Tom Pepinsky

Category: Research

  • Wealth into Power, Indonesia Style

    In preparing for my Asian Political Economy seminar tomorrow, I ran across this quote from Bruce Dickson’s Wealth into Power: The Communist Party’s Embrace of China’s Private Sector. (By the way, this is a very good book, and comes highly recommended.)

    China’s continued economic growth challenges the common assumption that a market economy leads to democracy and common prosperity. In the short run and for the foreseeable future, it seems more likely to lead to a continuation of authoritarian rule under the Communist Party, as top leaders look for ways to govern better but not necessarily more democratically. So far, economic development has led to continued authoritarian rule as the CCP finds ways to adapt itself to the new situation in China. It is doing so by incorporating the growing number of private entrepreneurs into the political system – by integrating wealth and power – and by adopting new policies to address the social tensions created by rapid growth.

    I can’t resist imagining a similar passage to describe Indonesia in 1996.

    Indonesia’s continued economic growth challenges the common assumption that a market economy leads to democracy and common prosperity. In the short run and for the foreseeable future, it seems more likely to lead to a continuation of authoritarian rule under Golkar, as top leaders look for ways to govern better but not necessarily more democratically. So far, economic development has led to continued authoritarian rule as Golkar finds ways to adapt itself to the new situation in Indonesia. It is doing so by incorporating the growing number of private entrepreneurs into the political system – by integrating wealth and power – and by adopting new policies to address the social tensions created by rapid growth.

    Don’t misunderstand me: China 2012 is not the same as Indonesia 1996. The point, rather, is that if political change of the type that we saw in Indonesia in 1998 were on the horizon in China, we wouldn’t know it. We might even comfortably proclaim that the CCP is a coherent actor, that it anticipates its challenges, that it acts independently of the whims of political elites, that it can manage the marriage of state capitalism with private entrepreneurship, etc., even if none of these things were true. Sure, political succession will be difficult, but trying times have been managed before. Even the Bo Xilai case has shades of Benny Moerdani.

    Timur Kuran has written on the challenges of anticipating political change. Here is one accessible introduction.

  • Studying Faraway Places from Faraway

    ALERT: VENTING TO FOLLOW. In the past day, two colleagues have said in public forums that my understanding of Malaysian politics is superficial (and therefore misleading) because I live far away. One accused me of “parading.” By public forums I mean “in situations where there are lots of my colleagues listening.” I’m not embarrassed to say that such accusations sting. They sting even if no one else is listening, but they sting even more when I know that my friends and colleagues are.

    What to do about this? Well, I could stay up at night worrying about it, or I could try to fire something back, but instead what I’d like to do is to accept the critique with a caveat. Yes, I am just not able to have an on-the-ground understanding of Malaysian politics that others can. Being employed in a U.S. university with teaching and research and service requirements and a young family and so on makes it nearly impossible to travel to the other side of the planet very often. When I do, it’s quick, and I rely on old networks to get information—these contacts may no longer be relevant or informed. Consequently, lots of deep contextual information is hidden from me. It’s a problem. And I know that it’s a problem. I know it without having to be lectured about it.

    The caveat, though, is that I don’t think that this is precisely the challenge that these critics think that it is. I view my task as bringing the area into conversation with the rest of the discipline: with non-Malaysianists who do Asian studies, or with political scientists more generally. To do that requires a rather different sort of intellectual endeavor than really describing with complete nuance all of the facts on the ground. It requires distance. It requires something other than careening from crisis to crisis or scandal to scandal. (Importantly, nothing substantive that my critics said after noting that I study Malaysia from far away leads me to change any inference that I have drawn about Malaysian politics.) Sure, I can give my thoughts on current events in Malaysia (that’s what this is for), but if you want an expert, don’t ask me because I don’t know, and I’d be the first to tell you. If you want the broader picture, the one that deliberately abstracts away from the details because doing this is useful, then that’s where I can help (that’s what this is for). So I take my cue from the baby elephant: