Asia's rising middle class: not a force for change.

• Author: Jones, David Martin

IN A RECENT issue of The National Interest, Eric Jones cast a skeptical eye over the Singapore school of authoritarian rule. Concluding his timely critique, Jones reassures those of a liberal disposition that the creation of a new middle class will ultimately transform the prevailing social and political reality of East Asia. "Some elements of that class," Jones argues, "start to demand those effete and non-material things which are associated...with Western lifestyles and philosophies. The items include political participation, multi-party politics, an end to corruption, a freer press, environmental clean-up. Already these things and others can be seen emerging on the East Asian scene."

Having earlier observed that the East Asian Miracle occurs within "quite another ethic," it is perhaps a little surprising to find Professor Jones endorsing this commonplace of modernization theory. In this view, readily familiar to readers of The Economist, economic modernization creates an irresistible pressure for political liberalization. Initially, authoritarian rule offers the necessary stability for economic growth. However, as a fully developed modernity approaches, an increasingly redundant authoritarianism withers away. The invisible hand guiding this change is a self-confident, and increasingly articulate middle class. In other words, the middle class, itself the frankensteinian creation of the Asian developmental state, constitutes its liberal democratic nemesis. But does it?

The Character of the New Bourgeoisie

ASSESSING THE EAST Asian Miracle, the World Bank recently reported that the various Asian dragon and tiger economies that inhabit the lexical jungle of developmental studies uniquely combine "rapid, sustained growth with highly equal income distributions." The most significant social product of the process was a materialistic, upwardly mobile and highly urbanized middle class.

This phenomenon owes nothing to constitutional democracy and little to neoclassical economic policy. The virtuous rule of one man or one party, mediated by an elite cadre of highly qualified technocrats, guided this socio-economic transformation. The model is one of planned development, what Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew refers to as "a step-by-step approach" where no aspect of social or political life is left to chance. Indeed, successful planning ultimately justified the rule of the autocratic generals or quasi-Leninist parties that governed post-colonial Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

This meticulously planned development, moreover, was supplemented ideologically by selectively re-invented "Asian values" in order to maintain the political stability central to export-led growth. These values, inculcated overtly in state education programs and mass media campaigns, emphasize community rather than autonomy, and conformity to rational rule rather than tolerance of pluralistic interests. It is claimed that specifically Asian practices of legalistic bureaucracy--Confucian hierarchy, harmonious balance, gotong royong (cooperation), and non-contentious consensus building in general--explain both Pacific Asian economic dynamism and social order.

It is, moreover, the middle classes in these nation-building states that are most exposed to these values, both in their state education and in their subsequent careers. Indeed, it is the ruling party in its various guises as government employer, political machine, and entrepreneur that remains the primary source of middle class employment in contemporary South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. This anxious pursuit of state dependency is even more evident in the moderately Islamized polities of Malaysia and Indonesia. In Malaysia, for instance, the ethnic Malay or bumiputera middle class has flourished...