Hello, I'm Blowing_Wind from my fav folk song "Blowing In The Wind"
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1st Aug 2003 - The
ASEAN Community Need To Integrate Or We Will All Suffer Badly
This is an update
of my 2nd article - "The Chinese Model Answer Or Why Bother About My
Private Live ". In it I was discussing the future of Singapore :-
"The bad news is that we are going to have a double collision; with
China (at the bottom competing to offer cheaper labour) and the USA".
In the 5 years since that article, the collisions already happened and
we are still reeling from the effects. China is booming and we are
suffering our worse economics downturn ever. The rest of ASEAN are just
as badly affected.
Why is the world so worried about China. It is her vast market
power; vast enough to stand against the might of USA. For example when
US companies set proprietary standards, the vast market in China would
be paying huge amounts of licensing fees to use those standards! From
the many technical standard wars in USA iself, we know there's always
more than one way to accomplish most technical tasks. Hence China
can choose to produce their own standards. With their own vast market
support, these standards will have enough volumes for economies of
scales in manufacturing. Recently, they even produced their own video
standards to avoid paying for licences for DVD and can use latest
better technology available now.
The powers of a vast market are not lost on politicians
everywhere. The Europeans had long realised that they need to have
their own local vast market in order to compete with the Americans who
have their 50 states to support their market for technical innovations
or pop cultures. USA guarded their market so tightly that they even
considered the popularity of the Beatles in the 60's as a British
invasion on their world dominating pop culture. The European nations
were historically always fighting amongst themselves and that gave the
American the chance to creep ahead. World powers then slowly
transferred across the Atlantic. So the Europeans created the EU. I
thought those quarrelsome and xenophobic Europeans would not be able to
achieve much. I was greatly surprised when I travelled in Europe.
Within the EU, there's no need for those troublesome passports checks
at the borders any more; it's a breeze to cross from one country to
another. In one company that I visited, there are staff from almost
every country of the EU. There was no outcry of protecting jobs
for the locals. Now with their common Euro currency, the
Europeans have almost produced a miracle! Now the EU has enough powers
to question the USA for unfavorable marketing imbalance. They are
even big enough to develop their Airbus industry to compete with the
USA successfully.
The ASEAN states look to the vast market in China as the future
growth engine pulling ASEAN along. Unfortunately, the reverse happened.
Just like the 20th century Europeans watched their powers crossed the
Atlantic, 21st century ASEAN watched our economic base being undermined
when China sucked markets and capital investments from us. No matter
how we try, we can never be given equal access to the China market as
their local ones. Their own pop culture award ceremonies will never
give our SBC TV serials much mention even though we tried to penetrate
their markets with production partnership. But the Americans don't even
need to do much and yet their movies and TV serials are very popular
there. Pop cultures thrive on cool factors not the "Asian values of
Confucianism". What's ironic is that we have "Speak Mandarin
Campaigns " here, over there they think learning English is the cool
thing to do. Here we say we are gay tolerant, there they don't even
have a law against homosexuals. No matter what we do, we never have the
economic powers for equal treatment.
ASEAN used to be a powerful bloc. Now the politicians became
xenophobic just like the Europeans were before 1950. The latest spats
between Singapore and Malaysia seem so petty and childish beyond
beliefs. They remind me of those spats between France and Germany
during the periods of the two world wars. They just cannot see beyond
their noses and fight each other for gains in the short term. In the
meantime, they try to blame the ecomomic conditions on anything except
trying to work together. Why can't they see that if ASEAN work together
then we all have our own vast market to find employment for ourselves?
Typical of immature and selfish politicians, Singapore will fear others
especially Malaysians will swamp the little island. The Malaysians will
fear that Singaporeans will dominate the market. the Indonesians will
fear
others will exploit their natural resources, the Thais will fear being
swamped by other Indochinese states and so on and so on. You now find a
bunch of small minded men in the region's history who think that they
are saving their little markets from being stolen.
If you look carefully, everybody seems to have something to
gain from the integration just like the EU did. If we lose some of the
ports to Johor, our Singaporeans can still work in Malaysia to help
make these cheaper ports more efficent to compete with Hong Kong. If
Malaysia lose some of their computer industry to Singapore, their
engineers can work here for a more efficient bigger market. If cheaper
land in Malaysia and Indonesia help to keep factories running here, we
don't need to open factories in China and lose jobs here. It's
all gives and takes.
Yet they all only look
from the negative side. If the Europeans can band together after two
great world wars where millions were killed, why can't we put aside the
petty differences of an unhappy separation? Of course these
politicians are not dumb after all they had all learnt modern economic
market theories. Just that these kinds of theories do need a lot of
explaining to do to the mostly unsophisticated citizens of this region.
With the threats of religious extremism in this region, the religious
extremists will take the opportunity to twist the favourable arguments
around because fears of the disadvantages are easy to magnify upon but
the long terms benefits require "gives and takes" that require
collective good faith in each other. People can have faith in religions
but not have faith in each other. What irony.
But the politicians and the local papers are playing exactly
into the hands of the religious extremists. The extremists thrive on
hatred and suspicious minds. If the leaders and the local papers don't
try to explain such things to the local people, such distrusts grow and
the papers gain financially by stirring things up to sell more papers.
In the mean time the local people with enough education have no ways to
express our disappointment with the short-sightedness of the
politicians or spread our views to counter the hatred spread by the
extremists. The NGOs ( non-governmental organistions ) of ASEAN are
very poorly organised.
The extremists are making all the nasty noises yet the educated
moderates just quietly stood aside. The extremists actively seek out
disgruntled people to join them and the educated moderates just pretend
not to see so that the extremists will not attack them. In the name of
racial harmony, discussions over religions are discouraged. So we all
keep quiet while the extremists don't need to follow such rules.
Again evil wins.
I, for one will not keep quiet. This is my little corner of
protest. I always believe in everybody doing his very small bit and
together we add up to make a very big difference. Let all the educated
moderates of ASEAN show their wish to be united in these difficult
times.
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