East Asia Marks Time Waiting for New Leaders

Gazing past the teeming refugee camps and across the Cambodian border toward the Vietnamese troops who have driven more than a quarter-million Cambodians into his country, the Thai Foreign Ministry official pondered the future.

“Ten years . . . ,” he said finally. “Within 10 years, we’ll have a settlement--after all the old men in Hanoi are dead.”

Not only here but along the entire Western Pacific rim there is similar watchful waiting, a sense that today’s unyielding realities will change only after the present generation of aging, ailing or lame-duck leaders gives way to a new generation. Sometimes the waiting is brightened by hope, as with the Thai view of future relations with Vietnam.

More often, it is tinged with anxiety.

Potential for Instability

Despite East Asia’s appearance of relative well-being today, a potential for political instability stretches ominously from the Korean Peninsula down through China and Vietnam on the mainland to the islands of Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia.

“Succession politics,” as the subject is called here, has become second only to the Soviet military buildup in the Pacific as the major preoccupation in the region. And the coming changes may alter East Asia’s political map as radically as the new Soviet power has upset its military balance.

Most experts predict that the changes will begin in two to five years, perhaps even sooner. And they could directly affect U.S. security interests, for better or worse.

In the 15 nations of the region, only the current leaders of Japan, Singapore and Malaysia were democratically elected. The 12 other leaders rose through coup, revolution or heredity, although elections were often used to gain political legitimacy.

The long tenures of present leaders in several nations here, coupled with their economic successes, have created the facade of stability as the autocrats have driven out their political opponents. Only in a few cases have these men designated their successors or set rules for the transfer of power; even in those cases, there is no guarantee that past leaders’ wishes will be followed once they are gone.

Moreover, forecasting the policies of the new leaders is hazardous. In Communist countries such as Vietnam and North Korea, any change will raise hopes of a brighter day. But in nations such as the Philippines, the prospect of change has already brought fear among some that dark and chaotic forces will be unloosed.

And in China, if leadership changes coincide with economic turmoil, the political stability and broader security of the region as a whole could be undermined.

Any leadership crisis in either of two countries, the Philippines or South Korea, would directly affect U.S. security interests.

The U.S. facilities in the Philippines--Clark Air Base and the Subic Bay Naval Base--are particularly important for sustaining a credible American presence in the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Pentagon officials have suggested that if the Philippine bases are lost, the United States--because it no longer has formal relations with Taiwan--would have to fall back at least to Palau in the Caroline Islands and most likely to Guam.

“Relocating the functions performed by these bases elsewhere in the region,” said Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Asia, “would be inordinately expensive and leave us and our allies less secure.”

A senior U.S. naval officer in Hawaii added, “No contingency plan is good enough to make up for the Philippines.”

The Philippines are the exception to the rule that Communist subversion is no longer a source of political instability in East Asia, where, in the view of U.S. specialists, striking economic successes have generally kept Communist insurgents at bay.

Economic failures in the Philippines--unemployed sugar workers alone number as many as 500,000--and the autocratic rule of President Ferdinand E. Marcos, who is 68 and reportedly suffering from kidney disease, have given new life to Communist guerrillas and armed Muslim dissidents.

The Communist insurgency there is home-grown and gets no significant help from Moscow or Peking, analysts in East Asia and Washington agree. But the longer Marcos remains, the more the United States will be criticized for supporting him and greater will be the danger that anti-Marcos sentiment will spill over on U.S. bases.

Those facilities are safe for one or two more years, according to knowledgeable U.S. specialists, but not necessarily for five years.

“The situation in the Philippines is very delicate, very dangerous,” U.S. Ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield said in an interview. “We’re keeping our fingers crossed.”

In South Korea, the other strategically vital nation, President Chun Doo Hwan, although only 54, has promised to resign in February, 1988, just before the summer Olympic Games there. He rose to power through seizure of the presidency and violent suppression of dissent.

Any significant unrest in the next 30 months, whether indigenous or fomented by North Korea, could give Chun an excuse to suspend the constitution again, which would revive South Korea’s simmering political unrest.

North Korean leader Kim Il Sung’s capacity to instigate violence--few doubt that he planned the terrorist bombing in Rangoon, Burma, in 1983 that killed four South Korean Cabinet ministers and almost claimed Chun as well--looms as a major threat. He covets South Korea’s economic success and increasing legitimacy in the international community, according to students of his regime. With his military advantage, he constantly seeks ways to undermine his neighbor despite his recent overtures toward improving relations with Seoul.

Now 72, Kim--for 40 years self-styled as “the Great Leader”--has a large, inoperable tumor on his neck, but U.S. officials say that it is apparently benign and recently has shown no sign of growing. His effort to bestow power on his son, Kim Jong Il, called “the Dear Leader”--a remarkably monarchial ploy for a Communist--has met no open opposition yet in Pyongyang, but the father’s death could change that.

“We’re in for a very difficult period between now and 1988,” Adm. Sylvester R. Foley, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, said in an interview at his headquarters in Hawaii. “I think Kim Senior will try to cause trouble, out of impatience and frustration, and after him it may not be much better. Kim Junior is not as able and not as strong as his father.”

In Vietnam, Premier Pham Van Dong is 79 and Communist Party chief Le Duan is 77. Hanoi’s neighbors hope that the old Vietnamese revolutionaries’ dreams of a Vietnam-dominated Indochina will be buried with them and that a Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia will set the stage for peace in the region.

China remains the region’s strongest Communist state despite the embarrassing failure of its incursion into Vietnam in 1979 after Vietnam had invaded Cambodia. But China faces potential crises of both politics and economics.

Entrepreneurial Experiments

Deng Xiaoping, the country’s top leader, has already caused considerable upheaval by junking classical communism in favor of entrepreneurial experiments in which special economic zones have been established along the coast. Local officials and factory managers there have considerable freedom to deal directly, and for profit, with Western companies.

Recently, however, these zones have come under fire from inside China, and signs of tension are appearing between the growing urban areas and the stagnant rural regions. Whether Deng’s economic policies will survive him--and, if not, what then--remain the key and unanswerable questions for China-watchers.

“A politically unstable China caused by economic mismanagement will have serious consequences for the regional security environment,” according to a March study for the Trilateral Commission by Japanese scholar Masashi Nishihara.

Deng, who is 80, has picked two men, party chief Hu Yaobang, 70, and Premier Zhao Ziyang, 65, as his successors.

But Hu may have made a diplomatic slip this spring when, in advance of a scheduled port visit to Shanghai of three U.S. destroyers, he said publicly that the ships would not bear nuclear arms. When the United States said in response that it could offer no such assurance in public, the Chinese canceled the visit, and China specialists suggested that significant political opposition to the current regime’s relatively pro-Western foreign policies has shown its head.

Across the straits in Taiwan, the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) of the late Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek appears to be reaching its end. His son, President Chiang Chiang-kuo, is 75 and ailing, and some U.S. specialists believe that indigenous Taiwanese may recapture political control of their island from the exiles from mainland China after he departs.