As in the rest of Southeast Asia, the outward
forms of Western bureaucratic efficiency have been grafted onto a traditional
power elite, and the patient is showing all the signs of possible postoperative
tissue rejection. While Southeast Asian governments are carbon copies of
European bureaucracies in their formal trappings, the elite values of the past
govern the behind-the-scenes machinations over graft, patronage, and power. In
the area of Southeast Asia we have been discussing, three traditions continue to
influence contemporary political behavior: Thailand's legacy of despotic,
Hinduized god-kings; Vietnam's tradition of Chinese-style mandarin bureaucrats;
and Laos's and the Shan States' heritage of fragmented, feudal kingdoms.
The Hindu world view spread eastward from India into Thailand carrying its sensuous vision of a despotic god-king who squandered vast amounts of the national wealth on palaces, harems, and personal monuments. All authority radiated from his divine, sexually potent being, and his oppressively conspicuous consumption was but further proof of his divine right to power.
After a thousand years of Chinese military occupation, Vietnam bad absorbed its northern neighbor's Confucian ideal of meritocratic government: welleducated, carefully selected mandarins were given a high degree of independent administrative authority but were expected to adhere to rigid standards of ethical behavior. While the imperial court frequently violated Confucian ethics by selling offices to unqualified candidates, the Emperor himself remained piously unaware while such men exploited the people in order to make a return on their investment.
Although Chinese and Indian influence spread across the lowland plains of Vietnam and Thailand, the remote mountain regions of Laos and the Burmese Shan States remained less susceptible to these radically innovative concepts of opulent kingdoms and centralized political power. Laos and the Shan States remained a scattering of minor principalities whose despotic princes and sawbwas usually controlled little more than a single highland valley. Centralized power went no further than loosely organized, feudal federations or individualy powerful fiefdoms that annexed a few neighboring valleys.
The tenacious survival of these antiquated political structures is largely due to Western intervention in Southeast Asia during the last 150 years. In the midnineteenth century, European gunboats and diplomats broke down the isolationist world view of these traditional states and annexed them into their farflung empires. The European presence brought radical innovations-modern technology, revolutionary political ideas, and unprecedented economic oppression-which released dynamic forces of social change, While the European presence served initially as a catalyst for these changes, their colonial governments were profoundly conservative, and allied themselves with the traditional native elite to suppress these new social forces-labor unions, tenants' unions, and nationalist intellectuals. And when the traditional elite proved unequal to the task, the colonial powers groomed a new commercial or military class to serve their interests. In the process of serving the Europeans, both the traditional elite and the new class acquired a set of values that combined the worst of two worlds. Rejecting both their own traditions of public responsibility and the Western concepts of humanism, these native leaders fused the crass materialism of the West with their own traditions of aristocratic decadence. The result was the systematic corruption that continues to plague Southeast Asia.
The British found the preservation of the Shan State sawbwas an administrative convenience and reversed the trend of gradual integration with greater Burma. Under British rule, the Shan States became autonomous regions and the authority of the reactionary sawbwas was reinforced.
In Laos, after denying the local princes an effective voice in the government of their own country for almost fifty years, the French returned these feudalistic incompetents to power overnight when the First Indochina War made it politically expedient for them to Laotianize.
And as the gathering storm of the Vietnamese revolution forced the French to Vietnamize in the early 1950s, they created a government and an army from the only groups at all sympathetic to the French presence -the French-educated, land-owning families and the Catholic minority. When the Americans replaced the French in Indochina in 1955, they confused progressive reform with communism and proceeded to spend the next seventeen years shoring up these corrupted oligarchies and keeping reform governments out of power.
In Thailand a hundred years of British imperial councilors and twenty-five years of American advisers have given the royal government a certain veneer of technical sophistication, but have prevented the growth of any internal revolutions that might have broken with the traditional patterns of corrupted autocratic government.
At the bottom of Thailand's contemporary pyramids of corruption, armies of functionaries systematically plunder the nation and pass money up the chain of command to the top, where authoritarian leaders enjoy an ostentatious life style vaguely reminiscent of the old god-kings. Marshal Sarit, for example, had over a hundred mistresses, arbitrarily executed criminals at public spectacles, and died with an estate of over $150 million. (13) Such potentates, able to control every corrupt functionary in the most remote province, are rarely betrayed during struggles with other factions. As a result, a single political faction has usually been able to centralize and monopolize all Thailand's narcotics traffic. In contrast, the opium trade in Laos and the Shan States reflects their feudal political tradition: each regional warlord controls the traffic in his territory.
Vietnam's political factions are based in national political institutions and compete for control over a centralized narcotics traffic. But even the most powerful Vietnamese faction resembles a house of cards with one mini-clique stacked gracefully, but shakily, on top of another. Pirouetting on top of this latticework is a high-ranking government official, usually the premier or president, who, like the old pious emperors, ultimately sanctions corruption and graft but tries to remain out of the fray and preserve something of an honest, statesmanlike image. But behind every perennially smiling politician is a power broker, a heavy, who is responsible for building up the card house and preventing its collapse. Using patronage and discretionary funds, the broker builds a power base by recruiting dozens of small family cliques, important officeholders, and powerful military leaders. Since these ad hoc coalitions are notoriously unstable (betrayal precedes every Saigon coup), the broker also has to build up an intelligence network to keep an eye on his chief's loyal supporters. Money plays a key role in these affairs, and in the weeks before every coup political loyalties are sold to the highest bidder. Just before President Diem's overthrow in 1963, for example, U.S. Ambassador Lodge, who was promoting the coup, offered to give the plotters "funds at the last moment with which to buy off potential opposition. (14)
Since money is so crucial for maintaining power, one of the Vietnamese broker's major responsibilities is organizing graft and corruption to finance political dealing and intelligence work. He tries to work through the leaders of existing or newly established mini-factions to generate a reliable source of income through officially sanctioned graft and corruption. As the mini-faction sells offices lower on the bureaucratic scale, corruption seeps downward from the national level to the province, district, and village.
From the point of view of collecting money for political activities, the Vietnamese system is not nearly as efficient as the Thai pyramidal structure. Since each layer of the Vietnamese bureaucracy skims off a hefty percentage of the take (most observers feel that officials at each level keep an average of 40 percent for themselves) before passing it up to the next level, not that much steady income from ordinary graft reaches the top. For this reason, large-scale corruption that can be managed by fewer men-such, as collecting "contributions" from wealthy Chinese businessmen, selling major offices, and smuggling-are particularly important sources of political funding. It is not coincidence that every South Vietnamese government that has remained in power for more than a few months since the departure of the French has been implicated in the nation's narcotics traffic.