called a provisional parliament, the Grand National Assembly, to reject
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the victors’ demands and fight for national independence. Military commanders, troops, and ordinary citizens rallied to his cause.
As massive Greek forces, supported by British, Italian, and French troops, marched into Turkey, Atatürk led his forces in resisting them. With Atatürk as commander in chief, the Turkish side fought heroically, driving out the Greeks and attacking the invading armies of Italy, Britain, and France until they decided it was not worth it to continue their occupation.
Troops under Atatürk also forcefully pushed the Armenians back from territories that had once belonged to Turkey and reestablished an earlier border. Atatürk’s independent government became the government of Turkey.
With widespread popular support for maintaining Turkey’s independence, Atatürk in 1922 abolished the sultanate. He calculated that trying to abolish the caliphate at the same time would stir up too much opposition, so he used religious supporters in his struggle against the sultan and waited several years before taking on the caliph and religious officials.
On November 20, 1922, Turkey and the Allied powers began to negotiate a peace treaty in Lausanne. Atatürk sent his former chief of staff, Ismet Pasha, who turned out to be a brilliant and stubborn negotiator. Unlike in China, where the leaders were determined to claim the territory the country had possessed at its peak, including Tibet, Taiwan, and islands along the coast, Atatürk accepted the reality that Turkey no longer had the ability to maintain all the territory of the former Ottoman empire such as the Balkans and the north African territories. But Atatürk insisted that Turkey should include Istanbul, Thrace, and other areas the Allies had intended to occupy immediately after their victory in World War I. Through persistence in the Lausanne discussions, Turkey was able to get a favorable treaty, signed on July 24, 1923, and in early October the Allied troops left Constantinople. This success enabled Turkey to become the first of the vanquished Central powers to sign a treaty with the Allied powers and emerge as an independent nation. A few months later, on October 29, 1923, Atatürk, with widespread popular support, proclaimed the Turkish Republic with himself as president.
Lee Kuan Yew rose to power in a series of political campaigns and elections that began with the formation of the Political Action Party (PAP) in 1954. In 1959, when he was first elected prime minister, Singapore was part of a British colony, separated from the rest of Malaya by a causeway.
In 1963 when Malaysia achieved independence from Britain, Singapore became part of independent Malaysia. When Malaysia included Singapore, the population was fairly evenly divided between Malays and ethnic Chinese. But in 1965 Malay leaders, fearing that the ethnic Chinese who constituted 75 percent of the Singapore population might collaborate with
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the ethnic Chinese minority elsewhere in Malaysia to overwhelm the Malays, expelled Singapore, giving the Malays a clear majority. Lee and his allies, bitterly disappointed by the expulsion, began to build Singapore as an independent country.
Lee, observing the momentum of history against imperialism, was optimistic that Britain would recognize that it could not perpetuate its rule in Singapore and that he could negotiate the terms of the turnover of power with wise and civil British officials who accepted the inevitable. His assessment proved correct.
In Singapore, unlike the other three countries, Lee and his allies could deal with the British through discussions and gain power through legal means, including voting. When the leaders formed the PAP in 1954, they knew they did not yet have the votes to win an election. Instead Lewe and his team took a long-term perspective, aiming to show the rottenness of the current system while building up popular support to prepare for a later election that was eventually set for 1959. PAP leaders realized that to win an election they had to appeal to the 75 percent of the population who were ethnic Chinese, many of whom had communist leanings. Since the Communist Party was strong and effectively organized, PAP leaders determined that they would need communist support if they were to win elections. In 1959, while Singapore was still under British rule, Lee Kuan Yew sought and received some communist help in his first election as prime minister of Singapore. By the September 1963 general election, however, Lee, after building up a stronger degree of support, split with the communists and his PAP still won a decisive victory.
In December 1978 when top Chinese Communist Party leaders chose Deng, then seventy-three, to be their preeminent leader, it is hard to imagine how he could have been better prepared for the position. He had been a military leader for twelve years, including being front secretary for some 500,000 troops in the critical campaign of the civil war, at Huai Hai. He had been the top official in Southwest China, serving as first party secretary from 1949 to 1952, with overall responsibility for establishing order in a region of some 100 million people. He had been finance minister in 1953–1954, had played a key role in the quarrel with the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, and had represented China in the first appearance of a high-level Chinese leader at the UN. For years he had joined Mao or Zhou Enlai in seeing foreign leaders and after Zhou became ill in 1973 was the key leader who met foreign visitors. He was general secretary of the Communist Party from 1956 to 1966, in charge of the front line of Party activities, covering all major areas of political and economic activity throughout the country. He had been a favorite of Mao’s from 1931, but after 1949 his
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experience was not in making revolution but in building the Party and the country. He had proved himself as a strategist, as a communicator of Party policy, and as a leader who could command respect and get people to work together.
In his last year of life, Mao became convinced that Deng’s thinking differed from his own and chose Hua Guofeng to be his successor. But in the April 5, 1976, demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, the public made it clear not only that they were mourning Zhou Enlai’s death but that they supported Deng, who had provided such outstanding leadership while he was de facto premier in 1975. The decision to elevate Deng to the top position in December 1978 was made by a small group of high Party officials, and their decision in turn was based on their familiarity with Deng’s ability and experience, their conviction that he understood China’s problems, and their confidence that he would exert forceful leadership to bring about fundamental policy change. Hua Guofeng had been only a provincial Party secretary, with little experience in policy circles in Beijing and no experience in foreign affairs. He was beholden entirely to Mao and had announced his determination to be faithful to all of Mao’s directives. The top Party leaders, dismayed at the errors of Mao in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and convinced that continuing to follow Mao’s directives would be disastrous when the country needed fundamental change, passed the baton to Deng. Not being Mao’s chosen successor, Deng had the leeway to distance himself from Mao’s policies.
Park, unlike the other three leaders, had not built up a large public following before he took over the top office. Unlike the other three, he lacked experience in communicating with various groups and the general public to gain their support. He rose to power by building support among a small group of military officers, forging a secret plot and staging a coup. A few weeks after the coup, when Park emerged as the supreme leader, he was not well known to the public. He was not sociable by nature, and he took office without developing the skills to persuade the public to support him and his cause.
Atatürk had legitimacy to rule because of his military heroism and proven dedication to the country. Lee had legitimacy because of his election. Deng had legitimacy because of his long and dedicated service in high positions and his selection by a small group of Party elders. Park had no legitimacy aside from raw power. Whatever resistance the public may have had to authoritarian rule and to some decisions the leaders made, their ability to unify their c
ountry, provide security against the outside, and maintain stability helped provide an acceptance of their rule that would later be further strengthened by the benefits of economic growth.
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Approach to Rule: Politics and Security
All four men mastered what it took to gain and retain power. They understood power instinctively and were sensitive to threats to their power.
But to them, power was pursued not for its own sake, but as a means to accomplish something bigger. They shared similar goals: protecting the independence of their native land from attacks, enriching their people, strengthening their nation, and gaining the respect of other countries.
They were single-minded and unwavering in the pursuit of these goals.
“Greatness,” Atatürk once said, “consists in deciding only what is necessary for the welfare of the country and making straight for the goal.”11 The other three would not have disagreed.
No issue was more basic than defending their nations’ borders from outside threats and for all four this was crucial. Atatürk was concerned about the invasions of the British, the French, the Greeks, and the Russians. Lee was concerned about the communists in Singapore and nearby areas and about his aggressive neighbors, Indonesia and Malaysia. When Deng came to power in 1978, he was aware that Vietnam and the Soviets, who had just signed a new treaty, had designs on controlling Southeast Asia and encircling China. It was only nine years after the Sino-Soviet clash on their border, and the Soviets still had an estimated one million troops stationed nearby. Vietnam, confident following its defeat of the United States three years earlier, was ready to cooperate with the Soviets against the Chinese.
Park was aware when he came to power that the American commitment to South Korea could not be taken for granted. To retain U.S. support he sent large numbers of his best troops to fight in Vietnam. When U.S. officials took strong stands on issues such as human rights, he could not ignore those views. At the same time, especially after Jimmy Carter became president, Park also had to make contingency plans for what to do if U.S.
troops withdrew.
From his observations in Manchuria, where the Japanese had worked to build an industrial base to serve their military needs, and from his analysis of how the United States defeated Japan, Park was convinced that a nation’s industrial base was crucial in determining the outcome of a war. He knew that in the 1960s and early 1970s North Korea had a stronger industrial base than South Korea because of the Japanese concentration of industry in the North during the Japanese occupation and because of further industrial assistance from the Soviet Union and China.
He was also aware of how deeply committed the North was to uniting the peninsula on its terms, how daring the North was prepared to be, and
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how willing the North was to use any means to achieve victory over the South. Park’s fears were genuine, but he also used fear of the North as a rationale for tightening authoritarian controls in the South. Park worked closely with a small group of staff members and went all out to build a strong military and to hasten the establishment of industry.
Although these four leaders did not have detailed plans when they came to power, they did have a sense of direction for what they wanted to achieve. They were not ideologues and were pragmatic and smart enough to keep learning in an effort to get results. The nature of their rule evolved, but by the time Atatürk, Lee, Deng, and Park had been in power for nineteen, thirty-one, fourteen, and eighteen years respectively, a new approach to rule had taken root and continued as the basis for the governments that followed.
Atatürk’s overall goals were presented as the “Six Arrows”: republican-ism, secularism, nationalism, populism, statism, and reformism. Atatürk wanted to establish a homogeneous Turkish nation-state with modern Western-style political institutions, including a parliament, elections, and parties. Religion, the spiritual force that had underpinned political rule for so long, was eliminated from political activity. Education was secular. Although he felt he needed support from some religious groups when he was abolishing the sultanate in November 1922, by early 1924, after he had proclaimed the Turkish Republic with himself as president, he felt confident enough to abolish the religious side of traditional rule, the caliphate.
Atatürk introduced a totally secular modern culture. Religious ministries were abolished, separate religious schools closed, education secular-ized, and religious courts eliminated. He adopted a new judicial system, with codes for commercial, maritime, and criminal law based on the Swiss civil code and Italian penal code. In 1928 Atatürk removed Islam as a formal religion from the constitution. He introduced the Gregorian calendar, Western numerals, international weights and measures, the use of sur-names, and made the weekly holiday the Western Sunday rather than the Islamic Friday. In 1928 he introduced the Latin alphabet to replace the Arabic-Persian writing script. Women were given the right to vote and enter public service. He toured the country to persuade people to make the changes.
Atatürk’s style in dealing with big controversial issues was the blitzkrieg, suddenly taking bold action and presenting others with a fait accompli so they had little choice but to accept the results. To establish the republic, he plunged the nation into a ministerial crisis and then he rammed through the constitution. To minimize opposition, he took up one issue at a time,
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concentrated on getting it through and cooperating with one group without revealing that he intended to attack that group at a later date.
Lee Kuan Yew, later reflecting on his perspective when he became prime minister in 1959, said, “I had begun to realize the weight of the problems that we were to face—unemployment; high expectations of rapid results; communist unrest; more subversion in the unions, schools and associations; more strikes, fewer investments; more unemployment; more trouble.”12 When Singapore was part of Malaysia, it was under no serious security threat, but when separated in 1965, Singaporean leaders worried about their vulnerability to attacks by Malaysia and Indonesia as well as by communists. When Malaysia cast Singapore aside, Lee and many of his associates in the PAP were dismayed, frightened, and depressed.
To cope with Singapore’s security problems, Lee built up a small modern military force and strong internal security forces. He instituted compulsory military service and required veterans to remain in the reserves for several years after their discharge from active duty, thus giving Singapore the capacity to mobilize large numbers in an emergency. Singapore also acquired airplanes, tanks, and other military equipment. Lee benefited from cooperation with another small country that had learned how to defend itself from the threats of neighbors, Israel. At the time of independence, 80
percent of Singapore’s military forces were Malay. Lee feared that if there were race riots between Malays and Chinese, it was questionable whether the troops would defend ethnic Chinese. He therefore increased the proportion of forces that were ethnically Chinese or Indian.
Lee realized that Singapore, once it was on its own, was too small to defend itself against a major threat from the outside. Lee was able to persuade the British to postpone their navy’s plans to pull out of Singapore.
He realized that with threats from communists and from Islamic Malaysia or Indonesia, both hostile to Singapore, only the United States could help.
In anticipation of the departure of the British navy, Lee concentrated on building closer relations with the United States. To deepen his ties, he spent several months in the United States, where he consulted with academics, business leaders, and political leaders to better understand their thinking and increase his support base.
Lee’s approach was first to think through issues logically, next to get other leaders on board, and then to sell his plan to the public with tightly reasoned and highly articulate personal presentations. Lee considered it important to maintain his authority and was ready, when challenge
d in public debate, to push his opponents to the wall, embarrassing them by the weight of forceful arguments.
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Deng’s slogan for his new era was “reform and opening.” Deng was acutely aware that China had fallen decades behind and that the country needed to import technology, machinery, investment, and management skills from Japan and the West. In his visits to Japan in October 1978 and to the United States in January 1979, he proved very popular, paving the way for substantial help from the two countries most able to assist China’s development. He recognized that opening the doors to foreign investment would pose problems for Chinese companies that could not compete and that foreign ideas about freedom would create demands that he did not believe China could grant and still stay together, but he never wavered in his commitment to remain open and face those risks.
Deng was convinced that the Soviet Union was in deep trouble because it was exhausting itself spending on national defense. He was determined that China work to create a peaceful environment so that it could attract foreign investment, promote trade, and keep military expenses low.
Deng realized that many “leftists” in China were uncomfortable with the changes needed to achieve a dynamic economy. He used the goal of
“four modernizations” (industry, agriculture, science-technology, and national defense) to drive reforms. China was big enough that it could try experiments in various localities. If they didn’t work, drop them. If they worked, apply them on a large scale. But Deng, unlike Soviet Union leaders, did not want to open markets suddenly with a “big bang.” China had such massive underemployment that it needed to hold on to its state industry sector to provide jobs. New growth was initially to come from outside the state system.
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