HUMANITY AND ITS INSTITUTIONS. In my travels in Turkey, India, Nepal, China, Hong Kong and Macau I have found nothing but friendliness, kindness, hospitality and humour from ordinary people along the way. Halfway up the Bosphorus without any lunch, a Turkish family shared their food with us. In one of the poorest of countries, the Nepalese porters were always laughing and sharing jokes with us. Sitting in the 747 next to an engineer from Pakistan, in less than an hour we found enough in common to joke “Why are you Moslems always fighting each other?” “Because we got the idea from you Christians” and we laughed. We were talking about the religious institutions that are always in tension between war and peace and, on a longer flight, I am sure we would have talked, amicably, about the other institutions that have shaped, or misshaped the orient. Let us call them “isms”.
THESE ISMS are far from benign. European and Japanese imperialisms, that once dominated and subjugated the Orient, have now been replaced, according to Noam Chomsky and Susan George, by US imperialism. That authoritarian nationalism, called Fascism, is probably a reasonable description of the Burmese and North Korean military governments. Asiatic feudalism, the concentration of land ownership in a few families, having persisted throughout the region for thousands of years, is still alive and well. Communism brought disasters to China, Kampuchea, and North Korea. Imported religions brought, at least initially, imperial and feudal obligations that rivalled the indigenous religions of the Orient. But these religions also supported the ruling aristocracies, Hinduism by conforming to the caste system, Taoism by a priesthood cultivating connections at court, Confucianism by obedience to an imperial ideology, and Shintoism by obedience to an emperor directly descended from the Shinto God. In the hands of priesthoods, poverty and inequality in this life were justified in return for resurrection or reincarnation in the next life. For the old Crusaders as for the new suicide bombers “Your rewards will be in heaven”. Let us follow this tangle of feudalism and ideologies, and its victims in class and gender, through the countries of the Orient, to some sort of conclusion.
Afghanistan, as a focal point on the Silk Road, attracted many empires. The British Empire tried to use it as a buffer against the Russian Empire but were defeated in 1919. The Soviets invaded in 1979 and were defeated after t he Americans armed the Taliban. The Americans and allies are now trying to defeat the Taliban. Meanwhile Afghanistan produces most of the world’s opium and has perhaps the world’s worst female rights record.
Bangladesh. When it was called East Pakistan in 1970, suffered storm flooding that killed nearly half a million people. These people were forced to live in flood plains since ownership of safer lands was monopolised. In 1971 India, seeing its political advantage in a split Pakistan, invaded East Pakistan which then renamed itself Bangladesh. Then in the 1974 floods one and a half million people starved to death even though production of rice per head was the highest ever – the poor could not afford it. Meanwhile, well-meaning attempts to reduce child labour by Eurocentric legislation simply tipped now unemployable children into crime, prostitution and the drug trade. With the population almost entirely Sunnis, Hindus lie low and Buddhists keep to the hill country. Women suffer numerous pregnancies, hard work and poor diet.
Burma. In 1826 the British conquered Burma in order to cut down 10 million acres of teak forest. When Burma switched to rice production around 1920, landlords (half of whom were absentee) had access to finance , built up their plantations and then employed the peasants at low wages. Those who tried to compete went into debt to moneylenders who ended up owning over a third of the land. One of Asia’s richest countries but, after 50 years military rule, it has some of the poorest and most oppressed people. Early observers saw Burmese man as lazy and backward, woman as hard-working and industrious. Traditional Burmese men cited the Buddha’s seven inherent faults in women: untruthfulness, artfulness, indiscretion, vanity, un-cleanliness and cruelty.
China. Traditionally, some 90 percent of households were landless peasants with 50-60 percent of harvests privately taxed. See previous China chapter and later land reform notes.
Hong Kong. See previous HK and Macau chapter.
India. In 1943, though there was no absolute shortage of food, about three million people starved to death. India’s problem has always been unequal access to food due to poverty. Food aid has not helped since it simply increases the ability to pay rents which, supply and demand, simply rise anticipation. Other forms of aid have no more helpful. In the 1980s the British government gave India 65 million pounds provide they were spent on helicopters from Westland, an ailing firm in need of support. World Bank dams in the Narmada valley made one million people landless, most of whom received no compensation. Indian problems are often associated with the caste system and Hinduism. See previous India chapter and ideology notes later.
Indonesia. The Dutch east India Company virtually controlled Indonesia, imposing production quotas and forced labour through the estates of local lords. After independence, Susan George describes a land “drowning in oil, with deposits of tin, nickel, copper and bauxite on an Eldorado scale, vast tropical forests and natural rubber plantations” yet with some of the poorest people in the world. Both Chomsky and George follow the CIA and the US multinationals in reversing land reform, labelling those who objected to land reform as communists, and killing some half a million peasants. The World Bank supported Indonesia’s eviction of three and a half million people from Java to outlying islands. The intention was to increase military control by swamping restless ethnic minorities and tribal people.
Iraq. In the earliest settlements all the land was owned by the religious elite, always anxious to extract more surplus and therefore to achieve more power. This led to social differentiation and the emergence of wealthy classes. Eventually large palaces with staffs of several thousands (plus large numbers of slaves) replaced the temples.
Japan. Cultural imperatives have included Hara-kiri, suicide when losing face and honour (Madam Butterfly). Loyalty to the Emperor led to Kamikaze suicidal aerial attacks and the military Banzai Charge which was often suicidal. Before General MacArthur’s land reforms farmers on small one-acre farms paid half their crops to absentee landlords. His reforms lifted Japan out of poverty and into the OECD league. Gender inequality here is by far the worst within the OECD developed countries. In 1987 the Japanese Joint Whaling Company changed its name to the Cetacean Research Institute and the following year no fewer than 10,000 whales were killed for ‘scientific’ purposes.
Kampuchea. Pol Pot emptied the cities and killed some 20 percent of the population in a bizarre genocidal version of communism supported, at the time, by China.
Malaysia was colonised by the Portuguese, Dutch and British. It is unusual, like Fiji, in legislating in favour indigenous people, the ones who own the land.
Middle East. See Orient chapter.
Nepal. See Nepal chapter.
North Korea, also supported by China, developed a harsh form of communism in which wealth accrued to the elites. As a result, the 1990s famine killed two million people, nearly ten percent of the population. Today they lack food and basic medical care, major surgery often performed without anaesthetic. At the Writers Festival we heard Barbara Demick’s descriptions of the sequence of isms: feudalism throughout history, Japanese fascism from 1905 to 1945, the communism that brought starvation, the misguided foreign aid diverted to the regime and, underlying all this, a familiar fascist superiority myth, in this case the belief that Koreans form a uniquely pure and spiritual race. In Demick’s book review a satellite photo says it all. A blaze of light covers the South. In North Korea a single spot of light identifies the capital where the elite lives.
Pakistan was the site of one of the earliest civilisations that grew up along the Indus valley and suddenly collapsed around 1800 BC, probably due to river floods. At that time “Extensive works were built [slave labour?] to contain the river and to irrigate the fields to produce the food that supported and fed the ruling elite, priests and the army” (Ponting, 1991). As part of India it shared the same sort of feudal structure described by McNeill and Malina in the chapter on The Orient. After the arrival of Islam, successive invaders such as the Mughals and the British maintained cohesion between Moslems and Hindus until the prospect of independence in 1947raised new temptations of power over vast lands. Pakistan means ‘Land of the Spiritually Clean and Pure’, a fair indication of the role of religion in dividing a mixed society that had rubbed along fairly peacefully for centuries. Though millions of people then had to walk to their new countries, slaughtering each other on the way, the feudal structures that controlled wealth were adapting to new rent seeking opportunities. For example, Susan George describes how “land prices in areas of Pakistan where the Green Revolution has been introduced have increased 500 percent as landlords compete for land from which tenants have been removed”. The recent disastrous floods have revealed the triangulation of Pakistan’s deep-seated problems. “In a country where most politicians are also hereditary landlords, he [an exiled opposition leader] called for a radical redistribution of land between the classes in response to the destruction” (Sydney Morning Herald). This opposition leader was urging legal proceedings against those “who save their crops and divert floods towards the localities as well as the villages of the poor.” The other sides of the triangle include the alternative government of the military, and that of the Taliban who recently urged Pakistan not to accept emergency aid from the West. On the same page was a list of countries donating to the flood disaster. First was the US at 89 million, second Britain at 34 million, third Australia at 24 million, eighth Saudi Arabia at 9 million, with none of the other immensely rich Arab states contributing very much. Could an equivalent of the East Asian land reforms have funded the water-management infrastructure that other flood-risk countries have installed, and eliminated poverty and therefore the Taliban? See religion notes later. With 22 families owning the bulk of Pakistan’s land and industrial and financial assets the prospects for reform are dim. The Sunni-Shiite divide is now being stirred up by Iran and Saudi Arabia, to the benefit of the Taliban. Women are property and honour killings exceed 1000 a year.
Singapore is small, densely populated, and the fourth richest country in the world in terms of GDP per capita. Like Hong Kong it has built its wealth on trade and rent reform. An earlier prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, emphasised Asian Values in support of his authoritarian government. It has similarities with Confucianism, now being rediscovered by the Chinese government, perhaps for the same reason.
South Korea. Largely as a result of the land reforms, South Korea’s per capita income is at least 20 times than that of North Korea. See Economist quotes later.
Sri Lanka was first colonised by the Dutch who brought in African slaves. Later, when rents became high in Tamil Nadu, the labour force was supplemented by Tamils, landless newcomers. Therefore Sri Lanka’s civil war has its roots in land inequality, not helped by religious divide. For example, in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita and also in Islam religious duty comes before the individual, while Sri Lankan Budbhism is always intertwined with politics, suspicious of Hindu and Christian influences. Arising from the civil war, one in five households is now headed by women.
Vietnam was colonised by the French who divided up the land of the Mekong Delta and sold it in large blocks. These large estates were worked by share-cropping tenants, kept in a position of quasi-serfs and tied to the land in a state of permanent debt. Eventually the French were defeated by the Viet Cong, supported by China. Then, after defeating the US, Britain and Australia, Vietnam finally redistributed communal land to peasant families leading to economic growth.
REFORMS. There are three institutions that can be damaging to any societies, but especially to those I have called The Orient, where poverty and inequality have been the highest. These institutions concern land, ideology and gender, and their reforms are very closely integrated. For example, land reform reduces the tensions that both ideologies and gender inequality (women own one percent of the land) can create. Sadly, all three reforms are those that have eluded the huge cumbersome structures we call the United Nations, for example: “Count up the results of 50 years of human rights mechanisms, 30 years of multi-billion dollar development programmes and endless high level rhetoric and the general impact is quite under-whelming…this is a failure of implementation on a scale that shames us all.” (Mary Robinson, UN Human Rights Commissioner).
Land Reform. Why have the overcrowded, resource-poor countries of East Asia achieved such high growth with social equality? “In all three of Asia’s biggest successes – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan [and China] – the groundwork for both fast growth and the income equality that eased the social strains of development was laid by a radical land reform.” (Economist, 29 June, 1991). But there are two big problems with third world land redistribution. First, you need a strong coercive force to overcome feudal vested interests. For Japan, Taiwan and South Korea General MacArthur was that force. The victor in the Pacific in WWII, he had full authority from the US government to prevent the spread of communism. His advisors said the best way to stop communism was to redistribute land to the peasants. He did, and those three economies took off.
The second big problem is that land redistribution is only appropriate to rural land and all the countries of the Orient are now rapidly urbanising. For whatever reason people migrate to cities, they have to sell up on a falling market and, at their final destinations, they face rising rents collectable by the landowners already there. Meanwhile their struggle to survive in overcrowded shanties and slums subtracts from everyone’s environmental quality. The only means of balancing this rising inequality is a tax reform that redistributes landed wealth. Australia, in its system called Local Government Rates, already has such a tax on unimproved land values that, if raised high enough, could more than compensate for the reduction of inefficient taxes on labour and capital investment, while reducing social inequality and increasing economic growth.
Ideology Reform. At best, ideologies provide social cohesion and social justice. At worst, they have caused a hundred million deaths in a single century. Here are my suggestions. North Korea should first follow China’s example and re-establish family farms, open up international trade, and use these two initiatives to replace poverty by progress. China should then lead the way, by adopting item one of the Communist Manifesto: The Collection of all Land rent for Public Purposes. It should modernise its old State Owned Industries (SOEs), reduce its bureaucracy and move towards a guided democracy. Islamic states should retain the social capital they have in family and community values, while replacing much of Koranic education with more practical modern education, most especially for women. Since Islamic states exhibit the greatest social inequality, they should implement item one of the Communist Manifesto (since communism is atheism they may prefer to call it land value taxation instead) as a reform underpinning any others.
Gender reform. In the region I have called The Orient, gender inequality, even including Japan, is by far the highest in the world. I have in front of me an article from the Guardian Weekly and, from The Sydney Morning Herald, a review of Half the Sky – How to Change the World (Kristof and WuDunn). Both are unusual in making a strong case for economic growth through gender reform. They start with a rubbery statistic, and there is a good reason why it is rubbery. “At least 60 million women, perhaps 100 million, are missing today.” The reasons are murder, rape, sex trafficking, hunger but, most of all, sheer lack of interest in whether females, of any age, survive. The authors then assemble some comments, mostly from within the orient. Examples include the concerns of an Egyptian obstetrician, female infanticide in China, Indian girls denied the vaccinations their brothers get, the Afghan man who would prefer his mother to die than see a male doctor, the boy soldier from the Congo who sees raping girls as his right, the Delhi girl sold into a brothel watching a rebel girl stabbed in the stomach and left to die, and the misogyny that keeps Yemen and Pakistan in poverty.
Research cited by Goldman Sachs suggests that “Men tend to spend money unwisely, on bars and prostitutes; women buy child-care, food, education and small businesses” (see later notes on the Grameen Bank). The same research predicts that, offering women more opportunity to earn a living could push up income per head by 20 percent over the next two decades. And the World Bank argues that the gender divide has imposed huge economic costs throughout the Middle East, where the gap in economic opportunity is the widest in the world. The authors conclude that “prosperity is not a zero-sum game: if a society cashes in on the female dividend to create more wealth, men and children share in the bounty. Everyone wins.”
Aid reform. The World Bank loans are for large projects, such as hydro-electricity dams, or the application of irrigation, fertilisers and pesticides on large estates which can afford them. Much of these loans therefore get absorbed by landowners or in a quicksand of inefficiency and corruption. It is arguable that many forms of “charity” release additional funds with which people can pay rent, causing land values and hence, perversely, rent to rise. Those owning land benefit, those who do not, do not. At the other end of the scale small farmers can get small loans from landlords and moneylenders but, without collateral, interest rates are often astronomical, leading to debt bondage. The Grameen Bank makes a huge number of tiny loans to the poor, mostly to women (98%), to buy a cow, a sewing machine, whatever. Over three decades it has extended 6 billion dollars with a loan repayment rate exceeding 98 percent.
MAIN SOURCES
William McNeill, 1977, Plagues and People, Oxford, Blackwell
Bruce Malina, The New testament World, Insights from Cultural Anthropology
Clive Ponting, 1991, A Green History of the World, London, Sinclair-Stevenson.
Edward Said, 1994, Culture and Imperialism, London, Vintage.
Edward Said, 2003, Orientalism, New York, Vintage.
Lonely Planet guides, esp history sections