1988.03 远东 亚洲杂志

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The Far East: Asian Journal
Scenes from a debate between Lee Kuan Yew and William Safire, and a look at the racial troubles of Malaysia

By James Fallows
MARCH 1988 ISSUE
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ISOMETIMES WONDER what it was like to be an American in Asia in the decade after the Second World War, when Douglas MacArthur was emperor. It must have been different from the way it feels now.

On a cold night this winter I was having dinner in a little shabu-shabu place in the Ginza with three Japanese friends. They were paying for the meal, of course. Before dinner I’d treated them to a round of beers in a hotel lobby, and then discovered that beers were $7.90 apiece. The previous day, when I’d changed money at the airport, my dollar had bought 126-point-something yen, half as many as in the fall of 1985. That morning the Japan Times reported that university students were collecting old clothing for relief donations to foreigners living in Japan.


When dinner was over, we stepped out of the restaurant into a twisting alleyway and were engulfed by a sea of prosperous-looking Japanese businessmen. They were red-faced from whiskey and sake, but they surged purposefully forward, breath steaming in the frosty air. As we turned a corner, I saw a bedraggled-looking vendor, with matted black hair, standing on the sidewalk, wearing a grimy ski jacket. He was selling cheap puppets, dogs and monkeys that did funny dances when you pulled the strings. This looks familiar, I thought—he was like the pathetic characters who come into American restaurants and try to shame you into buying flowers while you dine. He had been looking down while he worked the puppets, but as I passed by he happened to look up at me. I glanced back, and then stopped dead in my tracks. “Hi,” he said. He was an American. Then he said, or maybe I just thought he did, “Buddy, you’re next.”

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No doubt I’m taking this all too personally and irrationally. When my Japanese friends saw how (and why) the blood had drained from my face, they started laughing so hard they had to lean on one another to keep from toppling over into the gutter. I know perfectly well that having a strong currency is not the same thing as having a successful society, that the yen’s stupendous rise is largely speculative and therefore not really a verdict of doom on America, and that even now there are places (Korea) where the dollar remains so mighty that the stores seem to be giving everything away free. There are other places (the Philippines) where the United States still seems too influential and all-competent, as it must have seemed everywhere forty years ago.


Still, in the twenty-one months I’ve spent so far in Asia, which have coincided with the dollar’s collapse against the yen, I’ve often felt as if I were living through a dramatic shift in international power—or, more precisely, through what people on this side of the Pacific view as such a change. I’ve taken on enough of this attitude myself that sometimes I’m afraid to come home, for fear that I’ll start lecturing strangers about the Japanese and the Koreans, or walking around in sackcloth with a placard saying, THE END IS NIGH.

THESE FEARS WERE reawakened by a conference late last year, sponsored by the International Herald Tribune and held in Singapore. The Tribune had planned it long in advance, as part of the paper’s worldwide hundredth-anniversary celebration, but it ended up taking place a few weeks after the Black Monday stock-market crash. The official conference theme was stupefying—“Pacific 2000: Prospects and Challenges,” or something of the sort—but the conference itself was engrossing, because most of the talks focused, seemingly without plan, on the theme of the historic shift of power from America to Japan.

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The Thais and the Indonesians talked about how they would get their new investment capital from Tokyo, not New York. Economists from Hong Kong discussed whether or not it was “too soon” to start talking about the “post-American" era. The Japanese speakers shuffled their feet and talked about what they might do with their huge piles of money. Every other phrase out of the Asian speakers’ mouths seemed to be “American decline.”

The most polished of these performances was by the Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. He talked about what Britain’s 150 years of technical-financial-military world leadership had in common with America’s thirtyodd years. Its technical advances allowed Britain to build up trade and investment surpluses around the world; the surpluses financed its military and diplomatic presence; eventually the surpluses went away and the empire had to be scaled back; and so now with America. For a while after the Second World War the United States enjoyed a lead on the rest of the world in its commercial technology, Lee said; but that lead had been lost and would never be regained. American politicians might smash up Japanese radios with sledgehammers (the photograph of congressmen pulverizing Toshibas was published in every newspaper in Japan, and it instantly eliminated the public embarrasstnent about Toshiba’s sales to the Russians, leaving bitter resentment instead), but “the skills, the knowledge, the capacity to dream up the next [product]—that cannot be broken with a sledgehammer.” Japan, at least on paper, already had a higher per capita income than America, and the Japanese “will grow richer because they are more productive, because they have concentrated all their energies, all their R&D on where it would score on the marketplace,” Lee said. “America is not the surplus country, it’s Japan and Germany. It is New York with the expertise but Tokyo and Bonn with the actual cash.” The greatest problem for Americans, he said, was facing up to this shift—accepting, in our guts, that “this is a permanent change in competitive position.”


Now, Lee may have been right and he may have been wrong. Japan’s overall position, relative to America’s, is nowhere near as strong as America’s was relative to Britain’s when New York overtook London as a world financial center, seventy years ago. By that time the U.S. economy was already bigger than Britain’s; the Japanese economy is still only about half the size of America’s. And Japan, of course, has no military power and virtually no diplomatic influence to complement its heaps of cash. What we’re seeing may not be a replacement of American power by Japanese so much as a merger, blend, or balance of the two. Moreover, if Lee wanted to get into a name-calling game about imperfect empires, he would have some foibles of his own to answer for. (Anthropologists love Singapore, because it’s one of the few places on earth where you can see how Chinese society behaves when its members are rich and not subject to some other group’s political control, as they are elsewhere in Southeast Asia.) “What we have here is a traditional Chinese empire,” a non-Chinese Singaporean once told me. “We have our strong leader, whom we view more as emperor than as democratic leader, and we expect that his dynasty will continue as long as he enjoys the mandate of heaven.” The day after Lee Kuan Yew’s speech the conference heard from Lee Hsien Loong, who became Singapore’s youngest brigadier general at age thirtyone and at thirty-six is a Cabinet member and the heir apparent. General Lee gave a speech on the importance of meritocracy. He is Lee Kuan Yew’s eldest son. But Lee, like most of the other Asian speakers at the conference, had obviously spent a lot of time thinking about large-scale changes in national power, and he was trying his best to make an important, unsettling point.

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The job of defending America’s regenerative powers fell to William Safire, of The New York Times. I’ve always enjoyed Satire’s columns, because of their comparative lack of pomposity, and on the platform he embodied the best of a relaxed, confident American style. The Asian speakers wore identical dark salaryman suits and read word for word from pre-released scripts. Safire showed up in a sports coat and light pants, and ad-libbed his way through a very funny lunchtime speech. But by the end of his talk his optimism didn’t seem so reassuring or contagious. Like Ronald Reagan—and like America as a whole, in the Asians’ view—he sounded confident only because he didn’t understand the facts.


Safire told the Asians they should stop paying so much attention to America’s tedious federal deficit and trade problems. Hey, those issues would scoot right out of the headlines once there was another good confirmation fight or primary election to cover. The stock-market crash? People would stop brooding about it once the Republicans got the normal election-year boom going—this, Safire said, was something the American government understood just how to do. And all this talk about “permanent" changes in competitive position was so much hogwash. Did Lee Kuan Yew think America would never again have a fifteen-year lead over the rest of the world? Just watch! All across America, Safire said, youngsters were tinkering with computers, preparing the way not just for new products but for whole new ways of buying, selling, distributing, living. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union couldn’t possibly permit its people such freedom to experiment, since that would mean instant samizdat. Therefore, computers would make America’s lead grow and grow.

Safire was clearly pleased with this smashing rebuttal to Lee Kuan Yew. But around the room people sat with jaw’s agape. The Soviet economy? Was this going to be America’s new benchmark for competitive success? Everybody else in the room knew that also all across Japan, Korea, Singapore, and other points east youngsters were tinkering wdth computers. America’s looseness, creativity, diversity, and so on may give the country a permanent edge in this field, but other countries have other advantages, beginning with Japan’s limitless supply of capital. I’m a big believer in American resilience, and I keep warning Japanese and Chinese that they should not underestimate what the United States can do. (They are tempted to, because so many things that can mean vitality in America—immigration, rapid political change—look like chaos to them.) But the United States tends to show its resilience only when it suddenly realizes that it is in big trouble—remember Pearl Harbor—and if Safire’s dumb complacency is any guide, the realization is going to take a while to arrive.


WHEN I’M ALL WORN out from carrying America’s burdens on my shoulders, I shuck them off and pick up the woes of Malaysia, my current home.

In principle Malaysia is paradise, and in practice it can come close. The country is composed of the bottom half of the Malay peninsula—known in colonial times and in the first few years of independence as Malaya—and the top quarter of the island of Borneo, whose incorporation in 1963 turned the country into Malaysia. (Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore was incorporated at about the same time but split off as a tiny independent state two years later.) If you can live with perpetually hot, equatorial-jungle weather, you can think of it as Eden. “It is a place where there are no seasons to speak of, neither winter nor summer; no wet or dry season, and the sun rises and sets at practically the same time all the year round,”a young pre—First World War Colonel Blimp type named Carveth Wells wrote in Six Years in the Malay Jungle.

The mean shade temperature at sea level (about eighty degrees) has not varied more than about three degrees for a hundred years. . . . Rain falls about two hundred and seventy days in the year but there is scarcely ever a wet day. The weather may be perfectly fine all the morning, then rain nine inches between noon and three o’clock, and be fine again for the evening.

“Nine inches” may be stretching it— the annual rainfall is about a hundred inches—but the impression of timeless, placid lushness is correct.

Like Indonesia and the Philippines, Malaysia is packed with natural resources—tin, petroleum, the right terrain for growing rubber and palm-oil trees. Papayas, bananas, and mangosteens drop from trees in our back yard in Kuala Lumpur faster than we can eat them. But unlike Indonesia’s central island, Java, or the Philippines, Malaysia is lightly populated, with only about 16 million people. Early in the 1980s the government was pushing a nationalgrandeur scheme to breed the population up to 70 million by the end of the century, but the plan has not been in evidence in the year or so my family has lived here. The schools are (relatively) well funded; the roads are modern and smooth. The east coast of peninsular Malaysia has some of the world’s most beautiful white-sand beaches, and there are still large unlogged rain-forest stands. Many people live in primitive backwoods kampungs, or villages, but very few seem really destitute or hardpressed. It’s a nice country. The only unavoidable discontents of daily life come from the humidity and the insidethe-house wildlife. Our colonial-era whitewashed house, with unscreened, unglassed windows, teems with bugs and mosquitoes preying on people, lizards eating the bugs, rats eating whatever they can find, and snakes eating the lizards and rats. My children can now visualize the concept of the food chain. In this fecund atmosphere everything grows so fast that I need a haircut once a week and a shave about six times a day. Recently I threw out a hundred computer floppy disks I’d brought from America. Even they had spawned a coating of mold.

“The place isn’t perfect, but all the big things are right,”a man who I belatedly figured out was the CIA station chief told me soon after I arrived. “The military is professional and out of politics. The police too. The courts are independent. People are used to voting in regular, relatively fair elections. This is saying a lot. ”

Carveth Wells, who left the Malay jungle seventy years ago, would still recognize the topography and the climate, but my friend the CIA man, who departed more recently, might not recognize the political landscape anymore. In the past year Malaysia has gone through a depressing decline of its own.

AT ROOT ALL OI Malaysia’s problems are racial. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when tin mining had yet to begin in earnest, the Malay peninsula was even more lightly populated than it is today. Aboriginal tribes lived in the jungle interior, scattered groups of Malays lived in coastal settlements by the mouths of rivers, and traders from China, Portugal, and elsewhere operated out of the few famous seaports, such as Malacca and Penang. Then, within a few decades, British colonialism, the tin boom, and rubber planting created a totally different ethnic lineup. People poured in from all over—Malays from nearby Sumatra and Java, Chinese from Hunan and elsewhere in southern China, blue-black-skinned Indians from the southern Tamil regions. Malay culture is celebrated for its gentleness and languor, which can be either dignified or exasperating depending on whether you are attending a traditional ceremony or trying to get a check cashed in a Malaysian bank. The British colonialists were mainly exasperated and felt they needed to look beyond the Malays for the manpower to work the tin mines and staff the colonial sub-bureaucracy—thus the officially sponsored importation of Indians and Chinese. (“Work is about the last thing a Malay wants,”the irrepressible Carveth Wells announced.) Although the interpretation of past migrations can be an extremely sensitive and politically weighted subject in Malaysia, the low pre-colonial population seems to indicate that most Malaysians are descended from people who came from someplace else during the past hundred years. As the Malays see it, however, only they are the original inhabitants, since their journey was the shortest and since Malay kingdoms had historically held sway over the peninsula. Malays call themselves bumiputera, or “sons of the soil.” Everyone else is pendatang, “immigrant.”

The mixture of races is potentially the most admirable thing about Malaysia. Officially the country believes in racial coexistence, and in many small ways the amalgamation looks successful. A typical row of shops will have signs in Bahasa Malaysia (“Language of Malaysia,” or Malay), Chinese, English, and, less frequently, Tamil. We have a mosque and a small Chinese shrine near our house; our Indian landlord keeps talking about erecting a Hindu shrine in our yard. Each race’s religious festivals are public holidays, which gives a constant festival feeling to local life. A heavy-handed “unity” campaign is now under way on TV, in which every commercial and public-service announcement is supposed to have the right mixture of Indian, Chinese, and Malay faces in smiling harmony.

Unofficially, and in large ways, things don’t work out so well. No Asian society is truly enthusiastic about the meltingpot ideal, and many Malaysians, especially Malays, feel sorry for themselves because fate (plus the British) has placed other races in their midst. At a dinner last summer I asked the wife of a prominent official whether it might be more graceful for Malaysia to let some other country lead the “non-aligned” bloc’s denunciations of South African apartheid. After all, a large number of Malaysian laws grant people different legal privileges on purely racial grounds. Malaysian discrimination is not remotely as vicious or unfair as South Africa’s, but still, why give the South Africans this debating-point edge? The woman erupted: as a non-Malavsian I could not possibly understand how difficult the country’s problems were, I had no idea what a challenge it was to have people from different cultures living in the same society.

The Indian Malaysians, who make up about 10 percent of the population, are on the sidelines of the main struggle, between the Malays and the Chinese. The “overseas Chinese,” as the émigrés in Southeast Asia are known, make up the world’s most skillful and aggressive merchant culture. (This may seem too sweeping an assertion, but see if you can find anyone who’s lived in Asia who disagrees.) Wherever they’ve settled, they’ve encountered—or created, in the non-Chinese view—resentment from less aggressive local groups. Thailand, whose culture is generally sweet-tempered, seems to have absorbed them more successfully than any of its neighbors. In Indonesia, where there are only a handful of Chinese, they must adapt or be crushed. But in Malaysia the Chinese make up 35 to 40 percent of the population. This is enough to make them unignorable, but in the polarized racial politics of Malaysia it has not been enough to persuade the Malays, who make up about half the population, to give them even a tiny share of political power, which the Malays monopolize.

IT IS DIFFICULT to determine howmuch of Malaysia’s racial problem arises from deep-seated person-to-person hostility and how much has been trumped up by political leaders. There is evidence on both sides. On the one hand, it takes the average Chinese Malaysian about five seconds to begin complaining about anti-Chinese discrimination and the anti-work ethic among Malays. On the other hand, the country’s Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, is a touchy, chip-on-theshoulder character who first came to prominence with a racial-consciousness tract and seems to have a talent for setting groups against one another.

Mahathir’s famous book, The Malay Dilemma, is an absolutely astonishing document. It was published in 1969, shortly after race riots occurred in which several hundred people, mostly Chinese, were slaughtered. It argued that Darwinian selection had made the Chinese fundamentally more capable than the Malays (remember, Mahathir is the Malays’ champion), so in any fair competition between the groups the Chinese would win. Life in China had been hard for thousands of years, with famines and floods, so the Chinese who survived were the hardiest of all. Meanwhile, life in the lush Malayan jungle, with fruit dropping constantly from the trees, had been so easy that “even the weakest and the least diligent were able to live in comparative comfort, to marry and procreate.” When these two groups came into contact, Mahathir said, the results were inevitable. “The Malays, whose own hereditary and environmental influence had been so debilitating, could do nothing but retreat before the onslaught of the Chinese immigrants. Whatever the Malays could do, the Chinese could do better.” As a result of this inherent difference in fitness, Mahathir argued, “fair” competition couldn’t be fair. In office he has resolutely supported the New Economic Policy, a sweeping, decades-long program of pro-bumiputera quotas and affirmative-action requirements. For instance, there are now about 20,000 Malaysians studying at American colleges, making up the second-largest bloc of foreign students in America, after Taiwanese. Those on Malaysian government scholarships are Malay; Chinese or Indians have to pay their own way. I’ve seen newspaper ads offering government-subsidized mortgages at one rate for bumiputeras and a higher rate for non-bumis.

Several factors other than the straightforward racial tension have contributed to the recent decline that I mentioned, and to the political crackdown, which began last winter, that is the visible evidence of this decline. The most important was a power struggle within Mahathir’s own permanent ruling party, the Lnited Malays National Organization (or UMNO), which left Mahathir imperiled and tempted him to make a preemptive strike against his opponents. The Chinese were alarmed by a schoolsystem change that they thought threatened the future of Mandarin-language education. The continuing slump in tin and rubber prices kept the economy depressed. Politicians from both the Chinese and Malay camps struck combative poses. Everyone started talking about “another May 13,” the date of the antiChinese riots in 1969—especially after an AWOL, Malay soldier went amok and started machine-gunning people in downtown Kuala Lumpur. (Fortunately for everyone except the victims, they were all Malay.) Then Mahathir lowered the boom.

By the standards of, say, East Germany or Uganda, what has happened here is nothing to get worked up about. Mahathir threw about a hundred people in jail without trial, including most of the Chinese political leadership, a few nettlesome opponents from the Malay side, and several respected private and religious activists. By Christmastime he’d released fifty-five detainees but announced that thirty-three others, including most of the Chinese opposition leadership, would be held for a further two years, without trial. International human-rights groups began agitating about the conditions of their confinement— some of the detainees were allegedly being held alone and in the dark, without medicines or anything to read, isolated from their families. Little was heard of this dispute inside Malaysia, because the only newspapers still allowed to operate were the lickspittle publications controlled by UMNO. Mahathir described his new policy as “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” and he quickly rammed through a new press law to show what he meant. The new law gives him unlimited and arbitrary powers to ban any publication and arrest any writer or public figure for making “untrue” remarks. More significant, it says that such decisions cannot be reviewed or challenged by anyone else, including the courts. To Americans who can barely tell Malaysia from Mongolia, this might seem par for the course in the tyrannical Third World. But only a year ago Malaysia prided itself on its honest, intelligent, independent judiciary. (In 1986 the government expelled two Wall Street Journal reporters who’d been investigating highlevel corruption; the courts overturned the riding and let them back in.) Malaysia’s most revered figure, the eightyfive-year-old Tunku Abdul Rahman, who led the country to independence and was its first Prime Minister, said in December that “Malaysia has been made a police state.” His words were carried in foreign papers but censored in Malaysia itself.


I suppose Mahathir’s clampdown must be judged a success, at least tor now. A few months after the arrests began, the atmosphere does seem calmer than it was immediately before he acted. A few people talk about the detainees, but more seem relieved that someone, somehow, broke the momentum that seemed to be leading to outright racial conflict. The foreign experts I’ve spoken with are divided: a few predict that five years from now Malaysia will be a full-fledged tyranny, but most say that this is a temporary rough spot on the road to happier times.

When I’m in my age-of-decline mood, I Find myself agreeing with the pessimists. I feel lobotomized each morning when I pick up the remaining Englishlanguage paper, the UMNO mouthpiece New Straits Times, and see headlines like “DR. M’S COURAGE PRAISED” and “STOP THE COMPLAINING.” No, this is not Russia or the domain of the thought police, but the government’s treatment of the people, through the managed news it serves up, reveals a deep contempt for their intelligence and judgment. A case can be made—and has been, both by Mahathir and by Lee Kuan Yew—that complaints about the muffled press reflect an effete, exclusively Western sensibility. Asian societies, they say, do not like the turmoil of a truly free, “American-style” (usually said with curled lip) press, and developing countries can’t afford anything that might undercut national unity. It’s true that most Asian cultures disdain the unbridled argument that many Westerners enjoy. Still, I think too highly of my Malaysian friends to believe that they appreciate the pap that now constitutes their news. Koreans, after all, are Asians too, and they have rejoiced during the past year at their first chance to read a more-or-less free press.

The value of free debate, for everyone, is one of the things that the United States can stand for. Upholding that value is one more reason to regain our strength.

—James Fallows

James Fallows is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and author of the newsletter Breaking the News. He was chief White House speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, and is a co-founder, with his wife, Deborah Fallows, of the Our Towns Civic Foundation.



远东。亚洲杂志
李光耀和威廉-萨菲尔之间的辩论场景，以及对马来西亚种族问题的观察

作者：詹姆斯-法洛斯
1988年3月号
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有时会想，在第二次世界大战后的十年里，当道格拉斯-麦克阿瑟还是皇帝的时候，在亚洲做一个美国人是什么样子。它一定与现在的感觉不同。

今年冬天的一个寒冷的夜晚，我和三个日本朋友在银座的一家小涮锅店吃饭。当然，这顿饭是他们付的钱。在吃饭之前，我请他们在一个酒店大堂喝了一轮啤酒，然后发现啤酒是7.9美元一杯。前一天，当我在机场换钱时，我的美元买了126点左右的日元，比1985年秋天的一半还要多。那天早上，《日本时报》报道说，大学生们正在收集旧衣服，以便向居住在日本的外国人提供救济。


晚餐结束后，我们走出餐厅，来到一条曲折的小巷，被一群看起来很富裕的日本商人所吞没。他们被威士忌和清酒弄得满脸通红，但他们有目的地向前涌动，呼吸在冰冷的空气中蒸腾。当我们转过一个街角时，我看到一个看起来很憔悴的小贩，他的头发已经枯黄，站在人行道上，穿着一件肮脏的滑雪夹克。他在卖廉价的木偶，狗和猴子，当你拉动绳索时，它们会跳一些有趣的舞蹈。这看起来很熟悉，我想，他就像那些进入美国餐馆，在你用餐时试图羞辱你买花的可悲人物。他在操作木偶时一直低着头，但当我经过时，他偶然抬头看了我一眼。我回头看了一眼，然后在我的脚下停了下来。"嗨，"他说。他是一个美国人。然后他说，或者也许我只是认为他说了，"巴迪，你是下一个。"

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毫无疑问，我把这一切看得太个人化和非理性了。当我的日本朋友看到我脸上的血是如何（以及为什么）流出来的时候，他们开始大笑，以至于不得不相互依靠，以免翻到阴沟里去。我非常清楚，拥有强大的货币与拥有一个成功的社会是两回事，日元的大幅上涨主要是投机性的，因此并不真正是对美国的厄运判决，即使现在有些地方（韩国）的美元仍然如此强大，以至于商店似乎在免费赠送一切。在另一些地方（菲律宾），美国似乎仍有很大的影响力，而且无所不能，就像四十年前它在所有地方看起来一样。


不过，在我迄今为止在亚洲度过的21个月中，恰逢美元对日元的崩溃，我经常感觉到，我仿佛是在经历一场国际力量的巨大转变，或者更准确地说，经历太平洋这边的人们所认为的这种转变。我自己已经有了足够的这种态度，以至于有时我不敢回家，因为我担心自己会开始向陌生人讲授日本人和韩国人，或者穿着麻衣拿着标语牌走来走去，说：末日到了。

去年年底，由《国际先驱论坛报》主办、在新加坡举行的一次会议重新唤醒了这些恐惧。论坛报》提前很久就计划好了，作为该报全球百周年庆祝活动的一部分，但会议最终还是在黑色星期一股票市场崩溃后几周举行。官方会议的主题令人目瞪口呆--"太平洋2000年。前景与挑战 "或类似的主题，但会议本身却很吸引人，因为大多数会谈都集中在权力从美国向日本的历史性转移这一主题上，似乎没有计划。

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泰国人和印度尼西亚人谈论了他们如何从东京而不是纽约获得新的投资资本。来自香港的经济学家讨论了现在开始谈论 "后美国 "时代是否 "太早"。说话的日本人洗了洗脚，谈论他们可能用他们的巨额资金做什么。从亚洲人嘴里说出的每一句话似乎都是 "美国的衰落"。

新加坡总理李光耀的表演是最有水平的。他谈到了英国150年来在技术-金融-军事方面的世界领先地位与美国三十多年来的共同点。其技术进步使英国在世界各地建立了贸易和投资盈余；这些盈余为其军事和外交存在提供了资金；最终盈余消失了，帝国不得不缩减规模；现在美国也是如此。李说，在第二次世界大战后的一段时间里，美国在商业技术方面领先于世界其他国家；但这种领先优势已经丧失，而且永远不会恢复。美国政客可能会用大锤砸碎日本的收音机（国会议员砸碎东芝的照片被刊登在日本的每一份报纸上，它立即消除了公众对东芝向俄国人销售的尴尬，而留下了痛苦的怨恨），但 "技能、知识、梦想下一个[产品]的能力--这不是用大锤可以砸碎的。" 日本，至少在纸面上，已经拥有比美国更高的人均收入，而日本人 "将变得更加富有，因为他们的生产力更高，因为他们把所有的精力、所有的研发都集中在能在市场上取得成绩的地方"，李说。"美国不是过剩国家，是日本和德国。是纽约拥有专业知识，但东京和波恩拥有实际的现金。" 他说，美国人最大的问题是面对这种转变--在我们的内心接受 "这是竞争地位的永久变化"。


现在，李可能是对的，也可能是错的。日本的整体地位，相对于美国来说，远没有七十年前纽约超越伦敦成为世界金融中心时美国相对于英国的地位那么强。那时，美国的经济规模已经超过了英国；日本的经济规模仍然只有美国的一半左右。当然，日本没有军事力量，也几乎没有外交影响力来补充其成堆的现金。我们看到的可能不是美国的力量被日本取代，而是两者的合并、融合或平衡。此外，如果李显龙想对不完美的帝国进行骂战，他自己也会有一些缺点需要回答。(人类学家喜欢新加坡，因为它是地球上为数不多的地方之一，在那里你可以看到中国社会在其成员富有而不受其他团体的政治控制时的表现，就像他们在东南亚其他地方那样）。"我们在这里拥有的是一个传统的中华帝国，"一个非华人的新加坡人曾经告诉我。"我们有我们强大的领导人，我们更多地把他看作是皇帝，而不是民主领导人，我们期望只要他享有上天的授权，他的王朝就会继续下去。" 在李光耀演讲的第二天，会议听取了李显龙的发言，他在31岁时成为新加坡最年轻的准将，36岁时成为内阁成员和继承人。李将军发表了关于任人唯贤的重要性的演讲。他是李光耀的长子。但李将军和会议上其他大多数亚洲演讲者一样，显然花了很多时间思考国家权力的大规模变化，他在尽力提出一个重要的、令人不安的观点。

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为美国的再生能力辩护的工作落在了《纽约时报》的威廉-萨菲尔身上。我一直很喜欢萨蒂尔的专栏，因为他们相对来说缺乏浮夸，而在讲台上，他体现了轻松、自信的美国风格的精华。亚洲演讲者穿着相同的深色工薪族西装，一字一句地念着事先发布的稿子。萨菲尔身穿运动服和浅色裤子出现，在午餐时以广告语的方式发表了非常有趣的演讲。但在演讲结束时，他的乐观主义似乎并不那么令人放心或具有感染力。在亚洲人看来，他和罗纳德-里根一样，也和整个美国一样，听起来很自信，只是因为他不了解事实。


萨菲尔告诉亚洲人，他们应该停止对美国乏味的联邦赤字和贸易问题的关注。嘿，一旦有另一场精彩的确认之战或初选可以报道，这些问题就会从头条新闻中消失。股票市场崩溃？萨菲尔说，一旦共和党在选举年获得正常的繁荣，人们就不会再纠结于此--萨菲尔说，这是美国政府知道如何做的事情。所有这些关于竞争地位的 "永久 "变化的讨论都是胡说八道。难道李光耀认为美国永远不会再有领先世界其他国家15年的机会？看着吧! 萨菲尔说，在整个美国，年轻人都在摆弄电脑，不仅为新产品，而且为全新的购买、销售、分配和生活方式做准备。与此同时，苏联不可能允许其人民有这样的自由来进行试验，因为这将意味着即时的同传。因此，计算机将使美国的领先地位不断扩大。

萨菲尔显然对这个对李光耀的有力反驳感到高兴。但房间里的人都瞠目结舌地坐着。苏联的经济？这将是美国竞争成功的新基准吗？房间里的其他人都知道，在日本、韩国、新加坡和其他东方国家，年轻人也在摆弄电脑。美国的松散性、创造性、多样性等可能使该国在这一领域具有永久的优势，但其他国家也有其他优势，首先是日本无限的资本供应。我非常相信美国的复原力，而且我一直警告日本和中国，他们不应该低估美国的能力。(他们很想这样做，因为许多在美国可能意味着活力的事情--移民、快速的政治变化--在他们看来是混乱的）。但是，美国往往只有在突然意识到它有大麻烦的时候才会显示出它的复原力--记得珍珠港事件--如果萨菲尔的愚蠢自满是任何指南的话，这种意识将需要一段时间才能到来。


当我把美国的负担扛在肩上而疲惫不堪的时候，我就把它们卸下来，拿起我现在的家--马来西亚的苦难。

原则上，马来西亚是天堂，而实际上它可以接近天堂。这个国家由马来半岛的下半部分组成，在殖民时期和独立后的最初几年被称为马来亚，以及婆罗洲岛的上四分之一，婆罗洲岛在1963年被并入马来西亚，使这个国家成为马来西亚。(李光耀的新加坡也是在同一时间并入的，但两年后分裂成一个独立的小国。） 如果你能忍受长期炎热的赤道丛林天气，你可以把它当作伊甸园。"这是一个没有季节可言的地方，既没有冬天也没有夏天；没有雨季或旱季，太阳全年几乎都在同一时间升起和落下，"一位年轻的一战前的飞艇上校型人物卡维斯-韦尔斯在《马来丛林六年》中写道。

海平面上的平均阴凉温度（约80度）一百年来变化不超过三度。. . 一年中大约有二百七十天下雨，但几乎没有潮湿的一天。天气可能整个上午都很好，然后在中午和三点钟之间下九英寸的雨，晚上又很好。

"9英寸 "可能有点夸张--年降雨量约为100英寸--但对永恒的、平和的茂盛印象是正确的。

像印度尼西亚和菲律宾一样，马来西亚拥有丰富的自然资源--锡、石油、适合种植橡胶和棕榈油树的地势。在吉隆坡，木瓜、香蕉和山竹从我们后院的树上掉下来的速度比我们吃的还快。但与印度尼西亚的中部岛屿爪哇或菲律宾不同，马来西亚人口稀少，只有约1600万人口。在20世纪80年代初，政府正在推动一项国家宏伟计划，以便在本世纪末将人口繁殖到7000万，但在我们家住在这里的一年多时间里，这个计划并没有出现过。学校的资金（相对）充足；道路现代而通畅。马来西亚半岛的东海岸有一些世界上最美丽的白沙海滩，而且仍有大片未砍伐的雨林。许多人生活在原始的落后的甘榜（kampungs）或村庄，但很少有人看起来真的很穷或很困难。这是个不错的国家。日常生活中唯一不可避免的不满来自于潮湿和屋内的野生动物。我们的殖民时代的白墙房子，窗户没有遮挡，没有玻璃，到处都是捕食人的虫子和蚊子，蜥蜴吃虫子，老鼠吃它们能找到的任何东西，蛇吃蜥蜴和老鼠。我的孩子们现在可以想象出食物链的概念。在这种富饶的氛围中，一切都生长得如此之快，以至于我每周都要理一次发，每天要刮六次脸。最近我扔掉了从美国带来的一百张电脑软盘。即使是它们也已经生出了一层霉菌。

"这个地方并不完美，但所有的大事情都是正确的，"一个我后来才知道是中情局站长的人在我到达后不久告诉我。"军队很专业，不参与政治。警察也是如此。法院是独立的。人们习惯于在定期的、相对公平的选举中投票。这说明了很多问题。"

七十年前离开马来丛林的Carveth Wells仍能认出这里的地形和气候，但我的朋友，也就是最近才离开的CIA人员，可能已经认不出这里的政治景观了。在过去的一年里，马来西亚经历了一场令人沮丧的自身衰落。

从根本上说，马来西亚的所有问题都是种族问题。在19世纪中期，当锡矿开采还没有真正开始的时候，马来半岛的人口甚至比今天还要少。原住民部落生活在丛林内部，零星的马来人居住在河口的沿海定居点，来自中国、葡萄牙和其他地方的商人在马六甲和槟城等几个著名的海港经营。然后，在几十年内，英国殖民主义、锡业繁荣和橡胶种植创造了一个完全不同的民族阵容。人们从各地涌入，有来自附近苏门答腊和爪哇的马来人，有来自湖南和中国南部其他地方的华人，有来自南部泰米尔地区的蓝黑皮肤的印度人。马来文化以其温和和慵懒而闻名，这可以是庄重的，也可以是令人气愤的，这取决于你是在参加一个传统的仪式，还是试图在马来西亚银行兑现一张支票。英国殖民主义者主要是被激怒了，他们认为他们需要在马来人之外寻找人力来开采锡矿和为殖民地的次级官僚机构配备人员--因此官方赞助进口了印度人和中国人。("工作是马来人最不想要的东西，"不可抗拒的Carveth Wells宣布。) 虽然对过去移民的解释在马来西亚是一个极其敏感和具有政治色彩的话题，但殖民前的低人口似乎表明，大多数马来西亚人是在过去一百年中来自其他地方的人的后代。然而，在马来人看来，只有他们才是原始居民，因为他们的旅程是最短的，而且马来王国在历史上一直掌握着半岛的统治权。马来人称自己为bumiputera，或 "土地之子"。其他所有人都是pendatang，"移民"。

种族的混合可能是马来西亚最令人钦佩的地方。从官方角度来说，这个国家相信种族共存，而且在许多小方面，这种融合看起来很成功。一排典型的商店会有马来语（"马来西亚的语言 "或马来语）、中文、英文和泰米尔语（不太常见）的标志。我们家附近有一座清真寺和一个小型的华人祠堂；我们的印度房东一直在说要在我们的院子里建立一个印度教的祠堂。每个种族的宗教节日都是公共假期，这让当地的生活始终充满了节日的感觉。现在电视上正在进行一场强硬的 "团结 "运动，每一个商业和公共服务公告都应该有适当的印度人、中国人和马来人的面孔混合在一起，面带微笑的和谐。

在非官方的情况下，在很大程度上，事情并不那么顺利。没有一个亚洲社会真正热衷于大熔炉的理想，许多马来西亚人，特别是马来人，因为命运（加上英国人）将其他种族放在他们中间而感到遗憾。在去年夏天的一次晚宴上，我问一位著名官员的妻子，如果让其他国家领导 "不结盟 "集团对南非种族隔离制度的谴责，马来西亚是否会更有风度。毕竟，马来西亚的大量法律纯粹是以种族为由给予人们不同的法律特权。马来西亚的歧视远没有南非的歧视那么恶毒或不公平，但是，为什么还是要给南非人这个辩论点的优势？这位女士爆发了：作为一个非马来西亚人，我不可能理解这个国家的问题有多困难，我不知道来自不同文化的人生活在同一个社会中是多么大的挑战。

占人口约10%的印度裔马来西亚人，在马来人和中国人之间的主要斗争中处于旁观地位。东南亚的移民被称为 "海外华人"，他们构成了世界上最有技巧和最具侵略性的商人文化。(这似乎是一个过于笼统的断言，但看看你是否能找到任何在亚洲生活过的人不同意。） 无论他们在哪里定居，他们都会遇到--或者在非中国人看来--来自于不那么好斗的当地群体的不满。泰国的文化通常是温和的，它似乎比任何一个邻国都更成功地吸收了他们。在印度尼西亚，只有少数几个中国人，他们必须适应，否则就会被击垮。但在马来西亚，华人占人口的35%至40%。这足以让他们变得无足轻重，但在马来西亚两极分化的种族政治中，这还不足以说服占人口一半的马来人，让他们在马来人垄断的政治权力中占有哪怕是很小的份额。

要确定马来西亚的种族问题有多少是来自根深蒂固的人与人之间的敌意，有多少是由政治领导人捏造出来的，这是很困难的。两方面的证据都有。一方面，普通的马来西亚华人只需要五秒钟就可以开始抱怨反华歧视和马来人的反工作伦理。另一方面，该国总理马哈蒂尔-本-穆罕默德博士是一个易怒的、肩上有筹码的人物，他最初是以种族意识的小册子而崭露头角的，而且似乎有让各群体相互对立的才能。

马哈蒂尔的名作《马来人的窘境》是一份绝对令人震惊的文件。该书出版于1969年，在种族骚乱发生后不久，几百人被屠杀，其中大部分是华人。它认为达尔文的选择使中国人从根本上比马来人更有能力（记住，马哈蒂尔是马来人的冠军），所以在两个群体之间的任何公平竞争中，中国人都会获胜。几千年来，中国的生活一直很艰难，有饥荒和洪水，所以活下来的中国人是最顽强的。同时，马来亚丛林的生活是如此轻松，树上的水果不断掉落，"即使是最弱小和最不勤奋的人也能生活得相对舒适，结婚和生育"。马哈蒂尔说，当这两个群体接触到时，结果是不可避免的。"马来人，他们自己的遗传和环境影响是如此衰弱，在中国移民的冲击面前，他们只能退缩。无论马来人做什么，中国人都能做得更好"。马哈蒂尔认为，由于这种内在的体能差异，"公平 "的竞争不可能是公平的。在执政期间，他坚决支持新经济政策，这是一项长达数十年的支持黑人的配额和肯定行动要求的全面计划。例如，现在有大约20,000名马来西亚人在美国大学学习，成为美国第二大外国学生群体，仅次于台湾人。那些获得马来西亚政府奖学金的人是马来人；中国人或印度人必须自己付钱。我看到报纸上的广告，提供政府补贴的抵押贷款，对bumiputeras有一个利率，对非bumis有一个更高的利率。

除了直接的种族紧张关系外，还有几个因素导致了我提到的最近的衰落，以及去年冬天开始的政治镇压，这就是这种衰落的明显证据。最重要的是马哈蒂尔自己的永久执政党--马来人联合民族组织（简称巫统）内部的权力斗争，这使得马哈蒂尔岌岌可危，并诱使他对对手进行先发制人的打击。中国人对学校系统的变化感到震惊，他们认为这威胁到了普通话教育的未来。锡和橡胶价格的持续低迷使经济不景气。中国和马来阵营的政治家们都摆出了战斗的姿态。每个人都开始谈论 "另一个5月13日"，即1969年反华暴乱的日子--特别是在一名擅离职守的马来士兵在吉隆坡市中心用机枪扫射人们之后。(幸运的是，除了受害者之外，所有人都是马来人。)然后马哈蒂尔降低了繁荣程度。

以东德或乌干达的标准来看，这里发生的事情并不值得大惊小怪。马哈蒂尔未经审判就把大约一百人关进了监狱，其中包括大部分华人政治领导层、马来人方面的几个棘手的反对者，以及几个受人尊敬的私人和宗教活动家。到了圣诞节，他释放了55名被拘留者，但宣布其他33人，包括大多数中国反对派领导人，将再被关押两年，不进行审判。国际人权组织开始对他们的监禁条件进行抗议--据称一些被拘留者被单独关押在黑暗中，没有药品或任何读物，与家人隔绝。在马来西亚，人们很少听说这场争论，因为唯一被允许经营的报纸是由巫统控制的小报。马哈蒂尔将他的新政策描述为 "不再是好好先生"，并迅速通过了一项新的新闻法来表明他的意思。这部新法律赋予他无限和任意的权力，以禁止任何出版物，并逮捕任何发表 "不真实 "言论的作家或公众人物。更重要的是，它说这种决定不能由任何人，包括法院来审查或质疑。对于几乎分不清马来西亚和蒙古的美国人来说，这似乎是专制的第三世界的常规做法。但就在一年前，马来西亚还以其诚实、聪明、独立的司法机构为荣。(1986年，政府驱逐了两名调查高层腐败的《华尔街日报》记者；法院推翻了这一判决，让他们重新进入。） 马来西亚最令人尊敬的人物，八十五岁的东姑-阿卜杜勒-拉赫曼（Tunku Abdul Rahman），领导国家独立并担任第一任总理，在12月说，"马来西亚已经成为一个警察国家。" 他的话被外国报纸转载，但在马来西亚本土却被审查。


我想马哈蒂尔的镇压必须被判定为成功，至少现在是这样。逮捕行动开始几个月后，气氛确实比他采取行动前要平静一些。少数人谈到了被拘留者，但更多人似乎松了一口气，因为有人以某种方式打破了似乎会导致公然的种族冲突的势头。与我交谈过的外国专家意见不一：少数人预测五年后马来西亚将成为一个成熟的暴政国家，但大多数人说这是通往幸福时代道路上的一个暂时的粗糙点。

当我处于衰退期的时候，我发现自己同意悲观主义者的观点。每天早上，当我拿起剩下的一份英文报纸--巫统喉舌《新海峡时报》，看到诸如 "DR. M's COURAGE PRAISED "和 "STOP THE COMPLAINING"（停止抱怨）。不，这不是俄罗斯或思想警察的领域，但政府对待人民的态度，通过它提供的管理新闻，显示出对人民的智慧和判断力的深深蔑视。马哈蒂尔和李光耀都可以提出这样的理由，即对被压制的新闻的抱怨反映了一种陈腐的、完全是西方的感觉。他们说，亚洲社会不喜欢真正自由的、"美国式的"（通常是弯着嘴说的）新闻界的动荡，而发展中国家不能承受任何可能破坏国家团结的事情。诚然，大多数亚洲文化不屑于许多西方人喜欢的肆意争论。不过，我对我的马来西亚朋友的评价太高了，我不相信他们会欣赏现在构成他们的新闻的那些狗屁。韩国人毕竟也是亚洲人，在过去的一年里，他们为第一次有机会阅读或多或少自由的新闻而感到高兴。

自由辩论的价值，对每个人来说，都是美国可以支持的事情之一。维护这一价值是我们重新获得力量的另一个理由。

詹姆斯-法洛斯

詹姆斯-法洛斯是《大西洋》杂志的特约撰稿人，同时也是通讯《新闻大爆炸》的作者。他曾是吉米-卡特总统的白宫演讲稿撰写人，并与他的妻子黛博拉-法洛斯共同创办了我们的城镇公民基金会。