COMMENTARY
Asia's growth relies on free flow of information
By Tom Plate
The Financial Times, ordinarily a great newspaper (despite being published in London, the Western world's Babylon of hysterical journalism) got editorially all shook up last week over press freedom shortcomings in Asia.
It breathlessly indicted South Korea, where some media bosses are facing government prosecution; Thailand and Indonesia, where journalists have been threatened with expulsion; and Taiwan, where a newspaper planning to run a major corruption story was raided.
There's no doubt the news media of Asia are, by and large, less than what U.S. press pundits, plenipotentiaries and potentates would prefer.
But is the U.S. media so utterly exemplary? Consider the near-psychotic pack journalism on O.J. Simpson, Monica Lewinsky and Gary Condit — not to mention our extraordinary general inattentiveness to international news that borders on either parochial arrogance or sheer stupidity. Or both.
Even so, as with the West, East Asia is better served when the people are more informed — and better governed. After all, between 1960 and 1997, East Asia's high-performing economies consistently grew faster than the world rate of growth. "This remarkable record rests in part on innovations in policy and in governance made by governments in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand," says Dr. Hilton Root, a U.S. Treasury official, and one of the few Bush administration officials who knows a whole lot about Asia.
It is notable that all the nations on Root's honor roll have been evolving (with inevitable stops and starts) more professional news media.
It's no coincidence (indeed, it's both a cause and an effect) that adult literacy rates in East Asia are 20 percent higher than the world average; that the number of Internet hosts per capita is four times greater than in Latin America; and that personal computer use is three times what it is in Latin America.
This general trend of more open and accurate publicly available information, through whatever media (print, video or Internet), is a necessary (though by no means sufficient) condition if Asia is to realize a rightful and powerful place in the 21st century. China, especially, needs to face up to this painful but necessary truth, though the notable handful of terrific newspapers in Hong Kong gives it a huge overall national leg up on sorry excuses for societies like Burma and North Korea.
Even so, the average Chinese citizen has to be a bit confused when one March day China Daily, the high-quality but Beijing-controlled English-language daily, splashes the Page One headline: "WAR ON CORRUPTION CONTINUES." That's a good thing, right? But hold on to your reformist hat!
Less than two weeks later, people hear that the well-respected Chinese investigative paper Southern Weekend, down in the south of China, has to kill a hot expose on corruption. Pressure from the Ministry of Propaganda was said to be one factor. Now how in the world can this be good for
China?
East Asia will continue its advance up the economic and political ladder only if it continues to open up — whether via the Internet or through the more conventional media. Note the recent large-scale labor protests in China, as reform and restructuring put people out of work. Beijing needs to come up with new safety nets for these people — and fast. One more Tiananmen-like incident in China and the current government, so dependent on foreign investment and acceptance, may not be long for this world. A more informative news media would not only be in the best interests of the people — for they would have a better idea of what's going on — but also of true reformists (such as China's savvy Premier Zhu Rongji), because they'd now have a more credible news media as a public ally.
Ditto in South Korea, where the new-style "labor mobility" triggered by the government's privatization program is leading to similar large-scale street protests. This country may have a more U.S.-like news media than almost anyone in East Asia, but crackdowns on media leaders, whatever the motivation, are a cure worse than the disease. The Kim Dae-jung government, however well-intentioned, needs to find a better way to address media conglomerate tax evasion (undoubtedly a real issue) than by jailing media bosses. It just doesn't look good.
Openness — in reality as well as in appearance — is not a drag on economic and political reform but, in most cases, a key driver. A press need not be as irresponsible as most in London to be as effective as some of the great newspapers of Asia, not to mention the Financial Times, whose readers on the issue it raised last week, however, would have benefited from a more sophisticated perspective.
Tom Plate, a columnist with The Honolulu Advertiser and the South China Morning Post, is a professor at UCLA. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu. He also has a spot on the Web.
