Tag: Southeast Asia

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Books, essays and others History & heritage

[3021] The River Road to China: recounting the 1866-1868 French expedition for the source of the Mekong

The song Begawan Solo used to play regularly on Malaysian television. It is an Indonesian serenade in the form of keroncong describing the longest river in Java.

Solo is one of the great rivers of Southeast Asia and when I think of great Southeast Asian rivers, the Salween, the Irrawaddy and the Chao Phraya would come to mind. Adding to the list is possibly the Kapuas and the Musi. But the greatest without doubt is the Mekong.

The Mekong River flows from the Himalayas, snakes through southern China and defines the contemporary boundaries of Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia before empties out into the South China Sea just south of Saigon.

The Mekong is the great river I am most familiar with. From the air, I have seen the river and its delta in Vietnam. I have been to Phnom Penh twice over the span of 14 years and marveled at the transformation of the city. I have walked the streets of Vientiane during what appeared to be a dry season when the river to the west looked meek with people walking across to either get into Thailand or Laos. Further upriver in Luang Prabang where I spent several weeks, the river was wide and fierce. To cross it as many did at the Laotian capital would be pure madness. I have been through the Chiang Khong border checkpoint, where the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge crosses a gentler Mekong. And more recently, I have been to Sop Ruak where the Thailand-Myanmar-Laos tripoint is.

While geographically and politically familiar with the river, I had never really thought about the history of its exploration until when I picked up a little gem from Tintabudi bookstore some months back. It is Milton Osborne’s River Road to China. I am familiar with Osborne from a long time ago when I took a class on Southeast Asian history at Michigan. His work was one of the references we used in a class ran by Victor Lieberman.

By Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved.

River Road to China recounts the 1866-1868 French expedition’s attempt to locate the source of the Mekong and determine whether it was navigable. Based on my previous travels and embarrassingly basic geographical knowledge of the river, I would have bet it was navigable all the way up to at least the Myanmar’s section. At each section of the river that I have visited, the Mekong is wide except in Vientiane during what appeared to be a drought.

With a more limited geographical knowledge but with a whole lot more courage (or bravado), that was exactly the suspicion of the French empire, which was expanding its influence across the Indochina in competition with the British. The French were looking for inland access to southern China via the Mekong, while the British were doing so through the Salween in Myanmar. There was race to Yunnan and the supposed riches of southern China.

The French expedition led by Ernest-Marc-Louis de Gonzague Doudart de Lagrée and also later Marie Joseph François Garnier met their first challenge near Sambor, approximately 200km to the northeast of Phnom Penh by river. The Sambor rapids were difficult but it could be negotiated, especially with stronger ships of the mid-19th century. de Lagrée, his men and local guides definitely did with more primitive boats after a struggle that came physically and psychologically.

Public domain image. Wikipedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mission_M%C3%A9kong_05310.jpg
The principal expedition members at Angkor in 1866. By Émil Gsell.

de Lagrée had been to the Sambor rapids before and he had thought it was impossible to pass. But the expedition did pass the rapids and that raised hope.

That hope was quickly dashed. The Khone Phapheng Falls at the modern Laotian border are the uppermost reach of navigable Mekong. Khone Phapheng Falls are in fact the widest waterfall in the world. I never knew that, thinking Iguazu Falls on the Argentine-Brazilian border being the widest. But no. The Khone Phapheng Falls have a width of nearly 11km, Iguazu is only nearly 3km.

Unlike the Iguazu that rises close to 100 meters, the Khone Phapheng is just 21 meters tall in a series of cascades. In many ways, the Laotian falls are a gentle feature. But that was enough to block any steamship from going upstream. Years later, the French ended up building a rail line to sidestep the problem presented by the Falls.

Now knowing the Mekong was unnavigable, there was still an objective left: find the source of the Mekong. And so, the expenditure pressed on but in a disastrous fashion due to tropical diseases, the limits of French medical knowledge of that time, political realities of the Indochinese interior and simply, European imperial arrogance. de Lagrée in fact spent a second half of the expedition suffering from what seems to be malaria and died unceremoniously in Yunnan away from the Mekong after a failed surgery. de Lagrée shared the fate of another French explorer, Alexander Henri Mouhot, who popularized in Europe the ruins of Angkor but died out of malaria. Mouhot is buried in a tomb in the outskirts of Luang Prabang.

The rest of the team attempted to look for the source but they eventually abandoned the mission due to a civil war in Yunnan between Muslim rebels and the Chinese imperial forces. It was too dangerous to proceed.

While there was strong suspicion about the location of source of the Mekong by the end of the 19th century, it was only truly discovered by the 1990s technology. We today know that the Mekong originates from Lasagongma Spring, deep in the Tibetan Plateau.

Finally, there are two other points I would explore slightly further.

One, the expedition played a role in expanding French influence in Southeast Asia. During the expedition, France controlled the Mekong delta (French Cochinchina) but one surviving member of the expedition, Garnier, briefly captured Hanoi on the delta of the Red River in northern Vietnam on the pretext of securing free river passage in yet another attempt to access Yunnan but this time, via the Red River. While he died in a battle near Hanoi and the city itself was liberated by the Vietnamese soon after, in the longer run, France ended up ruling the whole of Vietnam because Garnier showed it was possible.

Two, I wonder if there were non-Europeans who had traversed the length of the Mekong before the French exploration. It seems quite plain that the locals who worked as porters and navigators for the French knew about the rivers more than their employers. More than that, there were Malay fishmongers all the way from the Malay Peninsula in Phnom Penh when de Lagrée spent days dining with the Cambodian king, Norodom I. He was familiar with the king given that earlier, he played a role in forcing Cambodia to become a French protectorate. More curiously, there were Malay bombmakers as far north as Dali, the northernmost city along the Mekong that the French explorers visited. If there were Malays along the upper reaches of the Mekong, surely it would not be an overreach to expect others like the Thais, Laotians, Cambodians. Vietnamese, Chinese or any other local groups that had explored the river.

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Books, essays and others Economics History & heritage

[2994] Reviewing How Asia Works

Even when free trade consensus was at its most influential period during the 1990s, industrial policy involving government intervention across Asia was commonplace. For Asian beneficiaries of free trade and globalization like Malaysia, South and Taiwan, they were and are at best mixed economies.

Now that that consensus is collapsing and trade barriers are rising, industrial policy is becoming more and more important as a response to contemporary challenges. The US under the former Biden administration did it. Europe is trying to follow suit. China has doubled down its initiatives. Almost everybody else of importance has moved in the same direction as they try to capture some segments of a shifting and fraying global supply chain caused by competition between China and the US. As far as the China-US competition is concerned, Malaysia has been promoting itself as safe haven for cross-border manufacturers and service providers since at least the first Pakatan Harapan government.

It was this context that convinced me to re-read Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works that hit the book market back in 2013. The book does not touch about contemporary industrial policy concerns like how Chris Miller’s The Chip War does but it provides a historical overview of post-war economic development of selected prominent economies in the Asia Pacific while outlining a general theory of which industrial policy worked and which did not.

The overall framework itself is not controversial: an economy progresses from agriculture-based towards manufacturing and later service-based. That feels like a truism when we look back from a mainstream 2020s lens. In fact, even the leading communists of the late 19th and early 20th century understood this.  So, the general idea has a very long history.

What the author proposes differently is the method which an economy carries out that shift.

For newly independent underdeveloped economies during the post-World War II era, Studwell highlights that economies needed land reforms to soak up loose labor market, boost agricultural productivity and build up national surplus. Land reforms mean redistributing land from the biggest landowners to the peasants, turning tenant-farmers into owner-farmers. This solved multiple post-war challenges: social unrest, extreme mass unemployment, production disincentives associated with rentierism, indebtedness and lack of capital surplus that is required for industrialization.

Economies that managed to commit land reforms the earliest and most comprehensively are the ones to experience robust industrialisation first. Here, Japan is the original success story going all the way back to the 19th century Meiji Restoration and again later following its defeat in the World War. Taiwan did the same after the Kuomintang government fled mainland China and implemented various reforms on the island. South Korea carried this out on the urging of the United States’s occupying authorities. China attempted land reforms and achieved successes until communist excesses led to collectivism in the 1950s. Collectivism undid earlier Chinese agricultural progress and delayed Chinese industrialisation until after the death of Mao Zedong. Thailand for the longest time was in denial about the state of its economy but belatedly (and informally) allowed new land to be opened up north. Meanwhile, Malaysia and Indonesia cheated their way out of land reforms: Malaysia by encouraging land openings through Felda (and not mentioned in the book, new villages as a response to the Communist Emergency) and Indonesia through its transmigrasi program that relocated population from Java to other Indonesian islands (the most important were Sumatra and Kalimantan). Finally, the Philippines did not bother with land reforms (as a colonial power, the US is to blame: US policy here is the direct opposite of its actions in South Korea. But it is also a story of landowning elites capturing the state), leaving the profile of the Philippine economy to that of an inefficient oligarchy.

By the 1990s, land reforms and agricultural successes had a high correlation with industrialization progress. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan were the most successful in terms of how industrialized the country had become. China came second while Malaysia and Thailand perhaps were close third and fourth before the Asian Financial Crisis knocked them off the track. Indonesia was some ways behind two these economies. And the Philippines was the Sick Man of Asia and remained so until maybe the 2010s.

Malaysia and Thailand are the odd ones here. They managed to build up surpluses to carry out industrialization despite relative failures at land reforms. The reason is that they were engaged in export-led manufacturing largely financed by foreign investment that somewhat mitigated agricultural failures (it is jarring to call these two economies as agricultural failures but failures here should be defined by the counterfactual: their agricultural output under full land reforms could have been much bigger than it was in reality, following examples from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan). The jumpstarted manufacturing sector solved some problems local agriculture did not and the most obvious of that problem was mass unemployment. In Malaysia’s case, careful natural resource management also created the surplus necessary for Malaysian industrialization.

The key concept here is exports. To be a successful economy, the country has to have export-discipline. Here, again, the most export-disciplined economies were Japan, South Korea and Taiwan (and China). In Japan and South Korea, the government forced tycoons and corporations to become involved in export-led manufacturing. Taiwan was different in that it used state-owned enterprises as its export vehicles. In places like Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand however, the tycoons were happy to become rentiers and investing their surplus in largely less productive sector such as real estate, banking and other financial services. There were manufacturers but they were happy to confine themselves in the protected domestic economy in absence of a less-than-gentle nudge from the government. Here, the three Southeast Asian economies ran a flawed industrial policy for the longest time: import-substitution in a protectionist environment before foreign manufacturers came in to allow export-led manufacturing to flourish. What the author argues is exports-led industrialization/export discipline in a protectionist environment (but these protected exporting manufacturers competing against themselves). Again, the worst of the lot was the Philippines with its oligarchs.

The next stage of development is the shift towards service-based economy. The pitfall is to liberalize the economy before the industrialization process is complete. All Southeast Asian economies failed this test and made their economy more vulnerable to financial crisis. The most successful, again, were the three (and later four including China in the 2000s) that liberalize when their manufacturing had matured.

But the ultimate message is that a government has to intervene and try. Studwell shows that even those who tried half-baked reforms and industrialization achieved much more progress faster than those who did not try. Malaysia is a prime example of committing to half-baked reforms and industrialization and then ended up much better than most in Southeast Asia. Malaysia could have been a South Korea if the country had done it properly but then again, Malaysia is also not a bad place to be compared to a majority of economies out there in the world.

To not try at all is to be left behind. So, Yoda is wrong as far as industrialization and economic history are concerned.

Categories
Economics

[2553] The lesson of Europe for Southeast Asia

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono warned of the danger of a common currency in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. It is a reminder that needs not a resounding. The horror of Europe is enough to make one thinks twice of a currency union. The talks of Greek exit can potential become the end of the European dream.

The European crisis is a challenge to me partly because I am supportive of a currency union for Southeast Asia. Sometimes in the past, I contended to be associated with the term Aseanist.

More importantly, I am supportive of a currency union because of my free trade tendency: a union boosts trade because it reduces trade barrier significantly.

To be fair to myself, I support a union across similar economies and not wholly across the diverse Southeast Asia economies from the financially sophisticated Singapore to the tiny backwater East Timor.

Really, the lesson of Europe is not that monetary union does not work. The lesson is that monetary union works best for similar economies: the economic cycles mostly coincide, the structures are about the same, the culture of societies in it are not so different, etc.

I think I have made the case for a currency union for Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei for a start. In fact, Singapore and Brunei are already on a currency board, which effectively means de facto currency union. Malaysia is the natural extension of the Brunei-Singapore union because of its proximity and the massive interlinking between the three economies.

Then, there is perhaps historical hangover on my part, given how the original Malaysian proposal was a 15-state federation, with both Brunei and Singapore in it. Indeed, prior to 1973, all three currencies were interchangeable freely. Even before that between 1953 and 1967, all three countries used the same currency.

One issue with the Malaysia-Singapore-Brunei currency union is that the Singaporean economy tends to be more volatile than Malaysia. Nevertheless, I think in many ways, the direction of both economies are more or less the same. In that sense, the challenge of a monetary authority is to be more flexible and responsive to a more dynamic economy.