The year 2020 has been one of survival for millions of Cambodians, especially the poor and the vulnerable, with their livelihoods affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, flash floods and economic sanctions by the European Union and United States. The ruling regime's legitimacy—chiefly measured in terms of economic performance, public service delivery and infrastructure development—is facing pressing challenges as the economy suffers its worst contraction since the establishment of the Second Kingdom in 1993. State capacity, political leadership and social resilience have all been under severe strain. In June the government decided to cut half of its budget in 2021, but it reversed its decision in October and instead reduced the budget by only about seven per cent. The budget for 2021 is about US$7.6 billion, compared with US$8.2 billion in 2020. Moreover, these unprecedented downward socio-economic pressures affect the development trajectory of the Kingdom, including efforts to realize the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 and the visions to become a higher-middle-income country by 2030 and a high-income country by 2050.

After the controversial landslide victory in the general election in 2018, the government, led solely by the Cambodian People's Party (CPP), pledged to carry out “serious” reforms under the slogan of “taking a bath, looking in the mirror, cleaning the body, applying treatment, and conducting surgery”. The appointment in 2020 of new, young and dynamic cabinet members to head the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and Ministry of Civil Service was applauded, but the results of these reforms are being awaited. Since 2018 the government has made strides in state revenue collection and the capacity of the state to deal with pandemics like COVID-19 and natural disasters. Widespread and systemic corruption, however, remains the most complex public sector issue in need of reform.

It can be argued that Cambodia responded relatively well to the COVID-19 pandemic and the flash floods. With respect to the external economic and diplomatic pressures highlighted by the imposition of sanctions, the government has adopted and promoted a hedging strategy through economic diversification. The government was able to maintain a reasonable degree of public trust. But as the sources of regime legitimacy and the political power bases are becoming more volatile, the government must continuously improve its performance to address legitimacy deficits.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how politics and societies operate worldwide. Stay-at-home restrictions were imposed, to varying extents, in around seventy per cent of countries globally. In Singapore, the government imposed a “circuit breaker”, or a lock-down, in April 2020 to limit the spread of COVID-19. During the circuit breaker, most workplaces were closed except for those providing essential services, and schools moved to full home-based learning. The priority to manage community spread led to a slew of social-distancing measures, which remained in place even after Singapore lifted the circuit breaker on 1 June. It was amidst this disruption that Singapore held its 13th General Election on 10 July 2020. In the run up to the election, the Elections Department (ELD) announced new campaigning guidelines for political candidates. Some of the changes included the limitation of walkabouts and door-to-door campaigning to groups of not more than five and a prohibition on physical election rallies and large gatherings. In view of the new restrictions, all political parties and constituents were given additional airtime on national television. In addition to the party political broadcasts, the ELD introduced the constituency political broadcasts (CPBs) to give political candidates more airtime. Also, for the first time in Singapore's election history, a political debate featuring candidates from the People's Action Party (PAP), the Workers’ Party (WP), the Progress Singapore Party (PSP) and the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) was broadcast live on national television and simultaneously streamed on YouTube.

Given the campaigning restrictions, political parties ramped up their digital outreach efforts on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Apart from the CPBs that were aired on television, voters tuned in to e-rallies and candidate speeches via the official social media accounts of political parties. Because of the shift of political campaigning to the online space, in the lead-up to Polling Day on 10 July the 2020 election was much hyped as an “Internet election”.

This chapter will examine the role of digital media during the election, with a focus on citizen engagement. Our observations indicate that the COVID-19 restrictions did not stymie the engagement of voters with the election. Social media and instant messaging (IM) platforms were verdant grounds for citizen-generated content, which ranged from information-packed voting resources to satire-laden memes.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is a global shock that has resulted in simultaneous disruptions to both supply and demand in an interconnected world economy. On the supply side, infections reduce labour supply and productivity, while lockdowns, business closures and social distancing cause supply disruptions. On the demand side, layoffs, losses in income and poorer economic prospects reduce household consumption and investment by firms. The extreme uncertainty about the path, duration and impact of the pandemic could pose a vicious cycle of reducing business and consumer confidence, which could further increase job losses and deter investment.

This chapter aims to gauge the prospects of economic recovery in Southeast Asia in 2020–21. The prospects are reviewed against three indicators: domestic containment of the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of COVID-19 on economic growth, and the prospects of economic recovery in the rest of the world.

This chapter consists of four sections. The first section provides a comparative overview of the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic in Southeast Asia and the rest of the world. The second section assesses the impact of COVID-19 on economic growth using the projected real GDP growth from the International Monetary Fund's “World Economic Outlook” and the realized growth figures from CEIC. It also reviews the size and composition of economic stimulus packages and the use of monetary policy instruments to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on households and firms. The third section discusses the prospects for economic recovery, and the fourth section concludes the study.

Containing the COVID-19 pandemic

Sustained revival of economic activities in a country requires the successful containment of the COVID-19 pandemic. But major economies and some Southeast Asian countries have not yet been able to contain the spread of COVID-19. The United States, India, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan are still facing rising numbers of daily COVID-19 infections and deaths (Figure 1a). As of 27 November, these countries had recorded 27 million infections and 524,795 deaths, which accounted for 45 per cent of global infections and 37 per cent of global deaths, respectively.

The pandemic has so far been contained in many parts of Southeast Asia, but not in Indonesia or the Philippines, and it still threatens other countries, most recently Myanmar and Malaysia (Figure 1b). The number of daily infections in the Philippines has declined from about 4,000 cases in August to 1,700 cases in November.

Introduction: The NLD Foreign Policy Manifesto and its Broken Promises

In the run up to Myanmar's 2015 general elections, the National League for Democracy (NLD) published a foreign policy manifesto that appeared in strict consonance with the diplomatic approach and overarching goals pursued over the course of the previous quinquennium under the banner of Thein Sein's “positive non-alignment”. According to the document, the key mission was to practice:

Similar remarks were then reconfirmed after the historic triumph achieved by the progressives at the polls. In April 2016, shortly after the swearing-in of the new cabinet led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the state-owned newspaper Myanma Alin provided additional details on the diplomatic agenda of the NLD government, stating that “Myanmar's foreign policy, based on friendship with all, will not only continue to be consistent with the changing world politics but also, besides enhancing national interests, serves the world peace, development, and prosperity as it enters into the 21st century.”

Accordingly, following the smooth transition of power from the previous administration, many believed that Naypyidaw was on course to reiterate and further amplify the key traits ingrained in the successful hedging strategy brought about between 2011 and 2015, which had allowed Myanmar to break the chains of isolation after decades of self-imposed aloofness from the international arena. After five years in office, however, it appears increasingly clear that Aung San Suu Kyi's first term as the undisputable leader of the NLD administration has fallen short of expectations, not only in terms of Myanmar's foreign policy record, but also on other sensitive issues such as the liberalization of the national economy, the attraction of foreign capital and the advancement of a lasting peace between the central government and ethnic minorities.

A “COVID-ed” Year

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong described the COVID-19 global pandemic as the “crisis of a generation” for Singapore and Singaporeans. The year 2020 was a trying one, with the full ramifications of the crisis indeterminate for politics, economy and society. The imperative to keep Singaporeans safe and to mitigate the severe economic downturn preoccupied the government for much of the year. It saw the government put forth four budgets totalling S$93 billion specifically as countermeasures to the pandemic within a span of a hundred days. With the public health situation under control by the end of the third quarter of 2020, the focus shifted towards “emerging stronger” in the post-pandemic world. Singaporeans also went to the polls in July 2020 where the ruling People's Action Party won a clear mandate, but, arguably, turned in its worst electoral showing since independence. The uncertainty as to who will become the fourth premier resurfaced. Foreign relations remained on an even keel even as the pressing priorities globally were on domestic concerns. Singapore sought to keep supply lines open and ensure food security in a world that became drenched with fear, panic and trepidation. It is an understatement that COVID-19 demonstrated the city-state's continuing vulnerabilities, even though it is in a far stronger position at the end of 2020 to deal with the challenges.

Holding Pattern Adrift

Changi Airport, Singapore's icon of open borders, efficiency and a connected world, was eerily quiet for much of 2020. Air travel plunged dramatically as the pandemic made its visceral presence felt. The imperative and urgency of maintaining Singapore's air hub status took on greater poignancy even as the pandemic reared its ugly head since it “anchors Singapore's place in the world … an attractive node for international business, trade, investment, and tourism” despite it not being, geographically, a natural air hub. COVID-19 “decimated air travel and set us back decades”.

By end August 2020, Changi Airport had lost about half of its air links and over 95 per cent of scheduled passenger services. With that, the aviation and tourism sectors were badly hit. Terminals 2 and 4 were closed.

On the last day of 2020, all roads leading out of Hanoi were congested. My family and I were also stuck in the middle of a sea of cars for hours until it was completely dark. At that time, I thought the occasion symbolized the progress of the Vietnamese economy: prosperity had grown steadily over the past few decades and its dynamism was not interrupted even in 2020. Vietnam remains a rare positive exception in the year of “twin storms”—the tense economic confrontation between the United States and China and the uncontrolled COVID-19 pandemic shaking both global health and the economy. The country has tried over most of 2020 to keep its domestic affairs relatively stable and the daily lives of her citizens uninterrupted.

Indeed, in 2020 Vietnam's economic growth showed a significant drop in the second quarter (down 0.36 per cent year-on-year—the lowest in a decade) as a consequence of the negative shock from the late January outbreak of COVID-19, which caused the whole country to be locked down for the first two weeks in April. After a few weeks, however, the pandemic was effectively controlled, and though all borders remained closed, the domestic economy recovered to show a 2.62 per cent growth in the third quarter before reaching 4.48 per cent (year-on-year) in the fourth quarter (see Figure 1). Overall, Vietnam's GDP in 2020 was reported to have increased by 2.91 per cent, thus recording a positive growth rate while most other economies in the world were in contraction. The country's annual inflation has also been continuously maintained at a rate as low as under 4 per cent for the past seven years, indicating that macroeconomic stability has been skilfully and effectively achieved for the longest period since Doi Moi (in the early 1990s).

This chapter begins with an overview of the progress of the Vietnamese economy in 2020. It then briefly assesses the impact of the US-China trade conflict on the economic and trade development of Vietnam. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are then examined to understand how Vietnam was able to contain the virus outbreak for most of 2020. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the outlook for the Vietnamese economy in 2021.

The year 2020 has been the year of COVID-19. On 30 January, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of a novel coronavirus (later termed COVID-19) a public health emergency of international concern. The first signs of the virus had been detected just a month earlier, on 31 December 2019, in the Chinese city of Wuhan. By 11 March, two days after Italy entered a national lockdown to curb its exploding cases of the virus, the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Less than a month later, on 4 April, there were more than a million reported cases of the virus. In another two weeks there were two million cases, and by 12 May there were more than four million reported cases (including 280,000 deaths) across 213 countries. At the time of writing, the Johns Hopkins Resource Centre (2020) records over forty-three million cases globally, and more than one million deaths.

Despite being a global hotspot for the transmission of epidemic-prone diseases—and particularly zoonoses—mainland Southeast Asia has performed remarkably well in its containment of COVID-19. At the end of October, Thailand had reported just 3,743 cases, Vietnam 1,169, Cambodia 287 and Myanmar (a more troubling) 46,200. There had been just 1,216 total reported deaths across the region, 1,122 of which were in Myanmar. Indeed, how the region has so dramatically outperformed many of the world's wealthiest countries in its containment efforts demands further analysis.

Even in a region that has performed exceptionally, Laos stands out. With just twenty-three reported cases and no deaths, Laos has the world's fifth-lowest COVID-19 numbers. Even more remarkably, Laos has achieved this case rate despite having five international borders, including a 423-kilometre border with Southern China and a 238-kilometre border with Myanmar. Given that Laos has a heavily constrained media landscape and limited testing and medical facilities, statistical data on COVID-19 must be treated with a degree of caution. But even if the real figures were five times the reported rate (as some medical experts have proposed could be the case in other countries), Laos would still be performing exceptionally well.

To respond to the pandemic, the government of Laos implemented a monthlong nationwide lockdown that began on 30 March, just six days after its first (two) reported cases.

The year 2020 was not a good one for Southeast Asia. The international trade environment continued to deteriorate as a more inward-looking America sought to protect its domestic industry from foreign competition. Deborah Elms in her chapter in this volume explains how the penchant of the Trump administration for using tariffs (notably against China) as a protectionist policy tool undermined an already “creaking” global trading system. Southeast Asian states, particularly the more export-dependent ones, had already been affected by these trends for more than a year. The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 was a new shock that severely disrupted public health and economic well-being.

To be sure, the effects of these disruptions were uneven. In terms of public health, Indonesia and the Philippines were the most severely affected by the pandemic, while the mainland Southeast Asian countries, apart from Myanmar, were much less so. The degree of state effectiveness and preparedness to mount decisive early action to contain the spread of the virus largely accounted for the differences. Even so, the lockdowns and closing of borders damaged the economies of all, particularly those most dependent on foreign trade and tourism. Towards the end of the year there were hopes of a better 2021 as vaccines against the virus were developed, but much uncertainty remained about timely vaccine availability, the logistics for and pace of vaccinations, and the prospects for economic recovery.

In the midst of the pandemic, Thailand and Malaysia had to cope with difficult domestic politics that absorbed the energy and attention of their leaders. The revival of large student demonstrations in Thailand against the military-backed government put new pressure on the pillars of the traditional bureaucratic-military ruling elite, generating uncertainty about political stability for the near future. In Malaysia the political flux arising from the defeat of the Barisan Nasional coalition in the 2018 elections continued as no single party commanded sufficient support in Parliament to emerge with a strong mandate. There was little prospect of the early amelioration of political unsteadiness in Thailand or Malaysia. Myanmar and Singapore held elections amidst the pandemic. The incumbent ruling parties won the elections handsomely, though in Myanmar this was against the backdrop of a troubling deterioration in relations between the ruling National League for Democracy and the country's powerful military.

Environmental activism is a recent phenomenon in Vietnam and, considering the authoritarian nature of the regime, it is still uncertain whether sustained environmental movements might yet emerge. A movement is here defined according to Tarrow (1994, p. 6) as “people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities”, which distinguishes it from discrete instances of activism that do not challenge authority. This is the case in Vietnam, where campaigns are highly fragmented and generally do not last very long or have a deeper impact on the overall society. In order to thwart independent political association, the government has at first sought to engineer its own environmental movement with mass organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) controlled by the government. This, however, has not been successful as the government and business interests are closely tied together. As such, the government has tolerated more independent activism in the form of NGOs, but they are not only required to register with the government but the institutional context forces them to remain small with insufficient financial resources. Moreover, rather than promoting grassroots environmental activism, they focus mostly on service delivery and policy advice. Even the formation of networks has not resolved this problem and may have instead reinforced it. Nevertheless, the government has encouraged environmental activism. There has been a rise in protests against serious pollution, which have generally been tolerated. The government-owned media has reported extensively about them. However, this changed in 2016 when the government heavily repressed nationwide protests in response to massive fish deaths caused by the Taiwanese-owned Formosa Ha Tinh Steel plant. The government's response to this protest movement reveals that, despite recent progress, a widespread environmental movement is unlikely to emerge.

This chapter will explore the progress and challenges of Vietnam's environmental activism. In the context of potential repression and deep fragmentation, traces of environmental movements can be found, but there are severe restrictions under the authoritarian one-party state. By examining the opportunities and obstacles of the various actors in this field, it is possible to map the changing situation in Vietnam and draw attention to both the opportunities and obstacles on the path toward a broad-based environmental movement. First, the chapter seeks to demonstrate that the Vietnamese government has effectively weakened the organizational basis of society for any sustained environmental movement to emerge.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, Hong Kong was considered one of Asia's little dragons. Rapid industrialization in the post-World War II era has led to the worsening of the environment in the city. Subsequently, nascent environmental movements rose up to address the issues of air, water, and soil pollution. However, the opening up of China in 1978 led to the de-industrialization of Hong Kong. Over the course of a decade, almost all the polluting factories moved across the border to the Pearl River Delta. In the 1990s, Hong Kong was further transformed from an industrial city to a global centre of finance, trade, and business services. With the growth of its service industry, the issues addressed by Hong Kong's environmental movements also changed to reflect the post-materialistic concerns of the new middle class, such as lifestyle and cultural preservation.

The political context changed dramatically towards the end of the twentieth century. After Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China in 1997, the city experienced two phases of national integration with the Mainland. In the first phase (1997–2002), Beijing did not intervene in Hong Kong's affairs, and thus the city's economy, society, politics, and environmental movements remained largely the same as before. During this phase, environmental issues did not arouse great debate or controversy in civil society. The major environmental organizations were, as in the past, absorbed into the formal political structure to advocate piecemeal policy change through consensual environmental campaigns and an institutionalization similar to the process described by Heijden (1997). Before 2003, Hong Kong's environmental movements may be considered as more or less managerial.

However, in the second phase (2003–present), Beijing intervened in Hong Kong to speed up the national integration process. In response to the re-scaling exercises and the mega infrastructure projects, environmental protests began to take place over a number of preservation, conservation, and anti-development issues. The demolition of heritage sites in 2006–7 sparked opposition from a new generation of activists who mobilized protests against a variety of developmental projects.

Given the importance of tropical rainforests in the struggle to mitigate global warming and save terrestrial biodiversity from the “Sixth Extinction”, Indonesia represents a key area of the Anthropocene (Simangan 2019, p. 572). It is thus no accident that, in addition to English and four other major languages, a referent website like Global Forest Watch also offers its online data in Bahasa Indonesia.1 Yet, in the literature on the Anthropocene, apart from a few exceptions (e.g., Chandler 2017), Indonesia is almost inexistent. As emphasized by the editors of this volume (see Chapter 1), the Anthropocene framework remains Western-centred; it has not yet been assimilated by Asian scholars, or its “indigenization” has started only recently. A rare exception in the literature in Bahasa thus far is a special issue of Balairung, edited by a group of students from Gadjah Mada University (Raja et al. 2018). Although it is a modest start, these young scholars nevertheless highlight that the Anthropocene concept opens a brand new theoretical gateway for understanding the specific meaning of the global ecological crisis for a country like Indonesia (Sugandi and Najjah 2018; Haekal and Suci 2018).

In this chapter, I analyse how Indonesian environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) have come to address two emblematic issues of the Anthropocene: deforestation and the climate emergency. A decisive moment in that process was the engagement of Indonesian ENGOs during the 13th United Nations Climate Conference, which was held in Bali in 2007. We will look also at two related issues: the responsibility of banks and other financial institutions in deforestation, or what I call “unsustainable finance”, and the problem of coastal reclamation as a result of land grabbing and developmentalist urbanization. These issues are emblematic of the Anthropocene in the fundamentally anthropic nature of the damage done to the environment. But if they have played a central role in the advocacy campaign of Indonesian ENGOs during the last two decades, it is also due to their entanglement with local and national politics. We follow on the editors of this volume to consider the Anthropocene as a heuristic time reference for the last two decades.

From the 1970s to the mid-1980s, environmental advocacy in the Philippines was subsumed within the broader demands of the democratic struggle. Elsewhere in Asia, opposition to authoritarianism triggered a strong partnership between environmental movements and democracy movements (Lee et al. 1999). The democratic transition in the late-1980s opened up political opportunities for the environmental movements to voice their agenda for change in the 1990s (Magno 1999). While democratization broke new ground for collaboration between civil society and government reformers, the politics of contention continued to simmer in resource conflict zones in the twenty-first century.

This chapter examines how political arrangements have influenced environmentalism, and conversely, how environmental movements have affected national politics in the Philippines in the past two decades. These processes are analysed through the framework of environmental justice and in the context of the historical period identified as the Anthropocene. According to Crutzen's seminal article (2002), the Anthropocene refers to the “human-dominated geological epoch” that started in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The notion has thus become a marker for the “profound, global and irreversible alterations of the Earth's ecosystems by collective human activity” (Cho 2014, p. 3). But the epochal shift characterized by human-driven environmental changes, including pollution, natural resource degradation, water scarcity, and climate change, are also accompanied by growing social inequalities (Stengers 2015). In this regard, the use of an environmental justice lens highlights “how the results of environmental and climatic change became differently distributed over the human populations of the world and which communities have carried the burden of the ‘ecological footprints’ of commodity consumption” (Lane 2015, p. 11).

In the Philippines, centuries of Spanish domination imposed a radically uneven access to land and natural resources, which has never been challenged by a comprehensive land reform programme (as happened, for instance, in Taiwan and Japan after World War Two). The landed nobility (latifundistas) has survived until today, metamorphosed into a political elite and a ruling class of capitalists. In reaction, social activists, progressive Church leaders, and trade union organizers have encouraged vulnerable communities to develop an “environmentalism of the poor”.

Over the last two decades, despite threats and pressure from China, Taiwan has consolidated its democracy and its identity in the international community. So, too, have its environmental movements. Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao (1999) has described how the emergence of an environmental movement in the mid-1980s played a significant role in the popular mobilization that put an end to forty years of authoritarianism, paving the way for the country's democratization. Hsiao further defined the three pillars—or what he prefers to call streams, a more dynamic and natural metaphor—of that environmental mobilization as follows: (1) a grassroots, victim-conscious, anti-pollution movement against heavy industry; (2) an urban middle-class movement for the conservation of natural habitats and animal species; and (3) an anti-nuclear movement, which the author detached from anti-pollution protests to emphasize a greater level of public concern and connection with national politics.

Nearly twenty years later, in addition to these three streams of mobilization, Hsiao (2017) notes the emergence of two additional movements: 4) a movement against high-tech industrial hazards that arose around the turn of the century and bears characteristics distinct from the initial anti-pollution protests (see also Tu 2007, 2017a; Tu and Lee 2009; Chiu 2011, 2014); and 5) a movement for energy transition toward a low-carbon society (see also Hsu et al. 2016). Kuei-tien Chou (2015, 2017) further argues that Taiwan's anti-pollution movements are now reshaping their episteme to cope with the new challenges of climate change; the fight against industrial hazards now goes hand in hand with a struggle to reduce the intensive consumption of energy and natural resources like water. Indeed, among the three hundred associations registered by the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), around thirty claimed that global warming is their main matter of concern.

This trend suggests that Taiwan's environmental movements have reached a critical turn, which reflects the dynamism of Taiwanese civil society and its solid connections with the international community. The notion of the Anthropocene has also prompted academic discussions, though thus far they remain limited to a small circle (e.g., Lin 2018; Chuang 2020; Lee 2020; Chuang and Gong 2020).