Newsgroups: bit.listserv.seasia-l
Date:         Mon, 4 Jan 1993 19:29:15 PST
From:         Coban Tun <tun@QUARK.SFSU.EDU>
Subject:      DEMOCRACY CREEPS ACROSS ASIA

RTw  12/21 0022  DEMOCRACY CREEPS ACROSS ASIA

    By Diane Stormont
    SEOUL, Dec 21, Reuter - In South Korea, voters elected a former dissident
as president. In Taiwan, they handed the ruling party its worst setback in four
decades.
    Earlier this year, ordinary Thais took to the streets to oust unelected
prime minister General Suchinda Kraprayoon.
    The Philippines built on the "People's Power" movement of 1986 that deposed
strongman Ferdinand Marcos to hold the freest and probably cleanest elections
yet.
    All these are symptoms of creeping democracy spreading across Asia in the
wake of growing prosperity, political analysts say.
    "There is perhaps no precedent in any other region at any other time for a
middle class population expansion of the kind Asia experienced in the 1980s,"
wrote David Moray, adjunct professor of International Affairs at Columbia
University in New York.
    "Mongolia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Taiwan and South Korea have witnessed
important political reforms and liberalisations.
    "Other democratic movements in China and Burma have been brutally rebuffed
by authoritarian regimes," Moray, who visited Seoul for the 1992 election, wrote
in a collection of essays for the U.S.-based Institute for Asian Democracy.
    The charismatic but authoritarian rulers who emerged with post World War
Two decolonisation are ageing or have gone.
    Kim Il-sung, who has held absolute power in Stalinist North Korea since
1948, was 80 this year. Death is shrinking the clique of Long March veterans
who control China.
    If the 1980s was the decade of economic boom, it seems the 1990s will be
the decade when more Asians gain political control of their lives, analysts say.
    Along with increasing prosperity, the people of non-communist Asia are
better educated than ever before, travel more, are more urbanised and have
more leisure time.
    Political systems are evolving as society grows more complex, analysts said.
The emphasis, east of the Indian sub-continent, is on evolution rather than
absolute change.
    "In Asian democracies, except the Philippines, there has been majority
party democracy -- there have been elections but no turnover in power," said An
Pyong-jun, professor of political science at Seoul's Yonsei University.
    In Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party has ruled since 1955.
    In Taiwan, the Kuomintang has dominated since Chiang Kai-shek and the
Chinese Nationalists fled to the island in 1949.
    In Malaysia, the United Malay's National Organisation has held sway since
independence from British colonialism. In Singapore, the same applies to Lee
Kuan Yew's People's Action Party.
    General Suharto has ruled Indonesia since 1965 and is widely expected to
win another five-year term in the elections next March.
    The traditional Confucian values of consensus-building and obedience have
been eroded by industrialisation, An said.
    "Majority party democracy has taken their place," he said.
    South Koreans voted in a former dissident on Saturday but president-elect
Kim Young-sam stood as a member of the ruling party.
    For the first time in three decades, South Korea has a president who did
not rise through the military.
    Performance is more important than procedures, An argued. When South Koreans
reached the polling booth, they opted for limited change -- a new face but one
that was a member of the familiar establishment party, he said.
    Analysts see this innate conservatism beginning to break down, at least in
east Asia.
    In South Korea's National Assembly elections of 1988 and 1992 the ruling
power lost its majority. It had to engineer party mergers and woo independents
into its camp to regain domination of parliment.
    In Taiwan on Saturday, in the first full elections to the legislature since
1949, the ruling party's share of the vote plunged to 53 per cent, its lowest
level ever.
    Indonesia's rulers face demands from younger technocrats for an end to
military domination of the government.
    Asia today is too rich, its middle class too powerful, its people too
conscious of freedom for authoritarian leadership to last long, wrote Moray.
 REUTER ADS JLW MS
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