World on Fire World on Fire World on Fire

by Amy Chua

  Ethnic Chinese timber tycoon Bob Hasan was another of Suharto’s close “business associates.” In the 1980s, Hasan wielded so much influence over the president that he essentially wrote legislation favoring his own group of rattan and plywood companies.39 Hasan’s logging companies further maximized profits by using environmentally disastrous burning methods to clear land. During the last few months of 1997, vast areas of Southeast Asia were smothered by thick smoke from massive forest fires in Indonesia. At the height of the fires, provinces in Sumatra and Kalimantan (the island formerly known as Borneo) were recording air pollution levels hazardous to human life. Eighty percent of the fires—burning 1.4 million hectares in Kalimantan alone—were caused by the deliberate action of Chinese-owned commercial entities. According to a recent, unpublished World Bank report, all of Sumatra’s lowland forests will be extinct by 2005, and Kalimantan’s by 2010.40

  By the end of the 1990s the spectacle of Suharto and a handful of Chinese cronies engorging themselves at the nation’s expense had provoked massive, widespread, long suppressed hostility among the pribumi majority. Suharto’s resignation in May 1998 was accompanied by an eruption of vicious anti-Chinese violence. Even as globalization’s enthusiasts celebrated the fall of Indonesia’s dictatorship and the good judgment of global markets—“Who ousted Suharto?” Thomas Friedman would later write. “It wasn’t another state, it was the Supermarkets, by withdrawing their support for, and confidence in, the Indonesian economy”41—thousands of torch-carrying Indonesians headed for Jakarta’s Chinese neighborhoods.

  For three long days, terrified Chinese shop owners huddled behind locked doors while screaming Muslim mobs smashed windows, looted shops, and gang-raped over 150 women, almost all of them ethnic Chinese. Salim’s Jakarta home was burned to the ground as were nearly five thousand other homes and stores owned by ethnic Chinese. In the end, over two thousand people died, including many pribumi rioters trapped in flaming shopping malls. The resulting $40 to $100 billion of capital flight, almost all Chinese-controlled, plunged the economy into a crisis from which the country has not recovered. At the time, however, the prevailing view among the pribumi majority was that it was “worthwhile to lose ten years of growth to get rid of the Chinese problem once and for all.”42 Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department called resoundingly for free markets and democratic elections.

  After the May 1998 riots, anti-Chinese violence, often preceded by spray-painted symbols marking Chinese shops and homes as targets, continued to break out, not just in Jakarta but throughout Indonesia’s cities. Unlike Salim or other tycoons, most Chinese Indonesians did not have the wherewithal to leave the country. They remained in the only home they had ever known, stockpiling weapons to defend themselves. Hundreds of Chinese Indonesians purchased “anti-rape corsets”: a stainless steel chastity belt, complete with tiny key, developed by a Chinese entrepreneur.43

  Much of the capital that fled Indonesia in 1998 ended up in Singapore. (Australia was another favorite destination.) Often disappointingly sterile to Western visitors, Singapore has for years been a multipurpose haven for Sino-Indonesians. Today, violence in Indonesia has subsided, and even as the great majority of pribumi Indonesians struggle to survive, the Friday afternoon Garuda Airlines flight to Singapore is packed with gaily jabbering ibu—the wives of Chinese Indonesian businessmen going to Singapore for the weekend to shop and dine. The latest rage in Singapore is “medical tourism.” Given Indonesia’s frightening hospital and health statistics, a constant stream of Indonesian Chinese fly to Singapore for cutting-edge medical care, from chemotherapy to liposuction and, especially popular among young Chinese women, operations on the epicanthic fold to produce Caucasian “double eyelids.”

  Indonesia’s population is 210 million; Singapore’s population is just over 3 million. Whereas the Chinese are a market-dominant minority in Indonesia (and the rest of Southeast Asia), in Singapore they are an 80 percent market-dominant majority. Indonesia’s per capita income is around $2,000—and it’s that high only because of the country’s many wealthy Chinese. Singapore’s per capita income is around $27,000, higher than that of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.44 Ethnic violence in Singapore is virtually unheard-of. For Indonesian Chinese, explains one Singaporean law professor, “Singapore is seen as Valhalla: a place where things work, where things are what they should be and would be if Chinese were in charge.”

  The Wrath of the Many

  The Chinese are not the only market-dominant minority in Asia. Throughout the region, resentment and vindictive terror have been directed at other disproportionately successful minorities with the same ferocity. India, for example, has no market-dominant minority at the national level, but plenty of market-dominant minorities at the state level. Thus, in the oil-rich northern state of Assam, Bengali immigrants, now roughly 40 percent of the population, have for years dominated commerce and the professions. Between 1979 and 1983, enraged members of the Assamese majority repeatedly attacked Bengalis in widespread, vicious ethnic riots.45 In Sri Lanka, the Ceylon Tamils, historically more educated, prosperous, and “advanced” than the Sinhalese majority, dominated the economy until a wave of anti-Tamil reprisals in the 1970s; ethnic strife continues to this day. Recently, writes Thomas Sowell, “a Tamil woman picked at random was dragged off a bus in Sri Lanka, doused with gasoline, and set ablaze by a Sinhalese mob in which people danced and clapped their hands while she died in agony.”46

  Nevertheless, no minority in Asia is, or has ever been, as stunningly wealthy or glaringly market-dominant as the ethnic Chinese communities of Southeast Asia, who collectively control virtually all of the region’s most advanced and lucrative industries as well as its economic crown jewels. As the U.S. government and international financial institutions continue to call for faster and tougher market reforms, there festers among the region’s indigenous majorities deep anti-Chinese resentment, rooted not just in poverty but in feelings of envy, insecurity, and exploitation. Such resentment is ready at any moment to be catalyzed, whether by another economic downturn, a charismatic hatemonger, or simply a dispute between a Chinese employer and an indigenous laborer. Even during relatively stable periods the Chinese throughout Southeast Asia are repeatedly subjected to kidnapping, vandalism, and violence. Just recently a Muslim Filipino kidnapping gang known as “The Pentagon” executed two Chinese hostages, both employees of a multimillion-dollar irrigation project in Mindanao, and vowed to behead a third if a $10 million ransom was not paid. Reacting to another series of kidnappings last year, one Filipino official shrugged and said, reflecting widespread sentiment, “The Chinese can afford the ransom.”

  Thus globalization and free markets in Southeast Asia have generated not only tremendous growth but also tremendous ethnic hatred and instability. During the 1998 Indonesian crisis I did a brief stint at the World Bank. At one point it was suggested that I join a delegation to Jakarta. A few days later, however, I was told not to go, as I was of Chinese descent and thus at risk. This surprised me; I thought my American passport and the auspices of the World Bank would surely be sufficient to protect me. One of my colleagues at the bank explained that Indonesian officials were apparently marking the passports of anyone “with Chinese blood” with a red stamp, Hitler-style. I don’t know if the rumor was true, but the sad truth is that it easily could have been, given the intensity of anti-Chinese fury in Indonesia at the time.

  The situation developing in Burma today is dangerously similar to the one that eventually sent much of Jakarta up in flames. Indeed, in its pro-market, pro-Chinese military dictatorship, the Burmese government is openly modeling itself on Suharto’s Indonesia, despite the latter’s disastrous collapse. If anything, SLORC is even more universally hated than was the Suharto regime, and the Burmese Chinese—SLORC’s financiers—are seen as even more flagrantly plundering. Symbolically, near the border town of Ruili, a Chinese-owned factory houses three hundred Burmese brown bears. The wretched beasts are packed into cages one cubic meter
in size and further restrained by metal harnesses used to collect the bile from their gall bladders.47 The bile is a highly prized Chinese medicine, exported at great profit to Hong Kong and South Korea. As well-intentioned Americans and international human rights organizations properly celebrate the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, and earnestly demand democratization, they are completely oblivious that global markets, SLORC-style, have turned Burma into a powder keg.

  CHAPTER 2

  Llama Fetuses, Latifundia,

  and La Blue Chip Numero Uno

  “White” Wealth in Latin America

  In the fall of 1999 a graduate student from Bolivia named Augusto Delgado raised his hand in my Law and Development seminar. Always frank and incisive, and one of the best students I have ever had, Augusto said: “I believe, Professor Chua, that my country is a perfect counterexample to your thesis. In Bolivia, we have all the conditions you mention. A very small light-skinned minority dominates the economy, while 65 percent of the population are impoverished Aymara and Quechua Indians. But in Bolivia today there would never be an ethnic movement against the market-dominant minority. The reason for this is because ethnicity has no appeal in Bolivia. No Indian would ever want to identify himself as an Indian. They are willing to think of themselves as campesinos, or peasants, but as indios—no.”*

  Augusto’s comments are typical of a sentiment that has prevailed in Latin America for many decades: that “there is no ethnic conflict” in Latin America, certainly by comparison to Africa or Southeast Asia. There may be class conflict, or political conflict, but little distinctively ethnic conflict. The reason most commonly given is that almost everyone in Latin America, high and low, is “mixed-blooded.”

  Less than two years later, when Augusto was back in La Paz working as a corporate lawyer, he contacted me by e-mail. He explained that he was writing to take back his earlier words. At that very moment, angry indigenous coca peasants were marching on La Paz, protesting the government’s decision to eradicate coca—for Bolivians, a “sacred plant,” widely used in legal, nonaddictive forms; for the U.S.-sponsored antidrug campaign, the source of cocaine. Calling for a constitutional assembly to organize a new “majority-based” government, the peasants had set up road blockades, paralyzing the country’s major cities. Meanwhile, seemingly from nowhere, a powerful Amerindian movement—led by Felipe Quispe, an Aymaran Indian known as Mallku, or the Great Condor in Aymaran—was threatening to take over parts of Bolivia. The worst thing about Mallku’s movement, wrote Augusto, was that it was explicitly antiwhite. “For the first time in our history, an organized Aymara leader is asking those who are not ‘indigenous’ to leave the country. . . . Boredom is easily swept away by the passion I feel for my country and by the intense historical movement we are living in.”

  Bolivia’s elites, of which Augusto is one, were stunned by the bitterness and venom of Quispe’s rhetoric. Bolivia’s land “belongs to the Aymara and Quechua Indians and not the whites,” Mallku declared at several points.1 After negotiations between protesting Amerindian farmers and the cabinet broke down, Quispe shouted at the (white) ministers: “The whites should leave the country. We cannot negotiate the blood of my brothers. Kill me if you are men!”2 Years before, when asked by a journalist why he was engaging in terrorist activity, Quispe lashed back, “So that my daughter will not have to be your maid.”

  Despite a tendency for Westerners to romanticize indigenous leaders—the Financial Times recently described Quispe as a “natural-born rebel with a cause”—Quispe is not an altogether savory character. He was jailed in the 1990s for guerrilla warfare, has been accused of corruption, and may have participated in blowing up electrical infrastructure a few years ago.3 The Bolivian establishment was thus appalled by the level of Amerindian support, at least in certain rural provinces, for Mallku, who, as one government minister said incredulously, “is encouraging acts of violence” and “operating under a mentality of 400 years ago.”4 Another view common in Latin America (although not in Bolivia, whose history includes many indigenous insurrections)5 is that Amerindians, perhaps because of years of exclusion, are apathetic and “fatalistic.” As a Chilean professor put it a few years ago, “They don’t seem to care about politics—they are totally out of the system.”

  What Latin American elites are learning is that poor, “apathetic and fatalistic” masses are prime targets for charismatic demagogues. Increasingly, indigenous leaders like Mallku are offering the region’s demoralized majorities a package that is hard to beat: a natural scapegoat (rich, corrupt “whites”) and a sense of pride, ownership, and identity. Sometimes that identity is “Aymara”—the Aymara are a fiercely independent people whose ancestors created architectural marvels many centuries before the Incan conquest; other times, it is “Quechua,” “Mayan,” “Inca,” or just “indio.”

  But however charismatic, indigenous leaders like the Great Condor face formidable obstacles, including the entire weight and momentum of Latin American history since the European conquest. The last lines of Augusto’s e-mail to me are revealing. “The political conflict will surely be over by June,” he concluded, “and that would be a wonderful time for you to finally visit Bolivia. Lake Titicaca is especially beautiful then, and we can visit my friend’s vacation house overlooking the water.” Even in the midst of immense turmoil, Augusto was confident that within a few months, things in Bolivia would be “back to normal.” And so they were.

  Bolivia and Other Countries

  with Amerindian Majorities

  At Augusto’s urging, I visited La Paz in June 2001 along with my husband and two daughters, and gave a lecture at the Catholic University of Bolivia. La Paz is breathtaking, literally and metaphorically. The city rises up out of a gigantic crater, surrounded by the Andes, with the magnificent Mount Illimani towering over the other snowcapped peaks. Despite its stark beauty, La Paz attracts relatively few tourists, in part because its eleven-thousand-foot altitude leaves the unaccustomed with headaches and even the locals with low energy. My family and I were no exception. Arriving in early June 2001, we spent most of the first day resting, as Augusto had advised, downing aspirin and mate de coca (tea from coca leaves), venturing out only late in the day to do some exploring. As it happens, the first souvenir I bought was a dried llama fetus.

  Revolting as it may sound, my poor stillborn llama is actually rather cute. Frozen in the fetal position and dried stiff like beef jerky, it has the gentle, smiling face of a camel and plenty of soft, if slightly formaldehyde-scented, fur. I bought the llama fetus partly because it horrified me, but also for educational purposes, so that my eight-year-old daughter Sophia could show it to her class. (She refused to bring it in.)

  Bolivians buy llama fetuses to ward off evil in its many guises. Bolivian miners—who, with a life expectancy of forty-five years, basically live their entire adult lives dying—look to llama fetuses for protection against dynamite explosions and the lung-destroying silicon particulates they inhale all day. Downing high-proof alcohol also helps. “The purer the alcohol, the purer the minerals I find,” one miner told me wryly.

  Llama fetuses can be found everywhere in Bolivia if you just know where to look. (So can live llamas and, at least in La Paz, llama steaks.) I bought my llama fetus at the Mercado de las Brujas, or Witches’ Market, on Calle Sagárnaga. Like virtually all the market vendors in Bolivia, the person who sold me my llama fetus was an Amerindian woman: in this case an Aymara wearing the distinctive bowler hat and ruffled skirts seen all around La Paz. (Along with most tourists, I assumed that these wonderful hats and skirts were traditional, indigenous costumes; in fact, they reflect early indigenous efforts to look more “Spanish.”) Our vendor was friendly and inquisitive. Her skin was typically sun-leathered—La Paz is the highest, most radiated capital in the world—and to my untrained eye she could have been anywhere between thirty and sixty years of age. She spoke almost no English and a nonstandard Spanish, infused with numerous Aymara words.

  Nevertheless, i
t was obvious that this vendor of fetuses—pig and lamb as well as llama—and other traditional amulets was an adroit entrepreneur. After five minutes of her marketing, cajoling, bargaining, and lifetime guarantees, I eagerly paid the woman twenty dollars (about 8,000 percent the going market price, I later learned) for a souvenir that, it turns out, scares the living daylights out of everyone I know.

  Legend has it that Amerindians are famous traders, long used to money and markets. The vendors in La Paz’s open markets work hard, wheedling and charming locals and tourists alike from dawn to dusk. They are frugal and aggressive; one Mexican anthropologist said fifty years ago that they have a distinctly “commercial libido.”6 Yet, along with the rest of Bolivia’s 65 percent indigenous majority, these Aymaran booth vendors are part of the country’s entrenched, appallingly poor, Amerindian economic underclass. Compared to the West, this ethnic “underclass” is, relatively speaking, huge, encompassing the great majority of the Bolivian people, most of whom have no access to heat—not even in the high plateau areas, where it is freezing cold at night—clean water, or medical care. “Only the rich can afford real doctors,” a Quechuan driver said to me. “For most of us Bolivians, if you get sick, you pray to pachamama (Mother Earth). But you probably die.”

  The same day that I bought the llama fetus, I met some of Augusto’s friends at a dinner party at his apartment. They were an urbane and witty group. Two were descended from former presidents of Bolivia. Several held notable political positions. A cabinet-level minister was there; she was a beautiful woman whose parents had been schoolteachers. Her husband, also present, had been head of a different department in a previous administration; his family once owned what is now an entire neighborhood in La Paz (although at the time, he explained, the land was not valuable). Another guest, a jovial, self-made cement magnate, was a vice presidential candidate in the coming election, who had a few years earlier survived a harrowing kidnap. Not all of Augusto’s friends were well-off. One was a quirky, erudite polyglot, who had cotaught with the philosopher Adorno in Frankfurt for many years. “Augusto and I come from one of the oldest families in Bolivia,” he whispered to me at one point, “but we were not businesspeople, and today we are the poor cousins here.” “I can’t bear this horrible Indian folk music,” he announced loudly at another point, requesting that Augusto put on a different CD. Another guest was a newspaper columnist who made ends meet by acting as a guide for European and North American tourists.