The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

THE EDITORS

Series Chairman:

Series Editor:

Editorial Committee:

Archaeologists have made some progress in the study of ancient Southeast Asian textiles, but the results of this form of research are likely to remain limited to verifying the types of plants used to make the fibres and dyes, and possibly the weaving techniques employed. It seems likely that we will have to depend on indirect methods for the foreseeable future in our attempts to reconstruct the textiles used in early Southeast Asia. Historical sources contain some data, but these have serious limitations. Most surviving documents only refer to textiles in passing. Many terms used to refer to them are no longer understood. Old Javanese vocabulary concerning textiles is extensive, a sign of their interest in this topic and its importance in society, but there is scant chance that the literal meanings of these words will ever be recovered.

For several years I taught a course on traditional arts of Southeast Asia in the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, in which I emphasized the importance of textiles in trying to understand the roles of what in the West we call art and artists. No female artists and very few male artists are mentioned in ancient inscriptions. Artists were not a separate category of people in ancient Java; as in early twentiethcentury Bali, the making of objects possessing what is now called artistic value was a common activity of children as well as adults, as were performances of music and dance. Artists were not marginal members of society, though some people were certainly recognized as more skilful than others in creating textiles or pottery, both of which were exclusively made by women. The high aesthetic and technical value of Southeast Asia textile production only came to be acknowledged in the West in the midnineteenth century. Since that time, scholars have elevated the importance of textiles as a medium of artistic expression in traditional Southeast Asia from the status of a craft to the cultural equivalent of painting and sculpture.

Textile art in precolonial Southeast Asia had great ceremonial and symbolic value. Locally made textiles commanded high economic value not only within Southeast Asian societies but also in diplomatic gift exchange with China.

Statues originating from the Central Javanese period range in date from the late eighth to the ninth century, and they vary in size from a small bronze statuette at 7.5 centimetres to a monumental stone statue at 3 metres. These, along with a few small bronzes dating from the early East Javanese period in the mid-eleventh century, are the subject of this chapter. These statues were all chosen as examples for their diversity of patterns. Their places of origin are shown in map 3.

The term “Central or early East Java Style” describes a style of sculptures made in Java but showing some similarities to an Indian type of dress. The Indian style is especially evident from Eastern and Southern India in the early years of the Chola of the mid-ninth to the thirteenth century (Huntington and Huntington 1993, p. 509) and of the Pāla dynasties of Eastern India. There are many sculptures that appear to fit more closely with this Indianized style of dress—for example, a small Śiva from Gemuruh and the male figure half of the gold plaque (fig. 26)—a style that is apparent in the apparel but not the textile patterns themselves. The sculptures clearly show the figures wearing a dhotī, worn short, pulled up between the legs and tucked in at the rear of the body. Another explicit Indian detail of the dress is the use of the many small metal girdles and belts, chains and sashes. In Java, the chains around the hips are used as girdles, and the broad band or demarcation across the upper body is a sash or seléndang. These features are depicted in a somewhat different manner in India. There are obvious similarities, however, between the Indian and Javanese styles. In some instances the kain appears to stand proud of the limbs, which is more typical of the Singhasāri period.

The textile patterns are divided into four groups based on their pattern and design type.

Group 1 is made up of four sub-groups covering statues depicting small overall textile patterns in a repeat of flowers, circles and dots. These patterns are reflected in certain Indian painted resist and mordant dyed cotton fabric, which by their very nature indicates the design has a repeat. It is reasonable therefore to suggest that some of the figures in this group are dressed in a textile replicating a painted resist and mordant dyed fabric pattern.

Indicators of a New Power Structure

International trade used to be global, as the label “the global supply chain” indicates, but it is turning into a regional supply chain. No other place demonstrates this phenomenon as clearly as Asia. Asia's share of intraregional trade was 57.3 per cent in 2016, up from an average of 55.9 per cent between 2010 and 2015. It has been a general pattern, when analysing global trade, that trade among emerging markets and developing economies has been increasing, while that among industrialized countries has been in decline. What may be termed south–south trade had increased from 8 per cent of global trade in 1995 to 20 per cent in 2016. In contrast, north–north trade has fallen from 55 per cent in 1995 to 33 per cent today.

At first glance this may not seem much. But if the trend continues, and all signs indicate that it will, it is going to turn the tables of the global trade structure. It shows that whilst Asia in the past produced for consumption in the United States and Europe, it is now producing for consumption in Asia. From a logistics and transport point of view, the supply chain is becoming more compact, which will have repercussions on international transport, mainly sea transport, and in particular on container lines, which will need to adjust after decades of investment in global transport.

The global value chain is replacing the global supply chain as an indicator of the complexity of global trade. One example is that fifteen thousand components come together to make up a modern car. More than two-thirds of international trade—including the supply of smartphones, cars, TVs and computers—takes place within such global value chains. It allows each country to specialize in a particular role or phase of the chain. China, for example, exports many technological products, but it has in fact moved into the role of an assembler of components from many other countries, including the United States, sitting at the end of many global value chains.

INTRODUCTION

Business groups and governments throughout Southeast Asia have a long history of mutual interaction, joint service delivery and involvement in economic policy. In Malaysia, this has largely developed during several decades of continuous rule by the same governing coalition, who held office from independence in 1957 until May 2018.

When government is stable and long-lasting, business groups, public servants and ministers develop a familiarity and knowledge of each other, and of their respective goals and views. However, when administrations change, these relationships are also up-ended and the relationship can become much more challenging.

What impact did the installation of a new government have on business associations in the country? How were business groups able to adapt and respond to the change? What lessons can be learnt from this when dealing with future changes of government? And how can business associations ensure they maintain their role as effective policy advocates going forward?

This paper details the views of a diverse range of Malaysian association leaders to these questions, based on a series of personal interviews held between February to April 2020. It begins with some background on the key characteristics and current status of associations in Malaysia today. A detailed discussion of the change in government, along with other observations and reflections from business chamber office bearers, is then provided. Finally, the report concludes with some suggestions from interviewees for the future enhancement of association advocacy when dealing with future governments.

UNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF BUSINESS ASSOCIATIONS

Business associations are a well-established feature of all modern economies, and play an important role in business development, management, trade, entrepreneurship, skills training, public policy, and politics. Also, sometimes referred to as “industry associations”, “chambers of commerce”, and “professional associations”, there are over a hundred of these organizations in Malaysia today, representing at least 600,000 firms across the country.

The functions of business associations typically include lobbying and advocacy; workplace relations and human resources assistance to employers; the provision of training, skills development and education to members; organizing networking and social events; information collection, knowledge sharing and policy development; conducting trade missions; and acting as a public voice on behalf of business to politicians, public servants, ministers, the media and other interested external parties.

Being born and bred in Malaysia, haze was an unavoidable part of growing up for me. With the massive 1997–98 haze episode coinciding with my formative years, this transboundary puzzle seemed an obvious research topic of choice during my undergraduate studies. Little did I know that a small student conference paper would somehow snowball into fifteen immersive years and counting of research.

The title of this book is directly lifted from the title of my academic blog, which I have maintained since 2015. The blog title was, in turn, inspired by the popular phrase “to miss the forests for the trees”, which is defined by Merriam Webster's Dictionary as “to not understand or appreciate a larger situation, problem, etc., because one is considering only a few parts of it”.

Indeed, over the years, as I do more fieldwork, speak to more people and collect more personal experiences, I am even more appreciative of how large and complex the haze situation in Southeast Asia truly is, and how impossible it is for one to consider and understand all the different aspects of the problem.

As an academic who focuses on an issue that is very much in the public eye, I have enjoyed the privilege of being able to share my research, hypotheses and opinions with an interested public audience beyond academia, at a pace more-or-less reflective of the rapid development of this issue on the ground. Thus, this book is a collection of my commentaries, some solicited and some not, previously published on various media platforms, on various facets and various stages of the regional transboundary haze problem and its links to unsustainable agribusiness practices.

My view from Malaysia is, as expected, somewhat myopic in that my research, and by extension this book, focuses on the fires and haze in the southern ASEAN subregion and its connection to this particular subregion's “golden crop”—palm oil. Hence, I should caution that the issues discussed within this collection, while not entirely dissimilar, should not be easily generalized to apply to the Mekong subregion.

The commentaries featured in this collection were originally published between 2013 and 2020. They are divided into four broad topics and are arranged chronologically within each of these topics.

Singapore's Transboundary Pollution Act: Prospects and Challenges

First published in Khor Reports on 8 March 2014.

Last June saw Singapore battling with its most severe episode of haze yet. During that period, Singapore's Pollutant Standards Index hit the record high of 401. This event ignited a diplomatic row between Indonesia and Singapore, with Dr Vivian Balakrishnan of Singapore's Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources almost immediately accusing Indonesia of not caring about the welfare of its neighbours. It was also around this time that Dr Balakrishnan first revealed plans to table a Transboundary Pollution Act that would provide for criminal and civil liability for any Singaporean or non-Singaporean entity causing or contributing to transboundary haze pollution in Singapore.

The Draft Act

A draft version of the act has now been released, and the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources is seeking the views of the public on it. The consultation period will last until 19 March 2014, before the act will be reviewed and tabled in Parliament. Dr Balakrishnan hopes to have the act passed within the first half of this year.

The act is unique for its application of extraterritoriality; it covers the operations of all Singapore and non-Singapore entities whose activities outside of Singapore contribute to haze pollution in the city-state. Theact would be the first of its kind for Singapore, as Singapore usually only punishes action overseas for severe crimes such as corruption or sex with minors. It will also be the first of its kind in the region and the world, as there is currently no law in the world that allows a country to prosecute commercial entities in other countries for such offences. Currently, the only way to catch entities based overseas is if somebody in the entity's management position comes to Singapore.

The act makes it a criminal offence should an entity engage in conduct or authorizes any conduct that causes or contributes to haze in Singapore. A penalty of up to SG$300,000 can be imposed, and this may be increased up to SG$450,000 if the entity has deliberately ignored requests by authorities to take appropriate action to prevent, reduce or control the pollution. An individual company officer can also be held personally responsible.

The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

THE EDITORS

Series Chairman:

Series Editor:

Editorial Committee:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• • Vietnam-US relations have kept strengthening since bilateral normalization in 1995, including in the defence and strategic domains. This has turned the two countries into increasingly important security partners for each other.

• • The shared perception of the China threat, especially in the South China Sea, provided the strongest momentum towards bilateral strategic rapprochement in recent years despite the strategic uncertainties generated by the Trump administration. Such strategic dynamics also shaped Vietnam's supportive view of the US-led regional and global orders.

• • In the short to medium term, challenges for bilateral relations include the further improvement of mutual trust and the building up of Vietnam's capacity to participate in more substantive defence cooperation initiatives with the United States. In the long run, how to balance its strengthening ties with Washington and the troubling yet important relationship with Beijing remains a challenge for Hanoi.

• • Vietnam's support for the US-led rules-based international order should remain persistent, but will vary depending on the shifting dynamics in Vietnam's relations with China as well as Sino-US strategic competition.

The first phase of economic globalization in modern times lasted from the early 1950s to the first decade of the twenty-first century. It was shaped by national economies adapting to a global market and was dominated by the liberalization of trade and investments. The impulse for this came from the transformation of national economies that spread growth to other countries, drawing them into globalization. To make it work, rules-based international organizations were set up. Some nationstates went further and established a system of economic integration, such as the European Union (EU)—both an economic and a political enterprise—and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The sinews of the global economy over the next fifteen years will be neither the national economies nor the conventional well-known forces such as trade and investment, but rather demographics, technology and energy, and how these will interact with each other. They will frame the conditions for the national economies to thrive; those that cannot do so will face a lacklustre economic situation. The impulse will be in the opposite direction to what it was in the first phase. This time it will be from internationalization to the national economies.

The political problem will be how to exploit the opportunities that this interaction will put on the table, and the question of where nationstates will be willing to take further steps to globalize their economies despite the short-term problems of restructuring.

Demographics

The size of the labour force (the share of the population aged 15–64 years of age) and the dependency ratio (the share of those aged over 65) are decisive parameters in attempts to forecast the future economic global competitiveness of a nation-state.

For many years the Chinese labour force knew only one direction—it was going up. When Deng Xiaoping initiated reforms in the late 1970s, he gambled on cheap labour costs combined with a reasonably skilled labour force, discipline and willingness, plus the ability to work hard. It turned out to be a colossal success. China became the centre for manufacturing, and it crowded out the industrialized countries as well as competitors among emerging markets and developing economies, coming close to monopolizing labour-intensive, low-cost manufacturing.

Indonesia's Moratorium on Deforestation

First published in The Forests for the Palms on 25 July 2013.

In May this year, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono released Presidential Instruction No. 6/2013, instructing for a two-year extension to a ban on clearing 158 hectares of primary rainforests and peatland. This extends the original two-year moratorium on deforestation that was declared in May 2011 (Presidential Instruction No. 10/2011) under a US$1 billion deal with Norway to incentivize forest protection in Indonesia as part of the UN-REDD Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries. The ban preserves about fifty per cent of Indonesia's primary forests in an attempt to reduce the country's carbon emissions, up to eighty-five per cent of which have been traced to the clearing and draining of carbon-rich peatland, mostly related to plantation development. This agreement was to “pause” business-as-usual development to allow time for the government to establish a degraded-land database to provide the necessary information to identify areas of land acceptable for the establishment of economic activity, especially oil palm plantations.

The Indonesian palm oil industry has long opposed this moratorium. The Association of Indonesian Palm Oil Producers (GAPKI) lamented that producers stand to lose more than gain from the moratorium. Palm oil producers have pointed out contradictions between the moratorium and the governmental goals for continued expansion of the sector to reach a crude palm oil output of forty million tonnes per year by 2020. They have argued that for these goals to be achieved, companies “had no choice” but to continue establishing plantations on restricted areas. However, despite the stringent opposition from the palm oil lobby, the president went ahead with this second two-year moratorium.

While this can be taken as a positive sign of Indonesia's commitment to reducing deforestation and carbon emissions, environmentalists have identified several inherent weaknesses in the moratorium that remain unchanged in this second ban. First, this “Presidential Instruction” is a non-legislative document, meaning there are no legal consequences if the moratorium is not implemented. Hence, the instruction has not been able to stop permits from being issued at the local level.

The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

THE EDITORS

Series Chairman:

Series Editor:

Editorial Committee:

COVID-19 has exacerbated and accelerated some trends:

• •In geopolitics—the decline of US leadership, rising US-China tensions and the “demise” of multilateralism and rules-based order.

• •On economic globalization—the trend towards regionalization2 and economic nationalism.

More specifically, it has, for both the short and long term, added implications for:

• •Economic recovery—whether it will be V-shaped, U-shaped or L-shaped.

• •Societal structure

• •Technology and data

The health aspects have attracted a lot of interest. The most important one may be: Are we prepared for another pandemic?

Geopolitics

American global leadership has been declining for some years. The US share of global GDP fell from 31.2 per cent in 2000 to 23.8 per cent in 2018. The same trend is visible for manufacturing, with the United States accounting for 16.6 per cent in 2018 compared to not many decades ago when it was the leading manufacturing country in the world. Debt is rising fast. It may still be the leading country for innovation and higher education, but the gap to challengers such as China is narrowing. There have been signs of an American strategic withdrawal for a decade or two in view of a mismatch between its capabilities and commitments. While the United States is unquestionably still the most powerful nation, its global outreach, capability and willingness to continue as global leader are not at the same level they were at the turn of the century. A cornerstone of President Trump's foreign and security policies has been to realign the costs and benefits of the US global role by cutting commitments. In some cases this has been manifested in the withdrawal of troops, as was the case in June 2020 with the announcement of a cut by a third of US troops in Germany Such reductions, often made without any warning to allies, raises doubts about US credibility, and they may give rise to suspicions that US guarantees may be subordinated to presidential whims.

For several years many observers have seen China as the next global leader. This conclusion may be too hasty. China's share of global GDP has risen from 7.2 per cent in 2000 to 15.8 per cent in 2018. This is remarkable, but it still leaves China far behind the United States.