Can Asians truly accept democracy?

By John Teo

THE regional fallout from Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan’s remarks about how Chinese people need to be politically controlled amuses me no end.

The fallout was mostly negative not only among Chinese especially in Hong Kong and Taiwan but also among sections of people in the mainland (even if most Chinese, as one astute observer commented, would tend to agree with Chan if you scratched their façade).

Predictably, those who protested loudest were Taiwanese politicians, whose often egregiously unparliamentary antics are fodder for television news segments worldwide.

They do protest too much, especially as we now witness the tragicomedy of the trial of their former president; the one who brought down a half-century of rule by the powerful and corrupt Kuomintang only to be incriminated by his own family in some petty and illicit personal acquisitiveness. Chen Shui-bian’s claim of a political vendetta against him provides the comic relief.

It cannot be good for the ego for an entire race to be put down as unfit for democracy. The natural reflex would be to dismiss such a preposterous proposition, and bury such an unflattering thought in the deepest recesses of one’s being.

Singaporeans have long accepted it as fact and do so with great equanimity. And they can show us some pretty commendable results to boot.
Malaysians, to our misfortune, have not. Why not? Well, for starters, we like nothing better than to laugh at Singapore for even having an anti-litter law.

We do so not because we think we can keep our own country clean voluntarily, without pain of a stiff fine. We do so instead because we enjoy the “freedom” to litter — and enjoy it with gusto — while Singaporeans do not.

We also show ourselves unfit for democracy by abdicating any personal responsibility for whatever ails the nation and dumping it all at the feet of government.

We elected a government so evenly divided in Perak and get all worked up, frustrated and surprised that the only business that now gets conducted in the state seems to be politics, politics and more politics.

We forget that whichever government gets formed is our government, and start to throw tantrums when the government we thought we elected, and which about half the electorate seemed to prefer, is replaced through perfectly defensible constitutional means.

We wish that the political paralysis that is the predictable consequence will just go away, even as we seem unprepared to turn the page and move on. Instead, we hanker for “justice” and “fairness” as if they are the only important things that matter.

We fail to realise that democracy only thrives when there is acceptance that there can be only one winner at any one time, and that not making it is not the end of the world. We forget that whichever side wins, we, the voters, win all the same, all the time.

We overlook that the reason why the United States can be such a great functioning democracy is that a presidential candidate who won the popular vote but was denied the presidency by the courts in the closest election ever could still joke that he was once “the next president of the United States”.

We never pause to ponder for a moment how damaging it would have been for America had the plurality of Americans who voted for Al Gore in 2000 not accepted his concession of defeat and instead, with justification, goaded him to continually challenge the legitimacy of former president George W. Bush.

We never seem to appreciate that it is on the basis of the exercise of our vote that a chastened Perak Barisan Nasional dares now to take on the challenge to prove itself in hope that it will be able to regain the trust of the people come the next general election.

We encourage and partake of endless political debate and then turn around to angrily ask why the government is not focusing on the gravest economic threat to hit our shores in almost a century. We never quite comprehend that in a democracy, we invariably get what we deserve.

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