“No race holds the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of strength / and there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory,” wrote the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire in Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, first published in 1939 and later translated from the French by Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James.

Many writers have quoted these lines from Césaire, but more striking is the fact that 16 years later, such a rendezvous did occur. In 1955, 29 countries from Africa and Asia met in Bandung, Indonesia, for the historic Asian-African Conference—a diplomatic summit of the emerging postcolonial world. The sense of common purpose and solidarity at the meeting, which became known as the “Bandung Spirit,” served as a unifying myth of decolonization. For decades, Bandung epitomized a political, cultural, and historic front against the past legacies, present dangers, and future threats of imperialism in Asia and Africa. Though real-world conflicts would erode this spirit over time, Bandung and its ethos of self-determination persisted as a global symbol and attitude in the popular imagination.

Co-sponsored by Indonesia, India, Burma (present-day Myanmar), Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), and Pakistan, the 29 invited diplomatic delegations met from April 18 to 24 to address the pressing issues facing their continents during the early Cold War period. A number of well-known leaders attended, including Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Zhou Enlai of China, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and Sukarno of host country Indonesia. The remaining delegations represented countries from Japan and Jordan to Egypt and Ethiopia, as well as Sudan and the Gold Coast (Ghana), which would soon be independent in 1956 and 1957, respectively.

As a consequence of this wide range of geographic representation, the Bandung meeting initiated a new period of postcolonial diplomacy and Third World internationalism, which comprised an alternative “third way” beyond the U.S.-led capitalist democracies of the First World and the Soviet-led communist states of the Second World. Refusing the pressures and demands of this new great power rivalry, Asian and African countries sought to define their own destinies after global decolonization.

The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference, published in 1956 by the African American novelist Richard Wright, remains the most influential account of the meeting, capturing the details of the event as well as its historic importance. The diplomatic summit struck Wright with a sense of astonishment from the moment he learned it would take place, revealing his underlying Western-centric worldview as well as his desire to connect with the wider world experiencing decolonization. Wright had already visited a part of this world as depicted in his preceding book on the British Gold Coast, entitled Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954). His trip to Bandung subsequently expanded his sense of decolonization and its global meanings.

The Color Curtain still retains a certain interpretive power today due to Wright’s prominence as a Black intellectual and how the conference’s themes touched upon deeper issues that Wright had grappled with for decades, including the roles of race and racial identity in the modern world, the function of class politics, and, not least, the possibilities of freedom at individual, community, and global levels. The moment of global self-determination at Bandung intersected with Wright’s own long-standing attempts at individual self-determination.

As the title of Wright’s book underscored, the group of emergent nation-states assembled at Bandung ultimately highlighted a “Color Curtain” in world affairs. Wright’s phrasing echoed both the better-known Iron Curtain, which separated Western liberal democracies from the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and a famous remark by W. E. B. Du Bois. In 1903’s The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois declared, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” Wright’s account therefore situated the Bandung Conference against a dominant U.S. foreign policy framework, which retained certain imperial-like qualities, as well as within a genealogy of Black American thought.

Yet the importance of Bandung was not, of course, limited to an American worldview. Sukarno’s opening address captured the moment of opportunity, both diplomatic and symbolic, for postcolonial Asia and Africa, in which he asked:

What can we do? We can do much! We can inject the voice of reason into world affairs. We can mobilise all the spiritual, all the moral, all the political strength of Asia and Africa on the side of peace. Yes, we! We, the peoples of Asia and Africa, 1,400,000,000 strong, far more than half the human population of the world, we can mobilise what I have called the Moral Violence of Nations in favour of peace.

“The Moral Violence of Nations” implied an ethical, rather than military, approach to achieving world peace. This vivid phrase set the tone for how Asian and African countries could participate in the evolving global order: as a force for solidarity and intercontinental accord, rather than conflict. Sukarno’s words consequently presaged what became the Bandung Spirit—a feeling of global political possibility when Asian and African countries collected their interests together.

Yet the Bandung Conference remained a one-time event, despite an attempt to hold a “Second Bandung” outside of Algiers in 1965. By then, the energies of decolonization had begun to dissipate in different ways. Antagonisms between Bandung attendees, such as India and China, eventually rendered moribund the potential of future diplomatic collaborations along the same lines as those in 1955. Still, the symbolism of the Asian-African Conference continued to inform intercontinental solidarity and anticolonial internationalism until the end of the Cold War. The conjoining of political stance and geographic space through the idea of Afro-Asianism generated new geopolitical alignments and aspirational projects, including the 1961 founding of the Non-Aligned Movement, a new grouping of developing nations, which Nehru largely spearheaded against China’s competitive influence. The impact of Bandung was also on display at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba, which inaugurated Latin America’s commitment to Third Worldism under the leadership of Fidel Castro.

Bandung as a unifying myth of decolonization offered a tantalizing vision of transnational solidarities that could sidestep preexisting cultural differences and political conflicts. It attempted a remaking of the world on terms favorable to those who had been colonized for centuries across the Global South. Yet, like most political myths, there were real-world limits that compromised its idealism. Césaire’s imagined rendezvous was both attained and incompletely realized. The work of economic, cultural, and political decolonization remains. The Bandung Conference today conjures these ghosts of unfulfilled futures, serving as a reminder of the lost political prospects and forgotten historical itineraries of the past that continue to haunt our present dreams of decolonization—and our realities.

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The particular lab McDougal was visiting focused on a promising meat alternative—tofu—and was overseen by a scientist named Dr. Yamei Kin, dressed that day in a blue kimono and white apron. “I have never seen a quieter, quicker or daintier person in a kitchen,” McDougal reported to her readers.

Kin was something of a celebrity. A year earlier, with much fanfare in the press, she had embarked on a tour of China to investigate the culinary uses of tofu, with a headline in the June 10, 1917 edition of The Sunday New York Times Magazine proclaiming, “Woman Off to China as Government Agent to Study Soy Bean: Dr. Kin Will Make Report for United States on the Most Useful Food of Her Native Land.” Now she was back to share her findings.

“Everybody in the place was ready to root for soy beans,” McDougal observed. Chemists from other labs dropped by to testify that, having taken Kin’s tofu home for their dinners, they could not tell it apart from the fish or pork chops it was prepared with. McDougal was particularly impressed by an array of soybean products displayed in a row of glass jars on a long table: a white cheese, a brownish paste, a brown sauce. “Talk about dual personalities!” she wrote. “The soy bean has so many aliases that if you shouldn’t like it in one form you would be pretty sure to like it in another.”

McDougal might just as well have been talking about Kin herself, a Chinese national sent as an agent of the U.S. government to China. This was, in fact, typical for Kin, who had shuttled between Asia and America her entire life, gaining in the process the mastery of two identities that she was able to switch between—or blend together—as circumstances demanded. From available sources, mostly news accounts such as McDougal’s, but also a growing number of archival sources unearthed on both sides of the Pacific, Kin’s motives remain somewhat obscure. At times, she was a voice insisting on the value and dignity of Asian lives, who in a small way helped counter the deep prejudice that prompted the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. At other times, she appears to have been a woman of great personal ambition who reinvented herself in the service of her own success—perhaps paradoxically the most purely American thing about her.

Kin was born in 1864 in the Chinese port city of Ningbo. Her parents, converts to Christianity, died in a cholera epidemic when she was two. She was taken into the family of D.B. McCartee, a white American medical missionary from Philadelphia. McCartee taught at the nascent University of Tokyo as a professor of natural science for a time, and Kin spent as much of her childhood in Japan as in China (as well as in the United States when the McCartees were on furlough). She dressed in embroidered breeches and wore her hair in braids, Chinese-style. She learned the Chinese classics. She also showed an aptitude for science, and McCartee prepared her to follow in his footsteps.

At age 16, after some preparatory courses, she enrolled as Y. May King in the Women’s Medical College in New York, founded by pioneering physician Elizabeth Blackwell. May King wore high-collared Victorian dresses, spoke five languages, and in 1885 graduated at the top of her class, becoming the first Chinese woman to earn a U.S. medical degree. A scientific prodigy, she mastered the microscopic photography of human tissue, publishing a well-received report on the subject in The New York Medical Journal.

She traveled to Amoy (now known as Xiamen), China in 1887 as a missionary for the Reformed Church of America, but only lasted a year in the field. It appears that she suffered a serious illness, or perhaps her ambition to duplicate Blackwell’s achievement by establishing a special hospital for women and children in China did not garner enough financial support from churchgoers. She joined her foster parents in Kobe, where she operated a clinic for five years.

In 1894, May King gave way to Yamei Kin Eça Da Silva when she married Hipolite Eça Da Silva, a Macao-born Portuguese musician—and, it seems, something of a cad. The couple moved to Hawaiʻi in 1896, where she gave birth to her son Alexander on what would soon be American soil. Motherhood notwithstanding, she applied for a medical license, submitting a letter from a Reverend F.W. Damon, who rejoiced that a “Chinese lady has proved that she is able so thoroughly to acquire the training of our Anglo-Saxon civilization.”

Mrs. Eça Da Silva traveled to California in 1897 to win support from congregations for missionary work to the women of China, whom she characterized—if news reports are to be trusted—as “sunk in stolidity and sensuality, the abject slaves of their lords and masters,” surrounded by “dense clouds of superstition and ignorance.” This seems to have represented the peak of her identity as a Christian missionary, perhaps shaken by the death of her adoptive father in 1900, simmering discontent with her marriage, and a turn toward Confucianism.

In 1902, having moved permanently to San Francisco with her family, she published a short story in the Overland Monthly as Dr. Yamei Kin, full stop. “The Pride of His House: A Story of Honolulu’s Chinatown” was a sympathetic portrayal of Ah Sing, a prosperous merchant and Confucian gentleman who gently and reluctantly proposed to his barren wife that they bring a handmaiden into their household to bear him an heir. Despite the wife’s eventual acquiescence, she is nowhere portrayed simply as an abject slave to her lord and master. The story’s publication was Kin’s first foray in a new role, as an emissary from the East explaining Asian culture to American audiences.

Among other possible motivations for this new persona was Kin’s entrée into high society. She chaperoned three young San Francisco ladies on a six-month tour of Japan. In 1903, a women’s club in Los Angeles announced “a series of FOUR LECTURES OF THINGS ORIENTAL by the Noted Chinese Woman DR. YAMEI KIN.” Over the following two years—as she traveled to Chicago, Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C.—she became a sought-after speaker. In Washington, the Post reported, she “delivered a lecture at the residence of Senator Kean before an audience representative of all that is best in Washington society.”

During her travels, Kin told people she was a widow. Her husband was very much alive, however, and had sued her for divorce, charging her with desertion. According to the San Francisco Call, he claimed that she had told him he was not “up to date” and that she was a “new woman.” A judge granted him the divorce in Kin’s absence, who “when last heard of [was] in Boston.”

If she was a modern American woman in private, on stage she appeared in elaborate Chinese costume, with tastefully coordinated flowers in her hair. She spoke in a flawless English that delighted the press as marvelously incongruous. She reassured audiences that China was receptive to Western science and technology—and even to some social and political innovations—but insisted as well that Chinese culture, having mastered the art of gracious living, in turn offered a model to younger nations.

To clubwomen, she urged that the clothes of Asia were not simply more beautiful than American clothes, but also comfortable, loose, and simple—the ideal reform dress. To a Peace Congress in Boston and a pacifist audience in New York, she pointed to China as the only nation in the world to “live up to your doctrine.” (During the same trip, she had enrolled Alexander in a military boarding school.) To the Ethical Culture Society, she pointed out that, “all China is one vast ethical culture society.” And at a talk to socialists at the Cooper Union, she responded to the query, “Have you any Social Democratic party?” with, “No, we tried that in 200 B.C. It proved a failure and we adopted Confucianism.”

Kin eventually returned to China, where in 1907 she succeeded in emulating Elizabeth Blackwell by directing the Imperial Peiyang Women’s Medical School and Hospital in Tianjin. She held on to the position when the Manchu Dynasty was replaced by the Chinese Republic in 1910. Beginning in 1911, she began traveling regularly to the United States to escort Chinese nursing students for American training. She once again hit the lecture circuit to extol Chinese traditions and advocate for a China-friendly foreign policy. Meanwhile, her American son Alexander graduated college, worked in finance in New York City, and joined the army to fight in the war, only to be killed in battle six weeks before the Armistice.

On top of this loss, the terms of the peace gravely disappointed Kin, who feared the militarism of an emboldened Japan. The 1920 U.S. Census lists Kin as living on 11th Street with her foster mother, Joanna McCartee, who would die at the end of that year. With this bond to America severed, she would make her final return to China, living there until her own death in 1934 on a farm near Beijing.

To Kin, tofu was but one example of the Chinese art of living well on less, a gracious way to obtain meat directly from a plant. But while colorful enough to draw reporters like McDougal to her lab, her efforts proved a case of too little, too soon. Soybeans were not yet the widespread American crop they would one day become, and wartime scarcities soon ended. In addition, Kin herself described tofu as substituting best for chicken, fish, and organ meats, none of which were rationed during the war. While soy foods would briefly gain renewed attention during World War II, it would not be until a surging counterculture embraced tofu in the ‘60s and ‘70s that it would gain longstanding popularity in America.

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That was the message from panelists at a Zòcalo/UCLA Anderson School of Management event, “Is China Prepared to Lead the Global Economy?” at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown Los Angeles.

China is seeking global economic leadership, panelists said, as Chinese President Xi Jinping made clear at the recently concluded 19th National Congress of the Chinese Community Party. “They want to make China great again,” quipped panelist Jerry Nickelsburg, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast.

And, 40 years after the opening up of China under Deng Xiaoping, China has achieved global leadership in several areas, including mobile platforms and mobile finance. The event moderator, former Los Angeles Times Beijing bureau chief Julie Makinen, lamented that when she returned to the United States, she lost the ability to pay easily for items—even flowers from a street vendor—with WeChat, which is ubiquitous in China.

But the panelists, in a variety of ways, suggested another Chinese motive for pursuing global economic leadership: It has to—if it’s going to deal with its own internal challenges.

Ruixue Jia, a political economist at UC San Diego, said that the Chinese push to dominate global trade and infrastructure reflects the reality of the country’s high savings rate. Since Chinese growth is slowing, “the investment opportunities within China are likely to be reduced,” she said. So it makes sense, Jia said, that China is pursuing initiatives such as One Belt and One Road, a plan to recreate the old Silk Road, via rail and maritime links, all the way to Africa. And “many of these countries” along the One Belt and One Road routes “do need a lot of this infrastructure.”

Christopher S. Tang, the Edward W. Carter Chair in Business Administration at UCLA Anderson, said China was following the path of previous empires, including the British, that conquered the world by global trade. It’s also seizing an opening left by the United States, which pulled out of the Paris climate accords, to seize environmental leadership. But China also needs to make big environmental strides to address its own problems with water and air pollution.

“Now China is thinking maybe they can take the lead. Why not turn it around and be a leader?” Tang said. He noted the country’s pioneering efforts in solar panels and its aggressive development of electric cars.

China is also seeking to lead in innovation—not only as a way of earning global respect, but because of its own economic challenges. “The hidden message” of government calls for more entrepreneurship and innovation, Tang said, “is the economy is slowing down. There are not that many jobs. Labor costs are growing rapidly.” So entrepreneurs are needed to produce new jobs.

Nickelsburg, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, said that China, although it now rivals the United States in the size of its overall economy and in trade, remains a poor country that is not blessed in natural resources or farmland. So it needs to trade and build infrastructure links in other countries in order to procure an adequate food supply—which, in turn, is essential if the communist regime wants to keep control over the country’s massive population. “They need to trade, because having hungry citizens is not really a recipe for staying in power,” Nickelsburg said.

Yiwen Li, a young biotech executive who works for U.S. companies that expand globally, marveled at the changes in her native city of Wuhan, where her family lives, that have resulted from China’s growing links to the world. More progress—and more global leadership—is essential internally, she argued, in part because of changes in demography.

She pointed in particular to the need for China to become a leader in health care, because its longtime one-child policy and other demographic factors are causing the country to age rapidly. China also is home to the world’s largest number of people with cancer and other diseases requiring lengthy and expensive treatment. “China is going to be the oldest country in the world,” she said. “China has to innovate.” To illustrate the scale of the challenge, she noted that when the Obama administration invested $250 million in personalized medicine at one point, China countered with a $9 billion investment.

The harder question, panelists suggested, is whether China can achieve leadership. Xia, the UCSD political economist, said that Chinese manufacturers are struggling, and that its economy’s heavy competition and the lack of intellectual and other property rights discourage innovation.

Tang, of UCLA Anderson, said that China has huge strengths that put it in a strong position—he called them the four C’s, for Culture (of trade and entrepreneurialism among its people), Customers (given China’s massive and growing middle class), Capabilities (it’s producing 500,000 graduates in STEM fields annually), and Cash (given the high savings rate).

But in order to lead globally, China needs to make the difficult shift to a service economy, and become better at building global brands and developing leadership of major companies that allows for succession between generations. “Take Alibaba—what happens after Jack Ma? No one knows,” Tang said.

During the question-and-answer session with the audience, panelists were pressed on whether China could ever really lead without becoming an open society, or without becoming more of a market economy and less of a planned one.

In response, Nickelsburg noted that China has made tremendous advances as a planned economy, and should continue to make progress on its current path, given its political leadership, for the foreseeable future, even without market changes. “Don’t mistake Xi Jinping for Adam Smith,” he cautioned.

Nickelsburg said that China wouldn’t set the rules of the global economy in the United States or the European Union. But, he added, “in the part of the world where they are most interested—which is Asia and Africa—they really do have the possibility of doing it.”

The post China Soon Could Dominate the Global Economy—but Leading It Will Be Tougher appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My favorite map looks different. It puts China, not the Atlantic, at the center of the world.

That reflects reality. In 2014, China became the largest economy on the planet, if you calculate Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in purchasing-power parities: in other words, by measuring the production of final goods and services with a common system of international prices. China’s new role as global superpower was celebrated with little fanfare. But in my opinion it’s the source of many of the global economy’s recent shifts and shocks. My favorite way to explain the current situation is that we’re witnessing a collective silent scream on behalf of the West in response to the loss of its worldwide dominion.

If you want to understand why, just look at my map. With China in the center, Europe is moved to the periphery. The relevant oceans become the Pacific and the Indian, from which China’s growth radiates out. China’s contribution to world growth increased from 3 percent in 1970 to 31 percent in 2015. That growth is rolling across South Asia and East Africa. It’s also noteworthy that the Pacific countries in Latin America are doing better than the Atlantic countries there.

The transition may feel especially jarring because, since World War II, we have been living through a period in human history that is extraordinary in its absence of violent global conflict. That relative peace has allowed much of the world to concentrate on growth, technology, innovation, prosperity, and energy.

This period has also given space for economies around the world, and especially those in Asia, to catch up with Western countries. Just look at how Korea, Singapore, Japan, and other Asian nations have achieved a rapid, unprecedented catch-up with the United States in terms of GDP per capita.

China illustrates the extraordinary scale of the catch-up, as well as how much progress there has been. Back in the 1950s, China had less than 5 percent of the per capita income of the United States. Today that number has increased to 25 percent. That lags well behind Korea and Japan, which are both at 80 percent, but the scale and speed of China’s ascent is big enough to make us rethink the geography of the world. As China leverages its size going forward, it will become more and more a source of global growth.

Visitors walk past a mannequin set up to show how individuals attempt to get past customs, smuggling counterfeit products in violation of intellectual property rights law during an exhibition in Beijing, April 17, 2006. Photo by Ng Han Guan/Associated Press.

So much change, of course, is unsettling. And when things are unsettled, international trade often gets jostled, because trade is such a delicate thing. Trade requires both a complicated mix of public sector and private sector activities. And trade is politically perilous because trade comes with unavoidable imbalances; it leaves the whole richer off, but there are winners and losers, and it doesn’t lift all boats at the same time. Some of the biggest, most obvious losers are manufacturing workers who are undercut by lower-wage competitors. And if you are working in heavy manufacturing and you’re not computer literate, you may be unemployable until you die. And if you’re such a person and you live in a country without a strong safety net, you may have little to protect you.

The Great Recession, and the anti-trade backlash that has followed, are a painful reminder of trade’s fragility. And of this hard fact: While we have global trade, we don’t really have global governance. That means governments can’t easily respond to this anti-trade, protectionist wave, at least quickly.

The lack of political response to unsettling change conspires to make groups of people become desperate or hopeless, to lose faith, and to lash out. It’s very easy for smart, populist politicians to pick up on this, and gain votes and power by blaming trade or immigration, or by appealing to that ultimate trump card, national security.

The response we are seeing in many places is the re-institution of controls on trade and global exchange, despite the costs. Such controls aren’t new. The biggest came after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, with tight new screening measures in airports, and the time and money that this wastes.

What is the best response to this backlash and these controls? For me, that question reminds me of a saying we have in Spanish (I’m originally from Madrid) that translates as: “You kill the dog, no more rabies.” You want to find ways to get rid of the rabies—or, to unpack the metaphor, the disease of unsettling change under globalization—without killing the dog. One approach is to defend free trade directly, since we economists understand that trade is not a zero-sum game; rather, it’s a positive game, with winners who could compensate the losers.

Still, as an economist trained in free trade and the research on it, I’ve begun to rethink whether we need a more robust response that would mean profound changes for Americans.

For one thing, we might have to become much more serious about providing a social safety net. Being from Europe, I’m struck by how many of my American students at UCLA have this instinctive aversion to anything that comes from the state, even badly needed safety-net programs. It seems to me there’s an imbalance in this country—so much private wealth, and not enough safety net. (I see a similar imbalance in L.A. traffic: You have all these private cars, especially fancy cars, but not enough public roads, so no one can go fast enough to get the full benefit of their great cars.)

This moment requires some hard questions and rethinking. How well does free trade really fit with the other things we want in modern societies? I was just re-reading work on globalization from an economist colleague, Dani Rodrik, at Harvard. And he says you cannot have all three of the following things simultaneously: democracy, national sovereignty, and free trade. For example, you cannot have international trade without some international rules, and those rules have to be enforced by somebody with international power. So if you want a globally integrated world, you have to give up some sovereignty.

Or you have to go the Chinese way and forget about democracy. You have trade and national sovereignty, but capital controls and top-down management. The theory here, extended to Western liberal democracies, is that you don’t give the electorate a say in economic policy because they’ll support Le Pen or Brexit or Trump.

I’m also not sure I’ve fully taken into account the risks of globalization and trade. Look at the recession of 2008; the risks are pretty high that something like this will happen again. A more economically integrated world would transmit any shocks that happen anywhere on the planet, and that could produce havoc.

It’s clear that putting up walls, trade barriers, and restrictions will not solve a more fundamental problem here in the United States: that the country has too little savings relative to investment, and that this gap needs to be financed from abroad, and this requires a current account deficit. Perhaps this idea is not easy to understand, but it is an accounting and an economic truth.

I also find myself thinking of the Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson, and the famous challenge he was issued by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam to “name me one proposition in all of the social sciences which is both true and non-trivial.” Samuelson eventually answered by citing the concept of comparative advantage, the idea that gains from trade follow from allowing economies to specialize. If one country’s economy is better at making computers than coffee, it makes sense for it to invest more in computers and export them, to be able to afford to purchase coffee from some other country.

Samuelson was right, but the problem is that too many people, including many in power, don’t understand the concept. And they don’t understand that even if the United States tried to fix its trade imbalance with China, there would be a backlash, retaliation, and the demise of thousands of companies and jobs.

What we need is to adjust to the world as it is, not to the old maps on the wall, with the Atlantic Ocean at the center. We must recognize the value of trade, and do more for the losers. And we must reckon with the reality of China’s ascendancy and the increasing role that machines will play in our lives.

The post In the New Global Trade Map, China Commands the Center appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I am here in Myanmar teaching an international business class. After the gloom and doom of the rancorous U.S. election, spending winter break in a beautiful place where everyone is looking towards a brighter future is refreshing. At UCLA Anderson, we offer these classes to our MBA students as a way of showing them contrasts to the U.S. business climate.

And what a contrast Myanmar is.

The distance between the two largest cities in Myanmar, Yangon and Mandalay, is about the same as that between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The road to Mandalay is relatively good. But Yangon, the major port for the country, is another story.

Singapore’s Straits Times accurately observes that Myanmar’s “main port has changed little since the end of British colonial rule nearly 70 years ago—emblematic of ramshackle infrastructure.” The key here is not that Yangon’s port facility uses old technology; it does, but the port operators are changing that rapidly. The operative word is “ramshackle.” The port does not function because the natural degradation of equipment and structures from usage over time has not been countered with maintenance and repair. That’s because repair costs money and government funds were directed to immediate rather than future needs.

And the Yangon port is more the rule than the exception. Aside from the aforementioned road to Mandalay, surface transport is quite poor. A drive from Yangon to Thilawa, site of the new deep water port under construction, reveals roads far worse than pothole-marked Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. By rail, it takes three days at best to deliver goods from Yangon to Myitkynia, the capital of the 1.7 million-population Kachin State in the north. That adds up to about 300 miles a day. By contrast, shipping by rail from the Port of Long Beach to Chicago, more than twice the distance, takes not much longer and is more reliable.

In addition to the problem with transportation, power generation is another challenge. Everywhere in Yangon are small generators used to back up an unreliable electrical system. As one investor I spoke with put it, “even a low-tech textile factory needs power.” While that seems like a truism, it’s also a reminder that expectations of growth must confront physical limitations that might take a long time to ease.

This is a country that has now awakened from a 50-year economic slumber. Myanmar’s economy was asleep on purpose. Back in 1962, after a turbulent 14 years of independence, the military stepped in. The dominant ethos under General Ne Win was isolation. He and his generals wanted to avoid Western “exploitation” and to create economic development through centralized direction and protectionism.

But, in 2011, the military voluntarily turned the government over to an elected civilian government. The election was controversial as the military-friendly USDP won, but it was a step forward. The giant step came in 2015 with the opposition NLD party led by Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi prevailing in elections. The peaceful transition to an opposition government is, of course, a key element of a true democracy and it has arrived in Myanmar.

The optimism in this country is palpable. The re-pats—Burmese who fled the country for Singapore, Thailand, the U.K., and the U.S. but have recently moved back home—say things like: “I never expected to return to my home country, but there are so many opportunities to build something good and to prosper while doing it.”

And for the world, this resource rich country is now arguably the best new thing since China opened up in the mid-90s. Myanmar is blessed with natural resources, fertile land, and a central location between the fast-growing economies of India and China. Everything seems possible here—but with a caveat you often hear: “possible is only for those who are patient.” This advice is understandable: Corruption and bureaucracy, hallmarks of the previous regime, fade slowly. But, that is not the only reason why patience is counseled in Myanmar.

The real issue in Myanmar is infrastructure. Understanding that issue here offers a strong lesson—and warning even—for the U.S.

Why does Myanmar matter to our country and its relatively good roads, air and seaports, and railways?

It matters because usage means depreciation, in the U.S. as in Myanmar. If fiscal austerity puts repair, maintenance, and upgrades on the back burner, the ability of infrastructure to support economic growth diminishes. And the U.S. has failed to keep up with repairs, maintenance and upgrades to its infrastructure.

For example, a city street has about a 30-year life before it needs to be replaced. If it is periodically capped with asphalt slurry, that life can be extended. But if it deteriorates beyond a certain point, capping it is no longer possible. About one-third of the city roads in Los Angeles are in this condition right now. It is still possible to navigate these roads without too much disruption, but for how long?

The bottom line is that, if it is difficult to get goods and services to market and people to jobs, rapid growth doesn’t occur. So the notion of sustained 3 percent growth—much less the 4 to 5 percent growth promised in the U.S. Presidential election—looks more challenging when you consider our infrastructure constraints.

President-elect Trump has promised a $1 trillion infrastructure plan, but it is in trouble even before Inauguration Day. The public-private partnership that was supposed to fund a significant portion of the plan is fatally flawed. Even with big tax breaks, the private sector won’t be interested in building infrastructure that doesn’t produce sufficient revenue streams. And the types of infrastructure we most need do not generate such streams. Bridges in Missouri, potholes in San Francisco and levees in Louisiana generate economic growth but not direct revenue for the developer.

Thus the Federal Government would have to fund the bulk of the $1 trillion spending. The appointment of a fiscal hawk, the South Carolina Congressman Mike Mulvaney, as Director of Management and Budget, coupled with Mr. Trump’s promise to end deficits, might be the final nail in the massive-infrastructure-plan coffin.

This brings me back to the road to Mandalay. The U.S. has been letting its infrastructure depreciate for some time. The less we do now, the more likely we’ll learn once again the lessons of Myanmar: that everything is possible, but a lot of patience and optimism are needed for the infrastructure to catch up to the possible.

The post A Warning From the Bumpy Road to Mandalay appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

During these days of transition speculation, there is plenty of talk about what president-elect Donald Trump’s victory means for health care, for immigrants, for the economy, for minorities, for NATO, and so on. In terms of long-term national interests, it’s important to add the endangered concept of a U.S.-centric Pacific Rim to this list. This is because the Trump victory may well spell the end of America’s previous Pacific aspirations.

We will quite possibly see a significant shift of innovation and entrepreneurship westward in the Pacific Rim—indeed, so far West that the center of economic gravity ends up firmly in the Far East.

There are two big reasons for these shifts. First, changes in immigration policy under a new administration will make the U.S. less friendly to talented foreigners seeking to work here. Second, new trade policy is likely to diminish the competitive environment for domestic manufacturers.

The new administration’s anticipated changes to immigration and trade policy are, whatever you think of them and their potential impact on the U.S. economy, a response to real issues. For one thing, globalization has depressed incomes of the middle class—average wages for production and non-supervisory workers is about the same after inflation as in 1974, at $20.67 per hour, according to the Pew Research Center. For another, immigration exacerbated competition for an ever-shrinking pool of low-skilled jobs. Economists have documented, for example, a 6 percent decline in employment and a 2.5 percent decline in wages for low-skilled African-American men attributable to this increased competition.

On top of that, manufacturing employment has been steadily declining for decades and is now at one-third the number of jobs in 1970.

Hillary Clinton promised a continuation of current policy (i.e. these trends) and Donald Trump promised less of them. The voters have now asked for a different engagement with the world that will seek to blunt these three trends.

Immigration policy, in particular, may shift the geography. During the campaign, Trump, with talk of walls and border security, was all over the place. His policy position on H1B work visas and J1 work and study visas has been unclear, through the views of his confidant and nominee for attorney general clearly lean toward more restrictive visa policy.

Overseas news media and businesses—according to reports in the India Express, The Jakarta Post and elsewhere in the Pacific Region—see current visa programs as being in jeopardy. Suffice it to say that whatever new immigration policy emerges will be less inviting to foreigners.

In particular, innovators and tech entrepreneurs from China (vilified in the campaign), Indonesia (the world’s largest Islamic country), Malaysia (another Islamic country), and India (with a Muslim population of 175 million) will feel less welcome. This will be true even if there is an expansion in visa issuance to highly qualified tech people in general.

Instead those ambitious, smart, entrepreneurial innovators will be more inclined to migrate to another hub of technological innovation, perhaps Singapore, Bangalore, Toronto, Tokyo or Shanghai. The more attractive these hubs are to innovators, the faster their local economies will grow, potentially at the expense of U.S. growth. Singapore, with centrality, two large universities, and several small technical colleges and the new Singapore Technology Development Center, is especially ready to take advantage. But others are as well.

Shanghai eased restrictions for foreign science and technology professionals willing to participate in the Chinese Communist Party’s innovation initiatives at its new technology hub in 2015. When I was in Shanghai with a UCLA class last March, we learned that even though China ranked low on IP protection, innovation in the new hub was starting to explode. Silicon Valley Bank, whose original mission was funding new ventures in California, is in a joint venture that provides funding to exciting new Shanghai start-ups.

The U.S. election will push not only people but also the products they produce in a “westward to the East” direction. New innovative products coming out of expanding Asian tech centers will be traded among Asian countries and not as much with the U.S. This is because American trade policy will be less friendly towards imports that compete with U.S. manufacturing.

The rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and the consequent ascendency of the Chinese-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) will reinforce this trend. Meanwhile, as our innovation edge erodes over time, the U.S. will likely lag in producing, and exporting, cutting-edge goods. Instead U.S. firms may come to copy what the foreign firms are doing much in the way that the Chinese now try to copy what quality U.S. firms are doing.

One might argue that the U.S. is a very large economy and therefore restrictive trade measures are not liable to have much impact. Domestic competition and the ability to sell in a very wealthy market should be attraction enough for entrepreneurs.

While that might be true, protectionist policies—what economists call import-substitution policies that include high tariffs on imports, like those suggested by Trump during the campaign—have been pursued by many countries and studied extensively. The consensus is that, by protecting domestic firms from more efficient international competitors, they hurt economic growth and manufacturing efficiency.

Stagnation in Latin America is in part attributable to a reliance on import substitution. Argentina is a classic case. In 1909 it was the seventh-richest country in the world. Many things went wrong in the 20th century, but import substitution was part of the story. Nehru’s India is another case of a country that insulated itself from world competition because it thought itself a big enough market to go it alone, and suffered the consequences. Myanmar, where I will be writing the next piece in this series in December, took protectionism to extremes and has basically been dormant for 50 years.

The point here is not that the U.S. will stagnate nor that it will become Myanmar, Argentina, or India, but rather that all of the examples of protectionist policies, however mildly applied, lead to a diminution of the country’s ability to be a leader in the protected industries.

A desired move towards a more protectionist economy was one of the key takeaways of the Nov. 8 vote, especially in battleground industrial states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The electorate may have deliberately chosen international withdrawal, opting for stable but less efficient domestic industries over dynamic and nimble leading industries.

It is rare—and very valuable—for a place to achieve critical mass in a certain industry. Critical mass in entertainment occurred in Los Angeles because it was possible to film in a variety of nearby locations all year long. Many states and countries have tried to counter it with subsidies, but Atlanta, Toronto, and others have transferred wealth into Hollywood moguls’ bank accounts in Beverly Hills, and not into a self-sustaining critical mass. The same is true with technology and Silicon Valley. The Silicon Corn Field in Iowa and Silicon Bayou in Louisiana are only shells of what the planners dreamed of for them.

We don’t know right now which places are going to be most competitive and achieve critical mass in innovative industries as the Pacific Rim center shifts west. My money would be on Singapore, with its English common law, low taxes, affluent and well trained work force, major universities, and central location. If Singapore (or insert your top candidate here) in fact hits critical mass, it will be very hard to dislodge. So even if the U.S decides to reverse course on immigration and trade policy in the future, we will have to live with the consequences of this shift.

In 2011, Joshua Kerlantzik in an article in Current History argued that the 21st Century was “not quite yet” the Asian Century. A shift to the west of innovation and technology may well change that.

The post How a Trump Economy Could Make Singapore Great Again appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I went with some preconceptions. For one thing, I had read that ayrag, home-fermented horse milk, was widely consumed and not for the faint of heart. For another, I had also read that investors were high on the Mongolian economy, an economy with a 10-fold increase in GDP since the fall of communism.

This trip was about climbing, but I could not help but look for clues about Mongolia’s purported success. The analysts are consistent; Mongolia is a great place to invest even though its GDP growth has slowed significantly since hitting double digits in 2014. Google Mongolia and you will find many articles to this effect. (You also will find a few contrary notices about how some foreigners spend time in jail for tax evasion without being afforded due process).

I arrived in the capital, Ulaanbaatar (UB), on the middle of a day in early August. As is my custom, the first thing I did was take a walk and get a sense of the place.

The Blue Sky Tower (a.k.a. the Blue Taco) and the Choijin Lama Temple in Ulaanbaatar.

 
UB is a city of 1.4 million, half the population of the country, but it feels smaller. There are a few modern structures—like the famous blue taco, a high-rise hotel and office building that looks like its nickname. For the most part, however, this is a city of yurts (1/3 of the people live in them) and old socialist-style buildings. In the center is the Government Palace complete with a giant statue of Chingas Kahn (for Mongolians–no hard G) and a massive square reminiscent of Red and Tiananmen Squares. All this left me wondering: where was the supposed economic dynamism hiding?

My search would continue but first it was time to go for some climbing. The trip to the Altai Tavan Bogd Mountains began with a three-hour flight to the town of Ölgii on Hunnu Airlines (pronounced “who knew”). UB’s modernity, such as it is, quickly gave way to the relatively unpopulated windswept steppes of Asia. Ölgii with 30,000 inhabitants, it is the seventh largest city in Mongolia.

From Ölgii we traveled seven hours by Russian four-wheel drive over a maze of dirt tracks to the National Park gate and then hiked into the mountains. Over the next nine days, thoughts on the Mongolian economy were drowned out by the majesty and primitive beauty of the mountains of Western Mongolia. Large glaciers, tundra, sweeping views, and snow fields spread out before us as we moved into base camp. This is what I came to Mongolia for and it definitely did not disappoint.

In the Altai you feel you are about as far away from California, where I live, as possible. The region is home to nomadic Kazaks, and while they have some trappings of the western world, they still work their herds on horseback, live in gers (Kazak yurts) and cut grass by hand with homemade scythes. It is a hard, perhaps idyllic, life for these nomads, who make up almost 40 percent of Mongolia’s population.

Back in Ölgii I noticed that the stores had mostly Russian products. The people were poor but not starving, and economic growth had eluded them. I did find ayrag, the highly touted horse milk, in a little out-of-the-way shop, and it lived up to its reputation—strong with a sour and long-lasting aftertaste.

Vegetables at the market in Olgii.

I also saw more clearly why this country, despite its dynamic economy reputation, didn’t seem so promising on the ground. The problem lies in the engine of Mongolia’s growth: extractive industries.

In boom times the few—the very few who work removing riches from the ground— accumulate wealth and share some of it by spending in the domestic economy. But mines and oil fields employ lots of capital and not many people. If a country is largely rural, as Mongolia is, most of it may be untouched.

When commodity prices fall, as they did in 2015 (coal and copper were off by more than 30 percent), that growth turns on a dime (hence the fall in the rate of Mongolia’s GDP growth). While starkly clear in Mongolia and less so in Texas and Louisiana, the phenomenon is present in all three.

Much has been written on how countries can be cursed by an abundance of natural resources. What I saw in Mongolia confirmed that if the windfall gains from natural resources are not turned into the fundamental building blocks of a diversified economy, like education and infrastructure, the promise of mineral wealth will be squandered.

Mongolians I met didn’t complain about this much—I was treated warmly and generously, and I appreciated how absent modern stresses were from life there. But the lack of economic opportunity has a deep human cost; many Mongolian youth are working abroad.

As my departing flight to Beijing ascended over the glass buildings and sheepskin yurts of UB, it occurred to me that Mongolia can teach us much about economic miracles. A North Dakota or Texas miracle may be real, but it may also be ephemeral.

Also, now that I know how to ride a Mongolian horse bareback, if Chingas Kahn and the Golden Horde ever ride again, I have a fallback to working as an economist.

The post Why Mongolia and North Dakota Aren’t Economic Miracles appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Or as Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr., Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, put it: “Location, location, location.”

At a Smithsonian/Zócalo “What It Means to Be American” event supported by the Daniel K. Inouye Institute, Harris was joined by the president of the U.S.–Japan Council, a high-level diplomat, and a renowned chef in addressing the question: “What role will Hawaii play in the Pacific century?”

The wide-ranging conversation before a full house at the East-West Center in Honolulu explored trade, the economy, and military strategy, and emphasized Hawaii’s value as one of the nation’s most inclusive and culturally diverse states.

The program kicked off with a traditional oli, or native Hawaiian chant, including the harmonic blowing of conch shells, followed by a Chinese lion dance. Moderator Irene Hirano Inouye, president of the U.S.-Japan Council, opened the discussion by asking each of the panelists to address questions exploring how Hawaii is fulfilling its role on the global stage and what it could be doing better.

“Hawaii is a perfectly located and extraordinarily capable platform for diplomatic activity,” said Kurt W. Tong, U.S. Consul General to Hong Kong and Macau. “Every successful meeting of the Pacific Islands Conference of Leaders that President Obama has held has been here.”

There’s “a constant flow of soft-power exchange that Hawaii should aim to be a nexus for,” Tong said. Hawaii “can act as a magnet for really thoughtful people from around the world, for big set-piece government meetings, but also lots of conversations among leaders of the Asia Pacific. From the perspective of Washington, that’s how we would like to ‘use’ Hawaii.”

Admiral Harris concurred on the value of Hawaii’s physical location for different reasons, pointing out that Hawaii is home to the United States Pacific Command, America’s largest and oldest command with about 400,000 total personnel throughout the Pacific.

“I look at the world through the lens of the threats,” and protecting the United States and its friends and allies from those threats, Harris said. In that regard, he said, location is crucial. “Being in Hawaii makes it especially helpful. It’s where we need to be.”

He said that the U.S. government is in the midst of a “rebalance” in terms of its economic, diplomatic, and military commitment to the Asian Pacific region. “The most visible piece,” of the rebalance is a military shift, Harris said. “Everything that’s new and cool that the military has is coming to the Pacific,” whether it’s combat ships aircraft carriers.”

Harris added that the most important piece in the effort to both recognize and bolster the value of the region is not military but economic. “The business community here—the civic community—is very welcoming of the military. We enjoy this synergy that’s special. It’s critical that we continue the rebalance and continue to grow the relationship between the military and all of you here in Hawaii.”

The third panelist, Roy’s Restaurant chef and founder Roy Yamaguchi, whose chain stretches across both Hawaii and the mainland, stressed the importance of cross-cultural understanding to Hawaii’s economic success. Yamaguchi, who is known for fusing French and Japanese cuisine, described himself as an “Army brat” who grew up in Japan but whose family heritage is rooted in Hawaii.

“Growing up on army base—I probably think Japanese,” Yamaguchi said. “I’m an American, but for some reason I just feel that I think Japanese.” People from Hawaii, he said, “understand the Asian culture, so it’s easier to do business.”

Inouye asked the panelists to address another ongoing challenge for the islands: Ambitious visions for the future aside, Hawaii’s draw as a tourist destination has generated significant economic benefit, but also contributed to a soaring cost of living. How, she asked, can Hawaii balance growth and its global aspirations while also ensuring that it is “livable and affordable”?

“That’s probably a question for the governor of Hawaii,” Tong quipped, to appreciative laughter from the crowd.

“If you think about a place like London or New York or Hong Kong—where I live now—it’s very expensive, but people continue to move there,” Tong said. The government needs to work hand-in-hand with business to ensure livability.
“That’s a struggle that every major successful city on the planet has to contend with,” he said. “But I don’t think that’s a reason not to be ambitious.”

Harris acknowledged Hawaii’s high cost of living, but, he said, “It’s not insurmountable. The advantages of living here are great. People come here to vacation; we get to live here.”

Yamaguchi added: “What can I say? It’s paradise. I’m very blessed that I’m able to live here.”

During the question-and-answer period, one audience member wondered why, despite Asia’s obvious emergence as a global leader, the United States remained stubbornly Euro-centric in its cultural leanings.

Harris observed that while the U.S. will always have strong ties to Europe, “we’re changing as a nation,” and Asia’s primary role will become more apparent in the months and years ahead.

The question brought to mind a comment made earlier in the evening by Tong regarding the multiple ways in which Asian cultural influence is growing in the United States. Tong described his own experiences as “an arrogant guy from Massachusetts” who has spent decades living and working across Asia. His wife is Japanese, and their children are “double kids,” meaning “they really mix both cultures, they understand both.””

“I meet more and more people in the United States who are living ‘salad bowls,’” Tong said. “I think, as a nation we’ve moved beyond the whole melting pot idea to really appreciating that a salad tastes better than a soup.”

The post Can Hawaii Be America’s Bridge to Asia—and the World? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Under the lèse majesté laws anyone can be charged with the crime of disrespecting the king, queen, or any heir to the throne. The current monarchy-backed military junta has used these laws to protect members of the King’s families, including, absurdly, their pets. Late last year, a young man was arrested after he posted a meme that mocked the king’s dog on a satirical Facebook page. Because of his joke, he now faces up to 37 years in prison.

These prosecutions indicate a problem far older than social media: Thailand’s constitution is designed to protect the king above everything else, including justice. Today, the first chapter of the constitution reads, “The King shall be enthroned in a position of revered worship and shall not be violated. No person shall expose the King to any sort of accusation or action.”

Because of this, the whole kingdom of Thailand is wary of honest conversation about the monarchy—and about the army generals who have frequently attempted to manipulate our country’s democratic system (nominally in place since a 1932 coup overturning the absolute monarchy of King Bhumibol’s uncle). This is quite a chilling effect, as the royals’ first coup to overthrow the constitutional government and regain power was attempted after democracy failed in 1933. The last, to date, occurred in 2014. Each time the king regains power, none of the coups’ leaders are ever brought before a court of justice.

To understand Thailand’s cycle of “coup, uprising, crackdown, election, coup” is to understand the relationship King Bhumibol—the world’s longest reigning monarch, having come to power in 1946—has with coups. By my count, approximately 10 coups have been staged for the king between 1947 and 2014. Each time, the palace’s Privy Council and other powerful actors have been able to generate enough military power to retain control for themselves and the civil servants that constitute this country’s elite.

This preoccupation with meddling in election results and quashing uprisings has left the majority of Thais with a subpar quality of life.

Young King Bhumibol.

I was born in 1966 in a rice-growing village 100 kilometers from Bangkok, Thailand’s capital. Because of its location, births were overseen by a midwife, rather than a medical doctor. As a youth, I was among the approximately 37 percent of Thai people suffering from thalassemia, a genetic blood disorder that degrades the carrier’s blood cells and can lead to anemia. I often think about how lucky I am to have survived my childhood sickness under the spotty care of the veteran medics and nurse’s assistants whom we called “doctors.”

This inferior health care was the norm for more than half of Thailand until the 1990s. If someone in the family needed serious medical attention, it meant selling anything you could to pay the medical bills and/or appealing to civil servants, who often seemed to only respond to bribes of food, gifts, or cash. (For this reason, the most secure life you can have in Thailand is to be a civil servant.)

Thus the less-secure classes cherished free universal health care when they experienced it for the first time in 2002, after it was implemented by Thaksin Shinawatra’s newly elected Thai Rak Thai party. When this happened, the whole country realized that bribing or personally knowing a civil servant was no longer the only option for getting reliable access to healthcare.

I like to think that the plan was implemented as a result of the mobilization of rural people who spurred the Thai Rak Thai party to power. However, the party dissolved after the monarchy regained control via yet another coup in 2006. This coup led to Shinawatra’s exile and many of his supporters being banned from practicing politics for years.

But dissatisfaction with the monarchy’s status quo, mainly among rural and lower-class Thais, remained, and led to massive demonstrations in 2010. Protestors from the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (commonly known as “Red Shirts”) took to the Bangkok streets in April and May of that year, and were met by tens of thousands of Royal Thai Armed Forces who opened fire on crowds, killing 100 people and leaving close to 2,000 injured. Shocked rural and urban Thais might not have supported Shinawatra’s political party—I myself do not support it—but the massacre alerted them to the brutality and selfishness displayed by the elite establishment and its protected class of civil servants.

The crackdown in May 2010 was yet another catalyst for many political activists to install democratic principles in Thailand. I answered my calling a few years before this, when I self-published an essay titled “Why I Don’t Love the King” and decided to live in exile outside Thailand. Today, I’m in Finland, but continue write on the “unspeakable” (under lèse-majesté) issues still affecting Thailand.

For instance, much of the national tax revenue is being funneled towards the nation’s elite. The budget allocation to the palaces has increased greatly since King Bhumibol came to power in 1946. And since the 2006 coup, the purpose of the national budget has been to support the development of the capital city of Bangkok and to look after the two million civil servants, military, and police, all in the name of protecting and honoring the King. This has worked out well for King Bhumibol; for almost a decade Forbes has ranked him as the world’s richest monarch, with a net worth of $30 billion.

Meanwhile, rural politicians fight amongst themselves over budget scraps, which they use to secure their families’ fortunes. The members of parliament in my hometown province, Suphanburi, have been passing positions between networks of family members for as long as I can remember.

2010 New Years Card for the Thai people, given by His Majesty the King of Thailand, King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

Growing up, we would hear things like “by the time the commission fees have been divided up, the money remaining for the construction of roads will only be around 20 percent.” On top of that, the prices for building materials such as brick, stone, and cement are greatly inflated, to the point where one of the Crown Property Bureau’s largest sources of income is from cement sales. As a result, Thailand’s road projects often take forever.

These issues have not spurred Thailand’s remaining political parties to action. No political party explicitly opposed the coups that occurred in 2006 and 2014, and they never felt the need to mobilize so that they could tell the military to go home. Party leaders resisted action so that they could protect their own families and businesses.

And so the current Thai junta survives, even though junta members have done nothing to endear themselves to the public, choosing instead to strengthen their ties to the monarchy. In March 2015, under the orders of Prayuth Chan-o-cha, a retired army general who leads Thailand’s National Council for Peace and Order, Article 44 was added to Thailand’s interim constitution, granting the junta unlimited legal power whenever the King feels threatened.

In return, the Privy Council, the body that advises the King, as well as other palace insiders, pushed out propaganda arguing that Thailand is not ready for democracy and is better off under the protection of 1,400 generals and 400,000 soldiers.

King Bhumibol seems to fear that he cannot keep the hearts of all Thai people submissive, and that they will one day rise up to eliminate the monarchy once and for all. And yet, because of his increasing reliance on lèse-majesté, many people outside of Thailand believe the king is universally beloved, and have no idea that there might be a different reality than the anachronistic story pushed by the palace. Indeed, the harsh lèse-majesté sentences have helped encourage that fantasy within the country as well.

There is a saying among the critical voices in Thailand that Thai people are living under a coconut shell, believing that Thailand is the most fantastic nation in the world, that Thai people are the sweetest human beings, and that the Thai king is the king of all kings. But outside of the coconut shell, the view is much darker.

 
*An earlier version misstated the year of the 2010 demonstrations.

The post Don’t You Dare Speak Ill of Thailand’s King appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The takeover of the government by Thailand’s army followed six months of street demonstrations aimed at bringing down the government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, the sister of Thaksin, who was himself overthrown by the military in 2006. The army says this most recent coup was necessary to restore the peace, as the opposing political sides seemed unable to break their deadlock while protests resulted in the deaths of dozens and hundreds of injuries.

How has this affected my life in Bangkok? Not much, so far. My commuting has become more difficult, and I’m much more conscious of my words, and the color of my shirt. But it’s still the Bangkok that I’ve come to love for its vibrancy, its mix of modernity and old-world Asia, the food, the world-famous massages, and the bright colors.

I was born in Japan, schooled mostly in the U.S., and first came to Bangkok in 2000 for a summer internship with a project against sexual exploitation of children. Work on a project for HIV prevention brought me back in 2001 and then in 2007, when I met my German-Thai husband. We have small children we’re raising here (and we appreciate the affordable childcare) and live comfortably in a Thai family compound, with members of my husband’s extended family living in multiple houses inside a gated compound. My husband likens the whole place to Downton Abbey.

I sing for Opera Siam and its affiliated Orpheus Choir and work as a project management consultant to an international organization. (The organization doesn’t want us to comment on Thai politics, so that’s why I’m not using names.) My office is located in the old-fashioned government area near the center of Bangkok, where there are a number of popular targets for protesters: the Government House where the prime minister has offices, Bangkok’s police headquarters, parliament, and other military offices.

This last batch of protesters (the People’s Democratic Reform Committee, or PDRC, who opposed Yingluck’s government) decided to camp out on the main road smack in front of my office, thus blocking most of the office’s entranceways. For a while, the wide avenue was filled with tents, portable showers, port-a-potties, and communal dining areas. Eventually the number of people dwindled, especially after the king’s birthday last December, but the road remained blockaded. When the police attempted to reclaim the nearly deserted area in February, the protesters scrambled back to fight for their space. In the clashes there were casualties, and the area was left again to the protesters, who again mostly deserted the area as soon as it was not being threatened. They then consolidated their forces in Lumpini Park, a more convenient location in modern, downtown Bangkok.

Despite these disruptions, life has actually gone on quite normally for most of us Bangkok residents. The malls are still filled with people, we have no problems getting groceries and gas, businesses are open, public transportation is bustling as ever. If it weren’t for how the roadblocks added to already notorious Bangkok traffic, you might have thought these disturbances were occurring in another country.

For me, the road closures around the office doubled my commute from 20 minutes to at least 45 minutes, and I’ve heard colleagues lamenting some mornings about how their normal 45-minute drive to work took them as much as two hours. Recently, our office was closed for two and a half weeks when the protesters moved en masse back to our area, and we had to telecommute.

Another effect of these political upheavals has been that my husband and I have become extremely conscious of the color of our clothes. We dare not wear yellow (a remnant of the “yellow shirts” protests), red (likewise from “red shirts”), or any clothes that bear the three colors of the Thai flag: red, white, and blue (PDRC supporters wore Thai flag paraphernalia), for fear of our sartorial choices being taken as a political message. Some mornings will find us asking each other, “Does my shirt look too red?” or “Do you think this is too yellow?”, and it’s a running joke that we’ll soon run out of colors to wear.

Everyone is eager to talk about the political crisis, including on Facebook. What strikes me most is how emotional people are about Thaksin, who isn’t in the country anymore, but whom many think is orchestrating events from afar. One seems either to love or hate him and his family; there’s no middle path. Facebook is a minefield, with the real danger being that a carelessly made comment on my part might lose me friends whom I otherwise like. I try hard to say nothing more than that I hate the horrible traffic that the protests are causing.

The other thing that strikes me is how most people generally seem to welcome and trust the military. There was a picture circulating on Facebook where the head of General Prayuth, the man who instigated the coup, was Photoshopped onto Superman with a comment: “Our Hero!” It could be that Thais are simply used to coups—by one count there have been 24 in the 82 years since Thailand became a constitutional monarchy. (I got a good laugh out of a headline from Thailand’s version of The Onion stating that the most recent coup marked the discovery “of a new species of coup.”) Of further note, I’ve hardly heard a word mentioned on the role of the monarchy, which plays an essential role in Thai society and politics. I can only conjecture that most Thais seek “good” authorities—such as the monarchy and the military—to take control.

The general feeling in Bangkok following the military coup seemed to be that of relief. (See this piece by an eclectic conductor/composer/science fiction novelist friend, Somtow Sucharitkul.) I confess, even I felt a sense of satisfaction to hear that the main opposing political leaders were scolded for not getting along and then stripped of their powers. It was certainly a relief also that the military immediately dismantled the protest sites; our office has reopened and we can get back to work.

Thailand is the only home that my children have known, and it’s hard to see turmoil tearing it apart. Naturally, I hope for some kind of resolution, although it’s hard to tell how to reconcile a people who seem to be split down the middle. I hope that the military makes use of its stewardship of the government to find some miraculous compromise that all sides can reasonably accept. Otherwise, one can see elections taking place down the line, the pro-Thaksin party winning again (or not?), and the losing side taking to the streets again in protest. I can only pray that we won’t find ourselves saying: Here we go again.

The post Just Another Military Coup Monday in Bangkok appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.