Boom Times in Bangkok : Thailand’s economic surge, based on Japan’s high-tech model, has created the ultimate free market and a glimpse of what the new Asia could look like

THE FIRST FEW TIMES I VISITED THAILAND I WAS NAGGED BY A SENSE OF familiarity that I could not quite pin down. It did not have to do with Thailand’s sights and sounds--the muddy klongs or canals of Bangkok, the gold-roofed temples throughout the country, the monks in orange robes who walked from house to house each morning carrying their begging bowls. These were all exotic to me but also quickly recognizable from books and movies I had seen over the years.

The sense of deja vu seemed to come instead from the speed with which nonstop economic growth was turning the whole society upside down. In Thailand, even more than in Japan during its boom years starting in the late 1980s, you could see and feel the way money was transforming life. Reconstruction in Japan tends to be quick and unobtrusive; it reminds me of a cat bathing itself. When my family was living in Japan during its bubble years of the late 1980s, when money practically pumped through the air, we would notice one day that a house on our street was covered with bamboo scaffolding. The next day the house would be gone, and in a week a new one would have sprung up in its place. Roads were repaired at night, as if by elves.

There was nothing subtle or hidden about the changes being worked on Thailand--above all in Bangkok, where most of the country’s industry is concentrated. On nights when the moon was down or was covered by fog, it seemed possible to read by the light of the welding torches that flickered all over town. One summer my family stayed in Bangkok for a month, in a 12th-floor apartment not far from downtown. We had to close the curtains at night against the electric-blue light that flickered round-the-clock from the condo that was rising, one floor per week, across the street. When dawn came, the night crews would climb down from the bamboo scaffolding. The workers had rags draped over their face to keep out the dust. Their eyes were visible as moist spots. I had seen this procession for several weeks before I noticed a worker remove the head-rags. She was a woman--and so, I eventually discovered, were about half the other laborers on the high-rise. Along with the men, they had poured into Bangkok from Thailand’s impoverished hinterland, known as the Northeast. At construction sites in the city they could earn as much as 100 baht per day, almost $4.

This is the face of progress in Southeast Asia, which through the past decade has contained most of the fastest-growing economies on earth. American discussions of the “Asian economic miracle” often begin and end with Japan, sometimes stretching to include Korea, Taiwan and the vast potential of China. Yet Southeast Asia--Thailand and its neighbors along the border of the South China Sea--now provides the most rapidly expanding markets and investment sites.

During the past two years, when Japanese corporations faced stagnant demand at home, their near-dominance of markets in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and even Indochina kept them afloat. Even now, as economies recover in the United States and elsewhere in the industrialized world, the fastest expansion in demand for cars, computers and other advanced products is in the Southeast Asian countries that once made up Dai Toa Kyoeiken--the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which was Imperial Japan’s term for the rest of Asia. China’s hopes for economic growth and political acceptance rest on Southeast Asia as well: The Chinese diaspora, composed of emigre Chinese who make up the business class of most Southeast Asian countries, builds markets for Chinese products and facilitates its trade with the outside world.

This region hums with an economic dynamism that the United States has not known for decades and Europe for more than a century. Society is being changed by the day--made gentler and more comfortable in some cases, wrenched apart in others. Under this pressure, fundamental political and social tensions are emerging, including those that involve direct challenges to Western concepts of human rights.

The rapid growth of Southeast Asia, initiated by the outflow of capital and technology from Japan, is significant in its own right, as it remakes old societies. It is also significant for the rest of the world, because it represents the projection of models developed in Japan to an entire region. An economic system in a single country, even a country as economically large and significant as Japan, is by definition a limited phenomenon. A system that organizes hundreds of millions of people in a dozen countries is something else. Thailand, with its more than 57 million citizens, is at the moment the purest illustration of the causes and consequences of this kind of growth.

DURING THE PAST FIVE YEARS, BANGKOK HAS SEEMED LIKE A machine running so fast that gears and rods fly out in all directions and the lubricating oil smokes away. It is natural to think of smoke when you try to breathe in Bangkok. The air in Los Angeles does not seem opaque until you view it from a distance, looking toward an invisible mountain or out from an airplane sinking into the smog. After one of Bangkok’s big, smoke-belching buses roars by, it can be hard even to see to the other side of the street. Smog is not the only problem. Only a generation ago, canals snaked through the entire city, and the broad and mighty Chao Phraya river was the symbolic heart of Bangkok. Now most of the canals have been paved and the Chao Phraya bobs with sewage and the pink plastic shopping bags that are the ubiquitous debris of the Third World.

Bangkok’s sidewalks are also jammed, with Thai students, Western tourists and hippies, Japanese businessmen, peasants newly arrived from the provinces and the ever-present beggars and vendors. Outside the city’s major Buddhist shrines sit women in front of cages packed with sparrow-like birds. For 30 baht, about a dollar, the vendors will open a box and let a bird go. This act of charity “makes merit” for the bird’s benefactor, the customer, according to Buddhist teachings; the vendors are doing passersby a favor in offering this opportunity. Along with the birds, vendors offer turtles, which can be released into a pond in Bangkok’s downtown Lumpini Park. Most of the turtles, unfortunately, are land tortoises, captured in the countryside and hauled by the basketful into the city. The lucky ones are recaptured within a few seconds of their liberation in the water by boys who return them to the merit-baskets.

Beggar gangs present similar opportunities to make merit. The beggars in Bangkok are not as overwhelmingly numerous as those in Manila or New Delhi. Yet even as Thailand’s economy has surged, visitors can find on its streets disabled children, pathetic mothers with grimy infants hanging at their breasts, blind flower-sellers and others with their hands out in supplication. The Thai government recently became so concerned about the beggars’ effect on tourism that it began issuing notices in the English-language newspapers. Don’t pay attention to the beggars, the announcement said. Don’t feel sorry for them or believe their hard-luck tales. The saddest-looking children with the most pitiable disabilities are actually part of vast beggar gangs, the official warnings said. The gangs are run by evil beggar-bosses, the “Fagins of Bangkok” according to a newspaper account.

With the word Fagin, my nagging sense of familiarity was resolved. The Thailand of the 1990s does not resemble anything I had seen, but it does resemble something I had read about. The combination of rapid economic growth and chaotic social disorganization, the streets jammed with displaced country folk in search of jobs, the new factories obscured by smoke and dust, the material progress and consequent human suffering--all these conditions were those of mid-19th-Century England as portrayed by Charles Dickens, who immortalized a metropolis going through the painful and messy birth of industrial life.

What is happening in Thailand now is ugly but not unprecedented. Today’s richest countries, when they were growing fastest, were at least as raw and ruthless as Thailand seems now. In England, in North America, in Germany and elsewhere, modernization drove people from their farms and villages into tenements and factories. England lost its forests to the Industrial Revolution. America plowed up its prairie and drained its western aquifers. Each country used up people on its way toward industrialism, as Dickens and, later, Upton Sinclair chronicled. But when the dirty work was finished, the countries had become so prosperous that they could afford to outlaw child labor, impose safety laws, clean up their water and air.

There is no question that Thailand and its neighbors in Southeast Asia are in a messy period. Almost by the hour you can see the forests being mowed down. Social turmoil is so fast it is easy to feel old in a hurry. I was gone from the United States for most of four years; yet when I returned very few things made me think, “I don’t recognize this place.” When I visited Jakarta or Bangkok or Taipei after only six months, however, I found myself vainly looking for landmarks that had been razed, remodeled or transformed.

The question for Thailand and its neighbors is where today’s disorder will lead and what the growth of a new Asian system will mean for them and for the rest of the world.

IN A SENSE, THE ASIAN ECONOMIC ERA BEGAN LATE ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Sept. 22, 1985. Early that day, the finance ministers and central-bank governors from the five major industrial powers had gathered at the Plaza Hotel in New York. For the preceding five years--the “morning in America” phase of the Reagan presidency--U.S. officials had promoted the line that a strong dollar meant a strong America. In February of 1985, it reached a high of 263 yen. But at this same time, with the trade deficit nearing $10 billion a month, the Reagan Administration started to believe that there could be such a thing as too strong a currency. With the dollar worth so much, American exporters couldn’t compete, and American consumers were snapping up the suddenly bargain-priced cars and computers from overseas. The officials who gathered in New York that September orchestrated an increase in the yen’s value against the dollar. Two years later, the dollar had lost more than half its value. Through most of 1993, the dollar was worth less than 110 yen, 58% below its peak.

The high yen was intended to make Japanese corporations less competitive worldwide. In self-defense, and taking advantage of the Japanese government’s loose-money policy, the corporations poured money into new factories and production lines outside of Japan that might prevent their losing ground to foreigners. In the first five years of the high-yen era, Japanese corporations invested about $600 billion internationally in new factories and other productive capacities. At the time, Japan’s economy was about half as large as America’s, but in absolute terms, the Japanese firms invested more than U.S.-based corporations did. Most of the money that went overseas went to the United States. But the amount that flowed to the rest of Asia had an enormous effect.

In 1989, Japanese firms were investing four times as much money in Taiwan as they had in 1985; five times as much in Malaysia; five times as much in South Korea; six times as much in Singapore, 15 times as much in Hong Kong, and 25 times as much in Thailand. By 1990, Toshiba, Matsushita and similar Japanese firms had built more than 300 fully owned plants in Southeast Asia. The idea was not simply that machines once made in Osaka could be made instead in Bangkok and sold, more cheaply, to the same customers back in Japan. The concept was instead that these cheaper production sites could be incorporated, with the Japanese headquarters firms, into a system that could export to yet other countries (mainly to the United States).

Thailand, as the most attractive low-wage site for Japanese investors, became the showpiece for this strategy. Thailand’s people had less of a chip on their shoulders about foreigners in their midst, including Japanese, than did most other Southeast Asians. Although Thai governments had accommodated European colonial powers, the country had never officially been colonized, and therefore lacked the complexities that twisted the Malaysians’ dealings with Britain or the Filipinos’ with the United States. Japan had long been the largest customer for Thailand’s exports, mainly farm products and fish, which built gratitude among Thailand’s businesses and government.

About 5,000 Japanese lived in Thailand in the early 1980s; more than 25,000 did by the end of the decade, and about 150,000 Thais worked for Japanese-owned firms. And as the money poured in, Thailand became a kind of mini-Japan. Japan’s trade surplus with Thailand increased as it provided the machine tools, production equipment and advanced components for that country’s growth. Thailand’s surplus with the United States simultaneously grew as it sent more VCRs and light machines overseas. In 1989, American imports of Japanese-made consumer electronic products fell by about one-fifth. But at the same time, American imports of consumer-electronic goods from Thailand rose by 2,000%, virtually all of them from Japanese-owned factories in Thailand.

“What has happened in Southeast Asia is the emergence of ersatz capitalism,” Japanese scholar Kunio Yoshihara wrote in the late 1980s. He meant that the systems of Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and other nations were being propelled, shaped, inflated and in countless ways changed by forces far beyond their control. As a result, he said, they were growing but not developing. Their cities were spreading, factories were sprouting up, their GNP figures were the envy of the world. Yet these economies did not seem to be gaining leverage and strength in the world. Modernization might not do for them what it had done for Japan--increase their ability to control or steer the economic activity going on around them. Such control is what colonialism took away from most people in Asia, and it is what Japan has spent a century and a half fighting to attain.

Thai officials would reject the idea that their country’s growth was in any way ersatz, or based on traits other than their own decisions and strengths. Thailand, according to Thais, has succeeded because Thailand is pleasant and attractive, making foreigners, especially Japanese businessmen, eager to work there.

The crucial fact about Thailand, according to this hypothesis, is that it is the sweet-dispositioned “land of smiles,” the independent-spirited and playful-minded kingdom where nothing is taken too seriously and every interaction is greased with kindness, care and, above all, permissiveness.

Thailand’s major industries--textiles, mining, rice farming, tourism--have been guided and controlled by the government, like most others in Asia, and through most of the 20th Century the military has been the dominant force in its government. Yet in many social mores, Thailand applies a brand of laissez-faire unimaginable in many other parts of Asia.

When my family was living in Japan or Malaysia, we were shielded from the rough-and-tumble of a really free-market system. In Japan, everything cost too much. In Malaysia, things that were considered bad for us, from pornographic films to books critical of the country’s government, were illegal. But whenever we went to Bangkok, we found that everything was for sale.

I stepped into drugstores on Sukhumvit Road or Rama IV and bought all of the antibiotics, sleeping tablets and other products that my family thought it might need. Why bring a nosy doctor into it? In Thailand we could write prescriptions for ourselves. I could step outside the drugstore and buy a lifetime supply of Lacoste-style tennis shirts for less than $4. Sidewalk vendors carried pirated tapes, for $1, of whatever recordings were then popular in Europe or America. People could do what they wanted; it was the libertarian dream.

Prostitution is theoretically against the law in Thailand, a fact that would surprise nearly any visitor and every resident. In any Thai village large enough to have a store or gas station, there is a brothel; in the big cities, there are hundreds. The Thai ministry of tourism periodically releases, without comment, statistics showing that most visitors to the kingdom are male, usually traveling on their own. Driving through the Thai countryside, far to the north or east of Bangkok, you will pass hundreds of bamboo or wooden huts--and then all of a sudden you will see a concrete or brick structure with a real roof and perhaps a paved walkway. The parents who live in these houses almost always have a daughter who is working in Bangkok, Phuket or Pattaya and sending money back home.

In 1987, I interviewed an official of the Thai health ministry, who claimed that Asians would prove uniquely resistant to AIDS, despite Bangkok’s enormous prostitution industry. By 1990, the health ministry was reporting that one-third of the Bangkok construction workers it tested were positive for HIV. Nonetheless, the prevailing Thai idea is that everything is OK, everyone can please himself. Mai pen rai.

Mai pen rai is Thailand’s version of the cliche insight into the national character that becomes annoying in any country. What che sera, sera is supposed to be for the Italian soul or “I gotta be me” is for America, mai pen rai is for Thailand. The phrase variously means “Don’t worry about it,” “No problem,” “Never mind” or “Oh, calm down.”

Mai pen rai , I would hear from taxi drivers or Thai friends when sitting for hours in the traffic jams on Sukhumvit. Mai pen rai, in the sense of there’s nothing to do about it, dominates the discussion of Thailand’s severe environmental problems.

Like most cliches, the Thai emphasis on its open culture and the mai pen rai spirit obviously has something to it, yet like most cliches it omits certain crucial factors. The Thais’ sense that their culture accounts for their success is certainly true in three areas: Thailand’s freedom from the psychological aftereffects of colonialism, its relative success in racial integration and its adaptation of the monarchy to modern needs. What the cultural explanation omits are the economic fundamentals that have left this country, like most of its neighbors in Southeast Asia, dependent on decisions and events made by outsiders, especially in Japan.

THROUGHOUT ASIA, THE MARK OF COLONIALISM REMAINS, PHYSICALLY and politically. Much of Hanoi looks like a provincial town in the south of France. When you ride through the hinterland of the Philippines and come over a rise to a small town, you will see the town hall, the public school and the basketball court, relics all of the American colonial age.

The political and cultural marks are harder to see, but more important. Japan’s late-20th-Century industrial power is, in many ways, the legacy of its 19th-Century determination to avoid becoming colonized. The politics of Malaysia revolve around racial issues left from the British colonial era. The main unifying force in Indonesia, a country that might otherwise fly apart because of geographic and ethnic divisions, is the sense of nationalism that came from rebelling against the Dutch. Part of China’s brittleness in responding to Western pressure today is leftover resentment at its centuries of vulnerability to what it saw as upstart Western powers.

Thailand demonstrates the importance of colonialism in the opposite way. Just as Japanese theories of Japanese success always seem to begin with the phrase, “Because we are all Japanese,” Thai explanations of how their country works begin, “Because we were never colonized.” The very word thai, visitors are quickly told, means free . In its dealings with the outside world, therefore, Thailand need not display either the resentment or the leftover deference of a onetime colony, since it has never had to salute a foreign flag.

As a matter of strict historical fact, Thailand’s emphasis on its unbroken liberty is not exactly true. Thailand avoided being conquered largely because its leaders shrewdly and preemptively cooperated whenever a superior force came in view. In the late 1800s, Thailand (then Siam) could look to the east and see the French colonies of Indochina. To the west lay the British occupiers in Burma, then part of the Indian raj. Thailand’s rulers ingratiated themselves to each colonial power and survived as an independent buffer state.

A century later, during the Vietnam War years, Thailand’s military rulers similarly ingratiated themselves to the United States. Vietnam and Thailand are old rivals in Southeast Asia, and Thailand had reasons of its own for wanting to contain Vietnam’s expansion. So through the 1960s, it voluntarily made itself into a kind of American colony, with U.S. air bases throughout its eastern regions and hordes of GIs recreating in Bangkok.

In between these two episodes came World War II and Thailand’s most dramatic preservation of its “independence.” Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Thai politics centered on the rivalry of two men, named Pibul and Pridi. (Thai people are often referred to only by their first name.) Pibul was Thailand’s prime minister late in 1941. On the eve of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese ambassador tried to track Pibul down in Bangkok with the formal request that Japanese troops be allowed free passage through Thailand as they moved against British positions to the west. Pibul avoided him by hiding in his office building. Pridi, then foreign minister, received the ambassador instead, and turned down his request.

As dawn broke the next day, with the Japanese army preparing to move across Thailand anyway, Pibul appeared and gave his OK to the Japanese. Through the following three years, until Allied forces began to roll the Japanese army back toward its home islands, Pibul served a quisling-like role as the Japanese puppet. Pridi left the government and organized a resistance movement, and when the Allies came back he was installed as prime minister.

The “alliance” with Japan during World War II required certain modifications in the mai pen rai approach. The Japanese theory of “pan-Asian brotherhood” resembled a real family mainly in that the members were not equals. The theory held that Japan had a responsibility for its little brothers throughout the region, but part of that burden was to make them shape up and modernize themselves.

In Korea, Taiwan, China and other places where the Japanese had taken over by main force, the immediate task was to keep people under control. In Thailand, under the guise of alliance, Japanese officials could act as if they were providing etiquette tips. As British author Alec Waugh wrote:

“(The Japanese) pressed for Westernization. They found Pibul most cooperative. Orders were issued that women should wear gloves, hats and stockings. . . . The Japanese did not consider that the Thais showed sufficient respect to their wives, and it was decreed that when a man left his house in the morning and returned to it at night, he should bestow a kiss upon her cheek.”

Thailand was naturally expected to declare war on the United States, but the Thai government never quite got around to this formality. Pibul’s collaborationist government relayed instructions to its ambassador in Washington, telling him to present a formal declaration to the American authorities. The ambassador refused. By wartime’s end he had become a major resistance leader.

This maneuvering gave Thailand two horses in World War II. Because of Japan’s alliance with Thailand, the Japanese army did not have to invade in 1941, as it did in the Philippines and China. Because of the Thai resistance movement that had been sustained by prominent Thais outside the country, the Allies did not have to invade either. When they came they could be embraced as liberators.

Starting in the late 1980s, when nearly all the new money coming into Thailand seemed to be coming from Japan, there were signs that the “cover all bases” strategy was being applied again. On his visits to the United States, Thai Prime Minister Chatchai Choonhavan gave speeches urging a larger American presence in the region, so that his grandchildren didn’t have to “grow up speaking Japanese.” At the same time, inside Thailand, officials were increasingly solicitous of the visiting Japanese. When I interviewed politicians in Bangkok in 1989 and 1990 I would hear a constant refrain about Japan: “After all, we were allies in the war.” As an American who lived in Thailand in the 1960s wrote, “The Thai always plant respected men in active cooperation with the publicly labeled enemy so that, no matter which side is victor in big power politics, a competent Thai is always in position to take over.”

THAILAND HAS FREED ITSELF FROM ANOTHER FORM OF NASTINESS that prevails elsewhere in Southeast Asia: racial friction between Chinese minorities and the majority population.

The migrants who have fanned out from southern China since the 1500s constitute the largest diaspora in the world. The forebears of today’s Chinese businessmen arrived in Southeast Asia as coolies to work in the great plantations of Java and Sumatra or as clerks and traders whose entry was encouraged by the British, French and Dutch colonialists. Like most emigrants, they were not from the elite class of their homeland, and they had the familiar immigrant drive to become established as quickly as possible.

Established they now are: In virtually every great city of Southeast Asia, ethnic Chinese dominate business and finance. With bonds of language and family relations, Chinese merchants form a network that connects mainland Chinese, the mainly Chinese nations such as Singapore and Taiwan and the large Chinese enclaves in Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Penang, Bangkok and even Ho Chi Minh City. In most parts of Southeast Asia, their conspicuous success is a significant political problem. Anti-Chinese feelings have reached explosive proportions in Indonesia, where the Chinese make up less than 3% of the population but account for perhaps 80% of all business activity. In 1965, huge numbers of ethnic Chinese were hacked to death by their fellow Indonesians in a months-long pogrom touched off by accusations that the Chinese were working as agents for the communist Chinese government. No one knows exactly how many people died during this slaughter; estimates run between 500,000 and 3 million. Similar, though less lurid, cases of anti-Chinese oppression have occurred in Burma (which the current regime calls Myanmar) and Vietnam. Malaysia’s politics, though rarely violent, turn on little else except Malay-Chinese tensions.

Compared to the situation in the neighboring countries, racial frictions in Thailand are mild. Thailand has solved its “Chinese problem” by acting as if the Chinese are actually Thai. Ethnic Chinese families are required to take Thai names from a government-approved list. These assigned names are easily identifiable, but Chinese Thai and ethnic Thai alike seem to have agreed to act as if they share a common nationality.

One evening in Bangkok, I went with my family to a Thai kick-boxing match. It was a strangely captivating spectacle, as two short, skinny, sinewy young Thais danced around each other in the ring--really danced, since the fights were to the accompaniment of what Westerners would call snake-charmer music. A crowd numbering about a thousand was in the arena. My family and I, along with a Thai-speaking American friend, made about half the foreign contingent; the rest was a group of German students.

The real action in the stadium, we soon discovered, had no direct connection to the ring. People had come to gamble, and with each kick or gouge they waved new signals about odds or stakes as they searched for takers around the room. Except for us and the Germans, nearly everyone in the room was ethnically Chinese--this was clear from their dress and manner and other details. Yet every word they spoke was in Thai. In almost any other part of Asia where so many Chinese gathered to gamble, the shouted odds would have been in Chinese; it was the most convincing testimony to assimilation.

ON MAY 21, 1992, AFTER THAILAND had undergone another of its frequent military coups, newspapers around the world published an extraordinary photo. It showed the king of Thailand, Bhumibol Adulyadej, dressed in a light, natty Western business suit and seated on a French-style sofa. The king wore aviator-style glasses, had his receding hair neatly combed back and generally looked as if he might be a still-sprightly professor of mathematics.

The other people in the picture were the two men who had been bitterly struggling for political control of the country: the prime minister, Suchinda Kraprayoon, a longtime soldier who had taken power in the coup, and Chamlong Srimuang, who had made his reputation as a Jerry Brown-style “shake up the system” candidate and had been jailed for his opposition to the coup.

The two politicians were on the floor, sitting on the sides of their hips with their feet pointing away from the king and their heads leaning reverently toward him. This pose allowed them to avoid the two cardinal sins of etiquette in dealing with the king: pointing your feet toward him and allowing your own head to be higher than his. These two leaders, struggling to head the country’s government, had entered the room on their knees. Such is the position of Thailand’s king.

The reverence for the royal family in Thailand, both spontaneous and enforced, is impossible not to notice. Pictures of the king are everywhere, in every shop and office, in every restaurant and bathhouse. The most common shot is of him in standard, military-looking, ribbon-bedecked regalia. But often he is shown in an open-necked shirt and khaki trousers, tromping through city slums or in the forests as he visits his people. There are pictures of the king playing his clarinet with jazz orchestras, pictures of the king at the wheel of a sports car, pictures of the king behind an easel, painting dramatic landscapes.

In the land of mai pen rai few things are forbidden. Exporting Buddha images is one and making negative comments about the royal family, in any form and with whatever justification, is another. Few people are even tempted to criticize the current king; the country apparently agrees that he comes as close to meriting adulation as a mortal can. The one controversial event in his reign occurred at its very beginning. In 1946, the king’s older brother, who was then king, was shot to death under still-mysterious circumstances in the Royal Palace. Today’s King Bhumibol, then a slight, weak-eyed boy of 19, took the throne.

Ever since, he has been a performer of seemingly endless good works--opening dams, but opposing them when they would uproot too much of the forest; visiting the homeless and downtrodden but still lecturing on self-reliance; serving as patron of universities and of high-tech research. He has had exhibitions of his (surprisingly good) paintings and nature photographs; he ran a jazz radio station from the palace grounds and wrote some numbers produced by Mike Todd in the Broadway revue “Peepshow.”

For more than four decades, the king has generally acted as the soul and conscience of his nation, a sentence I write with no irony at all. It was in this function that he summoned the feuding politicians to his feet in 1992, telling them to calm down and spare the country the effects of their violent quarrels. Nearly 20 years earlier, in 1973, when students rioted at universities and the military government cracked down, the king appointed a university regent as prime minister, a clear signal that he was tipping in favor of the democratic, anti-military forces.

The benefit of Thailand’s emphasis on royalty, and in particular of this king, is that it and he have provided a living manifestation of such concepts as the public interest and the welfare of the nation. But this strategy creates one problem. If a good king has steered the country off the shoals so often, then a bad king could presumably do comparable harm. The great problem for Thailand is that King Bhumibol, despite his other virtues, will die some day.

“This king has been very instrumental in creating this system and legitimizing such steps toward democracy as we have,” Kraisak Choonhavan told me in 1990. Kraisak was the son of the man who was then Thailand’s prime minister, Chatchai Choonhavan. Kraisak had been a leftist professor but became a business consultant when his father rose to power.

“The king has been a guiding figure in developing the legitimacy of state. But the idea that any king can build democracy is contradictory as a national ideology. If the democratic system had become strong enough, with its own ideological basis and legitimacy, then if we had a king who was not as outstanding, it wouldn’t matter,” he concluded. But the very virtues of this king have made the country more vulnerable to the liabilities of some future king.

“All Oriental people spiritually need leaders who are of royal rank,” Kukrit Pramoj announced to me a few days later. Kukrit had been (briefly) his country’s prime minister, a celebrated novelist and newspaper columnist and a matinee idol. Kukrit held court in a palace of his own, one in the old Thai style. This collection of teakwood buildings around a garden sat only a few hundred yards from one of Bangkok’s main drags, Sathorn Thai.

“We do not want ‘Mr. President,’ ” Kukrit said of his countrymen. “When Franklin Roosevelt was President, I thought America’s President was heaven-sent. When Harry Truman became President, I said, ‘This is democracy.’ After Eisenhower, I have no opinion anymore. Anyone can be President. Countries are rather sad without kings.”

Reporters who are based in Bangkok, or who hope ever to return to Thailand, find it almost impossible to speculate in print about what may happen after the current king dies. In most of Asia, the press is more thoroughly controlled, through formal laws and informal self-censorship, than in North America or Western Europe. In Japan, the taboo subjects for the press mainly concern the imperial family and the untouchable, lower class of people known as burakumin. In Indonesia, the most important taboo covers the business dealings of President Suharto’s family.

In Thailand, there is a lese-majeste clause of the country’s criminal code, Section 112, which says that anyone who criticizes the king, heir apparent or regent faces between three and 15 years in jail. Even comments that aren’t critical can be considered so. In 1987, a Thai politician was hauled up on Section 112 charges; his offense was to have said in a campaign speech that, given the choice, he’d rather have been born in the royal palace than have grown up tilling the soil. Foreigners in Bangkok live with the knowledge that the biggest offense that will get them kicked out of the country for good is to comment critically about the royal family.

Therefore, the principal problem facing Thailand’s royal system, the personal character of the heir apparent, is almost never discussed in print. The rumors surrounding the current crown prince involve his emotional volatility and physical brutality. Yet when I asked most politicians or journalists in Thailand about what would happen next, their eyes wandered, as if scanning the room for those who might overhear. It was the only time in my life in which I felt as if I’d entered a spy novel.

“He likes to fly fighter planes and drive fast cars,” one politician told me in 1990. “This is a dangerous life.” He stared at me for about 15 seconds to be sure I had gotten the point. In 1980, the law of succession was changed to permit, in principle, a princess as well as a prince to inherit the throne. The king’s daughter, Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, rivals her father in belovedness. With luck, the country that relies on benevolent monarchs will find another one.

NOW SOUTHEAST ASIA JOINS the societies that have coped with the blessings and the curses of rapid economic growth. In England, Germany, the United States and Japan, the development of a capitalist business system has, over two centuries, increased each country’s control over its surrounding world. Development gave these societies tools not simply for manipulating nature and generating material wealth, but also for projecting their values onto other cultures (in the case of Western powers) or defending their values against outsiders (in the case of Japan).

Thailand and its neighbors may not reap the rewards of development in quite the same way. Yet as all of East Asia has grown, the transfer and projection of values have also begun. One political consequence is the increased attention to collective “Asian” interests. The fissures that separate countries in East Asia are obvious and deep. Yet more and more politicians, businessmen and journalists talk in “Asian” terms. A generation ago, it would have been hard to imagine the prime minister of Malaysia--a raw-material-producing, English-speaking, mainly Islamic country that was invaded by the emperor’s troops during World War II--finding any common ground with the Japanese. Yet in the 1990s, Malaysia’s prime minister, Mahathir Mohammed, has pushed for a pan-Asian economic grouping that would pointedly exclude Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders.

Also, the success of Asian economies has begun to legitimize the idea of Asian politics. Feeling more confident on the world stage, believing that they have more interests in common, leaders from many Asian countries have begun arguing with their Western counterparts about whether universal definitions of democracy and human rights exist. Japanese officials say Americans are wrong to scold China about its political system, since this is a matter for each nation to decide.

After the Thai military ousted Prime Minister Chatchai in 1991, most Western governments suspended their foreign aid programs and denounced this reversion to military rule. Japan announced that it recognized the new regime as a legitimate, constitutional government and would continue its foreign aid, which amounts to three times as much as aid from all other donors combined. In Thailand, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Japan’s aid goes overwhelmingly to build roads, bridges, ports and other infrastructure projects usually designed by Japanese architecture and engineering firms, built by Japanese construction companies and serving sites for Japanese-owned factories. The projects create jobs for Malaysians, Indonesians, Thais and other locals, but they also help bind together a Japan-centered industrial sphere.

During the nearly four decades in which the Liberal Democratic Party ruled Japan, politicians in Korea, Taiwan, China and elsewhere were studying Japan as a model for how, in the words of American scholar Gerald Curtis, “a country can have democracy and one-party rule at the same time.” Even after the LDP lost its majority, the Japanese model remained more plausible than two-party democracies in Britain or America. Singapore has repeatedly banned or restricted foreign publications and has done so not apologetically, saying that the chaos of Western countries illustrates the harm a free press can do.

“The West approves the freedom of the press in India, frowns on the lack of it in China,” Kishore Mahbubani, a senior official in Singapore’s foreign ministry, wrote last year. “Yet which society is developing faster today and which society is likely to modernize first?”

The further that Asian economic development proceeds, the more important such political issues will become. The countries that border the western edge of the Pacific, despite their many variations, share historic experiences and intellectual precepts that differ from those prevailing in the Western world.

The plot line of modern history, as seen from the Asian perspective, involves Europeans and Americans with superior technology being able to tell Asians what to do. Most Asian societies were colonized by Western countries, and even the ones that weren’t have been fully conscious of the West’s dominance in machinery, technology and the flow of ideas. Like most of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, societies in East Asia had no choice but to put up with this imbalance. The British, French and Americans were simply too rich and powerful to be held off.

Today’s East Asia, unlike any other part of the once-colonized world, is beginning to redress the balance. In building semiconductor plants and aircraft factories, in striving to rely less on Western technology and make the Western world rely more on Asian technology, these Asian economies are acting for political as much as economic purposes. They are less interested than Americans in whether the rules of trade are fair or unfair. History has taught them that the most important difference is between the strong and the weak.

Although many of these Asian societies have been washed in Western concepts for decades or centuries, the concepts largely remain imported. The ideal model toward which the Asian system is evolving differs from the Western ideal. It is more hierarchical, more divided in function by gender and ethnicity, more status-bound and more authoritarian than is advocated in most of the West. The economic success of such a system in Asia is what makes its modern interactions with the West so significant and interesting.

“Ultimately we shall have to realize that this challenge encompasses not only Japan but China as well, and indeed the whole of East Asia,” wrote American scholar Ivan Hall, who has lived for decades in Japan and other parts of Asia, “With poetic justice, we are now getting a tiny inkling of the intellectual and psychological anguish thrust upon those countries by the pressures from our more dynamic civilizations.”

Not in 500 years has the Western world encountered a system that was based on deeply non-Western principles and that nonetheless worked. In an arc stretching from Sapporo, in far northern Japan, to Bangkok on its tropical plain, such a system is fast taking shape.