Middle Class, Civil Society and Democracy in Asia

Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367894641
• eBook ISBN: 9781351054249
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a timely analysis of the tripartite links between the middle class, civil society and democratic experiences in Northeast and Southeast Asia. It aims to go beyond the two popular theoretical propositions in current democratic theory, which emphasise the bilateral connections between the middle class and democracy on one hand and civil society and democracy on the other. Instead, using national case studies, this volume attempts to provide a new comparative typological interpretation of the triple relationship in Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. Presenting a careful analysis and delineation of historical democratic transformation over the past thirty years, three discernible typologies emerge. Namely, there are positive links in Taiwan and South Korea, dubious links in the Philippines and Indonesia, and negative links in Thailand.

Middle Class, Civil Society and Democracy in Asia will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian politics and democracy.

Part I

Overview

1 Comparing the tripartite links of middle class, civil society and democratization in Asia

Positive, dubious and negative

Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao

Democracy in Asia: a growing literature

Over the past decade or so, there has been a growing literature on various aspects of the performance of democracy in Asia. Almost every country in East and Southeast Asia has been discussed and analyzed, either on its path to democratic transition or on the prospect of its democratic performance. The increasing publication of related books on Asian democracies is a reflection of the intense interest or concern over the retreat of new democracies and the rise of anti-democratic forces and authoritarian populism across countries in Asia. From a brief glance at all democracy-related books published in the last ten years or so, the picture appears to be somewhat unpleasant and not promising. This has been persistently documented well in the annual Freedom in the World Reports over the past decade (Freedom House, 2018).

The main objective of this overview chapter is not so much to assess the overall trends and specific fates of the democratic transformations in East and Southeast Asian countries, but rather to provide a theoretically inclined review of ten social-science-oriented books on comparative Asian democratic experiences, and by so doing to highlight what actual theoretical concerns are prevailing among the publications. Among the ten books on comparative democracy in Asia, two are the lengthy handbooks on democratization in both East Asia and Southeast Asia, and the remaining eight are individually edited or authored books on democracies in Asia overall, sub-regions of Asia, or specific Asian countries.

The Routledge Handbook of Democratization in East Asia (Cheng and Chu, 2018) consists of thirty chapters providing multi-dimensional assessment of East Asia’s democratic paths. Among East Asia’s eighteen states, nine have experienced democratization while the other nine have remained authoritarian and are resisting democratic challenge. This handbook examines four viable democracies (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Mongolia) and four authoritarian regimes (China, North Korea, Hong Kong, and Vietnam) as its country cases. Other chapters discuss regional trends, institutions, elections, political parties, democratic citizenship, governance, and political economy of democratization. Though some important emerging agents, actors, or other factors for democracy-making and governance are pinpointed in some chapters, such as class, gender, new media, civil society, and social movements, no direct attention is paid to how democratic transition was started and by what social forces in East Asia. Certainly, no specific attempt is ever made to assess the theoretical propositions of the contingent roles of middle class and civil society in the making of East Asian third-wave democracies.

On the other hand, The Routledge Handbook of Democratization in Southeast Asia (Case, 2015), with twenty-seven chapters included, takes a more vigorous stand to address the reasons for democracy’s decline, treat, and reverse in the region in the past decade. It also deliberately rethinks their democratic experiences and theorizing. In addition to tackling the stunted trajectories of democracy in some cases and unhelpful milieus in others, as well as uncertain institutions and democratic guises in seven country cases, a full section of eight chapters is devoted to the interesting analysis of various wavering social forces that either facilitated democratic transition and consolidation in Southeast Asia or failed to do so. Included in what the editor terms “social forces for democracy” are people power, the middle class, protests, civil society, ethnicity, religion, women, the internet, and social networking. The seven countries under investigation are the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Vietnam, and, without much surprise, the tone of the discussion is generally pessimistic.

To the benefit of the reader of this current volume, it is important to point out that the chapters on middle class and civil society have actually touched upon the theoretical links between the middle class, civil society, and democracy-making in Southeast Asian democratic experiences. Interestingly, the links are rather questioned in the discourse. The concept of “contingent democrats” is applied to describe the middle class’ democratic role (Sinpeng and Arugay, 2015: 103–104), and a resulting taxonomy of civil society–state relations is stressed so as to assess the consequential rather than initiating role of civil society in democratic experiences in several Southeast Asian states (Weiss, 2015: 136–138). Civil society is treated as a “dependent variable”, not an ‘independent variable”, vis-à-vis democracy-making. The author on civil society even suggests debunking assumptions of the liberalizing force of democracy in Southeast Asia (Weiss, op. cit.: 139).

A similar typological analytical perspective was previously proposed in Muthiah Alagappa’s edited volume on Civil Society and Political Change in Asia (2004). He distinguishes three types of civil society in facing the state for the cause of political change. The first is the legitimate civil society negotiating democratic space, such as in Japan, India, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The second is the controlled and communalized civil society challenging or reinforcing the state, such as in Singapore, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka. The third type is the repressed civil society being penetrated or coopted by the state, such as in Pakistan, Myanmar, and China. The issues remaining to be clarified are, however, how the status of the above three types of civil society was individually created and recreated historically, and what were the major class constituencies of those civil society organizations in the above Asian countries. Although a similar conception of “contingent connection between civil society and democracy” was also suggested by Alagappa, what constituted the propitious conditions for civil society to push for democratic transition remained unanswered (Alagappa, 2004: 479–484).

Another comparative and typological analysis is offered by another volume I edited, on Democracy or Alternative Political Systems in Asia: After the Strongmen (Hsiao, 2014). This book examines seven East and Southeast Asian countries that were previously under dictatorial and authoritarian rule but then followed different trajectories of political transition following the fall of political strongmen: Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and China. Importantly, the case studies reveal the factors that may enable transition to a more democratic system and, at the other end, the factors that inhibit democratic take-off and push countries down a more authoritarian path. As a result, three emerging typologies of the post-strongmen political systems are delineated out of the seven cases. The first outcome is democratization with substantial reforms and consolidation, such as in Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia. The second output is limited democratization leading to weak democratic institutions and instability, such as in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand. The third consequence is a sustained authoritarianism to resist any democratic transformation, like in China. The editor’s overall chapter considers pro-democracy civil society to be the major contributing force to shape the political outcomes following a strongman’s fall. To follow such typological reasoning, one can then construct corresponding types of civil society dynamism: persistent or proactive force, weak or fragmented force, and nonexistence or suppressed force by which to explain the above post-strongmen politics. The three typologies are constructed in terms of a civil-society-centered perspective that can be distinguished from the ones made by Alagappa mentioned earlier.

It is quite interesting to note that in another book on East Asia’s New Democracies, edited by Chu and Wong (2010), a typological assessment is also used to classify the current situations in a variety of political regimes and their respective democratic futures in East and Southeast Asia. Though the title states “new democracies”, the case of China is also analyzed in the volume. It is common knowledge that China is in no way a democracy, nor is Vietnam. However, the subtitle – Deepening, Reversal, Non-Liberal Alternatives – is more instructive, as it suggests three possible alternative models of political futures under examination in a broader set of East Asian states. The first is to witness the deepening and consolidation of democratic institutions, such as in Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia. The second alternative is to see the reversal from a democratization process, such as in Thailand and Malaysia. And the third model is labelled by the two editors a “non-liberal alternative.” But it is more proper to call this typology “conversion to authoritarian developmentalism” as noted by chapter author (Thompson, 2010: 96), or it can simply be described as being “resistant to democratization”, as seen in China and Vietnam. The unique contribution of that volume is that many chapter authors have explicitly examined the roles performed by civil society, social classes (including the bourgeoisie and middle class), and strategic groups (ethnic as well as racial) on the path toward or transition to, consolidation of, reversal from, and resistance to democracy. Such attempts are much needed, but the editors do not make a clear assertion on the middle class–civil society–democracy connection in Asia’s democratization experiences as presented in this volume.

Another interesting typological assessment of the overall democratic development paths in Asian countries can be found in the volume Democracy in Eastern Asia, edited by Fung and Drakeley (2014). In this book, four empirically based typologies of democratic experiences are established to classify the twelve Asian states. The first typology is the improving liberal democracies in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The second type is the flawed democracies, developing democracies, and low-quality consolidation in Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Indonesia. The third model is the democratization under hegemonic party regimes in Malaysia and Singapore. The fourth and last one is the uncertain transitions to democracy in Myanmar, Hong Kong, and China. The typology is all right and reasonable, but like the other typology constructions mentioned earlier, there is a lack of empirical indictors or relevant theoretical propositions from which the taxonomy can be made and substantiated. Though the editors openly assert that democracies in East and Southeast Asia are under stress, and facing an array of difficulties and challenges, most of the chapter authors do not make a conscious attempt to draw specific actors, agents, processes, or dynamics that can be used to account for the four different political outcomes. No wonder it is emphasized in the conclusion that the contributors of the volume have shown collectively that country-specific circumstances are paramount.

The above county-specific perspective is highlighted even more clearly in the next edited book, Democratization in China, Korea and Southeast Asia? (Zhou, Rigger, and White, 2014). The title of the book is rather misleading, as the majority of the chapters (ten out of fifteen) are actually devoted to discussion on a wide range of political issues involved in “proto-democratic changes or proto-democratization” in the obviously authoritarian China. Only four chapters analyze the good and bad democratic experiences in Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, and other archipelagic nations in Southeast Asia. The use of a question mark at the end of the title is quite correct as far as the case of China is concerned. Again, like much other existing literature on Asian democracies, this book pays no special attention to the theoretical concern of the links and connections of social factors like middle class and civil society to the making of democracy and its future.

Erik Paul’s Obstacles to Democratization in Southeast Asia (2010) offers a different angle to review the democratization of eleven Southeast Asian states (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Lester, and Vietnam) by focusing on the obstacles to democracy. Unfortunately, the author does not offer a theoretical framework to systematically examine and pinpoint what the obstacles to democratization are in Southeast Asia as a whole, nor is a typological analysis ever applied to the individual countries under investigation. Although some insightful observations can be found on each country’s hindrances to democracy-building or democratic consolidation, the book provides no systematic comparison of those obstacles. It seems that in many authors’ view, the obstacles to democratization lie in the very nature of political systems and political leadership in individual countries.

A similar attempt is also made in another edited volume, The Crisis of Democratic Governance in Southeast Asia (Croissant and Bünte, 2011). The editors do make effort to develop a comparative approach to examine the specific crises of democratic governance in different groups of political regimes in the region. The first group consists of the long-standing elected authoritarian regimes in Singapore, Malaysia, and Cambodia. The second group comprises unambiguously authoritarian regimes such as Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, and Brunei. The third group consists of states that have been experiencing political transition to democracy in one way or another in the past two to three decades but without much improvement in democratic quality, such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and East Timor. The various chapters then deal with an array of sources of crises for democratic government and rule. To many chapter authors, the respective crises can occur in political culture, civil society, political institutions and representation conflict management, security, and human rights. Unfortunately, no systematic comparative assertion is made on what crises are more prevalent in the above three different groups of political regimes.

The last book under review is an edited book, Globalization and Democracy in Southeast Asia (Wugaeo, Rehbein, and Wun’gaeo, 2016). The title seems to suggest some important link between democracy and globalization in the region, but the included chapters have not really tackled the issue at all. However, each chapter does add something interesting about the democratic paths and their limits in Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Indonesia. In addition, another four chapters are devoted to the special case of Thailand’s democratic breakdown. Overall, this volume does not appear to be a theoretically or thematically coherent collection of essays. Perhaps it reflects the assertion that Southeast Asia offers a case study of negotiation between Western democratic philosophy and local political values, and a living laboratory for experiments with democracy.

From the above extensive review of ten related books on democracy in Asia, the following interesting observations can be made on the outstanding features of the growing literature on democratic development and its prospects in Asia.

First, most of the works seem to express great concerns about the overall situation of the declining performance of democracy in Asia, especially the retreat of democracy and even the reversal to authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia.

Second, it is interesting to note that many publications have been taking a comparative and typological perspective to understand and assess the democratic prospects of all Asian political states. Generally speaking, the scheme of three types is the commonly accepted one: (1) the consolidated new democracies, of which the typical cases are Taiwan and South Korea in East Asia; (2) the weak and retreating new democracies and even the reversal to authoritarian rule, of which the most-cited examples are Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand, all in Southeast Asia; and (3) the sustained authoritarian regimes resisting any meaningful democratic reforms, such as China.

Third, the majority of the published writings are mostly interested in portraying and assessing the present status of how democratic institutions are performing at both the regional and country levels. Less attention is paid to offering plausible theoretical explanations of the historical trajectories of how various democratization experiences have been shaped and reshaped over the decades.

Fourth, in addition to a lack of historical dynamics and theoretical vigor to tackle the origins and causes of the rise and development of various democratic experiences, inadequate attention is given to the analysis of the possible roles played by critical agents and driving social forces such as the middle class and civil society.

Fifth, even if the above two social forces are brought into the analysis, their respective roles are viewed in two separate bilateral connections vis-à-vis democracy-making and consolidation. None has tried to bring the tripartite connections and links of middle class, civil society and democracy into the critical assessment of Asian democracies.

Sixth, the above two bilateral links of “middle-class–democracy” and “civil society–democracy” are often not discerned in specific terms. The most-used general descriptions are “possible connection”, “contingent roles”, and “necessary but not sufficient conditions”. The lack of necessary specification of the above two related bilateral links is also quite evident in the existing literature.

The tripartite links of middle class, civil society and democracy: specification and historical dynamics

The main purpose of this volume tackles the tripartite links of the middle class, civil society, and democratization experiences in five frequently studied Asian countries – Taiwan and South Korea in Northeast Asia, and Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand in Southeast Asia. As pointed out explicitly earlier, the former two states are considered to be the consolidated new democracies, while the latter three countries’ systems hav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: Overview
• PART II: The positive links in Taiwan and South Korea
• PART III: The dubious links in the Philippines and Indonesia
• PART IV: The negative links in Thailand
• Index