A survey of power and politics in South-East Asia

Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia. By Michael Vatikiotis. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 336 pages; £20.

SOUTH-EAST ASIA is adorned by jungles, islands and gleaming skyscrapers. Home to more than 640m people, the variety of the region’s 11 countries defies most analytical attempts at clustering them together. Sweeping takes often fail to encapsulate the complexity of ancient cultures, languages and people that are to be found from the tip of Timor-Leste to the top of Myanmar. This is precisely what makes “Blood and Silk”, Michael Vatikiotis’s frenetic overview of politics in South-East Asia, so ambitious.

In his analysis of the power structures which define the region, Mr Vatikiotis, a private diplomat, analyses the role of monarchies and elite groups in perpetuating political uncertainty. Corruption, violence and religious extremism follow in cycles of misery: “When the water is high the fish eat the ants; when the water is low the ants eat the fish,” goes a Cambodian saying he records. An array of interview subjects, from Malaysian bigwigs with faded clothes to Javanese taxi drivers who believe in royal magic, provide small glimpses of humanity amid a landscape darkly portrayed.

The most intriguing insights regard the nature of power itself in South-East Asia. “Power is regarded as an absolute attribute…you either have it, or you don’t,” Mr Vatikiotis writes. “And your life is worth far less if you don’t.” His understanding comes from time spent both as a journalist, pestering officials, and as a peace negotiator, challenging them. In America former presidents plan libraries and speaking tours; by contrast, leaders in South-East Asia fear their own decline. Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister, has been in charge since 1985.

Systems of patronage break down unless the man or woman at the top stays there. So he or she tends to cling to the position for as long as possible. Jewel-like historical examples embellish the book, but one in particular encapsulates this point. Sir James George Scott, a 19th-century observer of Burmese society, related that on hearing that William Gladstone had been replaced as Britain’s prime minister by Benjamin Disraeli in 1874, King Mindon Min responded with sympathy for Gladstone, whom he supposed must be in prison.

The competition for power is all the more desperate given the weakness of civic institutions in South-East Asia. Victims of violence and slaughter, such as those attacked in anti-communist massacres in Indonesia in the 1960s, receive little justice. Mr Vatikiotis tells how 40,000 people were killed on the island of Bali alone, now a paradisiacal destination for more than 4m tourists a year. But the bloodshed is barely discussed there amid the surfing schools and the yoga studios. Impunity festers too in Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand.

“Blood and Silk” is a timely book. In Malaysia voters anticipate an election; in Thailand a new king awaits coronation; and in the Philippines the army is fighting for victory against militants linked to Islamic State (IS). China’s growing influence, and uncertainty over the role America wishes to play in the region now that Donald Trump is president, are causing a shift in alliances. The magnitude of the abuses, deceptions, conflicts and scandals which have shaped South-East Asia’s politics over the past century is barely contained within the book’s pages. Yet Mr Vatikiotis has some advice for those trying to live and work in spite of them: “When elephants fight, stay out of the long grass.”