Origin of Regional Cooperation in the Asia Pacific

The origin of economic cooperation in the Asia Pacific dates back to 1967–68. In five countries surrounding the Pacific a business group formed a conference series of the Pacific Basin Economic Council (PBEC) in 1967 and an economist group formed another conference series of the Pacific Trade and Development Conference (PAFTAD). They were stimulated by the successful development in Europe and aimed to study and discuss economic cooperation and integration in the Pacific. The first PFTD conference was organized by its proponent Professor Kiyoshi Kojima in Tokyo, and in its second conference in Honolulu, scholars from South Korea, Taiwan, and other Southeast Asian countries participated. Both conference series were hosted by different countries in turn and discussed a variety of cooperation issues in the Pacific, but neither of them had any participation from governments.

In 1978 Japanese Prime Minister Masayaoshi Ohira proposed the “Pacific Basin Community” idea in his inaugural speech, which paved the way for individual governments to participate in the discussion. Interest in the cooperation of Pacific nations spread from businessmen and economists to diplomats, international relations scholars, and journalists. In Japan a study group was formed to give substance to the Ohira proposal and it published a report a year later (Pacific Basin Community Study Group Report 1979). Prime Minister Ohira and his Foreign Minister Saburo Ohkita visited Australia and New Zealand, bringing with them the report. Australian Prime Minister Malcom Fraser and his advisor Sir John Crawford (vice-chancellor of the Australian National University) agreed with Ohira and Ohkita on the promotion of the cooperation of Pacific nations so that a Canberra Seminar on the Pacific Basin Community was organized in 1980. Both Ohkita and Crawford were co-founders of PAFTAD together with Kojima and this personal link helped to start the Pacific nations cooperation, which commenced with a series of Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference (PECC).

INTRODUCTION

Between 1963 and 1970, the central state was struggling to impose its presence in Sarawak which was administered by a weak ruling party led by the Iban leaders. Without strong grassroots support and high political aptitude, the Iban leaders failed to adopt the right strategy to bring order and stability, leading to a long-running crisis in the ruling party and widespread anti-government dissatisfaction among the masses. To the central state, the volatility of Sarawak politics posed a threat to the existence of the Federation, especially after the cession of Singapore in 1965. Hence, the central state took a coercive measure by declaring a state of emergency on 15 September 1966, after an earlier attempt to remove Chief Minister Stephen Kalong Ningkan of Sarawak National Party (SNAP) failed. Through this declaration, the central state amended the Constitution, empowered the Governor to call a meeting of the Council Negeri which subsequently passed a motion of no confidence against Ningkan, thus effectively removing him from office. In order to avoid Ningkan's removal being turned into a racial issue, the central state endorsed another Iban leader, Tawi Sli, from Parti Pesaka Anak Sarawak (PESAKA) to fill up the vacant Chief Minister's seat. The elevation of Tawi Sli who was one of the Iban candidates nominated for the post in 1963 did not resolve the political instability in Sarawak especially after SNAP decided to leave Alliance and joined SUPP to establish a formidable opposition force.

After the conclusion of Sarawak's first direct election in 1970, the central state manoeuvred a plan to install a Muslim bumiputera who was highly regarded by the central state leaders as the new Chief Minister. The chosen leader was Abdul Rahman Yakub, a prominent Muslim Melanau law graduate from a Muslim bumiputera-dominated party, Parti Barisan Anak Jati Sarawak (BARJASA). The appointment of Rahman as Sarawak's third Chief Minister marked the resurgence of Muslim bumiputera political dominance which had been momentarily broken by the Iban leaders. This chapter argues that the elevation of Rahman was the result of the central state's strategy of using Sarawak's social forces, specifically the Muslim bumiputera intelligentsia who later transformed themselves into strongmen-politicians, as a means to dominate the populace.

INTRODUCTION

During Taib's first six years in office, Muslim bumiputera politics was tainted with contestation and fragmentation, leading to an unprecedented plan to topple the strongman-politician. By calling for a snap election, Taib survived the political onslaught led by his own uncle Rahman who launched a formidable challenge to his power. After the election, Taib further strengthened his position by taking several repressive and accommodative measures, aimed at consolidating the support of Sarawak's electorate, especially the Muslim bumiputera. These measures eventually strengthened Taib's position as the central state's representative in Sarawak and also the most powerful strongmanpolitician in the negeri.

Taib's amplified strength was manifested in the domination of Barisan Nasional (BN) in Sarawak elections throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium. This domination, however, was slightly tainted by the ability of DAP and Independent candidates in capturing several Chinese and Dayak seats. On the other hand, the dominance of the ruling party in the Muslim bumiputera seats was almost absolute. Although some Malay and Melanau electorate voted for the opposition, an overwhelming majority of them continued to support the ruling party, thus preventing the opposition from wrestling control not even a single Muslim bumiputera seat. This chapter, therefore, analyses Taib's ability to consolidate and dominate society in Sarawak, in particular the Muslim bumiputera, after the 1987 election. Before analysing Taib's strategies in dominating Sarawak politics, this chapter will first of all discuss developments in Sarawak politics within the corresponding period, with a special focus on the Muslim bumiputera.

THE POST-1987 CRISIS

Several significant changes were made by Taib to the negeri cabinet after winning the 1987 election. Since Daniel Tajem and his party joined the opposition, Taib decided to scrap the third Deputy Chief Minister's post which was traditionally allocated for an Iban leader from a Dayak party. Prior to the formation of Parti Bansa Dayak Sarawak (PBDS), the third Deputy Chief Minister's seat was reserved for Sarawak National Party (SNAP) but it was subsequently given to PBDS. Although Alfred Jabu from the Pesaka wing of Parti Pesaka Bumiputera Bersatu (PBB) was retained as one of the two Deputy Chief Ministers (the other one was allocated for a Chinese leader from Sarawak United People's Party (SUPP)), he was largely seen as representing PBB and not Dayak parties.

This volume is a collection of papers in English presented at our conference to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1911 Revolution in China. While there are extensive research and voluminous publications on Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution, it was felt that less had been done on the Southeast Asian connections. Thus this volume tries to chip in some original and at times provocative analysis on not only Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution but also contributions from selected Southeast Asian countries.

This volume starts with the keynote speech given by Wang Gungwu. Wang's speech revisited his earlier thesis that Sun Yat-sen was China's first modern politician. By comparing Sun with other Chinese in the 1860s generation, Wang noted that Sun was different from students sent to the United States by the Qing Government and selected figures from the Overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. By and large, Sun was able to plant a vision of ideals from the West and graft it onto Chinese traditions that still mattered to the majority of his followers. Sun was definitely not following the traditional mandarin-literati framework or the way of the upper class. Instead, he was interested in pushing for western political ideas and combining them with some of China's popular ideas of legitimate authority and governance. Wang came to the conclusion that Sun's ability to project his mixed vision in times of uncertainty in China would carve out a political life for Sun and make him “the first to offer a dedicated political leadership for a cause that set China on its own path to modernity”.

In the light of Wang's remarks, it is perhaps befitting to examine Sun's vision or thoughts on modernity and nation-building. Thus the chapters in Part I starts with an analysis of the British influence on Sun Yat-sen's vision of modernization with special reference to the Three Principles of the People by John Wong.

Professor Leo Suryadinata reminded me that when I first wrote about Sun Yat-sen in 1952, it was twenty-seven years after his death and just over forty years after the 1911 Revolution. Some of the people I spoke to at the time had known Sun Yat-sen and they spoke of him with respect while admitting that they did not find it easy to understand him. Was he a failed politician but a great leader? Now he has been dead for eighty-five years and we are commemorating 100 years of the Revolution that he will always be identified with. We now know much more about him. Many scholars have worked on his life and work and each has sought to evaluate his place in history and especially his role in that Revolution. I have little to add to what has been published. But there is something I would like to revisit. I once described Sun Yat-sen as China's first modern politician when he emerged as a leader of a revolution at the end of the nineteenth century. What kind of politics did he promote? In what ways were his politics modern?

Modernity is a concept that has been much debated about, especially when juxtaposed with the word “tradition”. Most of the debates linked with Western attitudes towards China are not relevant here. The word “modern” was first used in the West to mark the progress that followed the struggles against tradition that its peoples were engaged in. It was not a word applied to Asia. For Asian leaders, Western power was the reality, and the question was how far to westernize if they were to defend their countries against being dominated or worse, either conquered or colonized. The first decisive response had come from the young Japanese samurai who helped to overthrow Tokugawa Shogunate. They were prepared to go all out to learn everything they needed from the West in order to fight back.

In his pioneering post-war work on Pan-Asianism, Takeuchi Yoshimi, an expert on modern Chinese literature, noted in the 1960s that what was known in Japan as ajiashugi or Pan-Asianism was too variegated a concept to have any clear definition (2006, p. 255). “There are as many interpretations as there are books written about it”, as he put it. Indeed there are many different types of Pan-Asianists, but as Eri Hotta has recently observed, Pan-Asianists “were of one mind on the question of why they were Pan-Asianists, which was that ‘Asia was one’ and ‘Asia was weak’, and utterly and unconditionally at that” (2007, p. 49). Pan-Asianism, briefly defined, is an idea that called for the unity of Asian people in order to resist the plundering of Asia by western imperialists, an idea widely shared among nationalists and revolutionaries throughout Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Pan-Asian sentiments emerged in Japan in the nineteenth century, but it was in Sun Yat-sen that the Japanese Pan-Asianists found inspiration for and a means with which to pursue their idea of Pan-Asian solidarity, or more specifically, close cooperation between Japan and China for the sake of Asian liberation. This chapter examines the Pan-Asianism of Sun Yat-sen by analysing his last major speech in Japan, and the Pan-Asianism of his Japanese supporters. It also discusses the success and failure of their Pan- Asian ideals.

Japan's Pan-Asianists in Meiji Japan

Japan's Pan-Asianism is often equated with imperialism and colonialism. However, in the late nineteenth century, Japanese Pan-Asianists regarded themselves as playing the role of promoting Asian solidarity for the sake of reviving Asia, and not for the sake of expanding Japan's own interests in Asia. “Asia is One”, the famous opening line of Okakura Tenshin's book, The Ideals of the East (1904), was an expression of this ideal that Asia is one and that Asia must be one in order to liberate itself from the subjugation by the West (Matsumoto 2000, pp. 54–57).

For many nineteenth-century Chinese, only the Han ethnicity could be viewed as legitimate Chinese rulers. Like the Mongol Khans of the Yuan dynasty, the Manchu of the Qing dynasty were widely viewed as foreign invaders. While, in the early days of the regime, the Qing were able to forge alliance with influential Han administrators, and contrived to position themselves as the heir to the Ming dynasty, putting down the peasant rebellion that had caused the collapse of the previous regime in 1644, the notion that they were foreign masters never left the majority Han population. Manchu officials dominated at court, were present at all levels of government, and Manchu soldiers were garrisoned in all the important urban centres to assure the stability of the regime. Imperial regulations favouring the Manchu were a tolerable irritant to the subjects of the empire during the prosperous Kang-Qian period, but became an intolerable invasion of sovereignty when fortunes turned bad in the nineteenth century. Significantly, the demonstration of weakness evident in the loss of the Opium War (1839–42) to Britain instigated a series of open rebellions and secessionist movements in the West and South, dividing the attention of the Court for the last half of the century.

While rebellion raged, other agitators sought reform to re-establish the authority of the dynasty through the will of the people. The One Hundred Days Reform (1898) of the Guangxu Emperor, with the advice of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, is one example of a non-revolutionary reform movement in the late Qing period. However, the abject failure of the movement and the harsh reaction of the conservative forces in the government only further convinced revolutionaries that the removal of the Qing was the only hope for China.

Sun Yat-sen believed the best remedy was to transit into a republic. He began actively looking to reverse the Qing regime in the 1890s. By 1894 he had established the Xingzhonghui (Revive China Society) to work toward this goal.

Introduction

Sun Yat-sen's vision for a modern China is encapsulated in his Three Principles of the People. He professed in 1918 that what he had seen and heard in London in 1896–97 enabled him to synthesise his Three Principles. What exactly did he see and hear?

During his sojourn in London in 1896–97, Sun Yat-sen did not keep a diary. One had to be reconstructed for him. This was done by tracking down at Stanford the reports of the private detective hired by the Chinese Legation to shadow him. Permission was sought from the grandson of Dr James Cantlie (whom Sun Yat-sen visited almost daily while in London) at Christchurch, Dorset, England, to read the diary of his grandmother, Lady Mabel Cantlie. In Shanghai and London might be located the diary and memoirs of some of the Chinese Legation staff in London. In Toyko was available the diary of Sun Yat-sen's Japanese friend Minakata Kumagusu (1867–1941) who was visiting London at the time. A skeleton began to emerge, on which flesh was put with pertinent information sifted from the London daily newspapers, weekly journals, the British Foreign Office records, papers deposited at the First Historical Archives in Beijing, and relevant British biographies. The result was a substantial picture.

The second step was to explore the places which Sun Yat-sen had visited; interview descendants of the people whom he had seen; analyse old notes and photographs; and follow up books or articles which he might have read.

The third step was to pin down reports on all the interviews he might have given, the speeches he might have made, and the works he might have published during his sojourn in London in 1896–97.

The last step was to search the text of his Three Principles to identify aspects which might bear hallmarks of his London experience. The aim was to discover concrete examples of how his daily life in London might have influenced him. After thirty-two years (1979–2011) of research, the following picture emerges.

This chapter examines the lives of the young men and women who organized the Darwin Branch of the Kuomintang (KMT) during the 1920s and 1930s, in particular looking at the role of Chinese women in politics. The influence of Sun Yat-sen in the Nanyang was most obvious during the period when the children of the 1911 Revolution were of an age to take up his aim of making a modern Chinese community. In 1925, when Sun Yat-sen died, the executive members of the Darwin KMT were aged between twenty and thirty. They were well-known figures in this small northern Australian port-town that boasted a Chinese population of some 400 people. If we were to judge by the surviving photographs there was a certain glamour about the members of the KMT. They dressed in the fashionable western clothes of the time. The men were physically fit, being keen promoters of sports. They were well-educated, in both English and Chinese, and were eloquent public speakers on matters of local, national and international significance. They were, one might argue, the embodiment of Sun Yat-sen's modern young Chinese.

In this 1930 wedding photograph (see Figure 9.1), we can see Chin Mon Di, the president of the Darwin KMT wearing the twelve-pointed white sun on his lapel. To the right of the bridegroom is Gee Ming Ket, secretary of KMT until 1930. To the left of the bride is Selina Hassan (nee Lee), secretary of KMT after 1930.

I want to thank Dr Lee Lai To, His Excellency Ambassador K. Kesavapany, as well as Professor Leo Suryadinata, for organizing this amazing conference and organizing it before anybody else does so that we can steal the thunder. I was asked to make a few comments as a discussant. Some of you have come to me and said, “Oh well, let's see how you do your keynote speech at the end.” I said, “There is no keynote speech, just some concluding points. Please do not have much expectation. That way we can release you early, so that we can all go home.” I also want to apologize that I am unable to make comments on the individual papers mainly because I could only attend to one set of papers. But I tried to look through many of them.

I will comment on the three terms, “Sun Yat-sen”, “Nanyang”, and “the 1911 Republican Revolution” contained in the conference title “Sun Yat-sen, Nanyang and the 1911 Revolution”. Now, each one of these terms is a very important topic in itself and each of these can have a very complex relation with one another. So, I want to see how we have tried to relate them in our conference and how we can think about these issues.

The word “Nanyang” as we all know refers to the regions of the South Seas, but basically, it also refers to the Chinese in this region. There was an old migration of course, long before the late nineteenth-century plantation migration, of people who came to be called the “Peranakans” in addition to the later migrations of the late nineteenth century with which you are all familiar. But when nationalists like Hu Hanmin and others tried to organize the Nanyang Chinese for the revolutionary cause in the early 1900s, they were very frustrated. They would say that the Nanyang Chinese did not know their Chinese names; they did not know the language; they did not even know they were Chinese.

Ideas of regionalism play constructive roles in guiding directions, providing visions, and setting up principles for organizing and creating regional communities. They touch upon the fundamental question of what kind of regional organizations should be formed, and how they should operate.

In the first part of the twenty-first century, the process of regionalism has been speeded up and many proposals and ideas concerning regionalism have been put forward. In 1984, Japanese scholars proposed an Asian economic circle, which was later supported by the Japanese Government (Japan Research Institute 1988; Yotaro 1991). The South Korean Government in 1987 put forward an idea of a Yellow Sea economic circle (Jeong and Choe 2001). In 1987, Chen Kuiyao, a Hong Kong scholar, suggested that mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong should establish a Great China circle. In 1987, Indonesia suggested triangular economic cooperation among ASEAN, Japan and South Pacific countries. In 1990 the Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad (1995) proposed an East Asian Economic Caucus that drew both praises and criticisms. Singapore has strongly advocated the free trade zone of ASEAN. At the ASEAN business and investment summit in Bali, Indonesia on 6 October 2003, Singapore's then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong called for the building of an ASEAN Economic Community: a single production base and a single market, with free movement of goods, services and capital. In 2008, the Rudd government proposed an “Asia Pacific Community” (APC) by the year 2020. In 2009, Yukio Hatoyama, former Japanese Prime Minister, proposed an East Asian Community, based on the European Union model, to rival the APC.

In the above context, it is surprising that China often does not talk about its greater vision of regionalism. The absence of China's grand vision of regionalism can be traced to the idea of regionalism in the early twentieth century. In this context, it is vital to understand Sun Yat-sen's idea of Pan-Asianism which provides Chinese perceptions of regionalism and valuable sources.

Introduction

Reform and opening up in 1978 was a starting point for China to change its economic and social system gradually. This gradual change brought about certain political changes as well. When Deng Xiaoping initiated the reforms that transformed economic and social structure of China, he refrained from identifying the ideological orientation of the process. However, it soon turned out that it actually mattered “if the cat was black or white” because the structural changes that the country going through was changing the identity of its people as well. The transformation that the state and society were going through required identifying the sources of this new identity, and both the ruling elite and the community influentials in the society got engaged in an ongoing search for different symbols that would legitimize the new order. Ideologies such as liberal Westernism, schools of thought such as Confucianism, historical periods such as Ming dynasty or Republican era are among the many to serve as a source for the collective identity of Chinese state and people in the making.

These changes in the state structure and society required a re-evaluation of values to associate with. While some of these values were new to China, either imported as a policy or as an inevitable result of increasing interaction with the outside world, some other sources of legitimacy for the new regime were to be found in its own past. Selective remembering and interpretation of history becomes not history as documented but collective memory as a source of contemporary values and identifications. When old ideals are abandoned, collective memory provides values people can identify with. Selectivity of what to remember helps justification of the new orders and mindsets.

There are two simultaneous challenges that the new government face: (1) how to legitimately incorporate the “continuities and discontinuities” (Aguliar 2002) of Mao era in their new identity; (2) how to fill the vacuum that the absence of the image of Mao Zedong in the collective consciousness.

Introduction

Up through the earliest decades of the twentieth century, the Thai public generally was rarely concerned with the domestic political affairs of any foreign country beyond peninsular Southeast Asia. Events in China, however, proved a major exception. The Xinhai Revolution of 1911 was, by all accounts, among the best documented and best publicized political upheavals in the history of Thai journalism. This was, of course, partly due to the very large ethnic Chinese population in Thailand at that time. Chinese and Japanese official sources agree that, at least up to the end of the Second World War, Thailand hosted the largest Overseas Chinese community in the world. The last major influx of Chinese migrant workers was a major driving force behind King Chulalongkorn's (Rama V, 1868–1910) modernization projects in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was the values and aspirations of these resident aliens that resulted in the momentous proliferation of Chinese newspapers and Chinese educational institutions of various sorts in Thailand.

Another significant factor contributing to the unusually high profile of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution in the eyes of many Thai people was the overt concern and obvious anxiety of the Thai ruling class about the possibility that such an anti-monarchic upheaval could break out in the Kingdom as well. In fact, the Thai court had been well aware, long before the outburst of that revolution, of the dangers of allowing the general public to be exposed to foreign political systems and ideas. Consequently, only a limited circle of high-ranking members of the royal family and young nobles destined to serve the court had been allowed to obtain higher education in Europe and America during Chulalongkorn's reign. Exposure to different political ideas and developments from the West was jealously guarded and carefully restricted in the local educational system.

Introduction

Chinese nationalism in Singapore began in 1877 with the establishment of a Chinese consulate-general, the first in Southeast Asian Chinese history. From 1877 to 1894, the emergent Chinese nationalism was more cultural in content with Consul-General Tso Ping Lung (1850–1924) playing an enlightened but pivotal role in stimulating the intellectual awakening among the Chinese-educated immigrants and English-educated Straits Chinese. During his term of office (1881–91), he promoted a Confucian movement, chaired debates among the Straits Chinese on current affairs and lectured the Chinese immigrants on Chinese culture and civilization. Besides, he personally awarded students who composed the best essays or classical Chinese poems graded by himself. Coupled with the late Qing's diplomatic drives and the sales of Qing's titles and degrees to the higher echelon of the Chinese society for improved prestige and social mobility, Tso's cultural endeavours bore fruit in the form of a pro-Qing's cultural nationalism. However, all these efforts of the Qing Government and officials were undone by the defeat of China at the hands of the Japanese in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) which resulted in the ceding of Taiwan to the victor.

From 1894 to 1911, there blossomed forth a political nationalism with two diverse and opposing strains, one led by K'ang Yu-wei (1866–1929), a pro-Qing and pro-monarchist reformist and the other by Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), an anti-Qing revolutionary and a staunch republican. Both K'ang and Sun made Singapore an important base in Southeast Asia for enlisting Chinese support for their respective political causes. To these ends, K'ang helped to organize a semi-secret society, the Pao Huang Hui [Emperor Protection Society] in 1900 to promote his movement, while Sun initiated the formation of a Singapore branch of the Tongmenghui (TMH, the United League) in 1906 to rally public support. Both societies utilized print media (such as TMH's Chong Shing Yit Poh versus reformists' Union Times) to propagate their respective ideologies which often resulted in political polemics, involving such issues as revolution and reformism as panacea for China's problems.