Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim “Other”
Francis Wade
Zed Books

Around fifteen years ago, a petty criminal named Kaung Latt was sweating away in a filthy prison in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy Delta when he was presented with an offer that was hard to refuse: early release, a house of his own, fields to till, a stipend and regular food rations in exchange for – nothing.

Clashing over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy
Douglas A. Irwin
University of Chicago Press

The world was surprised in 2016 by the election of New York property developer Donald J. Trump to the White House over Democrat establishment figure Hillary Clinton. Trump had never held elected office and had no fixed political allegiances, identifying as a Democrat in the 1980s before running as a Republican – albeit as a self-styled anti-establishment “outsider”. To be fair, Clinton had also switched sides, starting her life as Republican (a so-called “Goldwater girl”, supporting conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964) before becoming a Democrat and part of a political dynasty.

Perhaps less surprising was candidate Trump’s message in support of trade protectionism and isolationism, which helped him to secure the nomination and the election. This stance was also taken by left-winger Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, forcing Clinton to reconsider her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as she began to realise how much free trade was on the nose in the American electorate.

Trump ran very hard against free trade agreements – particularly the North American Free Trade Agreement and the TPP – claiming that China and other foreign powers were taking advantage of the United States through these “lousy” deals, which, as a successful businessman, he could renegotiate. Politically, this was aimed at the blue-collar industrial swing states, which eschewed Clinton and the “Corporate Democrats” and gave Trump the electoral college votes to get him to the White House. Hillary offered them lectures on misogyny and racism; Trump offered them tariff protection. Neither is going to help them in the long run, but tariff protection might help Trump – again – in 2020.

As president, Trump has upset financial markets and US trading partners by engaging in trade policy erratically via Twitter. He announced a “trade war” with major tariff hikes in steel and aluminium, targeting China, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil and the European Union. He then abruptly suspended some of the tariffs for China (and gave exemptions to Australia) to announce a trade “peace in our time”. The on-again, off-again approach has the world reeling, especially given the Trump administration’s obsession with bilateral trade deficits rather than the global stability of the world trading system.

But the temptation to throw the switch to populism didn’t begin with Trump. It has a long history. That’s the theme of a magnificent account of US trade policy, Clashing over Commerce, by renowned scholar Douglas A. Irwin. Like Australia’s battles over free trade and protection at the dawn of federation, the United States has grappled with this policy question since its Founding Fathers won independence from the British Crown in 1776.

Irwin explains that US independence was declared the same year Adam Smith published his anti-mercantilist treatise The Wealth of Nations, and the Founding Fathers were very much acquainted with Smith’s support for free trade. But the fledging colony had a problem – lack of revenue – and needed the revenue-raising aspects of protection. The nation’s first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, was sceptical of tariffs because they sheltered inefficient and productive enterprises, and led to consumer price increases, which encouraged smuggling and eroded government revenue. Hence Hamilton opted for bounties, or state payments to producers, over tariffs. He later clashed with Thomas Jefferson, who opposed government intervention and advocated free commerce, as the new nation navigated its way through trade wars, the British Empire’s dominance over world trade, and literal wars between Britain and France.

Eventually, the debate over trade policy, as in all countries, was captured by sectional and regional interests. These divisions led to the Civil War: the manufacturing interests in the North preferred protection, and the agrarian, slave-owning states of the South preferred free trade. In fact, until the early twentieth century the Republican Party – the party of Abraham Lincoln, the president who abolished slavery – was largely protectionist in outlook, and the Southern-based Democratic Party, which wanted to keep the cost advantages of slavery in cotton, sugar and textile exports, was mainly for free trade.

According to Irwin, the Great Depression reignited tensions on the topic. In response to the high unemployment rate, Congress passed the Hawley–Smoot Tariff Act, which raised tariffs and caused an unprecedented decline in world trade, worsening labour-market conditions. This was partly as the tariff act encouraged trade retaliation by other nations, and led to initiatives such as the 1932 Ottawa Agreement, which restored British imperial preference by reducing tariffs for Commonwealth countries and jacking up tariffs for those outside it (so benefiting Canada and Australia and penalising Argentina). In the end, it took the New Deal and World War II to shake the effects of Hawley–Smoot from the world trading system.

Following World War II, the global trading system was created on a more liberal footing. After a stumble with the stillborn International Trade Organization, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was set up to guide the world economy through a reduction of tariffs based on reciprocity. In this era, the United States was largely a force for liberalism, with the rounds of multilateral trade negotiations – notably the Kennedy Round, under President John F. Kennedy – culminating in the Uruguay Round almost thirty years later, which led to the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.

However, it was around the time of the WTO’s creation that the rise of the anti-globalisation movement became noticeable, epitomised in the “Battle for Seattle” WTO protests in 1999. Free trade was seen, rightly or wrongly, as responsible for the loss of American jobs, increasing economic inequality and environment degradation. The party positions became reversed, with the Democrats worried about free trade and the Republicans more sceptical of protection; this matched the changing political geography, as the Republicans dominated the South, and the Democrats the North. The decline of US blue-collar wages and employment was conveniently blamed on trade with Japan, then Mexico, and now China, and on immigration, rather than on the erosion of labour-market protection and the impact of technological change.

Today, the US political parties are in flux on trade policy, with the left, led by figures such as Sanders, outflanking the “Corporate Wall Street” Democrats represented by Clinton, and Trump outsmarting establishment Grand Old Party types and running a populist line. Both parties have their schisms over free trade versus protectionism, but these are part of a greater debate over inequality and the role of the United States in international affairs. And as fiery as these debates about trade policy are, they are nothing compared to debates about race and immigration.

What will happen next? There’s now trade peace with China, but that could change at any time. Trump could win in 2020 by having a few high-profile corporations keep open a plant or two in Michigan that may have otherwise gone to China or Mexico, and then taking credit for the falling unemployment rate in the United States (which is, in fact, largely thanks to the efforts of Janet Yellen and her team at the Federal Reserve). Free trade could, rightly or wrongly, take the blame – or the credit – for the re-election of a candidate who seemed not so long ago to be a most unlikely president.

Tim Harcourt

End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival Is Undermining Its Rise
Carl Minzner
Oxford University Press

A cursory glance at China today hardly seems to bear out the pessimism of the subtitle of Carl Minzner’s End of an Era. Indeed, by many measures, objective and subjective, China seems on the crest of a mighty wave.

Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, The U.S., and the Struggle for Global Power
Richard McGregor
Penguin Books

After enjoying a royal welcome in Beijing late last year – complete with a tour of the Forbidden City at sunset and a full military parade in Tiananmen Square – Donald Trump declared that he and Xi Jinping had “great chemistry.”

The Chinese president, for his part, was less magnanimous. Xi told his American counterpart that the Pacific was big enough for the both of them – a dismissive line that reflects his belief that he heads a rising power while Trump leads one in decline.

Flattery versus disdain. The remarks neatly encapsulated the seismic shift taking place in Asia.

The United States, the supreme power in the Pacific for some seven decades, is now run by an impulsive president who has shown little appreciation for America’s old alliances. China, meanwhile, is led by an increasingly authoritarian leader who sees his country as a global power with a glorious, millennia-long history that is returning to its rightful place in the world. Neighbouring North Korea is ruled by a ruthless dictator who’s made astonishing advances towards having a deliverable nuclear arsenal. And in the middle is Japan, an American ally and a Chinese rival, a nation that modernised while Chin disintegrated but is now in denial about the countries’ reversal of fortunes. Even amid a demographic crisis it has no idea how to fix, Japan still sees itself as an economic colossus and is unwilling to concede its decline.

In his excellent new book, Asia’s Reckoning, Australian journalist Richard McGregor writes that the competition between these two Asian powers, exacerbated by Trump’s unpredictability, should alarm the rest of us. “Any clash between China and Japan would not be a simple spat between neighbours,” writes McGregor. “A single shot fired in anger could trigger a global economic tsunami, engulfing political capitals, trade routes, manufacturing centers, and retail outlets on every continent.” That, of course, includes Australia, a country torn between its long-standing alliance with the United States and the commercial opportunities of a rising China.

McGregor is uniquely placed to draw together these themes. He spent two decades in Asia, reporting from Tokyo, Shanghai and Beijing, and was the Financial Times’ bureau chief in Washington, D.C. (he was the bureau chief in Beijing while I was the paper’s correspondent in Seoul, and we worked together in Washington). Drawing on his experience, McGregor has written a magisterial book that combines old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting – he conducts interviews with major players in Japan, China and the United States – and extensive archival research to chart seven decades of relations between the three countries. These relations, he shows, are more complex than suggested by the prevailing view of China versus the US–Japan alliance. He recounts the line by China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai, that China and Japan had enjoyed “two thousand years of friendship and fifty years of misfortune,” and recalls Henry Kissinger’s disdain for his Japanese counterparts, as well as Japan’s constant fear that the United States will desert it. “The Japanese have always been paranoid that the United States and China are natural partners – big, boisterous continental economies and military superpowers that wouldn’t hesitate to bypass Tokyo in a flash, if only they could find a way to do so,” he writes.

At the book’s centre is the growing rivalry between China and Japan – and the risk of a confrontation that an overstretched America will struggle to deal with. Even before Trump came to office and disrupted the old way of doing things, Xi and Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abe, both fierce nationalists, were locked in a battle for influence and supremacy. They took office only a month apart, at the end of 2012, just after Japan had nationalised a group of rocky islands known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China. Xi was radically different from his notoriously dreary predecessor, Hu Jintao, and had an ambitious plan to make China great again. One of the first things Xi did was to whip up antipathy towards Japan, recalling late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century events such as the Nanjing massacre.

In 2015, ahead of the seventieth anniversary of the “Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War” commemoration, as the end of World War II is known in China, I went to a special exhibition at the Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in Beijing. It featured a display of Japanese wartime artifacts, including flags, under a glass floor. Chinese visitors were literally walking over Japan. “We want to keep Japan under our feet,” Li Yake, a twenty-two-year-old college student doing a summer internship at the museum, told me.

At the same time as Xi began fuelling this anti-Japanese sentiment, Abe returned to power, hell-bent on achieving what he hadn’t managed to during his first tenure as prime minister six years before: revise the pacifist constitution imposed on Japan by the American post-war occupiers.

Abe wants to free Japan of the restrictions that stipulate it must not maintain any “war potential” and can defend itself only if under attack. He is making progress, with a vote expected on amending the constitution this year, and is simultaneously seeking relatively small increases in Japan’s defence budget. Of course, both moves are seen in Beijing as definitive proof of Japan’s “re-militarisation.”

In a visit to Tokyo in December, Steve Bannon, the arch-nationalist and erstwhile advisor to the American president, praised Abe for his efforts, calling him “Trump before Trump.” Despite such words – meant as a compliment – and the rapport between Trump and Abe, there is deep anxiety among Japan’s conservatives about the US commitment to the security alliance.

Abe was already worried about China’s ascendancy when Trump started using Japan as an example of what was wrong with the United States’ foreign policy. Why was the United States defending a rich country that was cutting the US’s lunch when it came to trade? Trump’s victory alarmed the Abe government, which had been sure of a Clinton win and had few contacts within the Trump camp. Senior officials told me that this was, in part, because they didn’t want to risk Trump going out on the campaign trail claiming that the Japanese were begging to talk to him.

However, the Japanese prime minister has since skilfully handled Trump. Days after the 2016 election, Abe personally delivered a gold-plated golf driver to the president-elect in Trump Tower. On Trump’s recent trip to Tokyo, Abe pandered to his counterpart’s tastes, serving him hamburgers and steak, and taking him out on the golf course. Not a sliver of raw fish in sight.

Still, despite the public jollity, Japan’s defence hawks are clearly worried. Now that North Korea has a demonstrated ability to send missiles to the mainland United States, will Washington – which is in the firing line – bother to defend its junior partner? Shigeru Ishiba, a hardline but nevertheless influential voice in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, has stated that Japan should have the freedom to build nuclear weapons. Trump himself has several times said the same. Given Beijing wants nothing more than for the United States to leave the region, Trump’s talk of closing American military bases in Japan and South Korea must have been music to Chinese ears.

But Xi has not capitalised on Trump’s isolationist rhetoric to try to seduce Japan. Instead, he has stoked hostility towards its neighbour. McGregor’s research underlines how much the foreign policy of both countries is driven by domestic considerations.

With Xi, Abe and Trump all set to enjoy several more years in power – not to mention Kim Jong-un in North Korea – these relationships will only become more toxic. That makes Asia’s Reckoning crucial reading for our times.

Anna Fifield

The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder
Jess Melvin 
Routledge

It has been the mystery of a lifetime. What really happened in Indonesia in the early hours of 1 October 1965 and the months that followed? It started with rebel troops seizing the centre of Jakarta, then an army countermove. By the time I first went backpacking across the archipelago, five years later, it was all over: the revolutionary president Sukarno out of power, the once-triumphant Partai Komunis Indonesia obliterated, a stolid pro-Western general named Suharto the new president.

Incorrigible Optimist: A Political Memoir
Gareth Evans
Melbourne University Press

Gareth Evans, foreign minister in the Hawke and Keating governments, talks a lot about the centrality of “good international citizenship” to his thinking on foreign policy. He defines this as a willingness to cooperate internationally to advance the public good. For Evans, prioritising “purposes beyond ourselves” – today, one might think of improving the international response to refugees, or nuclear weapons proliferation, or rising sea levels in the South Pacific – can be reconciled with hard-nosed arguments about the national interest. He not only regards the instinct for good international citizenship as a characteristic of the governments in which he served; he also understands it to be part of the Australian national psyche.

Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia
Michael Vatikiotis
Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Every foreign correspondent, once they have spent a few years in a region, will be tempted to write a book about their experiences. This is always risky. Journalists may allow themselves to think they compose the first drafts of history, but the nature of their work usually gives them only a relatively superficial acquaintance with the issues they cover. The result may come across as too glib, too personal, too quickly overrun by events, more memoir than illuminating analysis.

Michael Vatikiotis calls on a lifetime of familiarity with South-East Asia to ask an impressive range of questions about how the region developed the political characteristics it has today and where it is heading. He has had the advantage of a more varied career than most foreign correspondents, which has moved from reporting to editing and, for more than a decade now, to conflict mediation. His book is far more than a journalist’s memoir, although it cannot avoid some of the pitfalls of the genre.

The author was fortunate to arrive in South-East Asia long enough ago to have met some of the first generation of postcolonial nationalists, idealists and intellectuals with uplifting visions of what their countries could become. The contrast he paints between their dreams and the messy reality today is sobering.

Drawing on his experience as a private diplomat working for a Swiss-based mediation organisation, Vatikiotis examines the region’s intractable conflicts – those that have held the border areas of so many countries in their grip for much of their postcolonial histories, and those, as in today’s Thailand, that have flared up between rival political groups. These conflicts, he shows, have had a corrosive effect on the political culture but have been perpetuated by the shortsighted self-interest of entrenched elites.

The impressive economic progress in the region has, Vatikiotis argues, created spectacular levels of inequality of wealth and opportunity, which governments exploit to constrict the circle of power. Even the demands for change following the rapid adoption of social media have, he says, in one of many striking metaphors in the book, “fallen like spent bullets on the tough armour” of South-East Asia’s overcentralised states. The author dwells on the many atrocities committed by state actors, for which there has rarely been redress. His experience in Indonesia often takes him back to the mass killings that accompanied the rise to power of General Suharto after 1965, which still cannot be discussed openly in the country. “Impunity afflicts the region like a chronic disease, one that leaves the host outwardly healthy but which nonetheless inhibits many critical bodily functions,” he writes.

The gloomy prognosis seems apt for a book published at a time when the apparent democratic advances of the 1990s are being reversed in many countries or, in the case of Myanmar, accompanied by state-sponsored communal violence, and where the authoritarian model of China appears to be carrying more sway than the fading beacon of American democracy. Even in Indonesia, arguably the region’s healthiest democracy, the author believes that the population, faced with a choice between divisive and corrupt politicians or formidable military leaders, “are not averse to a strong hand on the tiller – so long as it is cloaked in the trappings of democracy and not run by a thief.”

Why, though, have democratic habits failed to take root in South-East Asia? Vatikiotis posits various reasons. He refers to the selfishness of elites, but it is hard to argue that Asian elites are any more innately selfish than their European, American or Australasian counterparts. He discusses the yearning for security in countries that have experienced debilitating instability; the instilled culture of patronage; and the weakness of historical analysis in societies that prefer “to interpret the past through comforting or heroic myth and legend, rather than by recording actual events,” but none is explored sufficiently to provide any persuasive conclusion.

The absence of an independent and competent judiciary in almost all South-East Asian countries is touched on, but such an absence arguably poses the greatest obstacle to a more defiant democratic culture. Who can challenge holders of power if even the courts are in their pockets, as they so often are here? These days, those in authority resort to repressive laws, such as Malaysia’s Sedition Act and Thailand’s Computer Crimes Act, to silence dissent and intimidate the media (rather than outright thuggery and torture, as in the past). By contrast, in the United States we see President Trump’s efforts to impose controversial measures being repeatedly and successfully challenged in the courts.

Likewise, South-East Asia’s absence of an impartial civil service, with a sense of public duty as the prevailing ethic, deserves investigation. The riddle that anti-corruption campaigners in Asia confront is how to break the cycle of patronage and build genuinely independent institutions whose leaders cannot afford to be corrupted, where the shame and fear of legal retribution for bribery far outweighs any financial rewards. Singapore has done it, through the ruthless discipline of a determined state, and through generous salaries, which sap the incentive for corruption. But Singapore, a small city-state, is no model for the rest of South-East Asia.

Where Vatikiotis’s analysis is strongest is, unsurprisingly, in the areas where he has most experience. The chapter on the growth of religious intolerance is superb. It chronicles the increasing appeal of piety among Indonesian student activists and the new urban middle class, the cynical exploitation of Islamic sensibilities by Malaysian political parties, and the rise of extremist jihadism, stirred by outside influences, as so many of the region’s political movements have been.

His discussion of the lasting influence of colonial policies is likewise rewarding, although again demands further investigation. To what degree is the colonial practice of bringing in foreign workforces to Myanmar and Malaysia responsible for the racial tensions we see today? A large degree, surely, but were these explosive tensions inevitable? You will need to look elsewhere for more detailed answers.

Vatikiotis reveals his influences through his references to other thinkers, such as the British colonial official and anthropologist John Furnivall, who first coined the term “plural society” – although he meant unintegrated multi-ethnic communities rather than the more positive gloss the term has today. Or the Malaysian scholar Syed Hussein Alatas, who believed that colonial stereotypes of “the incompetent native” were adopted by the elites who ruled after independence. The text contains some lovely descriptive phrases, such as “the broad, seemingly unending tangle of family ties that provides the essential matting of Southeast Asian societies,” which underscore the author’s intimate familiarity with the region. There are also omissions – Vietnam, where presumably he has not spent much time, is barely mentioned.

On finishing Blood and Silk, I was left feeling it contained several potential books, with the author’s years as a mediator, for example, opening a possible avenue to a more thorough work on border conflicts, or perhaps a detailed examination of the slow death of religious co-existence. For the newcomer to this extraordinary region, some persistence is required to follow the author’s meandering recollections, spanning nearly forty years. For the old hand, and I count myself as one, there is much to learn from this book, opening many fresh paths of investigation.

This is at heart a compassionate but pessimistic reflection on the state of South-East Asia today, a stark rejoinder to the sunnier assessments of this being “Asia’s century.”

Jonathan Head

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy
Dani Rodrik
Princeton University Press

“Are economists responsible for Donald Trump’s shocking victory in the US presidential election?” It hasn’t exactly been the question on everyone’s lips. But perhaps it should be.