Efforts to Justify Indonesian Family’s Donations Call for a Little Skepticism

A curious cultural argument is being made by Asian business leaders to help justify the political contributions that were made by the Riady family of Indonesia to President Clinton’s Democratic Party. This argument ought to be examined critically, because there is less to it than there might seem on the surface.

It goes like this: Why all the fuss? Americans just don’t understand Asia. This money was just a way of establishing what are called guanxi, the Chinese word for connections or relationships. It was just the traditional way of doing business, nothing more.

“I think we are all surprised, including the Riadys, by the American reaction,” Sofyan Wanandi, a prominent Indonesian businessman, told the Far Eastern Economic Review. “Making such donations in Indonesia is very common.”

American business executives in Asia who reflect the viewpoint of the Asian business community have started to pick up the refrain.

“For these guys, that’s tin money,” William Overholt of Bankers Trust in Hong Kong told the Washington Post, referring to hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions from the Riady family and associates in their company, the Lippo Group.

“It’s sort of like buying membership in a club,” Overholt said. “They’d just like to be members of the club of people who say, ‘Hey, I can talk to these very important people.’ To join a good golf club in Asia costs a million dollars. To pay half that and to be able to say, ‘I had lunch with the president of the United States’--it’s in the range.”

There are several problems with this argument.

The first is that, in one sense, the apologia is misdirected. It’s not the Indonesians who need to justify the contributions so much as those in this country who solicited and received the money. Our election laws forbid the acceptance of campaign contributions from foreigners living abroad, or from foreign governments or corporations. The question is whether the law was violated.

Second, the thrust of this argument about guanxi is that the people who contributed the money didn’t expect anything in return--and that, therefore, there was nothing wrong with the transaction.

We ought to view such assertions with considerable skepticism. At the least, they are worthy of further investigation to see whether the donors did in fact hope for or receive anything in return.

The effect of the relationship that Chinese call guanxi is to create a certain distance, a benign explanation, for what might otherwise be viewed as a quid pro quo. One person does a favor for someone else, out of friendship or the goodness of his heart. And then later, often at some point well removed from the initial favor, the other guy reciprocates.

Ask yourself the obvious question: How come the largest sums of money usually seem to go to people in a position of power, who are able to convey status, favors or benefits? How come hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations don’t seem to go to minor-party candidates, or to you and the rest of us?

Third, and most important, the claims the business executives now make about the importance of connections overlook the fact that, in Asia itself, there are plenty of people, both senior officials and ordinary people, who don’t think government ought to be run in this fashion.

Sure, government decisions in Asia (and in this country too) all too often seem to be made on the basis of money and connections. But it’s a big step to say that this should be the normal way of doing things and that this practice should be accepted. In Asia itself, there is a tradition of believing that government should be fair and impartial.

“In Chinese political culture, there have always been ambivalent attitudes about guanxi because of its tendency to compromise impersonal relations and weaken the building blocks of formal power in government institutions,” writes Lucian W. Pye, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist, in his book “Asian Power and Politics.”

“High officials in Confucian as well as Communist times have decried the existence of guanxi, saying that it undermines the upright administration of government.”

In some ways, the current Indonesian fund-raising affair is tinged with irony.

Scholars and historians note that the United States has, during the past half-century, repeatedly used American money to influence the outcome of elections in other countries. Now, here we are in the midst of an interesting turnabout: Americans are worried about how the U.S. elections might be influenced by foreign interests.

“The Americans live in such an unbelievably glass house that they ought to be less noisy,” asserted Chalmers Johnson of the Japan Policy Research Institute. “The CIA was virtually created to rig the Italian elections of 1948. We’ve been rigging the Japanese system for the last 40 years. . . . I see nothing even slightly remarkable about rich Japanese, Indonesians, Koreans or Chinese buying a few [American] politicians or universities.”

Because of this unseemly history, Americans should, at least, avoid being overly self-righteous when talking about the role of foreign interests in our electoral process.

Yet that doesn’t excuse the acceptance of contributions from Indonesian interests in our own elections this year.

This is, after all, not a case of Americans trying to export our own values overseas--the usual charge when there is a supposed cultural conflict between the United States and Asia.

Whenever Americans try to foster the causes of democracy or a free press or better treatment for workers in other countries, business executives and foreign policy realists often complain that the United States should not try to promote our own ideals in other countries.

That may be an important debate in other contexts, but it certainly doesn’t apply to the Indonesian political contributions. In this case, America isn’t trying to export its values, but merely to carry out its elections under its own laws.

Let’s look at the recent revelations about the Riady political contributions from the standpoint of how the U.S. government works.

By the accounts of Clinton administration officials, the president met at the White House at least twice in the last two years with James Riady, the member of the family whom he first met years ago in Little Rock, Ark. Clinton also met with the Riadys during a trip to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, in 1994.

White House officials have insisted that these meetings were mostly social in nature and that they were not improper. Still, look at how fund-raising occupies the time of the president of the United States (and of those others who would be president).

Clinton, for example, appears to have spent at least as much time face to face with James Riady as he has with Stapleton Roy, the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, or with the Indonesian desk officers at the State Department, the Pentagon or the CIA.

Indonesia, with nearly 200 million people, is one of the most important countries in Asia. Yet by all appearances, at the top levels of the White House, it has been viewed at least to some extent through a fund-raising perspective.

Some would attempt to put the blame for this exclusively with the president and his associates. In an editorial last week called “In Defense of Asians,” the Wall Street Journal said of the Riady/Lippo affair: “What it’s about is Arkansas,” blaming the “culture and milieu” in which Clinton arose.

But sweeping claims about the culture of Arkansas seem even more implausible than the ones made about Asian culture. Clinton is not the first politician who has felt obliged to raise large sums of campaign funds from people who might want something in return, nor will he be the last.

The blame lies not in the culture of Asia or Arkansas. It lies in the structure of our system for financing political campaigns. That system has been too loose for decades, and in each election the candidates succeed in finding new loopholes. Yet each time there are calls for serious change, political leaders, including Clinton and GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole, fail to follow through on them.

Next January, when a new Congress convenes, a far-reaching reform of the campaign-finance laws ought to be the very first item on the agenda. We’ve been ducking this problem for far too long. It’s time we fix it before the next presidential election.

The International Outlook column appears here every other Monday.