent, a figure which happens to coincide with the "genius"
threshold adopted by the International Mensa Society as a prerequisite
for membership,
1969 December
During the Parliamentary Debate on the Abortion and Voluntary Sterilization
Bills, the Prime Minister quoted extracts from an article by Professor
Richard Lynn, published in the New Scientist of 20 March 1969,
in support of the legislation: "... the I.Q. of higher professionals and
executive parents had been shown to be considerably higher than that of
unskilled workers (150 to 86)". Lee warned that there might be a need
for "comprehensive incentives for graduate mothers to reproduce more
and disincentives for less-educated women to reproduce less in future"
(Straits Times, 30 December 1969).
On 29 December, the Straits Times ran an editorial in support of the
Bills, ironically referring back to the views of Professor B.H. Sheares,
"Singapore's leading gynaecologist during the final colonial decade".
Professor Sheares not only believed that sterilization had a definite place
in any programme to control the rapidly increasing population in developing
countries, but "it was the only successful method" (Straits Times,
29 December 1969). This calling up of the views of a colonial doctor
underscores the uncanny colonial repetition that these policies represented,
and the PAP's adoption of what Heng and Devan term, "internal
Orientalism", 7
The state received early support for its programmes from some wellknown
eugenicists, scientists like William B. Shockly, noble-prize winner
in physics, and co-inventor of the transistor 8
(Heng and Devan 1992,
p. 358). In his 1969 speech to Parliament in support of the pending
Abortion and Voluntary Sterilization Bills, Lee called on the research of
Richard Lynn, Associate Editor of the anthropology journal Mankind
Quarterly. Lynn suggested in 1991 that the poor and ill are "weak specimens
whose proliferation needs to be discouraged in the interest of the
improvement of the genetic quality of the group, and ultimately of group

3: Representing state desire and the sins of transgression 85
survival" (Lane 1995, p. 129), Lynn is a strong proponent of the theory
that "Mongoloids" and "Caucasoids" are on average, brighter than other
races:
Who can doubt that the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the only two
races that have made any significant contribution to civilization. ... Whatever
criteria are adopted, che Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the two
most intelligent races and the historical record shows that this has been the
case for approximately the last 5,000 years. (Lynn pp. 280-84, cited
in Sautman 1995, p. 206)
Lynn not only divides the world by race, but by geography and
gender as well, using the North-South line between most First World
and Third World cultures for his I.Q. Rubicon, Lynn hypothesizes that
Mongoloid and Caucasian intelligence resulted from having to adapt to
and survive in the severity of northern climes. The longer Ice Age in
northeast Asia required higher intelligence among Northeast Asians than
was demanded of Europeans or any other race. These archaic adaptations
to the environment, he <strong>claims</strong>, have been genetically passed to the
present generation.
Lynn also maintains that the smaller cranial size of women has resulted
in their diminished intellectual capacity (Sautman 1995, p. 217,
note 50). The socio-biological rational for male superiority, supplied by
Paul Broca's disciple, Topinard, in 1882, is strikingly close to Lynns
explanations for Mongoloid superiority and the Singapore state's rhetoric
privileging male responsibilities:
The man who fights for two or more in the struggle for existence, who has all
the responsibility and the cares of tomorrow, who is constantly active in combating
che environment and human rivals, needs more brain than the woman
whom he must protect and nourish, than the sedentary woman, lacking any
interior occupations, whose role is to raise children, love, and be passive.
(Topinard 1981, p. 22)
1983, National Day
Lee Kuan Yew announced incentives for high-income, graduate women
to marry and procreate, and, later, a disincentives programme for lowincome,
"less-educated" women to procreate less, including payment of
a cash grant of S$ 10,000 into their Central Provident Fund account for
voluntary sterilization.

86 Ray Langenbach
Graduate women, according to Lee, were being too selective of their
mates, reproducing an average of 1.9 children versus less-educated women
at 3.9. Less education, for Lee, apparently meant less intelligence, and
he read Eysenck's "80% nature, 20% nurture" statement thus: "Studies
have shown that 80 percent of how well you do depends on nature and
only 20 percent on nurture" (emphasis added). It was here, in this "turn"
that a performance-and-reward system, initiated by the ruling party but
now largely accepted and shared broadly by the populace (constitutive of
the Gramscian hegemonic State), was performatively reframed as an ideology
designed to maintain the specific hegemony of that ruling party. Once
meritocracy was naturalized as a genetic inheritance, the entire structure of
the daily performance of the State economy became instrumental to the
desire of the current state apparatus to remain in power. Through the language
of genetics and biometrics, continued PAP hegemony was presented
as a logical outcome of the system, a Darwinian inevitability.
13 September 1983
Dr Chow Kuan Hon, from the National University of Singapore Botany
Department, is credited with the assertion that ancient Greece, "a once
culturally rich and technologically advanced country ... collapsed because
of a fall in the intelligence of its race. Rich Greek women ... regarded
giving birth as shameful and bringing up children as a burden".
He suggested a "Selective Population Control" policy to "encourage birth
control among highly intelligent women", but discourage it among lessintelligent
ones, thereby "maintain[ing] and upgrad[ing] the level of
intelligence of Singaporeans" (Straits Times, 13 September 1993).
Dr Chow apparently got his ideas, almost verbatim, from Hereditary
Genius (1869) by the English Francis Galton (1822-1911), a cousin
of Charles Darwin and the founder of eugenics:
we know, and may guess something more, of the reason why this marvelously
gifted race declined. Social morality grew exceedingly lax; marriage became
unfashionable, and was avoided: ... mothers of the incoming population
were of a heterogeneous class, In a small sea-bordering country, where emigration
and immigration are constantly going on, and where the manners are
as dissolute as were those of Greece in the period of which I speak, the purity

3: Representing state desire and the sins of transgression 87
of a race would necessarily fail. It can be, therefore, no surprise to us, though
it has been a severe misfortune to humanity, that che high Athenian breed
decayed and disappeared. (Cooley 1995, p. 433)
Dr Chow, trying to rationalize a highly controversial policy promulgated
by his employers, ironically harkened back to a text from the
heyday of British colonialism: a text motivated by a neo-classical imagining
of fifth century BC Greece. The notion of a "marvelously gifted
race ... in a small sea-bordering country, where emigration and immigration
are constantly going on" must have resonated in 1860s Britain
as it later did in 1980s Singapore, offering an imaginary narrative of
cultural continuity of great civilization directly from Greece to Britain
and now to Singapore. Here was the historical narrative needed for a
policy which oversaw the application of (Euclidean) "ratio" to the human
subject in accordance with biological and statistical evidence.
23 January 1984
The then Minister of Education, DrTay Eng Soon announced the Graduate
Mothers' Priority Scheme to encourage university-educated women
to have more children by offering them first choice of primary and secondary
schools, while less-educated mothers were offered S$ 10,000 to
accept sterilization after two children.
The government recognizes that if well educated mothers, who can provide
well for their children, produce three or more children, they are adding to the
assets of the country. Their children will hopefully grow up to be good and
useful ciitizens. (Straits Times, 23 January 1984)
The Singapore states population control measures climaxed in the early
1980s, and a poor election result in 1984 may have led to the termination
of what were perceived as unpopular and intrusive policies (Hill
and Lian 1995, p. 152), In 1985 the "Graduate Mothers Priority
Scheme" ended and the Singapore Family Planning and Population Board
was closed.
However, in 1993 che theme returned when the new Prime Minister,
Goh ChokTong, announced the "Small Families Improvement Scheme",
offering twenty-year housing grants and housing for low-educated mothers
who agreed not to have more than two children, as long as the family

88 Ray Langenbach
remained together (ibid., pp. 153-54). Further housing disincentives
against single mothers were added in 1994 (Straits Times, 21 August
1994).
23 November 1993
Twelve men were arrested for alleged sexual offences during the course
of a week-long sting operation at the Tanjong Rhu beach. Six of the
men pleaded guilty and received jail terms along with three strokes of
the cane.
December 1993
Tongues Untied banned.
January 1994
Artist, Josef Ng, and Iris Tan arrested for "Brother Cane". 10
Conclusion: race, gender,
sexuality, art, and sociobiology
So, what do minority races, ambitious women, gay men and women,
and "irresponsible" artists have in common in the eyes of the state? In
an expanding economy in 1993, with a rapidly burgeoning middle class,
these transgressive elements must have represented the dangers of what
Zizek calls "excessive enjoyment".
What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the
national Thing. We always impute to che "other" an excessive enjoyment: ...
the peculiar way he organizes his enjoymenc, precisely the surplus, che "excess"
that pertains to his way. (Zizek 1993, pp. 203 ff.)
Zizek reapplies Marx's theory concerning the contradictions inherent in
the capitalist mode of production to the cultural field of production,
that is, the problem of surplus production outstripping the capacity of
consumption, and the need for periodic "violent eruptions which for a
time restote the disturbed equilibrium" (Marx 1962, p. 244). The Other's
excessive enjoyment threatens the state because it prefigures the possibility
of the disruption of the ratio-nal (based on the proper ratio or
proportion) standards and representations of society as a site of productive
labour and cultural continuity.

3: Representing state desire and the sins of transgression 89
In its media representation of a unified nation in perpetual crisis,
the Singapore state has identified consumption and enjoyment (including
the desire to not work too hard) as excesses of cultural capital that
must be periodically withdrawn from the systems of exchange until equilibrium
is restored. But the process has to be constantly repeated as a
"rift must continually ensue between the limited dimensions of consumption
... and a production which forever tends to exceed this immanent
barrier" (Marx 1962, p. 251).
Wee Wan Ling places the incipiency of the period of the promotion
of homogeneous "Asian values" in the late 1970s (Wee 1999). Continuing
through the period until the economic crisis of 1997, Asian values
and Confucian values were the banners under which the populace was
anxiously inscribed with the virtues of work and bourgeois values of
thrift and moderation. 11
With the willing participation of many artists
and intellectuals, the government sought "to impose the dominant principle
of domination (that is to say — ultimately — the definition of
human accomplishment)" (Bourdieu 1993, p. 41), as a sign of equilibrium,
cultural order — the excesses of pleasure endlessly deferred to a
"fully developed" future.
In this process, the Singapore state accepted a broad infrastructure
of Western science and ideology for the realization of industrial modernity,
while seeking to distance itself from the transgressive heterogeneous
elements that come along with gobalization, including liberal Western
discourses of human rights, women's rights, and artistic, intellectual,
and political criticism. It is ironic that the Singapore state wrote
colonial and orientalist perceptions of Europe's Other into the discourse
of Singapore national identity. These stigmatized and rigidly controlled
signs of heterogeneity represent excessive enjoyment in the late capitalist
State, what Zizek refers to as the "eruption" of the "real" (Zizek 1993,
p. 204), that is, the "nondiscursive kernel of enjoyment" (Zizek 1995,
p. 37).
The Singapore state chose to represent itself as a "true believer" of a
contested Western tradition of scientific knowledge; originally formulated
in the conditions of European and American "manifest destiny"
and expansionism. This tragic flaw In a State system predicated upon an
industrial-age capitalist mode of production, in which cultural and fi-

90 Ray Langenbach
nancial capital is carefully managed and engineered, has produced a late
capitalist spectacle of self-commodification, so aptly described by the
French Situationist theoretician, Guy Debord:
The ruling class, made up of specialists in the ownership of things who for
that very reason are themselves owned by things, is obliged to tie its fate to
the maintenance of a reified history and to the permanent preservation of a
new historical immobility. (1994, p. 106)
While eugenicist rhetorics has helped the ruling elite maintain the
power of "first seeing", the internal contradictions of that colonial position
appear to have left the State bifurcated: an "hombre invisible" obsessed
with his own deferred image.
NOTES
1. I am borrowing the term from Jeffrey M. Blum, who in turn found it in the writings
of Bowles and Gintis. I accept a definition of meritocracy along the lines of
Richard C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kanmin's tripartite, developmental
concept of biological determinism in their article, "Bourgeois Ideology and che
Origins of Biological Determinism" (1984, p. 108).
"First, it is asserted that the inequalities in sociecy are a direct and ineluctable consequence
of che differences in intrinsic merit and ability among individuals. Second,
it is asserted that these differences are coded, in large part, in an individual's
genes, so that merit and ability will be passed from generation to generation within
families. Finally, ic is claimed, that the presence of such biological differences between
individuals of necessity leads to the creation of hierarchical societies because
it is part of biologically determined human nature to form hierarchies of status,
wealth, and power."
In Singapore the PAP government adopted meritocracy to reform an inherited
bureaucracy established under the British colonial system.
2. All newspapers, except Tamil Murasu (a family-run daily with a small circulation)
come under Singapore Press Holdings, a public-listed company with two types of
shares: ordinary shares and management shares (Tan and Soh 1994, p. 27). Management
shares can be held only by approval of the Minister for Information and
che Arts (MITA). Those who hold management shares can sit on the board of
directors. The chairman of the board and the editor must be approved by MITA, as
specified in the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act (Baratham 1994, p. 93).
3. Looking at Culture (1996), a limited-edition book edited and published by Sanjay
Krishnan, Sharaad Kuttan, Lee Weng Choy, Leon Perera, and Jimmy Yap. The
book devoted a section to che controversy,

3: Representing state desire and the sins of transgress ion 91
4. Gramsci's description of the interventionist state as one "which will take the offensive
more openly against oppositionists and organize permanently che "impossibility"
of internal disintegration — with controls of every kind, political, administrative,
etc., reinforcement of the hegemonic "positions" of the dominant group, etc."
(p. 239). Later, however, description of the interventionist state as having an "economic
origin ... connecced ... with tendencies supporcing protection and economic
nationalism" (p. 263) does not fit Singapore's globalise economic stance.
This discrepancy points to (a) the uneasy comparison between the nationalist socialist
states of the late 1920s to early 1930s that Gramsci was describing, to Singapore
of the 1960s to the 1990s, and (b) the widely variant regulations imposed by
the Singapore government towards, on the one hand, the cultural field of production,
and, on the other, the economic field.
5. "UNNATURAL OFFENCES
377. Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with
any man, woman, or animals, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or
with imprisonment for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be
liable co fine. (Penetration is sufficient to constitute che carnal intercourse necessary
to the offence described in this section.)
377A. Any male person who, in public or private, commies, or abets the commission
of, or procures or attempts co procure the commission by any male person of,
any act of gross indecency widi another male person, shall be punished with imprisonment
for a term which may extend to two years."
6. In 1863 Louis Agassiz expounded the doctrine of "multiple Adams" (thac different
races represent different species):
"Conceive for a moment the difference ic would make in future ages,... if instead
of che manly populations descended from cognate nations che United States should
hereafter be inhabited by the effeminate progeny of mixed races, half Indian, half
negro, sprinkled with white blood. ... I shudder from the consequences." (Gould
1981, p. 49).
7. "The institution of what can be called, for suggestive convenience, an "internalized
Orientalism" makes available to postcolonial authority the knowledge-power that
colonial authority wielded over the local population" (Heng and Devan 1982,
p. 355).
8. In 1970, Shockly recommended in a letter co che U.S. National Academy of Scientists
thac a fund be established co pay "intellectually inferior" people for voluntary
sterilization (Sedgwick 1995, p. 146). Dr Chow's call for scerilization falls into a
long tradition of American, South African, and Rhodesian programmes, reaching
up to the present-day activities of the American Eugenics Society, and the Pioneer
Fund. On the connection becween eugenics, fascism, and white supremacism, see
also Kaxrier 1972, p. 345; Kevles 1985, p. 152: Sedgwick 1995, p. 151.

92 Ray Langenbach
9. However, Asians have not always scored so well in I.Q. polls. Scoring at an I.Q.
level of 65-70 in the 1920s, the Chinese were placed in the feeble-minded category
with the Jews (Kutzik 1995, p. 246). The discrepancies raise many questions
concerning the effects of economic well-being, class, and education on such tests.
10. The government's response to Josef Ng's performance should be viewed in the
context of the cases of American, Michael Fay, and Shiu Chi Ho from Hong Kong,
two youths arrested in October 1993 for vandalizing cars and other infractions.
Fay and Shiu were charged with vandalism under the 1966 Vandalism Act, which
carried a mandatory punishment of caning and incarceration.
11. Chua points ouc the scepticism of S. Rajaratnam and Goh Keng Swee concerning
this ideology of the moment. Goh apparently felt that "thrift and industry", which,
as former Finance Minister, he saw as the crux values of Singapore's success, were
"great Victorian virtues" rather than Asian values [Straits Times, 25 August 1984,
cited in Chua 1995, p. 66).

3: Representing state desire and the sins of transgression 93

94 Ray Langenbach

McNationalism in Singapore
LEE WENG CHOY
Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable
reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a
support for our "reality" itself... (Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology)
The camera loves Manhattan, Each gaze is an immediate infatuation
— with che skyscrapers and their great shadows, with che way Central
Park in June carves a giant green rectangle out of grey concrete, with
the bricks of old brownstones, the bright big city lights. From chic
uptown Madison Avenue to the dirty surrealism of the Lower East Side,
from a Wall Street frenzy to a 42nd Street hustle, the camera has raced
to catch every detail: to climb up to the Chrysler Building gargoyles, to
recognize a famous face in the crowd, or to pity a homeless person sleeping
in a sidewalk bed of newspapers and cardboard.
The first rime I saw New York — not counting the time when I
lived there as a toddler — I was overwhelmed like most everyone else is
when he is in the presence of something so big. But my sense of awe had
as much to do with having grown up in Manila on a diet of images from
America. America was the "Other" for me, the central object of my
imagination, fascination, and desire. That autumn day in 1981, as I
wandered around Manhattan, things would seem familiar, although I

96 Lee Weng Cboy
had never actually seen them or could not possibly have remembered
them from when my mother pushed me around in a stroller. The explanation
for this deja vu is that I must have seen the thing in question or
something similar on television, in a movie or a picture. Even now when
I visit the city, I have no grasp of the thing itself; everything is always
mediated by a mythology of images. That, however, has not made me
any less enchanted with the place. On the contrary, the image, the fetish
instead, has become the object of desire. There is always a doubt that I
am really there, always the comparison with the screen, and soon enough
I will have left, and my memory of the city will have become grafted
with the many images stored in mind from cinema, television, and photography.
By virtue of being one of the most photographed, filmed, and televised
cities, New York <strong>claims</strong> a spectacular place in the world's imagination.
For many — resident, visitor, or one who's never been there — the
city is a metonym for a whole country, the United States of America
piled onto a rock thirteen-and-a-half miles long and two-and-a-half miles
wide. Yet the representing of New York is hardly unique. All of the United
States, from its major metropolises to its highways, farmlands, and small
towns, has been endlessly signified. America is an imaginary invented as
much by itself as by others. No other place and no other identity are
more articulated: either with such enormous volume and repetition in
the mass media, or with such subtlety and complexity in diverse discourses
from academic theory to African-American hip-hop music.
I begin this chapter about cultural nationalism in Singapore with a
paragraph reminiscent of Woody Allen's prologue-paean in his film
Manhattan so as to put to the forefront the United States as a fantasy
space. That there is a preponderance of American cultural forms in Singapore
is obvious. The shopping centres teem with imported goods,
notably American brands — Levis, Ralph Lauren, Nike, Coke, Mattel,
Hewlett Packard, and Time Magazine, to name a few. Franchises like
McDonald's and Pizza Hut practically punctuate the commercial areas
of the country, while the movie multiplexes showcase such films as Forrest
Gump, Batman and Robin, The English Patient, and other Hollywood
fare. Not only do American shows occupy a large share of Singaporean
English-language television, even the home-made productions are pat-

4: McNationalism in Singapore
terned after them (for example. Masters of the Sea, a Dallas-style drama
serial, Gotcha, a Candid Camera clone, and Under One Roof a family
sitcom a la The Cosby Show and Family Ties). This state of affairs is not
unusual, as any site thoroughly permeated by transnational capital is
also pervaded by commercial-popular culture, whose sources, references,
or forms are very often American.
The question is: how does the U.S. figure as an "Other" that is
contemplated and contested in expressions of Singaporean cultural nationalism?
My query presumes that, firstly, identity is constructed and,
secondly, that its construction is predicated on the simultaneous constructing
of others qua "Others". In terms of official rhetoric, the frequent
"othering" of the United States is symptomatic of what sociologist
Chua Beng Huat describes as the "anti-liberal democracy" of the
ruling Peoples Action Party (PAP), "where collective well-being is safeguarded
by good government by honourable leaders" (Chua 1995,
p. 185). This guardianship of good government is anxious about the
spread of American media, culture, and values in Singapore. Prime Minister
Goh ChokTong, in his 1994 National Day Rally speech, for example,
contended that the United States is declining precisely because of
too much liberal democracy, where traditional values have lost their authority
and influence over society. Goh argued that if Singapore is to
continue to prosper, it must avoid liberal Americas pitfalls.
This ideological othering of America by Singapore's leaders may seem
contradictory, since the United States is hardly a political, military, or
economic threat but rather an important ally in all three regards, The
fact is American investments and export markets were instrumental in
Singapore's rapid economic growth since independence in 1965, and
"the [Singapore] state has vigorously promoted ideological support for
the activities of international capital" (Rodan 1989, p. 209). Moreover,
as part of its strategy to ensure the nations competitive advantage, the
state is investing considerable effort into making Singapore the information
hub and arts centre for the region, How then does the PAP's
antagonism with American liberalism square with the imperatives of
attracting and furthering the flow of information and transnational capital
in an increasingly competitive, rationalized, and globalized world
economy?
97

98 Lee Weng Choy
Following the terms "McDonaldization" and "McWorld" — used
by George Ritzer (1993) and Benjamin Barber (1995) to signify rationalization
and globalization — I use the term "McNationalism" to designate
the complex of tensions between articulations of nationalism and
the forces of rationalization and globalization, and will look in particular
at the expression of cultural nationalism, rationalization, and globalization
in advertisements in Singapore. In Reading Ads Socially, Robert
Goldman writes:
Advertisements saturate our social lives. ... Yet, because ads are so pervasive
and our reading of them so routine, we tend to take for granted the deep
social assumptions embedded in advertisements. We do not ordinarily recognise
advertising as a sphere of ideology. (1992, p. 1)
Whereas Goldman's social and critical reading of advertisements intends
to "map the cultural reproduction of commodity hegemony" (ibid,, p. 2),
my reading of advertisements in Singapore turns instead to the relation
between fantasy and ideology. Deploying psychoanalytic film theory, I
will discuss certain advertisements as "McNationalist" fantasies, analysing
them in the context of the state's ideological othering of the United
States.
Ideological advertisements: SIGN-APORE
Often when typing the word "Singapore", "Signapore" is the typo I
produce instead. Though perhaps "Signapore" is exactly what I should
intend to type all along, for Singapore is indeed a city of signs — as is
New York, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, or any other modern city, great or
small. It is my premise that Singapore is part of Guy Debord's (1967)
late capitalist society of the spectacle, where images have eclipsed the
commodity as the primary object of our consumption and contemplation.
From this perspective, the ideological analysis of Singapore's visual
cultural forms' is of particular importance for a critical understanding
of that society.
Since the 1970s, psychoanalysis has played a major role in the discourse
of how cinema operates as an ideological medium (Mayne 1993,
p. 20) .This coupling of psychoanalysis and ideological critique in film
theory builds on Louis Althusser's emphasis that ideology most impor-

4: McNationalism in Singapore 99
tantly operates not only in institutional structures) but also in the representational
realm which addresses or "interpellates" subjects. There is,
as Althusser puts it, "no ideology except by the subject and for subjects"
(Althusser 1971, p. 170, quoted in Mayne 1993, p. 14). In other words,
individuals respond to ideology by recognizing themselves as subjects of
it. And the realm of the subject or subjectivity is, of course, the domain
of psychoanalysis.
Cinema and psychoanalysis share many central preoccupations, not
least of which are story-telling, and the operation of desire and fantasy.
Story-telling or narrative is understood in psychoanalysis as "one of the
most fundamental ways in which one constructs an identity, in both
cultural and individual terms" (Mayne 1993, p. 24); whereas desire is
understood as "how individuals conceive of themselves in subjective
terms, how relations between self and other are defined, and how pleasure
is sought and satisfied" (ibid., p. 22). To these definitions, we should
add that, following Lacan, the Other is essential to the formation of
desire; desire is always the desire for and of the Other. Not only do we
desire the Other as the object of our desire, we desire what (we imagine)
the Other as a subject desires (for us). In the words of Slavoj Zizek:
Desire is not something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed
— and it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the coordinates of the
subject's desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the subject assumes
in it, It is only through fantasy chat the subject is constituted as desiring:
through fantasy we learn to desire. (1991, p. 6)
What 1 will attempt in my reading of certain advertisements as
McNationalist fantasies is to situate the Other of the desires staged by
these fantasies. My purview is the reading of these advertisements as
texts, and their particular enunciation of ideological desire. In psychoanalytic
film theory the concept of enunciation refers to the process by
which the viewer forgets that he or she is watching an external or disembodied
fiction outside the discernment of desire. Rather, "the film seems
to be narrated by the viewer himself, who becomes, in imagination, its
discursive source" (Stam et al. 1992, p. 129). Furthermore, I presume

100 Lee Weng Choy
film theories tend towards a monolithic view of the unconscious, and
consequently, like other modernist-type master codes, are limited in their
relevance across cultures (Mayne 1993, p. 79). On the other hand, the
current emphasis in film theory on fantasy (with its focus on subjectposition
mobility and the staging of desire) provides for a more sophisticated
reading of the relationship between the psychic and political dimensions
of spectatorship — a relationship that is clearly in place in the
Singapore context.
McDonald's, McNation, McSingapore ...
Apparently Singaporeans watch more movies per capita than anybody
else in the world. If you went to the cinema here sometime during 1994,
chances are you would have caught the Giordano "World without Strangers"
series of advertisements and the "Get that man a Tiger" Tiger Beer
advertisement.
The Giordano advertisements came in pairs: in one advertisement,
a teenage Chinese male travels to some "Third World" place and befriends
the "natives"; in the other, a female counterpart does the same in
a different place. The various scenarios were: a village in rural China
(boy); a Russia littered with fallen communist monuments (girl); somewhere
in the grasslands of Africa (boy); an isolated train stop in Latin
America (girl); and the last in the series — which was usually shown
twice in a row as it had no counterpart — a boy playing football with a
tin can on the streets of a small town clearly located in Latin America.
What these advertisements do, apart from selling Giordano jeans and
casual clothing, of course, is represent Hong Kong — the cosmopolitan
centre of Chinese capitalism even before the July 1997 takeover —
through the visage of a benign, youthful, handsome, and trusting face,
In the Singaporean context, this Hong Kong-Chinese capitalist representation
would likely be identified as a close cousin of Singapore's own
ascending capitalist modernity. While the advertisements herald the rise
of a new capitalist bourgeoisie elite — new in the sense that it implicates
a different location in global capitalism, a different cultural con-

4: McNationalism in Singapore 101
ing its promotion of Asian capitalism would miss the point. The name
may be a concession to the dominance of Western language in marketing
discourse, but the Giordano company makes clear its Asian global
cultural identity. At any rate, its use of a catchy moniker is not the only
application of marketing principles first practised in the West that have
since become the grammar of globalization. What McDonald's is to
food, Giordano is to clothing: its products are inexpensive, limited in
range, not of high quality but competently mediocre, and the brand has
a recognizable and respectable image. The marketing of Giordano is an
example of the fusion of rationalization and globalization with pan-
East Asian cultural nationalism in the fantasy space of advertising.
Nevertheless, even if a marketing strategy did send mixed signals
about Asian subjects in global or non-Asian locations, that would not
mean the advertisement campaign would be less effective. As fantasies,
advertisements do not require the impeccable coherence of, say, philosophical
treatises. The pleasures a subject obtains from fantasy lie in the
pleasures of mobility, of moving from one subject position to another,
and often across contradictory terrains. As Mayne writes, fantasy's "very
nature is to exist for the subject across many possible positions" (1993,
p. 88). Such a movement across perhaps conflicting subject positions is
even clearer in a 1994 Tiger Beer advertisement. Raffles Light Beer and
Anchor Beer have also used White actors in Western settings to try to
impress upon the Singapore viewer that these local, Asian products have
international reputations and cosmopolitan aura. Do the people at beer
companies really believe that Asian viewers find the self-satisfied smile
of the White male the true sign of sophistication and the quintessential
indication of the quality of their beer?
A cast of six are on a yacht out at sea. Two bikini-clad Western
women fawn over four men, one of whom looks boyish and Asian, and
who remains in the background throughout. The advertisement begins
with one man having just caught a fish. Our hero arrogantly tosses it
back to sea as bait. In the next shot we see that he has hooked a marlin.
We see him grimacing, grappling with his fishing rod, then a close-up of
him looking triumphant, with the women's ample cleavages flashed on
either side of his face. Just when the two other White guys are about to
haul the vanquished fish on board, one says — "Get that man a beer"

102 Lee Weng Choy
— while the other, the guy who caught the first fish, shoots back —
"No, get that man a Tiger!" Back at the pier, with the large marlin hanging
in the background, everyone toasts and drinks, and the Tiger theme
song hits its final crescendo.
As a fantasy, the Tiger Beer advertisement stages the cosmopolitan
ideal of White, handsome, and sporting men, surrounded by White,
attractive women: the very crystallization of fun which any subject —
Asian or otherwise — would desire. "Desire", as defined by psychoanalytic
film theory, is about "how individuals conceive of themselves in
subjective terms, how relations between self and other are defined, and
how pleasure is sought and satisfied" (Mayne 1993, p, 22). Moreover, as
mentioned above, for Lacan, desire is always the desire of the Other.
Lacans terms "ideal-ego" and "ego-ideal" designate the two sides of desires
Other (the first term refers to the site of imaginary identification,
while the second pertains to symbolic identification).The "ideal-ego" is
what we would like to be, that is, the image of ourselves that we would
like to see ourselves as. What the Tiger advertisement does is place the
viewer, 2
especially but not necessarily the male viewer alone, in a position
to identify with the White male as an ideal-ego.
The central question here is whether the advertisement actually "calls"
or "interpellates" the desiring subject into being by enabling him to
identify with the White male as an ego-ideal. The ego-ideal is the "very
place from where we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves
so that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love" (Zizek
1989, p. 105). To name the ego-ideal is to answer the question "whose
gaze is it with which we desire?" But the answer in the case of the Tiger
advertisement is not simply, "the Westerners gaze". I would suggest that
accompanying this identification with and desire for the white Other is
an equally strong desire to be Asian. Tiger Beer is after all unmistakably
made in Singapore, as most viewers would know. In this and other advertisements,
Tiger Beer trades on the theme that "our beer" is as good
as "theirs" in the West. Such a comparative contestation implies — and
constructs — a differentiation between "us" Asians and "them" Westerners.
Under the sign of "Our Beer from Singapore", the advertisement
is not simply about an Asian subjects desire to pass as white or Western.
Rather, the tension between the two sets of ambivalent desires is located

4: McNationalism in Singapore 103
in a site intersected by the anxiety of surpassing even while it longs for
the West and what it represents.
To better analyse the Singaporean relation with the Western gaze in
advertising, it is useful to contrast the Tiger Beer advertisement with
one of McDonalds. While the local, Asian product attempts to acquire
an international aura by taking on signifiers that are clearly "Western", a
foreign product achieves credibility by passing as local. A 1994
McDonald s television advertisement defined the state of the art by creating
the perfect Singapore, replete with a sense of local authenticity —
thus almost completely naturalizing as Singaporean one of the worlds
most commercialized purveyors of homogenized, American mass culture.
The advertisement begins with the tide, "The Sounds of Singapore",
and from the first scene we see it is designed to rouse nationalistic sentiments.
School children are outdoors and the school flag is being raised.
They sing their allegiance — "When the sun shines upon our land".
The advertisement is clearly MTV-influenced with its quick jumpy edits:
from the raised school flag we cut to laundry hanging on bamboo
poles from windows. The many scenes include the MRT subway system,
teenagers flirting with each other at a McDonalds, Chinese lion
dancers, and a young man singing a Chinese song 3
as he drives through
a "drive-thru" in what looks like a red, open-top Triumph or MG. The
next scene deserves attention: it is at a kindergarten and the children are
learning the alphabet. The teacher raises a "B" and some kid says "B for
boy", then "G for girl", and when it comes to "M", which should stand
for "mother", a precocious boy says "M is for McDonald's" — a not-sosubtle
but significant substitution indeed. Throughout, music makes
seamless the multitude of images, switching deftly back and forth from
Chinese to Western, from old to new styles — thus the ideal integration
of Eastern and Western, traditional and post-modern cultures. A notable
omission perhaps is that the Singapore depicted is peopled only with
Chinese, while in reality it is multiethnic.
As the advertisement reaches its climax, shots of McDonalds food
are intercut with a saxophone, then with teenage boys in a room playing
electric guitars. There is a souvenir banner with a red star on the rooms
ceiling, It is a minor detail, but one that situates the advertisement clearly

104 Lee Weng Choy
in the Post-Cold War era, which for McDonald's means one big happy
New McWorld Order. The advertisement is teeming with visual virtuosity.
After the boys' room, we cut to fireworks, then to tossed lettuce
strips, the latter for a moment resembling pattern etched in the sky by
the fireworks (recall the earlier correspondence/juxtaposition of flag and
laundry). We wind down with a shot of a clock tower showing seven
o'clock, so presumably the advertisement began at exactly seven in the
morning and compressed 12 hours into a single minute. The final scene
shows an old man inside his room playing the McDonald's theme on an
Erhu, a Chinese two-stringed musical instrument, with the setting sun
piercing through the Chinese lattice windows. The old man's presence
contrasts with that of the boys, with their modern, Western guitars and
cosmopolitan room decor. Sophisticated and self-reflexive, the advertisement
ends with the epilogue "A visit to McDonald's always sounds good".
Surely the Big Mac, the Chicken McNuggets, and the French fries
are not really what it is all about. They are not so much food as the stuff
of Guy Debord's society of the spectacle, of Jean Baudrillard's "simulacra"
(1983). They are signifiers — perhaps if you could taste an empty signifier
it might taste like a McDonalds hamburger. What McDonalds advertisements
have consistently staged — whether in the United States, Singapore
or anywhere else — is the desire for the idyllic, fetishized, fantasy
McWorld under the golden arches, a representation the advertisement
so succinctly captures. In the "Sounds of Singapore", this fantasy
world has been extended to a Singapore McNation of rationalized comforts.
Does watching the McDonald's advertisement make Singaporeans
proud of Singapore? If so, that would mean the immediate identification
is with McDonalds — which signifies an ideal scenario of Singapore's
perfect life — and through McDonalds as a signifier for Singapore,
we then identify with the nation. The advertisement works by
offering a gaze through which Singaporeans can stage their longing and
wishes. McDonald's assumes the power to call forth Singapore, to interpellate
its viewers as nationalistic citizens. On the other hand, perhaps
the advertisement presumes a sense of nationalist pride in the first place.
The advertisement does both: wanting McDonalds makes you proud
of Singapore, and being proud of Singapore makes you want McDonald's.

4: McNationalism in Singapore
Zizek writes:
Let us take the case of the famous advertisement for Marlboro: the picture of
the bronzed cowboy, the wide prairie plains, and so on ~ all this "connotes",
of course, a certain image of America (the land of hard, honest people, of
limitless horizons ...) but the effect of the "quilting" occurs only when a
certain inversion takes place; it does not occur until "real" Americans start to
identify themselves (in their ideological self-experience) with the image created
by the Marlboro advertisement — until America itself is experienced as
"Marlboro country" ... [T]he point is not chat Coca-Cola "connotes' a certain
ideological experience-vision of America (the freshness of its sharp, cold
taste, and so on); the point is that this vision of America itself achieves its
identity by identifying itself with the signifier "Coke". (1989, p. 96)
Following Zizek, what happens with the McDonald's advertisement is
that Singapore becomes experienced, even if so minutely, as a
McSingapore.
However, long before McDonalds reconfigured Singapore as a
McNation, it had made a McAmerica of the United States. Zizek's re-
marks about the United States achieving its identity through Marlboro,
Coke — and one would certainly add McDonald's to that list — imply
that the globalization of world culture through the importing of American
commercial-popular culture happens not only to other countries
but to the United States as well. McDonalds might pass as part of the
local wherever it has been imported; however, more accurately, it remains
a paradigmatic local signifier for both globalization and American
commercial-popular culture. The implicit Other in the "Sounds of
Singapore" is undoubtedly America. But, significantly, the advertisement
presents a fantasy of Singaporean cultural nationalism without
antagonism with this Other, Instead, all elements are strung together in
harmony, as were the electric guitars and the erhu in the ads' musical
score. Perhaps in another country the use of McDonalds as a signifier
for cultural nationalism might seem less uncanny, but in Singapore, where
America is vigorously contested, it is the height of irony
Contesting America
Prime Minister Goh Chok Tongs 1994 National Day Rally Speech focused
on a single theme, family values. Goh argued that if Singapore
did not want to "lose its vitality, its solidarity", then it must have che
105

106 Lee Weng Choy
moral anchor of strong family values. Central to the speech was a con-
testing of America.
Societies can go wrong quickly, US and British societies have changed profoundly
in the last thirty years. Up to the early 1960s, they were disciplined,
conservative, with the family very much the pillar of their societies. Since
then, both the US and Britain have seen a sharp rise in broken families,
teenage mothers, illegitimate children, juvenile delinquency, vandalism, and
violent crime.... American society now places less value than before on what
it owes to others as a matter of moral obligation; less value on sacrifice as a
moral good; less value on social conformity and respectability; less value on
correctness and restraint in matters of physical pleasure and sexuality ...
Recently, The Straits Times carried an advertisement showing a boy saying:
"Come on, Dad. If you can play golf five times a week, I can have Sustagen
once a day". I found the language, the way che boy speaks, most objectionable.
Why put an American boy's way of speaking to a father into a Singaporean
boy's mouth?... These advertisements will encourage children to be insolent
to their parents. Many American children call their fathers by their first names,
and treat them with casual familiarity. We must not unthinkingly drift into
attitudes and manners which undermine the traditional politeness and deference
Asian children have for their parents and elders. ...
Michael Fay, back in America, got drunk, and when his father protested,
he tackled the father and wrestled him to the ground. I cannot imagine a
Chinese son, or any other Asian son, physically tackling his father. But chat
may happen when sons call their fathers by their first names and treat them
as equals. Familiarity can breed contempt. ..,
America's and Britain's social problems — a growing underclass, which is
violence-prone, uneducated, drug-taking, sexually promiscuous — is a direct
result of the family unit becoming redundant or non-functional, ...
(Excerpts of Goh's speech, "Three Lessons for Singapore", Straits Times, 22
August 1994)
Goh is by no means the only Singaporean leader to criticize the
United States. The West has and continues to figure crucially in Senior
Minister Lee Kuan Yew's speeches. While he has argued that the eco-
nomic growth of East Asia will lead to the reaffirmation of Asian cul-
ture, tradition, and values, Lee nonetheless acknowledged that "the Eu-
ropean and later the American civilizations have dominated the world".
He went so far as to "assess Western influence [in Singapore today] at 60
per cent, compared to the influence of core Asian values at 40 per cent".
Although in "20 years, this ratio will shift, as East Asia produces its own

4; McNationalism in Singapore 107
mass products and coins its own political vocabulary" (Straits Times, 6
February 1995). Implicit in Lees notion of culture and value is that
they underpin comparative difference and reflect power relations. There
is no "better" or "best" without those others whom you have bettered,
hence the prefacing of his remarks about an anticipated Asian superiority
with a mention of the previous supremacy of Europe and America.
Of course, this constant comparison and competition with Others is
not a feature unique to Lees or Goh's discourse, but to any construction
of cultural nationalism at large. What is arguably distinct about the
Singapore leaderships rhetoric is the degree to which America predominates
as an ideological "Other" figure. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has
written that "the discourse of man is in the metaphor of woman" (1983,
p. 169). Pace Spivak, my claim, less emphatically, is that a substantial
part of the discourse of Singapore is in the metaphor of America.
Apart from being frequently contested by Singaporeans, the import
of the United States as an ideological arena is further demonstrated by
the fact that the conservative discourse of America is re-staged here,
using the American sources themselves. The Straits Times regularly prints
or reprints American columnists and pundits, with topics ranging from
U.S. foreign policy to economics to the state of the American family.
Given the newspapers editorial policy, these reprints generally promote
positions convergent with the Singapore leaderships own. In "The system
promotes illegitimacy in US", for example, former Dan Quayle
speech writer Lisa Schiffren writes: "America feces no problem more
urgent than its rocketing illegitimacy rate. Last year 30 per cent of all
babies were born out of wedlock" (Straits Times, 12 August 1995). Speaking
of Quayle, during the 1992 U.S. presidential elections, the Quayle-
Murphy Brown dispute was well covered by the Straits Times with a bias
for the then Vice-President's pro-family values stance. When the controversial
The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray (1994) was published,
the discussion of race, intelligence, class, and government policy
in American was reproduced in Singapore press. 4
The book got a lot of
positive press, and excerpts were given a number of full pages in the
newspaper. What these examples illustrate is how American debates are
appropriated into the discourse of the Singapore state. The conservative
American voice — pro-free market, anti-welfarism, tough on crime,

108 Lee Weng Choy
pro-family — becomes yet another vehicle for Singapore's leaders to
criticize American liberalism, to hold it up as the image of catastrophe
for this "highly vulnerable" island city-state that can, as Prime Minister
Goh puts it, "go wrong quickly".
"Westernization", Chua Beng Huat asserts, "became a convenient
holder of ail the ills of capitalist developments in Singapore, against
which a very loose formulation of "Asian values" was elevated supposedly
to arrest the rot that threatened" (1995, p. 118) Furthermore:
In contrast to the earlier policies that were aimed at producing an efficient
and disciplined work-force necessary to the economic development of a new
nation and the material well-being of the new citizenry, the policies and programmes
of che mid- and late 1980s have as their motivation che inscription
of selectively reinvented "traditional" attitudes and values as the "truths of
Asians" in general. (1995, p. 119)
Thus, having achieved economic success, the state has acknowledged
that it is time to channel energies into safeguarding the nations Asian
cultural identity. Underlying this evolution in policy-making is the same
paradigm: at stake is survival and success, and a strong cultural identity
is deemed necessary to thrive in this competitive world. Western liberal
values, so the argument goes, differ fundamentally from Asian values,
and if Singapore emulated America it would sabotage its supposedly
authentic culture and values, and, most importantly, its chances to survive
and thrive,
In the 1980s, partly to stem the anticipated problems from excessive
individualism (read: Westernization) in society, the PAP attempted
to utilize Confucianism to explain the cultural factors underpinning the
country's economic success (see Chua 1995). In 1882, Ernest Renan
said; "Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation" (quoted from
Hobsbawm 1990, p. 12); following Renan, the PAP's less than convincing
articulation of neo-Confucianism could be read as "getting their
Chinese history wrong". But apart from ideologically engineering its
own history, getting American History wrong has also become part of
being Singapore.
Goh's 1994 National Day Rally speech, for instance, offers a terri
bly inadequate summary of the last thirty years of American history,
Goh's version, nonetheless, is shared by many American conservative

4: McNationalism in Singapore 109
politicians, pundits, and business leaders. For Goh, as well for Dan
Quayle and company, the rise of single-motherhood is virtually the cause
of the decline of America, rather than poverty and urban decline having
as one of its effects high rates of minority single mothers on welfare. In
his speech, Goh indicated a moment in American history, the post-war
years — a period for which Reagan America had tremendous nostalgia
— when America supposedly had solid traditional values and was on
top of the world. Goh and conservative Americans maintain that todays
America is declining not only because it has lost its traditional
values; what is worse is that it has become the culture of articulation par
excellence — all values are open for negotiation. In contrast, the Singapore
leadership wants to circumscribe negotiation, and its rhetoric reveals
(as all essentialist positions reveal) a refusal to admit articulation as
the fact of the identities of nation, state, and ruling party.
The simple reason for Singapore's convergence with American conservatives
on the explanation of the latter's decline is that the PAP is
conservative as well. But, more to the point, the state-big business interests
in both countries coincide. The Singapore leadership has always
acknowledged the nations dependence on the larger forces in the world
political economy, particularly the American economy and military. In
an interview with the New York Times, Lee Kuan Yew remarked that
Singapore's survival in the next twenty years depends on the U.S.
economy and a stable balance of power between China, Japan, and Russia.
5
Lxe is basically reiterating the crucial external factors that have
made possible the country's success since independence. As mentioned
earlier, from the onset in 1965, American investments and markets were
instrumental in Singapore's rapid economic growth (see Rodan 1989);
three decades later it is still the case; with over S$10 billion committed,
the United States led Europe, Japan, and Singapore with its share of the
total investment commitments in manufacturing during the period of
1991-96. 6
Given their substantial mutual interests, how then does one explain
Singapore's vocal antagonism against America? Singapore's attacks are
directed specifically at those custodians of culture and values — the
"liberal" media — and not at American businesses. In a speech criticizing
the American media's sense of cultural superiority, Lee Kuan Yew

110 Lee Weng Cboy
made it clear that American businesses valued and prospered in their
partnership with Singapore, that the multinational corporations (MNCs)
"disregard what the Western media alleges". Moreover, "these MNCs
have come to make profits, not to do us favours. We have enabled them
to make their profits" (Straits Times, 14 August 1995). This "We" could
refer to Singapore as a whole but also specifically to the PAP-led state,
whose strong role in the rapid industrialization of Singapore has been
well discussed. Since to be attractive to MNCs is to enable "them to
make their profits", a central (though not exclusive) ideological agenda
underlying Singaporean "nation-building" is to serve multinational capital
accumulation — the primary force behind globalization. Nationalism
and globalization achieve a symbiosis in Singapore, with the PAPled
state, the MNCs, and supposedly all Singaporeans benefiting.
1 have been arguing that the contesting of America is prominent in
current political discourse in Singapore, that the lines of contestation
are over culture and values, and that this contesting does not undermine
Singapore's substantial economic, military, and political partnership with
the United States. But I have yet to suggest why the leadership would
appropriate America as an ideological arena in the first place.
The PAP appears to have adopted a small-state defence mentality: it
is best to fight your battles outside your country, on the Others turf.
While plugging into globalization is the crux of Singapore's economic
strategy, the uncontrolled opening up of society is considered a dangerous
side-effect. Contesting America displaces the debate over the liberalization
of Singaporean society to an outside of the country. Consequently,
the most visible antagonisms are between a unity, Singapore,
and an Other, liberal America, and internal antagonisms are downplayed
(though not eliminated). These internal antagonisms are not just about
party politics between the PAP and the opposition; they are about negotiating
the very means of government and state, about the autonomy of
civil society, about individual rights, and so on.
Saturating political discourse in Singapore with debates about the
United States in the most reductive versions of "liberal" versus "conservative"
makes room here for articulation — of cultural, ethnic, and
political difference and identity, social responsibility, individual freedoms,
modernity, and tradition — even narrower than the relatively narrow

4: McNationalism in Singapore 111
mainstream political discourse within the United States. Here the values
of capitalism are inadequately examined, and non-conservative (for
example, leftist) critiques of liberal-democracy are not broached. The
problem with the United States is consistently presented as one of an
excess of democracy and a lack of discipline. 7
Where it is especially
lacking in the United States is at the home, and home is where Singapore
has it. Family discipline becomes a code for social discipline. Significantly,
the excess of democracy is always seen as an excess of individualism.
Never mind that the social activism in the United States in
the 1960s — a "flourishing" of democracy, if you will — addressed
fundamental flaws in good old traditional-values 1950s America, such
as systematic racism and sexism.
The 1995 William Safire-Williams College episode illustrates some
of the dynamics of contesting America. Safire in his New York Times
column attacked Prime Minister Goh, saying he was unfit to receive an
honorary degree from Williams College, Massachusetts. George Crane,
and other Williams College faculty who protested the Colleges decision
to honour Goh, invited the PM to a debate there. The PM's press secretary
responded by inviting Crane and Safire to come to Singapore and
debate Goh. Safire declined but offered to face-off with Lee Kuan Yew,
if Goh would take on Singaporean exile Francis Seow. Chee Soon Juan,
of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), called for a public debate
with the PAP saying it was "hypocritical" of the PM "to make a show of
debating Americans about matters dear to Singaporeans while ignoring
the opposition in Singapore" (Straits Times, 19 July 1995). In the end,
no one debated anyone. The PAP rebuffed Chee's calls for a public debate,
maintaining that the SDP has ample opportunity to debate politics
in parliament, and Deputy PM Brigadier-General Lee FIsien Loong
dismissed Satires counter-offer as a chickening-out.
Subsequently, Chee got embroiled in defending himself against accusations
that he was siding with the Western media and being disloyal
to Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew, in a speech after the Safire episode, said;
We must debunk those who echo the American media line that we will only
prosper and progress if we dismantle our practices and institutions.... Those
who peddle this line to our people are stooging for the Western media and
their human rights groups. (Straits Times, 14 August 1995)

112 Lee Weng Choy
In Lees rhetoric, criticism, opposition, and the articulation of political
antagonisms within Singapore become conflated with "stooging for the
Western media", and attempting to "dismantle our practices and institutions".
It is not just that every new, different, or critical argument or
position is framed through a single consideration — whether it is proor
anti-government — but the lines are also drawn between an "us" —
the true and pragmatic patriots of Singapore — and an "Other" — the
stooges or sympathizers of American liberalism,
Denied desires
In this paper I have discussed certain "McNationalist" fantasies (for example,
the McDonalds "Sounds of Singapore" advertisement) in the
context of the Singapore states ideological othering of the United States.
Because it is thoroughly permeated by transnational capital, Singapore
is also pervaded by commercial-popular culture, whose sources, references,
or forms are very often American. And while plugging into globalization
is the crux of Singapore's economic strategy, the state aims to
curtail the spread of liberal American values.
As I have argued, a key feature in the advertising strategy of
McDonalds is to pass for the local wherever it is imported, nevertheless,
McDonalds is still read in Singapore as a sign for both globalization and
American commercial-popular culture: America is the hidden "Other"
in the McSingapore of the "Sounds of Singapore" advertisement. I would
like to close this paper with a few more remarks about this hidden Other
which is at the heart of so many McNationalist fantasies in Singapore,
Lacan uses the term l'objet petit a (literally, the object small "a") to
refer to the object that is the cause of desire (Zizek 1991, p. 12). But as
Zizek notes: "[t]he paradox of desire is that it posits retroactively its own
cause, ie., the object,can be perceived only by a gaze "distorted" by
desire" (ibid., p. 12). As an object of intense fascination for Singapore,
liberal America is ideologically distorted in its contemplation and contestation.
Represented as the society of total articulation, it is the forbidden
desire. What is liberal America for Singapore if not the lobjet
petit a that Singapore denies itself and is hysterically afraid of becoming?
"We" (Singapore) must remain disciplined; "they" (America) are excessively
permissive. They enjoy themselves too much. Zizek observes: "We

4: McNationalism in Singapore 113
always impute to the "other" an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal
our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some
secret, perverse enjoyment" (1993, p. 203). In the case of the United
States, che enjoyment is hardly secret — it is because it is never secret
but so conspicuously exhibited that American pleasures are so perverse
to Singapore.
The "mirror stage" is another Lacanian concept that sheds light on
the contesting of America. It is the stage in early child development
when che child's first sense of an integrated self-image takes place, Janadas
Devan has suggested that the West, and America in particular, functions
like the mirror for a young Singapore still in its mirror stage. 8
This explains
some of the hurt implicit in Singaporean retorts to Western and
American criticisms. The PAP-led state sees itself as an exemplar of pragmatic
rationality and instrumental reason, and should be acknowledged
as a revitalized incarnation of an otherwise flagging Western modernism.
Instead, che Western media ridicules Singapore as an aberrant version
of itself (of liberal democracy), belittling it as an uptight, coo-perfect
little McNation, or, as science-fiction writer William Gibson once
put ic, "Disneyland with the death penalty".
The hurt and anxiety, however, find partial resolution in fantasy;
there, the mobility between conflicting subject-positions allows for the
enjoymenc of a fetish which displaces or blocks consciousness of the
conflict. The McDonald's advertisement is an instance of such: in a
fecishized McSingapore, Eastern and Western cultures fuse harmoniously,
and rationalization and globalization converge with nationalism.
There are a number of other McNationalist-type advertisements, but
suffice to cite two which reveal how readily the seductive enjoyments of
the "enemy" — of "liberal values" Hollywood/America — can be appropriated
for the (phantasmatic) defence of the nation. A newspaper
advertisement for the Singapore Air Force shows a stack of videos of Top
Gun, Fire Fox, AirWolf, and Blue Thunder, below which a caption asks,
"When was the last time you rented a video about a finance executive?"
Then there is a television advertisement for the government's "Total
Defence" campaign (Psychological, Social, Economic, Civil, and Military
Defence), It looks pretty slick, but what is remarkable is that its
style of music signifies a detoured return of the Others repressed. Once

114 Lee Weng Clmf
a marginalized African-American cultural form, hip-hop and rap has become,
in a most watered-down version, the song to "put your heart, mind .
will to the defence of Singapore",
NOTES
1. Within the scope of this chapter, the distinctions between television and cinema
are not crucial, as I am concerned mainly with what psychoanalytic theory hits co
say about the moving images of advertisements as a text, rather than on the differ
ences between the nature of television and cinema viewing. Unlike cinema
spectatorship, where viewers sit attentively throughout the film, television viewer
channel-surf as well as do other things while watching (such as read or eat a meal)-
Nonetheless, as Sandy Fiitterman-Lewis argues, television-viewing operates through
"reduplicating structures of Fascination to compensate for its appeal to a dispersed
and fractured subjectivity" (1987, p. 204). In my discussion of advertisements, the
difference between televisions fragmentary and cinema's rapt viewing is beside the
point, because advertisements, which are short in duration and frequently repeated.
operate similarly enough whether shown in the cinema or on television. The com
parison between feature films and television shows, on the other hand, would warrant
specific attention co how each medium is viewed differently.
2. I should clarify due in psychoanalytic film theory, the "viewer" is not the same as a
'Veal person", but the viewer or subject is a constructed position. To watch a film is
to enter into a discursive space and to fill up the various subject-positions construtted
by the film and i cs apparatus. The problem lies in trying to map a con nation
between film theory's subjects and real individuals (Mayne 1993, pp. 36 )
Actual persons who watch 61ms indeed take on these subject positions, but they do
not do so passively — they negotiate these positions. Yet it is beyond the scope of
this chapter to discuss how real Singaporean viewers negotiate the advertisementdiscussed
here.Therefore, I am careful co argue that d>e advertisements only "place
the viewers in positions to identify", and my <strong>claims</strong> can go no further than that.
3. Yao Souchou identifies the song as the dassic "Shina no Yoru" sung by Yoshiko
Yamaguchi, which was popular among Japanese soldiers fighting in China during
World War II.
4. See Langenbach in this volume for a discussion of race, intelligence, and govern
mcnt policy in Singapore.
5. "Singapore Must Adjurt to World Changes or Decline: SM Lee", Straits Times, 16
August 1995.
6. Data on investment commitments in manufacturing for 1991 to 1996 are from
the Singapore Economic Development Board, published in Economic Survey of
Singapore, Third Quarter 1997 (Singapore: Ministry of Trade and Industry, 1997),
p. 90.

4; McNationalism in Singapore 115
7. A cartoon accompanied the Richard Armitage article "Promote Common Values
and Respect Differences: What the US, S'pore Should Do After Fay's Caning"
(Straits Times, 10 May 1994). On one side was a picture of New York City —
polluted, vandalized, jammed with traffic and violence on the streets; on the other
side, Singapore — clean, no traffic jams, no violence, families strolling on the
waterfront, a "No Littering" sign and a "Protect your Environment" sign. The
Statue of Liberty asks the Singapore Merlion statue, "Hey pal, what's your secret?"
The Merlion, showing a cane, says, "This!"
8. Janadas Devan's remarks were made in a personal conversation with the author.
REFERENCES
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Towards an Investigation)".
In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster.
New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
Barber, Benjamin R. Jihad us McWorld. New York: Times Books, 1995.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(c), 1983.
Chua Beng Huat. Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore. London:
Routledge, 199*).
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New
York: Zone Boob, 1994.
Economic Development Board, Economic Survey of Singapore, Third Quarter 1997.
Singapore: Ministry of'Trade and Industry, 1997.
Plitterman-Lewis, Sandy. "Psychoanalysis, Film, and Television". In Channels of Discourse,
edited by Robert C. Allen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina,
1987.
Goldman, Robert. Reading Ads Socially. London: Routledge, 1992.
Herrnscein. Richard J. and Charles Murray. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure
in American Life. New York: The Free Press, 1994,
Hobsbawm, E.J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990.
Mayne, Judith, Cinema and Spectatorship. London: Routledge, 1993.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 1993.
Rodan, Gary. The Political Economy of "Singapore's Industrialisation. London: Macmillan,
1989.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Displacement and the Discourse of Woman". In Displacement,
edited by Mark Krupnick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1983.

116 LeeWengChoy

Part Two
Identity,
the state,
and post-modernity

National identity, diasporic anxiety,
and music video culture in Vietnam
ASHLEY CARRUTHERS
Formally approved by the Sixth Party Congress in 1986, Vietnam's doi
moi or renovation policy has seen the country transform itself from a
reclusive Marxist-Leninist state into a market economy ever-increasingly
incorporated into the global capitalist system. Along with this new economic
openness, Vietnam has variously embraced and had forced upon
it a new cultural openness, a process chat has seen che once relatively
discrete borders of its national culture begin to exhibit an unsettling
new porousness, As new media have flowed into the country alongside
other consumer goods, the state has begun to find that the tight control
it once exercised over virtually all fields of cultural production and consumption
is slipping. As one might expect, this process has been quick
co revivify the spectre of cultural pollution by a decadent West, one co
which the state has periodically reacted since the advent of the policy in
spectacular fashion.
But doi moi has not only let the West back in. A less remarked consequence
of the policy is that it has precipitated something of a return of
the repressed of national culture in the form of che popular culture of
che Vietnamese diaspora. Doi moi has seen the formation in Vietnam of
a huge market in pirated versions of video music variety shows, karaoke,

120 Ashley Carruthers
and compact discs produced by Vietnamese living the United States,
France, and Canada. Thus as well as introducing Vietnamese consumers
to Playboy and Die Hard, "renovation" has allowed them to meet
such diasporic cultural icons as Elvis Phuong, Lynda Trang Dai, and
Paris by Night, While the state has over the past few years become more
resigned to the presence in Vietnam of a commercial music culture produced
by its former enemies or My nguy [American puppets], and recently
has even allowed diasporic singers to perform in Vietnam, this
state of affairs continues to afford it no little source of ambivalence and
disquiet. The return of an overseas Vietnamese "exile culture" (Nacify
1993) violates a post-Reunification symbolic geography whereby the
nations traumatic North/South split is resolved by the driving of its
enemies, American and Vietnamese, from the divided national space
and into exile in the West. Consequently, the renewed presence of these
enemies (or at least their music) in the socialist homeland poses a threat
to the purity and integrity of the reunited national space, one constituted
as whole by the very fact of their banishment (see Duiker 1994).
The return of diasporic music and video to Vietnam is an ambivalent
issue not only for the state but also, ironically enough, for a large
number of diasporic community leaders, intellectuals, journalists, and
other people of influence in overseas Vietnamese communities around
the world. Identity formation in the diaspora has traditionally been dependent
on an anti-communist homeland politics underpinned by a
spatial imaginary of exile, wherein communist Vietnam plays the role of
the Evil Other against whom the "Free Vietnamese" are defined in terms
of unbridgeable spatial, ideological, and even cultural difference. With
the advent of doi moi, elites had sought to impose moral pressure on
diasporic Vietnamese not to return to a communist Vietnam, be it only
for tourism and family visits. Currently, the emphasis is on limiting
business and trade links with Vietnam, a practice that is still interpreted
by many as a "surrender". In the recent past, the presence of overseas
Vietnamese music and video in Vietnam had been considered a good
thing in that the circulation of this anti-communist exile culture was
seen as having a subversive effect. Of late, however, its increasingly comfortable
presence in Vietnam has led to controversy. As cultural values
in doi moi Vietnam undergo a transformation from autarchic, and-

5: National identity diasporic anxiety, and music video culture in Vietnam 121
colonial statist to global consumerist ones, diasporic commercial culture,
alongside other Western and East Asian cultural flows, is playing
an important role in the "cosmopolitanization" of the homeland. This
process has advanced to a point where homeland music and video, increasingly
indistinguishable from the overseas product, are now popularly
consumed in the diaspora, while homeland stars such as Hong
Nhung, My Linh> Hong Hanh, Anh Tuyet, Ngoc Son, and others have
been able to acquire at home the requisite elan to appear in ultra-chic
overseas productions. While for many in the diaspora these are seen as
positive developments, indicative of a liberalization of the field of cultural
production in Vietnam, for others they raise the spectre of the
transformation of an anti-state exile culture into a transnational commercial
culture with a common consumer habitus. Diasporic elites in
particular have sought to resist this opening up of the diasporic public
sphere to the homeland, fearing that it must put into question the integrity
of the oppositional cultural-national project of "Free Vietnam",
and eventually lead to the replacement of the lost homeland, the defunct
Republic of Vietnam, by the contemporary homeland as the referent
of diasporic national identity.
It is this somewhat unholy remarriage of the Vietnamese homeland
and diaspora at the altar of popular music culture — a reunion brought
about by the uncontrollable, upredictable nature of cultural flows in
these global times — that I wish to explore in this paper. In attempting
to capture something of the transnational nature of the object, the space
of cultural exchange between Vietnam and the diaspora, I have adopted
a research strategy that might be called multi-sited ethnography, after
Marcus (1995). The discussion covered here will be split between Vietnam
and the diaspora. On the homeland side, I will look at some recent
instances of official and popular discourse on the return of diasporic
music culture. In the diasporic context, I will analyse a controversy centred
around Thuy Nga (the largest of the diasporic popular culture producers)
whereby the company was suspected of having abandoned its
anti-communist homeland politics in an attempt to break into the official
music video market in Vietnam. What I hope to be able to produce
from this approach is some sort of representation of the way in which
the processes of modernization and globalization in Vietnam, and the

122 Ashley Carruthers
forms of diaspora-homeland transnationalism they have engendered, are
both challenging and reinscribing the hegemonic Cold War narratives
which initially gave shape to the Vietnamese diaspora-homeland split.
In both sites, <strong>claims</strong> to cultural and national authenticity have traditionally
been based on the putative inauthenticity of the other. Exilic
discourse has tended to represent those in Vietnam as having been deethnicized
by communism, a Western "import" that undermines the
Confucian bases of traditional Vietnamese identity, while state discourse
in Vietnam has tended to represent the overseas Vietnamese as having
been alienated from their cultural origins and moral tradition by the
extraneous values of Western consumer capitalism. Such totalizing depictions
of the other have become, however, increasingly difficult to
maintain as global processes erode the distinctions between inside and
outside, friend and foe, and other key self-constituting binarisms. The
analytical task here is to trace the ways in which narratives of national
identity have been both disrupted and reinscribed amidst the global
circulation of capital, people, objects, and signs.
Diaspora
Exile and return: narratives of diasporic identity
Some twenty-four years after the fall of Saigon, the dominant representation
of the Vietnamese diaspora in the West continues to be that of a
victim or refugee diaspora, in the classical Jewish mould. Community
gerontocrats protect and project a diasporic identity grounded in the
collective experiences of war, hardships suffered under the communist
regime, a traumatic exodus, a sense of belonging to a lost homeland,
and a commitment co return to and restore the homeland once it is free
of communism. This is in origin a middle-class discourse of identity,
espoused most rigorously by a core of first-wave political refugees who
brought with them considerable symbolic capital from the old society.
and by later arrivals with like attributes. This elite has hegemonizect
community associations and the Vietnamese-language media from the
advent of the post-war diaspora in the West, and its ideas, concerns, and
anxieties continue to dominate the diasporic public sphere (Viviani 1996,
pp. 102-3; Thomas 1996, pp ; 154-55; McCoy 1996; and Smith ami
Tarallo 1995, pp. 59-60). Elite have furthered an essentialist defini-

5: National identity, diasporic anxiety and music video culture in Vietnam
123
tion of Vietnameseness that naturalizes anti-communism and refugeehood
by presenting them as intrinisic facets of ethnic identity. This
master-narrative of diasporic identity is, however, far from being an
untroubled one. While, as recent protests over the hanging of a communist
flag and portrait in Little Saigon, California, show, it is still quite
possible to generate a communal "we" over a broadly anti-communist
issue (Jolly and Mai Iran 1999), the extent of elites influence has been
significantly reduced over the last decade. The subsequent arrival in the
diaspora of second, third, and fourth waves of less politicized refugees
(the "passive hurt"), economic migrants, family reunion migrants,
northerners, and ethnic Chinese Vietnamese (Viviani 1996, p. 104);
the processes of generational change, integration, and assimilation; the
normalization of diplomatic and trade relations between Vietnam and
the various host nations; and, most importantly for our purposes here,
the advent of the doi moi programme of economic reform and
(re)globalization in Vietnam, have all served to disrupt and challenge
narrow, essentializing definitions of the diaspora as a militantly anticommunist,
refugee, or victim one. We have already witnessed the
marginalization of a hardline politics of armed return to retake the homeland
from the communists by a more liberal discourse of international
human rights and "peaceful evolution" to political pluralism. We have
also seen a policy of "no contact, no return" to the homeland give way to
an acceptance of family visits and a grudging tolerance of cultural, business,
and professional contacts with communist Vietnam, which is now
receiving around 300,000 returnees and up to US$3 billion in remittances
and informal investments from overseas Vietnamese per year. 1
These developments have led many to predict the eventual waning of
elites' influence and the disappearance of Cold War politics in determining
communal identity and relations with the homeland (for instance,
Viviani 1996, p. 121; Thomas 1997). It is in the context of this
politics of overseas Vietnamese identity that I wish to look at a recent
debate over diasporic commercial culture.
Variety shows and the exilic tradition
Sporting titles such as Paris by Night, Asia, Hollywood Nights, Dem Saigon
(Saigon nights) and Lang Van, to name the more prominent series,

124 Ashley Carruthers
music variety shows are almost universally popular amongst overseas
Vietnamese audiences. Structured as they are on the premise of variety,
the shows incorporate a wide range of musical styles, from pre~colonial
works through Western-influenced Tan nhac (new or modern music) to
bilingual covers of contemporary American pop songs like Hotel California
and Flashdance. They also incorporate a wide range of Vietnamese
identities, again ranging from pre-colonial figures through Frenchera
cosmopolites to "hybrid" youth, As one Vietnamese journalist put
it, we find in these music videos:
a variety of musical styles to suit the tastes of many different classes of viewers:
love songs, light music, music for the young, foreign music, music from
home, trendy music, nostalgic music {nhac sen), comic skits and rich meetings
of the old and new. The audience will see Lynda Trang Dai leaping
about on the stage, then Huong Lan in black peasant's pyjamas and a conical
hat, then Ngoc Hue in a swimming costume and a pointed bra aping Madonna,
then finally Ai Van, holding a broad straw quai thao hat, following
Elvis Phuong, dressed in Western trousers and a black coat going off to a
festival. (Gia Mom 1996)
While the various segments may pander to individual tastes, the general
mode of address of the music videos is very much a collective one. The
diverse segments of performance only ever individuate parts of the audience
for part of the time. Audience members are constantly recouped
via the shows' diegesis, and the anchoring role of the comperes and their
commentaries, into an overarching conception of shared overseas Vietnamese
identity. This is centred on an appeal to core cultural values,
common tradition, linguistic unity, and an anti-communist homeland
politics. Viewers are addressed very much as the members of families, a
fact that in itself tends to reinforce the Confucian centrality of the family
as a key cultural value. Indeed, it is no doubt a large part of their
commercial success that the videos don't disrupt "family life". In my
experience, watching them is most frequently a family activity, even something
that produces solidary family activity. Here the shows' variety produces
unity in that there is something for everyone, and nothing likely
to seriously alienate anyone. The videos' loosely sequential, non-narrative
structure is also "family-friendly" in that it presupposes a domestic
context of reception in which viewing will be interrupted by and cooccur
with a range of family activities like cooking, eating, conversa-

5: National identity, diasporic anxiety, and music video culture in Vietnam 125
tion, care of children, family members and guests coming in and out of
the television room, and so on.
Described by musicologist Tran Quang Hai as a vehicle for "a specifically
Vietnamese exile-music, the variety show form has been a
mainstay of overseas Vietnamese anti-communist culture from the mid-
1970s onwards. Composers and performers were initially drawn from
the ranks of artists who had been living in South Vietnam before becoming
refugees subsequent to the fall of Saigon, and their works reflected
their wartime experiences and continuing opposition to the communist
regime. In the first decade of diaspora, exile music was explicitly
constructed by its producers as being a political weapon in the struggle
against Hanoi. Songs such as Nam Locs "Farewell Saigon" (1975) [Sai
Gon Vinh Biet], and Viet Dzung's "A Few Gifts Sent Home" [Mot Chut
Qua cho Que Huong] were broadcast back to Vietnam via the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Voice of America (VGA) with
the intention of encouraging people to flee Vietnam, thus destabilizing
the society. Most older diasporic Vietnamese remember listening to these
broadcasts in secret in post-liberation Saigon. The composer afSai Gon
Vinh Biet, which has been performed by over thirty diasporic artists,
<strong>claims</strong> that he received numerous letters from people in refugee camps
saying that having heard the song — and specifically its promise of return
— encouraged them to flee Vietnam by boat. Pham Duy, the most
revered diasporic composer, is said to have been so moved when he performed
it on VOA that he fell down unconscious, Finally, an author
who escaped from a re-education camp in Vietnam told of how a friend
had tried to copy down the song in secret so that the prisoners could
sing it. He was caught, beaten, put in solitary confinement, and died
next to the unfinished copy of the song (Nguyen Ninh Hoa 1995)!
Early themes for variety show songs include nostalgia for the country,
nostalgia for Saigon (1975—77); resistance, struggle for the reconquest
of the country (1978-81); and description of prisoners' lives in Vietnam
(1981) (Tran Quang Hai 1990). Programme tides include Farewell
Saigon, A Tear for Vietnam, The Spring When We Return, and Looking
Back at the Last 20 Years, The trend over the last decade, however, has
been for these programmes to become less and less explicitly political, to
the extent that one is more likely nowadays to come across love songs

126 Ashley Carruthers
and spectacular dance routines than statements of opposition to Hanoi.
The gradual depoliticization of diasporic identity outlined above has
produced market pressures that have led to a shift in the political and
nostalgic concerns of a somewhat narrow exile culture to a more pluralistic,
celebratory, and "hedonistic" diasporic entertainment culture. Exile
songs and identities vie here with a plethora of other identities in a
post-modern space of plurality, hybridity, and affect (Cunningham and
Nguyen 1999).
Ca dao me [my mother's songs]
Recently, the anti-communist credentials of the most prestigious and
longest-running variety show, Thuy Ngas Paris by Night, have been put
under the spotlight. Since the release in August 1997 of Paris by Night
number 40, Mother, an unprecedented scandal has erupted. Its makers
claim that they fully intended the programme to be in the exilic tradition
sketched above, but something went horribly wrong. Due to (depending
on who you believe) either careless editing, a cynical market
ploy, or a communist plot, the video included a dramatized segment in
which Vietnamese civilians appeared to have been killed by helicopters
and jets of the air force of the Republic of Vietnam (the old South Vietnam).
Such has been the outcry over Mother that Thuy Nga has been
obliged to offer customers two newly edited versions of the video: the
first minus the song Ca Dao Me [My Mothers Songs], in which the
offending image track is set; the second minus this song plus a number
of other amendments insisted upon by critics after having viewed the
first re-issue. Not satisfied with this exchange, a crowd demonstrated
outside the Thuy Nga office in "Westminster, California, dumping the
videos in a pile and demanding their money back. A further protest has
been planned in front of the studio in Toronto where Thuy Nga will
record its next production ("Bieu tinh truoc phong thu ..."). Angry articles
continue to appear thick and fast in newspapers and on overseas
Vietnamese websites. Company director To Van Lai and Paris by Night
compere Nguyen Ngoc Ngan have both been obliged to publish in the
press and post on the web an apologia, and Van Lai has appeared on
radio programmes to take angry calls from Thuy Nga's disaffected
audience.

5: National identity, diasporic anxiety, and music video culture in Vietnam 127
The release of Mother was timed to coincide with the festival of Vu
Lan, otherwise known as the Season of Filial Piety, beginning on the
fifteenth of the seventh lunar month (mid-August). This is meant to be
a time in which children, in keeping with the Confucian prescription of
unconditional love and respect for one's parents, become particularly
aware of the value of their mothers and of the great debt of gratitude
they owe them. By acting properly towards their parents at this time,
children may experience and attain the virtue of Hieu thao or filial piety.
Accordingly, all of the songs in Thuy Nga's programme are dedicated to
recognizing and praising the selflessness of mothers and the sacrifices
they undergo for their children. This proved to be an excellent marketing
strategy and Mother sold better than any Thuy Nga video ever has.
Mothers sales figures attest to the fact that music variety shows have
been and continue co be seen as an important means of cultural maintenance
and communal survival. Particularly important here is their perceived
pedagogic function. These shows have been looked upon by audiences
and producers alike as a means of active "culture-building" across
generations, thac is, as a means of acculturating the younger generations
of overseas Vietnamese into an "authentic" Vietnamese socio-cultural
universe, including of course an anti-communist homeland politics.
These pedagogic expectations are, however, to be cruelly disappointed
by Mother. In an article in an American Vietnamese newspaper, one
journalist describes how his small child has been asking him about the
Mother tape every time he goes to town:
"Hey Dad, do you have the Mother tape yet?"
"Not yet, sweetheart!"
"When its in, will you buy it for me, Dad?"
"Sure, when its in, I'll buy it!"
"Are there songs about Mum in it, Dad?"
"Of course there are, honey!"
"Are there people who escaped across che sea like us, Dad?"
Although I didn't yet know what was in the tape, I confidently said:
"Of course there are!"
Later, when the author of the article returns home with the tape, his son
wrests it out of his hands, runs inside with it and puts it in the machine
to watch.

128 Ashley Carruthers
"Dad! There are helicopters from our army, Dad. There are jets as well. Come
and look, Dad, ... Come and look quickly, there are people holding little
children as well. Who are they, Dad?"
I stepped forward, and looked at the screen:
"They're people fleeing the enemy."
"Who's chasing them, Dad?"
"It must be the Viet Cong,"
"Are the Viet Cong cruel, Dad?"
"They sure are!"
"Did you run like them, Dad?"
"I sure did. Your Dad ran away and escaped across the ocean."
"Was running away across the sea hard, Dad?"
"Of course it was!"
"Dad, there's another plane there. Is that plane from our side, Dad?"
"That's right,"
"Is that house on fire, Dad? Who lit it?"
There was a loud explosion. My son stopped his ears and pulled on my hand,
calling out:
"But Dad, why are our army's planes killing the little boy's father?"
My eyes widened at the images in the video. What conspiracy was this? Wis
it for profit, or clumsy propagandising? I had no answer, as my boy continued
to cry out:
"Is the father of the little boy dead yet, Dad? Does it hurt co die, Dad? Why
are our planes killing his father? Is the little boy miserable? Whac about his
mother? Is she unhappy? Who's going to look after him? Is he angry at the
planes of the army who killed his Dad?"
The son then picks up his toy gun and, eyes wide, makes bang-bang
noises.
"What are you doing, son?"
"I'm firing my gun."
"What are you shooting?"
"I'm shooting the planes of the army that lolled the little boy's Dad!"
I nearly died. I didn't know whac to say co my son.
(Bui Xuan Vu 1997)
While there is perhaps an element of fiction in this account, what is
significant here is the way the author constructs himself as having invited
Thuy Nga into his home, the very stronghold of cultural maintenance
and bosom of filial piety, only to be made to appear illegitimate
in the eyes of his son. What was it he fought for, the author asks, what
was it so many of his people died for, what was the purpose of his des-

,5: National identity, diasporic anxiety, and music video culture in Vietnam 129
perace flight across the sea if his son cannot be made to understand and
hold dear the rightness and justice of the anti-communist cause? The
offending videos violation of this exalted pedagogic task is only compounded
by its abuse of the hallowed name of Mother, which transmutes,
easily enough, into a betrayal of the Mother-land itself. At least
three critics of the cassette used the rhetorical device of dramatizing the
context of family viewing to illustrate the harm that this video is capable
of doing. In each of these remarkably similar accounts the video takes
on something of the role of the jets and helicopters which, in the narrative
of Ca Dao Me, shatters the tender domestic environment of a peasant
family with bullets and bombs,
Speculation has been rife as to what Thuy Nga is up to. The most
popular interpretation is that the company has turned its back on its
overseas audience, and has dumped its exilic politics in order to break
into the much larger homeland market. According to this reading, the
controversial scene was included as a concession to Hanoi for permission
to officially market Paris by Night in Vietnam (currently only pirates
of the show are marketed there informally, an activity from which
the company derives no profits), See, for instance, Dao Nguyen Phuc
(1997), Thi-Anh (1997), and Tran (1997). To Van Lai and Nguyen
Ngoc Ngan have, however, vigorously denied allegations that they have
sold out. Both were quick to point out that they have never been back
to Vietnam, be it for tourism or business (To Van Lai 1997a; Nguyen
Ngoc Ngan 1997), Ngoc Ngan <strong>claims</strong> that he refused to return even as
his father lay dying in hospital in Saigon. On the day he got che news
that his father had died, he says, he was performing in Atlantic City —
stoically doing his exilic duty. He also points out that he has written
over twenty-six books and sixty audio books, the majority of which contain
anti-communist content (Nguyen Ngoc Ngan 1997). To Van Lai
cites the fact that Thuy Nga videos are officially banned in Vietnam,
where they have been categorized by the National Censor as "extremely
reactionary 11
. The Thuy Nga directors have been told in the Party paper
Saigon Giai Phong [Saigon Liberation], Van Lai <strong>claims</strong>, "[not to] hope
that there will be a spring when you'll return". Van Lai was also quick to
point out that people returning to Vietnam with copies of Thuy Nga
products risk having them confiscated at the airport, and that this in

130 Ashley Carruthers
fact had recently happened to someone bringing a copy of Mother into
Vietnam (To Van Lai 1997a). Finally, all politics aside, the company
denies that the strategy of changing its ideological colours would even
make economic sense: "If people in Canada are producing pirate copies
in droves, wealthy as that country is, then try asking, who's going to be
able to pay over twenty US dollars to buy an original copy in Vietnam?"
(Hoang Dang Son Ha 1997).
Thuy Nga has attributed the Mother blunder to an inexperienced
director in whom it put too much faith. The company is guilty only, it
says, of releasing the video without properly checldng his work (To Van
Lai 1997a, 1997b; Hoang Dang Son Ha 1997). I am inclined to believe
this account. One reason is that it admits to the embarassing fact that
one of the company's young directors should be so unaware of the iconography
of the war as to have used the American-provided helicopters
and jets of the Republic of Vietnam's air force to symbolize the "enemy".
This says something about inter-generational alienation that rings
true. I also find it far-fetched that Thuy Nga should have changed its
political leanings overnight, or that it would make such a clumsy attempt
to pander to the communist regime. Given the company's impeccable
anti-communist credentials, it seems unlikely that Hanoi would
respond to such overtures. Ironically, it seems that the Thuy Nga company
itself deplores as much if not more so than its critics the fact that
its videos are consumed in Vietnam, The integrity of the absolutely committed
anti-communist position it would like to claim for itself is undermined
by the fact that the evil communist Other does not hate Thuy
Nga as much as the company might like it to, but instead quite liberally
tolerates the circulation of its products on a "grey market" of quasi-legal
popular culture. Indeed, such is the embarrassment on the part of the
company about its inability to control the circulation of its videos that a
Sydney representative of Thuy Nga asserted to me that the company's
products are in fact not available in Vietnam in any form. The fact that
one can obtain the latest copy of Paris by Night from any corner video
store in Saigon is one that the company needs to repress because it disrupts
entirely the exilic fantasy of the lost homeland as a communist
dystopia and of itself as the radical oppositional voice of the "Free Vietnamese".

5: National identity, diasporic anxiety, and music video culture in Vietnam 131
Betrayal?
Why then have some exile writers been so quick to condemn Thuy Nga?
Why do they insist on making the worst possible interpretation of the
blunder of a company with such a reputable history of anti-communism?
I would suggest that the somewhat paranoid betrayal narratives targeted
at Thuy Nga are best read as something of a disguised or cryptic recognition
of the fact of the opening up of the diasporic public sphere to the
homeland by market forces. Consumer desires in the diaspora, it seems,
have increasingly little respect for exilic niceties. So successful has the
doi moi rejuvenation of commercial cultural production in Vietnam been
that homeland cultural traffic has begun to flow the other way. Just as
Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, and Xian are gaining ground against
Hong Kong and Taiwan in the competition to serve as the geographic
centre of Chinese popular cultural production (Harding 1995, p. 23),
so Ho Chi Minh City is coming into contention with Westminster,
California, and Paris. Homeland-produced music is increasingly visible
on the shelves of CD and video stores in overseas Vietnamese communities.
Take, for instance, this response, posted on an overseas Vietnamese
Internet list, about a collection of homeland songs chat a Vietnamese-American
contributor had heard on a tape brought back by a relative
from Vietnam:
Now I have good news For you. Put away your tape. You can get these songs
on CDs. Although you may not find the Lan Song Xanh I & II collection in
its original packaging in the U.S. (because it is produced by the Voice of
Vietnam), you will find all the songs contained therein on musical CDs published
in Little Saigon and San Jose (Mu+cTi'm Production). I was in Little
Saigon last week and picked up copies of Ho A'
ng Nhung and My- Linh's
CDs for $ 1.99 each (at La'ng Va(n in Phuoc Loc Tho Mall on Bolsa). Some
of these are exact duplicates of those sold in Vietnam right down to the cover
picture, with the exception of the contact information of the producer! This
is yet another wonderful example of how normalization and commerce are
narrowing che dividing gaps between che Vietnamese-American and Vietnamese
in Vietnam and between che two countries. (Contributor co Vnforum,
26 June 1999)
This "reconciliationist" discourse sounds a strikingly different note to
those analysed above. It presents us with an image ofa very transnational
Little Saigon, where homeland music is freely available to consumers

132 Ashley Carruthers
who have brought a taste for it back from their trips to Vietnam. Note,
however, that the Californian companies which pirate the homeland
music are careful to remove the producers' names, fearful of a potential
backlash against anyone selling cultural products with the logos of stateowned
Vietnamese media companies on them. Note also the incredibly
cheap price of the CDs, US$2, not much more than the 25,000 dong
consumers in Vietnam pay!
The efflorescence of anti-communist sentiment around the Mother
video might be seen then as one of the perverse effects of globalization
and the claustrophobia of the increasing proximity of the Other, communist
Vietnam, While these post—doi moi debates involve the same
ideological symbols as the pit-doi moi ones, we should see them not in
terms of an opposition between territorial nation-states and Cold War
ideological blocs, as the diaspora's rejection of communism in a distant
homeland, but rather as a here-and-now refusal of a homeland identity
in the struggle between elites and the state for hegemony over an emergent
transnational Vietnamese social field. At stake in this struggle is the
exile class's very ability to reproduce its domination of diasporic politics.
With the general erosion of exile culture, exile cultural capital risks losing
its value in the field of community politics. Were this to happen, the
fact that one was once an officer in the South Vietnamese army, or that
one was once imprisoned by the communists, would no longer convey
the sense of legitimacy and right to speak for others in the community
that they currently do. The hegemony of the exiles would be over.
Nation-state
Occidentalism and cultural purity
If since the advent of doi moi Vietnam has maintained something of a
gracious silence on the international stage about its past and present
abuses by the West, its actions on the domestic front have spoken louder
than words in aligning it with the attitudes of states like Malaysia, Singapore,
and Indonesia to the Wests cultural excesses, Over the past decade,
the Vietnamese state has carried out a succession of cultural purity
drives in an attempt to slow the nations perceived inundation with foreign
cultural pollution. Such endeavours have, of course, a precedent in

5: National identity diasporic anxiety and music video culture in Vietnam 133
post-revolutionary anti-Western movements in Vietnam, and to an extent
have a continuity with the concerted attempt after the fell of Saigon
to throw out the "harmful neo-colonialist garbage of the US imperialists"
(Duiker 1989, p. 24; see also Taylor 1998, pp. 177-85). Contemporary
culture drives need to be read, however, as a specific response
to the changes wrought on Vietnam's cultural landscape by doi moi.
While earlier anti-Western movements were oriented towards a "simple"
deglobalization, contemporary discourses on cultural pollution take
place against the background of a transformed national identity, one
which is no longer autarchic but defines itself at least in part by its
openness (one speaks of doi moi as an "open door" or mo cua period).
<strong>Cultural</strong> purity drives address the need to renegotiate the terms of Vietnam's
integration into global culture, not to disentangle it once and for
all. On a more pragmatic note, the possibility of really re-engineering
national culture had been lost since doi moi let the genie of commercial
culture out of the bottle. What we witness now is damage control in the
unforseen circumstances to which reforms have led.
The most recent drive was an early 1996 campaign so fervent that it
was described by one local commentator as a "minor cultural revolution"
(NguoiTan Dinh, 2
7 March 1996). Instigated by the Central Party
Secretariat, this nation-wide movement sought to "protect and develop
the national character" through a massive effort to investigate the importation,
reproduction, and circulation of overseas cultural products
("Ban bi thu trung uong"). In the course of the campaign, vehicles with
loudspeakers drove through the streets calling on people to "eradicate
'noxious' culture and social evils and build an orderly and civilized environment"
("Thanh pho va ca nuoc..."). The confidence of foreign investors
was shaken when in Hanoi billboards bearing the brand names of
companies like Panasonic, Kodak, Coca-Cola, Aiwa, Tiger Beer, and
Sony were torn down without warning because they featured English
and other foreign-language slogans inscribed in letters more prominent
and colourful than those written in Vietnamese (Nguoi Tan Dinh, 7
March 1996). Pornographic magazines were burnt. Pirated videocassette
copies of films from Hong Kong and Taiwan, Asian neighbours
perceived to have fallen victim to the Western cultural rot, were singled
out for particular attention, The comic artist But Sai Gon [The Saigon

134 Ashley Carruthers
Pen] saw fit to illustrate the risk posed by them in a picture of a foreign
mercenary carrying a gun labelled "noxious culture", wearing an ammunition
belt loaded with video-cassettes reading "violence", "sex", "horror",
and "ghost stories", and casting a shadow of ngoai luong, literally
"foreign stream [of culture]" (Saigon Giai Phong, 12 January 1996, p.
6). At the conclusion of the first step of the campaign, 202,000 videocassettes
and several hundred thousand compact discs, laser discs, and
audio-cassettes had been seized and destroyed, and around half of the
estimated 6,000 video rental stores and "video cafes" in Ho Chi Minh
City had been forced to temporarily close down ("Khoi dan buoc ...,
"Thi truong video ..."). Those remaining open were permitted to carry
only stock approved by the censor. 3
Such a process of "cultural cleansing" can be read, clearly, according
to the Occidentalist paradigm elaborated by a number of contributors
to this volume (see Langenbach, Lee, Loong Wong, Yao), who understand
it as a discursive strategy by which Southeast Asian states have
reversed the classical Orientalist idiom (albeit asy metrically) to construct
themselves as the positive term in a relation whose Other is a degenerate
and ailing West. For Yao, such a production of the West as an object of
fear/desire articulates the Southeast Asian subjects anxieties in a globalized
world (see Yao, in this volume) — an uncertain and fluid context
in which we all, no doubt, need others against whom to fix our own
identities. Indeed, attempts such as that described above to classify culture
into the categories of "inside" and "outside" can be read as reactions
to the very indeterminacy to which such classifications are subject in the
context of globalization (Featherstone 1990, p. 11). It is here that Yao's
reading of the ambivalent signification of the cultural products of the
West according to the logic of "the stranger" is instructive. Like the
stranger, who refuses the distinction friend/ enemy and the spatial order
of proximity/distance it supports, the nagging and protracted presence
"amongst us" of the now familiar and desirable, now strange and dangerous
cultural products of the West puts into doubt the very principle
of oppositionality itself (Bauman 1990, pp. 148-49). Their presence in
many Southeast Asian contexts is, we can say, chronically ambivalent.
While retaining this basic analytical structure, I want to introduce a
further level of complexity into it by asking where might the term

5: National identity, diasporic anxiety, and music video culture in Vietnam 135
"diaspora" fit into the flawed and troubled narratives of Occidentalism?
Western yet not entirely so, other and yet something like ourselves, them
and yet us, diasporic subjectivity would appear to further confound
Occidentalisms effectivity as an ordering and normalizing discourse.
While with the re-admission of the West the Vietnamese state has had
to deal with the fact that "those who used to be outsiders now live amongst
us", with the return of diasporic culture it has had to cope with the more
troubling realization that this particular stranger is not as strange as it
might like him to be. Cosmopolitan yet familiar, Western yet unmistakably
Vietnamese, global yet filled with such local knowledge as the names
of Saigon streets or the colour of an autumn afternoon in Hanoi, this
popular diasporic music culture refuses to fit unproblematically into the
blanket category of "external" or "foreign" culture [ngoai luong] applied
to it in official discourse. Thus the diaspora becomes an ambivalent sign
which intrudes between Vietnam and the West, disrupting the spatial
boundaries and cultural polarities set up in the Vietnamese states particular
version of Occidentalist discourse.
Diasporic music in Vietnam 4
Contemporary diasporic music, having evolved out of a cosmopolitan
pre-1975 Saigonese culture which the communist victors sought in the
aftermath of the war to suppress and erase (Duiker 1989, pp. 32-33;
Nguyen Hung Quoc 1994), is still officially considered reactionary and
subversive in Vietnam. Pre-1975 musical works produced in the South
and those written after 1975 by diasporic artists are submitted to intense
scrutiny before being officially passed for circulation and performance.
Illegally circulating diasporic works have been subject to periodic
crackdowns, which have traditionally been part and parcel of antiforeign
culture drives such as the one described above. In the course of
that campaign, hundreds of thousands of pirated karaoke videos, laser
discs, cassette tapes, and compact discs were seized, and hundreds of
unlicensed karaoke machines used to play them were confiscated ("Tren
870 vu ..."). Customs officials at Ho Chi Minh City's Tan Son Nhat
airport, a key strategic and symbolic site during the campaign, seized
1,320 video-cassettes, compact discs, and laser discs described as having
"decadent and reactionary contents", that is, having originated in the

136 Ashley Carruthers
diaspora ("Tai cua khau Tan Son Nhat..."). It is estimated that more
than half of the karaoke parlours in Saigon were either shut down (or
voluntarily closed) during the course of the campaign for failure to comply
with licensing and censorship regulations, including possession of
illegal videos and laser discs ("Ket qua thuc hien ..."). One official noted
during the campaign, with evident satisfaction, that "when the (pirated)
overseas music videos disappear then local music and karaoke videos
reappear, bright and shining, in the display cases of the city's video shops"
("Tki truong video ...").
But such initiatives rarely have lasting effects. Despite the states
evident will to regulate their activities, consumers are easily able to sidestep
state control and obtain a wide range of diasporic titles on a barely
clandestine "grey market". This market is grey in that, while the state
appears to have the will to curtail it, it lacks an apparatus of surveillance
and discipline sufficiently powerful and efficient to do so (except for
extremely limited periods, and then only imperfectly). Even during the
height of the 1996 campaign, video store proprietors who had been
forced to temporarily close down their stores continued a clandestine
trade by taking their wares from house to house, a practice so common
it has a name, dich vu video gio xach (carry bag video service) (Nguoi
Tan Dinh, 7 March 1996). The state is thus obliged to tacitly permit
the existence of diasporic popular music and video, and to suffer its
nagging presence on the cultural landscape. When I conducted research
for this paper in Saigon at the end of 1997, a time when there was not a
"culture drive" in action, it was easy to obtain copies of overseas-produced
music variety shows at corner video stores, white vendors around
Saigon's central market, Cho Ben Thanh, were openly showing the latest
edition of the diasporic variety show Paris by Night on their display
screens. Karaoke parlours were being a little more cautious, particularly
those using laser disc technology, many initially showing patrons only
song menus with local music on them, but carrying diasporic discs behind
the scene, to be produced at the request of trusted customers.
The states fear of the threat of subversion posed by diasporic culture
is not, of course, untempered with desire — for the technical accomplishment,
high production values, and cosmopolitan aura of the
diasporic product. What really smarts about the popularity of diasporic

5: National identity, diasporic anxiety and music video culture in Vietnam 137
music is that it demonstrates the failure of national culture to meet consumers'
needs from within local cultural and economic resources. Much
to the chagrin of Vietnam's official cultural police and producers, the
culture of its former enemies has in the recent past bested the local product
in the competition for consumers' hearts and wallets. This has been
one of the pressures which has led to the wholesale transformation of
local music, music video, and karaoke. According to Philip Taylor, the
early 1980s saw the introduction of some Western pop and a broadening
of themes in "revolutionary music". The mid-1980s brought a rehabilitation
of the work of pre-reunification South Vietnamese artists such
as Van Cao and Trinh Cong Son, while 1986 saw an informal return to
pre-1975 music, and to overseas Vietnamese rearrangements of these
works, as well as post-1975 diasporic compositions (Taylor 1998, p.
214). In the 1990s, Vietnamese artists and producers have sought, as far
as they have been allowed, to emulate their diasporic counterparts, initially
in broadening the scope of song subject matter from revolutionary
and patriotic themes to more personal and introspective narratives —
including, of course, love songs —- and then in adopting the same fashions,
performative styles, and televisual genres (especially the music variety
show) favoured in the diaspora. Production and distribution companies
such as Fafilm and Saigon Television have sought and been granted
permission to include songs written and performed by diasporic artists
on their own releases in an attempt to reclaim their market share from a
monopoly of overseas artists. The situation back in 1995 was such that
most karaoke businesses, including state-owned ones, had no local Vietnamese
songs on their lists, only overseas ones (Nguoi Tan Dinh 1995). 5
More recently, a returned overseas Vietnamese noted: "When I was in
Vietnam, EVERY coffee shop and restaurant in Vietnam plays Vietnamese
music made overseas. Every home plays music made overseas"
(Tran Dinh Hoanh 1998).
Saigonese consumers
Interviewees 6
evidenced a genuine desire for these newly cosmopolitan
products of the local music industry, and many took pride in the assertion
that the local product is in fact now superior to the diasporic one. A
high percentage of interviewees recounted that the heyday of diasporic

138 Ashley Carruthers
music (and in particular Paris by Night) had been in the 1980s. This was
a decade in which local performers were still not entirely free to shrug
off the Confucian moral/political didactic function expected of popular
music by the Party, and in which production values remained extremely
low. Indeed, in the early 1990s, the "Young Music" (Nhac tuoi tre) programme
on Hanoi TV still consisted of badly dubbed and unfashionably
dressed singers self-consciously gesticulating beneath mirrorballs in
sparsely decorated studios. In addition, informants stressed, Paris by Night
had in the 1980s been "new". Audiences were curious. No doubt the
image of their diasporic compatriots amidst the trappings of Western
modernity provided a fascinating mirror to audiences' own (largely frustrated
7
) fantasies of consumption. There was also perhaps an element of
nostalgia here. In the South, the consumer habitus for exiled wartime
celebrities and their works was readily revived, since the nhac vang or
"yellow music" of the old regime had never ceased to circulate in secret
during the "closed door" period (Taylor 1998, p. 179). Respondents
also stressed that a sense of transgression had then adhered to watching
the show, which the authorities had regarded far more seriously than
they do now. "If you were caught with a copy of it then" a university
student told me, making a grave face, "then "Oh my God!'" (Oi troi oi!).
By way of showing how audiences' desire for diasporic music has cooled,
virtually all of the interviewees recounted the story of the unfavourable
popular response to a much anticipated live show staged by diasporic
performers around Tet 1996 at the Nha Hat Hoa Binh (Peace Concert
Hall), featuring Elvis Phuong and other diasporic luminaries. This was
the first time a large, high-profile diasporic show had come to Vietnam,
and the tickets to this event had been several times more expensive than
those to concerts given by local star performers such as Siu Black or My
Linh. Audiences were, reportedly, "extremely disappointed". One respondent
pointed out that the technical ability of the singers had not
been equal to that of local singers, while another reported, tellingly, that
audiences were immensely let down to see that "on the stage [che diasporic
artists] looked just like anyone else"!
It would be unwise not to take these comments critically. There is a
structural sense in which the diasporic artists' live performances could
not but have been disappointing to Vietnamese audiences, since the

5: National identity, diasporic anxiety, and music video culture in Vietnam 139
cosmopolitan aura which makes diasporic music culture so desirable is,
paradoxically, dependent on the absence and distance of the diaspora.
The actual presence of diasporic stars in the homeland cannot, of course,
deliver this aura. Rather, the banality of their empirical presence ruptures
it, and the magic is gone; they become "just like anyone else". A
further interpretation is suggested by one respondent's reflection that
perhaps the negative response to the singers was unfair, since people in
Vietnam generally delight in "trashing" (cbui) Viet Kieu (a term for overseas
Vietnamese with pejorative connotations) at any opportunity they
get. Thus we might read the unfavourable response to the singers as the
taking of a kind of nationalist pleasure, whereby Vietnamese nationals
seek to assert their cultural superiority over their diasporic counterparts.
In this vein, a university lecturer told me that overseas Vietnamese composers
are incapable of producing new works, and can only rehash pre-
1975 songs. His suggestion that the diaspora is "culturally exhausted"
makes a claim, I would argue, that those who remained in the homeland
have access to a source of cultural regeneration which those who
left do not — one which flows directly out of the soil, as it were. We
might read such a claim as an attempt on the part of the informant co
valorize his "hereness", his having stayed behind in Vietnam, as a way of
dealing with his lack of the qualities stereo typically attributed to Viet
Kieu (cosmopolitanism, wealth, international mobility, and so on).
Claiming that their immersion in the homeland is whac gives local artists
the edge over diasporic artists arrogates the lack co the diasporic
artists, who become culturally stagnant and inauthentic.
The assertion, made by almost all of the informants, that they did
not like and rarely watched diasporic videos, was belied, however, by the
fact that all viewers with whom I watched Paris by Night knew numerous
details about che show, such as the fact thac Paris by Night co-presenter
Ky Duyen is the lawyer daughter of former Republic of Vietnam President
and Air Force Commander Nguyen Cao Ky; or that Nguyen Ngoc
Ngan has literary pretensions, and has published a number of anti-Hanoi
treatises. Interviewees recognized many of the singers appearing on the
show, and displayed a high degree of familiarity with its format. After
having been told by the members of a household where I was staying
that they never watched diasporic videos, I was surprised to discover

140 Ashley Carruthers
upon looking into the video drawer that it was in fact full of them!
Members of this same household also watched with evident delight when
I brought home diaspotic videos, and even scolded me one time for
renting a pirate copy of inferior quality, giving me directions to go to a
more reputable pirateer. By contrast, the only informants who expressed
an unashamed preference for diasporic videos were those with a professed
dislike of the communist regime, those with a large number of
family members living overseas, or those with a keen desire to emigrate
themselves.
This evidence would suggest, then, that respondents were using
popular music culture as a ground on which to express their nationalist
identifications. Unfavourable popular feeling against diasporic music
might be seen as an expression of their desire to participate in the states
vision of a self-sufficient national culture chat rejects corrupting influences
from the West. It may also be read as a (state-sponsored) denial of
the model of cultural modernity presented by the diaspora, which is
considered to have played too dangerous a game with Western modernity,
and lost its roots in the process. Their accual practice of consumption,
however, indicates the inability of national culture co meet their
(disavowed) consumer aspirations and desire for the glittering produces
of Western modernity.
Conservative resistance to the
"diasporization" of Vietnamese music
In 1995, the Office for the Protection of Culture of the Ho Chi Minh
City Ministry of Information and Culture, in co-ordination with the
police, performed a series of raids on a number of famous karaoke restaurants
in Saigon. Officials seized 240 laser discs belonging to che
"Golden Discs" or "Super Besc Collection 20" series, carrying the serial
numbers 8001, 8002, and 8003. The significant thing about this case
was that these three discs, each containing twenty selected songs, were
not pirates of diasporic music, but were actually produced by the stateowned
Saigon Television Service, in co-operation wich Lek video Hong
Kong. The official reason for the seizure of the discs was chat they contained
"a number of songs closely connected with the military of the
Republic of Vietnam". This was not, however, a clear-cut case. All of

5: National identity, diasporic anxiety, and music video culture in Vietnam 141
these songs, made popular by their performance by diasporic artists,
were in fact on a list of 130 works written in South Vietnam before
1975 that had been passed for performance and circulation by the national
Office for Culture and Information. The Saigon Television Service
was furious at the confiscation of the discs and, supported by the
newspaper Thanh Nien [Youth], entered into a vitriolic public debate
with the Ministry (Nguoi Tan Dinh 1995, "Quang cao, bang video ..."),
What I want to highlight here is the fact that a government agency
in Ho Chi Minh City should have felt so strongly that it took it upon
itself to actually go beyond the guidelines laid down by Hanoi for the
regulation of diasporic and pre-revolutionary Saigonese culture to seize
copies of the "Golden Discs" series, thus coming into conflict with the
national censor. We may read many things into this action. For one, it is
reminiscent of a particular anxiety on Hanoi's part about southern Vietnamese
cultural identity as being "determined by hostile and alien forces"
(Taylor 1998, p. 185). (I can remember a time when it was illegal to
dance the lambada in Saigon while it was legal in Hanoi!) For another, it
is perhaps an instance of conflict between conservatives and progressives
in the regime, a split which allegedly originates in the Politburo. Such
bickering between government agencies over the suitability of particular
songs is also indicative of a more general ambivalence on the part of
the state towards the diaspora. The state's desire to co-opt overseas Vietnamese
subjects capital and professional skills for its own project of
nation-building is coupled with a fear of their politically subversive potential
and oppositional conception of the national project (officially
referred to as the threat of "peaceful evolution"). We find quite a frank
discussion of this in the government literature on overseas Vietnamese.
One author draws readers' attention to the following: "There are around
400,000 Vietnamese living overseas who have tertiary and higher degrees
... Through them we might reach out and grasp the latest achievements
of science and industry, including the sciences of management
and business." However, the state must be wary, lest it be "insufficiently
vigilant with regard to a small bad element, extreme reactionaries who
openly declare their opposition to our administration" (Pham Xuan Nam
1997, p. 298). In the states relation to its recalcitrant overseas subjects
we discern much of its relation to the West and modernity in general.

142 Ashley Carruthers
Here, the overseas Vietnamese are in some moments seen as embodying
che possibility of a new, true modernization that will nevertheless leave
Vietnam's "cultural values" (and hence the state's hold on power) intact.
Hence the desirability of overseas Vietnamese professionals who are "integrated
with the societies and peoples of their host cultures while at the
same time preserving their original cultural characteristics" and who
thus may "contribute their part alongside the local people to build the
nation" (ibid., p, 300). The flipside of this is the fear that the overseas
Vietnamese have become too Western, too modern, and that their presence
in the homeland must undermine the moral basis of the Confucianauthoritarian
state.
Another instance of conflict between government agencies sprang
up in 1996 over the song A Love Ten Years Past, written by exile composer
Tran Quang Nam and performed by overseas star Elvis Phuong.
Young Film Saigon had submitted the song to the Ministry of Arc and
Performance in Hanoi who, after close consideration, found that Tran
Quang Nam's attitude to che nation and the contents of his song had
"no problems" (Nguoi Tan Dinh, 12 September 1996). After the song's
release, however, musician Diep Minh Tuyen, vice-general secretary of
the Saigon Music Association, wrote a scathing newspaper article about
the piece, which he described as "a reactionary overseas song of extremely
subtle wickedness":
This song which has been supposed to be purely a love song really has an
accusatory and inimical character ... Its reactionary intention comes out in
its name.. is no question that [the composer] was writing about che
ten years since the defeat and flight [of the southern regime] (1975-85),
whether he might have left before or after 1975 ... The lyrics of "A Love Ten
Years Past also announce ics deep and subtle reactionary character. The love
of this song isn't che love of people who live in our national community, it
isn't thac of chose who stood beside us in the front line. The thirtieth of April
1975 is for us a great day, marking the glorious victory of our people, when
we were "happy after che tears flowed", as Xuan Hong has sung. But in "A
Love Ten Years Past", che man in che song abandoned his nation, and from
under Western skies fraudulently spews forth moving words about a past
lover, co whom he is without doubt still faithful, moaning and crying for a
love cut short: "A love unexpectedly cut short, a love still like a dream". Ask
yourself, who does che author mean co accuse of "breaking up" this affair? He
left his lover and ran away but still asks: "My love, over there are your eyes

5; National identity, diasporic anxiety, and music video culture in Vietnam
still sad?" then lifts his voice co counsel her co "Forget, forget this sad dream".
We see dearly whac che author is trying to say here: whoever stayed behind to
live under the new regime must have "sad eyes and sad dreams". When the
composer says "[We had] a whole sky full of love, when will it come back?",
he longingly remembers the love he has lost: South Vietnam before liberation.
(Nguoi Tan Dinh, 12 September 1996)
What strikes me most about Diep Minh Tuyen's somewhat paranoid
reading of A Love Ten Yean Past— a song which the censor was satisfied
is nothing but an innocuous love ballad — is its emphatic insistence on
the difference of the diasporic Vietnamese, a people "whose love is not
our love" (is theirs a bourgeois love?), from those who remained in the
homeland. The author is in such earnest to convert these strangers into
unequivocal enemies that he is obliged to indulge in an almost comically
forced interpretation of the songs lyrics to "find out" its subtly
concealed subversive intentions.
Conclusion: a common culture?
Diep Minh Tuyen's evident need to insist that homeland is homeland
and diaspora is diaspora presupposes the possibility that the two are
capable of becoming, or have become, muddied. And indeed this is the
case. What is so infuriating for conservatives in Vietnam and in the
diaspora alike is the fact that, given the post-doi moi shift of song subject
matter from war and revolution to love and nostalgia for a timeless
and apolitical homeland, overseas and local Vietnamese popular music
culture arc to an extent no longer distinguishable. The homeland/diaspora
difference is frequently not pertinent to audiences in the act of consumption,
and confusion reigns as to whether such and such a song or
singer is local or overseas. This confusion reflects the fact that there now
exist figures in the Vietnamese music industry whom it is hard to locate
as being exclusively diasporic or homeland. Perhaps the best instance of
this crossover is the revered composer Trinh Cong Son, who actually
lives in Vietnam but enjoys equal popularity at home and in the diaspora,
and has had a long and fruitful collaboration with overseas singer Khanh
Ly. A further instance of this border-crossing is the appearance of Huong
Lan, the revered diasporic performer, in the homeland variety show Duyen
Dang 6 (1998). Having just arrived from San Jose, she declared to the
143

144 Ashley Carruthers
shows host that she'd been particularly keen to fly in to take part, since
Duyen Dang is "so popular both at home and overseas". Other examples
are singers such as My Linh, Ngoc Son, Ai Van, and Hong Nhung. All
of these figures have had, of course, in their personal and professional
lives, to "choose their sides". Their music, however, hovers somewhere
in between. One is equally likely to come across it in music stores, or
hear it played in restaurants, in Saigon, Westminster, Paris, or Sydney.
As for consumers of transnational Chinese commercial culture, this music
potentially enables Vietnamese consumers "to inhabit trans-spatial and
trans-temporal imaginaries that dissolve the fixity and boundedness of
historical nationhood and state territorial imperatives" (Yang 1997, p.
288). The opening up of such spaces, and the struggles of diaspora and
homeland to recoup them into their respective territorial imaginaries, is
the next chapter in the history of the relations between Vietnam and the
Vietnamese overseas.
NOTES
1, Remittances have been sent by overseas Vietnamese back to Vietnam since che lace
1970s, reaching the level of US$700 million per annum by che time doi moi was
instituted (Nugent 1996, p. 147). It is currently estimated chat US$1 billion to
US$1.2 billion is remitted to Vietnam annually through official channels, forming
5 per cent of the councry's GDP or 11 per cent of export earnings, bringing in
more foreign exchange than any other source bar oil exports, and equal co yearly
rice export earnings. Ten years' accumulated remittances are equal to ten years
accumulated foreign investment in Ho Chi Minh City (Hong Le Tho 1999;
Haughton 1999). When one adds unofficial remittances, the figure could be as
high as 3 billion. While Vietnam's overseas population is around 3 percent of its
in-country population (Tran Trong Dang Dan estimates 3.7 per cent [1997, p.
251]), comparable to that of China, remittance flows into Vietnam are far more
important, both in per capita terms and relative to incomes, than chose into China
(Haughton 1999, p, 32). Virtually all of this money comes from overseas Vietnamese.
Haughton estimates that che typical adult overseas Vietnamese is sending about
US$500 to family and friends in Vietnam every year, or US$2,000 per emigrant
household. Mandy Thomas reports that among her Vietnamese Australian research
subjects, about 10 per cent of net income was sent back home (Thomas 1997, p.
171). Of che 300,000 overseas Vietnamese who return each year (around 15 per
cent of the diaspora), most carry gifts of cash and other goods to relatives (Haughton
1999, p. 33).

5; National identity, diasporic anxiety, and music video culture in Vietnam 145
2. Since I will use much of "Nguoi Tan Dinh" work here, a note on his posittonality
is warranted. Firstly, "Nguoi Tan Dinh", or the "Man from Tan Dinh" is a pseudonym
taken from che name of a street in Saigon's District 3. While Nguoi Tan
Dinh's articles appear in the Toronto-based newspaper Thoi Bao, he himself is actually
based in Ho Chi Minh City, where he worked as a professor both before and
after 1975, that is, under both the southern Republic of Vietnam and the unified
Socialise Republic of Vietnam regimes. He is now retired. His being on the ground
in Saigon, avid interest in matters of censorship and popular culture and exhaustive
reading of Vietnamese newspapers and magazines make him an excellent source.
His work is neither dogmatically anti-Hanoi, as is much overseas Vietnamese writing,
nor is ic excessively constrained by local censorship, since it is destined for
publication overseas (Kim Nguyen, personal letter; Nguyen Due [editor of Thoi
Bao], personal letter),
3. It was estimated chat 85 co 90 per cent of stock in Saigon's 3,000 unlicensed video
stores was foreign ("Thi cruong video ...").
4. This section draws on archival and ethnographic research I carried out in Ho Chi
Minh City (Saigon) at the end of 1997, as well as overseas Vietnamese publications
pertaining to diasporic culture in Saigon. I have focused on Saigon because it is che
largest market for diasporic culture in Vietnam. Its economy has revived much
more quickly under doi moi than has chat of Hanoi, where central planning was
implemented as early as 1954. As a consequence, private entertainment technologies
such as karaoke machines, VCRs, compact disc players and, more recently,
laser disc players, continue co be more within che financial reach of Saigon residents
than their northern counterparts. Such technologies are necessary to access
diasporic culture, which very rarely features on broadcast media. Further, diasporic
culture has its roots in a pre-1975 Saigonese culture which still exists in the living
memories of many Saigon residents. Some diasporic stars, such as Khanh Ly and
Elvis Phuong, are already familiar co che Saigon audience, since they won their
fame in Saigon before fleeing the city's fall, resuming their careers in the diaspora.
While I have focused on Saigon, however, much of what I have to say is applicable
co Vietnam as a whole.
5. For instance, the Tay Uyen Karaoke Restaurant, belonging to the state-run "House
of Culture" of Saigon's district one, had in 1995 "no local Vietnamese songs on its
list, only overseas (Vietnamese) music". According to one author, this was because
"overseas laser discs have more good songs, especially noisy rock songs and feelgood
songs, and also background shots of Europe and America, that our people
just cam get enough of, as well as some other pretty exciting images, so it's easy to
see thac they have pushed the local product out of che way" (Nguoi Tan Dinh
1995).
6. I had informal interviews with over twenty Saigonese, ranging in age from sixteen
co over forty, about their castes in music, music video, and karaoke, in all cases

146 Ashley Carruthers
asking specifically whether they preferred diasporic or local products and performers.
Wherever possible I also watched diasporic music videos with informants in
their households.
7. See Lockhart (1992, pp. 26-28; 1994, p. 176), on consumer frustration in doi moi
Vietnam.

5: National identity, diasporic anxiety, and music video culture in Vietnam 147

1 4 8
Ashley Carruthers

5: National identity, diasporic anxiety, and music video culture in Vietnam 149

The post-modernization
of Thainess
KASIAN TEJAPIRA
Consumerism versus nationalism
On 28 April 1993, Wednesday, Manager Daily, a best-selling Thailanguage
business daily, carried a full-page advertisement of the Association
of Siamese Architects under Royal Patronage (ASA) announcing
its annual seminar for that year on the theme of " Seubto winyan seubsan
weld" ("Tradition and Trend", in the Association's own English rendering,
although a more literal translation would be "Carry on the Spirit,
Move on with the Times"), to be held in the Plenary Hall at Queen
Sirikit National Convention Center from 30 April to 3 May. The advertisement
featured a photograph of an attractive young Thai lady elegantly
dressed in a business suit. Sitting relaxed in an armchair and looking
intently (even invitingly) at her supposed viewers, she was surrounded
by several graphic pointers with English captions revealing the un-
Thainess of various parts of her bodywear, namely, a hairstyle with a
"Parisian Touch", "Italian Import(ed)" ear-rings, "American Fragrance",
a suit of "English Wool", a "Swiss Made" watch, and "Japanese Silk"
stockings. A big caption in the top right corner of the photograph asks,
directly enough: "Bok dai mai khun pen thai thi trong nai?' ("Can you
tell which part of you makes you Thai?").
But who, actually, was the "you" being asked? And who, for that

6: The post-modernization of Thainess 151
matter, was the consumer of un-Thai commodities being looked at?
Was it the lady in the photograph or her viewers? Through her reflexive
gaze, the viewers were enticed to look with unexpected and growing
unease at her image as evidence of the possibility of their own un-
Thaincss, their imagined communion with her being grounded on the
common challengeability of their Thai identity. For once, the voyeurs
themselves were subjected to ethnic self-voyeurism.
But not for long. The lengthy caption beneath the photograph rushed
to relieve the viewers of the troubling, incipient self-doubt about their
own national identity with a quick-fix, soothing message:
Its not strange if we are used to bread and coffee more than rice with curry.
... There's nothing wrong with the fact that we arc dressed in Western style.
Its not unusual that we drive Japanese cars. Because Thai-Thai feelings still
remain in our spirit... That's why ARCHITECT 93 summons up the meaning
of Thai style of living again by presenting contemporary architectural ideas
that are consonant with the Thai way of life in an attempt to stimulate ties
between modern living and Thai identity under the theme "Carry on the
Spirit, Move on with the Times" (Tradition and Trend) in order to preserve
Thainess. (Authors translation, emphases added) 1
Without pausing to elaborate on what "Thai-Thai feelings", "Thai style
of living", "Thai way of life", "Thai identity", and "Thainess" were, the
advertisement hurried along to invite architects and the public from all
over to the seminar to learn and exchange ideas so as to formulate "the
concept of a unique contemporary Thai architecture". Ironically, the
highlight of this mission turned out to be an introductory speech on
"present day new concepts [sic]" by a "world renowned Japanese architect,
Mr Fumihiko Maki" (emphasis added). The advertisement then
ended with an assuring note: "And we who are called Thais ... will not
be 'Thais' by name only." 2
The presumption that Thainess and the consumption of un-Thai
commodities could coexist without qualms or dissonance, the fact that
Thai architects these days could begin to discuss contemporary Thai
architecture only after hearing words of wisdom from their Japanese
counterpart, stand in stark contrast to Thainess of yesteryear when the
burgeoning nationalist, democratic student movement launched an effective
and influential campaign to boycott Japanese goods in the early

152 Kasian Tejapira
1970s. Being then in high school, I was shown by one of my classmates
(whose Thai name, by the way, happened to be Ekkaraj, meaning "independence")
a newspaper clipping of a contemporary Thai poem. The
poem wittily rhymed familiar brand names of Japanese consumer products
in the Thai market with Thai words, and hilariously poked fun at
the way Thai people unceasingly and unthinkingly pursue the consumption
of these Japanese goods in their daily lives. The poem left such a
profound impression on me that, twenty years later, having been through
one massacre in Thammasat University, one failed guerrilla war in the
jungles of northeast Thailand and Cambodia, one doctoral thesis at
Cornell, and another recent mass uprising in the middle of Bangkok,
and having forgotten the details of its reference save some of its culturalpolitical
resonance, I still could recite from memory its first and final
rhyming couplets. Needless to say, it was the lady with un-Thai bodywear
in the above-mentioned advertisement who reminded me most strongly
of that poem. And here is its full text, with the title Khaniyom ("Values"),
by a virtual unknown, Mr Sakda Jintanawijit:
First thing in the morning,
grasp White Lion toothpaste and enjoy brushing teeth;
then make some tea with a National electric kettle
and smooth down hair with Tanjo pomade.
Put on Thaitorae Tetoron clothes,
wear a Seiko watch when leave home,
listen to government news broadcasts on a vSanyo radio,
drive a Toyota to pick up girlfriend.
Wonder where to do luxurious shopping?
Go to Daimaru where there are plenty
of consumer products made in Japan,
sent here from faraway Nippon.
Girlfriend buys Kanebo cosmetics
and also those of Shiseido and Pola,
Wacoal underwear for her big boobs,
Onkyo electric appliances for her ecstasy.
Then back at home, switch on a Toshiba TV set,
flip through the channels looking for Gamo and Kendo, 3
But after fighting mosquitoes for a while,
feel like visiting Saburi massage parlour. 4

6: The post-modernization-of Thainess 153
In our modern daily life,
we begin to have self-doubt
so we ask an Asahi mirror;
"Eh, am I a Thai?"
("Watachiwa thai yen deseuka?") 4
Freedom of consumption and liberation of national identity
To this soul-searching, nationalist question self-reflexively and rhymingly
posed by a Thai consumer of Japanese goods twenty-one years earlier,
the resounding answer unhesitatingly and unrhymingly proffered by a
Thai consumer of un-Thai commodities today is emphatically: "Yes, I
am a Thai despite my consumption of many an un-Thai thing!" 6
What I would argue is that this affirmative answer signifies, in
present-day Thailand, cultural liberation from the nationalist regimes
of the past and present, be it radical leftist or right-wing authoritarian.
This liberation is achieved by consumption in which the consideration
of national identity is irrelevant. One can consume commodities of
whatever places of origin regardless of ones own identity with no nationalist
angst, guilt, or remorse. Or, to parody a well-known cri d'extase
a la the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Thai consumers
are now "free, free at last!" (to consume whatever they desire). On
the other hand, consumption also signals the liberation of national identity
as signifier from the specific national or ethnic commodityreferents.
Thus Thainess becomes unanchored, uprooted, and freed from
the regime of reference to commodities signifying national or ethnic
Thai identity. Thainess is now able, as it were, to roam freely around the
commodified globe, to coexist and copulate with Italian ear-rings, American
fragrance, English wool, a Swiss-made watch, Seiko, Sanyo, Toyota,
Wacoal, or any other un-Thai commodities and sundries. Its referential
essence lies in mere spectral, amorphous, and undefined Thai-Thai feelings
in the spirit. Once liberated, Thainess takes wing and turns into a
free-wheeling, free-floating signifier.
And yet, come to think of it, is it the products themselves or their
representations, that is, brand names, that is at issue here? From the
point of view of our lady with un-Thai bodywear and her fellow consuming
compatriots, will it still be acceptable if the brand names of that

154 Kasian Tejapim
bread and coffee and those Western dresses and Japanese cars which
they consume daily are changed from fashionably foreign to commonplace
Thai ones (for example, from Sony to Sent, or from Hitachi to
Hatthachai)} Or, if Thai products assume exotic foreign brand or even
generic names, will they be more or less palatable to the Thai national spirit?
Numerous examples spring to mind in this connection. Not long
ago, the Thai manufacturer of a popular but controversial stimulant
drink called Krating Daeng (meaning Red Bull) marketed a new product,
a sterilized refreshing tissue, under the English brand name of Red
Bull. Also, during the annual Chinese Buddhist kin je (a Thai term for
going vegetarian) festival in October 1994, a long-established Thai manufacturer
of a variety of canned food products bearing the Tra nok phirab
(Pigeon Brand) trademark launched canned, ready-cooked Chinese vegetarian
food under the brand name of J-Foods, which is a fantastic
linguistic hybrid consisting of the abbreviated English transliteration of
aThai word whose origin is Teochew Chinese plus an English word.' In
addition, there are Regency brandy, Cute Press, and Oriental Princess
cosmetics — all locally produced by Thai manufacturers. As to generic
names, during the 1994 Chinese lunar festival, the traditional Chinese
cakes consumed for the occasion had the Thai name khanom wai prajan
changed simply to "moon cake".
The foregoing questions are also posed against the background of a
growing trend among Thai business companies, film, and TV stars, singers,
musicians, and entertainers to adopt foreign (that is, Western and
Chinese) names for themselves and their products and services. 8
This is
readily understandable with regard to those companies, products, and
individuals with a foreign market and audiences in mind, But even when
they are clearly for domestic consumption, foreign names are still widely
adopted. Thus, most shopping centres in Bangkok and major provincial
centres carry such names as Central, the Mall, Robinson, Pata, Welco,
Wonder, Safco, Cathay, and so forth; the bigger and better-known among
Thai companies adopt such names as Telecom Asia, Jasmine International,
Bangkok Land and Houses, IBC, Thai Sky TV, Media of Medias,
and so forth; and singers of Thai songs adopt such foreign-sounding
stage names as Tik Chiro, Chen Chen Bunsungnoen, Honey Sri-isan,
and so forth. 9

6: The post-modernization of Thainess 155
The reason for this, as revealed by MrThiraphol Phongphana-ngam,
the general manager of a newly opened Thai fast-seafood restaurant located
in the midst of cut-throat competition from nearby McDonalds,
Popeyes, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the like in a huge shopping mall
in an affluent residential area in Bangkok, is presumably fairly typical.
He explains why, having pondered over more than 200 possible names,
he finally chose to name his restaurant in English as Calico Jack:
Although we set up our restaurant for Thai customers, it would be risky to
use a Thai name. That's why we decided to use an English name in order to
create an inter [sic] image as well as to compete with ourselves. (Author's own
translation)
So according to MrThiraphol, in order "to compete with ourselves" or,
in other words, to drive our Thai selves harder, we need an inter(national)
image created by a foreign brand name to prod us and prick our Thai
conscience.
Freedom from Thainess
The adoption of foreign brand names by Thai products aside, it has
become increasingly difficult in the present age of economic globalization
to determine the Thai/un-Thai nationality of a consumer product
in the market through its original brand name. It is now possible, according
to Milton Friedman, "to produce a product anywhere, using
resources from anywhere, by a company located anywhere, to be sold
anywhere" (Naisbitt 1994, p. 19). So, not surprisingly, Thailand has
become, in recent years, a favourite overseas investment site and production
base for exports of many Japanese, Asian NIE (newly industrializing
economy), and Western multinational corporations, owing to its
comparatively low labour costs and strategic geo-economic location as a
gateway to Indochina' and South China. Not only Toyota but also
Mitsubishi, Isuzu, Honda, Nissan, Volvo, and BMW cars; not only
National but also Sony, Sharp, Sanyo, Saijo Denki, and Nordmende
electric appliances are now being manufactured or assembled in Thailand
with increasing more local content. In the strictly economic sense,
with regard to the productive process, these "foreign" products are already
becoming more and more Thai despite their brand names. What

156 Kasian Tejapira
is actually liberated so as to be united with Thainess may not be so
much the products themselves as the foreign significations in their brand
names.
The liberating force of consumption and brand names leads to the
next logical step: the liberation of identity from the national as defined
by the state. Through various attempts by the royal absolutist and military
authoritarian governments of the past, what have emerged arc certain
recognizable imaginary characteristics of Thainess, constructed out
of the official nationalist ethno-ideology sponsored by the state. These I
have summarized elsewhere (Kasian 1995) as:
1. The Thai nation as a harmonious village (national) community.
2. The state as an organic outgrowth of traditional hierarchy from family
to community to nation.
3. Vigilance against "the political and ideological other" and "outsiders"
arbitrarily misrepresented in racial or ethnic terms as "un-Thai".
4. Deflection of the origin of social problems to the level of personal
morality.
5. Thainess is culturally unique.
6. Buddhism as the national religion.
Try as the state may, Thai national identity never settles into a homogeneous
and unproblematic whole for the average people. In practice,
what is regarded as Thai identity is more likely to be a ghostly
mesmerizing by one or more of these characteristics. Nonetheless, it is
against this shadowy realm of imaginary Thainess that consumption
would operate. As the Thainess signified by things Thai is let loose, the
meaning of Thai identity is also ruptured into multiple significds which
people can partake of through the consumption of goods. To put it
another way, the manifold freedom from the barriers imposed by national
or ethnic self-identity simultaneously allows Thai consumers the
possibility of consuming commodities, not for their utility value, but as
cultural signs of desired identity.
The alienation of the Thai people from Thainess, the distance they
subconsciously assume between themselves and their supposed national/
ethnic essence, is evidently the underlying premise in the following ex-

6: The post-modernization of Thainess 157
cerpts from the interviews of four rising young stars in the Thai entertainment
industry. First, Miss Angkhana Thimdi or simply Ann, a sexy
film and TV star, fashion model, and occasional singer, well-known for
her voluptuous body and revealing dresses, had her attitude towards
Thainess written up as follows just before the beginning of the official
Pi ronnarong watthanatham thai (Year to Campaign for Thai Culture)
of 1994:
Does anyone know that, even though she likes to wear extremely provocative
dresses, actually Ann-Angkhana Thimdi is very strict in observing Thai traditional
customs, to the point of always saying a Buddhist prayer before going
to sleep ... She also likes to give alms to Buddhist monks regularly. Moreover,
she is a very old-fashioned lady who likes to preserve Thainess ... However,
that Ann-Angkhana must wear such provocative dresses ... is due to the
fact that she has a good figure and wants to show off what she has. ... And
having learned a lot about the teachings of Buddha lately, Ann-Angkhana
would like to take vows as a Brahmin nun sometime next year, (Authors
translation, emphasis added) 11
In the same vein, Mr Billy Ogan, a popular young Filipino-Thai
singer and film and TV star, explained the concept of his new album in
relation to the official Year to Campaign for Thai Culture as follows:
Although the songs that will be produced are teenage songs, Thai cultural
issues will also be stressed. This is because next year will be the Year to Campaign
for Thai Culture, therefore, in regard co the new songs, Thai cultural
issues must be mixed in. And personally speaking, I also like Thainess a lot
but don't have much chance so far to express that. So, when there is a chance
of producing songs according to my own ideas, I would like to bring out
what I myself am ... (Authors translation)'"
And last but not least, Kob-Paphassara Chutanuphong and Tui-Monreudi
Yamaphai, two famous leading female TV stars, told a newspaper reporter
of their special plan jointly to celebrate the 1995 Saint Valentines
Day in a very Thai-Thai way:
While most young stars who are in love take today's opportunity (14 Feb.) to
celebrate Valentines Day or the Day of Love according to Western custom,
the young-star couple, Kob-Paphassara Chutanuphong and Tui-Monreudi
Yamaphai, choose instead to observe the Thai Buddhist festival of Magha
Puja (a Buddhist festival on the day of the full moon in the third lunar month
to commemorate the spontaneous great assembly of the Buddha's disciples

158 Kasian Tejapira
— Kasian) which falls on the same date, Kob-Paphassara states that actually
she and Tui have already celebrated their Day of Love festival late last year by
touring round the U.S. for two full weeks with Tui's elder sister. "Both of us
work hard and intend to save ten thousand Baht a month. When October
and November come, we will spend our savings on a tour to refresh ourselves.
This year, we plan to go to Italy." However, it so happens that this
year's Valentine's Day coincides with the Magha Puja Day. So, Kob decides
on doing something special even though they have already celebrated the
Day of Love. Kob says that on February the 14th, she and Tui will fly to che
province of Kilasin to make merit by buying a bookcase for the Tipitaka and
Pali texts for a Buddhist temple as well as wearing a white dress and observing
the Buddhist precepts in that temple for a day. On the following day, they
will come back to work. (Authors translation, emphases added) 13
So, professedly, all four of them — Ann, Billy, Kob, and Tui, like
Thainess, love Thainess, and desire to remain Thai and, better still, to
become even more Thai. Their common desire is premised upon the
existence of Thainess as the object of desire, with themselves as the desiring
subjects. Moreover, in the very act of pursuing Thainess, the four
subjects concurrently reveal a split in their respective personalities and
symptoms of cultural schizophrenia. Thus we have, in the same Miss
Thimdi, the presumably un-Thai, sexy, exhibitionist Ann and the presumably
Thai traditionalist, Buddhist Angkhana. Again, in the case of
Mr Ogan, we have Billy, the embodiment of un-Thai teenage fads and
Ogan, the lover of Thai culture. As for Misses Chutanuphong and
Yamaphai, there are, on the one hand, Kob and Tui, who crave after
foreign tourist exotica and, on the other hand, Paphassara and Monreudi,
who prefer observing the Thai Magha Puja to the West's Valentine Day.
Each one's own claim that his/her Thai self is deeper, truer, and more
authentic than its un-Thai counterpart can only be taken with a grain of
salt, given the context in which the statements were made, namely, right
before and shortly after the official Year to Campaign for Thai Culture.
Rather, his or her fragmented subjectivity seems to be flexible and selective,
in response to the varying demands of the different cultural markets
in Thailand which include, among others, the government, the
Buddhist faithful, teenagers, soft porn fans, and so forth. None of these
market segments is deeper, truer, or more authentic than the others.
They are constituted by different groups of image consumers.

6: The post-modernization of Thainess 159
<strong>Cultural</strong> schizophrenia
Lest anyone should think that Ann, Billy, Kob, and Tui are isolated
individual cases, let me introduce further instances of cultural schizophrenia.
When the 125 students who took the Creative Copywriting
class at Ramkhamhaeng University's Department of Advertising and
Public Relations were assigned by their instructors to make a one-page
advertisement to instil Thai cultural values into todays youth on the
occasion of the Year to Campaign for Thai Culture, the best twenty
picked out by the instructors include the samples in the table on the
following page.
Over and over again, the same symptoms as in the cases of Ann,
Billy, Kob, and Tui are shown here: a split personality or fragmented
subjectivity, be it individual or collective, realistic or symbolic (rap dancer
versus Thai dancer, screaming youths versus shouting soldiers, jeans versus
a Raja Pattern dress, a skateboard versus Thai-Thai games, Singha versus
Lion King); the submersion, subjectification, spiritualization,
interiorization of Thainess 14
(evident in phrases like "Thai (classical)
dance is not forgotten", and "not (Thai) on the outside, but the heart is
genuinely Thai"); 15
the claim that the interiorized Thai self is more authentic
than the projected un-Thai self in the form of dress and behaviour
(thus the Thai classical dance and the genuinely Thai heart are
more authentic than the Western "rap"); and lastly, the irrepressible desire
to be Thai (which is supposed to keep on haunting Thais even when
they are rap dancing, screaming in a pop concert, or watching a Walt
Disney cartoon). As the lyrics of one of Billy Ogan's songs pro<strong>claims</strong>: "If
you want to rap dance, lets do it but don't forget to preserve Thai-Thai
things. Associate with Westerners but don't forget that you are Thais". 16
After solid Thainess has been vaporized and inhaled into the psyche,
it is then purged of any elements deemed unsuitable for the urgent
task of surviving in the increasingly competitive economic and cultural
environment of globalized Thailand. In the same manner that the manager
of Calico Jack had to give his Thai fast-seafood restaurant an un-
Thai name so as "to compete with our (Thai) selves', Mr Patrick
McGeown, an Australian creative head of EURO RSCG Ball Partnership,
and one of the two instructors who taught the above students in

160 Kasian Tejapira

6: The post-modernization of Thainess 161
their Creative Copywriting class, advised his students on Thainess and
their future advertising careers as follows:
It's really for the students to think that they are Thai and never forget it. They
don't have to drop it when they go into the real world of advertising; it should
be something that they should always carry with them. The things that are
created in Thailand — when creating an advertisement try to make it Thai,
keep it Thai. It doesn't have co be Western; they don't have to copy. (Reeya
1994, p. 18)
So for, so good; then he continued:
Its because Thai people have this nature of being kreng jai [that is, being
considerate] and always saying mat pen rai [chat is, never mind]. That is why
I insist that my students .speak up if they don't agree about anything. This is
not because I'm trying to change Thai traditional values of always being polite
and giving in, but rather I'm doing it co improve the advertising industry,
ultimately, by standing up for ones ideas, (Reeya 1994, p. 19)
And here again we have dual personalities in the same person- There
is, on the one hand, Pat, a Siamophile, lover of Thai culture ("Thailand
is rich in culture — so is India — but America and Australia are not", so
he averred), who repeatedly urged his students to "always carry (Thainess)
with them". Then there is, let us call him Mac, a world-class advertising
guru, who regarded krengjai and mai pen rai as a hindrance to the improvement
of the advertising industry and insisted that his students had
to "drop it" and thereby become more "un-Thai". Alas, this proves that
nationality and ethnicity provide no immunity to the truly infectious
disorder of cultural schizophrenia, induced by the desire to beThai amidst
the un-Thai exigencies of globalization.
The case of Pat Mac offers an interesting contrast to that of Calico
Jack. While Calico Jack represents an attempt to become "un-Thai" under
an un-Thai sign, Pat Mac makes the clarion call to his students to try
desperately to become "un-Thai" in their working style under the sign
of "Thainess". One can well imagine, some time in the future, one of
Pat Macs former students arguing in a very "un-Thai" style, that is,
forcefully and assertively, without krengjai and mai pen rai, with his/her
surprised, polite, and submissive Thai copywriting colleagues in a worldclass
advertising agency for his/her own idea of "Thai" advertisements, I
would like to call this process the psychological sublimation of un-

162 Kasian Tejapira
Thainess, in which un-Thai urges are expressed under more socially
acceptable Thai signs.
<strong>Cultural</strong> sublimation: psychological and pseudo-chemical
But Thainess is also sublimated in another sense. In the chemical process,
"to sublimate" is to change a solid substance into gas by subjecting it
to high heat before solidifying it again to achieve greater purification. I
have already discussed how solid Thainess is melted into air, spirited
into the psyche, in order to purge it of those elements that are not conducive
to un-Thai globalization. The last step in the "sublimation" of
Thainess is to resolidify it as a sign. To do this, we need an appropriate,
readily recognizable "Thai" form for encapsulating that sign. Indeed
that form has to be old, venerable, immutable, and by the same token,
rather irrelevant and fossilized in present-day circumstances. Such is the
form associated with almost all advertisements, official or private, related
to the government's designated Year to Campaign for Thai Culture
as well as most public displays and individual expressions on this
theme. This can be clearly seen in the Ramkhamhaeng students' Thai-
Thai advertisements above. Most of the signs with which they chose to
express Thainess in their advertisements are of this character. And it is
perhaps for the same reason that, to give other examples, the Thai traditional
dress and Thai classical dance are not seen anywhere else but in a
museum, theatre, or Buddhist temple on special occasions. Thai-Thai
games are hardly ever played by most urban Thai youths or they have
stopped playing them a long time ago since their parents took them
away from the rural villages. Generally speaking, a singha appears only
either on a bottle of Singha Beer or on the logo of the Ministry of the
Interior, "the least just and honest government agency", according to
the findings of a recent opinion poll commissioned by the Ministry
itself. 17
Military parades and prowess have become less and less relevant
to Thai national security and political stability since the collapse of the
Thai communist rural insurgency in the early 1980s, the end of the
Cold War at the end of that decade, and the middle-class uprising against
military rule in May 1992.
In any case, symptomatic of the pseudo-chemical sublimation of
Thainess is a statement by Mr Anand Praphaso, on behalf of a group of
eight Thai painters named Klum Nimit (or the Creation Group), on the

6: The post-modernization of Thainess 163
occasion of the opening of the exhibition of their collection of paintings
called Thai Nimit ("Thai Creation") at Landmark Plaza Hotel in Bangkok
on 17 March 1994. Anand proclaimed:
In che age of turbulent cultural currents, no one denies that every Thai has to
be able to lead his life amidst che growth and prosperity of a modern society.
.., Modern Thai society has made us into a heartless robot. ...
Is not it high time that each and every one of us revived the spirit of being a
Thai? Is not it high time that each and every one of us refused to lead a life of
a brainless robot without any feeling for the spirit ofThainess?
"The Nimit Group has created the collection of their works of art called "Thai
Nimit" in order partly co contribute towards the arousing and awakening of
the consciousness of being a Thai so that it may come back in the form of
"Thai Mai" ("New Thai"), which is in harmony with modern society. We
hope that our collection will contribute cowards linking up Thainess with
technology unawkwardly. We hope that the children will know what is Thai
art, what is a Thai, and that a modern Thai must be "a genuine Thai". 18
A sample of their collective effort to spiritualize and project Thainess
back into a solid image reportedly consisted of a young Thai male in
traditional northern Lanna Thai princely dress with all the awkward
trappings of ancient royalty.
In these fossilized forms, Thainess has been ripped away from its
traditional social contexts, deprived of its aura and turned into a freefloating
signifier which can then be commodified by goods of any nationality
or origin. Thus, apart from Coke — the promoter of Thai
values long before the official Year to Campaign for Thai Culture, we
have such Thai-Thai advertising campaigns as "Singha Beer — the pride
of the nation", 19
"Thai Life Insurance — the life insurance company of,
by, and for, the Thais", 20
"Central Department Store — the Thai Store", 21
and so forth. These commodified forms have changed Thainess willynilly
into one identity option among many others in the free market of
a limitless plurality of significations, in the same sense that Coke is just
one option among many other brands of cola, Singha Beer is just one
option among many other brands of beer, and so on. In the process,
Thainess has become, alongside Chineseness, Europeanness, Englishness,
and so forth, another choice among a variety of national/ethnic
signifiers to be worn or shed according to the changing circumstances.
Nationality and ethnicity having been loosened and unravelled thus

164 Kasian Tejapira
far, it is now possible for commodities to take the next logical step, that
is, to undo their tie with the national altogether and create an identity
of their own under the sign of their respective brand name. The following
are a few examples of commodity-constituted identity being offered
for prospective identity consumers in a globalized world.
Tri Fetch Isuzu Sales Co. Ltd. presents a sports utility vehicle imported
from Japan as the identity sign of its prospective buyers. Its advertisement,
which appeared in Bangkok Post on 16 July 1994, includes
these words:
You've reached the top: its up to you to make the big decisions, the ones that
count. Your achievement is the realization of everything that people think of
when they hear the word success, and your position is one thac everyone
aspires to attain some day. Now your life is full of new and bigger challenges.
And when you move out into the world to experience the special exhilaration
that come with leadership, you drive a car thac reflects your identity as someone
who is modern, successful, and ready for anything — an Isuzu Trooper.
To the seemingly endless and meaningless collective suffering of
nameless, faceless, and powerless drivers in Bangkok's world-notorious
suffocating traffic jams, Volvo offers itself as a symbolic difference and
relief:
Outside the Volvo its hot, noisy and polluted. Inside the Volvo it's cool, very
quiet and very, very comfortable. The Volvo Executive is an island of luxury
and tranquillity in a sea of impatience and discomfort. Of course, everyone
knows that Bangkok's traffic is getting worse by che month. And even a Volvo,
with its deep leather seats, auto air-conditioning, CD player and stretch-out
legroom, cannot make the traffic jams any shorter. But they certainly seem
shorter. Thank goodness, I'm in a Volvo. 22
Last but not least, the same message is said in not so many words by
this advertisement, which offers a special credit card membership to
prospective or actual owners of a luxurious can "You know who I am.
Tell them who you are with the Mercedes Card." (Bangkok Post, 15
August 1994, p. 13). No longer a Thai, a Thai-Thai, or even an un-
Thai, but simply a Mercedes person.
Conclusion
The current rapid and disconcerting changes in Thai identity have been
brought about by two major forces. First, there is the pervasive process

6: The post- modernization of Thainess 165
of economic and cultural globalization. On the other hand, there is the
attempt of the Thai state to hold on to its cultural and political hegemony;
to control the signification of Thainess amidst the flux of globalization
and commodification. Under the pretext of conserving
Thainess, the state tries to maintain and reassert its official nationalist
authority over an increasingly fluid and complex society and culture. It
is for this purpose that the Year to Campaign for Thai Culture project
was launched in 1994, and then extended for another three years.
And yet, the upshot of the official campaign for Thai culture, instead
of freezing Thainess as the state intended, is to further loosen the
signifieds of Thainess, It is true that in enthusiastic and energetic response
to the official clarion calls, Thainess has come to be seen everywhere
in the cities. But it makes its appearance as an empty, free-floating
signifier which is made to refer to both un-Thai and super Thai-Thai
things. The game of Thainess is an interplay between the official ethnoideology
of Thainess and the popular desire to be Thai unleashed by the
state. The result of this interplay is the negotiation, fragmentation, and
vaporization of Thainess as an object of desire.
But if Thainess has been vaporized in a truly post-modern process,
how does one go about representing the unrepresentable? I have tried to
demonstrate one can do this by looking, reading and perhaps voyeurizing
the various images of Thainess. The crucial thing to look for is not what
the images are supposed to represent, which has proven to be amorphous
and imaginary. Rather, it is in the images or signs themselves,
disconnected from their referents, that their true significance can be
discovered. For, in the end Thainess the signifier signifies nothing beyond
itself. The prior, cherished Thainess, promoted by the state and
desired by the people, is nothing more than a purely empty signifier. It
is in this desolate semiotic setting that global capitalisms violent assault
on Thainess takes place.
NOTES
A less elliptical and trendy if rather cumbersome title than the one being used here
would be: "Solid Thainess Melts into Air ... and then Solidifies Again into Signs:
National Identity and the Consumption of Identity Commodities in the Age of <strong>Cultural</strong>
Globalization". It is perhaps a self-conscious play of post-modernism that many
of che substantive details in support of my argument are in the footnotes rhat follow.

166 Kasian Tejapira
1. It is a long-standing and popular Thai linguistic practice to double an adjective so
as to lessen the effect or intensity of its meaning. Thus, daeng is supposed to be
redder than daeng-daeng which is not very red. Likewise, whereas Thai implies a
singular, pure, genuine, authentic, original, definite, narrow, and monolithic version
of Thainess, Thai-Thai connotes a pluralistic, mixed, mutant, altered, simulated,
indefinite, broad, and differentiated version of the same. For example, one
usually applies the adjective Thai-Thai to foods, drinks, tastes, dresses, atmosphere,
and so forth, but never to nation, country, people, armed forces, government, or
king which remain chat thai, prathes thai, khon thai, kongthap thai, ratthabal thai,
phramahakasat thai. While Thai suggests a clear-cut division, disparity and even
opposition between Thainess and un-Thainess both in their material existence and
ideal essence, Thai-Thai indicates internal differentiation, blurring of external borderlines
and shades of Thai-Thainess. Suffice it to say that Thai-Thai seems to
admit a far greater and wider membership of people and things into its club than
the rather exclusive Thai counterpart.
2. Phoojadkan Raiwan, 28 April 1994, p. 22. The English version of this advertisement
with basically the same message but in a more concise and less colourful
rendering was published on the same day in Bangkok Post, p. 2.
3. Being shown on Thai TV at the time, these two Japanese film series were especially
popular among kids and youngsters.
4. Presumably, the name of a massage parlour in Bangkok at the time. Massage parlours
began to sprout in Bangkok during the 1960s and quickly gained popularity
and notoriety as upgraded brothels. Ic was then a common practice among massage
parlours' proprietors to give their establishments an exotic Japanese-sounding
name like Saburi or Sakura which by no means necessarily implied any Japanese
ownership or connection. While its origin is unclear to me, I distinctly remember
a contemporary strong sense of association between massage on the one hand and
Japanese femininity on the other as if somehow ic had been the Japanese females
who excelled in the art of massage! Perhaps, this might have something to do with
the stereotype of a slavishly submissive Japanese wife.
5. Supposedly, a Japanese rendering of the question in the preceding line. The name
of the bohemian friend who "returned" this long-lost poem to me is Mr Suphachai
Jaroensakwatthana. The newspaper article in which he found it quoted is
"Khwamsamphan thai-yipun: Phapphot thi mai plianplaeng" [Thai-Japanese relationship:
the unchanged image], by Banyat Surakanwit, published in Matichon,
2 May 1983. The poem itself was originally published in Thairath, 17 December
1972.
6. Between the nationalism-above-consumerism of the 1972 Khaniyom poem and
the consumerism-above-nationalism of che 1993 ASA's advertisement lay a text
which mosc aptly captured the increasing commodification and de-rtferentialization
of the Thai signifier, namely, a Thai folk song with the English title of Made in

6: The post-modernization of Thainess 167
Thailand composed and played by a highly popular folk song group named Carabao
in 1984. Owing co its economic nationalist message, the song won government
approval and promotion and quickly became a cop hit. And yet, the jacket of the
Carabao cassette tape that featured this song bore a widely recognizable trademark
of the Coke soft drink in red and straightforwardly declared in print the following
assuring message: "Coke and Carabao jointly promote the value of Thainess"! See
cassette tape jacket information, Made in Thailand (Carabao 1984).
7. "Je n. food without fish or meat for Vietnamese or Chinese who observe a religious
rite, also Jae. (Chinese)" [my own translation]. See Photjananukrom ratchabandittayasathan
pho.so. 2525 [The Royal Inscicuce's dictionary, B.E. 2525] (Bangkok: The Royal
Institute, 1987), p. 238.
8. According to Associate Professor Dr Wilaiwan Khanisthanan of the Faculty of Liberal
Arts, Thammasat University, a recent survey of the brand names of products
advertised on Thai television shows that over 90 per cent of them are in English.
See Suphaphorn (1995, p. 5).
9. In this regard, ic is noteworthy chat a favourite gimmick among Thai singers is to
adopt a foreign stage name (for example, Honey, Chen Chen) but keep the surname
in Thai or a local dialect (for example, Sri-isan, Bunsungnoen, both of which
are distinctly Laotian). As for business establishments with original names in Thai,
a convenient ploy is to use the abbreviations of their English transliterations along
with them. Hence, DK for Duang Kamol Bookstore, MBK for Mabunkhrong
Shopping Center, CP for the Charoen Phokphand Group. Interestingly, the nominal
metamorphosis of the Charoen Phokphand multinational conglomerate from
Chia Tai through Charoen Phokphand into CP is indicative of che cultural and
economic transformations of Sino-Thai businesses in general (Suehiro 1992).
10. "Meua fast seafood baeb thai thai ja soo ham-kai sanchat nok" [When Thai-Thai
fast-seafood is going to fight ham-chicken of foreign nationality], Phoojadkan
Raiwan, 1 November 1994, pp. 29-30.
11. "Ann khan rab fashion hit, anurak-buach chiphram" [Ann responds co fashionable
hie, preserve Thainess — cake vows as Brahmin nun], Thairath, 30 December 1993,
p. 21.
12. "Khita yib chin pla mun khwa billy" [The Khita Company catches a big fish,
getting Billy], Thairath, 15 December 1993, p. 21,
13. "Maghavalencine kob-tui sweet sangob khao wad tham bun-nunghom khao" [On
Magha-Valentine's Day Kob and Tui sweetly and calmly go to the temple to make
merit and wear a white dress], Thairath, 14 February 1995, p. 14. A not-so-subtle
insinuation of lesbianism in their relationship by the Thairath reporter is distastefully
evident.
14. Emphatically not "internalization" for reasons that will soon become apparent.
15. A superb telepathic allegory of this spiritualization of Thainess emerged on a simi-

168 Kasian Tejapira
lar occasion, namely, a TV and radio spot contest on the theme of the Year to
Campaign for Thai Culture, jointly organized by the Office of the National Culture
Commission (a government agency under che Ministry of Education) and
Robinson Department Store, The top award in che radio spot category was won by
a team of five students from Chulalongkorn University whose entry was entitled
Mun khleun phid (or "Wrong Tuning"). They explained the concept behind their
work as follows (my own translation): "Suppose a kid turns on a radio, tries tuning
in to every possible program and then finds only Thai classical music — Thac is
well nigh impossible. But if we tune our mind, that is our feelings and spirit, then
we can receive Thai classical music and love Thai classical music. We can be tuned
in together and don't have to depend on other things around us including mass
media." ("Seu spot thorathas lae witthayu: sing sathon wacthanatham no. so. thai"
[TV and radio spots: reflections of Thai students' culture], Siam Post, 18 May
1994, p. 11).
16. From Sawaddi rap yo (or "Good Day Rap, Yo") in the album Billy World Class, by
Billy Ogan (1994).
17. The survey was conducted by Integrated Partners, a private company, among 1,200
people throughout the country from 1 to 19 November 1993. As it turned out that
che overall public perception of the Ministry was strongly negative, the Ministry
typically decided to suppress the findings for fear that its reputation would be
further tarnished. See "Opinion Poll Without Results", Bangkok Post, 9 June 1994,
p. 1; and "Poey phol wijai mahadthai, kromthidin-to.ro. huai sud" [Opinion poll
on Interior Ministry revealed, Lands & Police Depts. are the worst], Matichon
Raiwan, 9 June 1994, pp. 1, 13.
18. "Nithassakan 'thai nimit' pluk khwam pen thai hai kheun chip" [The "Thai Nimit"
exhibition: che revival of Thainess], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 22 February 1994, p. 10.
19. See the reports on the advertising and marketing campaign of Bunrod Brewery
Company, the producer of Singha Beer in Phoojadkan Raiwan, 9 December 1993,
pp. 25, 26; and especially the perceptive, tempting, and intoxicating comparative
analysis of the advertising strategies of Singha Beer versus Carlsberg Beer by Issara
(1993, p. 35).
It should be pointed out in this regard chat Thais are well aware of the un-
Thainess of beer as an alcoholic drink originally brought in from the West. There is
not even a Thai coinage for the word "beer", only a foreign-sounding transliteration.
It is in this cultural context that Singha Beer chooses to present itself to the
public as the pioneer in beer-brewing in Thailand and therefore a proud sign of
Thainess.
20. A TV advertising spot released in 1993 made the point that among the variety of
insurance companies, Thai Life Insurance was chosen "well, because I am after all
a Thai", so said the male character in the advertisement co his wife. And yet, this

6: The post-modernization of Thainess 169
Thai Life Insurance company had been founded in the 1940s by such Chinese
business tycoons as LoTek Chuan Bulasuk, Tan Chin Ken Wanglee, and so forth.
See Kasian Tejapira* "Jomphol plaek; phoonam ratdianiyom thai" [Field Marshal
Plaek: Thai statist leader), Sinlapawatthanatham 15, no, 3 (January 1994): 56-59.
21. Launched on 6 July 1994 by the cop executives of Central Department Store themselves,
all dressed up in traditional Thai style, the campaign was said to be partly an
adaptive management reform in the wake of the liberalization of Thai retail businesses
as a result of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the
ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), and partly a participative response to the government's
Year to Campaign for Thai Culture. Needless to say, the Chirathiwat family,
which owns this biggest chain of department stores in Thailand, is originally
Hainanese of the Zheng clan. Also, this Thai-Thai store has adopted an English
name since its founding. Of course, their Thai store campaign has become rather
problematic in the present context of global capitals and multinational (Thai and
un-Thai) business alliances in Thailand. See Phoemphol (1994, pp. 29, 30).
22, One may as well say "Thank goodness, I'm a Volvo". Bangkok Post Economic Review,
Mid-Year 1994, 30 June 1994, p. 5.

170 Kasian Tejapira

Part Three
State power,
development,
and the
spectre of
nation-building

<strong>Cultural</strong> <strong>claims</strong> on the
new world order: Malaysia
as a voice for the Third World?
LOONG WONG
The Cold War, as Martin Shaw (1992) has reminded us, has been "cold";
its dominating feature was the "freezing" of the domain of national politics
by international considerations, With the declaration of the end of
the Cold War in the 1990s, the "primacy of the national" reasserts itself
in international agendas, This is largely a consequence of the end of
"ideological politics" and the relative decline of geopolitical posturing
and reasoning especially by the major powers. Accepted theories and
practices of international relations were challenged and are in the process
of transition and/or transformation. New constitutive and reflexive
agendas reinserted themselves into the interplay of global diplomacy
and politics: human rights, the market, environment, "security", and
"rights" all now re-emerged as fundamental issues yet to be resolved
within the world.
Notwithstanding this flux in history, some commentators still maintained
a unilinear reading of global trends (Buzan 1991a; 1991b;
Fukuyama 1989), For these analysts, the end of history is nigh and the
indomitable West, accompanied with its twin angels — liberal democracy
and market capitalism — continues co triumph. What is remark-

174 Loong Wong
able in this reading of world events is the failure to grasp the historical
effects the West has had on the "non-West" via colonization, armaments,
and economic domination, processes which have subverted histories and
stunted development in the non-Western world,
A more fundamental question, however, remains: how far will the
"West" be able to carry public opinion, both within its domestic space
and without? For many in the West, a post-materialist post-modern
political agenda, based no longer on the satisfaction of wants but of
values, and no longer confined to representation of national interests
but that of international responsibilities, is gaining salience. This has
correspondingly engendered new ways of relating and different modes
of sociability. The dominant cultural traditions of progress, universalism
and objectivism are now interrogated and struggled over. Unlike
Fukuyama's and like-minded prosaic proclamations of the "end of history",
different histories and their fragments are being reconstituted,
created, and recreated.
The discussion of this chapter is set within the framework of
"postcolonialism" (During 1985) and is an attempt at "re-thinking history"
(Jenkins 1991). Notwithstanding Baudrillards post-modern assertion
that in a media society it is impossible to delineate historical
trajectories or political effects (1983), I contend that it is possible to
offer a richer and deeper appreciation of the practices of international
relations and politics as they are being constructed and rearticulated
through a closer examination of the relationship between the media,
culture, and the nation-state. The chapter focuses on the emergence of
Malaysia within global politics and seeks to position Malaysia within
the terrain in which the contestation and negotiation of strategic geopolitical
space between Malaysia and the "West" takes place. Malaysia, an
ex-British colony in Southeast Asia, has assiduously pressed its <strong>claims</strong> to
be heard within the global arena. Expeditiously exercising its "statecraft",
Malaysia has managed to rearticulate many post-colonial concerns —
human rights, sovereignty, trade, culture, and "imperialisms" — and, in
the process, critique the West for its neglect and different reading of
these concerns. My discussion attempts to identify, probe, and make
explicit the "differences" and political considerations affecting Malaysia's
attempts to renegotiate its position with the West, in particular the

7: <strong>Cultural</strong> <strong>claims</strong>: Malaysia as a voice fir the Third World? 175
relationship and representations of Malaysia in its "positioning" within
the vectors of a new global order.
Culture and international relations
In a text in international relations, Barry Buzan (1991a) made the claim
that the study of international relations can only be state-centred. For
him, states are inevitable and are the sole providers for security arrangements.
Whilst this line of argument has been dominant and has been
subjected to critique (which is beyond the purview of this chapter), a
second line of criticism can be laid against Buzan. In the book and in a
subsequent article, Buzan (1991a, 1991b) asserted that the centre (that
is, the West) is now more dominant than ever and that the non-West is
largely irrelevant in the calculus of world politics. This rather crude reading
of the non-West totally negates the efficacy of culture within global
political discourses and ignores the legacy associated with Western imperial
violence.
John Ravenhill (1993), while agreeing with Buzans <strong>claims</strong> in some
aspects, is more circumspect. He suggests that neglecting the periphery
(the non-West) within the ambit of the new world order can only be
read as a new rationalization of an old realpolitik, and as something
certainly counter-productive for the realization of justice and legitimacy
within the world. It is apparent that notwithstanding Ravenhills intervention,
the methodological assumptions of Buzans work remain relatively
uncontested: the nature of states remains a vexing question for
many theorists. Similarly, culture remains a neglected dimension in this
worldview and is subsumed within the purview of the state. <strong>Cultural</strong>
differences, in this representation, becomes solely a matter of national
identity and any exploration of such differences must not transgress on
state boundaries and its all hegemonic sovereignty,
Clearly, such an approach to culture and its analysis is inadequate in
failing to take into account the current debates on the nature of cultural
discourses. "Culture", described by Raymond Williams (1983) as one
of the two or three most complicated words in the English language,
defies easy definition. At its most deceptively simple, "culture" refers to
the artistic and intellectual product of an dike. More generally, it refers
to a system of shared beliefs or the whole way of life of a social group as

176 Loong Wang
it is structured by representation and power. <strong>Cultural</strong> analysis, therefore,
also involves an examination of the relations of power and the ways
in which dominance and subordination are negotiated and resisted, where
meanings are not just imposed, but contested. Conceived in this manner,
culture is no longer reducible to a fixed property of social groups
but "something intrinsically fluid, changing, unstable and dynamic"
through which social groups enact their "social and historical relationships"
(Gilroy 1990, p. 206). Deleuze and Parnet (1987) have reminded
us that such cultural interactions in this sense invariably bring about
collisions and collusions — a combined deterritorialization which simultaneously
opens up new sites of discursive possibility and reconstitution
of meanings. In international relations discourse, culture read
this way opens up new fields of inquiry. Such an inquiry evokes notions
of cultural innovation and, in so doing, problematizes much taken-forgranted
representational politics, social and racial formations, and their
corresponding institutional conditions.
Asia, Asia, Asia on my mind
In analysing the attributes of the West as synonymous with white hegemony,
Richard Dyer (1988, pp. 45-47) has suggested that the valency
and potency of the power of whiteness lies in its ability to project
a seemingly natural, neutral, transcendental image, comprising the full
diversity of human experiences. This "universalism", through a series of
historical conquests, connivances and betrayals, led to a global ascendancy
of the "West" in which power and control were maintained through
violence and coercion. The subordinated peoples and areas were written
out, demarcated, and reconstituted; their situations and status were
(re)defined, their ideas filtered out and/or erased. They became a "fixed
reality which is at once an "other" and yet entirely knowable and visible"
(Bhabha 1983, p. 33).
"Asia" has always engaged the minds of Western explorers, navigators,
scientists, and politicians right throughout the ages. It was adventure,
glory, gold, danger, and the great unknown, For the West, "Asia"
was also a pastiche of images. But as the dust of colonization settled and
Western administrators and scientists consolidated their positions, "Asia"
as a concept and an imaginary needed to be managed, demarcated, and

7: <strong>Cultural</strong> <strong>claims</strong>; Malaysia as a voice for the Third World? 177
defined. "Asia" became more derivative and more restricted; in colonial
discourses, it increasingly tapered down to a separation of the pure from
the impure, approximating and resembling more a closed totality — an
"Us" and "Them" binary difference. Turning to contemporary Western
popular imagination, Asia is a cauldron of fire, the "enemy", the "plague",
a place teeming with "hordes" which could only be tamed by the Marines
and Western technological know-how. As pointed out by Hamilton:
In [these) popular representations ... the Asian has been a non-individuated
"native" ... [It) is apparent that any Asian native can substitute for any other
(in films depicting Asian natives) ... [The] clothing, speech and habitations
of the Asian arc interchangeable, as long as the essential "atmosphere" of Asia
[scenic rice fields, rivers and ranges contrasted with dirty, smelly, bustling
cities) can be presented. (Hamilton 1990, p. 24)
As Hamilton goes on to illustrate, this homogenized picture of Asia is
misguided. Such an image of Asia, while invoking a multitude of circuits
of meaning, in the main reconfirms the notion of Western superiority.
The "Asia" so conceived and generalized reflects a continuum of
the Western tradition of an invented Asia incorporated "for Europe,
and only for Europe" (Said 1978, pp. 71-72).
This process has been aptly described by Said as "Orientalism".
"Grientalism", Said writes, is a "closed system in which objects are what
they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological
reasons that no empirical matter can either dislodge or alter"
(ibid., p, 70). Any reference to direct observation and experience not
cast in the terms of Orientalist discourse would endanger the whole
structure of knowledge. Orientalism thus relies on its own peculiar logic,
"its consistency about its constitutive will-to-power over the Orient"
(ibid., p. 222), In this way, Asia (the Orient) was always given, to be
constituted, known, understood, and controlled, through a Western imagining.
In his critique of Western constructions of "Asia", Dr Mahathir
Mohamad, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, has pointed to the outmoded
but still prevalent Eurocentric image of "Asia" (Mahathir and Ishihara
1995). The image of "Asia" as "romantic", "strange", "exquisite", and
"exotic" merely marks a continuance of a static "Western" woridview.

178 Loong Wong
Dr Mahathir goes on to point out — on this occasion in any case —
that "Asia" is far more diverse and indeed, the term "Asia" has no "equivalent
word in any Asian language". Indeed, in the words of Chaudhuri,
"Asia" is derived as "the inverse mirror image of geographical Europe"
and "will hold over time only as long as the identity of the set of sets",
Europe is intact" (Chaudhuri 1990, pp. 22-23). The imagining of "Asia"
is both a process and a phenomenon through which Europe names the
Other. Seen this way, Asia can be understood in a number of ways. It
denotes a geographical entity (a continent), a multitude of nations, histories
and societies, rather than a homogeneous bounded entity. Thus,
in his interpellation of what constitutes an "Asian" culture, Roger Keesing
reminds us:
There is no Asian "culture" we can characterise without oversimplifying the
picture: exaggerating the boundedness, discreteness and homogeneity of a
way of life, glossing over internal cleavages of class and gender (and usually
ethnicity as well), camouflaging conflicting interests and silencing dissenting
voices; and essentialising and eternalising, thus disguising radical changes
that have differentially affected rural communities and urban settings. (Keesing
1991, p. 46)
Any fetishising of simple cultural explanations, either in defiance of or
sympathethic to the Western imagining is both naive and patronizing.
More to the point, in these representations, the "heterogeneity of social
formations" and experiences within Asia is "submerged within a singular
identity of experience" (Aijaz Ahmad 1987, p. 10), making a lie out
of the rich, heterogeneous diversity of Asia. Remarkably, this reductive
homogenization of "Asia" is often undertaken, not only by Orientalist
scholars, but also by many Asian leaders themselves. In articulating a
narrower and more restrictive "Asian" telos, Asian politicians such as
Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew effectively perpetuate the stereotypical image
of "Asia", emptying it of its history and agency. It is this Janus-like dynamic
in the contestatory imagining of "Asia" thac has occupied the
minds of diplomats, members of government, politicians, and analysts,
and has rendered problematic any attempt at international dialogue in
terms of such simple distinctions as that between Western universalism
and Asian particularism.

7: <strong>Cultural</strong> <strong>claims</strong>; Malaysia as a voice for the Third World? 179
Malaysia and the West
Malaysia, like Asia as a whole, has been subjected to diverse readings.
Colonial authorities have variously described the country as an Eden, a
dystopia and a "living hell" (during the post-war years of communist
insurgency). Contemporary Malaysia is frequently referred to in terms
of its human rights abuses and its being ruled by an undemocratic government
whose leaders are renowned for their dictatorial practices. The
Malaysian state has responded to such criticism by adopting a dual strategy.
Going on the offensive, the Malaysian state has charged Western
media of telling and perpetuating lies about Malaysia, 1
while at the same
time seeking to present itself as a moral force in international politics. It
has championed environmental causes in the "Third World" (Far Eastern
Economic Review, 27 August 1992), criticized the nature of Western
involvement in the Bosnian crisis (Star, 23 April to 16 May 1994), supported
the minimum wages proposal for developing countries in the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GAIT) (Star, 21-23 April
1994), spoken out on human rights (Far Eastern Economic Review, 17
June 1993) and other populist issues. In so doing, the Malaysian state
has sought to move laterally and encircle its critics. Positioning itself on
the axis between the metropolitan position, by virtue of its developing
economy, and the "colonial" geographical peripheries, it has attempted
to (re) negotiate the imbalance of power existing between itself and the
West, In doing so, it seeks to reinscribe at the same time a crucial national
imaginary by creating a national identity, restoring national pride
and reaffirming its quest for autonomy and national self-determination
and, as argued by Yao in this volume, fortifying the country against the
influences of modernity and globalization.
When it became independent in 1958 from the British, Malaysia
adopted a fairly pro-Western international position. It continued to seek
security support from and economic ties with Britain and its allies. There
was consistency and predictability in the relations with the West, and
Malaysia's strategic interests and economic fortunes were tied in with its
old colonial masters and their friends. Economic, political, and security
arrangements were kept ostensibly intact even as the sun set on the empire.
As a new generation of leaders came into power, Malaysia, since

180 Loong Wong
the mid-1970s has demonstrated a more dynamic and assertive role in
international politics (Datuk Abdullah Ahmad 1990, pp. 113-14), In
his study of the evolution of Malaysia's foreign policy, Johan
Saravanamuttu has described it as grappling with the "dilemmas of independence",
as increasingly taking a more "radical" developing world
orientation, and as "equidistancing" itself from the "Western alliance"
(Saravanamuttu 1987, p. 144).
In the 1990s, under Dr Mahathir, Malaysia has been steadfast and
vociferous in its critiques of the West. These critiques cover a wide range
of issues: the moral bankruptcy and inconsistent approaches to human
rights practices and abuses in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Somalia; the intransigence
of dominant "Western" powers in restructuring the United
Nations; the "hypocrisy" of the position of "developed countries" on the
environment and minimum labour standards practices. The Malaysian
state has also taken on a pro-South position against the West. It has
reproached the West on its existing trade and economic embargo on
Iraq, continuing nuclear testing in the South Pacific and the approaches
on issues of autonomy, and self-determination in "Third World" countries.
In criticizing the West, Malaysia is seeking to mobilize support
against Western hegemony and in a sense, attempting to renegotiate
leadership roles for the non-West. This is perhaps most clearly manifested
in the processes surrounding the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
(APEC) discussions. Right from the beginning Dr Mahathir
has not shown much enthusiasm for APEC. According to Vatikiotis, Dr
Mahathir blocked plans in 1985 "to expand ASEAN's discussions with
its dialogue partners, the United States, Canada, Japan and Australasia
in what would have been an embryonic precursor of APEC" (Far Eastern
Economic Review, 31 January 1991, pp. 32-33). In floating a counterproposal,
the East Asian Economic Grouping (EAEG) (subsequently
known as the EAEC [East Asian Economic Caucus]), Dr Mahathir
sought to exclude all Western membership and influences from an Asian
grouping of nations.
Greg Sheridan, writing in the Australian, has described Malaysia's
current foreign policy as displaying a "strong close of and-Western sentiment"
which "plays on feelings of Asian solidarity" (Australian, 6 No-

7: <strong>Cultural</strong> <strong>claims</strong>: Malaysia as a voice for the Third World? 181
vember 1991). This is in keeping with Dr Mahathir's preference for
"Eastern" values and his corresponding distaste for "Western" values (see
also Mahathir and Ishihara 1995, also Yao, Ang, Weng in this volume).
Through his "frontal assaults" on the West, Dr Mahathir has managed
to propel himself as a "new voice for the Third World" (Far Eastern
Economic Review, 20 August 1992, pp. 16-19; Zakaria Haji Ahmad
1990, p". 127; Age, 2 September 1992), if not "the voice of Asia" (Mahathir
and Ishihara 1995). Throughout the latter part of the 1980s and into
the 1990s, Dr Mahathir has made political use of Western media attacks
on Malaysian (and other "Third World" governments) policy to
argue that Malaysia (and other "Third World" countries generally) should
not be judged by standards set by first world countries. In making public
its views, the Malaysian state actively solicited support from the
marginalized sections of the global community to curtail international
criticisms and to manage the adverse global public agenda inconsistent
with Malaysia's internal policies.
All this is especially important in the context of global "democratization"
trends and the social change in Malaysia and the rest of the
developing world. In challenging "First world" countries for their patronizing
and condescending attitudes, Malaysia is able to muster international
support from the "Third World". A critical arena which the
Malaysian state has considered salient is the area of media relationships,
in particular, the reportage and representations of the "Third World" by
the Western-dominated media. Dr Mahathir and his ministers have
claimed that the Western media, largely through excesses and slanted
reporting, sought to undermine Third World countries. They saw Western
media criticisms as media excesses, insulting, insensitive, and seeking
to undermine independent nations (New Straits Times, 14 August
1991; Star, 16 May 1994). It was further suggested that such "leeway
granted to the Western media smacks of cultural arrogance and lacks
integrity and philosophical coherence and principles" (Australian, 6-7
July 1991). In castigating the West and Western representations of Malaysia,
Malaysia seeks to both renegotiate its image and affirm its own
autonomy and control. This struggle for Malaysia's own autonomy strategically
capitalizes on anti-Western resentment, musters support and,

182 l.oong Wong
as an ostensibly unlooked-for-consequence, advances Malaysia's leadership
role as a "new" moral political force within the "Third World",
thereby increasing its sphere of influence.
Positioning Malaysia
The relative lack — or excess, in the case of Malaysia — of "cultural
sensitivities", it would seem, provides the explanation of the "cooling"
of relations between Malaysia and the West. Such a monocausal explanation
is, however, problematic. Jacques Derrida has cautioned the need
to re-examine the concept of the "centre" (read: culture), which could
be more fruitfully thought of, not in static terms, but as a "series of
substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of
the center" (Derrida 1978, p. 279). Applied to the breakdown in relationships
between the West and Malaysia, the central "cultural" explanation
becomes problematic; the issue is far more complex than is popularly
portrayed. There are many strands which can be read into the events
surrounding the "stand-off" between Malaysia and the West.
Malaysia's anti-colonial and anti-Western pronouncements, as welt
as its calling for a restructuring of global economic and political power
are, in themselves, probably deserving of support, However, these pronouncements
have to be critically dissociated from the heated intensity
with which they are made, an intensity that hides the Malaysian states
other agenda. David Calleo has advised us that any analysis lacking in a
sense of history or politics "must expect many surprises" (Calleo 1982,
p. 6). Any analysis of Malaysia's position, therefore, needs to be
contextualized. With a growing economy, a realization and affirmation
of its own identity, Malaysia seeks to contest for power and leadership
within the international arena.
In Malaysia, a whole series of laws inhibit and restrict the growth of
human rights. One such law is the Internal Security Act, which denies
the right to trial. Under the Essential (Security Cases Amendment) Regulations,
a suspect is considered guilty unless proven innocent. The media
is tightly controlled, strikes and public rallies are proscribed and a
plethora of legislative armaments further restrict political participation.
In recent years, Malaysia's treatment of its indigenous peoples and
the degradation of its environment have also attracted much widespread

7: <strong>Cultural</strong> <strong>claims</strong>: Malaysia as a voice for the Third World? 183
public criticism, The logging of tropical rainforests in East Malaysia has
caused massive destruction of the environment and widespread displacement
of indigenous peoples. The Penans, Kenyahs, Kayans, Kelabits,
and other indigenous peoples have suffered badly (Wong 1990). They
have been protesting for years and have received widespread global support.
This has given rise to fears in Malaysia that such publicity may
result in bans on Malaysian timber exports and indirectly threaten the
economic well-being of Malaysia. Currently, timber brings in M$8.7
billion in export earnings (US$3.1 billion) (Far Eastern Economic Review,
1 August 1991); losses from the sale of tropical timber would have
a seriously adverse impact on Malaysia's economic growth and development.
In its Outline Perspective Plan 2, growth projections in Malaysia
are premised on attracting continuing foreign investment. The maintaining
of a "stable" society is crucial. Malaysia's dependence on export
markets outside the region, and the vicissitudes of the market in primary
products continue to make the national economy vulnerable to
downturns in the West and in Japan. The state is painfully aware that
continuing adverse media criticism of Malaysia and a concomitant focus
on lack of accountability, economic mismanagement, social tensions,
and human rights violations may lead to an "investment strike"
by foreign investors in Malaysia. Consequently, the Malaysian state has
sought to control the media agenda so that it would not suffer as a result
of unfavourable media treatment.
In promoting a cultural relativist and an affirmative autonomous
position, the Malaysian state seeks to both legitimize its record on democratic
and human rights and assert its independence. In effect, it is saying
that Malaysia is democratic and should not be judged by "certain
particular (that is, Western) yardsticks" (Age, 20 July 1991). This geopolitical
posturing and practice has enabled Malaysia to insert and
"reterritorialize" itself within the global network of power. This, however,
could only be achieved through a reconstruction of itself within
world politics. That is why, in adopting a high profile in the global
arena, Malaysia has been incessantly critical of the West, cultivating a
non-Western image while limiting its exposure to the public gaze. In so
doing, Malaysia has sought to map out markers which may induce, con-

184 Loong Wong
solidate, and extend its influence and power. These markers both
disempower and constrain critiques of the state. The "Look East" policy,
for example, promulgated by Dr Mahathir when he became Prime Minister
in 1981, was oriented with reference to Japans all-important position
as Malaysia's major trading partner and source of foreign investment.
Equally importantly, in "looking East" and in castigating the West,
Malaysia re-established its "post-colonial identity" (During 1985). By
enhancing its anti-colonial credentials, Malaysia graduated to acquire
the mantle of Third World leadership which enabled it to regain "autonomy"
and to strategically subvert Western domination. The image
of Malaysia as anti-West and anti-colonial thus provides a bulwark against
international pressures, helping it to take its place in the world.
"(Re)Writing" Malaysia and global politics
In this regard, Malaysia's international posture has an interesting correspondence
with the ambivalence and "referential instability" of the textual
practices of post-structuralism in Western academia. Malaysia's critique
of the West is akin to Derrida's notion of deconstruction (Derrida
1978, pp. 278-93). In articulating this critique, Malaysia demonstrates
the potency of the voice from the margins. In establishing itself as an
important voice of the post-colonial world, Malaysia is able to mobilize
collective support for its position from other nations which have similarly
endured the "injustice" of Western criticism. In tackling issues relating
to the environment, the nature of wealth distribution within the
global community, Western hypocrisy in regard to non-military intervention
in the Bosnian conflict, and Western cultural imperialism via
the media, Malaysia has demonstrated the capacity for "middle powers"
to influence the tenor of world politics. This has all been astutely done
where the Malaysian state has posited for itself a "subaltern" (that is,
national and ex-colonial) position through which it has been allowed to
reinscribe itself in a different relation of power. Is it possible to comment
meaningfully on the way in which Malaysia has achieved this position?
Following Bhabha, it could be argued that the Malaysian state has
cleverly employed the twin strategies of "mimicry" (1984) and "hybridity"

7: <strong>Cultural</strong> <strong>claims</strong>; Malaysia as a voice for the Third World? 185
(1985/2) to invert its power relationship with the West. Via the discourses
of economic growth and "Asian democracy", Malaysia has been able to
reinvent itself as a success story while criticizing the West for its sclerotic
development. In mimicking the "successful West", Malaysia subverts
the identity of that which is being "imitated". In the process, the relation
with the West, if not altogether reversed, certainly begins to vacillate.
As Bhabha puts it:
[Mimicry is] a process by which the look of surveillance returns as the disciplinary
gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed and
the "partial" representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and
alienates it from essence. (Bhabha 1984, p. 129)
Through this "partial representation", Malaysia appears familiar and
comes to resemble the — economically successful and internationally
powerful — West"; yet menacingly seeks to challenge its hegemony in
the social, economic, and political realms. It is thus that the mimic disrupts
and destabilizes the prevailing stereotype. The process produces a
loss of agency on the part of the "colonizer" as it tries to second guess
the "natives" sinister intent, enabling the "colonized" to rearticulate itself
within the prevailing grids of power.
In a similar vein, Malaysia has also been able to broker for itself a
"hybrid" role in post-colonial world politics. Through its embrace of
the "free market" and "democracy", Malaysia embodies an "Asian democracy"
which straddles and articulates colonial and native knowledges.
The "success" in this project has enabled Malaysia to enact active forms
of resistance against a universal inscription of international rules of conduct.
This is particularly noticeable in the discussions on human rights
and the Bosnia conflict, discussions which, Malaysia <strong>claims</strong>, are "Westerndriven".
With regard to Bosnia, Malaysia has attributed to the "West" a
failure in leadership, and asserted that any "Western" position on human
rights can only be hypocritical, as the "West" has failed to secure
fundamental rights for the Bosnians. This "strategic reversal of the process
of domination", in effect, reimplicates the "colonial" authority and
"turn[s] the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power"
(Bhabha 1985a, p. 154), calling into question the efficacy of the "West".

186 Loong Wong
"Positioning" a conclusion
Malaysia's political relationship and discontent with the West clearly
has not arisen in a vacuum. It is a problem that affects both parties; both
are prisoners of history in so far as both rely upon or are informed by
received ensembles of assumptions and knowledge of each "other". Both
seek to set up an "authentic Other" — a "true East" and a "true West"
which are affixed as permanent and natural antipodes, "absolutizing"
each other. While Western governments' policies have been and are informed
by their imperial "pasts", Malaysia's position is one of a reaction
to the West just as much as one shaped by the colonial past. In this
context, the perception of the excesses of Western materialism, and that
the "West" does not want to see the "East" developed and advanced, as
such development may pose a threat to the "West", begins to makes a
special sense. This perception has seen Malaysia seeking to construct a
"East" that is an antithesis to the "West". This quest to be the obverse of
the "West", as Nandy has pointed out in his study of the "Uncolonised
Mind", only constricts choices and forces the "Eastern man" to "stress
only those parts of his culture which are recessive in the West and to
underplay both those which his culture shares with the West and those
which remain undefined by the West", paradoxically binding it "even
more irrevocably to the West" (Nandy 1983, p. 73; see also Memmi
1967).
This double bind — the cleaving to and from the West — has been
very much a preoccupation of the Malaysian state under Mahathir's
leadership. In the search for an anti-Western national identity Malaysia,
like other post-colonial states, has sought to reintroduce agency into the
closed frameworks and representational categories inscribed by colonial
powers. What Malaysia shows is that it is possible to restore a degree of
autonomy and self-determination to the marginals by the twin strategy
of subverting dominant (Western) discourses and mobilizing the countercurrents
to these discourses. Taylor (1992) has described, in another
context, this type of negotiational possibility as the "politics of recognition".
In such a politics, identity and recognition can only be forged
through dialogical interactions and relations with others. Whilst the
contradictions remain, and must remain, this politics enables the transgression
of space within and without, leaving the historical trajectory of

7; <strong>Cultural</strong> <strong>claims</strong>; Malaysia as a voice for the Third World: 187
the country, its identity, and quest for recognition, open to the democratic
innovations of human agency.
Another strand running through Malaysian state discourse, and in
particular Dr Mahathir's ire at the "West", is the view that there are
irreconciliable differences between the "West" and the "East". In the
mind of Dr Mahathir, East must remain East and West, West. As Kwame
Anthony Appiah (1992) and others have reminded us, indigenous religious,
moral, and intellectual traditions were never as fully pervaded by
colonialism as the colonial authorities and nationalists might have desired.
What we must emphasize in our task as analysts is not that a
society is necessarily enclosed within its own scaffolding of values and
preconceptions; but rather that there is a partial opacity of different
conceptual worlds to one another. The Malaysian case clearly demonstrates
this partiality Through "suffusing" values and ideas derived from
forms first communicated by the West, Malaysia has been able to advance
its own strategic interests. Notwithstanding therefore the moral
vigour and righteousness of the Malaysian states rhetoric, the truth remains
fuzzy and is not as stark as the state would have us believe.
In this chapter, I have tried to demonstrate the value and import of
adopting a cultural analysis approach in examining the dynamism and
interacting relationships between the representations and interventions
of a nation-state (Malaysia) vis-ti-iris global society. I have attempted to
demonstrate that a greater appreciation of Malaysia's current positioning,
problems, and discomfort in its dealings with the West are rooted
in its colonial experience, its position and sense of place in the world, as
well as in the search for national identity.
The present role of Malaysia in global politics cannot be solely envisaged
as the reworking of a particular spatial paradigm of East versus
West. What takes place, instead, involves the implementation of a series
of creative revisions which register the eager transition from a colonial
framework to a post-colonial one. In the post-colonial space, a nationstate
like Malaysia would enjoy greater freedom to engage in more equitable
dialogues with other nations in an increasingly fluid global exchange.
However, in attempting to unravel these representational
positionings and the associated <strong>claims</strong> of the politics of difference and
identity, this chapter has rejected the Malaysian polarization of "Us"

188 Loong Wong
and "Them" , "Asia" and "the West": the differences between "Us" and
"Them", and the threat to "Us" by "Them", may be very real in the way
they are socially experienced. Nonetheless, these — real and/or imaginary
— differences can also be subverted and strategically deployed in
political struggle. What I have argued in this chapter is that the postcolonial
stance taken by Malaysia and its aggressive cultural renegotiation
of its place in the world are motivated by powerful ideological concerns.
Malaysia's incursions into the global arena illustrate the limitation
of a stable and hegemonic Western discourse. They also mark, as
Said (1989, pp. 222-23) has suggested, a sign of crisis within European
colonialism and, one suspects, in a post-Cold War world order in which
the dominant role of the West no longer goes unquestioned. The
deconstructive efforts of the Malaysian state can thus be read as being a
key part of the representational <strong>claims</strong> of the post-colonial world —
<strong>claims</strong> which the Anglo-American West will have to take seriously.
NOTE
1. See, for example, the various reports in the following: New Straits Times (NST), 28
July, 2 August, and 14 August 1991; Sunday Star, 28 July 1991; Far Eastern Economic
Review (FEER), 13 and 20 August 1992; Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 4
August 1982; Australian, 6-7 July 1991.

7: <strong>Cultural</strong> <strong>claims</strong>: Malaysia as a voice for the Third World? 189

190 Loong Wong

(De)constructing the New Order:
capitalism and the cultural contours
of the patrimonial state in Indonesia
MARK T. BERGER
The dominant international visions of political and economic change
regularly represent the major trend in the post-Cold War era as an inexorable
and beneficent march towards global democratic capitalist
modernity under che leadership of the United States (Yergin and Stanislaw
1998; Friedman 1999). The virtuous connection between economic and
political liberalism and the democratizing effect of a rising middle class
continues co be emphasized by a range of commentators. Prior to the
financial crisis in 1997-98 and che end of Soeharto's rule in early 1998,
the most influential approaches to the Indonesian trajectory already
hoped, if not expected, that the country was winding its way towards
democratic capitalist modernity (Maclntyre 1990, 1994). For example,
in 1994, John Bresnan, a former long-time Jakarta-based employee of
the Ford Foundation, argued that the "general direction" of political
development in Indonesia (as well as in a number of other countries in the
region) was "that of expanding the political elites, opening the contestation
of public office, widening che process of consultation and consensusbuilding,
and in other ways increasing the transparency of government".
He concluded that in Southeast Asia the civilian and military structures
of the state were "on the defensive" and "the urban middle-classes" were

192 Mark T Berger
"on the rise" (Bresnan 1994, p. 58). Meanwhile, in a 1996 cover story
on Southeast Asia, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review
observed that "economic growth — and the middle class it nurtures —
may drum the soldiers back to barracks"; however, he conceded that
this would not take place "overnight" (Tasker 1996, p. 21). 1
The 1997-98 financial crisis (which acted as a major catalyst for a
looming social and political crisis centred on the rent-seeking and corruption
of the Soeharto family) strengthened the expectation that authoritarianism
and patrimonialism were about to pass into history under
the cleansing pressure of political and economic liberalization. For
example, an editorial in the Far Eastern Economic Review in late November
1997 emphasized that Soeharto's finance minister had been able to
close banks that belonged to members of the Soeharto family and that
increased accountability could be expected in so far as it is "a function of
the rising standards that come with emergence of a middle class"
("Suhartos Choice: Patriarch or Patriot?" Far Eastern Economic Review,
20 November 1997, p. 5). Eighteen months later, the elections in June
1999 were heralded by most commentators, despite ready acknowledgment
of the continuing influence of the legacy of Soeharto's New Order,
as the dawn of a new era in Indonesia (Murphy 1999a, pp. 8-10).
Shortly before the elections, one journalist emphasized that Indonesians
were "nurturing their freedom, despite economic stringency" and
"if this surprisingly good start continues, if the election result is accepted
as fair, if the haggling before the November presidential vote
yields a stable government", then "Indonesia has a second chance at
democracy" (McDonald 1999, pp. 4-5). Not long after the election,
the veteran Southeast Asian correspondent, John McBeth, observed that
"civil society, becalmed for three decades by Soeharto's exclusionary policies,
is flowering into a more intrusive force that will demand the attention
of the elite" (McBeth 1999, p. 20), These approaches, which are
representative of the dominant Anglo-American narrative on political
and economic change, rest on a unilinear and evolutionary conception
of history and define democracy in minimalist terms (elections, universal
suffrage, and relative press freedom). They continue to assume that
Indonesia is, or at least ought to be, moving towards a universalized
form of democratic capitalist modernity based on a romanticized version
of the history of the United States (Berger, forthcoming).

8: Capitalism and the cultural contours of the patrimonial state in Indonesia 193
In contrast, this chapter argues that Indonesia cannot be expected
to conform to the stylized conception of economic and political change
that is characteristic of influential Anglo-American narratives of progress. 2
Of course, this is not to suggest, as defenders of both the New Order
and of other authoritarian political arrangements in the region have done,
that economic and political change in Indonesia follows a mysterious
Eastern path and democracy represents a Western and irrelevant set of
ideas and institutions (Berger 1996; Bourchier 1998). But, despite the
apparent growth of a middle class in Indonesia, it constitutes a very
small percentage of the country's population and is composed of many
groups that reinforce the authoritarian character of the overall polity as
well as those that provide the enlightened liberal democratic leadership
of popular and academic imagination (Sundhaussen 1989; Robison 1990,
1996). 3
The view taken here is that the rise and demise of Soehartos
New Order is most usefully understood with reference to historical structures
and shifting relations of power, while paying close attention to the
cultural and representational dynamics of state authority. The way in
which Soehartos patrimonial state represented itself, and deployed influential
cultural ideas and concepts to bolster its dominance, will be
foregrounded. 4
While the country's patrimonial system was grounded
in decades of impressive economic growth and a centralized and coercive
politico-military apparatus, Soehartos rule was also bolstered by
the New Order states sustained deployment of a panoply of cultural
concepts and ideas. These cultural concepts and ideas emphasized national
unity under Soehartos continued leadership and worked to legitimate
and naturalize the hierarchical and patrimonial character of
Indonesia's political economy. Ultimately, social and political change is
best understood by looking at the ongoing shifts in power relations, the
emergence of new and reconfigured social forces, as well as the cultural
changes that have been integral to capitalist transformation and the
emergence and decline of the New Order in Indonesia.
The genesis of the patrimonial state:
Dutch colonialism and the social
and cultural roots of the New Order
The patrimonial state which was consolidated during Soehartos New
Order can be understood as the direct successor to the complex histori-

194 Mark T. Berger
cal amalgam which was the Dutch colonial state. East Timor aside, Indonesia
continues to lay claim to the former Dutch colonial boundaries
as they were laid down by the beginning of the twentieth century. Apart
from the same boundaries, the historic connection between the New
Order and the colonial era was also apparent in socio-ethnic terms in so
far as the Javanese priyayi (the hereditary petty aristocracy of Java) continued
to reproduce itself and play a central role in the bureaucratic
(and military) structures of the modern Indonesia state. Even before the
Dutch conquest, Java was heavily populated, agriculturally significant,
and a regional power centre. In the context of Dutch colonial expansion,
the petty aristocracy of Java was transformed into a bureaucratic
elite and incorporated into the colonial state apparatus (Sutherland 1979).
Already well entrenched in the colonial system, the priyayi benefited
the most from the expansion of the colonial education system at the end
of the nineteenth century. As a result, the Javanese elite took up most of
the administrative jobs in the growing colonial state at the same time, as
a number of the early Dutch-educated leaders of the Indonesian nationalist
movement also came from priyayi backgrounds. The number of
priyayi grew dramatically, through both birth and recruitment, as they
reproduced and consolidated themselves as a relatively distinctive social
class at the centre of the wider pangreh pradja. The term means "rulers
of the realm" and refers to the indigenous (usually Javanese) administrative
elite prior to 1945. In 1946 the post-colonial administrative elite
was renamed pamong praja, "guides of the realm". By the end of the
colonial period there was a large and variegated colonial state staffed by
the pangreh pradja drawn particularly from the petty aristocracy of Java.
In the early nationalist period they were marginalized. However, with
the support of an increasingly powerful military, the pamong praja enjoyed
a resurgence in the late 1950s, which was reflected in the growing
influence of organicist political ideas and culminated in a virtual restoration
in 1965-66 (Bourchier 1998).
While the priyayi dominated the lower and middle ranks of the Dutch
colonial state, their influence was much weaker in the emerging nationalist
movement. Anti-colonial nationalism did not take hold in the Netherlands
East Indies until the early twentieth century, but throughout
the colonial period local and regional rebellions and acts of resistance

8: Capitalism and the cultural contours of the patrimonial state in Indonesia 195
had shaped the wider historical trajectory in important ways (see, for
example, Stoler 1985, pp. 14-92). However, they rarely threatened Dutch
colonial rule as a whole. Even the emergent nationalist movement of the
1920s, over which the colony's nascent labour movement and the Indonesian
Communist Party (PKI) exercised considerable influence, was
unable to overcome the myriad forms of accommodation and co-optation
or the repressive capacity deployed by an increasingly powerful colonial
state (von Albertini 1982, pp. 487-513). In 1934, by which time the
nationalist movement was dominated by urban intellectuals, Soekarno
(who would become independent Indonesia's first president) and many
other major nationalist leaders were banished to remote islands where
they languished until the Japanese invasion in 1942.
The Japanese surge into Southeast Asia in che early 1940s dealt a
blow to European colonialism in Asia generally, while imperial Japan's
occupation of the Netherlands East Indies led to the release and encouragement
of the jailed nationalist leaders. The pangreh pradja often did
well during the Japanese Occupation (a shared enthusiasm for organicist
and totalitarian political philosophy ensured common ground between
many colonial officials and the Japanese occupiers). But the Japanese
era also marked the beginning of widespread rivalry between the Javanese
elite and other social classes for control of the emergent Indonesian
state. An important element in this struggle was the struggle between
the conservative and organicist ideas of the pangreh pradja and the more
egalitarian, democratic, and Islamic orientation of radical nationalists.
The Japanese gave Soekarno and Hacta, as well as other Indonesian nationalists,
important opportunities in the form of various mass-based
political organizations to reach out to the people in the rural areas. The
Japanese army also set up auxiliary armies in Sumatra, Java, and Bali,
using local officers, thus providing the nationalists with a future source
of military power. They encouraged greater use of Bahasa Indonesia as a
national language as well as providing jobs in the bureaucracy for an
increased number of "Indonesians". On the eve of the Japanese defeat a
plan was promulgated by Soekarno and Hatta and the Japanese high
command for Southeast Asia which laid the groundwork for an independent
republic of Indonesia. On 17 August 1945, just after the Japanese
surrender, Indonesia declared its independence. This led to a four-

196 Mark 7, Berger
year battle for control of the archipelago (Anderson 1990, pp. 99-100),
By the end of 1948, most of the former colonial administration was
in Dutch hands as were all the main urban centres while Soekarno, Hatta,
and other leading nationalists had been detained. At the same time, the
Dutch still faced highly localized popular military resistance, especially
on Sumatra and Java. This, combined with strong U.S. diplomatic and
financial pressure and Dutch war-weariness, led to the formal transfer
of power to the independent United States of Indonesia in 1949
(McMahon 1981). By 1950 the initial decentralized federal system had
been replaced by a unitary republic which fell much more under direct
Javanese control. Between 1950 and 1957 this fragile nation-state was
governed by a number of elected administrations which sought to stabilize
and unify the archipelago and reintegrate a state structure which
kept alive the "collective memory" of the pre-1949 struggles. The overall
coherence of the state was also undermined by the way successive
administrations dramatically expanded the size of the civil service along
patronage lines. At the same time between 1950 and 1957 all governments
were coalition administrations, further facilitating departmental
fragmentation (Anderson 1990, pp. 100-3).
From 1950 to 1957 the Indonesian state under Soekarno sought to
reform the economic structures of Dutch colonial rule via the encouragement
of pribumi (indigenous, that is non-Chinese) capitalists. By
the second half of the 1950s, as the republic lurched towards the populist
authoritarianism which Soekarno called Guided Democracy, it was
apparent that Indonesian capitalists were unable to compete effectively
with Dutch and other foreign corporations, not to mention the powerful
Indonesian-Chinese business groups. Many of the new pribumi capitalists
increasingly co-operated with established Indonesian-Chinese businesses,
with the former providing the political linkages rather than anything
resembling business acumen. In most instances where foreign capital
had left Indonesia it was Indonesian-Chinese capital that had taken
its place. At the same time, very little expansion of the industrial sector
had occurred (Robison 1986, pp. 42-44, 57). Between independence
and the late 1950s a series of increasingly weak coalition governments
grappled unsuccessfully with the new nations economic problems, while
military and civilian officials increasingly sought to mesh their political

8: Capitalism and the cultural contours of the patrimonial state in Indonesia 197
dominance with wider social and economic power (Robison 1989, pp.
383-84).
By the late 1950s the Indonesian state had clearly turned to an "intensified
nationalist strategy" which involved increased intervention to
restructure the economy and the takeover of a great deal of Dutch-owned
property. By the second half of the 1950s the central government was
also confronting serious rebellions in the Outer Islands, which were often
coloured by ethno-religious opposition to Javanese dominance. By
the early 1960s, although the Outer Islands rebellions had been contained,
they had resulted in further increases in power for the Indonesian
Army (ABRI). With important implications for the eventual emergence
of the New Order, ABRI also assumed a dramatically expanded
economic role, taking over direct control of large sectors of the economy
after 1957. Apart from the military, Soekarno's Guided Democracy rested
on a complex web of political alliances which revolved around the na
tionalist party (Partai Nasional Indonesia, PNI), the PKI, and a major
Muslim party. He played these parties off against each other at the same
time as he pitted the mainly anti-communist military against the PKI.
Guided Democracy, underpinned by Soekarno's strident anti-Western
nationalism and idiosyncratic socialism, represented an explicitly stateled
attempt at capitalist development. The Indonesian state directed
earnings from the primary export sector into the manufacturing sector
mostly owned and operated by the state. Export earnings were also directed
towards public works, health, food production, education transportation,
and repayment of foreign debts. At the same time the state
sought to attract new foreign loans in an effort to further expand the
country's industrial base and its infrastructure. By the early 1960s, however,
stagnation and decline in the sugar and rubber sectors, combined
with falling commodity prices, had resulted in a shortage of funds and a
serious balance of payments problem. Furthermore, the nationalization
of large parts of the economy had done little to attract foreign investment.
By the first half of the 1960s, Indonesia's economy was on the
brink of collapse. Inflation was hitting 600 per cent annually, foreign
debt was climbing rapidly and statistics on income and food intake per
capita rivalled some of the poorest countries in the world (Dixon 1991,
pp. 19l-92).

198 Mark T. Berger
By mid-1964, Soekarno had become very ill and it was increasingly
apparent that the country's fragile power structure was in crisis. There
were regular rumours of an impending military coup and/or a PKI-led
putsch. The sequence of events during the fateful years of 1965 and
1966 are complex and many aspects are hotly debated. Although
Soekarno was nominally still in charge in late 1965, the Indonesian
military, with U.S. military aid and CIA support, and the direct participation
of a host of paramilitary Muslim youth groups, turned on the
PKI and its supporters. By mid-1966 the CIA and the State Department,
to give just one estimate, calculated that anywhere between
250,000 and 500,000 alleged PKI members had been killed (in mid-
1965 the PKI was reckoned to have 3 million members as well as 12
million people in associated organizations). At the same time at least
200,000 people were imprisoned, with about 55,000 of them still in jail
a decade later (Kolko 1988, pp. 173-85). It was out of the bloodshed,
crisis, and turmoil of the mid-1960s that the New Order emerged.
The rise of Soeharto's New Order: the social
and cultural dynamics of the patrimonial state
The crisis-ridden years of 1945-65 can be seen as the period in which
the Javanese-led bureaucratic-aristocratic elite (the pamong praja) eventually
reconsolidated their position within the wider post-colonial social
formation. The administrative elite maintained its relative predominance
as a result of its control over the new Indonesian Army set up in
the early 1940s. Many army officers were of priyayi origin, and up to the
1960s, most were also products of the PETA, the armed forces set up by
the Japanese in 1943-45. Officers and soldiers who had been trained
by, and/or served the Dutch in, the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army
(KNIL) were also integrated into the Indonesian Army (of course many
thousands also went into exile in the Netherlands after 1949). For example,
the Army Chief of Staff by the late 1950s, General A. H. Nasution,
was a product of KNIL and married to a priyayi. The officers who entered
PETA during the Japanese Occupation were strongly influenced
by a Javanese cultural nationalism, at the same time as they articulated
virulent anti-communism and a expressed marked hostility to the political
Islam which was particularly prevalent outside of Java.

8: Capitalism and the cultural contours of the patrimonial state in Indonesia 199
The Indonesian army went on to preserve pamong praja dominance
in the Islamic revolts in the Outer Islands in 1958-59. In the specific
context of the expansion and deepening of its commitment to the politicoeconomic
management of Indonesia under Soekarno (which was reflected
in the promulgation of dwifungsi in 1958), the Indonesian military
had become central to the process of national unification and statebuilding
by the early 1960s (dwifungsi, dual function, explicitly committed
the military to a socio-political as well as a military defence role).
In this situation the Indonesian Army eventually emerged to guarantee
wider priyayi and pamong praja dominance after 1965 (Magenda 1988,
pp. 350-53).
The events of 1965-66 had a particular social and cultural resonance
and an important legitimating function for the new military-dominated
state. From, one perspective, the mass killings of suspected PKI members
and supporters was the culminating battle in an escalating Javanese
civil war. The elite interpretation, which was offered to the Javanese
lower classes and che peasantry, emphasized that the era of civil war on
Java had precipitated social polarization between classes, and by ending
class conflict and returning to their "cultural heritage", the peasants of
Java could successfully avoid a recurrence of 1965 (Magenda 1988, pp.
354-55). For the country as a whole, the bloody events of 1965-66 and
their official interpretation shaped the nature of post-1965 politics and
the contour of the New Order itself. The official interpretation of
Pengkhianatan G-3-S/PKI (the Treachery of the 30 September Movement/PKI)
is central to a wider state-centred anti-communist discourse
which played an important role in reorganizing the entire Indonesian
social formation (Heryanto 1996, pp. 242, 259-60). In the official interpretation
Soeharto and the military saved the nation from a communist
takeover and remained vigilant ever after. After 1965, priyayi-led
officers, with Soeharto at their head, represented the vanguard in the
wider process of building the New Order state, while the pamong praja
oversaw the consolidation of a more centralized bureaucratic administration
(Magenda 1988, pp. 352-53; Bourchier 1998, pp. 152-57, 161-
62).
The New Order marked a restoration of conservative social forces,
such as the pamong praja, marginalized during the early national period.

200 Mark T, Berger
Soehartos rise to power also paved the way for the adaptation of organicist
ideas and concerted attempts to represent New Order Indonesia as a
Negara Integralistik (Integralist State). The official interpretation of the
abortive coup of 1 October 1965 became a key cultural anchor of the
New Order and reinforced the patrimonial states version of Indonesian
nationalism emphasizing anti-communism, Pancasila, organicism
(integralism), and pembangunan (development). Meanwhile, in geostrategic
and politico-economic terms, Soehartos elimination of the PKI
and his regimes anti-communist credentials were central to the circumstances
under which the United States and its allies quickly embarked
on a major effort to reincorporate Indonesia into the world economy.
This included generous quantities of aid and a considerable amount of
debt re-scheduling. Under the guidance of a group of U.S.-trained technocrats,
known as the "Berkeley Mafia", the state actively solicited foreign
investment, particularly from the United States and Japan. From
the mid-1960s, until at least the early 1980s, the New Order regime
pursued an import-substitution industrialization strategy financed by
growing foreign investment, as well as by foreign aid and some domestic
investment. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the context of a
continuing commitment to an import-substitution industrialization strat
egy, an increasingly significant pribumi (non-Chinese Indonesian) capitalist
elite appeared. Their power was based on privileged access to the
state-controlled network of credit, contract distribution, trade monopolies,
foreign partnership, and manufacturing licensing arrangements.
Many of these rising capitalists had close links to officials (pamong praja)
who were well placed in the state. At the same time, a growing number
of state officials emerged as capitalists in their own right, the most famous
of whom were the "bureaucratic capitalist families" of the Soehartos
and the Sutowos. However, the general cohesiveness of an emerging
capitalist elite, based on preferential access to state power, was still relatively
narrow because most key business people were Indonesian-
Chinese, whose growing economic power remained dependent on the
socio-political power of the state officials (Robison 1989, pp. 384-85).
Until the mid-1970s, the state was heavily indebted to U.S.-backed
international agencies and foreign investors. This had meant adopting
macro-economic policies that were receptive to the interests of foreign

8: Capitalism and the cultural contours of the patrimonial state in Indonesia 201
capital. However, the dramatic increase in oil prices in the 1970s provided
the New Order with the means to return to an even more statecentred
capitalist model within a decade of its inception. In the first
years of the 1980s, gas and oil sales were over 80 per cent of export
earnings and brought in 70 per cent of the regimes total revenue. The
rise in revenue, combined with increased state investment in importsubstitution,
served to bring about a dwindling of the regimes reliance
on foreign capital and foreign aid. Renewed restrictions were placed on
foreign capital and overall foreign investment reached a plateau in the
mid-1970s. By the early 1980s state-guided industrialization was financed
primarily by oil money (Dixon 1991, pp. 195-200).
However, as oil prices dropped in the 1980s the whole system came
under pressure. This resulted in increasing debt and a decreased capacity
on the part of the state to facilitate local capital accumulation, while
greater use of foreign loans and foreign aid led co greater leverage on the
part of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and
foreign capital. The World Bank, for instance, was beginning to place
increasing emphasis on economic liberalization and kerbing state intervention.
The shift in economic policy facilitated an increase in the influx
of foreign capital in the late 1980s, much of it from Japan (as well
as South Korea and Taiwan), and the rapid emergence of an exportindustry
sector, producing things like textiles and footwear, strengthening
Indonesia's connections to wider regional and global capital (Stubbs
1994, p. 372; Matsui 1996, pp. 39-58).
Bapak pembangunan: the social and cultural
(re)construction of the patrimonial state
These broad politico-economic shifts dictated in part by wider trends in
the global political economy occurred in the context of the continued
and growing emphasis on the social and cultural (and political) centrality
of the New Order. In the second half of the 1970s, the New Order
increasingly sought to reinvent and entrench Pancasila, the five principles
of belief in one God, humanitarianism, nationalism, consensus,
democracy and social justice as the philosophical basis for an independent
Indonesia (Ramage 1995, pp. 1-44). In early 1974 the Malari Riots
had signalled growing discontent amongst the populace and an increase

202 Mark T. Berger
in intra-elite conflict. The New Orders response, which occurred against
the backdrop of the dramatic influx of oil revenues, was to consolidate
and tighten the structures of state control. By 1975 the New Order was
characterized by a comprehensive surveillance and security network and
a narrow and tightly controlled political system which had eliminated
or completely reorganized the country's political parties. This was complemented
by a large and growing state apparatus, linked from cop to
bottom to the military and centred on President Soeharto.
While in the immediate post-1965 period, the priorities of the New
Order had been overwhelmingly economic, from 1975 until the middle
of the 1980s, the regime focused on expanding the state apparatus and
ideological education and indoctrination. The ideological education and
indoctrination was aimed at inculcating Pancasila (especially among
government employees, university students, and school children) as the
"sole basis" of Indonesian national identity. Emphasizing the values of
order, leadership, hierarchy, and family, Pancasila was represented as being
grounded in Indonesian tradition and as offering a national alternative
to pernicious foreign ideologies such as liberalism and Marxism,
While the national ideology of Pancasila is backed up by a powerful
state apparatus, its success also flows from the way the government was
able to identify the New Order and Pancasila with what it defined as
national character and national tradition. The impact of Pancasila, however,
should not be exaggerated, in so far as many Indonesians are clearly
aware of its contradictions and shortcomings. Nonetheless it has acted
as a powerful complement to the overtly coercive aspects of state power
and successfully constrained political debate in Indonesia for many years.
Some New Order officials also attempted to revive the idea of Indonesia
as a Negara Integralistik (Integralist State), which was seen to have its
origins in Indonesia's pre-colonial history and had informed the chinking
of conservative members of the Indonesian elite for years. Integralist
ideas enjoyed considerable currency in military circles, and in the late
1980s they were promoted in an attempt to reshape Pancasila in a way
thac preserved the role of the military in the wider Indonesian polity
and to provide scientific and scholarly legitimacy as well as popular support
for the New Order as a whole. 5
Against the backdrop of an image of the Indonesian nation as a

8: Capitalism and the cultural contours of the patrimonial state in Indonesia 203
united and harmonious family, a related aspect of the hegemony of the
New Order was the production of a powerful Indonesian development
(pembangunan) discourse. It was a discourse which exhorted Indonesians
to work together to develop the nation and bring about economic
takeoff, under the leadership of the "father of development" (Bapak
Pembangunan) Soeharto. Significantly, what was also invoked and appropriated
in this period was a pre-colonial past in which the Javanese
aristocracy played a key role. Altogether, these themes, along with the
complexity and hybridity of the wider post-colonial Indonesian social
formation, were in evidence at "Beautiful Indonesia"-in-Miniature Park
(Taman Mini "Indonesia Indah"), a key site for the New Orders efforts
to generate national unity and reconfigure the Javanese aristocratic past
to fit the New Order present (Pemberton 1994a, pp. 148-235, 269-
318). Taman Mini was completed and opened in Jakarta in the mid-
1970s and had apparently been "inspired" by Mrs Soehartos visit to
Disneyland in 1971. Apart from the Borobudur and Yogyakarta pavilions,
a key aspect of the park was twenty-six pavilions modelled on "customary
houses" and symbolizing the country's twenty-six provinces. After
1975 there was an East Timor pavilion, which unlike the other pavilions,
was air-conditioned, had an Indonesian flag flying much of the
time, as well as an armed guard. The primary backers of "Beautiful Indonesia"
are the Jakarta-based elite of Central Java (Pemberton 1994a,
pp. 241, 246-47).
A key aspect of the theme park which reflects the dominant position
of the elite of Central Java is the Grand Place-of-Importance Audience
Hall (Pendopo Agung Sasono Utomo). This hall, which has a Javanese
rather than an Indonesian name, was constructed in a style based
on the customary aristocratic dwellings of Central Java. More particularly,
the model for the Grand Audience Hall was the oldest existing
palace of Central Java. This is the Palace of Surakarta (Kraton Surakarta),
which was built in 1745 under Dutch East India Company auspices.
Under the direct influence of the Dutch, this palace came to embody
"Javanese" difference, which would retrospectively be increasingly held
up as typically Javanese. At the time of the founding of the Palace of
Surakarta in 1745, royal Banyan trees (the Banyan tree is used as a royal
symbol by Javanese sultans and is also the GOLKAR logo) were dug up

204 Mark T, Berger
and relocated from the old palace grounds to the new. And to ensure
that the historical and aristocratic reverberations were not missed at the
parks opening in 1975 a ritual offering in which Imelda Marcos planted
a Banyan tree was organized (Pemberton 1994a, pp. 247-50).
Later, the state also built an important museum at "Beautiful Indonesia".
While it was built in a Balinese style, the actual contents and
programme of the museum reinforced a Javanese-centred national hierarchy.
The central exhibit is a "Diorama of a Traditional Wedding Ceremony
for Central Javanese Aristocrats" while the weddings mannequin
guests are, according to the official guidebook, attired in "traditional
costumes from almost all areas of Indonesia" in order to "demonstrate
the spirit of Unity in Diversity". Three years after the opening of
the Indonesian Museum, a real wedding was held in the Audience Hall
at "Beautiful Indonesia", On 8 May 1983 Siti Hediati, the daughter of
the President married Major Prabowo Subianto, the son of Sumitro, a
major economic adviser to Soeharto. The wedding was well-attended
and well publicized, and Javanese tradition meshed with the contemporary
administrative might and splendour of the New Order state
(Pemberton 1994a, pp. 250-55),
The power of the Java-centred elite and the cultural panoply of the
New Order, which are celebrated and reinforced at Taman Mini, have
been transformed and mediated by the wider processes of the global
political economy and uneven capitalist development. While many
priyayi, in keeping with the historic bureaucratic and administrative role
of the Javanese aristocracy, continue to take part in private business only
indirectly through Indonesian-Chinese capitalists, under the New Order
a growing number of priyayi, not least the Presidents children, have
taken up a direct and dominant role in commerce (Sender 1996; Shari
1997). 6
The patrimonial state in crisis:
the decline and fall of Soeharto's New Order
Prior to the current crisis, Soeharto and his family were already becoming
a symbol of the inequalities of contemporary Indonesia and the
excesses of the New Order. By the late 1980s and early 1990s a growing
number of Indonesians, led by secular and Islamic intellectuals, activ-

8: Capitalism and the cultural contours of the patrimonial state in Indonesia 205
ists, journalists, lawyers, and students, had begun mobilizing in various
parliamentary and extra-parliamentary ways against Soehartos rule, under
the banner of demokratisasi (democratization) and around questions
of economic and social justice (Chua 1993, pp. 144-45, 148-57). From
the point of view of many Indonesian political activists, the most significant
and slippery obstacle to democratization and political activism
was to be found in the New Orders unrelenting dissemination of an
ideology which denied the legitimacy of opposition. Oppositional activity
and democracy were not just represented by the New Order as
politically unacceptable, but as beyond the pale of the Indonesian national
character.
In this context the survival and staying power of Soehartos New
Order flowed in important ways from the regimes reorientation of che
nations founding ideology Pancasila. But, despite the continuing cultural
and ideological offensive carried out by the New Order, by the
early 1990s Indonesia was in a period of transition characterized by the
decline of the New Order without a unified force emerging to displace
it. For example, in 1993 the token opposition offered by the Democratic
Party of Indonesia (PDI) — the smallest of three political groupings
which are permitted to take part in national elections every five
years — appeared to be giving way to something more genuine. The
governments intervention in the PDI's 1993 congress failed to prevent
Megawati Soekarnoputri (the daughter of Indonesia's first president,
Soekarno) from being elected to the party leadership. This was of considerable
embarrassment to the regime. If nothing else, Megawati's popularity,
as the daughter of Soekarno, clearly symbolized growing popular
dissatisfaction with the regime (Heryanto 1996, pp. 247, 257-58;
Aspinall 1996, p, 231). Then in lace June 1994 the government shutdown
the Jakarta-based tabloid DeTik, and the news magazines Tempo
and Editor, Opposition to the bans soon became a focus for what appeared
to be a groundswcll of primarily middle-class opposition. While
the government was certainly not about to collapse, by 1994 the urban
middle class, with the support of the urban poor and working class,
began co appear more politically assertive and united than at previous
times (Heryanto 1996, pp. 245-53).
In response, the government again intervened blatantly in PDI in-

206 Mark T. Berger
ternal politics and successfully engineered the overthrow of Megawati as
leader (McBeth 1996, pp. 14-15). Megawati's ouster led to one of the
most substantial, and violent, urban uprisings in Indonesia since the
rise of the New Order in the mid-1960s. Although the Indonesian military
soon restored order, the government's heavy-handed approach highlighted
the cracks in the sprawling edifice of the New Order (McBeth
and Cohen 1996, pp. 14-16; Walters 1996, p. 8). This was apparent in
the general elections in May 1997. Although GOLKAR garnered 74
per cent of the popular vote (via an electoral process which was heavily
managed to ensure a GOLKAR majority), the PDI under the leadership
of Megawati's replacement (who had been handpicked by the government)
saw its percentage of the vote plummet from 15 to 3 per cent,
reflecting continued support for Megawati, who was not permitted to
participate in the elections (Long 1997, p. 85).
The final trigger for the looming crisis of the patrimonial state in
Indonesia was the onset of the region-wide financial crisis in 1997. It
proved to be the definitive challenge to Soehartos New Order, particularly
since the legitimacy of Soehartos rule had become closely linked to
decades of steady economic growth. 7
At the same time, Soehartos children,
relatives, and associates have emerged as the main beneficiaries of
an elaborate economic system centred on Soehartos patrimonial control
of state power. By early 1998 the Indonesian economy was on the
verge of hyperinflation as unemployment escalated. Then, in May 1998
major student protests broke out, demanding Soehartos resignation.
However, the transfer of power to Soehartos vice-president and protege,
B.J. Habibie, and the promise of new elections in 1999 was met
with continued political unrest and economic dislocation. 8
The promised
elections were held in June and Megawati's Indonesian Democratic
Party for Struggle (PDI-P) received the largest number of votes, encouraging
expectations that she would be appointed president in November.
But the presidency subsequently went to Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus
Dur) with Megawati as vice-president. While the role of the military has
been constrained somewhat, both the armed forces and the former ruling
party, GOLKAR, continue to play an important role in Indonesian
politics. Even with Soeharto gone, the process of democratization, and
the liberalization and deregulation mandated by the IMF, are being car-

8: Capitalism and the cultural contours of the patrimonial state in Indonesia
207
ned out in the context of a system where political and economic activity
are profoundly bound up with a centralized and patrimonial state. With
Soeharto's departure, the centralized and authoritarian system he erected
has been weakened in many ways, but important elements of the system
(such as the military's mandate to play the role of guardian in politics
and society and the continued influence of the Soeharto era judiciary)
persist. At the same time, the crisis in Indonesia has aggravated profound
vertical and horizontal socio-economic and ethnic cleavages which
were already threatening the New Order and the national boundaries
laid down in the colonial era (Berger 1997a; Anderson 1999).
Conclusion: (de)constructing the New Order
This chapter has sought to move beyond Anglo-American narratives
which see Indonesia as moving slowly, but more or less inexorably, towards
a post-Soeharto era of democratic capitalist modernity. The need
for an approach based on an analysis of history and structures of power,
combined with attention to the particularity and strength of social and
cultural processes, was emphasized. The way in which influential statedriven
discourses which celebrate and reinforce hierarchy, order, national
unity, and harmony were backed up by a substantial authoritarian political
structure was outlined and discussed. It was argued that, apart
from the bureaucratic and military coercion on which the patrimonial
state relied, the overall power of the New Order derived from, and was
reinforced by, che sustained use of a complex and changing amalgam of
corporatist and integralist concepts and images. The way in which the
New Order sought to represent itself and legitimate the day-to-day exercise
of authoritarian power provided the immediate context for the
formulation of counter-hegemonic ideas. Just as the history of Dutch
colonialism profoundly influenced the overall character of the rise and
transformation of the New Order, Soehartos rule has left a powerful
legacy and the complex social and cultural edifice centred on the
patrimonial state, which he consolidated and expanded, will continue
to cast a shadow over the post-Soeharto era. The New Order has been
toppled, but the forces of democracy in Indonesia continue to face important
obstacles to social and economic progress in the form of powerful
remnants from the Soeharto era. Ironically, they also confront influ-

208
Mark T, Berger
ential external actors such as the IMF which view "too much" democracy
as a potential threat to liberal economic reform (Murphy 1999b,
p. 11).
NOTES
I would like to thank Yao Souchou for his comments and criticisms. The work of, and
conversations with, a number of Indonesian specialists in the Asian Studies Programme
and the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University also needs to be acknowledged.
This list would include Carol Warren, Paul Stange, Vedi Hadiz, and David Bourchier,
as well as Richard Robison and Andrew Rosser. Conversations with, and the comments
of, Ed Aspinall at the University of New South Wales have also shaped my thinking on
Indonesia. For last-minute technical assistance I thank Anthony Aspden and Sarah
Graham. Of course any errors of fact or interpretation are entirely my responsibility.
1. Of course, some observers, such as Michael Vacikiotis, represented Indonesia and a
number of other countries in Southeast Asia as following distinctive paths, arguing
that they would retain significant authoritarian characteristics for some time co
come (Vacikiotis 1994; 1996, p. 136).
2. For a detailed discussion of Anglo-American theories of political change and the
Indonesian trajectory, see Berger (1997b).
3. While che dominant journalistic and academic approaches to political change in
Indonesia have often focused on che failure of the middle class co be more of a
democratizing force, explaining the lack of democracy in terms of the shortcomings
or weakness of the middle class still assumes that it is the middle class which
can and should play a central role in democratization. See Berger (1997b;).
4. A patrimonial state is defined here as a state in which the central government
operates in a fashion that is powerfully shaped by the personal interests of the ruler.
For a detailed discussion of the patrimonial state in relation co Indonesia, see
Anderson (1990, pp. 46-50, 59-61),
5. While organicist and integralist ideas are represented as indigenous, their lineage
can be traced to continental Europe and, to a lesser extent, Japan, combining conservative
totalitarian and corporatist ideas with a romantic vision of harmonious
communities in pre-colonial Indonesia (Bourchier 1998, pp. 80-83, 212-15, 222-
23, 234, 239-41, 255-57).
6. The net worth of che Soeharto family as a whole was calculated to have been A$8.2
billion at the beginning of 1997, dropping to A$5.9 billion by October 1997
(Hiscock 1997, p. 21). For a recent assessment of the Soeharto family's wealth, see
"The Family Firm; Suharto Inc." Time: The Weekly Newsmagazine, 24 May 1999,
pp. 36-48.

8: Capitalism and the cultural contours of the patrimonial state in Indonesia 209
7. New Order Indonesia experienced an average annual economic growth rate of 6
per cent between 1967 and 1996. For a thorough economic overview, see Hill
(1996). For indicators of Indonesian economic growth and social change, see Asian
Development Bank (1997, pp. 79-84).
8. While 13 million Indonesians were living on less than US$1 a day in 1997, the
number had risen to at least 34 million people by 1999 (Speth 1999, p. 13).

210 Mark T. Berger

8: Capitalism and the cultural contours of the patrimonial state in Indonesia 211

212 Mark T. Berger

The state and information in
modern Southeast Asian history
T.N. HARPER
From che nineteenth century onwards, communications embodied che
idea of progress. The steamship, che railway, che celegraph attested to
the supremacy of the West. They represented the harnessing of new
forms of power; the triumph of steel over wooden construction; the
conquest of time and distance; the intoxicant of industrial capitalism.
They buttressed a complex of power relations that underpinned Europe's
command of modernity — power over nature, power over people
and their movement, power to more adequately predict events — above
ail, power to change the structure of systems (Elvin 1986).
Information and communications framed imperial technocracy.
They blazoned across the globe a vision of Europe and sought to project
a sense of her generosity. The ideal was a civilization "united not by
force but by information" (Adas 1989, Richards 1993, p. 1). Communications
underpinned the "psychological bluff" of European omnipotence
and prestige. It propelled the languages of the metropolis to che
remoter regions of the Earth and created a new ritual speech for their
inhabitants — one that would, it was hoped, turn them immutably
towards the metropolis for their tutelage. Whether it was in English,
Dutch, Spanish, French, or American, new vocabulacies of authority
were created that inculcated the keywords of European power, The Eu-

214 T.N. Harper
ropeans also reconfigured the status of vernacular tongues in a way that
privileged some utterances and disqualified others. The attempt co frame
the state in this way was not novel in itself. Throughout Asia, pre-colonial
states had sought to harness ideology to the service of the centre
(Reid 1993, pp. 181-83, 192-201). Their attempts to do so were bolstered
in the face of the European threat and continued into the colonial
period. However, their capacity to project themselves in this way
diminished dramatically in the face of the blinding new innovations
that radiated from the West.
Yet Europe's command of communications was infused with anxiety.
The dilemma for the European powers was that knowledge only
authenticated power when it was shared. But in this way communications
could also empower colonial peoples. Europeans were tormented
by the danger of their technology falling into the wrong hands. The
expansion of communications technology was therefore inseparable from
debates about its control, Pramoedya Ananta Toer's great tetralogy on
the rise of Indonesian national consciousness begins with a vivid description
of a young Javanese's perception of modernity:
One of the products of science at which I never stopped marvelling was printing,
especially zincography. Imagine, people can reproduce tens of thousands
of copies of any photograph in just one day: pictures of landscapes, import
tant people, new machines, American skyscrapers. Now I could see for myself
everything from all over the world upon these printed sheets of paper.
How deprived had the generation before me been — a generation that had
been satisfied with the accumulation of its own footsteps in the lanes of its
villages. (Pramoedya 1991, p. 17)
This essay examines the diffusion and management of these new media
in colonial Southeast Asia. It will show how colonial states employed
new technologies of communication to bind colonial societies to the
metropoles. New forms of language were central to this — the impact
of Europe was registered not merely in its message, but by the manner
in which it was uttered. The ideological projection of the state reached a
crescendo in the late colonial period as governments sought to recruit
new allies and create official nationalisms to which they could devolve
power and perpetuate their influence through informal means.
However, the forms and technologies of colonial state-building be-

9: The state and information in modern Southeast Asian history 215
came tools to plague their inventors' heads. By the turn of the nineteenth
century, key networks within the popular cultures of the towns
had seized on the new technologies and used them to develop alternative
projections of identity. Historians of anti-colonial nationalism have
long emphasized the impetus that modern communications gave to the
creation of new "imagined" communities (Anderson 1991). However,
they have said less about the ways in which colonial governments sought
to challenge this. Their failures in this, and their partial successes, are
historically important because the anxieties of Europeans resonated with
parallel debates within Southeast Asian societies on the legitimate applications
of technology and media. Although Southeast Asia's "imagined
communities" were to triumph over European social engineering, colonial
policy went a long way to dictating the place the communications
revolution would occupy within the newly independent states. These
early encounters help explain why much of the vibrant media culture
that pre-dated independence did not survive it. The continuities within
this experience tell us much about the ways in which, in response to the
renewed calls of transnational capitalism, the state in Southeast Asia
sought to harness a revolution in communications at the turn of the
twentieth century.
Communications and the expansion of Europe
Science has moved to the mainstream of the history of empire. It has
been argued that the expansion of Europe would have been impossible
without decisive innovations in transportation, firepower, and medicine
(Headrick 1981). This technological determinism is misleading.
Many of the great territorial conquests of Europe occurred without the
assistance of new technology. Moreover, there was a time lag between
scientific innovation in Europe and its widespread application in an
imperial context. Until the early nineteenth century — in a way that
flies in the face of the myth of oriental resistance to innovation — European
regimes were nor alone in their desire to acquire and to control
new technologies and new sources of knowledge (Waley-Cohen 1993).
They did not hold the monopoly on modernity. The indigenous states
of Southeast Asia sought to strengthen their central administrations and
armies and stamp their imprimatur on scriptural and intellectual tradi-

216 T.N Harper
tions. Far from being a period of stagnation, the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries saw innovations applied in a range of spheres.
The full impact of Europe's technology and modernity and the decisive
shift in the balance of power, particularly in maritime Southeast
Asia, came much later in the second half of the nineteenth century. It
was tied to the expansion of new forms of Western capitalist enterprise
and to the fashioning of a new kind of colonial state. It began in transportation,
with the advent of steam and rail and the opening of the Suez
canal, which, in Joseph Conrad's words, "let in upon the East a flood of
new ships, new men, new methods of trade". This was central to political
consolidation and economic expansion in the outer islands of Indonesia,
the interior of the Malay peninsula, and elsewhere. The foundations
of a colonial economy in Malaya, as opposed to British exploitation
of the indigenous one, might be dated from 1882 with the construction
of a railway track eight miles long, built at £7,000 a mile to
service the mines of Perak, By 1895 the Dutch developmental regime of
East Sumatra was bound together by an intricate cats-cradle of railtrack
(Kaur 1985, chap. 2). In the archipelago, historians point to the growth
of the great steamship companies, the pakketvaart, as much as to skirmishes
with natives or marks on a treaty, to mark the beginnings of the
high colonial era. Where the new colonial state had weak roots in society,
it became heavily reliant on the technological dimension to its power
(Campo 1994, pp. 11-29). The Indies state, for example, was not a
dormant bureaucratic monolith, a Beambtenstaat. Even before the muchvaunted
"ethical" reforms of the 1900s, a new generation of colonial
engineers had turned the Indies into a vast experimental laboratory. Their
desire to develop the Indies was stimulated not primarily by their humanitarian
or socialistic consciences, but simply because it was there.
"The conquest of distance" lay at the heart of Holland's image of itself
in Asia (Van Doom 1982). Communications not only symbolized material
progress; the projection of power it allowed was deeply ideological.
Government newspapers and gazettes introduced a new language of
law and ordinance to colonial peoples; new levels of jurisdiction and
regulation and, in the tabulations of census returns, they created new
categories of persons. Large private printing and propaganda operations
were established.

9: The state and information in modern Southern Asian history 217
The lead was taken by the Christian missionaries who were responsible
for many of the pioneer presses in Southeast Asia, and who created
literature not only for the colonial reading public but also new material
in the vernacular. Even as the missionary optimism faded in the later
nineteenth century, European publishing in Malay revived in the face of
robust competition from local presses, as witnessed in W.G. Shellabears
Methodist Publishing House in Singapore in the 1890s. A common
theme of this work was the reconfiguration of vernacular languages and
it arose from the shared problem of identifying the method of translation
that would best serve colonial power and the Christian religion.
The experience of Spain in the Philippines set the tone for much of
what followed. Vicente Rafael has shown how the process of translation
within Christian conversion affirmed the colonial order, and how, by
che introduction of key words that were untranslatable, it made Tagalog
into a new language. Yet use of che vernacular could also constrain the
universalizing assumptions of Christian civilization; the inner history of
translation shows how it could foster evasions of the colonial project
(Rafael 1988).
We see similar ambiguities emerging in the Dutch East Indies in
debates, from the seventeenth century onwards, on the relative merits
of "High" or "Low" Malay as che medium for the colonial power's communication
with its subjects. Missionaries invested heavily in the creation
of a printed standard for Malay in Western script; their principal
monument was the Leydekker-Werndly Bible translation of 1731-33.
Yet the question of what precisely this "High" or "Low" Malay consisted
remained deeply contested. A Dienstmaleisch, or bureaucratic Malay,
was favoured in a cacophony of variants by officials throughout the archipelago.
Yet it was challenged by the emergence from within of other
ways of speaking. For example, a "Jakarta Malay" had begun to exist as
a first language rooted in Malay by the first half of the twentieth century.
Colonial officials feared the persistent influence of Arabic; the extent
to which vulgar everyday usage of Malay by Europeans had lowered
the standard of the language, and the ways in which Malay newspapers
popularized their own form of "Low" Malay. This gave new urgency to
the task of standardization. Whereas, in an earlier era, linguistic heterogeneity
had prevailed; by the twentieth century a more rigidly defined

218 TN Harper
colonial hierarchy was being established of which language was a core
signifier. Philologists competed to standardize Malay as a colonial lingua
franca. The standard that was alighted on was an artificial one — it
came from the courts of Riau, and was based on its textual rather than
its oral tradition. Propagated through textbooks and grammars, "Riouw"
Malay was a political invention, an artificially created form of Malay
that was the mother tongue of no one. Yet, even at the height of these
experiments, the arguments for language as a unifying force stimulated
the linguistic sensibilities of Indonesian nationalists. Many officials had
been concerned that use of a lingua franca would reduce respect for the
Dutch in a way that the use of Dutch as an elite tongue would not,
especially in Java where status distinctions were marked through language
in a similar way (Hoffman 1979; Maier 1993). This, for the elite
nationalists, was a convincing argument for the acceptance of Malay.
Encouraged by Dutch Theosophists, early associations such as the Budi
Utomo seized on Malay as a language that would throw aside tradition,
and that would allow them to address social inferiors for the first time as
equals (Anderson 1990, chaps. 4 and 6).
Not just the choice of language, but the means through which it
was projected could rebound in this way. Colonial propaganda was a
vital catalyst to soul-searching within Southeast Asian societies. It provided
an audience for a sense of modernity, a tool for communal selfanalysis
that would steer the enterprise of intellectual renewal in new
and different directions. In the Islamic world, print attacked the very
heart of knowledge, especially the orality of the Quranic tradition —
the idea that authoritative knowledge was transmitted from person to
person. Despite the existence of a long textual and calligraphic tradition,
lithographic print was adopted widely only in the nineteenth century
in defence of the faith. It fostered ideological innovation by generating
a more universal vision of the Islamic ummah and world affairs. In
the long term it eroded the power of the ulama by breaking their monopoly
of transmission. With this came a new conception of being a
Muslim, especially in regions where secular power was in European hands
(Robinson 1993). Although these currents of ideological innovation had
deep indigenous origins, colonial policies and the new technology worked
to accelerate epistemological change.

9: The state and information in modern Southeast Asian history 219
In Malaya we can see how this occurred through British attempts,
after key educational reforms in 1906, to create a new reading public
amongst the Malays. They sought change without upheaval, to impart a
sense of industry and time discipline, and to quietly blaze a path towards
the modern. They celebrated the technological supremacy of the
West. The reproduction of tradition was undertaken to expose its weaknesses
and to provide a rationale for indirect British rule. Yet along with
this came the revolutionary step of furthering the use of romanized Malay
script, and colonial education, with its accent on individual reading and
self-improvement, supplied a very different ethos of education from that
of the Quranic system (Proudfoot 1993).
The Dutch went even further in their attempts to increase literacy
and convey Western modes of cognition. The Balai Pustaka was founded
in 1908 as an arm of the Ethical Policy to provide quality, low-priced
literature for the people. It was a reaction to the growth of an indigenous
public sphere and a recognition that a more or less free audience
was necessary if Holland was, in the words of the ideologue C. Snouck
Hurgronje, "to follow the material annexation by a spiritual one". Again,
romanization of the script and the adaptation of tradition were keynotes
of the Balai Pustaka's work. It developed a distributive apparatus
that endeavoured to reach beyond the elite and beyond Java. Its agents
were also a source of intelligence of native attitudes. It had its emulators
in French Indochina, such as Francois Henri Schneider, who, with the
co-operation of the chief of the Surete and Governor-General Sarrault,
began experimenting in "colonisation by means of books", and there
were plans to create a Bureau des Publications Indigenes on the Dutch
model. However, one French observer of this experiment identified a
central paradox of cultural engineering — by promoting vernacular literature
"they believed themselves to be forging a chain for their subjects,
but they see now that they have given them a terrible psychological
weapon, a common national language with which to express their common
national aspirations" (Marr 1981, p. 45).
The experience of America in the Philippines was unique in its emphasis
on the language of the colonizer and in the scale of its achievement.
English-language education was seized on instinctively by American
soldiers who knew no other language, to force a clear break with the

220 T.N. Harper
past that would to wean the people of the Philippines from insurrection,
break down Hispanic lethargy, and instil American industry. Six
hundred teachers were shipped in 1901, to educate the Filipinos to appreciate
Americas achievement in her own words and to entrench her
tutelage. By 1939 it was claimed that one-quarter of the indigenous
population could speak English (Bernabe 1987, pp. 24-30). Yet even
here, Americas faith in her developmental mission in the Philippines
was illusory. Although her propaganda seemed to cement an alliance
with comprador elites, these allies remained alert to other languages and
to what was changed in the process of translation. They would continue
to frame their utterances to a radical "other" — a continuous undercurrent
of peasant radicalism and millenarian expectation deep within Philippine
society (Ileto 1984, pp. 86-113).
By the late nineteenth century, colonial communications had created
new channels of information within the indigenous realm. Singapore
is the outstanding example. It was home to the mission presses,
but, more importantly in terms of what was read, it was home to a
network of Muslim publishers, controlled largely by Javanese from the
paisir settled in Kampong Glam, After 1840, 85 per cent of books in
Malay came from the island. Peaking in the 1890s, the Muslim publishers
produced a wide range of books of instruction, court chronicles, and
verse. Of these, the verse form, syair, was perhaps the most important
— it was closer to common speech and well-suited to being read aloud.
Chains of distribution were created by mail-order catalogues, agents,
vernacular school inspectors, itinerant seafarers, and traders. These, unlike
the vernacular books published by the government or the missions,
were commercial products sold in shops as a luxury item. They allowed
courtly texts to be uprooted from their social context and distributed
amongst everyone who could afford them. The new technology aided
the emergence of a new idea of literature — contemporary, authored by
named individuals, and read as an internal mental process, rather than
uttered as a social transaction. In 1890, the fortnightly output of the
Singapore Muslim presses alone eclipsed the entire production in literary
manuscripts to that date of several centuries, and this does not take
onto account the unregistered publications of other printers (Proudfoot
1993, "Introduction").

9: The state and information in modern Southeast Asian history 221
In Vietnam, the advent of colonial rule had provoked its own epistemological
crisis. Access to the printed word had previously only been
the privilege of the few. The growth of romanized, or quoc-ngu, newspapers
provided a continuity with oral tradition whilst achieving levels of
circulation unparalleled elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Around fifteen million
bound publications were printed in Vietnam in the two decades
before 1914 — perhaps eight or nine books per literate individual Historians
have spoken of the expansion of a new public sphere in these
societies, the rise of publications that began to speak to a nation. They
explained to their audience the new languages of politics and government
that had been brought by the Europeans, and began also to coin
their own (Marr 1981, pp. 44-53; Milne 1985, pp. 114-36, 249-51;
McHale 1995, pp. 173-94).
European insecurities were never far below the surface, and were
expressed in unprecedented levels of censorship and control. In the Straits
Settlements, as elsewhere in the region, printing from its earliest days
was met with suppression and deportations. By the 1850s initial restrictions
were relaxed, but after the 1886 Books Ordinance, publications
were gazetted and copies submitted to the government, though not all
were registered in this way (Byrd 1970, p. 1). In negotiating a relationship
with these new media, imperial governments wore a Janus face. In
the case of Indochina, European rule was, on the one hand, an authoritarian
demonstration of French power; on the other it was a civilizing
mission to export the ideals of 1789, and these ideals often stood in the
way of decisive repression of hostile voices. Cochinchina was under the
French press law of 1881. By playing up the Chinese threat, Governor
Doumer obtained in 1898 additional powers to suspend publications.
But on the whole, a more liberal regime prevailed there than in Annam
and Tonkin, which were under different and more confused jurisdictions.
In Vietnam, as elsewhere, repression actually forced more sophistication
on writers, and led them to adopt a deeply nuanced language,
j The more stringent controls in Annam and Tonkin drove elites into
I deep reflections on their culture (Thompson 1968 [1937], pp. 307-15;
Hue-Tam 1992, pp. 114-45). Indigenous presses would take advantage
j of confusions of intent on the part of Europeans. In the Dutch East
| Indies in 1906, freedom of expression was promulgated as part of the
i

222 T.. N. Harper
first wave of "ethical" policies, and preventative censorship was closed
to officials. Suppression had to be pursued through the courts, or by
quiet intimidation. However, the question of administrative suppression
raised its head in the immediate pre-war period, "Hate-sowing"
articles were incorporated within the penal code in 1914 that prevented
any declarations of hostility to Dutchmen and gave new scope co officials
to intervene.
Censorship was not only a reflection of insecurity. It became a question
of taste. The aesthetic sensibilities of the official shaped his response
to the new media as much as its actual subversive content, The British,
the French, the Dutch sought to wean the natives from their own popular
literature; to tear them away from the scandal sheets and penny
dreadfuls that were read aloud and passed around in coffee-shops and
bookstalls. Indeed, early literature thrived on innuendo, salaciousness,
and sensationalism. The literature of the Chinese in the Indies in Malay
embodied this spirit — it was an idiom rooted in the cacophony of the
port cities, sounds for which Europeans had no ear. The Dutch dismissed
it — to them it was not a language of culture. The shift to typography
made the content of publications even more impersonal. Literary
style moved away from poetry to prose — it became closer to that of the
newspaper, and this was a vital pre-condition for the emergence of modern
prose fiction in the 1920s and its exploitation in the new periodicals
that were appearing. Fiction was the medium for the transformation of
the indigenous realm. Its style allowed it to absorb contrary cultural
streams, standardize language and create narratives that envisioned a
nation (Maier 1991; Rafael 1988, pp. 213-19).
The propaganda wars of the end of empire
The colonial revolution in communications reached its crescendo during
the "twenty-year crisis" after World War I. It was the definitive crisis
of confidence for colonial authority. The new urgency with which the
colonial state projected itself in these years prefigured the means by which
post-colonial states would respond to information. This was felt in several
ways. First, war exposed the underground networks that had been
forged over the preceding decades, in particular links of education and
pilgrimage with the Middle East. These had multiplied in the middle of

i
9: The state and information in modern Southeast Asian history 223
che nineteenth century Pan-Islam was a recurrenc fear of imperial
proconsuls — war with Turkey unleashed a flood of Pan-Islamic propaganda,
some of ic aided by German sponsorship. Alchough this was more
influential in Africa chan in Asia it provoked new levels of propaganda
through which the British and French governments addressed the beliefs
of their colonial subjects, The Revolution in Turkey accelerated the
momentum of the great debates on modernism in the Malay world. It
compelled colonial censorship to step up a gear to combat Islamic propaganda
on the Khilafat issue. Even Reuter reports on this were censored
in London and Bombay. British propagandists presented their Empire
as the greatest Muslim power on earth and pressured its "loyal" Muslim
subjects — the Aga Khan, the Indian Princes, the Malay Rulers — to
defend the Empire as the "best friend of Islam" (Prasad 1985, p. 48).
Secondly, in the 1920s che colonial revolution in communications
deepened with the arrival in Southeast Asia of multiple new technologies.
Their impact was felt chiefly in the towns. Radio was brought to
Southeast Asia by amateur hams. In the Dutch East Indies a series of
short-lived experiments were begun by enthusiasts from 1925 that by
the early 1930s were repeated in a number of urban centres. Bandung in
particular had a wide and lively range of programming. By 1918 radio
telegraphic communication between Java and Holland began and it was
the Dutch who pioneered colonial broadcasting from 1927. In Malaya
in 1925 only twenty-five people owned sets, in 1935, 3,727. Roughly
half of the members of the amateur radio association were Chinese, and
Asian music featured prominently in their broadcasts. It was only later
thac the government responded to these developments. The Empire Service
only came on air in 1932; local radio in 1937, and it was interpreted
as unwelcome competition by the established local networks. In the
Indies a national network emerged by the same period, and, unlike the
local efforts which had a strongly Asian flavour, it broadcast mainly in
Ducch (Sarji 1982).
The cinema too rapidly rooted itself in the popular culture of the
region. As a spectacle, it first appeared at che turn of che century as a
novelty in the amusement parks of the towns. After 1910, permanent
cinema halls were established — in British Malaya by the 1930s there
were thirty to forty of them, mostly Chinese-owned; in 1927, 85 per

224 T.N. Harper
cent of cinemas in the Dutch East Indies were Chinese-owned, The first
locally produced films were Chinese-made. Statistics do not give the full
measure of the cinemas impact — throughout the region, travelling
shows transplanted the medium to the countryside. In the Philippines
by the late 1920s and early 1930s, locally produced films were already
embracing themes of patriotic struggle, and presenting dramatizations
of the work of writers such as Jose Rizal and Francisco Baltazar (Lent
1990, pp. 14-15). These media also opened up new possibilities for
colonial governments, in particular to promote the market for European
manufactured goods. In these years, advertising grew in sophistication
and was, to the Singapore Straits Times in 1927, "an essential
element in modern progress of every description".
Thirdly, between the wars controls were strengthened. The introduction
of new media seemed to encouraged the disrespect for colonial
authority that had always unnerved colonial societies — it bred idleness
and mischief amongst the population of the towns, Cinema threatened
to explode the myth of white prestige (Christie 1994, pp. 684-85). A
Cinematography Conference in Paris in 1926 registered the concern of
all the colonial powers about the moral threat the cinema presented.
Europeans saw the usefulness of cinema solely in its possibilities as a
didactic tool. The first propaganda film in Malaya was a 1926 short
advertising the Kuala Lumpur Infant Welfare Centre. In 1936, the Indies
government funded a film to encourage emigration from Java to Sumatra,
The main response, however, was censorship. In 1925, 12 per cent of
films entering Singapore and Malaya were banned — especially the products
of Hollywood — and 90 per cent were subject to some kind of
censorship (Stevenson 1974, pp, 44-68). Controls were extended in the
realm of print. In the Straits Settlements a Printing Presses Ordinance
was introduced in 1920, in the face of anti-Japanese agitation. It was
amended in 1930 by Sir Cecil Clementi to give unparalleled ex post facto
political control of the press, to an extent that left the Colonial Office
alarmed at the "arbitrary suppression" it permitted. Clementi argued
that the volatility of local Chinese politics made it unavoidable — a line
of reasoning that would recur throughout the post-war years. In
Indochina, although after the 1926 regulation was strengthened, repression
was often conducted outside the law through intimidation, harass-

9: The state and information in modern Southeast Asian history 225
merit of patrons, and by threatening printing houses with loss of contracts
(Yong 1992, pp. 308-21).
Yet the colonial censors did not have it all their own way. It was one
thing to excise a Hollywood screen kiss, but to silence indigenous voices,
one first had to understand them. Few Europeans did. In the French
case, journalists such as Nguyen An Ninh and his Cloche Felee exploited
the loopholes in French law. The "age in motion" of nationalist awakening
in Java after World War I was propelled by games of cat-and-mouse
with the censors and secret policemen. The utterances of nationalist
leaders were so heavily laden with images from the Quran and the wayang
that they were beyond Dutch comprehension. The local officials who
did understand them, reported and itemized them to public prosecutors.
It was a wearisome business and by the time one language was
encoded, a new vocabulary was created. Nevertheless, colonial repression
bore deep into these organizations. The "Survey of che Native Press"
was instituted by the Balai Pustaka as the official's window on che world
of local journalism, and precipitated attempts to gain control of native
newspapers, co-opt journalists, and publish their own, Pandji Poestaka,
in 1923. After 1920 a mood of deepening reaction gathered momentum
in the Indies. Closures of newspapers gave propagandists "no choice
but that between propaganda and prison" and helped precipitate the
desperate communist uprisings of 1926. Yet, even here the religious
propaganda of the Moe'alimin movement was so politically effective "that
the only thing the police had yet to do was to confiscate the Koran"
(Poeze in Cribb 1994; see also Shiraishi 1990, pp. 197, 309-30). Even
in the darkening 1930s, both Hatta in Holland and Soekarno in the
East Indies took advantage of court trials co utter statements of nationalist
commitment that could safely be reported under legal privilege
(Sarji 1982; McDaniel 1994; Ingkson 1979, pp. 137-38).
By this period, the transfer of technology had ceased to be monopolized
by the West. The Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia created
the political and cultural milieu for a massive counter-propaganda against
colonial rule, Although the Japanese did not relax the colonial controls,
their propaganda techniques far outstripped those of the Allies, who
throughout the war found themselves responding to, rather than anticipating,
Japanese innovations. The countries of Southeast Asia were sub-

226 T.N, Harper
mitted to an unprecedented barrage of propaganda that celebrated the
Japanese nation and the Asiatic spirit. However, the legacy of Japanese
ideological education lay not so much in its content, as in the manner
in which the message was projected. In the hands of the Japanese, the
technological tools of the state became a consciousness-raising force.
This new spirit rejected the bureaucratic elitism of colonial indirect rule.
Japanese youth training schools became forcing houses of racial awareness,
in which a generation of young leaders were trained as communicators
and technicians. In no sense were these men and women the compliant
tools of Japanese Imperial interest. What Japanese encouragement
engendered amongst them was a shared sense of the possible (Advertisers
Association 1971).
In the archipelago, local drama, the sandiwara for instance, became
rooted in local conditions, and voiced nationalist aspirations. Important
political networks were formed in the war of journalists, actors,
film-makers and propagandists. Their worlds cut across each other, and
continued to do so after the war. In the Philippines, there was a revival
of the stage, the vod-a-vil, with its double entendre and banter. In Java,
the Japanese Occupation led to an infusion of national consciousness
and local realism into theatre and cinema drama (Kurosawa 1987).
Soekarno was allowed to speak on radio, and through skilful allusions
evaded the censors and addressed a nation. By the early part of 1945,
the nationalist message was increasingly direct. News of the Japanese
surrender was broadcast by the staff of the Japanese station, and when
they were closed down they continued to broadcast from a mobile unit
as Radio Indonesia Merdeka. Radio would play a similar role in "pumping
up" the Viet Minh provisional government in Vietnam. In this way,
popular culture could be transformed into a new political force (Wild
1986, p. 163; Lockhart 1989).
Reithism and reaction in British Malaya
The colonial regimes that survived the war were driven by technology as
never before. The late colonial state was configured by counter-insurgency,
and as the roots of European regimes unravelled, they became
ever more dependent on technology for the prosecution of anti-guerrilla
warfare. Most dramatically, and tragically in terms of its human cost,

9: The state and information in modern Southeast Asian history
the Vietnam War became a projection of the technological supremacy
of the United States. Yet the campaign also exposed the limits of its
competence (Chandler 1981), Regimes became obsessive over their control
over technology. In these years, we can clearly see how deeply embedded
the legacy of the colonial management of technology had become
in the process of state-building. It was perhaps where national
leaders devolved power, rather than achieved it through revolutionary
struggle, thac we can most clearly identify the lineage of post-colonial
management of communications.
The British case is especially revealing. The fall of Penang and Singapore
in 1942 was a direct stimulus to the formulation of a colonial
public relations policy, and where previously the colonial state had been
slow to grasp the possibilities of radio and film, they were now energetically
seized upon. The process had begun in 1939 throughout the empire
with the placing of stricter controls over programme content and
the construction of loudspeaker systems in towns and villages. The BBC
gave new prominence to colonial issues on its Home and Overseas —
local content was swamped by relayed programmes from the metropolis.
South East Asia Command capitalized on these innovations. Unable
to make war in the region themselves, experts in the new field of psychological
warfare used radio to encourage others to do so on their behalf
(McDaniel 1994, pp. 41-48; McHugh 1965/66). The Communist
Emergency diverted vast resources into the science of political communication.
Communication went hand in hand with surveillance and
control — the new police VHF network was perhaps the most sophisticated
of its kind (Langley 1962). The Emergency was an ideological
war, and propaganda and psychological warfare a key weapon for the
military against the insurgents. Yet these techniques were increasingly
deployed in the civil sphere in an attempt to draw active expressions of
allegiance from the population, to capture, in the overworn phrase of
the time, "hearts and minds". This, in turn, developed into a much
deeper project co create a healthy nationalism and a new type of citizenry
thac would people a multi-racial, democratic "Malayan" nation.
British cultural policy in Malaya was perhaps the most ambitious of
any colonial regime anywhere. The diverse ways in which this was pursued
have been treated elsewhere and need not detain us here (Harper
227

228 7.7V. Harper
1999). However, two facets of this are worth emphasizing, First, it greatly
facilitated the diffusion of technology. The British published an extensive
range of newspapers and pamphlets. To reach illiterates they provided
community listening sets for farmers and labourers, laid on travelling
film shows, and even made their own movies. Secondly, they envisioned
a cultural renaissance under British patronage, a fusion of the
heterogeneous and polyglot cultures of Malaya. The policy was centred
on an attempt to expand the place of English as the first language of che
post-colonial elite, and to restrict the use of vernaculars. It was zestfully
pursued by a new generation of expatriates that arrived in Malaya after
the war. The anti-hero of Anthony Burgess's Malayan Trilogy, the frustrated
schoolmaster, Victor Crabbe, perhaps best exemplifies the spirit
of the age. Fusion meant Anglicization. In the arts; Eliot and J.B. Priestley,
and Macbeth in Malay dress. The whole was fortified by a robust anti-
Americanism. To one more sceptical observer, it seemed as if the British
were chasing a certain kind of society "in order to fulfil a kind of myth,
the myth of Malayanization" (Kaye 1955, p. 15).
Before the war, officials had argued for the unifying potential of
English as a means of bringing Chinese schools into the mainstream of
the colonial education system. The Protector of Chinese in Singapore,
Victor Purcell, was convinced by the father of New Criticism, LA.
Richards, that the real lingua franca of Malaya was "Basic English". The
Colonial Office half-heartedly promoted it, but it became clear that
Basic English could not compete with the established local patois (Purcell
1937, pp. 13, 64; Hyam et al. 1994, p. 265). However, during the
Emergency, English schools took on a special role as "nurseries for the
more Malayan-minded". A vast range of English primers were produced.
Publishers provided "controlled original reading material" for Malayan
consumption, a magazine for the Young Malayan; retellings of Malay
legends, and jungle adventures against the terrorists. In a similar vein,
the British attempted co create a "Basic Malay" as an elementary lingua
franca — fit only for the bazaar and rooted in rural life. Colonial educationalists
were contemptuous of attempts by Malay writers to move the
language away from its agrarian origins. Their textbooks inveighed against
the "unnecessary" innovations of Malay-language reformers — a vocabulary
of eight hundred words is enough for anybody (Dussek et al

9; The state and information in modern Southeast Asian history 229
1953, pp. vii-x). The dialogues in these primers are fascinating sources
for European perceptions of the Malays and the conventions of race
relations in the period — or rather of what they ought to be. They
showed Malays cheerfully embracing agricultural improvement and joining
the police to avenge their race against the communists, 1
However,
the government was compelled to produce its own political vocabulary
in Malay. In it the word "politics" was given as siasat, giving the sense of
a policy, an investigation, rather than the more dynamic borrow-word
that was gaining currency amongst Malays themselves, politik To the
British, politics was a business of administration, not struggle (McHugh
1965/66).
Democratic education and censorship moved forward hand in hand.
<strong>Cultural</strong> propaganda ran in parallel with the establishment of new information
regimes. After the Pacific war, a liberal regime had briefly
prevailed, with the relaxation of existing controls on freedom of speech
and publications. A series of confrontations between the colonial government
and predominantly leftist publications circumscribed freedom
of speech. The Emergency Regulations of 1948 gave new powers to
administrators. Yet the colonial government still voiced commitment to
freedom of expression. In the policing of the printed word and culture,
the "Malayan" was used as a yardstick to distinguish between legitimate
and illegitimate forms of public opinion, Distanced from operational
concerns on the peninsula, greater leeway was afforded the media in
Singapore, where the larger newspapers and foreign journalists were
based. Here, future BBC Director-General, Carleton-Greene urged on
administrators a more positive approach to the fourth estate and a
Reithian approach to broadcasting. It was to unify the collective life of
che nation, as the British envisaged it, and mark out a new public sphere
for Malayans to identify with. 2
Publications were to be tolerated unless
there was evidence of subversive intent. Sedition and not opposition
was to be the rationale of suppression, The press were to retain the maximum
independence and freedom, "but this does not release them from
the obligation to help on the lines of material and civic responsibility". 3
The role of the media was to educate, and not to hold its masters to
account.
However, the failure to create an Asian public opinion in the Reithian

230 T.N. Harper
image undermined the credibility of this position. The old fears of urban
popular culture and the cinema intensified in the twilight years of
colonial society in Malaya — both were identified with American influence.
The towns were an "American hell", the cinemas "glittering temples
where thousands worship everyday". The Singapore government
pressed for a 10 per cent quota of British or English Malayan films
(Singapore 1954). There was a flood of students' magazines and mosquito
papers, both Chinese and Malay. Government archives hold the
voluminous results of officials probing and translating them, of scouring
them for evidence of obscenity and sedition. Sheet music circulating
in Chinese Middle Schools and Chinese gramophone records were also
vetted and many banned. In Singapore in one month only in 1953, 460
of over 1,600 packets intercepted by post were stopped — including
dictionaries and primers from China, Kuomintang publications, and
Chinese publications from Jakarta — even books on accounting, herbs,
and pathology. There are lurid and comic examples of colonial Orientalists
debating the finer points of translation of pornography. 4
As elsewhere
in Southeast Asia, the worlds of scandal and sedition overlapped.
The periodicals that carried this material — especially Chinese mosquito
papers — were deeply politicized. The British felt that the communists
deliberately employed pornography to illustrate the moral bankruptcy
of colonial society. In the face of this, the British fell back on
more authoritarian arguments. Their assumption that papers were communist,
and their censorship of them before publication went beyond
even the Emergency Regulations. The Chinese, officials concluded, did
not understand freedom of the press. They could not understand that
the government itself might in some ways be committed to the principle.
Liberalism was misguided. It was taken for granted that a government
would seek to suppress hostile opinion; not to do so would be
interpreted as a sign of weakness. Similar justifications of censorship,
appealing to the peculiarity of local cultural traditions, would recur in
independent Singapore and Malaysia.
The official emphasis on the need for strict control was undermined
by the growing ineffectiveness of action. Attempts to build up allies in
the vernacular press failed, and top secret reports on the ownership and
political allegiance of the Malayan press show how powerful it had be-

9: The state and information in modern Southeast Asian history 231
come, and also the futility of attempts to suppress critical sections of it
entirely. In the absence of equally strong moderate opinion, repression
was futile. The colonial official responsible finally conceded that "the
problem must be seen primarily in terms of the growing politics of the
Federation, and not in terms of administrative convenience or anti-communist
activity". 6
Moreover, the "Malayan" project, although it had its
parallel in the "EngMalChin" literary movement in the new University
of Malaya, had little impact beyond the narrow Anglophone bourgeoisie.
Indigenous propaganda forms flourished and were even revitalized
in the last years of colonial rule. <strong>Cultural</strong> renaissance was a common
theme — theatre and film continued to be integrated in a wider didactic
process. There was a remarkable revival of local journalism and publishing
after the war. One survey has counted fourteen books of poetry,
ninety-six novels, and forty-eight books of essays in Chinese literature
during a period of liberal relaxation of colonial controls after the war
that became known as the "Malayan Spring" (Han 1964, p. 14). Chinese
publishing was hit hardest after 1948 under the draconian Emergency
Regulations. However, there was space for a gifted generation of
Malay writers and propagandists to manoeuvre. They may even have
been abetted by censorship. It diverted them from polemic into a deeper
level of engagement with social themes. They found it hard to penetrate
the language of newspaper editorials. Colonial translators could not keep
pace — the Malayan Civil Service exams in Malay ignored the new
genres, As one Malay writer, Masuri S.N., later reflected, censorship
actively fostered a new literature by forcing writers to express their ideas
in "parcels so wrapped up that it became difficult to grasp their message"
(Masuri 1993, pp. 13-14). This literature spearheaded a new
movement towards national reconstruction through literature and the
reformulation of the Malay language. It became a definitive struggle for
national identity during the period of decolonization and was consolidated
after independence with the establishment of literacy agencies
and new programmes of cultural engineering.
Information, citizenship, and the post-colonial state
The colonial experiment, like others elsewhere in the region, was frustrated.
However, it had a profound impact on the character of the inde-

232 T.N. Harper
pendent polity. This is not the place for a comprehensive account of the
relationship between the media and the state in independent Southeast
Asia. However, it is important to highlight several historical themes
through which it has been shaped. Even at the height of nationalist
struggle, we can discern a distinct ambivalence in the attitude of many
Southeast Asian leaders to the media. In Indonesia, although radio played
a major role in keeping alive the struggle of the new republic at pivotal
moments such as the battle for Surabaya, it did so often in the face of
political suspicions of leaders such as Soekarno (Wild 1986), One reason
for this was that colonial policing of public taste had, at this early
period, found its echo in parallel movements to eradicate "yellow culture"
— Americanism and materialism — within Southeast Asian society.
To turn again to the Malayan case, the rape of a young girl in Singapore
in 1957 sparked a campaign against the imported, degenerate, "sexy
culture" of the West. It was weakening local initiative, corrupting the
morals of society. The "anti-yellow culture" movement attacked the colonial
censorship for banning publications that carried Asian "healthy
culture", "The simplest and shortest way that is used by the colonial
power to ridicule the colonized people of Malaya is to allow the
unimpeded spread of yellow culture". Therefore, it was argued, "the
anti-yellow culture movement cannot be separated from the Merdeka
movement". 7
The "anti-yellow culture" movement was orchestrated by the Communist
United Front, but it drew support from a broad range of literary
associations that had led the struggle against colonial cultural engineering
— student bodies, trade unions, and radical politicians such as Lee
Kuan Yew. They demanded new levels of censorship. In Indonesia the
institutional development of media such as the cinema was shaped by
anti-Americanism. In 1953, the Mayor of Jakarta, Sudiro, made it mandatory
for first-class theatres to show Indonesian films, and there was a
struggle between rival cultural agencies for the political soul of media
such as the cinema (Said 1991, pp. 34-45), Communications framed
the cultural authority of empire. <strong>Cultural</strong> reconstruction was the basis
of one of the deepest challenges to the colonial order. Yet this struggle
bequeathed an anxiety — it was precisely because culture and its transmission
was seen as so central to colonial power that, after independ-

9: The state and information in modern Southeast Asian history 233
ence, it became even more fundamental to a society's strength, to the
nations very survival. To defend the integrity of the national culture, it
was necessary to adopt an equivocal attitude to new technology
A second theme is that, although this ambivalence existed at independence,
a deepening sense of threat developed. This had different
local manifestations, but it came to a head throughout the region by the
middle of the 1970s. The fundamental reasons for this were social and
political, as governments sought to rein in the popular forces that propelled
the struggle for independence, and found new political institutions
on the bedrocks of stability and development. It coincided with
the beginning of a revolution in communications. It was witnessed by a
new wave of assaults on "yellow culture". They were perhaps most vehement
in Vietnam. As the final stages of the revolution were accomplished,
cadres inflamed with a new orthodoxy moved to extinguish much of the
vibrant print culture that had emerged from the 1930s, particularly in
Saigon after its Bill (Tin 1995). It could be seen elsewhere. In Malaysia,
there was a mounting backlash against American television shows and
music. Colonial censorship laws were strengthened in 1974 after a heated
public debate on the showing of sex films, couched in terms reminiscent
of the crusade against "yellow culture" in 1957, Islamic resurgence
gave it a new force and the government instituted stronger controls on
what was not to be shown, and did its utmost to promote what it felt
should be shown. By the 1980s in Malaysia, the curbs on political subversive,
retrograde, or, increasingly, anti-Islamic uses of media and performance
were further strengthened. A similar pattern can be traced in
Indonesia (Sen 1994). This transition was perhaps most vigorously contested
in the Philippines. A more liberal policy in the 1960s led to the
growth of new media, most notoriously the bomba films. Even their
critics acknowledged that they sustained Tagalog cinema during a period
of fierce competition, and brought a more adult audience and a
new candour. In pornographic magazines, as one leading critic noted,
"social consciousness is the rule rather than the exception", as publications
embraced topical issues to strengthen a claim to legitimate existence
that would be harder to make on aesthetic grounds (David 1990,
pp. 154-57). However, by the early 1970s there was a reaction that
culminated in intervention by President Marcos. After 1972, under the

234 T..N. Harper
New Society, censorship was "an organic instrument of moral regeneration,
social development and cultural reawakening" (De Vega 1975, pp.
34—44). The underlying rationale did not fall with Marcos, and was
clearly visible elsewhere. The legitimate use of such media was measured
by its educational purpose, and defined by its utility in the development
of a robust national culture. As in the colonial period, it was an exercise
in obliterating impurity and establishing an authentic local vision. By
the 1980s, this emphasis on cultural boundaries allowed governments
to reinforce their arguments for respect for national contexts, yet it acted
as a yardstick for a regional approach to the problems of media management.
The "Asian" approach is a political artifice, and coexists with a
spectrum of variously nuanced and dissenting perspectives. However,
the articulation of the common themes of the official position gathered
momentum in the 1990s, and provides a point of departure for many of
the essays in this collection.
There was an unshaken faith in the capacity of the state to accomplish
the cultural and political ambitions of independence. This is a
third theme of the colonial inheritance. Its shape and intensity varies —
the colonial apparatus of control has been subject to very different priorities
since independence. Nevertheless, regimes drew heavily on the
bureaucratic preoccupations and language of the institutions they had
inherited. In many countries the fundamentals of colonial legislation
still govern the media. In Indonesia, "hate-sowing" articles continue to
be invoked in the final years of the Soeharto regime. In many cases
continuity was underpinned by personnel. In Singapore, for example,
British information moguls stayed on to serve the new state. Governments
seized upon colonial methods of censure and control to develop a
robust national culture and enforce new allegiances. Ironically, the very
agencies — the language and literacy bureaux — that had emerged to
challenge colonial cultural policy were employed to this end. The propaganda
machines of counter-insurgency did not wind down — governments
continued to give a high priority to the projection of the state
and in promoting a public opinion for development. "Public relations"
and "communications" became oversubscribed disciplines in new universities.
Language remained at the heart of the projection of the state
— in Malaysia and Indonesia the founders of the Bahasa Indonesia and

9: The state and information in modem Southeast Asian history 235
Bahasa Malaysia built upon colonial projects of standardization. Where
these were absent or ambiguous, such as in the Philippines and Singapore,
politicians embarked on new ones. New keywords for power were
created — in Indonesia as the New Order created a new vocabulary of
government as part of its attempt to depoliticize society. The achievements
of these projects were monumental, although not in every case
was their impact uniform, nor was it unchallenged. Rich popular patois
survived. Within the New Order, as within the Dutch Indies, complex
processes of translation deflected the homogenizing ambitions of the
state. Moreover, a new generation of Indonesians began to explore the
history of the anti-colonial struggle, and to rediscover the past was to
recover an entire language of politics which had been buried for thirty
years (Anderson 1994, pp. 138- 41). This is our final historical theme.
Poachers had turned gamekeepers, but they would not have the
domain all to themselves, In their moral policing of culture, governments
were not merely rooting out transgressions in public utterance,
but intervening in multi-layered popular cultures. In this they were inflicting
on themselves many of the same dilemmas that had afflicted
colonial civil servants. In the first year of self-government in Singapore,
the English poet D.J. Enright warned the new leaders that it would be
as futile to institute
... a sarong-culture, complete with pantun competitions and so forth, as to
bring back the Maypole and the Morris dancers in England just because che
present monarch happens co be called Elizabeth. The important ching for
Singapore and Malaya is to remain culturally open. Who can decide which
seeds will fall on barren ground and which will grow? (Enright 1960, p. 4)
Older indigenous methods of transmission survived, Quranic literature,
for example, was reinvigorated by global movements of Islamic resurgence.
Governments would invest in ic for political and moral education
(Federspiel 1994, pp. 25-28), In Malaysia, despite the rapid penetration
of new media into the rural areas, personal contacts and media
such as the wayang kulit and mak yong retained a role in public information
campaigns (Hassan 1985, pp. 53-60). Old habits of self censorship
and subterfuge also persisted, and counterpoints co the projects of the
state had perhaps by the 1990s been amplified by new media. Governments
seized upon these technologies with a renewed determination to

236 T.N. Harper
define ambitious fin de siecle developmental strategies. Yet for them to
succeed, the fruits of a new communications revolution had to be more
widely disseminated. In Singapore, for example, technology was seen as
indispensable for its survival in the competitive global market. Yet, at
the same time, its leaders sought to create a "curtain of immunity" from
the corrupting forces that could be beamed through by it (Yao 1994).
Regimes still erupted in rage against the tyranny of "yellow culture". In
early 1996, Vietnam launched a new campaign to incinerate magazines
and videotapes, and it even moved to obliterate foreign brands and lettering
on shopfronts and billboards. However, the new tools of communication
— faxes, video-cassette players, satellite dishes, personal computers,
modems, mobile phones — were such that their broadcast content
was controlled as much from the home or workplace as from any
central clearing-house. Communications was a massive industry, which,
no longer dominated solely by the Western media, was beginning to
spawn its powerful regional magnates. One option was to control new
technology as other forms of media had been controlled in the past. Yet,
in Malaysia, where one million internet users were forecast by 1998, the
Deputy Minister of Information admitted that "censorship or the role
of gatekeepers, be they governmental institutions or media barons, has
shrunk as they are not able to perform the functions they were used to".
He also assured his audience of media barons that the new technology
made it easier for governments to monitor what their citizens were saying.
8
The imperatives for mobilization and control continue to move in
tandem: and both were apparent to the political crises that shock the
region in the late 1990s. Whether it be the egalitarian forms of address
of the television presenter, the cyber language of the Internet, new media
continue to create new ways of speaking. The tools of propaganda
can empower as much as persuade, and censorship can enrich, as much
as silence, alternative voices.
NOTES
1. See, for example, "Visit to Tanjong Karang" and "Time of Emergency, in Coope
and M. Ali (1952, pp. 22-25, 42-45).
2. Sir Franklin Gimson to j. Higham, 2 August 1951, C0537/7255, Public Records
Office, London.

9: The state and information in modern Southeast Asian history 237
3. J.N. McHugh to Deputy Chief Secretary, 21 February 1950, FS/12290/50. Arkib
Negara Malaysia.
4. "Singapore Review of Imported Publications", January-July 1953, PRO/Conf/153/
53, Singapore National Archives [SNA], For example, one file contains an account
of po-faced Orientalises pouring through different translations of a scurrilous description
of a striptease show, in an attempt to decipher whether the prose was
suggesting that the woman involved had an orgasm. If she had, this would make
the article obscene. If in doubt, the senior man recommended, adopt a "consistently
Victorian attitude". SCA/137/46, SNA.
5. "A Note of 'Mosquito' or Non-Daily Chinese Newspapers in Singapore", 2 June
1955, PRO/Conf/286/54, SNA.
6. P.R.O. to A.S. "Political", 10 August 1954, ibid.
7. "Building an Extensive Anti-Yellow Culture Movement", an article written in Chinese,
translated from The Malayan Student into Malay and published in Utusan
Zaman, 19 August 1956.
8. At a conference in Kuala Lumpur on "Political Liberalization through the Internet",
reported in Asia Times, 28 March 1996.

238 T.N. Harper

9: The state and information in modern Southeast Asian history 239

240 T.N. Harper

Part Four
Representational
strategies
and politics
of the popular

Representing the Singapore
modern: Dick Lee, pop music,
and the "New" Asia
C.J.W.-L. WEE
1
In an implicit criticism of Francis Fukuyama, political philosopher
Chantal Mouffe says, "Not long ago we were being told .., that liberal
democracy had won and that history had ended." The event that matters
is, of course, the collapse of communism. What caught some people
offguard, however, was that "instead of the heralded 'New World Order,
the victory of universal values, and the generalization of 'post-conventional'
identities, we were witnessing the explosion of particularisms and an
increasing challenge to Western universalism", a universalism characterized
as "rationalist and individualist (Mouffe 1993, pp. 1, 3) — the
supposed culmination of the modern era ushered in by the Renaissance.
Mouffe is referring to the burst of ethnic nationalisms — "the archaic"
— which has erupted in Eastern Europe, and of particularistic
movements such as radical feminism. Since the 1980s, similar politicocultural
contestations or resistances against Western universalism have
also occurred in parts of East and Southeast Asia which have experienced
high rates of economic growth until the Asian economic crisis in
1997. Samuel Huntingron, of Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies,
has wrongly but influentially chosen to see this challenge as a "clash

244 C.J.W-L Wee
of civilizations" between Sinic or Confucianism Islamic and Western civilizations.
1
While the essentialist term "civilization" must be interrogated (as if
the vastness of Asia could be a single, fixed cultural entity), a discourse
on "East Asian modernity" has emerged, claiming the status of a counter-
or alternative model of modernity — a "regional" universalism, if
you like — in which "traditional" Asian values of family-centredness,
self-control, frugality, and corporate identity are seen as the foundations
for Asian success. 2
Within this discourse, some Asians like to believe
that we have indigenized modernity, and that we might escape the cultural
deracination thought to be taking place in the West — perceived
to be the consequence of its supposedly extreme, individualist modernity.
The discourse thus espouses a neo-traditional modernity that has a
less prominent role for individualist, bourgeois democracy. (The contradictions
indicated in that expression ate intended.)
One of the focuses of transnational cultural theory 3
has been an
examination of, among other things, the way in which non-Ekiropean
and non-North American groups or cultures use the local to resist Western
hegemonic forces of modernity. The challenge for cultural analysis,
as Anna Tsing says, "is to move from situated, that is local', controversies
to widely circulating or global' issues of power and knowledge and
back" (Tsing 1994, p. 279). Keeping in mind such a dynamic of resistance,
I suggest that some post-colonial Asian states play a game of creating
"frontier identities" in order to resist Western modernity through
appropriating it. This occurs even while these states remain engaged in
the high-stakes, free-trade game that went on with the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) — now transformed into the World
Trade Organization (WTO) — and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
(APEC) forum. This context is important for understanding
the regional success of a major Singapore musician, Dick Lee, who is
well-known in parts of Southeast and East Asia. I will look at the way in
which Lees musical representation of a "new" Asia is oddly related to
Singapore's ruling Peoples Action Party (PAP) leadership's overall stand
on Asian identity, and, in particular, what might be called (pace Paul
Rabinow) their version of a Singapore modern (Rabinow 1989). The

10; Representing the Singapore modern: Dick Lee, pop music, and the "Mew"Asia 245
PAP's position involves culturally resisting even while being politically
and economically involved with "globalization" 4
— the organization and
the exploitation of markets on a world scale 5
— through die re-invention
of a local identity (or what British cultural critics might call a "heritage"
culture) that seeks to preserve and not to eradicate the tension between
progress and restoration.
Dick Lee is relevant to these issues because he is the only Asian pop
artist I know of who has directly set out to depict — and, in some
abstract sense, to territorialize — the vacant idea of Asia. He started off
in the late 1970s, writing and performing a combination of Englishlanguage
pop and light jazz music. Increasingly in the early 1980s, he
inserted significant local touches to his music. Lees regional success really
began with The Mad Chinaman (1989), in which he blended traditional
Chinese and Southeast Asian music and older Chinese pop songs
either to create his own compositions, or to be played on top of more
contemporary rhythms. The music thus makes gestures towards being
World Music, or at least to being a quasi-World Pop. What distinguishes
Lee from being labelled definitely as an Oriental World Music artist is
the too-knowing and sometimes (self-)parodic incorporation of the authentic,
an incorporation which simultaneously questions the status or
need for the authentic, while on another level proclaiming a true "Asianness".
In local markets, Lee sold fairly well with university and polytechnic
students who appreciated the novelty of his hybrid pop-jazz, despite
critics' scathing assessments. Japanese youth also liked his quasi—World
Pop. Lees sophisticated, witty, and cosmopolitan personality, and his
chic Armani attire, gained in appeal as he began to foreground the Asian
elements of his cultural make-up. Arguably, within Southeast Asia, only
Singapore, with its specific Anglo-Asian cultural configuration, could
have produced a star like Lee. Initially rejected by the usually humourless
political establishment in Singapore for his populist sending-up of
local life, Lee has since become part of the states approach to the national-popular.
For instance, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra performed
Lee's music in July 1995, in a programme with the singers Sandy
Lam of Hong Kong and Tracy Huang of Taiwan.

246 C.J.W.-L Wee
II
I would like now to move to a discussion of che social and cultural
context which frames Lee's music. It is important to note that while
there exists a generalized discourse or rhetoric on Asian modernity and
the East Asian economic "miracle" (as the World Bank calls it), not all
East Asian nation-states use this discourse in the same way and with the
same political purposes, despite the impression one may get from the
Western media (see, for example, "Asian Values: The Scourge of the
West", The Economist, 22 April 1995, pp. 24-25). Gerald Segal points
out that at the 1993 United Nations conference on human rights in
Vienna, Japan "distanced itself from fellow Asians' anti-democratic views"
in which national development is prioritized over individual rights (Segal
1993). And yet, some voices in Japan also express the idea of an emerging
pan-Asia. Ogura Kazuo, Japans former ambassador to Vietnam, writes
that Western "universality is not something exclusively Western but rather
something that arose out of the ... Wests collisions with other civilizations".
Now that places like Taiwan and Hong Kong "are becoming
models of economic development ... we in Asia must seriously search
for values that we can present to the world as universal. In che process of
this search, we must lend our ears not only to Okakura Kakuzo and
Kitobe Inazo, author of Bushido, ... but also to people like ...
Rabindranath Tagore and Sun Yat-sen" (Ogura 1993, pp. 39, 38, 40),
This concept of an Asia Major propounds the plundering of Asia's cultural
pasts for the treasures which could advance world civilization.
Singapore and Malaysia — the latter a largely Islamic country with
a large Chinese minority which also (peculiarly) lays claim to what has
been described as a neo-Confucian or "Sinic" modernity 6
— despite (or
perhaps because of) their relatively small size, have emerged as two of
the most outspoken champions for the traditional-modern Asia. Singapore's
former premier, Lee Kuan Yew, roams around the world spreading
the good news of Asia's arrival. Singapore would host the first WTO
ministerial meeting in December 1996 because, as a journalist for Singapore's
Straits Times put it, "it would be 'symbolically appropriate' to
host the first meeting in Asia as an acknowledgment of the region's growing
importance in the world economy" (Ngoo 1994).

10: Representing the Singapore modern: Dick Lee, pop music, and the ''New"Asia 247
What, then, does Asian pop music have to do with the new Asia's
contestation over or demand for a space within the Western globalization
project through the 1980s to the mid-1990s? In Producing Pop,
Keith Negus argues thac "informing the resistance to a global mass culture
in various parts of the world has been the recognition that, over the
last thirty years, much of this has been Anglo-American in origin and
content" (Negus 1992, p. 7). Dick Lee recognizes in his and Singapore's
complex, post-colonial, Anglo-Asian identity the heritage (or baggage)
of Anglo-American culture. The transnational West is part of Singapore's
national culture, but it is also something Lee is contending with.
He struggles with what the exact link between "transnation" and "nation"
ought to be. Lee writes of his approach to pop in the liner notes to
his Asiamajor (1990):
I've always felt this need co find a musical answer co my identity problem.
You see, coming from Singapore, where case truly meets west on an island
largely of immigrants, there's always this thing about how we should dress,
speak and sound. ... Most Asian pop is written in the Western genre, but
sung in che various Asian languages. Why not throw the traditional aspects
in with the contemporary, add a few of my own touches, and mix them ... to
create a new kind of Asian pop.
Whether Lee manages a truly syncretic music, or stays at the level of
an unabashedly commercial and gimmicky pastiche — supported by
outrageous costumes' — as some of his detractors charge, is a real issue.
Yet, although Lee's picture of culture might look decentred, his creatively
assembled version of Asiamajor never lacks a grand, combative
narrative of progress in the face of anticipated Western scepticism. To
him, Asia is not stuck in the past. We should not see Lee as simply a
product of a global process called "post-modernity', 8
He sings, in the
suitably electro-pop title track of Orientalism (1991): "I think that its
time to show / That all of us are no / Caricatures or stereotypes, / No
token yellows! / We simply have to be / Assertive, make them see / This
is the new Asian / Ready for the twenty-first century!" The new Asian is
centred, dynamic, and progressive: he can be as modern as any Westerner.
The song continues (in a domesticated rap style befitting Lees pro-
West resistance to the West) — we were once in "some kind of limbo",

248 C.J.W.-L. Wee
but now the new Asian is both "east and west / forget the rest". There is
no need anymore to choose between the two, the either/or of the culture
of late colonialism which hid the desire for the Other. 9
The new
hybrid is potentially everywhere: "Oriental — New York City / Oriental
— Quezon City." Lee has found some freedom from an earlier postcolonial
subjectivity that enforced a pretend whiteness and a sense of
shame at a hidden but apparently ineradicable, backward Asianness; but
now, "It's quite alright: / Be white inside", as long as you are also "turning
on to Orientalism". I doubt that Lee is aware of how Edward Said
uses the term "Orientalism", since he gives it a positive meaning here.
The question of identity forms the core of Lee's music. The title
track of The Mad Chinaman (1989) portrays an Ancient Mariner—type
persona who stops all and sundry to listen to how the Mad Chinaman
struggles with his "Traditional, / International" halves — the mariner
asks himself "how should I react? defend with Asian pride? Or attack!"
Lee's attempts to transcend his colonial origins mark him as "postcolonial".
As Kwame Anthony Appiah has argued, "Postcoloniality is
the condition ... of a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained,
group ... who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism.
... [T]he post in postcolonial... is the post of... [a] space-clearing
gesture" (Appiah 1992, p. 149). Other Asian pop artists without
Lee's agenda, such as the immensely popular Hong Kong stars Aaron
Kwok, Andy Lau, Jacky Cheung, and Leon Lai — the so-called 'Heavenly
Kings' — borrow internationalized Western forms of music and
choreography without feeling the need to be "original". Lee is dismissive
of their form of Canto-pop 10
precisely because of this indifference to
cultural neo-colonialism. The Hong Kongers were, up to 1997, colonial
subjects, but they were and are not interested in transcending coloniality.
(Lee's own work co-opts many types of musical genres — but he takes it
to be a contestatory co-option.)
Ill
My use of the term "post-colonial" is markedly different from the way it
has been discussed by some cultural critics. This has to do with the Fact
that the Singapore musician's anti- yet pro-West discourse does not
emanate from an underdeveloped society struggling under the weight

10: Representing the Singapore modern: Dick Lee, pop music, and the "New"Asia 249
of a more-or-less direct neo-colonialism, as has been the case for many-
African peoples in the aftermath of the dismantling of colonialism proper.
Gayatri Spivak has rightly argued that "in the high-growth capitalist
parts of Asia the cultural sector [when compared to post-independence
Algeria or India] is not that strategic because within [contemporary economic
rather than territorial] neocolonialism they are run much more
by ministries of finance" (Spivak 1991, p. 221). But what she overlooks
is how successfully Asian governments, such as Singapore's, generate a
media-based knowledge both of the West, and of its own locally formulated
national and regional cultural identities. Since 1960, PAP leaders
have taken the stance that culture need not be organic — and this stance
has been asserted in an aggressive, masculinist form that is a re-working
of the colonial masculinity that dominated much late-imperial British
life (Sinha 1995). S. Rajaratnam, the first Minister of Culture and later
Deputy Prime Minister, announced in thac year; "We do not regard
culture as the opium of the intellectuals or as something to tickle the
fancies of gentlemen or gentlewomen. For us the creation of a Malayan
culture is a matter of practical politics [and] nation-building"
(Rajaratnam 1987, p. 119). Dick Lees pop music functions within this
state-generated, instrumentalist framework of cultural knowledge production
in which Western high and pop culture have been allowed to
permeate Singapore on the basis that the state could always manage
culture if it became troublesome.
Lee himself belongs to the colonial-created, English-speaking Chinese
minority that dominates the PAP government. Of financially comfortable
background, he grew up in upper-middle-class Singapore. His
early exposure to jazz, contemporary pop, and Stephen Sondheim-esque Broadway — a privilege for tho
1970s — contributed to his Asian pop style. Lees background is also
peranakan, that is, Malayan-born Chinese who have imbibed Malay culture.
He uses this Malayan background to effect, quite apart from the
folk and pop Chinese music he incorporates into his work. His music
contains a strong element of nostalgia for a Singapore of the 1950s and
1960s. In addition, as occasion demands, Lee will also pirate popular or
folk Thai, Filipino, and Japanese tunes, sometimes arranged for contrast
with a scat or bebop background. When he performs, rather than

250 C.J.W.-L. Wee
using standard English, he deliberately uses colloquial Singapore English
(or "Singlish"), which is riddled with non-English expressions
another marker of the local.
Like other pop musicians, Lee uses videos to cultivate his public
persona. His parodic and campy style contributes to a persona that consumes
and contests the West. 11
On the cover of The Mad Chinaman, he
appears in full Chinese opera regalia but with the army-style boots that
were part of a once-trendy "street-wear" or "work-wear" look. Lee's knowing,
sometimes parodic, incorporation of different elements from Asian
cultures has meant that he has avoided a claustrophobic and binding
notion of Asian identity in his music. Sometimes this has led to frivolity
— Lee's detractors regard him as a mere entertainer.
The (self-)parodic nature of Lee's public persona, along with his
campy costumes, makes a sharp contrast with the masculinist, pure, and
puritan white shirt and trousers of the PAP cadre. Contest the West Lee
might, but his body is gendered along different lines from the dominant
PAP masculinity. While, as I will argue, Lee may have been co-opted by
che PAP government, it cannot be assumed that he is in easy collusion
with the state, any more than one should assume Singapore "simply"
supports late capitalism as a Western client-state. These relationships
are all, in different but inter-related ways, fraught.
Popularly known simply as "Dick", Lee has written and performed
in musicals, plays, and comic revues of varying quality in Singapore,
Japan, and Hong Kong. One of the country's best-known personalities,
he has also hosted a television talk show. His albums sell well locally,
averaging perhaps 15,000 per release — high for a home-grown musician.
Despite his obvious success, public opinion about Lee is ambivalent:
the English-speaking middle class often finds him not serious
enough, while the Chinese-speaking population sometimes feels he is
using their culture inauthentically. Representations of Asia by either the
PAP government or by figures like Lee obviously are not always commensurate
with popular sentiment.
The height of Lee's career so far has been the 1992 staging of
Nagraland, termed, perhaps grandiosely, an Oriental pop operetta.
Mitsubishi spent six million Singapore dollars (just under US$4 million
then) on the operetta, and it was staged in Japan, Singapore, and Hong

10: Representing the Singapore modern: Dick Lee, pop music, and the "New" Asia 251
Kong. The key members of che performing and production team, in
keeping with the new Asia ideology, were all Asian — the choreographer
was Malaysian, the director Indonesian, and the production manager
Japanese. I will return later to a fuller discussion of Nagraland.
In 1994, Lee staged an Oriental musical review entitled Fantasia (a
contraction of "fantastic Asia", but also, suggestively, "fantasy Asia"),
once again with funding from Mitsubishi. The show opened at the Tokyo
Kosei Nenkin Kaikan before going on tour in Japan. It reprised
Lees well-known pan-Asian theme, and the mixed song and dance items
— which ranged from "a Mongolian songstress in native costume, to
Hong Kong singer Shirley Kwan sporting an Annie Lennox crew cut"
(Foo 1994) — went down well with the Japanese audience, who evidently
have shown keenness in receiving this self-consciously hybrid
exoticization of Asia. The concept in Fantasia is that the "condition" of
old and new co-existing in harmony is normal, not schizophrenic.
The production of albums and CDs have been the mainstay of Lee's
career. Among his best-known albums are: Life in the Lion City (1984);
Suriram (1984; a 12-inch single); Fried Rice Paradise (1986); The Mad
Chinaman (1989), arguably the most popular and creative work so far;
Asiamajor (1990); Orientalism (1991); and The Year of the Monkey (1992).
The tides are indicative of the pan-Asian and Singapore-Asian ideologies
that he has chosen to valorize and stage.
As early as 1986, when Lee was twenty-nine, he stated thac he wanted
"to sec if we can forge some kind of [more organic] Singaporean identity
[as] ... the Singapore government is ... trying to force culture upon
the people. ... It must be spontaneous" ("A Day in the Life of Dick
Lee", Asia Magazine, 29 June 1986, p. 54). Lees work attempts such an
empowering "spontaneity" in re-forming Asian identity, In "The
Windchime Song", from The Mad Chinaman, Lee tells che listener to
pay attention to the wind chimes common in many Chinese homes, as
he or she will discover that "Somewhere deep inside our [racial?] memories
/ Lie the cultures ... Our fathers father's fathers / Handed down
with hopes they'd grow" (my emphasis). Lee is not advocating an attitude
towards progress that eradicates the non-rational — for this attitude
is part of the negative baggage left from colonial insecurity. Lee
feels that We must be as progressive as They are, if We are to be able

252 C.J.W.-L Wee
Counterplayers. Presumably, he would, not agree with Kant that man
must emerge "from his self-incurred immaturity" (Kant 1970, p. 54).
Asian mankind's Bildung must be a more inclusive one.
In "A Human Touch", from Orientalism, Lee poses a question for
unspecified Asian leaders: "So, you think you know the score ... With
your new highways, and the foreign praise?" There is no need anymore
for self-deprecation and reliance on foreign validation, as "the old. colonial
ways are gone". Now, "the future identity" will arise only from a
simultaneous looking backwards and forwards — an action that will
add the "human touch" to a mechanistic Asianized, rather than Asian
modernity. 13
Lee's lyrics have at times been considered offensive — che song Fried
Rice Paradise, for example, was taken off the airwaves "for being too
specific in its sending-up of [Singaporean] things and places" (Go Magazine,
1979). But despite his criticism of the coldness and high-handedness
of the PAP government, Lee has been celebrated by the state. His musical
Kampong Amber (Malay: Amber village) was a centrepiece of the
1994 Arts Festival, and he performed the penultimate number (ironically,
the once-banned Fried Rice Paradise) in the 1994 National Day
variety show, "Rhythm of che Nation".
Lee's regional (and especially Japanese) success has been noted not
only by critics in Singapore, but also abroad. 14
The Los Angeles Times, in
a 1992 special feature on the "New Asian Order", said of Lee: "in appealing
for Pan-Asian pop culture unity, Lee stands as the clearest symbol
yet of an intriguing shift afoot in ... the Pacific Rim: Popular culture
in Asia, so long dominated by the West, is looking back East [even
though the 'West may not know Lee yet']" (Watanabe 1992). And Vogue
Paris, pretty much taking Lee at his own word, effusively (and uncritically)
said of him: "the singer and actor has become a celebrity in Japan because
he sings about the new Asian identity in English. He represents
the upcoming generation which learned little or no Mandarin in school
and assertively strives for an international Asian culture, where dances
from Bali and Taiwan meet the chants of Mongolia and the pop music
of Malaysia" (de Gramont 1993, pp. 26-27). The latter writer reduces
the discourse on the new Asia into a simple description of "identity
crisis" and the unproblematic cultural reality that is purportedly devel-

10: Representing the Singapore modern: Dick Lee, pop music, and the "New"Asia 253
oping out of this crisis. Both quotations reveal how Lee is treated as
representative of the new, more self-confidant Asian who challenges
Western cultural hegemony — this treatment suggests his place within
pan-Asian discourse in Singapore.
Plans were discussed for an assault on Broadway itself, possibly in
conjunction with the Cameron Mackintosh group (which produced Les
Misirables) a venture broadly supported by Singapore's National Arts
Council. 15
Hard as it might be to achieve, the ultimate pop cultural
success would be to penetrate the metropole, repudiating Orientalist
depictions of the East as an effeminate or feminized object.
IV
Lees music espouses what might be called a "neo-traditional modernity"
which, in Singapore, challenges Western progressivism of the sort
that is often associated with modernization theory. He hopes for a modernity
in which che tension between ethno-cultural restoration and
economic progress is not eradicated. Despite Lees intentions, progress,
as ic were, remains in control of tradition rather than being in partnership
with it, and this has implications when read against the PAP's programme
in the late 1980s to the mid-1990s to discipline the national
economic body via the discourse on Asian (previously "shared") values.
In its own odd way, Lees music attempts to be "traditional" because
it seeks to capture the past — the habits, customs and attitudes which
form the sources of Asia's "self. The music is neo-traditional, as is the
ideology which informs it, because Lee also believes that the past must
be recovered selectively, excising its more "atavistic" urges. The new
musical forms must include che progressive — che Western — and this
needs to be mixed with Asian genres. Only thus can the past be modernized
to fit into the booming cities of Southeast and East Asia, where
new, modernist skyscrapers reach up, a sign of Asian virility, Singapore,
not surprisingly, becomes the standard bearer of such an indigenized
modernity.
The clearly nostalgic element in the music partly results from che
economic re-making of post-War Asia. Yet, at the same time, there is a
note of pride in being as modern as the Western person. In a light, jazzfusion
piece entitled "ModernAsia" (in Year of the Monkey), Lee sings,

254 C.J.W.-L. Wee
"You're going to enjoy the ride / Through Wonderland.... / ModernAsia /
Isn't what it used to be." Modernity's homogenizing forces have worked:
"In this new world, we're all the same." Or are we? Lee adds, "A spirit
deep inside me remains." We still need the empowering recovery of our
fathers culture, as this ancestral spirit can help fuel the creation of Asian
commonalities: "Now the journey has begun / Into a land that once was
one / But is uniting once again." For Lee, there was once a unified,
prelapsarian Asia. Conscious of the historical divisions within emerging
Asia, he makes an appeal to his audience, in a note in the album: "Let us
take the pain of war and strife our parents faced, accept what we did to
each other in a new way."
Lee refers not only to World War II, but also to present Asian divisions.
Even in "The Windchime Song", with its optimism that deep
culture can be spontaneously recovered, he sounds a warning note: "Do
you feel the stirrings deep inside / When you watch your neighbours as
they war? / Do you lose your roots as they guard theirs ...?" The memories
of various Asian pasts need to be reconstructed in the light of the
needs of a rcconciliatory as well as progressive pan-Asian identity, which
means chat parts of the past must also be jettisoned. Asia has its distinct
realities which need to be connected if a unified and powerful Asia equal
to the West can be formed.
Lee's strategy in attempting to represent an emerging pan-Asia is to
run a number of Asian languages and musical forms together and, if
context permits, to use Asian Singlish in place of standard English. One
simple example is "One Song" from Asiamajor. The tune (Yin Dee) is
something he picked up in Bangkok, and Lee's version, with his own
lyrics, starts with the words for "welcome" in four different languages
(Thai, Malay, Chinese, and English): "Kapsawasdee kap, selamat datang,
huan ying, welcome". After this, Lee's heroic status as the herald of a
new Asian order is revealed: "I am an ambassador who brings ... / A
song about freedom and about peace. ... / Our separate lands / Are one
from now on ... / And we'll sing one song." The back-up vocals are
assembled from a variety of Asian ethnic or national groups, as might be
expected; included are Ekachai Uekrongtham, Tomoko Yamaguchi, and
(Singaporean) Kay Hamid.
While it would be easy to dismiss as fantasy Lee's idea of pan-Asia, I

10: Representing the Singapore modern: Dick Lee, pop music, and the "New"Asia 255
would argue thac it is the exigencies of cultural identity formation in
Singapore which feed into his discourse. From the 1960s until the early
1980s, Lee Kuan Yew and his co-leaders in the PAP tried to make industrial
modernity (rather than high culture) the meta-narrative which might
frame what they perceived to be an empty "Singapore" identity. They
hoped that in this way the country's extremely diverse population —
the majority, but not cohesive English- and Chinese-speaking Chinese,
Malays, Indians (largely Tamil), and "Eurasians" — to some extent could
be homogenized and contained (Wee 1993). The inflammatory and —
from the government's point of view— "primordial" issues of race and
cultural difference were to be discouraged at all cost. In 1961, Lee announced
that a non-organic consumer culture, as Rajaratnam had already
suggested, would be Singapore's national culture: "We are hoping
to build a modern society in which ... we will have the factories to make
more ... of the things which make life better. ... Recitation of poetry
and writing of essays are important things in a civilized society. But
important also is the turning of screws and lathes. They make our modern
world hum" (Lee, quoted in Josey 1968, pp. 172-73).
By the early 1980s, however, this meta-narracive, and its related institutions
— which were thought able to be capable of containing "primordial"
racial identities — were surrendered, and in their place an idea
of Confucian modernity was erected, which ran the risk of alienating
the minority groups. This idea was modified in the early 1990s and
became more generic in its propagation of Asian values and modernity.
16
There was an appeal to and a legitimization of che primordial —
or the "traditional" — chat had been vilified by che same government in
the 1960s and 1970s, but apparently without the elevation of the (supposed)
values of a specific group: the Chinese. There was opposition,
chough. Some asked what had happened to the earlier idea of a society
in which, as school children recited during school assembly every morning,
"We, the citizens of Singapore, pledge ourselves as one united people,
regardless of race, language or religion." Was the ideal of a universal
progress, unencumbered by the baggage of different racial pasts, to be
forsaken? 17
While bilingualism as an educational goal continued in the 1980s,
the logic which motivated it changed. In the 1960s and the 1970s, Eng-

256 C.J.W-L. We
Ush was considered the rational language of science and administrations
the (so-called) mother tongues were confined to the private sphere
ethnic culture. From the 1980s on, the use of Mandarin (which is not
the native language of most Singapore Chinese) was promoted as a publie
and rational language by the English-speaking, Chinese PAP leadership.
The opening up of economic opportunities in China was one majorreason
for Mandarins elevation. While this does not in itself account for
the local rise of a pan-East Asianist discourse, it does indicate the his
torical vicissitudes of Chinese identity formation in Singapore. Modernity
in this way was joined to the primordial. As sociologist Kwok Kian
Woon argues, "The instrumental learning of the Chinese language and
the promotion of a rationalized and mandarinized Chinese culture now
become part of a cosmopolitan identity which can claim to be both
traditionally rooted and economically useful" (Kwok 1994, p. 32).
V
Lees music is symptomatic but not directly reflective of the ongoing reformations
of politico-cultural issues in Singapore. He manages to both
resist as well as be complicit with the states position on multiracialism
Lee's suitably popularized Singlish rap version of "Rasa Sayang" (Malay
"to feel love"), a popular folk song which appears in The Mad Chinaman
seems comfortable with the older meta-narrative of progressive
national identity. The song is a small-scale version of the triumphan
British Whig's "Our Island Story", with its celebration of comment
and the triumph of universal history. The multiracial rap team singing
in "Rasa Sayang" unfolds a story where a once jungle-covered island
with "only trees / And a lion or two enjoying the breeze" has developed
into an international country. The song continues: "Everything we have
has to be the best / Of the fabulous East and the Wonderful West. . .
We can eat, eat, eat till we nearly drop / Then we all get up and we shop
shop, shop." All are at peace with each other, and consumption binds al
the races.
The yoking together of progress and the past in the story of Singha
pore manifests itself not only in the juxtaposition created by singing
traditional folk song in the rap genre, but also in the songs citing o
both the legendary Sang Nila Utama ("The island has come very far
l

1O: Representing the Singapore modern: Dick Lee, pop music, and the "New" Asia
All thanks to man named Utama") and the factual Sir Stamford Raffles
("We love that guy!"), who historically opposed the East India Company's
anti-free trade policies, as joint founders of the nation. In this song,
race simply does not matter, as long as we move on. But the coherence
of commercial modernity falls away (or perhaps the inherent contradictions
surface) when Lee considers his Sinic — that is, racial read as
cultural — heritage, the heritage that scholars like Harvard's neo-
Confucian champion, Tu Wei-ming contends have fuelled che new Asian
modernity (Tu 1984, 1991).
How is one to regard Chinese culture now that post-colonial and
largely Islamic Southeast Asia is having to come to terms with Chinas
re-emerging power? Until recently, to the English-educated Chinese who
rejected communism's modernity, China itself seemed a retrograde country,
and one that was perceived co be far removed from Straits-born
families like Lees, imbued as they were with the goals of imperial British
reformism, which strived not co be backward-looking. But Singapore
remains largely a Chinese nation, and this seems to demand new
efforts at interpretation. Even in a comfortably hybrid song like "Rasa
Sayang", a Southeast Asian Chinese-ness is potentially a problem: the
ending of the video of "Rasa Sayang" has Lee in Chinese opera attire
standing in the centre of a circle of people, including the non-Chinese
rap team, who are dressed in similar outfits. The framing of the music
seems to shift from the meta-narrative of industrial modernity to one of
Mandarinized Chinese-ness. In his album Orientalism, Lee explores these
questions of Chinese-ness and comes up with diametrically opposite
answers.
The first "answer" in Orientalism to the question of local identity
comes up in an arrangement of a song by He Luding and Guan LU That
is often played during the Chinese New Year, and now virtually has the
status of a folk song. Lee entitles his version of the song as "Springtime"
(first line: Chun-tian li-lai bai-hua xiang), and the first section is sung in
Mandarin by Lees mother Elizabeth. A translation of the song is given
— part of the first stanza goes: "In spring all the flowers are fragrant, /
The warm sun shines in the sky, / Shining on my tattered clothes
After Elizabeth Lee sings, her son sings a jazzy response in English,
accompanied by a solo trombone. The idea of springtime is peculiar in

258 C.J.W.-L. Wee
always-humid, equatorial Singapore where only the early morning sun
is tolerable. Lee is ambivalent about the relevance of the image of Chinese
life that is being touted: "Will I ever see a season change in front of
me? Never ever!" The Singapore experience? "Weather hot and wet outside
/ That's reality!" And yet, the imagined landscape is attractive:
"Cherry blossom in my mind / Blooming in suspended time / Countryside
of my design / Etched in memory." It is a China of no specific place
or history, "etched in memory". But where does this memory come from?
Is it a "blood" affair, the "Really you" of "The Windchime Song"? Is this
recovery of Chinese "roots" a threatening one? The call of an essentialized
identity, which coincides with the acknowledgement that culture is not
nature, nor is it ahistorical, remains difficult to deal with.
The song that immediately follows picks up on the question of an
originary Chinese identity. First, Lee sings, in Mandarin, a famous
folksong, "Alishan" (A-li shan), that virtually every Chinese Singaporean
of Lee's age would know. Then, like "Springtime", an English response
follows. Alishan is a famous mountain in Taiwan, and the home of Taiwanese
aboriginals, rather than the revered, truly Han Chinese. In his
response, Lee completely identifies with this landscape of che mind that
is not even, purely speaking, Chinese: "Mountain is calling to me. ... /
Alishan is my own / I'll never leave home / Alishan is where my spirit
will be free," It seems to me that Lee's conception here of what it means
for him as an English-educated, Southeast Asian-born Chinese-
Singaporean, to identify with (this mis-read version of) China, is becoming
incoherent.
There is a stark contrast in Lee's depiction of Singapore. On the one
hand it is a cultural entity which is part of a progressive, transnationally
dynamic core, while on the other hand it is connected to a bound, static
periphery— the latter being "a site of [an] autochthonous cultural formation"
as Tsing (1994, p. 282) would put it. One might also say that
the aesthetic configurations of realism and myth clash in Lee's oeuvre.
Perhaps restoration and progress cannot be as easily reconciled as Lee
would like.
VI
The contrast between realism and myth standing in for true identity is

10: Representing the Singapore modern: Dick Lee, pop music, and the "New" Asia 259
more apparent (and most unresolved) in Lee's Nagraland, first staged at
the Tokyo Nakano Sun Plaza. Lee played Chris, a confused, Westernized
Asian journalist, who dreams of Nagraland, and visits it with his
girlfriend and a friend. They are from a contemporary Asian city, obviously
Singapore. The second scene of the musical depicts the charms of
metropolitan life — singers in suits and hard hats cavorting in front of
skyscrapers and a flashing digital clock — here is the world of the present.
The island Nagraland turns out to be a version of Bali (though the island
is at the same time, somewhat obscurely, also meant to be pan-
Asian), with the natives getting about in lavish costumes designed by
Paris-based Singapore designer, Yang Derong, resembling costumes of
The King and I. With the gamelan in the background, the music is vaguely
Indonesian, and at moments possibly Japanese. 18
When Chris and his friends arrive on the island, it is in the midst of
a crisis. The Minister of the Interior is upset at the opening up of
Nagraland by che government to Western-style development. The Minister's
wife appeals to Chris to publicize the danger posed by Western
influence, reminding him that he hails from a formerly traditional culture:
"Trust your heart."
At a folk performance, Chris learns of the legend of Nagraland. The
Dragon King Nagarabashti had become infuriated with his daughter
Princess Naira because she had left her heavenly home and fallen in love
with a mortal outsider, Prince Nuxsalam. In anger, Nagarabashti killed
the prince and banished Naira to Nagraland. The legend indicates the
violence that lies at the heart of the island. The performance is enacted
by a beautiful young woman, Lia. Predictably, our hero falls for Lia, the
adopted daughter of the Interior Minister. The parallels between the
real and the mythical start to unfold.
After Chris meets and falls in love with Lia, a rebellion breaks out.
The Minister flees into the mysterious jungle, taking Lia with him. At
this point, che realiscic narrative begins to break apart. A woman seer
ties a sash around Chris, marking his re-nativization. Chris then sets off
to search for Lia.
After Lia's rescue, Chris and Lia are transformed into Nursalam and
Naira, who are confronted by the Dragon King Nagarabashti (a transfigured
Interior Minister). The King/Interior Minister's wife and a re-

260 C.J.W-L Wee
bellious son appear, appealing to him to forsake the cycle of violence
that, because of the legend, has always plagued the island. The son throws
himself on Nagarabashti's sword, bringing him to his senses. The cycle
of violence has finally come to an end. What one would perhaps expect,
then, is for Chris as the reincarnated Nursalam to remain in Nagraland,
possibly as the beneficent traditional-modern head of government. This
is not what happens. The operetta begins and ends with Chris awakened
from sleep by his dream: "I need to go ... / Back to my dream, to
Nagraland" — to the origins of the "Really you". Ac the end we learn
that the woman in bed with him is Lia. Thus, the entire stage action is a
recapitulation of events. Despite his longings for origins, Chris has returned
to the jaded, deracinated metropolis. Having reclaimed a now
Othered Southeast Asian identity from the frontier, he abandons it for
the charms of the modern. In the dream-like Conradian darkness of the
Nagraland jungle, Chris discovered that tradition can harbour pointless,
even savage, violence, resulting in a disorganized society.
What we find in this operetta is an odd re-staging of the mid- co
late-nineteenth century British quest for colonial kingship, rather like
Kipling's "The Man Who Would be King", but without the warning
signs of the dangers of such a kingship (Wee 1994). The rational, civilized
man would be king over natives who recognize his stature because
he is able to comprehend who they are and be a part of their world.
Whac is more peculiar here — discounting che Orientalist replay of the
ahistorical, exotic East — is that it is an Anglo-Asian Singaporean who
occupies the white mans civilizing role. While the people in the city
that Chris hails from stand in danger of deracination, they nevertheless
must still be careful of the source of rejuvenation from which they drink
as the work of civilization continues.
In looking at Nagraland and songs like "Alishan" and "Springtime",
it becomes clear how difficult the task is of territorializing Asia as a
single cultural entity. In the case of Nagraland, Asia is a primitive and
possibly uncontrollable territory; in the case of the Chinese songs, Asia
might be a static entity, but one which is restrained and possesses a high
civilization. To be static is also to be long-lasting. It would seem that Lee
prefers the nowhere and the misread aboriginal-seen-as-Sinic landscape
of Alishan to the savage dynamism of Southeast Asia. As the song

10: Representing the Singapore modern: Dick Lee, pop music, and the "New" Asia 261
"Alishan" goes, "The high mountains will forever be green / The valley's
water will forever be blue" (Gao-shan chang-qing, jian-shui chang-lan).
The binarism of self/other is not simply to be taken as West/Asia but as
a choice of either West/savage Asia or West/static Asia, And it is easier to
assimilate static Asia into a workable politico-cultural model of neotraditional
modernity. Perhaps this is why, in recent years, Southeast
Asia is invariably referred to as being part of the "East Asian success
story" — more "successful" now than ever, since China has joined the
capitalist fray — rather than as part of "Southern Asia", as it used to. It
makes transparent the Singapore success story (and presumably Malaysia's
and Thailand's as well) by lumping it together with the other mini-
Dragons of Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong. Ezra Vogel, for instance,
chinks chat while there are specific "situational factors" that account
for East Asian industrialization, we must still "consider tradition
[asj ... this achievement cannot be separated from the institutional practices
and underlying attitude ... absorbed in growing up in their culture"
(Vogel 1991, p. 92). Static East Asia requires reassessment, as it is
no longer as static as ic used co be.
An illuminating song to look at alongside Nagraland is "North and
South", from Orientalism. The first thing that strikes me is that "North"
and "South" are not used to refer to "developed" and "underdeveloped"
regions, but to Southern or Southeast and East or Northeast Asia, encicies
perceived to be coo long separated: "If North and South were to be
reunited once again, / We'd be the people we should be." He is singing
about pan-Asian unity. But the pan-Asian future he envisions is curiously
East Asian in its make-up: "Change your ways, alter everything /
Yellow people of tomorrow! ... North and South, out of che dragons
mouth / Spreading from the rising sun
Embedded within "North and South" is a second song in either
Indonesian or Malay (they are similar languages) that broadens the idea
of who is to be conjoined in the new Asia: "Ku ingin bersamamu / Kesuatu
tempat / Dimana Utara dan Selatan bertemu / Maukah engkau menikah
denganku / Disuatu tempat / Dimana seluruh Umat Campur / menjadi
satu ..." ("I desire to be together with you ac a place where the north
and south meet. Would you like to be married to me at a place where
the mixed people [or people of mixed marriages' ] become one ... ?"). l9

262 C.J. W.-L. Wee
Unfortunately, the translation in the liner notes is inadequate — " Umat
Campur" is more literally given as "Kingdom of Campur" rather than
with the implied sense of "people of mixed marriages". Nevertheless,
the fact remains that the "Yellow people" are the primary Asians that the
song refers to as making up the new Asia.
The complexities in Lee's work are in accord, as earlier argued, with
the tangled history of Chinese-ness in Singapore, and with the PAP
governments deployment of the discourse on Confucian — now Asian
— modernity, consensus, and communitarianism in national life: these
are now argued to be the grounding values of all the ethnic groups.
Although "Asian" values may indeed be Asian — that is not the concern
here — in this case, the government is specifically trying to achieve two
purposes by using a discourse on Asian values. The first is to maintain
discipline and efficiency in the area of economic production. The second
is co constantly keep Singapore in a central place in the larger Asian
setting — tiny Singapore needs Asia, if not vice versa (Chua 1995b).
Being a part of Asia Major gives the Singaporean nation-state the ballast
it needs to keep the pressure up on the West to maintain markets open
to its exports. Furthermore, incorporating Chinese-ness into its new
conceptualization of Asian values also means that a re-imagined regional
community with China — one in which trade and investment are important
— can be encouraged, even if it is fraught with political difficulties.
The fact that Singapore is such a small country means that its population
finds it hard to escape the combined pressures of the (re-) invented
Asian past and the demands of development that the PAP government
brings to bear. There is literally very little space to move in. Lee is not
free from these pressures, and his resistance to Western universalism, his
neo-traditional modernity, and his espousing of a positive Anglo-Asian
hybridity all seem brought under the spell of government-sponsored
"Asian values". Even in "Let's All Speak Mandarin", from The Mad Chinaman,
a send-up of the PAP's "Speak Mandarin" campaign of the 1980s,
Lee falls into the trap of the deployed blood call of essential identity —
the background refrain runs: "Mandarin — let's all speak Mandarin.
The sound that's happening inside my heart!"

10: Representing the Singapore modern: Dick Lee, pop music, and the "Mew" Asia 263
VII
During an earlier period, of cultural history, the English, like many continental
Europeans, found China, and the person of Confucius, very
attractive: "Confucius was the supreme apostle of the orderly status quo.
It was the temper of the Augustans to find their Elysium not, as their
descendants did, in the primitive innocence of the South Seas, but in
the glories of a civilized past" (Appleton 1951, p. 41). It is ironic that
various figures in post-colonial Singapore and in the West have returned
to chinoiserie as a way of re-envisioning a national and, more ambitiously,
regional selfhood. Given this restaging of chinoiserie, I do not
think that we can say the modernist impulse of the Enlightenment has
given way unproblematically to post-modernity. The concerns in Southeast
Asia, both in the Malay Archipelago and the mainland, are "modern"
— having to do with national development, free trade, and some
(circumscribed) notions of progress — although these concerns are definitely
complicated in a world where national barriers are harder to control.
And certainly, the new "East Asia", or alternatively the U.S. preferred
term, "Asia-Pacific", is not a clear-cut "hegemonic Euro-American
production" (Wilson and Dirlik 1994, p. 7).
The impact of economic competition cannot be overemphasized.
One critic of new Asian discourse, Gerald Segal, is of the opinion that
"for Asians co believe that they constitute a single civilization is a dangerous
delusion", as access to Euro-American markets may be jeopardized.
He adds: "Americans need little persuasion to worry about the
East Asian challenge." (Segal 1993)
What, then, can be said, in conclusion, of Dick Lee and the new
Asian order that those such as the PAP government seek? Does it transcend
the level of pastiche and become a significant site of cultural practice
and transformation? Certainly, both Lees work and Singapore itself
cannot be seen merely as pastiche, even given the comments made that
"the city resembles a clean and efficient theme park" (Branegan 1993,
p. 36; see also Sesser 1994), the result ofa deliberate, non-organic process
of nation-building. Still, at many levels, the nation coheres as a society,
despite the still existent multiracial tensions inherited from the colonial
period.

264 C.J.W.-L Wee
Lee's music, and the larger East Asian discourse on modernity used
by the PAP government do represent, I believe, a significant site of cultural
practice, though Lee's music is itself harder to evaluate, Ideological
elements are a strong component of his work, but given its witty, performative
nature, his music does not always manage to be "serious" enough
to uphold the pan-Asian ideology. The discourse proper is used to justify
the idea of a non-individualistic democracy (Chua 1995a), and within
the region, it offers potential models for a modernity that Vietnam,
Cambodia, and Myanmar might aspire to, in the hope that, whatever
their socio-economic woes, they may, in the end, become a part of what
the World Bank has described as "the East Asian miracle".
The actual transformative power of the East Asian discourse in the
long run is, of course, not clear. The linking of the ethnic to economic
survival in Singapore is a tricky game: it poses a constant problem as it is
never clear when the "irrational" card of a pan-Asian, but still Sinicized,
identity might be overplayed in a multiracial society. A sign of this can
be seen in Lee's Canto-pop album, Compass (Rock Records, 1995).
Chinese markets beckon, and it is not incidental that Lee's Compass is in
a Chinese language in which he himself is not fluent. This fact suggests
how strong the lure of emerging markets can be. Ethnic movements are
perhaps always ambivalent — in Singapore, even while a countermodernity
is being advocated, such movements do not forego all the
ideals of progress of the Enlightenment.
NOTES
Thanks ro Kwok Kian Woon, Bruce Robbins, Ronald Inden, Rant Moorchy, Kelvin
Tan, Victor Li, and Gregory B. Lee. Thanks, coo, ro Lauren Berlant. Glen B.Y. Goci
suggested the topic. Music and Movement Pee. Ltd. kindly gave me access co their
Dick Lee materials. An earlier version of this essay appeared as "Staging the New Asia:
Singapore's Dick Lee, Pop Music and a Counter-Modernity" in Ihtblic Culture 8, no. 3
(Spring 1996).
1. Samuel Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations?" (1993) has been well received
in Southeast Asia. This paper was part of an Olin Institute project on "The Changing
Security Environment and American National Interests".
2. Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong recently visited France, and told a journalist that
the "Confucian values" — "such as promoting the family, motivating education,

10; Representing the Singapore modern: Dick Lee, pop music, and the "New"Asia 265
developing a liking for hard work and a sense of thrift" — which some, such as
former Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and Harvard's Tu Wei-ming, have argued underpin
Singapore's success are universal rather than narrowly Asian, though these values
seem co survive better in Asia (Clerc 1994, p. 21).
3. See, especially, Paul Rabinow (1988). Arjun Appadurais "Disjunctive and Difference
in the Global <strong>Cultural</strong> Economy" (1990) is also suggestive, but it emphasizes
more the difficulties entailed in thinking through whac the globalization of the
imagination means,
4. "Globalization" is a buzzword in the business world. See Business Week's special
bonus issue on "21st Century Capitalism: How Nations and Industries Will Compete
in the Emerging Global Economy", 18 November 1994.
5. In 1988, Singapore expelled an American diplomat for allegedly meeting with antigovernment
lawyers. The backdrop of this event was the detention of twenty-two
activists by the government. The lawyers that the diplomats met were representing
the activists. The Financial Times opined: "The fracas between tiny Singapore and
the mighty US looks set co go down as one of the more improbable ... diplomatic
clashes. ... All this is directed against a country which absorbs a quarter of Singapore's
total exports, [and) provides about a third of its foreign investments ..."
(quoted in Sesser 1994, p. 46),
6. Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad deploys a generalized idea of
Asian values in his public discourse on modernity and human rights (see, for example,
"Mahathir Blasts Western Nations' Liberal Values on Human Rights", Straits
Times, 7 December 1994) but will also speak of "Islamic" modernization.
7. A Singapore magazine cited these two criticisms: "'This guys not for real. He's got
no talent. All he's got is money,' says a 30-year-old accountant, ... 'He's for show
only. He's part of that crowd of beautiful people all so covered with gloss. If that's
who he is, it's still a bit too much. Thac super-duper [usage of) Singlish [that is,
colloquial Singapore English].' says a 28-year-old secretary" (Go Magazine, September
1989, p. 79).
8. For a critique of global arguments of the post-modern, see Mitsuhiro (1989).
9. See Young (1994) and Wee (1994) for work which deals with the "consumption"
of the primitive Other within the imperial homeland.
10, That is, Cantonese-Chinese pop music,
11. Keith Negus quotes David Howells, Managing Director of Peter Waterman Ltd.:
"99 per cent of people give answers that relate [music] to the visual. The extraordinary
thing is that you see what you hear ..." (Negus 1992, p. 66). This statement
holds true for Lee, During che launch of Orientalism, in 1991, he appeared at a
popular dance club, Zouk, dressed in trousers with feathers at che hem, Elvis Presleystyle
sideburns and striped, Gary Glitter-type platform shoes (Fernando 1991, p. 29).

266 C.J.W-L. Wee
12. Of this release, one writer says: "Blending elements of Indonesian, Chinese, Indian
and Malay pop and folk songs, plus adding rap and singing in English has made
'The Mad Chinaman' one of the most adventuresome and satisfying albums in
years" (Hale 1990). The Mad Chinaman marks the moment Lee broke into the
difficult Japanese market: "Dick Lee ... has been given as much space in music
magazines in Japan during the past six months as the Rolling Stones. Lee, 33, has
won so much attention solely on che basis of his album 'The Mad Chinaman' ..."
(Shig 1990).
13. Lee's lyrics can be read as a response to the PAP government's policy, until recently,
of consistently tearing down much of old Singapore to create mote commercially
viable buildings. Current "restoration" activities have been criticized as giving buildings
a theme park-like appearance.
14. Lee's photo appeared on the cover of Billboard, 18 February 1992, and he was cited
in the caption as one of "the artists ... who helped the Japanese music industry
achieve its fastesc growth in two decades". Lee also did well in 1991 as he won Best
Newcomer award in the International Music Toll organized by Radio Television
Hong Kong.
15. Tommy Koh, a former ambassador to the United States, is the chairman of che
Council, and has said, "I told Dick that anything I can do to help htm fulfil this
[Broadway or West End] ambicion, I'll do it." The Asiaweek writer added, "[Koh]
is trying to get Lee and Mackintosh together" (Koh, quoted in "It's Glamor Time!
From Rock to Musical, Top Acts Light Up the Asian Stage", Asiaweek, 3 November
1993, p. 41).
16. On Confucian modernity, see Elegant (1990).
17. Regarding opposition to the scate's endorsement of the primordial or che traditional,
S. Rajaratnam, then in retirement, protested in a letter to the press: "At this
rate, there will be a long queue of Singaporean citizens proclaiming Sikh identity,
Jewish identity,... Cantonese identity, Hokkien [Fujian] identity — and goodbye
Singapore identity" (Rajaratnam 1990). The fear was that "communalism", as the
British called ic, might again rear its ugly head.
18. In the liner notes to Year of the Monkey, Lee says that he used "(in part) the game/an
scale of Indonesia, which coincidentally is similar to the Japanese Koto Scale". This
mix-and-match is consonant with Lee's pan-Asian theme.
19. Thanks co Wong SengTong at the National Institute of Education-NanyangTechnological
University for help with the translation.
REFERENCES
Appadurai, Arjun. "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global <strong>Cultural</strong> Economy". Public
Culture 2, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 1-24.

10: Representing the Singapore modem: Dick Lee, pop music, and the "Neiu"Asia 267

268 C.J. W.-L. Wee

10: Representing the Singapore modern: Dick Lee, pop music, and the "New"Asia 269

Pictures at an exhibition:
re-presenting the sugar industry at
the Negros Museum, Philippines
MARIAN PASTOR ROCES
The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as
picture. The word "picture" [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild]
that is the creature of man's producing which represents and sets before. In
such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular
being who gives che measure and draws up the guidelines for everything
that is. (Heidegger 1977, p. 115)
Picturing ambiguity
Picture, if you will, a museum as a study in discursive ambiguity. Picture,
then, an unsetded quality suffusing the Negros Museum, established
in 1994 within a handsome 1930s provincial capitol built in the
spirit of a design by the famous Chicago architect Daniel Burnham for
American colonial government buildings in the Philippines. One wonders
if it is the building itself— resting, as it does, in neo-classical splendour
and in close proximity to an open air and usually quiet wet fish/meat/
vegetable market across the street, near the busy pier of this capital city
of Bacolod, in the environs of the remarkable sugar-cane plantations of
this province of Negros Occidental 1
— that communicates this vague
sense of incongruity.

11: Re-presenting the sugar industry at the Negros Museum, Philippines 271
Ambivalence, too: but this perhaps issues from seeing this stately
capitol together with a museum within it that does not intone stately
narratives. Five years after it opened, the museum still conveys an indeterminacy
that is doubtless amplified by the very determined qualities
of its architectural setting. For it may indeed be observed that any act of
representation here — for instance, sounding voices stilled by the sugar
industry — inevitably sounds half-hearted, perhaps annoyingly so, within
the elegant ballroom of this building, emblem of the politics that guarded
the immense wealth created in this province by mono-cropping. Framed
by perfect acanthus-leaf capitals atop columns edifying the sixty-foothigh
ceiling — uplifting this space the way sugar-cane is said to have
done for this province — the museums critique-driven curatorial design
can only appear effete or irresolute.
My involvement with this museum began shortly after it was initiated
by a group of art patrons, 2
led by wives of important plantation
owners. They wished to establish a "sugar museum" at the old capitol. 3
This was at the end of the 1980s, which proved to be an ironically opportune
time for inventive museum-building in Negros. There was vivid
and traumatic recall of the near-collapse of the local sugar industry in
the late 1970s, due to global economic shifts. The Negros elite could
conceive the tastelessness of celebrating sugar in a region still reeling, a
decade after the crisis, from the effects of radical economic downturn.
On my part, hoping to seize a rare chance to sell an ambitious curatorial
project, I proposed an alternative curatorial plan on the theme of migration,
in as much as almost everyone who has ever lived in Negros came
from somewhere else. This migration, in any case, was radically intensified
by the 150-year old sugar industry, which will therefore be part of,
but by no means be the single focus of, the exhibition. The group agreed
to decentre (dilute) sugar thus, but could not rally the resources adequate
to the complicated research and design demanded by a museum
on migration. Putting this ambition on hold, we settled on the
oxymoronic strategy of a temporary permanent exhibition. My limited
objective was to see that the inaugural exhibition, subsequently entitled
Sugar and Other Negros Tales, would provoke some curiosity about those
"other tales" which heretofore did not seem to exist — or could only
exist feebly — in light of the heroic capitalist fable conflating sugar,

272 Marian Pastor Races
progress, and la dolce vita.
As planned, the exhibition was to suggest rather than tell these other
tales. Indeed, these histories do not form a homogeneous lot. They range
from plaints sung by plantation labourers to spatial memory of archaic
interior-to-sea riverine axes; to stories of recent combat between the
government and the New Peoples Army forces; to baffling recall ("recorded"
in dance!) of raids from the Sulu seas which happened some
200 years ago. And these are not so much accounts as entries in a list of
scantily researched topics — these gaps in scholarship, in themselves,
telling. 4
The gaps disclose openings into untried discursive possibilities.
To locate these gaps is to also suggest that sugar has over-determined the
identity, the dynamics of strife, and the imagining of Negros — and
hence to attempt a counter-politics. Certainly, a plural history may be
proposed, breaking with the unilinear and overly dyadic frame that limits
discussion to pro/con positions vis-a-vis the sugar industry. Such complexity
might reckon the mammoth Negros haciendas, for instance, not
as phenomena per se, but as topos sustaining the totalizing fictions of
sugar. This ground has long resonated highly polarized talk (for example,
the outrageously wealthy versus the severely abject) that rings true,
but rings so loud that little else is audible. The new museum had to be
polyvocal then. It needed to try toning down the sonorous and often
strident dualisms that have, of course, contributed to social understanding
in this province, but only by muting hints that Negros exceeds sugar.
That Negros had better be a construct that exceeds sugar came
through, in modest ways, in the exhibition. What follows in this chapter
are descriptions of some sections that variously sustain this theoretical,
thus political, possibility. Yet, more than anything else, Sugar and
Other Negros Tales exhibited the strains of a critical project perhaps naively
enacted within an architectural sign of power. That naivete is mostly
mine, especially the failure to foresee just how much the powerful elegance
of the building would aestheticize the strains. The capitol embodies
"period" architectural beauty and in it, the museums curatorial
meditations on change, transit, loss, decay, and grief, are enveloped in
nostalgia. A genteel past-ness pervades the museum, and its sections are
read as attractive pictures at an exhibition, albeit ambiguous ones — of
"cultural", but not "political", worth. Continuing as consultant of the

11; Re-presenting the sugar industry at the Negros Museum, Philippines 273
museum during staff training (which involved assisting them in refining
exhibition sections during the years immediately after the inauguration),
I was often confronted with the projects unresolved status. I encouraged
the incoming staff to see this situation as a good place, and to
seek a political education in studying the difficulties of re-presenting
Negros experiences within a literally imposing site. I pressed them to
analyse the lines of strain. I visit infrequently these days, however, having
no clear proposal for transforming the value of this theoretical tension
— this irresolution — into further refinements of exhibition design.
It is probably one of "those moments when a project is faced with
its own impossibility" (Visweswaran 1994, p. 98, quoted in Clifford
1997, p. 85), a moment that this chapter describes in order to foreshadow
more complex, emancipatory imaginings of a future Negros.
Decaying picture
In many ways, Negros is an impossible (read: absurd, preposterous, stymieing)
project of construction. Sighted and "discovered" by sixteenth
century Basque adventurers, it was named after its dark-skinned and
diminutive aboriginal inhabitants, described as Negritos, "small black
men", who are now almost impossible to meet, much less comprehend.
The Negritos are hardly to be found on Negros today. 5
The islands
name thus marks absence. It invokes and occludes a past that is impossible
to retrieve or "recapture". And while present residents of the island
do recall the association of Negros with an original people, few make
much of the possible meanings of this erasure. Carrying a name signalling
loss and picturing decay of memory, the island is already a place of
fabulation. In place of the vanished aborigines are the largely mestizo
upper crust and bourgeoisie (mostly descended from Chinese and European
economic migrants and their spouses from local Austronesian
populations), and the brown-skinned labourers (of Austronesian descent)
from many nearby islands. Together and at cross-purposes, they sustain
the invention of a Negros of warring classes. So intense has this conflict
been in the second half of this century, that few noticed the all-but-final
disappearance of the islands forest cover. Another loss then: the sugarcane
fields mark the forfeiture of botanical diversity. What used to be
triple-canopy rainforest is discerned today only as spatial absence. Negros

274 Marian Pastor Roces
is paradoxical in that its authenticity is built up of myriad disappearances,
impossible to reverse. But perhaps because such is the case, Negros
is, as well, a place where invention and bravura improvisation has had a
positive charge.
Fabulation is a slippery activity, of course, given such decay 6
and
impossibility in the air. To create the Negros Museum, its proponents
and staff accosted and wrestled with many impossible situations arising
from metaphoric and literal decay. Museum projects in the tropics are a
contradictory activity to begin with. Decay is a constant, and can only
be held at bay with impossibly big expenditures on climate control.
They had to let go of the museological imperative to preserve, early in
the planning. I advised the proponent group against collecting precious
materials like old textiles, to reinvent the activity of collecting. They
agreed to compose the permanent exhibition with well-made fake artefacts.
"Showcasing" present-day local craftsmanship instead, the museum
proposed an authentic Negros with an inflection on present-day
construction; of ideas, of things, of sense of place. In foregrounding
today's skills and imagination applied to "recreating" the past, the museum
raises the idea that heritage is invention. Whose invention and for
whom the invention, becomes the important question of power — yet
to be resolved. But this museum has already, however inadvertently, let
go of a conservative museology that idealizes a scientifically truthful
past, using objects rarefied in history,
The need for great inventiveness was so clearly impressed upon the
museum staff when they were forced by circumstances to continue working
on what we came to call the "banwa corner". We wanted a physical
evocation of the word banwa, which now means "town" in the Hiligaynon
vernacular, But it was not this banwa as town that we wished to translate
into a "display". It was the archaic banwa that posed the challenge,
with its medley of meanings, including the notions of "mountain", "countryside",
"terrain", "climate", "homeland", and "every island from sea to
sea". This medley exists only as tecorded in colonial period dictionaries
(Scott 1994, p. 13). 7
What materialized at the banwa corner are woven
web-like structures, chemically petrified tree trunks and painted shadows
on walls, the whole completed with fake bugs and birds added for
"realism".

11: Re-presenting the sugar industry at the Negros Museum, Philippines 275
In fabricating this corner, the museum staff encountered not only
the predicament inherent in capturing lost meanings, but also the limitations
of the conventions of media employed by museums to communicate
messages. Painting, sculpture, tableaux-making and photography,
they began to realize, simply affirm only their own histories as technologies
of representation, and promote the conceit of the omnipotent curatorial
gaze. Acknowledging this theoretical/technical quandary, the
curator-in-training 8
nonetheless kept tenaciously to the (apparently mad)
task of "weaving a room". But the multiple conceptions of banwa — a
space at once embracing, diffuse, and permeable — proved untranslatable
physically In hindsight, it should not have come as a surprise that this
task proved elusive. It was certainly predictable that the efforts would
result in an "installation" consisting of body-enshrouding, net-like structures,
that would read "contemporary art". (This was discomfiting because
the intention was to produce work that would seem appropriate
in a social history museum.) The apparent failure on a technical level is
in fact a theoretical challenge. For it became clear that to use weaving as
a technology of representation — alternative to the subjective, subjecting,
indeed subjugating and distancing media available in museum pedagogy
_ would require that weaving be theorized and exercised as craft
in ways that have not been attempted yet,
There was also the tautological problem inherent in sounding out
hope in a reversal of irreversible cultural loss: of archaic ideas and words
and of people in a geography of displacement. Still, the impossibility of
this protracted project not only is to do with che eclipse of the
significations of the term banwa itself. That the past is inaccessible has
stopped few of us from investing in memory, even in memories that
belong to others. The problem has more to do with the complicity of
museums in epic narratives of ruination. Museums resurrect ruins to
conjure a romantic rarification, so that the objects, texts, and images
within it are charged with other-worldly desirability. But it is also in this
sense of the museum as grandiloquent ruin that its representational
impotence shows up, as indeed it did in the "banwa corner". Although
rendered in three-dimensional space, the banwa in the museum remained
socially, historically, and conceptually "flat". It was flattened by the word
museum (the sign and power of the building), which transforms every-

276
Marian Pastor Roces
thing in it into relics. The museums banwa succumbs to the pull a
reverie and bourgeois delectation. And in its consignment to the rare
Red domain of the nostalgia-charged relic, it contributes feebly to an
social and political agenda. "Once materialized within the museum, ide
alist aesthetics could be expected to neutralize the possibility of art a
revolutionary praxis or resistance", writes Douglas Crimp (1993, p. 303
His observation applies to any offerings, by museums, of cultural pack
ages for consumption.
The same tension between decay and current conventions of
sumption of cultural capital was exposed in relation to the creation
tableau, based on a work in theatre. One section of the exhibition war
to represent a zarzuela written, composed, produced and performed b
a group of workers from the plantation Hacienda Adela — presumabl
an expression of how at least one group of labourers felt about socia
conditions in Negros. (Zarzuela is a Spanish popular musical theat
much indigenized in the Philippines.) This tableau was intended as th
museums most important effort at drawing attention to non-dominan
discourses. The zarzuela in question was one which had enjoyed grea
success, having won accolades in Manila and other Philippine citie
The success proved fatal, because eventually, the Adela landlords, mind
ful of what was finding expression, intervened in several performance
(insisting on certain "stylistic" improvements). Further success alien
ated the landlord even more, who eventually withdrew support and mad
it impossible for the workers to stage this and other theatre pieces. Th
Adela workers theatre group was already disbanded by the time th
museum commissioned a contemporary artist to craft the tableau. I
appears that he only sought out the Adela workers cursorily, contrary c
the specification of the design brief, and assumed the privilege of "speak
ing" on their behalf. The tableau was created using social realist iconog
raphy, demonstrating this artists personal vision, His reconstruction,
the zarzuela drew attention his values and his own sense of advocacy
a contemporary artist. The resulting tableau effaced the specificity
the Adela workers perception of the happiness and hardship of life a
the plantation, The artist produced an idealized image of worker's un
versal oppression — ironically, a version of the picturesque.
The zarzuela, as written and performed by the Adela workers, ra

11: Re-presenting the sugar industry at the Negros Museum, Philippines
mains one of the few available records of a social history of Negros from
the labourers perspective. This is crucial, in view of the privileged narratives
that have emerged from the studious documentation of the lives
of the wealthy. However, the translation of the zarzuela into the mode
of social realism has had the effect of de-radicalizing this counter-narrative,
because the zarzuela was absorbed into a personal artistic programme. I
connect this matter to the issue of decay and the phenomenology of the
ruin, on the one hand, and to the consumer-, ego-driven forces of contemporary
art, on the other, because a row eventually ensued between
the museum and this artist concerning real and virtual decay The tableau
was the first part of the permanent exhibition to show signs of
serious bug infestation and general disintegration. It was removed for
this reason, and not for ideological ones. The artist protested loudly and
charged the museum of elitism. The ensuing row did not lead to discussions
of whose voice? whose cultural capital? whose gain? whose loss?
whose ruin? Here the matter rests at the moment.
The picturesque
For more than a century and a half since imperial British entrepreneurship
vouchsafed the establishment of sugar plantations on this island,
the word Negros has been a signifier for decadence and excesses in the
Philippines. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the numbers of limousines
plying the narrow streets of Negros, botdes of champagne imbibed,
European chandeliers suspended in outrageous rooms in mansions, operas
consumed and diamonds worn, and happily demented offspring
issued from intense interbreeding among the wealthy, compared well
with the accounts of such phenomena in the court cities in other parts
of the world. Significantly, the recreation of an haciendero's 9
salon is the
one successful section of the exhibition. Surrounded by appointments
of crystal and hardwood, a trompe l'oeil reproduces the exclusive vision
enjoyed by the Negros landlord, as he beholds his plantation and workers
from his mansion window. The picture summarizes possession. His
gaze ravishes Negros land, workers, plants, machines, stories, the very
skies. Subjugation is enacted every time the picture was enjoyed. (It is
said in Negros that hacienderos were wont to provide their toilets with
such windows, but this may be apocryphal.) It provided a gist of the
277

278 Marian Pastor Roces
spatial breadth of the plantation owners expansive self-consciousness,
of his wealth and political importance.
This rather sinister Negros version of the picturesque may be about
to change — even as it was fixed on one wall of the museum. The change
comes in the wake of a radically changing world, but was, specifically in
Negros, accelerated by the mid-1970s crash of sugar prices on the world
market, which escalated the desperation experienced by plantation labourers.
The crisis continued to be played out as the Philippines attempted
to renegotiate with the United States for an extension of the
sugar quotas. In 1992, Time International (25 May 1992) emblazoned
on its cover the picture of a Negros labourer's malnourished child, belly
distended and naked. It raised the question: Who can fix the Philippines?
The Negros elite's response was a "battle-cry" of diversification.
Craft centres were established to create employment for displaced labourers,
or at least their wives. Supporting crafts production was among
the principal translations into action of this call to diversify.
It was at this time that the Negros Museum was being established.
Hence, one now looks again at the sample of the "haciendero picturesque"
at the museum, and sees an image and a punto de vista whose
time is quickly becoming past. Where the painted picture framed by the
window at the museum is fixed, the real picture to be seen out of real
windows in Negros is "morphing" into unpredictable shapes. At the
museum, the tromp l'oiel effects a mausoleum-like ambience at the
haciendero salon section. It may be said that the faux picture encapsulating
a spatial order once thought stable is now a fragment of a ruin.
This fragment can now take its place in the museum that has to be a
mausoleum as well, the better to parlay this institutions fund of symbolic
cultural capital. The "haciendero picturesque" (as exemplified in
the tromp l'oiel, and as metonym for a privileged vision that may shortly
be passe') will be a melancholic relic and a happy contribution, to the
heritage industry which many quarters in Negros hope may replace sugar
as a cash "crop".
The modest (and later, the remarkable) successes of small-scale crafts
"factories" made it convenient for the museum to commission ceramics
and earthenware representations of sugar-based delicacies, dried fish,
bananas, pineapples, mangoes, and so forth. I admit to a bizarre glee in

11: Re-presenting the sugar industry at the Negros Museum, Philippines 279
initiating the production of so much faux food, and choose to remain
untroubled by the clash of references engendered by these objects. But
then, my ability to be troubled has already been softened by encounters
with many other fabulous fakes: plastic sushi in windows fronting cheap
Japanese restaurants; mummified food in ethnographic and archaeological
museums; media and official reports of the bogus goodies of
development, on an island stripped of its forest cover and bulldozed for
mono-cropping. The satire of crafting phoney food in a museum uses
fraudulence as a claim to authenticity. On reflection, I was drawn to the
idea of a museum like the plantations it rries to represent, producing
only counterfeit food. Commissioning such "food" which imitates exotic
comestibles is at least good for a laugh. But laughter in this or any
museum is often hysterical or vexed, and is rarely easy.
Moving picture
The picturesque is not just a pretty picture. More than simply tame, the
picturesque is tamed space purposively domesticated, surveyed, and invested
with meanings dear to the gazing ego. It is a visual construction
of the dramatic and engaging, but not threateningly so. "Spatial historian"
Paul Carter regards the picturesque as a strategy, an activity of
visually claiming a geography to make it stand still for delectation, a
way of consuming landscape as though it were a painting. Of an early
surveyor in Australia, Carter writes that he
... did not adapt che picturesque device of [Portuguese explorer) Camoes's
epic ro disguise che facts, but to order and articulate them. It was not by
discovering novelties but by ordering them, rendering them conceptually and
culturally visible, that the great work of colonization went ahead. In a sense,
it was the process of surveying itself that constituted the decisive discovery,
rather than che fruits of exploration. It was the method of giving objects great
and small a place in the world, che picturesque logic of connection and contrast,
chat ensured they could never be lost again or overlooked, (Carter 1987,
p. 114)
Using Carter's insight upon another land, it is no wonder that the section
of our exhibition devoted to the development of the European view
of the island took on a presence of relative solidity. It was filled with
maps, machines, surveys, plant lists and foundation dates of towns, and

280 Marian Pastor Races
with data from a nineteenth century document entitled "Erecciones del
pueblos de isla de Negros". 10
These objects of European cartography and
census-keeping did not share the pervading tentativeness of other parts
of the exhibition. In this section, the picturesque maintains a sense of
integrity difficult to penetrate.
In order to contrive a counterpoint to such fixed, claimed territory,
I suggested another installation) which took the form of a jarringly lifesized
front section of a steam locomotive, positioned as though jutting
through a wall. The train is ubiquitous in Negros as in other sugar plantation
territories; it conveys goods and people, an emblem of rationalization
and regimentation of time and work. I thought of Magritte's train,
an oblique citation of James Cliffords discussion of ethnographic surrealism
(Clifford 1988, pp. 117-51) as a justification for this curatorial
pretension. If nothing else, the train has become a favourite of children
visiting the museum. It works to again problematize the god-like integrity
of the picture-making and picture-taking genius of museums. The
train has immediacy as a vision of power, of the destructive work of
other engines that have transformed the supine land.
The success of the section is a warning — like the sign that reads
Caution, Train Passing — for the seductive and solidly picturesque qualities
of such a display actually deflect attention from any consideration
of the voids that exist surreptitiously in ail spaces. Gary Shapiros summary
of Robert Smithson's engagement with the museum is relevant
here. Shapiro writes:
Smithsons reading of the museum is above all a spatial reading and one that
vigilantly attends to the absences that form the other side of the presences
that are celebrated in the museum's explicit ideology, (Shapiro 1995, p. 49)
In the Philippines, where hardly anyone can countenance a bare white
space, museum curators ironically run the risk of mistaking the profusion
of people and things for voidlessness. Not so at the Negros Museum.
For between the hand of a sugar worker and the ceramic food is a
vast chasm.
It was my hope that the train might arouse some sense of motion in
the stillness of the museum. It was an almost silly wish, for absence of
movement is so thoroughly predicated in the architectonics of museums.
Once installed, the trains thrusting stance follows an axis directly

11: Re-presenting the sugar industry at the Negros Museum, Philippines 281
confronting a large traditional boat, which dominates the commodious
vertical shaft of a former ballroom. The boat's relationship of tension
with the train falls into a set of signifiers of conflict and degrees of mobility,
becoming dangerously reductive. Moreover, trains and boats (and
planes) have been installed in museums everywhere to sing odes to
progress and human mobility. Yet, at the Negros Museum, the train and
the boat do suggest some understanding of the specific voids in the
exhibition.
Local shipwrights constructed the boat inside the museum. Bearers
of skills and knowledge that may be assumed to be thousands of years
old, they worked as though they were inserting a miniature boat in a
bottle. On completion, the huge boat was raised on slender plinths so
that it appears to float in the air. I take that as a necessary but probably
corrupted device to argue the validity of non-linear history. In any case,
the boat is packed with various things, some cheap, some precious, some
old, some new — examples of the payload of such boats in the last few
centuries. The train, on the other hand, was made by locomotive engineers
employed at a nearby sugar central. Neither vehicle offers the illusion
of motion. What they did achieve was far more interesting. For, as
I am told on every visit, both vehicles have become the locations where
stories are disclosed and retold: recollections of migratory routes, of rocking
movements on the way to fearsome destinations. These stories exhibit
the conflation of the social with the spatial in ways that subvert
mapping. Both vehicles evoke social memories. The stories and memories
are more numerous than the artefacts on the boat, and sometimes
produce recollections more powerful than the economic and political
power represented by the train.
These are tales meaningful only to those who have worked and lived
on the island. The stories are lodged in memories: in a quietude different
from that of the aestheticized stillness of the picturesque. The stillness
in the museum seems to have succeeded in expressing the opposite
— the moving dynamics of human longing in Negros, the pain and
rewards of busy life in the plantations, and the sea voyages that are a
part of Negro's history. It is as if these activities came to life through
their very concealment in the stillness of the museum. Although the
idea of a moving picture is a release from the regime of Heidegger's

282 Marian Pastor Roces
gebild, it is at present only an idea, which promises no more than the
same illusory, hallucinatory reality of the cinema. The registration of
tales in the voids of the Negros Museum took place without my planning.
But the fluencies with which these stones are told are only made
possible by recognizing the unpredictable nature of any political project
which, like all things in life, may be undermined by unexpected contingencies.
Conclusion: not in the picture
Bacolod City, home of the Negros Museum, is less than a hundred years
old. Most other towns and cities of Negros Occidental were founded in
the last 150 years. Like all new urban spaces, these relatively new municipalities
emerge out of the trajectory of modernity They represent
spatial transformations charted by the linear logic of progress and the
pull of industrial needs. That this progress has not (yet) delivered to the
majority of people of Negros Occidental the promise of emancipation is
obvious. This failure is visceral where people live: that is, in the lived
space of the city, and not the museum, church, and less and less, farms
and forests. But because the citification of human perception and physical
topography is merely about a century old in many parts of this province,
residents continue to invest considerable optimism in the idea of
urbanization. They desire urbanity and idealize urban joys. With the
fortunes of city life having been so intimately tied in with the sugar
plantation economy — in this geography of social and economic
connectedness between the city and the plantations — how then is the
future urban to be imagined? With the passing of sugar into the face of
the vanished Negritos and vanished forest cover of Negros, can and should
urbanization be dreamed as the final radical vanishing of Negros life
into pictures that can be consumed by buyers of che heritage industry?
Where do we find the sites that contest the reduction of the world into
pictures: into the tableaux, postage stamps, flags, and museum exhibits
with window-like frames? It is in this sense that museums seem to be
the least likely institutions for securing a truly inventive future.
My experience in working with the Negros Museum urged me to be
cautious with museums. However, I did come to view the activity of
establishing museums as a matter of technology transfer. Whether or

11: Re-presenting the sugar industry at the Negros Museum, Philippines 283
not this technology is appropriate in given contexts depends on the
thoughtfulness with which projects are effected, and a keen sense of
social justice, It is best to treat museums with caution — best, I believe,
to pay attention to what is not pictured, what is not in the picture. I
regard museums now as a kind of laboratory for flexing the capacity to
recognize the significance of che liminal, to sense the undulating presences
in their voids, so to speak, rather than in their pictures. This recognition
does not disavow the cultural urge to frame and to categorize,
but also hopes to give full expression to the need to historicize and thus
to reconfigure the past. And there may be vitality in museums that are
built to create opportunities to evaluate the adequacy of all critical engagements
with the social and the political. This, at least, seems to be
the only way of negotiating a monumental project like that of representing
the economic relations and the flow of power in relation to the
sugar industry in Negros.
The museum staff in Negros is unperturbed by my concerns. Perhaps
their insouciance is linked with the presence of the ramshackle
"wet market" across the street from the museum. In the market, the
chaos of the city is signified by the busy people as much as by the fish,
heads of pigs hung in hooks, and vegetables brought in, part of the way,
by water buffaloes. These signs of city life reinforce the near-futility of
the representational project in the museum. I think they are offered,
daily, a reminder that the voids in their institution are not small-scale
spectres in isolation. The voids resonate with the chaos and absences of
the larger society and with the wider cosmos of significations. What
comes to mind so sharply here is Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopia,
11
which can be deployed to express the impossibility of isolating a
single site from the flux of signification in modern urban life, in Negros
as in other parts of the Philippines. There are real people in the market,
and in the museum space where the archaic banwa is being awkwardly
evoked.
There is no need, it seems, for me to press my anxiety upon the
museum staff The bustling activities in the wet market are assuring
enough. Recently, plans have been announced to relocate the market
elsewhere, and to turn the site into a theme park. Until that happens,
the staff will continue to confront all the reminders of experiences plu-

284 Marian Pastor Roces
rai and paradoxical, simultaneously utopic and heterotopic, taking plac
next door.
At present, the museum workers have little choice but to recognize
Fredric Jamesons point, that
good city form ... may well involve a certain tension with purely architec-
tural space, asking certain buildings co accept a reduced position within the
perception of the whole, rather than to strive to become themselves micro-
cosms and models of the totality (and thereby the cotality of perception).
(Jameson 1995, p. 203)
And as for myself, I can only take recourse in a patient study of the wa
things unfold and in humility in the face of impossible projects. j
As a postscript, I note that I have been writing this chapter on an
off for about three years. I have a better sense now, I believe, of the valu
of the ambiguity I noted when I started. Writing of an exhibition eni
tled Paradise at the British Museum, James Clifford provides me, at th
juncture, with a succinct synthesis:
NOTES
the tension would not, should not, disappear. In this spirit, I find myself
wanting a more ambivalent Paradise; I look for the shadows already there to
lengthen, co trouble to hopeful story of hybrid authenticity. Trouble, not
erase. (Clifford 1997, p. 187)
1. Negros Occidental is roughly half of che island of Negros, in the Visayas islam
that form the central section of the Philippine archipelago. Negros is bisected by
volcanic mountain range situated along a northeast-southwest axis. The domina
language in Negros Occidental is Hiligaynon, brought to this side of Negros j
populations moving, across a strait, from the Iioilo side of the nearby island:
Panay. On che other side of the mountain divide, Cebuano is the dominant: la
guage in the province of Negros Oriental (which faces the island of Cebu). T
sugar plantation economy is more of a Negros Occidental than a Negros Oric?ri
phenomenon.
2. The Negros <strong>Cultural</strong> Foundation, Inc. (NCFI) is a non-stock non-profit founda
cion which, before working to establish the Negros Museum, had already und
taken che high-profile task of restoring an ornate mansion, built at the turn of j
century by a pioneering French planter. The restoration work was undertaken w
the intent of converting che mansion into a "lifestyle museum". This Balai Negara
"Negros House", constructs the glory days of sugar (more or less contempory
with the time this mansion was built) as a condition of unprobiematic bourse!

11: Re-presenting the sugar industry at the Negros Museum, Philippines 285
refinement. Mrs Lyn B. Gamboa has led the NCFI from the time of its establishment.
3. The Negros <strong>Cultural</strong> Foundation, Inc. (NCFI) was able to negotiate co lease the
central section of provincial capitol building from the provincial government for
half a century, for che token amount of one peso a year. In turn, the NCFI committed
to establishing and maintaining a museum within this central section of the
building.
4. Academic interest in Negros topics appears to have been circumscribed by the
politics of sugar. This is evidently because of the timeliness and hotness of topics
such as the following: the oppressive conditions lived by plantation labourers; the
heroically articulated projects to alleviate these conditions, vouchsafed by many
advocates of social equality; the vainglory but also the extraordinary visions of the
wealthy; the science of sugar vis-a-vis che global market-place. Greater attention is
devoted to these social history topics than to topics of ethnographic, archeological,
humanities (including musicology and dance ethnography) interest.
5. A few small bands of Negritos, also called ati, erstwhile nomads, still live in the
mountainous spine of Negros. However, their populations are so dwindled that
they are literally unseen by most of those who live on this island today. And because
of centuries of intermarriage with shifting agriculturists and farm workers of
Austronesian (previously known as Malayo-Polynesian) descent, the ati are in fact
vanishing as a racially distinct population.
6. I considered the "aesthetics" of putrefaction in che tropics during discussions in
preparation for a chapter on artist Simryn Gill, in "Slow Release" (1997, pp. 50-
55).
7. The principal source is Alonso de Mecrida's Bocabulario de la lengua Bisaya-Hiligueyna
y Haria de las islas de Panay y Sugbu, y para las demos islas, completed in the seventeenth
century (de Metrida 1841).
8. The curator-in-training then is now the appointed curator, Lilibeth V. LaO. She
works in close collaboration with the appointed CEO, Jennifer R. Limes, Both
have altered parts of che permanent exhibition only with my advice, I ended my
commission as curator of the permanent exhibition and overall adviser on museum
planning, at the end of staff training. The curatorial plan for Sugar and Other
Negros Tales was developed with a guest co-curator and exhibition designer, Adrian
Jones.
9. The Spanish word haciendero has currency in many Philippine vernacular languages
as a signifier for inordinately wealthy men, whose personalities are inflected towards
cynicism and contemptuousness.
10. Handwritten manuscripts, Philippine National Archives.
11. For che use of heterotopia in urban studies and cultural studies, see Soja (1995)
and Genocchio (1995).

286 Marian Pastor Races
REFERENCES

Stars in the shadows: celebrity,
media, and the state in Vietnam
MANDY THOMAS & RUSSELL H.-K. HENG
Media culture in Vietnam is presently documenting a vibrant revolution
in the relations between the public, the media, and the state. The
social and cultural transformations that are taking place are potently
manifest in the eager response of the public to an entirely unfamiliar
category of public person in Vietnam — the celebrity. The public is
experimenting with cultural icons that are not dictated by the ruling
political party, signalling a radical shift in the ideological topography of
popular culture. This chapter argues that contemporary celebrities in
Vietnam mark out a terrain for unexpressed popular protest at this formative
moment for media culture. Dissent is unrealizable in other domains
yet occupies a crucial space for the negotiation of political and social
meaning in an era of rapid social mutability. We suggest here that the
popularity of the tabloids in Vietnam expresses in readers' thirst for celebrities
a will to a reconfiguration of their political and cultural power.
This chapter first traces the changing relationship between the media
and the state in Vietnam and then provides a portrait of the sociocultural
milieu in which contemporary celebrities are positioned. Material
gained from interviews about popular culture with a cross-section
of Hanoi residents conducted in late 1997 and early 1998 indicates the

288 Mandy Thomas & Russell H.-K. Heng
precise modalities through which the role of public figures and fame are
undergoing eruptive change in contemporary Vietnam, It then argues
that attraction to celebrities holds the possibility of more transgressive
political acts (such as the formation of crowds), in support of which we
present a case study of the public reaction to the recent death of a popular
icon.
The metamorphosis of the media in Vietnam
Vietnam is on the brink of becoming a fully fledged media culture in
which the popular narratives and cultural icons are reshaping political
views, constructing tastes and values, crystallizing the market economy
and, as Kellner suggests, "providing the materials out of which people
forge their very identities" (1995, p. 1). If the media is, as Hartley suggests,
"a visualisation of society" (1996, p. 210), then the recent foray
into media culture is a dramatic turnaround from what existed previously.
Until the policy of renovation (doi moi) in Vietnam began in
1986, the media had a role of spreading propaganda and focused less on
reporting news than on educating the populace.
As evidenced in the memoirs of the northern journalist-turnedpolitical
refugee, Bui Tin, many journalists from 1954 onwards were
integrated into the party, and felt honoured to be spreading its messages
(Bui Tin 1995). Public criticism of the regime in che north has been
mainly apparent in literature rather than in journalism, and writers examining
forms of social deterioration such as Duong Thu Huong and
Nguyen Huy Thiep have often found themselves censured by the party. 1
In general, however, the nationalist cause and socialist ideals were promoted
by the arts, which were "to be purged of the perfidious influence
of Western bourgeois culture and provided with a new focus, nationalist
in form and socialist in content" (Duiker 1995, pp. 181-82). In the
south after 1975, journalists and writers were singled out for particular
punishment by the party, many sent to forced labour camps or imprisoned
(Jamieson 1993, p. 364). Awareness of the power of the printed
word has led the party to harness journalists and writers to their cause,
at the same time as it harbours a tenacious suspicion and distrust.
In early 1998, news in the major newspapers remains dominated by
party-related events in Vietnam highlighting activities that will repre-

12: Stars in the shadows: celebrity, media, and the state in Vietnam 289
sent the socialist society of Vietnam as a success. Other stories that predominate
in the newspapers are those that convey moral lessons or provide
information on public issues of health and safety. Although there
are increasing media reports of corruption, crime, and social upheaval,
these are often framed so that the information appears to be for the
protection of the masses, and thus may still represent the party as a body
interested in rooting out evil. While criticism may be directed at officials,
the leaders of the party and the overriding system of rule never
come under direct attack nor are they placed under the critical spotlight.
2
Since doi moi was instituted, there has been a dramatic increase in
the number of newspapers and magazines. At the same time, journalists
are permitted to investigate cases of wrongdoing by police and local
party officials as well as high-level corruption. However, there is still a
demand for greater press freedom. Journalists are in the difficult situation
of serving two masters, of wanting to attract a readership at the
same time as not being permitted to exacerbate political instability. The
shift from a "public relations state" (Schudson 1989. p. 160) to one in
which the public takes an active role in the choice of media information
they receive has been bumpy and the media has on occasions reverted to
dictatorial state control (Heng 1997; linger 1991). 3
Today in Hanoi, newspapers are very widely read. Our interviews
reveal that the average number of papers per day that a Hanoi resident
has access to, and very often reads, is four. Most of these newspapers are
not purchased but are read at work or at other peoples houses. Furthermore,
the average Vietnamese newspaper has relatively few pages, typically
ranging from four to eight. This, combined with its largely anodyne
content, means that it takes up minimal reading time and promotes
a tendency to read different papers when they are available. As a
result of the variety of reading sites available, the circulation numbers
are small but the readership is clearly much larger. A stroll along any
Hanoi street in mid-morning reveals the popularity of this medium of
information. One inevitably sees people gathered around news stalls, or
sitting drinking tea or eating noodle soup (pho), engrossed in the morning
papers.
Television programmes (in terms of hours and variety) and video

290 Mandy Thomas & Russell H ~K Heng
tape availability have grown, particularly since 1990, Although in 1988
only one in ten Hanoi households had television (Unger 1991, p. 50),
at that time enterprising cafe owners would set up television sets on the
street. In the early 1990s one could see crowds of up to several dozen
people sitting and gathering around the television sets watching Hong
Kong videos. As private ownership of television sets has risen, one no
longer sees such groups in public. In early 1998 in the survey we conducted,
eighty-seven households out of 100 owned a television set and
almost all had access to television. In the last decade the most dramatic
decline in media interest has been in the medium of radio, which television
has almost entirely replaced. 4
Television still devotes a noticeable
proportion of programming to promoting "socialist values" educating
the public in matters of health, hygiene, and education," Our interviews
revealed that the most popular programmes were news programmes (particularly
overseas news), sports, soap operas, films, music, and cultural
programmes about Vietnam as well as about other countries.
It is not only popular culture generally but media culture specifically
which has marked the end of global isolation for Vietnam, Even
though foreign news is filtered, the cumulative effect of a liberalizing
economy, foreign business investment, tourism, and the arrival of information
technology has meant that state control of information is weakening.
This is evidenced by the recent social unrest in Thai Binh 6
province,
which was reported both outside and inside Vietnam, demonstrating
that political unrest cannot be hidden any longer, in spite of any
effort on the part of the government to reimpose its control.
Civil society or popular culture?
Civil society in Vietnam is "a short-hand term to describe the emergence
of activity, including political activity, not under party control"
(Thayer 1991, p. 32). 7
Popular culture, on the other hand, refers to
those mass cultural activities, closely bound up with the media and advertising
(Strinati 1995, p. xvii), which Hebdige defines as "a set of generally
available artefacts: films, records, clothes, TV programmes, modes
of transport, etc." (1988, p. 47) and Hartley (1996) as "the practice of
media readership" (p. 47). It would be problematic, however, to see civil
society as having to do with unofficial actions and processes and popu-

12: Stars in the shadows: celebrity, media, and the state in Vietnam 291
lar culture as relating more to material culture. In Vietnam the two
terms are obviously blurred, for the attraction to popular culture and
celebrities has brought people onto the streets, and is drawing people
into activities that are seen to be subversive of the party. As Bennett
(1986) argues, popular culture is the set of practices and activities that
engage the population in their material worlds but which provide a zone
in which different "cultural values and ideologies meet and intermingle",
but also wrestle with each other "in their attempts to secure the
spaces within which they become influential in framing and organizing
popular experience and consciousness" (p. 19). It is popular culture as a
battleground for values where it most strongly differentiates itself from
civil society, which is always necessarily oppositional. Popular culture,
by contrast, engages with both dominant and subordinate cultural forms
in its generation of the popular.
We will show in this chapter how the understanding that celebrity
is anti-party is widespread in Hanoi and that the peaceful numbers that
celebrities are attracting are indicative of a new post-communist; media
revolution that is, by contrast, leaving the party isolated from public
appeal. The triad of the linked concepts of celebrity, media, and democracy
is intensifying in the same way that "journalism ... has shown a
tendency throughout the twentieth century to take over and textualize
the democratic function of the nation" (Hartley 1996, p. 200). This
shift to media culture also represents a fading in significance of a depersonalized
public sphere which has been promoted by the party, to a
public sphere dominated by popular media. The media transformations
in Vietnam map out social and political change and provide a cartography
of a nation passing through a phase of critical re-evaluation. 8
Celebrity and popular culture
Hartley (1996) and Marshall (1997) have both claimed that in many
areas of the globe there is historically a powerful association between
democracy, celebrity, and popular readership. Hartley suggests that political
revolutions such as the French and American Revolutions required
journalism to set them alight and that tabloid journalism effectively has
a "predemocratic role" (p. 11) scratching a "running sore in the body
politic". This irritant role of the tabloid press may in democracies lead

292 Mandy Thomas & Russell H.-K. Heng
to criticism of those in authority but in Vietnam there is as yet no possibility
of condemning those with political power except in ways already
sanctioned by the state such as in corruption trials. The media in Vietnam
thus must offer up new fare for a public hungry for appraisal and
commentary in the press. Journalists must direct readers interest onto
those without political power to sustain their interest. Often articles
fulfilling these functions are borrowed directly from foreign magazines
such as Paris Match, Time, and Newsweek The Vietnamese public is
activated as a group of consumers through an ongoing and dynamic
process of cultural production, in a lively engagement with the media.
Celebrity, like other forms of popular culture, often evades formal
institutional structures of power in appealing to the populace, and is
almost always linked with market economies, which legitimize it
(Marshall 1997, p. xii). Because the media in Vietnam is primarily viewed
as a potent means to engage in class struggle and as an instrument of the
party (Heng 1997, p. 1), the political institutions in Vietnam have in
effect suppressed the emergence of celebrities until quite recently. Celebrities
in Vietnam presently sit in the awkward position of having to
be sanctioned by the power structures at the same time as being spontaneous
expressions of popular appeal. While there has been a growing
number of tabloids and glossy magazines since the policy of doi moi
(renovation) was instituted a decade ago, the state still maintains a strict
if sometimes hidden control on censorship and editorial freedom (ibid,)
In Vietnam although the media is changing, the state does not see
information as a marketable commodity or as entertainment. The development
of celebrity in Vietnam thus requires something in addition
to media support. It depends upon the engagement of consumers with
tangible cultural products of the icon. The advent of market economics
and globalization had brought the notion and practice of pop culture
with icons and cultural products to Vietnam. Throughout Vietnam,
celebrities are being memorialized in obtainable objects, the media only
providing the initial catalyst for the interest in an individual. Celebrities
must be brought into the home embodied in artefacts. 9
These posters,
cassettes, soap operas, compact discs (CDs), videos, or even T-shirts,
with the pop image or name of the celebrity emblazoned on them, are
freely available in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. 10
Unlike neighbour-

12: Stars in the shadows: celebrity, media, and the state in Vietnam 293
ing socialist China, which has witnessed the phenomenon of Mao revolutionary
paraphernalia being turned into a massive pop industry of Tshirts
with slick slogans, posters with New Age images, and cover designs
for rock music CDs (Barme 1996), Vietnam has not done the
same with Ho Chi Mirth's heritage. The commodities associated with
popular icons are usurping some old mass cultural icons like the bust of
Ho Chi Minh or lapel pins/badges of the emblems of the socialist state. 11
It is evident therefore that with the rapid increase in the availability of
consumer items, che attraction to celebrities is growing. At the same
time, as the relationship between popular icons and commodification is
intensifying there has been a corresponding decrease in the circulation
and interest in the iconography of the socialist regime.
Interviews with a cross-section of more than 100 residents of Hanoi
about their preferences for news and their knowledge and interest in
public figures were conducted in December 1997 and January 1998. 12
The results indicated that a startling change in public culture and media
accessibility is under way in Hanoi. 13
Of people in the two age-group
categories, the forty-six to fifty-five years old and the the fifty-six to
sixty-five year olds, more than half stated that no public figures interested
them, and the rest named Ho Chi Minh as the public figure that
was most important. While many respondents would only have answered
this way because they have been habituated to always answer in this
way, when questioned further it was clear that a high number of older
people were really not familiar with many other well-known people.
When asked to name any foreigner at all thac they had heard about, a
common response was Lenin, Marx, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, and
Lee Kuan Yew. Considering that many of che respondents watched television
this seems a surprising result. When questioned further, many
said they did see other people on television but could not remember
their names because they just were not interested. How might this be
interpreted? The interest in tabloid celebrities in Vietnam is widespread;
however, many older people in Hanoi still feel chac popular culcure is an
invasion of whac they feel is superficial Wescern mass culture, and show
disgust towards rather than lack of interest in these figures. This is because
the regime felt in the past that Western cultural imperialism as
evidenced in mass media was an attempt on the part of capitalists to

294 Mandy Thomas dr Russell H. -K. Heng
impose Western ideologies upon their people (see also Alrschull 1995,
p. 234). The adult lives of these people were involved in the revolution,
and this formative period deeply influenced their perception of public
figures and what their role should be. Leaders were expected to exemplify
impeccable moral behaviour and a social conscience (Nguyen Khac
Vien 1974, p. 47). Since the revolution in the north, public figures have
been described in the media and in biographies in glowing terms, and
historians employed to write hagiographies of national heroes and revolutionaries
(Duiker 1995, p. 182). 14
Public persons for this age-group
had to combine patriotism with a socialist ideology. One respondent
gave a revealing reply to the question of her perception of the role of
public persons:
To be famous one has to help one's country. Being a singer or an actor does
nothing co help che snuggling workers here. Even a football player playing
for Vietnam wins for himself not for che country. Whereas Ho Chi Minh, Vo
Nguyen Giap, and others lived only for the people, i just cant understand
why people get excited about football heroes — they are not true heroes, they
didn't fight like we did.
Another respondent replied:
Ho Chi Minh is my favourite because he saved our country and was such a
clever politician. I'm not interested in these people who are "phenomena"
chat appear in magazines — they are just superficial and lack culture.
The type of individuality that has been revered in Vietnam is that of
people who have been marked by a career in the service of their country
as moral exemplars and emblems of nationhood. 15
Those raised in the
political environment of the post-1954 socialist transformation of the
north and the war for national reunification continue co be influenced
by the public culture of the period, 16
One older person stated: "We don't gain anything from these famous
people. The media is for education. I done read it when they
speak about someone who is a singer or so on." The association between
the mass media and nation-building is still strongly felt by older people
in Hanoi. Clearly, as Bennett has suggested:
Dominant culture gains a purchase in this sphere not by being imposed, as
an alien and external force, on to the cultures of subordinate groups, but by
reaching into those cultures, reshaping them, hooking them and, with them,

12: Stars in the shadows: celebrity, media, and the state in Vietnam 295
the people whose consciousness and experience is defined in their terms, into
an association with the values and ideologies of the ruling groups in society,
(1986, p. 19)
Here, the enjoyment of certain cultural forms, and the "capacities for
pleasure and conceptions of pleasure" are mobilized by a configuration
of cultural and historical meanings (Mercer 1986, p. 66). That is, what
is considered to he "entertaining" at any given moment is contingent
upon cultural systems of meanings at particular sites. So, until very recently
the powerful intervention of the state upon the desires and needs
of the populace was successful in implementing a regime of pleasure
associated with nationalist ideals. Following Mercer (1986, p. 55), the
imposition of desires upon the populace is part of a wider political arena
in which there is some persuasion, some resistance, and some negotiation.
So, the present popularity of football players in Vietnam, like the
attraction to national figures at an earlier period, is inseparable from the
dominant ideology of the moment and the everyday cultural and social
worlds of the individual consumer. These celebrities, all popular icons,
are meaningful because they are hieroglyphs, instantiations of worlds in
the making, of tastes, ideologies, and relations of power in the wider
social environment of the Vietnamese people.
A provocative disconnection between older peoples stated beliefs
about public personae and their reading practices was revealed in our
interviews. Not one person in any age-group listed Nhan Dan (The
people or Peoples daily) as one of their favourite newspapers. The most
popular newspaper in all age-groups was The Gioi An Minh (World security),
which presents a diverse range of information about the world
outside Vietnam as well as having articles about issues in Vietnam. Other
popular newspapers were Hanoi Moi (New Hanoi), specialty journals
such as those devoted to sport, those for women, and those for youth,
and Cong An (Police), an increasingly popular newspaper devoting its
pages entirely to reports of crime and criminal trials. Unlike these papers
with high readerships, Nhan Dan emphasizes the achievements of
the party, the country, and individuals who espouse the ideals of Vietnamese
cicizenhood. Bui Tin, the former editor of Nhan Dan (until
1991), commented that "the paper has become a platform for the organs
of the party and the state, in other words a heavy and depressing

296 Mandy Thomas & Russell H -K Heng
sort of official gazette reporting meetings, receptions, resolutions etc., as
if to torment its readers" (1995, p. 148). Even for those over forty-five
years old who are not interested in news and celebrities outside Vietnam,
the paper does not have any allure. This indicates a disjuncture
between the ideals that were asserted by this age-group (a commitment
to Ho Chi Minh and the national revolution in Vietnam) and the reality
of a wider pleasure and interest in international affairs as indicated
by the popularity of reading the more cosmopolitan newspaper The Giai
An Ninh. What this hints at is the possibility of a slow change in attitude,
as yet "unspeakable" but clearly present in the reading practices of
this age-group, one steeped in the revolution and communist ideology.
The very different responses of younger people to questions about
their media interests indicate the sea change in attitude about the role of
artists as public personae. Entertainment is a new phenomenon in postrevolution
Vietnam. The political configuration of celebrity-watching
in Vietnam is indicated by the way in which respondents answered questions
about what famous people they knew of and were interested in. In
the older age-group, the standard answer was either no one or "Ho Chi
Minh", whereas in the age range 36-45, only one-third of respondents
answered Ho Chi Minh (or General Vo Nguyen Giap, a revolutionary
hero who fought the French at Dien Bien Phu), but the remaining twothirds
mentioned singers (such as My Linh), footballers (such as Hong
Son), and other popular sports people and entertainers. For younger
people (in the two age-groups 18-25 and 26-35), Ho Chi Minh was
entirely replaced by their favourite footballers, singers, movie stars, and
only occasionally was Ho Chi Minh mentioned, usually at the very end,
almost as an afterthought. Here are samples of the individual replies to
the question (for the age-groups 18-25 and 26-35), "Who are your
favourite well-known people in Vietnam?"
* Hong Son (footballer), Nguyen Van Linh (politician)
* My Linh (singer), Thanh Tung (musician)
* Nguyen Thuy Hien (female martial arts expert)
* My Linh, Thanh Lam, Thuy Tien, Hong Nhung (singers)
Huynh Due, Hoang Butt, Hong Son (footballers),
Trinh Cong Son (entertainer)

12: Stars In the shadows: celebrity, media, and the state in Vietnam 297
Lai Van Sam (programme presenter on Vietnam Television VTV3)
* Hong Nhung (singer), Hong Son (footballer)
* Tra Giang, Thu Ha, Ngoc Hiep (film stars)
Thuy Dung, Hong Nhung, Thu Hien, Tran Duc (singers)
Thanh Tung, Trinh Cong Son (musicians)
* Dang Thi Teo (athlete)
* Trinh Cong Son (musician)
* Trung Duc (singer), Do Nhuan (musician), Hong Son (footballer)
Nguyen Thi Binh (female political leader)
* Tuan Vu, Khanh Ly (overseas Vietnamese singers), Trinh Cong Son
(musician), Ho Chi Minh
* My Linh (singer), Vo Nguyen Giap (general, revolutionary hero)
* Trinh Cong Son (musician), My Linh (singer)
For young people in Hanoi the admiration of celebrities that are apolitical
is, we argue, politically symbolic, an incipient political act of opposition.
In choosing to admire a singer over a communist political leader
individuals realized that in the past this would have been dishonourable,
as indicated in the following comments of one eighteen-year-old
respondent:
My parents don't think it is a good thing that my sisters and brothers; like
these singers and like the posters of films from Hong Kong. They think thu
we will lose our culture and have no values. Sometimes I hide the magazines
from my mother because ic would upset her so much.
This response indicates that young people may be aware that the party
would not so long ago have banned what today the youth find most
entertaining and appealing. It also indicated that the collective Vietnamese
memory still harbours fear at che consequences of unofficial
activities.
The interviews with Hanoi youth revealed that their interest in and
knowledge of public figures outside Vietnam was extremely diverse and
scattered. 17
Here are some examples of che listed favourite Western celebrities
that were listed by individual respondents in the age-group 18-
25:
* Freud, Shakespeare, Bill Gates, Darwin, Eicon John, President
Roosevelt

298 Mandy Thomas & Russell H.-K. Heng
* Bill Clinton
* Kevin Costener, Michael Jackson, Tony Blair, Tom Cruise
* Ronaldo (Brazilian footballer)
* Hillary Clinton, Princess Diana
* Martina Hinggis (tennis player) and Ronaldo (footballer)
* Fidel Castro, Napoleon
* Bill Gates, Fidel Castro
* Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson
* Roberto Baggio (Italian footballer), Ronaldo (Brazilian footballer)
* Fidel Castro
* Michael Jackson, Maradona, ABBA
* Marie Curie, Fidel Castro
Seven others in this age-group answered that they did not know, were
not interested in Americans or Europeans or could not remember their
names. By contrast, in the age-group 45-65 the following answers were
given by individual respondents:
* Einstein
* Marx, Lenin, Fidel Castro
* over ten respondents answered Fidel Castro only
More than twenty respondents answered that they did not think anything
of Western public figures, could not remember their names, or
were not interested. In the over-sixty age-group, no respondents answered
this question. The growth of a heterogeneity of popular figures
who appeal to youth is significant because of the noticeable contrast
between this range of interests and significations compared with the
figures that are popular with the older age-group. Here, so called "globalization"
has not been a homogenizing influence, rather the reverse.
For older people there was an intense narrowness of interest in public
personae but for young people there was a vast array of contrasting,
fluid identifications (see, for example, che answer "Bill Gates, Fidel
Castro" — a seemingly irreconcilable pair of individuals). In another
contrast, the choices of local celebrities by young people were much
more homogeneous. The foreign celebrities are spread over a range of
fields and interests and seem to vary with an unpredictability that indicates
the sudden flooding of the discursive field of fame with a ready

12; Stars in the shadows; celebrity, media, and the state in Vietnam
population of personae. This suggests that a populace newly exposed to
celebrities and without having had the opportunity to build ongoing
relationships with these icons over time readily identify with a diverse
range of images. This is not to say that Vietnamese youth are
"undiscriminating" when exposed to foreign media images, but rather
indicates their intense and growing fascination for overseas celebrities
and the gradual diffusion of the power of a few public figures co a larger
and more diverse field of personae.
Mass culture and crowds
The shift in appeal from a scattering of public political figures to a manifold
set of celebrities signals the increasing influence of Western conceptions
of the individual and the marketability of these conceptions
(Marshall 1997, p. x). Celebrities are placed in a position of resolving
the contradictions between the public and the private, of acting as mediators
between larger imagined communities and individual lives (ibid.,
p, 25). Emerging public figures in Vietnam offer a set of tropes through
which transgressive ideologies and desires may have an outlet. These
permissible forms of transgression are responded to by the state with a
nervous disquiet until they erupt into public space, where they are suppressed.
Political dramas were the only ones which drew masses until
recently. Ho Chi Minh's declaration of Independence in Ba Dinh Square,
Hanoi in September 1945 is perhaps the emblematic national crowd in
Vietnam, 18
Over the last decade Hanoi inhabitants note a gradual decline
in interest in public political events like party celebrations and
funerals. It is only in the last few years that crowds have been evident for
what appear to be entirely non-political activities. Here, it is social drama
that draws a crowd, and out of these events are created a sense of community
and shared emotion. 19
The crowd in Hanoi has had a huge semantic shift since the 1940s.
Clearly, although never stated blatantly, crowds have for the party been
the most splendid instantiation of state power in the past, but now signify
the possibility of a most terrifying subversion. Memories of the
crowds that tore down the Berlin Wall and of the crowds in Tiananmen
Square would add co che concern that officials have for the power of the
crowd to overturn and to threaten. The party has seen the impact of the
299

300
Mandy Thomas & Russell H. -K. Heng
potent mix of a public desire for reform, crowds and media interest in
Eastern Europe as well as in China and elsewhere in Asia. The evidence
for this is manifold. Recent rural uprisings, particularly in Thai Binh
province in the north, have clearly been of continuing concern for the
regime. The party has to devote considerable effort to arrest declining
membership and has not been successful in promoting attendance at
state-organized public events. Yet religious festivals are attracting larger
gatherings of people every year and undergoing a resurgence in popularity
with a rather dramatic flourishing of popular festivals and pilgrimages.
Football crowds are also of concern co the party. When Vietnam's
soccer team beat Indonesia in the South East Asian Games in 1997
there was a spontaneous mass oucpouring onto the street. The disruption
of public order was stressed in newspapers reporting the response
to this match, as a number of people had died in traffic accidents that
night as a result of both alcohol and youth racing their motorcycles
(Ashley Carruthers, 20
personal communication). Mass mourning and
mass celebration both open up sites of communal activity that express
"non-state" opinion. Popular culture here again reveals itself to be resisting
the politics of the state, albeit indirectly. The state funerals for important
cadres used to attract thousands of people who lined the streets
to see the funeral party pass by. Now, it is only people who live along the
route who would bother to be present. The fear that the party has for
crowds is indicated by the actions of censors in gluing together the pages
of a glossy magazine that had published photos of the funeral procession
of the soap opera star, Le Cong Tuan Anh (Ashley Carruthers, personal
communication). Three weeks after the funeral, the Ministry of
Culture and Information also publicly reproached the media for giving
excessive coverage to the event. 21
It was the reaction to this death that
provided an unprecedented example of the possibilities for disruption
in the triangulated relationship between che media, the public, and the
state.
On 17 October 1996, the suicide of a young movie actor, Le Cong
Tuan Anh, in Ho Chi Minh City produced an unprecedented media
and public response. He was not really a star in the sense that he was
enjoying vast fame and fortune, as the Vietnamese film industry was
rather small and had been in che doldrums in recent years. His career

12: Stars in the shadows: celebrity, media, and the state in Vietnam 301
was only just picking up momentum but his death transformed him
into a popular icon. Overnight, serious papers like Tuoi Tre (Youth) and
Thanh Nien (Youth) were competing to run background stories on him
and the suicide and increasing their print-run in anticipation of increased
readership. Readers' letters poured into newsrooms and one newspaper,
Nguoi Lao Dong (The Worker) received forty calls on one day from the
public wanting to talk about the late actor. Street entrepreneurs swung
into action and brought out photocopied copies of old magazine/newspaper
articles about him which sold in large numbers at his funeral procession,
and tens of thousands of Saigonese turned out to pay their respect
at his wake and on the funeral day, causing massive traffic jams.
Among those who went to the funeral parlour at all hours of the day
and night were homeless streetkids, pedicab drivers, and the ordinary
working people of the city, a spontaneous turnout which would have
been the envy of any state mobilization of grassroots participation. The
reasons for this were not just that he was young and handsome or that
he was suddenly seen as a person who had been destined for greater
things. The personal story of Le Cong in the press revealed that he had
been discarded as a child by his parents who separated, and spent part of
his childhood as a but doi (streetkid) until his aunt (father's sister) rescued
him from a reform centre. Somehow this combination of public
image and personal trials and tribulations had struck a chord with che
population. 22
In Hanoi we interviewed a group of cwency university students abouc
Le Cong's death. 23
Although it was Saigon where the funeral was held
and where the public responded with greatest intensity, the youth of
Hanoi paid close attention co the events. All chose interviewed knew
about his death and the details of his life. One young woman reported
that her cousin had been to the funeral in Saigon and was asked to
repeat the description of it over and over to her friends. After finally
arranging a meeting, the cousin admitted that although she had been in
Saigon her parents had forbidden her to attend the funeral. She said:
1 really wanted co go co his funeral because I felt so sad for him — My parents
didn't let me go because they thought it would be dangerous, there might be
bad people attracted there, you know, with the crowd of people from all over,
they worried that people might come and steal things when nobody was

302 Mandy Thomas & Russell H.-K. Heng
noticing, something like that. They also couldn't understand why he was so
special. I think they think he's not like the heroes they know ... Le Cong, in
my opinion was so sad for young people because he was like all the possibilities
and hopes for us, many good things happened to him I think but he
struggled all the time, a lot of people in Vietnam are like him .., wherever
you are in Vietnam, north or south it doesn't matter. We young people feel
the same I think ... What was important was that he was good-looking and
had a good job but had that tragedy; in the end somehow all those things like
doing well, getting money didn't mean anything.
Such sentiments were echoed by many of those interviewed, which indicates
that the death of Le CongTuan Anh reverberated with the many
contradictions that exist in contemporary Vietnam. It also reveals che
passage of information through Vietnam and some of the differences
but also the inseparable connections between north and south. As a
young man told us:
I think we've been through different things — the north and the south —
but it's the whole nation that has been through difficult times, We're still
Vietnamese though ... Le Cong had a story familiar co everyone, so we sort
of cried for ourselves.
Although it could be said that the south has a much more developed
media culture for historical and cultural reasons, che movement of people,
information and ideas between different regions in Vietnam has
accelerated dramatically in the last few years. In the north the emotional
response to the death of this popular icon represented to many young
people their shared sense of belonging to the imagined community of
all Vietnamese youth and resonated with a national mourning chat has
been co some degree "unspeakable" in purely political domains. The
cultural currency gained by being associated with the crowd of the funeral
was also notable. The young woman who had been refused permission
to go to the funeral said:
I wish I had been at the funeral. I had never heard of something like that, all
those people coming together for somebody that was special and meant something
important to them.
The sense that Le Cong triumphed over adversity was part of his attraction
but his early death turned che success into a poignant tragedy from
che perspective of Vietnamese youth. His girlfriend of many years (a
famous Saigon model) wanted a separation. The rumour mill had it

12: Stars in the shadows: celebrity media, and the state in Vietnam
that she was going to marry a more wealthy man (a foreigner), and that
her mother did not like Le Cong. She and close friends of the couple,
however, rejected these allegations. At Le Cong's wake, the press photographed
her in the traditional mourning dress of a bereaved wife, which
added to the poignancy and spectacle of the event. The fact that he had
had an unhappy love affair fed into the romantic narratives that appeal
to the Vietnamese psyche. The public mourning for a figure few knew
personally reflects a resonance between the public and the signification
of the celebrity because that person is an embodiment of a larger tragedy
which affected them personally. 24
In the case of Le Cong, the transition
from streetkid to star did not lead to happiness, nor did his talent
conquer difficulties in his emotional life. In this way Le Cong embodied
a self-abnegation, a quality which has hisconcally been revered as an
essential element of the Vietnamese spirit, exemplified in many national
legends as well as in the story of Kieu. 25
In a country where mass mourning has been almost entirely stage
(state)-managed, the death of Le Cong provided an exemplification and
a reaffirmation of what for many is imagined as che "national character"
of Vietnam, of self-sacrifice combined with social conscience and desire
for love and family. At the same time, the construction of Le Cong as a
popular hero, allowed the public to transcend the constraints of official,
authorized and legitimate codes of behaviour. His death thus contained
a bittersweet aspect to it. Here, the triumph of compassion and social
conscience in the public's response was also a claim for a return co values
chat are often thought to be lost in present-day Vietnam. This is exemplified
in the comments of one young student:
The papers mentioned thac Le Cong did not own anything and had not
spent all his money on foreign goods and things to show others how successful
he was. He spent his money helping other people who had problems. I
think he was a very good person who realised that money is not important
after all.
The ascetic lifestyle of Le Cong that was emphasized in the press fundamentally
supporcs the state's ideology of deriding so-called "Western
bourgeois capitalist values". Yet it could also mount an insidious attack
on che doctrinaire version of reccicude because Le Cong's meagre circumstances
scood out in relief against an increasing public awareness of
corruption and profligacy in high places. The anti-materialist message
303

304 Mandy Thomas & Russell H.-K, Heng
was, however, eclipsed by the fact of his death signifying the impotence
of principles in the face of emotional suffering, but reassured Le Cong
of the position of hero. That the details of his life were revealed to the
public is in sharp contrast to the lives of party figures, where there is a
overwhelming desire to cover up all personal details or co sanitize these
for public consumption. 26
The desire of the public for a shift to the
confessional mode in representations of public figures was evidenced in
the efflorescence of tabloids that narrated in detail events from Le Cong's
life and included interviews with those who knew him.
Le Cong's death was polysemous and represented many of the contradictions
and ambiguities in contemporary Vietnam. His travails as a
child were also emblematic of the socio-economic privations which almost
all Vietnamese have experienced. The phenomenon of the streetkid
continues to be an indication of the failure of the country's socialist
tradition of welfare for the poor. Even with a promising movie career, Le
Cong was not leading a life of affluence. His residence was a rented
shabby room which belied the glamorous image of a handsome moviestar.
This captured some of the ambiguities of the country's reform programmes
which, although holding much promise, have failed to live up
to expectations. The rumour of the gold-digging girlfriend, even if untrue,
fed into another dark undercurrent of contemporary Vietnam where
foreigners are viewed ambivalently as bringing prosperity and opportunities
at the same time as inflicting a sense of inequality and inadequacy
on the Vietnamese. Le Cong's appeal was mostly to the youth who were
expressing their sense of marginality to the dominant political processes.
Le Cong was the ultimate outsider to the orchodoxy because of his
screeckid pasc as well as through the nature of his work as a soap opera
star, not something valorized by the state buc seen as conveying false
value. Wyshogrod (1990) has argued chac popular saincs signify both a
disordering of institutional codes and association with outsiders. 27
His
"saintliness" was evident through his transgressions and by his being the
inversion of a national hero (young, a streetkid, having died by love
instead of war), as well as the redemptive quality of his death. But the
most significant aspect of che response to the death and subsequent involution
of state power was that the scale of public reaction required the
mediation of a media that were ready and willing to respond,

12: Stars in the shadows: celebrity, media, and the state in Vietnam 305
Conclusions
Tony Bennett has written about the political nature of popular culture:
Oppositional cultural values are formed and take shape only in the context of
their struggle with the dominant culture, a struggle which may borrow some
of its resources from that culture and which must concede some ground to it
if it is to be able to connect with it — and thereby with those whose consciousness
and experience is partly shaped by it — in order, by turning it
back upon itself, to peel away, to create a space within which contradictory
values can echo, reverberate and be heard. (Bennett 1986, p. 19)
Examining the creation of, and responses to, celebrities in Vietnam can
assist in making sense of the chaotic engagement of Vietnam in the
processes of modernity. The trope of the public figure in Vietnam formulates
and maps the sets of relations between the public and the state,
making these relationships visible, although fraught with contradictions
and anomalies. The coalescence of popular culture and journalism with
modernity releases a storm of desire for objects associated with democratic
capitalism exemplified in the figure of the celebrity (see Hartley
1996, p. 8). The inkling of an unravelling of state control on the media
in Vietnam has opened a crack onto popular culture during a period of
political liberalization. There is an unusual dynamic in Vietnam where
celebrities occupy a borderland between popular interest bordering on
"uprising" and state control. The state has effectively delimited public
criticism, yet a fragile but assertive form ofVietnamese democratic practice
has arisen at the margins of official society in the media at a time of
accelerating social change. Celebrities exist without democratic capitalism,
but in a site such as Vietnam their power is still delicate — even
though it has undergone breathtaking growth in the last decade. This
configuration means that in the future the place of the celebrity is likely
to symbolically register political unrest and social instability. Despite a
history of immersion in media propaganda, the Vietnamese audience is
highly discriminating and critical of the mass culture that they consume
and are not passive manipulated consumers of cultural products.
As Strinati (1995) has pointed out, there is a danger in arguing that
consumers of popular culture are "self-conscious, active subversives, exploiting
media culture for their own ends, and resisting and reinterpreting
messages circulating by cultural producers" (p. 258). This is a cari-

306 Mandy Thomas & Russell H. -K. Heng
cature of audiences and does not take into account the social and historical
forces involved in the production of both mass culture and audiences.
There is also a problem in suggesting that people have little knowledge
of the processes of globalization or the wider relations between the
media and politics which might influence their tastes and perceptions.
In the case of Vietnam, consumers are neither "active subversives" nor
"passive victims" of media imagery, but fall between these poles. Their
consumption of media products and popular icons often generates
"agency" (Appadurai 1996, p. 7) as audiences have been made explicitly
aware of the political and social forces at work in the production and in
the banning of images and information from them. In this way, it is
clear that in consuming celebrities, the Vietnamese populace are not
unmeditative masses undertaking an unthinking act. Rather, the contemporary
icons of popular culture in Vietnam are being engaged in the
social lives of the audiences in all their diversity. These acts are personally
pleasurable but also politically expressive while not being politically
motivated. Celebrities will attract crowds, and those crowds may often
express an "excess" which both symbolizes and exacerbates already
strained relations between the state and the people.
There is potential for the new communities of feeling that arise at
these moments to be revolutionary, as the new publicly known person
in Vietnam no longer symbolizes a nation (as did the pre-eminent public
figure Ho Chi Minh). By extending Bourdieu's analysis of the nature
of charisma and power (Bourdieu 1984) to the relationship between
celebrities and power, Marshall suggests that a "celebrity's formative power
rests with the people as an expression of popular culture and will"
(Marshall 1997, p. 56). Here, popular culture is, as both Fiske (1989)
and Hall (1981) argue, reconfigured into a cultural battlefield in which
differing representations of the popular imagination are fought over.
The close scrutiny applied to foreign celebrities particularly marks them
in this batde as being "icons of democracy and democratic will" (Marshall
1997, p. 246), The contemporary celebrity in Vietnam thus signals for
the nation a loss of ideological purpose and an unravelling of images of
a political struggle in which a public is being shaped but is also itself
constructing political and cultural meaning.

12: Stars in the shadows; celebrity, media, and the state in Vietnam
NOTES
1. The phenomenon of a critical political literature has historical roots in the colonial
period when in the 1930s in the north a group Tu Lc Van Doan (Self-Reliance
Literary Group) wrote novels that critically assessed the inequities arising from
colonization (Duiker 1995, p. 179).
2. This has also been reported in China, which has similar political institutions
(Polumbaum 1990, pp. 59-60).
3. See Polumbaum (1990) for an analysis of the relations between the media and the
state in China.
4. Although we did not conduct extensive interviews outside of Hanoi, in Yen Bai
and Vinh Phu provinces several informal interviews were conducted co ascertain
the levels of exposure to che media. These indicated that television is watched much
less than in Hanoi, with fewer than 50 per cent of households owning television
sets. Newspapers are not widely available; when available they are often out of date.
Families going to Hanoi occasionally bring back magazines, which are also left by
passing truck drivers. Information is much more local and interest in celebrities is
almost always focused upon Vietnamese talent.
5. In prime time television in January 1998, in addition to news, soap operas, and
films, there were education programmes such as "Washing your new baby and
other principles of hygiene" and a two-hour video of a lecture at Hanoi University
on physics and electronics.
6. Rural unrest and violence in Thai Binh province erupted because of economic
difficulties and villagers' disgust with the corruption of local party officials. This
has been reported in an official Vietnamese state newspaper Nhan Dart (The People)
(for example, 3 December 1997). However, similar political instability in Dong
Nai province in the south of the country was not reported in any national newspaper
(Bangkok Past, 3 December 1997, p. A8).
7. Others have defined civil society more narrowly. MeCormick (1995), for example,
defines it as being related to che "organisations that are autonomous from but
linked co che state" (p. 2). In this definition the media would not necessarily be a
potential site for the foundations of civil society which is a formation playing "an
essential role mediating between state and society, uniting citizens in voluntary
organizations that can shape or resist power, but at the same time providing a
means of communication and legitimation that provides the state a stable foundation
in society" (ibid.). The focus in this definition upon formal state-linked "organisations"
(like Solidarity in Poland) rather than activities means that spontaneous
gatherings of people around popular, religious, or political ideas would not
come under the rubric of "civil society", a notion we dispute.
8. See Hall (1986) for a theoretical overview of the relations between popular culture
and political leadership.
307

308 Mandy Thomas & Russell H. -K. Heng
9. It is worth commenting here that it is only the Vietnamese and regional products
that are affordable and accessible. As yet, the availability of products associated
with European and American celebrities is minimal. An integral component of the
new appeal of celebrities in Vietnam is that they signify a consumer world beyond
Vietnam, and are a material representation of capitalist democracies. In this way,
the cultural products associated with fame have become a visualization of modernity,
or as Hartley suggests, "of the promise of comfort, progress and freedom"
(1996, p. 200). Because of the lack of non-Asian consumer items, it has been East
Asian popular culture in Vietnam which has most clearly symbolized the possibilities
and desires for affluence, accumulation, and personal freedom and, in so doing,
has conjured up new forms of society for the Vietnamese populace.
10. Examples of this type of celebrity are the Hong Kong "Cantopop" stars Jacky
Cheung, Leon Lai, Andy Lau, and Aaron Kwok, who have a very large following in
Vietnam.
11. The mass culture icons of the socialist era were not really products in a marketplace
but units in a socialist distribution system which also indicates a differentiation
between what was the "mass" culture of the past and che "pop" culture of
today.
12. We would like to thank Tran Dang Tuan for conducting some of the interviews for
this survey.
13. Undoubtedly this change is felt even more strongly in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)
but the southern media phenomenon is not within che scope of the present research.
The souch is clearly a society with a different history, cultural life, and
political culture from the north but also has experienced a different media culture
prior to 1975, which is in the living memories of many individuals.
14. As an example of the way in which a foreign public figure was represented in the
press during the 1950s it would be worthwhile to quote Bui Tin, che northern
exiled journalist, at length: "During the 1950s in Vietnam, Stalin — just like Mao
Tse-Tung — was excessively praised. The mass media created an extraordinary
picture of a hero who had saved mankind from the disaster of fascism and paved
the way for more than a dozen countries in Europe and Asia, including Vietnam,
to stand up and gain their independence. ... At thac time teachers were specially
trained to explain to their pupils thac ic was Stalin who brought rice and cloches,
and smiles to the faces of the children. I have to admit that I too was absolutely
shattered and heartbroken when I heard of his death." (Bui Tin 1995, p. 18).
15. On this subject of the relationship between public artists and the socialist regime,
Duiker writes: "Under party rule, the creative arts were thus dedicated co two major
objectives: co stimulate a sense of national identity and commitment through
the encouragement of indigenous forms of arc, music, and literature and to promote
the growch of a socialist ethic through the creation of a new culture based on
the principles of socialist realism. In order to promote national pride, traditional

12: Stars in the shadows: celebrity, media, and the state in Vietnam 309
forms of art, music, and dance were revived and transformed co serve modern
purposes, The ca dao and other forms of literary and musical expression were transformed
into a medium for serving the cause of social revolution and national
reunification, In novels, plays, and poems, northern Vietnamese writers portrayed
in romantic terms the glorious struggle of their countrymen to bring about socialist
culture in the north and in achieving reunification with the south", (1995, p. 182)
16. Attitudes not just about public figures but also about Western music in the postreunification
period is indicated in the national newspaper Nhan Dan [Peoples
daily) which in 1979 reported an official's comments on the youth in Ho Chi
Minh City. He argued that "some of the youchs who are influenced by neocolonialism
and the old social system have been infected with such bad habits as
laziness, selfishness, parasitism, vagabondism, pursuing a good time etc". Another
official argued that Western music would encourage people to "turn their backs on
our peoples life of labour and combat, regret che past and idolize imperialism"
(Nhan Dan, 5 September 1979 reported in Duiker 1995, pp. 185-86). The cultural
life of the period was completely dictated by the party — "Radio, television,
newspapers, journals, poetry, songs, novels, motion pictures, all were transformed
into high volume, high redundancy transmitters of selected themes, new values
and new role models" (Jamieson 1993, p. 362).
17. Vietnamese youth are not a homogeneous group, as is also shown by Marr (1997)
in his study of Vietnamese youth in che 1990s. This research supports Marr's findings
of a diversity of opinion, attitude, and orientation among young people.
18. This mass gathering is mentioned in che opening introduction to Bui Tins autobiography
"Bui Tin stood among the crowd in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square on 2
September 1945 and witnessed Ho's historic proclamation of independence" (Thayer
1995, p. vii). Being a spectator of this formative national moment assured many
individuals of a lifelong commitment to the social revolution.
19. The tragedies of both personal tragedy and the Vietnamese national tragedy of war
and post-war crises are also reconstituted in the everyday dramas of both soap
operas and real-life soap operas. The most popular programmes are ones which
have strong moral messages and are psychological dramas. For example, Americas
Little House on the Prairie, a series of stories from mid-western United States containing
strict moral and religious codes is very popular, as is Justice Pao (Bao Cong)
from Taiwan. The pleasures of watching such dramas are that they engage che
Vietnamese audience in tales that are already familiar co them from Vietnamese
literary and legendary genres.
20. Ashley Carruthers, a post-doctoral fellow in the Centre for Advanced Studies at the
National University of Singapore, is also one of the contributors to this volume.
21. Nha Bao va Cong Luan [The journalist and public opinion], no. 19, 11-17 November
i 996, p. 6:"Ve giai quyet cac vu viec tren bao chi" [Solving the problem of
the media].

310 Mandy Thomas & Russell H, -K. Heng
22. The details of Le Cong Tuan Anh's death were gathered from issues of Tuoi Tre
[Youth], Thanh Men [Youth], and Cong An Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh [Saigon police]
from the time of his death to the end of October 1996.
23. Most Hanoi people residents over thirty years old who were interviewed only very
vaguely knew the story of Le Cong.
24. The response to the death of the Princess of Wales exemplifies the notion of the
strong identification between the public and a cultural icon (Re:Public 1997). Note
also the Vietnamese response to the death of Diana in Thomas (1997).
25. The story of Kieu was written by Nguyen Du (1765-1820) and all 3,000 lines of
the poem are known by heart by most Vietnamese people over the age of about
forty. Kieu is a tale of much significance to Vietnamese people as it sets out many
of the moral precepts that have guided the lives of many older Vietnamese people.
Filial piety, the virtue of women, and the ideals of womanhood are central themes.
The story also deals with two questions thac are of concern to many Vietnamese
people: how can love and duty be fulfilled at the same time? and can one's talent
and one's strong sense of morals overcome a poor destiny?
26. The life of Ho Chi Minh is such an example. Always said co be single because of his
devotion to the nation of Vietnam, in 1991 when a newspaper in Saigon (Tuoi Tre
— Youth) reported that he had married twice, the editor was sacked (Bui Tin
1995, p. 17).
27. See also McPhillips (1997), who discusses Wyshogrod's ideas in relation co Mother
Teresa and Princess Diana.

12: Stars in the shadows: celebrity, media, and the state in Vietnam 311

312 Mandy Thomas & Russell H.-K. Hen
Newspapers and Magazines
Tuoi Tre [Youth]
Thanh Nien [Youth]
The Gioi An Ninh [World security]
Hanoi Mot [New Hanoi]
Cong An Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh [Saigon police]
NHA Bao va Cong Luan [The journalist and public opinion]
Nhan Dan [The people]
Nguoi Lao Dong [Workers]
Bangkok Post

On the expressway, and under it:
representations of the middle class,
the poor, and democracy in Thailand
JAMES OCKEY
"Piak can't possibly be trusted ... he's a servant."
I raise an eyebrow.
"Besides," she says, "it involves technology, and you know thac they can't
operate electronic machinery..."
I've never seen Piak have any trouble, ... I wonder why my aunts persist in
the delusion thac there are certain things the servant classes simply don't have
the brains co do.
(Somtow 1995, p. 151) 1
In May of 1992, demonstrators succeeded in overthrowing the
military government of General Suchinda Kraprayun and restoring
democracy. One academic described these events in his newspaper
column almost exultantly, "It has never happened that a mob anywhere
has been so full of automobiles, mobile phones, hand-held
radios, and workers of the white collar' type" (Sayamrat sapda wichan,
14 June 1992, p. 12). Early in the demonstrations, the protestors
were dubbed by the press the "automobile mob", and the "mobile
telephone mob", a depiction retained in academic works and
retrospectives on the May uprisings.
Many protescors arrived at che demonstration site in their large cars, carrying
their hand phones. ... Local newspaper [sic] reported that che majority

314 James Ockey
of the demonstrators were "middle class". The typical member of che "mob"
was a well-off, well-educated, white-collar worker. (Sungsidh and Pasuk 1993,
pp. 27-28)
Representations thus prominently feature automobiles, mobile phones,
the "middle class", and democracy, tying these concepts together in a
way that has important implications for viewing their role in Thai society
and the democratic state. Yet these representations, constructed by
middle-class academics and journalists, are not an objective or accurate
portrayal of the events. In order to illuminate the discrepancies in this
middle-class constructed representation, and to locate the aspects that
have disappeared, a closer look at representations of the middle class,
the poor, the rich, and democracy is necessary.
This chapter begins by examining the development of the middleclass
lifestyle in Thailand. I look at those consumer goods linked to this
lifestyle in the various representations of the 1992 protests, namely, the
mobile phone and the automobile. I also consider the expressways constructed
for the automobiles, as they link the middle class to the urban
poor. I will then look at the ways that the poor are represented in relation
to democracy, by focusing on a community that has fallen victim to
an expressway ramp, and then by examining the selling of votes in Thai
society. I then turn to some contradictory representations of rich politicians
in relation to democracy and their practices of corruption. Finally,
I attempt to explain the contradictions in che middle-class representations
of democracy, and trace out some of the implications.
On the expressway: automobiles,
mobile phones, the middle class, and democracy
Automobiles are one of the most visible signs of increasing wealth and
changing class formations in Thailand. In 1960 there were only 33,105
automobiles in Thailand. 2
During the 1980s, expressways began to crisscross
Bangkok as the number of automobiles grew to over a million by
about 1990. In 1982 the first full year after the first expressway opened
in Bangkok, over 9 million trips were made on that expressway and over
the next decade, the figure increased to nearly 160 million expressway
trips. Still, traffic worsened, as construction failed to keep pace with the
number of new automobiles that came on the roads. The traffic jams

13: Representations of the middle class, the poor, and democracy in Thailand
played an important role in the popularity of mobile telephones. With
many people spending hours in traffic each day, mobile phones became
necessary to call clients to apologise for late arrivals at appointments, or
to call home about evening meals. Chatting with friends on mobile
phones has became a way to overcome the boredom of being stuck in
traffic. With fierce competition in the telecommunications industry,
the mobile phone — a symbol of prestige and of middle-class status —
became accessible to even the less wealthy of the middle class. In 1987,
there were fewer than 10,000 mobile phones in Thailand. By 1993,
there were over 200,000 mobile phones in use, and a year later, after a
price war, there were nearly 800,000 (Bangkok Post Year End Economic
Review, 30 December 1994, p. 71).
During the demonstrations of 1992, it quickly became clear that
the mobile phone could serve another function. When the military
government sought to censor television and press reports of the demonstrations,
the mobile phone became an important means of disseminating
information among callers and beyond. The middle-class
owners of mobile phones, and middle-class journalists and academics
had the opportunity to represent the events as they saw them.
The middle class were represented as the primary force in che demonstrations,
as well as the main reason for the success of che overthrow
of the government in 1992. Indeed, almost without exception.
3
the demonstrations were depicted as "the middle class" rising
up in the demand for democracy. For evidence of middle-class participation,
a survey of demonstrators done by the Social Science
Association of Thailand is frequently cited (Sungsidh and Pasuk 1993,
p. 28). According to the survey, some 52 per cent of demonstrators
claimed a monthly income of over 10,000 baht (then US$400). Yet
even if the survey is accurate, by implication, the 48 per cent of
demonstrators who made less than 10,000 baht have been erased
from the representations of the uprisings. Rarely is it mentioned that,
in fact, almost half of the demonstrators were from the lower classes,
that the poor were as strongly committed as their middle-class counterparts
in their demands for democracy. This erasure of the role of
the poor persisted despite the reported fact that nearly all of those
injured or killed were from the lower classes. 4
In these representa-

316 James Ockey
tions written by middle-class reporters and academics, the lower
classes apparently do not care about the struggle for democracy. 5
Under the expressway:
the poor, expressways, and democracy
In the 1980s, expressways were rapidly constructed in Bangkok for the
increasing numbers of automobiles used for business, for public transport,
and by the growing middle class who own and drive them. Expressway
construction is generally on public land, and through the leastdeveloped
and poorest communities where land compensation costs are
low. In 1996, the population living in Bangkok's slum communities was
estimated at about 1.5 million, 15 per cent of the total population of
the city. In order to build these expressways, poor residents are being
evicted from their homes, and are forced to occupy a dwindling amount
of land, in increasingly crowded conditions. 6
In a way, the class structure
of Thai society can be found in the expressways: the wealthy getting
wealthier from their construction, the poor evicted from beneath
them, and those in the middle driving on them.
For those facing eviction, the parliamentary system allows many
methods of resistance for those who understand its structures. Despite
the apparent belief of many in the middle class, my research on one
community, Bankhrua, demonstrates just how quickly and how well
the poor understand democracy when it is useful and necessary (Ockey
1997). Bankhrua was settled by Cham Muslims in the early nineteenth
century. Originally on the outskirts, Bankhrua was absorbed into the
city as Bangkok expanded, eventually becoming the busy, densely populated
community it is today. Later, ethnic Chinese and Northeastern
Thai moved in, creating a fascinating social and cultural mix. A few
residents became rich by co-operating with Jim Thompson in the silk
trade; most remained poor. In the late 1980s, the Express Transit Authority
(ETA) decided to build an expressway ramp through the community,
which would require the eviction of many people. Residents,
convinced the ramp was being built to benefit a shopping centre, set out
to oppose it democratically.
In February 1988, they sent a petition to the Prime Minister requesting
that the building of the ramp be stopped. This was the first of

13: Representations of the middle class, the poor, and democracy in Thailand 317
twenty or so petitions written and sent to various politicians. Later that
same year, Bankhrua residents convinced a member of parliament (MP)
to raise che issue in parliament. When a vote was called, the opposition
proposal to reroute the ramp was passed. The government called for a
recount and won the vote. But when a third and final count was requested,
the government agreed instead to reconsider the proposal and
later announced that the ramp would be eliminated. Nevertheless, the
ETA soon renewed efforts co build the ramp.
The response of the Bankhrua leaders was to open the issue for
public debate, certain that their cause would prevail. In April of 1993,
the Minister of Interior agreed to hold public hearings before a committee
of experts not related to the government, the first such hearings in
Thailand. In October 1993, in a close vote, the committee agreed that
the ramp should not be built. The report stated that the ramp was not
economically viable, might increase traffic problems, and would cause
tremendous damage to the Bankhrua community. However, the ETA
continued to demand that the ramp be built.
Faced with this situation, Bankhrua residents decided thac the next
step would be to stage a peaceful protest. In April 1994 they marched to
Government House. For three days their representatives negotiated with
the government, eventually gaining agreement on a Memorandum of
Understanding (MOU). The MOU committed the government to a
decision within six months, based on the evidence, and taking into account
the decision of the public hearing. The ETA continued to push
for the expressway ramp.
It was at this stage that the Bankhrua community again turned to
elected politicians. Residents supported a candidate in the 1995 election
who promised that his party would stop the ramp. He won the
scat, and then joined the cabinet, but conceded responsibility for traffic
in downtown Bangkok to another minister of a rival party in the coalition
cabinet. At the behest of Bankhrua leaders, the issue was raised by
a friendly MP in the House Environment Committee, which passed a
resolution calling on the ETA to stop the ramp project. Another supporter
in parliament argued that the canal where the ramp would be
built was a historical site that had to be preserved. In response, che ETA
simply moved che ramp a few metres away from the canal. Bankhrua

318 James Ockey
residents then pointed out that by law an environmental impact statement
was required. Ultimately, all their efforts to work, through the parliamentary
system failed when the cabinet approved construction. Residents,
however, continue to insist they will not move. Nevertheless, they
remain firm supporters of democracy. One community leader proudly
informed me that he had been in the forefront not just in 1992, but in
earlier uprisings, in 1973 and 1976 as well.
Press coverage of the residents' peaceful resistance to eviction has
been generally favourable. However, there was an underlying theme in
many reportings: that Bankhrua protestors were hot-tempered and stubborn,
and unwilling to compromise or sacrifice for the good of all —
even though they opposed only the ramp and willingly moved out of
the path of the expressway itself. So, for example, while Bankhrua leaders
were in the midst of difficult negotiations with the government, one
young woman leader was reported to have slammed a hand down on a
table during a meeting, declaring that Muslims world-wide would support
them. This minor incident received prominent play in almost every
report on the demonstrations. 7
Meanwhile, the ETA began claiming
that the construction of the expressway was being delayed by the community,
and that community residents were co blame for steadily worsening
traffic in Bangkok. 8
The actions of Bankhrua residents clearly demonstrate that the poor
can function effectively within the parliamentary system, though their
efforts may be ignored. This, together with the participation of the lower
classes in the May events, suggest that they are willing to fight for democracy,
and based on casualties, they are more willing than the middle
class to die for it. Yet the middle class "persist in the delusion that there
are certain things the servant classes simply don't have the brains to do"
(Somtow 1995, p. 151). Closer examination reveals thac the role of the
lower classes has been erased not only from depictions of the May 1992
uprising, but also the earlier October 1973 uprising (Ockey 1999). Curiously
the role of those middle-class actors who opposed the various
uprisings has also been erased. Occasional positive representations of
the ability of the poor ro function in a democracy, such as Bankhrua's
resistance to eviction, are overwhelmed by the near constant assertions
that the main problem with che parliamentary system is che willingness

13: Representations of the middle class, the poor, and democracy in Thailand 319
of the poor to sell their votes, a fact attributed to the lack of education
of the poor. How can these discrepancies in the representations of the
poor be resolved? Perhaps we can start by examining vote-buying among
the lower classes.
Representations of democracy:
the lower classes and vote-buying
The poor are often blamed by the media for the vote-buying in elections
in Thailand. But the real problems lie elsewhere. In my interviews
with slum community residents, a consistent pattern emerged. Politicians
come during the campaign, give speeches, make promises, buy
votes, and then disappear until the next election. It is unusual for the
poor to receive assistance from their representatives. Bankhrua is no
exception. As we have seen, their representative promised to do everything
possible to eliminate the expressway ramp. Although he was head
of a political party that joined the government, and became a cabinet
minister, he did not assist in any discernible way. 9
Once in parliament,
MPs promote policies that serve their wealthy constituents, often at the
expense of the poor.
Rather than cite other specific examples, it may be more useful to
look at the change in the distribution of income under the parliamentary
regime. The National Economic and Social Development Board
(NESDB), which draws up Thailand's five-year plans, has included the
distribution of income by quintiles for selected years in their assessments
(see Table I). Due to the rapid economic growth in Thailand, the
incidence of poverty declined during this period while the gap between
rich and poor consistently widened. This is particularly evident for the
bottom 40 per cent of income earners. In contrast, only the top 20 per
cent have increased their share. Thus many of those who believe themselves
to be middle class also face a widening gap between their income
and that of the wealthy. 10
Since the income gap continues to widen no matter which parties
are in government, the focus on the ability of individual candidates to
deliver specific benefits prior to the election — cash, donations to temples,
road or bridge building — makes perfect sense. In fact, one can
easily argue that the lower classes understand parliamentary rule all too

320
Table 1
Distribution of Income by Quintlles, Selected Years
James Ockey
1975/76 1980/81 1985/86 1988/89 1990
1st 49.26 51.47 55.63 54.98 56.48
Top 10% 33.40 35.44 39.15 37.85 n.a.
Second 10% 15.86 16.04 16.48 17.12 n.a.
2nd 20.96 20.64 19.86 20.30 20.11
3rd 14.00 13.38 12.09 12.20 11.92
4th 9.73 9.10 7.87 7.98 7.43
5th 6.05 5.41 4.55 4.51 4.05
Second 10% 3.62 3.28 2.75 2.74 n.a.
Bottom 10% 2.43 2.13 1.80 1.76 n.a.
Sources: NESDB, National Urban Development Policy Framework v. 2:47, TDRI
Quarterly Review 9 (March 1994), p. 6.
well. What the middle classes perceive as "corruption" can be seen as
one small benefit that parliamentary rule has brought to the poor.
Representations of democracy:
the upper classes and corruption
But vote-selling among the poor is also presented as the underlying cause
of much wider practices of corruption in Thai politics. Anan
Panyarachun, former (non-elected) prime minister and then chair of
the constitution drafting committee once remarked: "[Under the new
constitution], [t]he fraud in elections will decrease and more honest
politicians will enter politics ... I am sure it will get better" (Asiaweek,
10 October 1997, p. 23). The remark implicitly refers to the practice of
vote-selling among the poor, and blames this form of "election fraud"
for the state of Thai politics. The shifting of the blame to the poor is
subtle, but pervasive. In accordance with this representation, politicians
are forced to spend money to buy votes if they are to win. They then
have no choice but to recoup their investments through corruption. Yet
corruption by cabinet ministers was also common under authoritarian
regimes, without elections (Skinner 1958; Riggs 1966). Vote-buying
has been the result of corruption, not the cause, The opportunities for
corruption are so lucrative, that politicians are willing to invest money

13: Representations of the middle class, the poor, and democracy in Thailand 321
in buying votes in the hope of gaining a seat and thus ensuring a return
on that investment.
Although the lower classes have come in for a heavy share of the
blame in media representations, some wealthy politicians have also been
the focus of blame. Here, too, the discrepancy in the representation of
various politicians is fascinating. A comparison of two rather different
types of wealthy politicians is instructive. Both have made their fortunes,
in large part, through government contracts and concessions. The
first, a former prime minister, is almost invariably represented as corrupt
— he has been dubbed "ATM" [automated teller machine] by the
press because of his alleged propensity to distribute cash for support. He
is a provincial politician who has turned his province into one of the
most developed areas outside of Bangkok, through the allocation of large
amounts of development money. Naturally he is extremely popular in
his home province, and, since the middle class see this as evidence of his
corruption, he is also very unpopular in Bangkok.
A self-made tycoon, 11
he dropped out of school at the age of seventeen
to work in the family business. Not long thereafter, he travelled to
Bangkok where he worked as a waiter in his uncle's coffee shop near the
Department of Public Works, and got to know many civil servants there.
Eventually he was able to take advantage of an opportunity to act as an
agent in supplying chlorine to the department. When this venture proved
successful, he began supplying pipes, and later established a construction
company that relied heavily on contracts with the department
(Matuphum, 5 July 1988, p. 12; Anan 1988, pp. 56-57). Later he began
to play a role in provincial politics. He eventually built up his fortune
based on expanded ties to government departments and his growing
political power. In spite of his success, his lack of education sparked
controversy. It was alleged that he was not eligible for office, as his father
was Chinese and he had not completed the minimum level of education
required of a child of a foreigner to run for office. He enrolled at
Ramkhamhacng University and completed a Bachelors degree, and then
a Masters degree, studying part time. The second controversy arose when
he was accused of plagiarizing his MA thesis.
For the most part, he retains the manners of his province, of his
Sino-Thai ethnicity, and even of his former class. He has not adopted

322 James Ockey
the manners of the aristocracy, or even the middle class. For his middleclass
detractors, despite the fact that he was prime minister, he still resembles
a provincial yokel. The impact of press representations has been
clear in surveys taken by academics. An academic study, reported in the
press, found that most respondents believed his party was the "most
corrupt" (Pasuk and Sungsidh 1994, p. 144). Early in his term as prime
minister, another survey taken in Bangkok and widely cited in both the
English- and Thai-language press, found that two-thirds of respondents
wanted a reshuffle, with his party left out of a new government. Interestingly,
journalists most wanted the reshuffle, and farmers wanted it
least ( Post, 2 November 1995, p. 3).
The former deputy prime minister also built up much of his fortune
through government contracts. In contrast with the ex-prime minister,
he is invariably represented as a role model for the successful entrepreneur.
For example, there is a hagiography published by the publisher
Matichon, which also publishes a widely read middle class-oriented newspaper
(Sarakun 1993). (The former prime minister, by way of contrast,
has had a book written specifically to oppose him [Anan 1988]). The
ex-deputy prime minister came from a wealthy family in Chiang Mai. 12
After graduating from the police academy, he went to the United States
where he earned his Masters degree and later a Ph.D. degree in criminal
justice. His career with the police department was brief, and included a
stint attached to the Prime Ministers Office, where he came into contact
with politicians. A few years after obtaining his Ph.D., he left the
police department and went into business. He had had courses in computer
science while earning his Ph.D., and decided to move into the
computer industry, and then into telecommunications generally.
Here, the careers of the two man begin to resemble each other. The
ex-deputy prime minister's uncle had been the Deputy Minister of Communications,
and he could also call on his politician friends from his
days at the Prime Minister's Office. He obtained a concession for a mobile
telephone frequency and began to sell mobile telephones. Later he obtained
a concession for a cable television channel, perhaps with the help
of a fellow former police officer who then chaired the Mass Communications
Organization of Thailand (Khao phiset, 3 May 1989, p. 12). The
telecommunications mogul soon became one of the wealthiest people

13: Representations of the middle class, the poor, and democracy in Thailand 323
in Thailand. He then joined a Bangkok-based middle class-oriented
"clean" political party. He was immediately granted a cabinet post in
recognition of his financial contribution to the party. He later took over
the party, and won election in Bangkok. Bankhrua residents insist that
his party bought votes in their electorate.
Curiously, the former prime minister is always represented as a corrupt
politician, while the former deputy prime minister is generally represented
as a financial genius, and a role model for entrepreneurs. He
has twice been brought into the cabinet to improve the image of the
government. 13
Again, how can we explain this discrepancy?
The middle class and representations of democracy
Before attempting to resolve all of these contradictory representations,
it may help to summarize them. First is the insistence that the middle
class was responsible for bringing about democracy, not only in 1992,
but also earlier in 1973, and the associated erasure of both the middleclass
actors who opposed the uprisings and the participation of the lower
classes in those uprisings. Secondly, despite the occasional positive representations
of the democratic activities of the poor, there is the pervasive
conception that they do not understand democracy, as allegedly
demonstrated by their practices of vote-selling. Again this is despite the
fact that the poor use their votes to gain concrete benefits for themselves
in perhaps the only way possible in the current system. Finally, we have
the strikingly different representations of two politicians who got wealthy
through privileged access to the state and its resources. The one, a provincial
politician with limited education and "sophistication" is portrayed
negatively, the other a "sophisticated" high-technology-oriented
entrepreneur with a Ph.D. from the United States is portrayed positively.
Of course there is no reason to assume that representations should
be logical. Yet by examining these lacunae through the lenses of theory
and history, we may learn something about the relationship between
the middle class and democracy.
In looking at the way that classes form, there have been two main
approaches in the literature: structural and historical. Structural approaches
define class according to specific criteria, such as education, or
status, or relations of production, or, in the case of the survey of Thai

324 James Ockey
demonstrators in 1992, level of income. While this approach has the
advantage of establishing concrete criteria, it fails to include the circumstances
that influence the attitudes of classes. It ignores the element of
community, the sense of belonging that is necessary if a class is to become
anything like a coherent actor. In addition, the focus on structure
effectively confines understanding of the interests and attitudes of classes
to the economic sphere.
The historical approach, exemplified by E.P. Thompson (1968),
focuses on the way a class creates itself historically, by examining the
circumstances that cause it to coalesce into a coherent and conscious
group. This historical approach has been applied to the middle class by
Frykman and Lofgren (1987). According to Frykman and Lofgren, the
middle-class constructs a distinct "lifestyle" to set itself apart from both
the aristocracy and the lower classes. They identify that lifestyle with
particular attitudes and characteristics that they believe only they properly
value. The middle class then <strong>claims</strong> superiority for its lifestyle and
may attempt to impose that lifestyle on other classes. In Thailand, that
lifestyle has come to include the elements linked together in representations
of the 1992 demonstrations: mobile telephones, automobiles, and
a particular vision of democracy.
The Thai middle class expanded so rapidly in the late 1950s and the
1960s (Anderson 1977) that a new set of attitudes, a new "lifestyle",
had to be constructed to incorporate the new members. Understanding
this lifestyle requires an examination of the distinguishing characteristics
of the regime of the time, The Sarit regime (1957-63) was the first
government since the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932 that
did not seek legitimacy through an appeal to democracy. Instead, it appealed
to development, to security, and to the monarchy. Each of these
would have an impact on the formation of the middle-class lifestyle.
Development was responsible for the sudden increase in size of the
middle class. The particular type of development pursued was based on
private enterprise, and on foreign investment. This, along with the arrival
of U.S. soldiers and advisers, meant that the growing middle class
was widely exposed to Western military, economic, and political ideas.
Sarit's emphasis on security and U.S. interest in Thailand were both
rooted in Cold War ideology. According to this ideology, the main threat

13: Representations of the middle class, the poor, and democracy in Thailand 325
to security was communism, a foreign ideological import which would
flourish among "the masses" 14
who were vulnerable to its seductive lure.
Thus the masses were seen as gullible, incapable of understanding the
true nature of communism, and not to be trusted. Only chose who knew
better could be trusted with political power. Finally, Sarit elevated the
status of the monarchy to a new level. He restored its prestige, but not
power, so that the monarchy became a symbol of goodness. It is within
this climate thac the new middle-class lifestyle was constructed.
Cold War ideology was supported by a prevalent approach at the
time — modernization theory. According to this approach, the greatest
threat to development was instability (Huntington 1968), and a large
educated middle class was necessary for stable democracy (Lipset 1959).
Therefore, authoritarian-led development was necessary until a middleclass
democracy could come about. All the elements of this academic
theory were in place by the late 1960s, the period when large numbers
of middle-class students began to study in Thai universities (Anderson
1977, pp. 16-17). This framework not only reinforced the Cold War
ideology, but it provided justification for the legitimizing formula of the
Sarit-initiated regime; stability, security, and development. The rapidly
expanding middle class was thus getting the same message from government
propaganda, from U.S. propaganda, and from many educators, a
message which included the idea that the masses could not be trusted,
that only an educated middle class could sustain democracy.
The middle class and the political divide
The shape of the new middle-class lifestyle coalesced slowly. The consumer
goods associated with the middle-class lifestyle were soon standardized.
However, the ideology, or, more broadly, che set of attitudes,
that would represent a middle-class "lifestyle" were strongly contested.
On the one hand were those who accepted the Cold War ideology, complete
with its fear of communism and the masses, and its acceptance of
the U.S. security blanket and U.S. aid and investment. Many in the
middle class could trace their prosperity to this aid and investment and
were inclined to believe in the associated ideology. This set of attitudes
became pervasive and the mainstream, as Sarit and his successors used it
to legitimize military control. On the other hand, however, was a smaller

326 James Ockey
group of mostly young people who rejected the Cold War ideology and
the heavy U.S. influence. These young people had in common a recent
Western education, or were at least aware of the anti-establishment
movements of the 1960s in the West, and a dissatisfaction with American
influence and military rule. Among this group, there was also more
willingness to trust the masses under proper leadership. This group presented
an alternative set of middle-class attitudes, one that would rely
on the masses to support future government.
The 1973 uprising which overthrew the military government is often
identified with the emergence of the middle class on the political scene. 15
In fact, the uprising was mass-based, including people of all classes (Flood
1975). It was led primarily by university students who had rejected the
attempts of Sarit's successor, Thanom, to justify continuation of authoritarianism
in the name of security, stability, and development: young
intellectuals who subscribed to the alternative middle-class attitudes. Ic
is thus not surprising that this group sought change through mass demonstrations.
Significantly, the demonstrators appealed to the monarchy,
and the monarchy supported the uprising, placing it on the side of
democracy in 1973. Thus all classes supported this uprising, and the
military itself became the representative of authoritarianism, the "antidemocratic"
force.
After the 1973 uprising, the two sets of middle-class attitudes began
to diverge quite rapidly, and the point of divergence was over the role of
the masses in politics. Those with mainstream attitudes based on securicy,
stability, growth, and a distrust of the masses, found their values at
risk. With the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, American aid diminished,
and when American bases in Thailand were returned in 1975, the
security blanket was also withdrawn; this in the same year South Vietnam,
Cambodia, and Laos all fell to the communists. Worse yet, the
Laotian monarchy was eliminated when the communists cook over. At
home, the 1973 oil crisis had thrown the country into recession, a crisis
exacerbated by the decline in American aid. And, providing an easy
scapegoat for economic concerns, peasant and workers unions had
formed, and strikes and demonstrations had become commonplace, As
the Communist Party of Thailand began to be associated with these
demonstrations, fear of the masses mounted. In this context the 1976

13: Representations of the middle class, the poor, and democracy in Thailand
events took place, casting the competing sets of middle-class attitudes
into conflict.
Those who subscribed to the alternative set of middle-class attitudes
spent the years between 1973 and 1976 trying to build a more
independent and democratic society. They got involved in rural development,
in teaching democratic principles to the lower classes, and in
organizing labour and peasants. They provided support for opening relations
with China and for the retrocession of the American bases. And
they resisted what they saw as a return to authoritarian values in government
(Morell and Chai-anan 1981, pp. 150-234), These values were at
the heart of the October 1976 demonstration for those who led it. For
those who opposed it, however, the demonstration was communist-inspired,
a threat to the monarchy, security, stability, and development.
Thus members of the middle class, divided by the competing attitudes,
were on both sides of the 1976 massacre. This time, however, the monarchy
provided support for the suppression which brought about a return
to authoritarianism.
After the 6 October 1976 massacre, the alternative — and more
radical — middle-class set of attitudes was marginalized. Some of those
who had been promoting it fled overseas, or to join the communist
party. Some were jailed. Many abandoned politics. However, the victory
of the mainstream set of attitudes was not complete. That required
the return of democracy, a different sort of democracy, carefully controlled
to ensure security and stability, In 1978, this process was initiated
by factions within the military, most of them mid-level officers,
who by structural measures, were middle class. Many of these officers
had fought in Vietnam and the lesson they took from that experience
was the necessity of winning over the hearts and minds of the people.
This, they believed, could best be achieved through democracy (Chaianan
1982). These officers set out to destroy the communist party by
establishing democracy. However, it was a democracy carefully hedged
about by military control. The prime minister was the military commander,
the senate was dominated by officers, and a range of transitional
provisions in the constitution ensured that democracy would not
mean power for the masses, or even the middle class (Ockey 1992,
chap. 2),

328 James Ockey
During the 1980s, this transition initiated by the military brought
about a new type of democracy. This democracy developed simultaneously
to the collapse of the communist party and the decline of the left,
so that many believed it was an effective means of suppressing communism.
This time, democracy brought rapid economic growth. And it
had strong visible support from the monarchy, most obviously during
the attempted coup of 1981 (Chai-anan 1982). So stability and development
began to be associated with democracy. Eventually, politiciantem.
However, no effort was made to mobilize the masses into politics.
Instead, vote-buying became common, as mass participation was effectively
bought off.
Frykman and Lofgren (1987) argue that the middle class creates a
lifestyle that sets it apart from both the lower classes and the aristocracy
During the 1980s, the middle-class lifestyle began to clarify into something
like a consensus of what it meant to be middle class. Rapid development
had led to a close association between the middle class and
consumerism, accounting for the mobile phone and the automobile as
middle-class symbols. These symbols are also closely associated with
modernity. Westernization played an important role, as Western fast
food and restaurant chains, brand-name clothing, expensive perfume,
and imported whisky all worked their way into the lifestyle. These, however,
were only the outward signs, The core element of middle-class
values soon became democracy. History was rewritten so that the middle
class was on one side in 1973 and 1976, and the military (and for
1976, the "Rightists") on the other. The lower classes disappeared from
the picture. Closely associated with dtis middle-class value system was
education. Those in the middle class were well-educated enough to understand
the principles of democracy and how they work. The masses
were not — as indicated by their propensity to sell their votes — and
therefore, it was argued, could not be trusted.
While consumer goods and, apparently, democracy could be used
to distinguish the middle class from the masses, distinguishing themselves
from the upper classes proved more difficult. The prestige the
monarchy developed under Sarit, combined with the king's support for
democracy in 1973 and in the 1980s, made it impossible for the Thai

13: Representations of the middle class, the poor, and democracy in Thailand 329
middle class to clearly separate itself from the aristocracy. Furthermore,
from the beginnings of the rapid expansion of the middle classes, the
monarchy had sought to cement a solid relationship by granting royal
titles to prominent members of the middle class and by personally bestowing
university degrees (Thak 1979, chap. 6). Similarly, the extremely
rapid mobility that many in the middle classes had enjoyed held out the
prospects of rising even higher. Thus separation from the wealthy was
also problematic. That left two categories of the ruling elite that could
be demonized: military officers, who were portrayed as the representatives
of authoritarianism, and uneducated provincial tycoons who lacked
the proper manners, education, and dialect of the Bangkok middle class.
It is in this context that we can begin to make sense of the way lower
classes and their role in democracy in Thailand are represented in the
media and academic circles.
Conclusions
Examining the ways that the middle class has shaped its lifestyle helps
explain the lacunae in its representations of both the lower classes and
certain types of politicians. The lower classes have been erased from
representations of 1973, 1976, and 1992 because, for the middle class,
these were pro-democracy uprisings, and the lower classes do not understand
or value democracy. The evidence of this is the vote-selling.
Positive representations of the lower classes working democratically, as
in Bankhrua, are subverted and rapidly forgotten. The retired military
commander-in-chief who helped lead the May 1992 demonstrations
must be, underneath, authoritarian in nature, because he was a top general.
The former prime minister who made his fortune through connections
in the Public Works Department is represented as corrupt because
he is seen as an uneducated provincial yokel. The former deputy prime
minister who made his fortune through connections to the police department
and Ministry of Communications has a Ph.D. from the United
States and deals in mobile telephones and other middle-class high-technology
goods and is not portrayed as corrupt — if anything, he is a role
model. Finally, it should come as no surprise that modernization theory,
which provided the academic legitimation for the connection between
the middle class and democracy has persisted to this day, and has some

330 James Ockey
of its strongest adherents in Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia
as well (Anek 1997;Tadashi 1995). In the new variant, the middle class
brings about civil society, which then leads to democracy. Ironically, the
relationship between civil society and democracy was earlier used to
explain democratic transitions in Latin America and Eastern Europe,
where civil society meant mass-based organizations like labour unions
and the Catholic church. In the Southeast Asian variant, the lower classes
disappear from the theory, just as they did from the representations of
the May 1992 uprising.
The historical circumstances that led the middle class to distrust the
masses and disparage their ability to function democratically was not
limited to Thailand, but was common throughout Southeast Asia. Every
government in Southeast Asia limits, in some way, the participation of
the lower classes. This distrust seems to be strongest where Vietnam
War era leaders have survived. In Thailand, and perhaps other Southeast
Asian nations, the distrust has become engrained in middle-class
attitudes. In the Philippines and Thailand, the middle class has allied
with the lower classes in popular uprisings, but afterwards limited lowerclass
participation. In other Southeast Asian countries, the middle class
may be unwilling to ally with the lower classes at all, thereby ensuring
that civil society and democracy will remain truncated.
Middle-class distrust of the masses in Thailand is revealed in representations
of democracy, and in the representations of che middle class
and the poor more generally. It is particularly striking in the new constitution,
written in 1997, primarily by middle class-oriented reformers
and aptly described to me by a Thai academic as "a middle-class proclamation."
16
A number of provisions aim at corruption by wealthy politicians;
more interesting, however, are those aimed at limiting the influence
of the masses. Just as the military carefully wrote the constitution
to retain conrrol in 1978, so the middle-class reformers have written the
new constitution in ways that enhance middle-class power, at the expense
of the poor, and especially the rural poor. First, che institution of
100 non-constituency seats, about 20 per cent of the House membership.
A disproportionately large share of these seats are likely to go to
Bangkok and other urban-based MPs, who will be elected from a party
list, and will have no constituency. They will be responsible not to the

13: Representations of the middle class, the poor, and democracy in Thailand 331
people, but to the parties. A non-elected former deputy prime minister
in the cabinet claimed these seats will improve the parliamentary system,
"We will have two societies in one, those from the constituencies
to form the government and those hundred, who have a good image, to
run it" (Asiaweek, 10 October 1997, p. 24). In other words, those nonconstituency
seats, if that particular reformer gets his way, will be privileged
over the constituency MPs, who are more likely to be from the
countryside, and more directly dependent on the votes of the lower
classes. Equally interesting are the educational provisions resulting from
the new constitution. Education has become a key marker of middleclassness.
Laws related to the new constitution requires the government
to put in place universal free education through the twelfth grade. This,
reformers apparently believe, will enable the masses to understand the
workings of democracy. Even more striking, however, is the provision
regarding qualifications for election. In order to run for the House or
vSenate, candidates must have a university degree. This will, in theory,
prevent the election of MPs and senators without the proper education
and middle-class values. It will ensure that no peasant or worker representative
can be elected, not even with a vocational education. So middle-class
reformers have further reduced the ability of the lower classes
to participate in the political system.
If the Thai class structure can be discovered in the expressways, so
too can many of the problems of the democracy the middle class is
trying to reform. For those living under the expressways, democracy
delivers little. Perhaps a few baht at election time, if they are registered
to vote. Even when the poor participate democratically, as with Bankhrua,
they can be easily ignored, Bankhrua succeeded in establishing a new
democratic precedent in Thailand by forcing public hearings on the
expressway ramp. They presented their arguments before a committee
of neutral experts, and the state did the same. They convinced those
experts that they were right, that the expressway ramp was not economically
viable, and would be highly destructive to their community.
It would, however, benefit the wealthy owners of the shopping centres
that have sprung up at its planned terminus. And although the experts
from the public hearings believed that the expressway ramp might actually
increase traffic problems, the middle class, frustrated by traffic jams,

332 James Ockey
has come to see the building of more roads as always in their interest. So
the new democratic structure initiated by a poor community, the public
hearing, was ignored, and the results were dismissed. The public hearing
has been revived in the new constitution, but has thus far been ineffective.
Although the alternative set of less elitist middle-class attitudes was
pushed to the margins following the 1976 coup, and by the success of
the transition to "democracy" in the 1980s, it has by no means disappeared.
Bankhrua residents have received some assistance in their struggles
from academics and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Some
continue to encourage the participation of the poor in politics. Nor
should we ignore the generalized and genuine sympathy for the "plight
of the poor". However, with the mainstream middle class employing
democracy as a crucial marker for distinguishing themselves from the
poor, expanding participation to the lower classes is an uphill battle.
In the 1970s, Guillermo O'DonneLI (1979) argued that the Latin
American democracies were destroyed when the lower classes became
too demanding, and politicians competed to meet those demands. Demands
for redistribution led to hyper-inflation and economic chaos,
and the military, with the support of the middle class, stepped in to
restore order. The situation in Thailand seems to suggest the exact opposite.
The lower classes have been marginalized from the political process.
This has been done through attitudes — through turning democracy
into an elitist middle-class ideology — and also very concretely: the
needs of the lower classes are ignored outside of election time. The poor
have reacted by seeking direct compensation for their support in elections.
The result has been a subversion of the rules of democracy as
defined by the middle class. By turning democracy into an elite political
practice and ideology, by insisting that the masses cannot understand it,
and by the failure to formulate and support policies that will benefit the
lower classes and win their support, the politicians in particular and
the middle class in general have ensured that the most corrupt politicians
can take advantage of the system. This has been to the detriment
of the middle class, as well as the poor, as the widening gap in distribution
of income demonstrates. Now as Thailand faces an economic and
financial crisis in the late 1990s, the middle class find themselves in a

13: Representations of the middle class, the poor and democracy in Thailand 333
vulnerable position. Unfortunately, they "persist in the delusion that
there are certain things the servant classes simply don't have the brains
to do" (Somtow 1995, p. 151), and in the process they blind themselves
to the need for social reform as a part of the conditions of good govern-
ance and economic recovery. If the middle class truly wants democracy,
the lower classes must be not only allowed, but encouraged to partici-
pate, and politicians must be willing to work for them; is that not, after
all, what democracy is all about?
NOTES
These particular thoughts came about when I was asked to write two different papers
concurrently, one on the middle class and one on the poor (see Ockey 1999 and 1997).
Eventually I came to realize that they are in fact the same topic. I would like to thank
Naimah Talib for organizing the seminar where these ideas were originally presented,
Wang Gungwu for his insightful comments, Yao Souchou for encouraging me to write
up the seminar notes, and Gary Ockey for his comments on an earlier draft.
1. This book was also serialized in the Bangkok Post, and thus widely available in
Thailand to those who read English. Somtow's fictional work is set in 1963 in
Bangkok, and, with regard to household appliances, this idea now seems ludicrous
co middle-class readers. Their maids use those same appliances regularly nowadays,
2. Statistics on the number of automobiles comes from Thailand in Figures (Bang-
kok: Tera International, 1990) and Thailand Statistical Yearbook (Samut sathiti rai
pi khongprathet Thai) (Bangkok: National Statistical Office, annual). Other statis-
tics in this and che following paragraph come from Pocket Thailand in Figures (Bang-
kok: Alpha Research, 1994 and 1996).
3. One noteworthy exception was Nitthi (1993).
4. Of che thirty-eight dead where information is available, only one was a business
person, one a government employee, one a teacher, and one an engineer. At least
twenty belonged to lower classes, and ten more were students. (The other four
were vendors.) Even more celling, of che thirty-four where information is available,
not one had graduated from a university. Of the 176 injured where information is
available, only twenty-three clearly belong to che middle or upper classes, though
some of the others may, by some definitions, belong to a lower middle class. See
100 loan wirachon praehathipatai [100 days of che heroes of democracy] (1992),
pp. 3-5, 8,
5. Two simple answers can be quickly eliminated. One reason co emphasize che par-
ticipation of che middle class was tactical. It was believed che military would be less
likely to fire on middle-class demonstrators. Yet this does not explain why the

334 James Ockey
participation of the lower classes was ignored after che crisis. The other simple
answer is that since the middle class constructed the representations, they naturally
did it in a self-serving manner. But then why not depict the middle class as the
leaders and the poor as followers? Why go to the extreme of erasing the role of the
poor entirely?
6. Figures on slum communities were provided by the National Housing Authority,
December 1996. These are preliminary figures.
7. See the Bangkok Press, both English and Thai languages, 19-22 April 1994. The
most blatant criticism of the community is in Naeona, 21 April 1994, p. 3. The
most favourable coverage is in Phujatkan, a business daily popular with the middle
class, which reported that its middle-class constituency blamed Bankhrua for traffic
problems and wanted the ramp built. See below.
8. As Phujatkan, 22 April 1994, p. 13 put it in a favourable article, "An important
weak point is the news the ETA reveals to the people. It <strong>claims</strong> that the people of
Bankhrua are the reason the stage two expressway has not been completed, which
makes it impossible co solve the traffic problem. ... Most of the city's middle class
tend to think only of personal problems that directly affect them, that is the traffic
problem."
9. Some residents believe he assisted behind the scenes. If so, his efforts brought no
concrete results.
10. The widening gap between Bangkok and the country as a whole is even more stark.
The average income in Bangkok in 1975/76 was 1.95 times che national average,
rising to 2.23 times the national average in 1980/81 and 2.54 times the national
average by 1985/86. See Darunee and Pandey (1996, p. 101, table 4). The 1998
provisional figures on the National Economic and Social Development Board
website (www.nesdb.go.th) indicate the ratio had risen to above 3:1.
11. This brief biography of the former prime minister' early life is taken from Bangkok
Post, 30 March 1990, p. 5; Matuphum, 5 July 1988, pp. 6-17; Krungthep thumkit
sutsapda, 6 July 1991, p. 9; and Anan (1988, pp. 52-53). See also Sathit (1996,
chap. 3).
12. On the former deputy prime minister, see Plai-oh (1987, pp. 53-54, 80, 86, 148);
Bangkok Post, 3 June 1991, p. 32; Khao phiset, 3 May 1989, p. 12; Ukrist (1998);
and Sarakun (1993).
13. In 1995 and in late 1997. There may be other factors at work, and I do not mean
to accuse either of corruption. This example is meant to be illustrative rather than
definitive. The differences in the lifestyles and the way the two are represented in
the media could not be more stark. The emphasis on education is particularly
noteworthy and will be discussed further below.
14. This phrase more fully captures the sense of distrust than "the people", "the poor",
or even "the lower classes", and I use ic to indicate that sense of distrust.

13: Representations of the middle class, the poor, and democracy in Thailand 335
15. First by Anderson (1977) but this has since become the most common interpretation
of the uprising.
16. The best analysis of the politics of the new constitution is McCargo (1998, especially
pp. 17-21).
17. In the 2001 elections, the fledgeling Thai Rak Thai party developed clear policies
targeted at the lower classes and won 248 out of 500 seats, easily the highest total
and highest percentage in the post-1973 era.

336 James Ockey

13: Representations of the middle class, the poor, and democracy in Thailand 337
Ukrist Pathmanand. "The Thaksin Shinawatra Group: A .Study of the Relationship
between Money and Politics in Thailand". Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies
13 (1998): 60-81.
Newspapers and News Weeklies
Asiaweek
Bangkok Post
Khao phiset
Matichon
Matuphum
Sayamrat sapda wichan

Index

340 Index

Index
341

342 Index