From the nineteenth century onwards, communications embodied the idea of progress. The steamship, the railway, the telegraph attested to the supremacy of the West. They represented the harnessing of new forms of power; the triumph of steel over wooden construction; the conquest of time and distance; the intoxicant of industrial capitalism. They buttressed a complex of power relations that underpinned Europe's command of modernity — power over nature, power over people and their movement, power to more adequately predict events — above all, power to change the structure of systems (Elvin 1986).

Information and communications framed imperial technocracy. They blazoned across the globe a vision of Europe and sought to project a sense of her generosity. The ideal was a civilization “united not by force but by information” (Adas 1989, Richards 1993, p. 1). Communications underpinned the “psychological bluff” of European omnipotence and prestige. It propelled the languages of the metropolis to the remoter regions of the Earth and created a new ritual speech for their inhabitants — one that would, it was hoped, turn them immutably towards the metropolis for their tutelage. Whether it was in English, Dutch, Spanish, French, or American, new vocabularies of authority were created that inculcated the keywords of European power. The Europeans also reconfigured the status of vernacular tongues in a way that privileged some utterances and disqualified others. The attempt to frame the state in this way was not novel in itself. Throughout Asia, pre-colonial states had sought to harness ideology to the service of the centre (Reid 1993, pp. 181–83, 192–201). Their attempts to do so were bolstered in the face of the European threat and continued into the colonial period. However, their capacity to project themselves in this way diminished dramatically in the face of the blinding new innovations that radiated from the West.

A few years ago, when the so-called East Asian economic miracle was at its height, former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim delivered a speech in which he emphasized the challenges brought about by Asia's entry into the world of high modernity. Significantly, he saw the greatest challenges not at the level of economics, but at the level of culture and intellectual life. Not surprisingly, the role of media and technology, especially television, loomed large in Anwar's concerns:

What Anwar refers to here is not just a challenge faced in Asia. During the 1980s a similar worry about the proliferation of transnational satellite television channels raged across Europe. The image of the threat evoked was also similar: that of the integrity of a cultural and geographical space — “our” space — being eroded by the opening up of the frontierlands of the sky to wayward global explorers such as Ted Turner (owner of CNN) and Rupert Murdoch (owner of Sky Channel and, in Asia, Star TV). The resulting electronic invasion from the sky has exposed the vulnerability of national borders (which conventionally provide the enclosure of “our” space): with satellite technology, given geographical boundaries are superceded by the vectors of transmission, which generally transcend the bounded territorial space of the, any, nationstate. The idea of a “Television without Frontiers” — the title of a 1984 European Community policy document (Commission of the European Communities 1984) — was informed precisely by the perceived necessity of reimagining a new, pan-European electronic image space beyond national borders, induced by border-eroding new communication technologies such as satellite television (Robins 1989).

The camera loves Manhattan. Each gaze is an immediate infatuation — with the skyscrapers and their great shadows, with the way Central Park in June carves a giant green rectangle out of grey concrete, with the bricks of old brownstones, the bright big city lights. From chic uptown Madison Avenue to the dirty surrealism of the Lower East Side, from a Wall Street frenzy to a 42nd Street hustle, the camera has raced to catch every detail: to climb up to the Chrysler Building gargoyles, to recognize a famous face in the crowd, or to pity a homeless person sleeping in a sidewalk bed of newspapers and cardboard.

The first time I saw New York — not counting the time when I lived there as a toddler — I was overwhelmed like most everyone else is when he is in the presence of something so big. But my sense of awe had as much to do with having grown up in Manila on a diet of images from America. America was the “Other” for me, the central object of my imagination, fascination, and desire. That autumn day in 1981, as I wandered around Manhattan, things would seem familiar, although I had never actually seen them or could not possibly have remembered them from when my mother pushed me around in a stroller. The explanation for this déjà vu is that I must have seen the thing in question or something similar on television, in a movie or a picture. Even now when I visit the city, I have no grasp of the thing itself; everything is always mediated by a mythology of images. That, however, has not made me any less enchanted with the place.

I

In an implicit criticism of Francis Fukuyama, political philosopher Chantal Mouffe says, “Not long ago we were being told … that liberal democracy had won and that history had ended.” The event that matters is, of course, the collapse of communism. What caught some people offguard, however, was that instead of the heralded ‘New World Order’, the victory of universal values, and the generalization of ‘post-conventional’ identities, we were witnessing the explosion of particularisms and an increasing challenge to Western universalism”, a universalism characterized as “rationalist and individualist (Mouffe 1993, pp. 1, 3) — the supposed culmination of the modern era ushered in by the Renaissance.

Mouffe is referring to the burst of ethnic nationalisms — “the archaic” — which has erupted in Eastern Europe, and of particularistic movements such as radical feminism. Since the 1980s, similar politicocultural contestations or resistances against Western universalism have also occurred in parts of East and Southeast Asia which have experienced high rates of economic growth until the Asian economic crisis in 1997. Samuel Huntington, of Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, has wrongly but influentially chosen to see this challenge as a “clash of civilizations” between Sinic or Confucianist, Islamic and Western civilizations.

While the essentialist term “civilization” must be interrogated (as if the vastness of Asia could be a single, fixed cultural entity), a discourse on “East Asian modernity” has emerged, claiming the status of a counter- or alternative model of modernity — a “regional” universalism, if you like — in which “traditional” Asian values of family-centredness, self-control, frugality, and corporate identity are seen as the foundations for Asian success. Within this discourse, some Asians like to believe that we have indigenized modernity, and that we might escape the cultural deracination thought to be taking place in the West — perceived to be the consequence of its supposedly extreme, individualist modernity. The discourse thus espouses a neo-traditional modernity that has a less prominent role for individualist, bourgeois democracy.

Consumerism versus nationalism

On 28 April 1993, Wednesday, Manager Daily, a best-selling Thailanguage business daily, carried a full-page advertisement of the Association of Siamese Architects under Royal Patronage (ASA) announcing its annual seminar for that year on the theme of “Seubto winyan seubsan wela” (“Tradition and Trend”, in the Association's own English rendering, although a more literal translation would be “Carry on the Spirit, Move on with the Times”), to be held in the Plenary Hall at Queen Sirikit National Convention Center from 30 April to 3 May. The advertisement featured a photograph of an attractive young Thai lady elegantly dressed in a business suit. Sitting relaxed in an armchair and looking intently (even invitingly) at her supposed viewers, she was surrounded by several graphic pointers with English captions revealing the unThainess of various parts of her bodywear, namely, a hairstyle with a “Parisian Touch”, “Italian Import(ed)” ear-rings, “American Fragrance”, a suit of “English Wool”, a “Swiss Made” watch, and “Japanese Silk” stockings. A big caption in the top right corner of the photograph asks, directly enough: “Bok dai mai khun pen thai thi trong nai?” (“Can you tell which part of you makes you Thai?”).

But who, actually, was the “you” being asked? And who, for that matter, was the consumer of un-Thai commodities being looked at? Was it the lady in the photograph or her viewers? Through her reflexive gaze, the viewers were enticed to look with unexpected and growing unease at her image as evidence of the possibility of their own unThainess, their imagined communion with her being grounded on the common challengeability of their Thai identity. For once, the voyeurs themselves were subjected to ethnic self-voyeurism.

I have always loved television. Like many people addicted to the gentle habit, I have long realized that television viewing is not only pleasurable but is also good for the nerves. At the end of the day, after putting the children to bed, with a cold can of beer in my hand and sitting in front of the television, I am indeed a prince in my private realm. The exhaustion from the day's toil is imperceptibly dissolved in the realm of desire and fantasy. My enjoyment of television, however, is always mixed with a certain feeling of unease. There is often a sense that the pleasure of mass entertainment may deposit something unsound, something apocalyptic, that will act upon my consciousness when I am least aware of it. At the same time, even as I am deeply engrossed, there is a part of my mind telling me I should be doing something more worthwhile — maybe reading a book, or writing a letter to a friend. Perhaps it is also a question of self-image. As ambitious intellectuals we are not likely to openly confess the secret pleasure we take in watching Wheel of Fortune and the ideologically dubious Miami Vice, where the good guys and the bad guys are barely distinguishable in their Gorgio Amani suits and fast cars.

The clumsy reference to my ambiguous feeling towards television illustrates, if anything, how common is our suspicion of the enjoyment of the mass media. This suspicion in fact can be traced to major philosophic currents which work to invalidate such “common pleasures”. First is the essentially bourgeois view that the mass media is for the “masses”; it caters to the lowest common denominator of unreflective thoughts and easy emotions. Television programming, dominated by soap operas, talk shows, and musical video, it is argued, lacks pedagogic value: unlike classical arts, it offers neither spiritual enlightenment nor critical engagement with life's concerns. Popular culture pleases but does not teach.

The dominant international visions of political and economic change regularly represent the major trend in the post–Cold War era as an inexorable and beneficent march towards global democratic capitalist modernity under the leadership of the United States (Yergin and Stanislaw 1998; Friedman 1999). The virtuous connection between economic and political liberalism and the democratizing effect of a rising middle class continues to be emphasized by a range of commentators. Prior to the financial crisis in 1997–98 and the end of Soeharto's rule in early 1998, the most influential approaches to the Indonesian trajectory already hoped, if not expected, that the country was winding its way towards democratic capitalist modernity (MacIntyre 1990, 1994). For example, in 1994, John Bresnan, a former long-time Jakarta-based employee of the Ford Foundation, argued that the “general direction” of political development in Indonesia (as well as in a number of other countries in the region) was “that of expanding the political élites, opening the contestation of public office, widening the process of consultation and consensusbuilding, and in other ways increasing the transparency of government”. He concluded that in Southeast Asia the civilian and military structures of the state were “on the defensive” and “the urban middle-classes” were “on the rise” (Bresnan 1994, p. 58). Meanwhile, in a 1996 cover story on Southeast Asia, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review observed that “economic growth — and the middle class it nurtures — may drum the soldiers back to barracks”; however, he conceded that this would not take place “overnight” (Tasker 1996, p. 21).

The 1997–98 financial crisis (which acted as a major catalyst for a looming social and political crisis centred on the rent-seeking and corruption of the Soeharto family) strengthened the expectation that authoritarianism and patrimonialism were about to pass into history under the cleansing pressure of political and economic liberalization.

The Cold War, as Martin Shaw (1992) has reminded us, has been “cold”; its dominating feature was the “freezing” of the domain of national politics by international considerations. With the declaration of the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, the “primacy of the national” reasserts itself in international agendas. This is largely a consequence of the end of “ideological politics” and the relative decline of geopolitical posturing and reasoning especially by the major powers. Accepted theories and practices of international relations were challenged and are in the process of transition and/or transformation. New constitutive and reflexive agendas reinserted themselves into the interplay of global diplomacy and politics: human rights, the market, environment, “security”, and “rights” all now re-emerged as fundamental issues yet to be resolved within the world.

Notwithstanding this flux in history, some commentators still maintained a unilinear reading of global trends (Buzan 1991a; 1991b; Fukuyama 1989). For these analysts, the end of history is nigh and the indomitable West, accompanied with its twin angels — liberal democracy and market capitalism — continues to triumph. What is remarkable in this reading of world events is the failure to grasp the historical effects the West has had on the “non-West” via colonization, armaments, and economic domination, processes which have subverted histories and stunted development in the non-Western world.

A more fundamental question, however, remains: how far will the “West” be able to carry public opinion, both within its domestic space and without? For many in the West, a post-materialist post-modern political agenda, based no longer on the satisfaction of wants but of values, and no longer confined to representation of national interests but that of international responsibilities, is gaining salience. This has correspondingly engendered new ways of relating and different modes of sociability. The dominant cultural traditions of progress, universalism and objectivism are now interrogated and struggled over. Unlike Fukuyama's and like-minded prosaic proclamations of the “end of history”, different histories and their fragments are being reconstituted, created, and recreated.

Media culture in Vietnam is presently documenting a vibrant revolution in the relations between the public, the media, and the state. The social and cultural transformations that are taking place are potently manifest in the eager response of the public to an entirely unfamiliar category of public person in Vietnam — the celebrity. The public is experimenting with cultural icons that are not dictated by the ruling political party, signalling a radical shift in the ideological topography of popular culture. This chapter argues that contemporary celebrities in Vietnam mark out a terrain for unexpressed popular protest at this formative moment for media culture. Dissent is unrealizable in other domains yet occupies a crucial space for the negotiation of political and social meaning in an era of rapid social mutability. We suggest here that the popularity of the tabloids in Vietnam expresses in readers’ thirst for celebrities a will to a reconfiguration of their political and cultural power.

This chapter first traces the changing relationship between the media and the state in Vietnam and then provides a portrait of the socio-cultural milieu in which contemporary celebrities are positioned. Material gained from interviews about popular culture with a cross-section of Hanoi residents conducted in late 1997 and early 1998 indicates the precise modalities through which the role of public figures and fame are undergoing eruptive change in contemporary Vietnam. It then argues that attraction to celebrities holds the possibility of more transgressive political acts (such as the formation of crowds), in support of which we present a case study of the public reaction to the recent death of a popular icon.

The metamorphosis of the media in Vietnam

Vietnam is on the brink of becoming a fully fledged media culture in which the popular narratives and cultural icons are reshaping political views, constructing tastes and values, crystallizing the market economy and, as Kellner suggests, “providing the materials out of which people forge their very identities” (1995, p. 1).

Formally approved by the Sixth Party Congress in 1986, Vietnam's doi moi or renovation policy has seen the country transform itself from a reclusive Marxist-Leninist state into a market economy ever-increasingly incorporated into the global capitalist system. Along with this new economic openness, Vietnam has variously embraced and had forced upon it a new cultural openness, a process that has seen the once relatively discrete borders of its national culture begin to exhibit an unsettling new porousness. As new media have flowed into the country alongside other consumer goods, the state has begun to find that the tight control it once exercised over virtually all fields of cultural production and consumption is slipping. As one might expect, this process has been quick to revivify the spectre of cultural pollution by a decadent West, one to which the state has periodically reacted since the advent of the policy in spectacular fashion.

But doi moi has not only let the West back in. A less remarked consequence of the policy is that it has precipitated something of a return of the repressed of national culture in the form of the popular culture of the Vietnamese diaspora. Doi moi has seen the formation in Vietnam of a huge market in pirated versions of video music variety shows, karaoke, and compact discs produced by Vietnamese living the United States, France, and Canada. Thus as well as introducing Vietnamese consumers to Playboy and Die Hard, “renovation” has allowed them to meet such diasporic cultural icons as Elvis Phuong, Lynda Trang Dai, and Paris by Night. While the state has over the past few years become more resigned to the presence in Vietnam of a commercial music culture produced by its former enemies or My nguy [American puppets], and recently has even allowed diasporic singers to perform in Vietnam, this state of affairs continues to afford it no little source of ambivalence and disquiet.

In his short essay, “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars”, William Burroughs describes “The Walk Exercise” that he gives to his writing students:

Burrough's invisibility is a function of his obviousness and transparency. His strategy of “covert spectacle” combines a poignantly imperial act (the king who vacates his throne to pass unrecognized in his realm) with the petty megalomania of a bourgeois expatriate-on-smack. This notion of a visible “invisibility” recalls Michael Rogin's 1993 musings on the American Pentagon and Edgar Allan Poe's “The Purloined Letter”:

The “covert spectacle” is an integral component of contemporary state-craft and the mass commodification of late capitalism, as revealed in the functions of censorship and mass media propaganda. While censorship paradoxically works to make the invisible (the unnoticed) visible through its erasure, displacing original authorship with the signature of the state, in the spectacle of propaganda, the state is reified as this displacing meta-self.

Thus begins Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer's magisterial meditation on the fate of one living under the spell of the colonial state in his House of Glass (1992). The time was 1912; the place, Netherlands East Indies. The narrator Jacques Pangemanann is a former Commissioner of Police. Educated in Lyon, France, he is indeed like Conrad's Kurtz, a flower of European civilization. But what confronts his heart of darkness is an enterprise far more insidious than those of economic plunder and military conquest by colonialism. He has been asked by the Dutch colonial authorities to investigate the “textual activities” of the anti-colonial radicals:

Introduction

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been through rough times in the last couple of years. A vicious currency crisis in Thailand during mid-1997 mutated into a financial crisis, which then spread to the other currencies and financial markets of Southeast Asia, before mutating again into a more virulent regional economic downturn across much of East Asia. Depicted by one observer as the “bonfire of the certainties”, the Asian economic crisis knocked (formerly ebullient) subjective business confidence across the region, which further exacerbated the damage already being done to more objective business activity. Previously bold commercial banks took fright, as over-leveraged corporates in several countries began to default on loans, en masse. Banks’ loan books were frozen, credit became scarce, interest rates climbed precipitously, and the business environment became extremely hazardous. In those countries worst affected, good and bad firms alike found themselves in life-threatening situations. Some countries even saw the economic fallout from the crisis making an impact in their political arenas. The value of ASEAN's various local currencies came under downward pressure, as did the prices of most asset classes, from shares to property. Many forms of business endeavour were adversely impacted, including trade and investment. For almost anyone involved in business in ASEAN during 1997–99, the experience was decidedly unpleasant. Perhaps the only net winners so far have been corporate lawyers and accounting firms.

For most of those with operational investments in ASEAN, the period since mid-1997 has been extremely disappointing, as both the value of these investments, and the earnings to be derived from them, have shrunk fairly substantially. Conversely, for those seeking to enact new investments in Southeast Asia, the period since mid- 1997 has been quite exciting. Not only can some operational businesses now be bought at levels commensurate with their distressed condition, but post-crisis liberalization reforms are allowing foreign investors to acquire assets that were previously offlimits (in formerly protected sectors). This state of affairs has also dovetailed with new trends apparent in the field of international business, particularly with regard to a burgeoning of mergers and acquisition (M&A) activity, and strategic alliances.

Introduction

The ASEAN Eminent Persons Group (EPG), in June 1999, decided to draft the following proposals for the ASEAN Summit in 2000. They included the ASEAN Vision 2020, and proposals related to Post-Asian Crisis Economic Scenarios, Food Security, ASEAN Monetary Fund, and Civil Societies. Among these, the food security issue has been a top priority subject in ASEAN for some time. The ASEAN Ministers of Agriculture and Forestry (AMAF) oversee the co-operative efforts in the area of food, agriculture, and forestry in the region. It has established several priority areas: to promote the food, agriculture, and forestry sectors. Among them, strengthening food security in the region has been given top priority. This is because the incidence of malnutrition in Asia, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates, accounts for nearly two-thirds of the chronically undernourished in the world. It further indicates that by the year 2010, Asia will account for one-half of the world's malnourished population (FAO 1998, p. 1).

This suggests that food security is an issue that needs to be addressed urgently, and it will continue to be an important issue in the future. For the purpose of this study, the definition of “food security” will be borrowed from the FAO. According to the FAO, “food security is generally understood as access to adequate food to all households at all times to enable them to lead a healthy and active life” (FAO 1998, p. 79).

Hence, the objective of this chapter is to review the food security situation in the region in the framework of the economic and social environment and to explore ways and means to ensure food security in the region in the short-term and long-term perspectives. The first section will analyse the economic and social performance of the region in general and the salient features of Southeast Asian agriculture in particular. The second section will address the status of food security in the region in terms of adequacy, stability, and the quality of food. The third section will discuss the software issues, such as macro policy reforms, agricultural development policies, and programmes related to food security. The impact of the regional crisis on food security will be discussed next. The conclusion will sum up the findings of the study and discuss the problems and challenges of the region with regard to food security.