Silent Revolution ...

THINK-TANK
The silent revolution in my backyard

By Ho Kwon Ping

(With thanks to Straits Times) Jan 19, 2011

I HAVE learnt through travel. One of the few commonalities between my peripatetic, backpacking student days, my life as a regional economics journalist, and my current travels as chief executive of Banyan Tree is the importance of seeing first- hand new lands and new peoples, and through interactions and observations, learning not only about them but perhaps more importantly, also about myself.

I have just returned home from two weeks in South America. Though I know little of this vast continent, it wasn't the exotic wildlife of the Amazon or the rugged, windswept Patagonian wilderness that ignited my imagination as a youth.

Instead, while backpacking through Java and Kelantan, I had devoured the books by and of guerilla leader Che Guevara. I had been inspired by his Motorcycle Diaries - about the young, pre-revolutionary medical student's discovery of the Pan-American dream - to discover my own roots in a Pan-Asian heritage.

Studying development economics in university, I came across the writings of South American thinkers who decried their neo-colonial relationship with North American capitalism. Their theories and prescriptions for change informed much of my own thinking as a journalist writing about development in Asia. Sociological theories about 'primate cities' (Sao Paulo and Jakarta) or 'tertiary involution' (roadside flower sellers in Bangkok or shoeshine boys in Buenos Aires) seemed relevant to all underdeveloped societies, even if separated by thousands of miles.
And so I was keen to visit this continent which I had read so much about but had never visited. Armed with the appropriate economics statistics and Economic Development Board-type brochures soliciting foreign investors, I was intrigued by the similarities between my part of the world and South America. There are 10 countries in Asean and 12 in South America. The two largest countries in each region - Indonesia and Brazil - are, in terms of population size, ranked fourth and fifth respectively in the world.

But with a population of only two-thirds Asean's 600 million people, South America's total gross domestic product (GDP) is 50 per cent greater than Asean's US$1.8 trillion (S$2.3 trillion). At least statistically, the 'average' South American is richer than the 'average' Asean citizen, with a per capita GDP of US$7,000 compared to Asean's US$3,000.

Interesting facts, but I admit that upon embarking on the trip - part business fact-finding, part family trekking holiday to Patagonia - I also had another, more personal mission, which could perhaps be half-whimsically entitled In Search Of Che And The Third World.

But search as I did, the only images of Che I could find were the ubiquitous T-shirts and plastic mugs in tourist shops. The greatest insult was a nightclub with his striking neon-lit visage blinking on and off. Che's ideological legacy, however, has survived his military execution four decades ago.

Ms Dilma Rousseff, the just-inaugurated Brazilian President was once a guerilla leader and admirer of Che, as was her widely admired predecessor 'Lula', former labour leader Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. Che's selfless, almost romantic idealism also inspired generations of South American youth, including the thousands who died anonymously during the dark years of military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina.

But what about his political dreams?

As a university student in the 1970s, I thought that mankind lived in three separate worlds. The First was, of course, the rich white man's. The Second was the Soviet-led bloc. And the Third was a motley collection of countries, all generally lumped under the rubric of non-aligned.
The term 'Third World' was first coined in the 1950s by French historian Alfred Sauvy. Alluding to the commoners of the Third Estate who had rebelled against the priests of the First Estate and the nobles of the Second during the French Revolution, he had called on the newly independent, impoverished former colonies of the world to assert their own identity.

'Like the third estate, the Third World is nothing, and wants to be something,' he remarked. It was like a rallying cry in the historic Bandung Conference of 1955, which created an Afro-Asian alliance of the non-aligned.

South America was considered to be part of the Third World. Yet it had many contradictions: Its nations became independent many decades before the Afro-Asian countries did, but they were still ruled by the white ruling elite with the native population considered a lower class. Their economic and political policies gave rise to the pejorative term 'banana republic', but some among them, like Argentina, had once been richer than even their colonial motherlands.
South America, some said, was Third World with First World pretensions.

Well, the contradictions are still glaring, despite recent progress - including the establishment of democracy and sustained economic growth. Virtually every South American government over the past half century has struggled to overcome massive economic disparity between the haves and have-nots. Their failure to do so is apparent in the technically illegal but virtually institutionalised shanty towns - favelas in Portuguese - in which almost one-third of South America's urban dwellers reside. Income inequality has worsened, not narrowed, in past decades.

But despite this glaring failure, the fact remains that through both the extremes of military-dictated capitalism and apparatchik-directed communism, the Third World has muddled through the past half century. Many have remained undeveloped or developing economies, but have not (yet) become failed states. Others are firmly on the path to sustainable and even relatively equitable growth. A few, like Singapore, have joined the First World. And others, like Brazil, are on the threshold.

Rio de Janeiro's selection to host both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics Games is the most dramatic proclamation that South America - and Brazil in particular - may finally be shedding its 'Third World' image. Just as the 1964 and 2008 Olympics heralded the emergence of Japan and China respectively, Brazil's debut as a world power is only a few years away.

Perhaps the most important phenomenon in the countries I visited - Chile, Argentina and Brazil - is not the unequivocal domination of either the disenfranchised, impoverished working class or the entrenched, obscenely privileged elites. Instead, it has been the quiet but relentless emergence of a vibrant middle class. As Karl Marx had astutely predicted, an economically powerful bourgeoisie will challenge feudalism and demand liberal democracy as the best environment for it to thrive and multiply.

A South American middle class has emerged even in the midst of extreme income inequality, and has taken hold like a fragile moss on inhospitable terrain. It has even started to flourish. And its tastes, as Marx would have sniffily observed, are solidly bourgeois.

Their aspirations for the bourgeois lifestyle - good home, food, clothes - and their appetite for consumption will, as in Asia, fuel domestic industries and embolden them to eventually become global.

Mulling over these thoughts, I could not but be reminded that Singapore's singular success has not been just in its First World infrastructure. It is also reflected in the creation of a broad, home-owning middle class that tangibly has a sense of ownership in the nation.

The pragmatic genius of Singapore's political pioneers was not to try to free the working class by destroying the elites to achieve a classless society. It was, rather, to broaden the middle class massively and to ideologically co-opt the working class into adopting middle class lifestyles and mentalities.

Not for this new working class the workers' sanatoriums of the Soviet paradise; instead, golf and country clubs run by the labour movement, every bit as good as the top private golf clubs. Not warehouse-like workers' co-ops with heavily subsidised basic commodities; instead, modern supermarkets for everyone, run by the labour movement in open competition with private supermarkets. Not the depressing council flats rented to blue-collar workers on the desolate outskirts of European capitals; but public housing, sometimes mistaken now for stylish private condominiums - and sold, not rented, to the 'working class'.

The socialist heritage of Singapore's trade unionists can be observed in quaint anachronisms like the way they still formally address each other as 'comrades'. But the younger comrades enjoy wine-tasting parties and their parents compete in ballroom dancing.

The new middle class - from lower to upper - is so broad and entrenched in its prosperity, and has such a large stake in Singapore's political stability, that complacency rather than agitated discontent, is the challenge of the future.

I went to South America in search of Che Guevara and to assess his answers to economic underdevelopment and inequality. I found no successful revolution there - only idealistic but botched movements by both leftist and rightist regimes - but at least some progress and hope for the future.

But it was in my own backyard, the tiny island of Singapore, where the most significant socio-economic revolution has taken place. The answers to much of the Third World's malaise can be found in Singapore's own ascent from Third to First World.

The challenge for this too obviously successful city state is unique: how to not drown in its own success; to not fall into the quicksand of hubris; to not dismiss Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew's continual warnings of complacency as just a grumpy grandfather's rantings.

Singapore's biggest success has been the creation of a middle class society - but one which must not ever lose its edge, its slight paranoia and its unease at its own success.

The writer is chairman of the board of trustees of the Singapore Management University. Think-Tank is a weekly column rotated among eight leading figures from Singapore's tertiary and research institutions.