Ei Thinzar Maung
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
An interview with Ei Thinzar Maung ASIAN LITERATURE MAY – JULY 2021 China in Southeast Asia Thomas A. Bass on Bryony Lau Viet Thanh Nguyen Malaysia’s lost year Sudhir Vadaketh on Pauline Fan Edmund Wee My Hong Kong Lawrence Li on Maureen Tai Ōtaki Eiichi 32 9 772016 012803 VOLUME 6, NUMBER 3 MAY – JULY 2021 SOUTHEAST ASIA 3 Bryony Lau In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century by Sebastian Strangio; The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21st Century by Donald K. Emmerson (ed); Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia by David M. Lampton, Selina Ho and Cheng-Chwee Kuik AUSTRALIA 5 Michael Reilly China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New Global Order by Geoff Raby POETRY 6 K Za Win ‘The clarion call of a rainbow’, ‘A letter from a jail cell’ NOTEBOOK 7 Ben Dunant Leaving Myanmar MYANMAR 8 Kenneth Wong The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century by Thant Myint-U POEM Ko Inwa ‘They don’t talk big’ INTERVIEW 9 Abby Seiff Ei Thinzar Maung NOTEBOOK 12 Pauline Fan Malaysia’s lost year CHINA 13 Anne Stevenson-Yang Invisible China: : How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise by Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell TAIWAN 15 Joshua Yang The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan by Dominic Yang HONG KONG 16 Francis Moriarty Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization by Peter Hamilton THAILAND 17 Puangchon Unchanam Coup, King, Crisis: A Critical Interregnum in Thailand by Pavin Chachavalpongpun (ed) HISTORY 18 Peter Coclanis World War II and Southeast Asia: Economy and Society under Japanese Occupation by Gregg Huff SHORT STORY 19 Vikram Kapur Unmade lives TRIBUTE 22 Peter Zinoman` Nguyen Huy Thiep FICTION 23 Thomas A. Bass The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen STREETFOOD Connla Stokes Behind the blue fence THE PHILIPPINES 25 Christopher Kelly Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines by Tilde Acuña, John Bengan, Daryll Delgado, Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III, Kristine Ong Muslim (eds) POETRY 26 Michael Freeman Acrobat by Nabaneeta Dev Sen NEIGHBOURHOOD 27 Maureen Tai Kennedy Town, 5:30 a.m. PROFILE 28 Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh Edmund Wee, publisher of Epigram Books SOCIAL HISTORY 30 Ken Kwek Sonic City: Making Rock Music And Urban Life In Singapore by Steve Ferzacca MUSIC 31 Lawrence Li Ōtaki Eiichi COMICS 32 Benjamin Tausig The Art of Thai Comics: A Century of Strips and Stripes by Nicolas Verstappen JOURNAL 33 Stephen Gregory Teaching days POEM Sam Cheuk ‘Nov 6, 2019’ BOOKSELLER 34 Lam Le Hop (Box) PUBLISHER & EDITOR Minh Bui Jones CONTRIBUTING EDITORS ko ko thett (poetry), Preeta Samarasan (fiction) Pauline Fan (translation), Abby Seiff (website) DESIGN Jess Barr WEBSITE Nicholas Lhoyd-Owen SUB-EDITOR Allen Myers PROOFREADER Gareth Richards COVER Damien Chavanat ARTISTS Gianluca Costantini, Erica Eng, Paul Orchard PO Box 417, Broadway NSW 2007, Australia; [email protected] Mekong Review is published four times a year; next issue August 2021 2 SOUTHEAST ASIA China at large Bryony Lau SEBASTIAN STRANGIO In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century Yale University Press: 2020 DONALD K. EMMERSON (ED) The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21st Century Stanford: 2020 DAVID M. LAMPTON, SELINA HO AND CHENG-CHWEE KUIK Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia University of California Press: 2020 he study of international politics revolves around two questions: which actors matter and what explains their behaviour? One school of thought, Trealism, offers the simplest answer: only states matter, and Alamy they are bound to compete and pursue whatever is in their self-interest. Other theoretical frameworks champion the Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, March 2015 role of trade, democracy and multilateral institutions or the importance of ideas and non-state actors, but realism in the future maybe we would have to consider but nonetheless resort to country-by-country analysis is deceptively straightforward and enduring. it globally. at times. In a region as diverse and divided as Southeast Realism dominated international relations as it JF: So unipolarity, you suggested, allows the US to do Asia, this approach brings forth a messy reality evoked emerged as a distinct field of political science in the a lot of boneheaded things? through statistics, maps, interviews, potted histories and second half of the twentieth century, championed by KW: Right. It’s an age-old story. The dominant power political analysis. But by trying to cover so much ground, theorist Hans J. Morgenthau inside the academy and always abuses it. none of the books is particularly clear about what all of by his protégé Henry Kissinger in the halls of power. That future seems to be here. China’s foreign policy the bridge building, dam construction, ship ramming During the Cold War, the international system closely has become bolder and stronger since 2020. But few and deal making means. These books are descriptive and resembled how realists saw the world: as a cut-throat Anglo-American scholars would agree with Waltz and analytic rather than predictive. battle for supremacy. They embraced the perverse logic perceive the change as a positive development, let alone Notably absent is any detailed discussion of the of mutually assured destruction (the idea that two one that could potentially stabilise international politics. Association of Southeast Asian Nations, as retired countries capable of destroying each other with nuclear Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan laments in weapons would not go to war, as satirised by Stanley owhere is more exposed to the frictions of the his recent review of Strangio’s book and two others Kubrick in Dr Strangelove) and took a grim pleasure in new great power politics than Southeast Asia. for Foreign Affairs. Kausikan points out that few the stability the superpower stand-off created. Since at least the early 2000s, academics and scholars really understand how ASEAN works—its With the collapse of the Soviet Union, realists fell Npolicymakers have pondered the options for this motley main purpose, he argues, being to maintain civility out of favour. Their gloomy predictions that US global of less powerful states, from Laos to Malaysia. But these and stability among its members rather than to solve hegemony would make the world less safe were out of are no longer mere regional concerns. China’s strategic problems (a discouraging but accurate assessment for step with the liberal interventionist spirit of the times. ambitions and economic clout have become clearer over anyone hoping to see ASEAN play a decisive role in After a series of I-told-you-so academic articles (such as the past ten years due to tensions over the South China ending Myanmar’s spiralling political and human rights ‘Is Anybody Still a Realist?’) during the 1990s, leading Sea and massive investments under the Belt and Road crisis). Downplaying ASEAN’s importance is partly a realist scholar Kenneth Waltz doubled down. In an Initiative. (While precise figures are unknown, most product of the topics these recent books cover and their essay published in 2000, he predicted that the US would estimates suggest a total value of $1 trillion.) Southeast structures, but it also speaks to the waning relevance of destabilise the international system in the absence of a Asia is at the vanguard of a new global order, and the liberal institutionalist thinking among regional analysts. credible challenger. Consistent security threats produce rest of the world is now paying attention. consistent policy, he wrote. In support of his point, he No fewer than five books on China and Southeast n October 2011, I interviewed Henry S. Bensurto, cited Colin Powell in his capacity as chairman of the Asia were published last year. Many analyses of China’s Jr, the legal mind behind the Philippine strategy to Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1991: ‘I’m running out of demons. role in Southeast Asia adopt, consciously or not, a realist challenge China’s claims to the South China Sea, in I’m running out of enemies. I’m down to Castro and framing and vernacular. Namely, how have Southeast Ia cavernous room inside the Department of Foreign Kim Il Sung.’ Asian states responded to China? Have they balanced Affairs in Manila. Earlier that year, Chinese patrol boats Waltz was not wrong; the era of US dominance was by turning to the US (an option most accessible to had forced a survey ship to leave Reed Bank, a contested marked by erratic foreign policy adventures that had treaty allies like Thailand and the Philippines, but not area west of the Philippine island of Palawan but within devastating consequences for the people of Afghanistan, exclusively); bandwagoned by casting their lot with the country’s 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone Iraq, Libya and beyond. He was also correct that US China (as exemplified by Cambodia and to a lesser extent allowed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea power would not be uncontested for long. In 2012, Laos); or hedged by finding a middle path between the (UNCLOS). The incident was just one of many that Waltz discussed China’s rise in an interview with fellow two (the most popular choice of turning to China for have unfolded year after year between China and other political scientist James Fearon: economic gain and to the US for security guarantees)? claimants—the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia JF: So potentially a plus of moving away from These three books begin by asking similar questions but and Taiwan—over the islands, reefs, shoals and other unipolarity, in your view, might be that we’d be less dig more deeply into domestic politics to answer them.