Political comparisons
In East Asia, these issues can be seen as much through the prism of rivalry between nations as through the prism of competition for influence and resources between political and social organizations within specific countries. As the 2018 Chatham House conference entitled ‘Governance, Leadership and Legitimacy in East Asia’ elaborated, there are conflicting political models in Japan, South Korea and China, arising from very different political traditions and post-war experiences, and with different sources of governmental and leadership legitimacy.
South Korea and Japan rank 21st and 22nd respectively in the current edition of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. The two countries fall into the category of ‘flawed democracies’,5 just below the ‘full democracies’ section in the index. Both their overall rankings are dragged down by their sub-scores for the functioning of government (on which Japan outscores South Korea), political participation (on which South Korea outscores Japan) and political culture. China, at 130th on the list, is one of 53 ‘authoritarian’ countries where there are no free and fair elections, and where there are serious deficiencies in terms of political culture, political process and respect for civil liberties. This comparative ranking allows politicians in each country to argue rhetorically about liberal democratic values or their absence. But it does not offer a reliable sense of the sources of legitimacy in each country, nor does it adequately capture the internal and external threats to that legitimacy.
The political structures in the three countries are, of course, very different. Japan is a state that recovered from abject defeat and destruction in the Second World War, to build a world-leading industrial economy and develop a democratic system that has increasingly exposed its politicians to what Takako Hikotani, at the Chatham House conference, described as ‘a more volatile and discriminating public’. South Korea has made the transition from autocracy to democracy much more recently, after prolonged periods of dictatorship and martial law. In both cases, the external power of the US set the framework within which political institutions initially developed, often in adversarial competition with Soviet Russia.
In Japan, this process involved the imposition of a pacifist constitution in 1947 and the negotiation of the US–Japan security alliance of 1960. On the Korean peninsula, the temporary division of 1945, widely opposed by Koreans across the political spectrum, hardened by 1948 into the creation of two separate states. The United Nations’ attempt to elect a government for the whole of Korea failed, as did North Korea’s attempt to impose reunification by force in the face of the military response of the UN (dominated by the US). The 1953 armistice agreement stopped the conflict but maintained the division.6
China, by contrast, is an autocracy combining Communist Party dominance and a high level of political control over the terms within which politicians can be held accountable (witness the abolition under President Xi Jinping of the two-term presidential limit). Under the present leadership, the country has seen radical re-education programmes and the reintroduction of the personality cult, as well as a degree of open intellectual discourse, within strict party-defined limits, and heavily controlled local democracy, accompanied by a tough media clampdown.7
The delivery of economic benefits is not the only element of a government’s claim to legitimacy – the security of the state and the ability to articulate a sense of national identity will also be factors. But since the return to power of Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, in 2012 (five and a half years after his first, unsuccessful, premiership, cut short by illness), it has been the economy’s performance that appears to have resonated more with voters as far as the popularity of the government has been concerned.
Abe’s policy emphasis, since 2012, has been on reform of Japan’s pacifist constitution to allow a more proactive role for the country’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF). In his proposed constitutional reforms, he has stressed a rebalancing towards personal responsibilities rather than universal rights. In part this is a desire to rehabilitate the legacy of his nationalist grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, prime minister from 1957 to 1960, who had to resign following the demonstrations against the passing of the 1960 US–Japan security treaty, which led to the cancellation of President Dwight Eisenhower’s scheduled trip to Japan. But public views of Abe’s policy goals in this area remain divided.8 Japanese voters, in general, have more ambivalence about amending Article 9 of the constitution (which enshrines the principle of pacifism) than about the general principle of political agency giving effect to constitutional change. More importance is also attached to Abe sorting out the problems in the economy.9 His economic policies – widely dubbed ‘Abenomics’ – have been a higher voter priority than self-defence. Nor has the evidence of voter engagement been particularly encouraging during Abe’s tenure, with general election turnout never reaching 60 per cent in any of the three elections held since 2012, and the two most recent (2014 and 2017) recording overall turnouts of 52.6 and 53.7 per cent respectively – the lowest overall votes in any Japanese general election since the Second World War.
Abe’s economic policies – widely dubbed ‘Abenomics’ – have been a higher voter priority than self-defence. Nor has the evidence of voter engagement been particularly encouraging during Abe’s tenure, with general election turnout never reaching 60 per cent in any of the three elections held since 2012.
Perhaps this is to be expected in a mature democracy where politicians are managing a country at a very different stage of political and economic development from, say, South Korea. In Japan, the years of rapid economic growth came to an end with the bursting of the asset bubble on New Year’s Eve, 1989. The emphasis has since been on finding ways to kick-start the economy above a consistently lower level of growth, without a clear consensus for the sort of radical restructuring applied to some other developed economies (and with some commentators arguing for an economic model premised on slower growth after the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011). Growth in GDP per capita in Japan has actually outperformed that in the rest of the G7 during the Abe years,10 and a high level of technological innovation and industrial competitiveness has helped the process of adaptation to a society with a shrinking and ageing population.11
The headwinds from a slowdown in China and the threat of US–Japan and US–China trade wars could drive the Japanese economy off-course: Japanese industrial output in March 2019 was down 4.6 per cent year on year, marking its sharpest fall since 2015, and at the time of writing the Economist Intelligence Unit’s forecast for GDP growth in 2019 is just 1.0 per cent. But the underlying trends – of stability as well as efficiency and productivity – point towards a continuation of slow but steady growth, albeit not a dramatic economic recovery, as Chatham House Chair Jim O’Neill noted in an article in February 2019.12
In South Korea, as Jiyoon Kim pointed out in the conference, the attitudes of the voters have developed differently in recent years. Before 2013, voters prioritized economic growth; but since 2013, there seems to have been a shift in preferences, especially among younger voters, towards more value-driven policies. There is now an increasing popular focus on economic redistribution, global issues and civic principles – a shift that, though not necessarily linked to a desire to prioritize unification with the North, perhaps reflects more distinct (if still contested, by some older voters) ideas of South Korean identity. As John Nilsson-Wright points out in relation to the 2017 impeachment of President Park Geun-hye, identity politics have partly driven political challenge:
For the 77% of Koreans backing impeachment … including hundreds of thousands of young and middle-aged voters … Ms Park’s failings have been proof of the wider institutional and political shortcomings of the country … [including] privilege and corruption within the economic elites … favouritism and lack of transparency within an education system that should ideally provide social mobility … and an authoritarian predisposition on the part of Ms Park to blacklist her political rivals.13
China, South Korea and Japan are competitors as well as economic partners. They are rivals for influence and status within a region in which there are security tensions, nuclear flashpoints, and no clear and uncontested historical memory on which a common set of values and priorities can be based.
The background to these developments has been the ability of successive South Korean governments to keep the economic wheels turning: despite the effects of the slowdown in the global economy in recent years,14 the country has sustained annual GDP growth of around 2–3 per cent for most of the past decade (having also maintained solid growth in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1998).15
In China, the legitimacy of the regime derives again from its ability to deliver a high level of continued economic expansion. Real GDP growth has averaged nearly 10 per cent each year since market-driven reforms were first introduced in the late 1970s. This has helped China to achieve the Millennium Development Goals in 2015 and lift 800 million people out of poverty. The slowing of Chinese growth rates during this decade has been accompanied by a resurgence of political control over nascent democratic processes, and over the ability of citizens to challenge the status quo – although mass incidents of protest appear to be rising around the country.16
The broader context is also important. China, South Korea and Japan are competitors as well as economic partners. They are rivals for influence and status within a region in which there are security tensions, nuclear flashpoints, and no clear and uncontested historical memory on which a common set of values and priorities can be based.17 The impact of the conflicting bases of each of these polities on the international order needs to be seen in this framework.
5 A category that includes the US and 16 members of the EU, including France and Italy.
6 In both Japan and Korea, there have of course been pre-war antecedents of democratic processes. In Japan during the Taishō and early Shōwa eras, there was a degree of democratic innovation, drawing eclectically from other parliamentary democracies; in Korea, the March 1st movement, suppressed by the Japanese colonial government, led after 1919 to the establishment of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea, based in Shanghai. In this context, the US can be seen as the catalyst rather than the originator of change.
7 For an analysis of the suppression of media (including social media) and dissent, and the backlash that has followed, see Schlesinger, D., Henochowicz, A. and Wang, Y. (2016), ‘Why Xijinping’s media controls are “Absolutely Unyielding”’, Foreign Policy, 17 March 2016, https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/17/why-xi-jinpings-media-controls-absolutely-unyielding-censorship-china-economy-speech/ (accessed 21 Jun. 19); Human Rights Watch (2017), ‘China: Free Xinjiang “Political Education” Detainees’, 10 September 2019, https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/09/10/china-free-xinjiang-political-education-detainees (accessed 21 Jun. 19); and Wang, X. (2018), ‘As fears of Xi’s personality cult deepen, China must dial down the propaganda’, South China Morning Post, 24 March 2018, https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/2138481/fears-xis-personality-cult-deepen-china-must-dial-down-propaganda (accessed 21 Jun. 19).
8 For an interesting assessment of the shifts in the public’s views of possible constitutional revision, and the arguments in favour of it, as seen by both liberal and conservative voters, concluding that ‘the public has been fairly split over this question … over the past two decades’, see Smith, S. and Teraoka, A. (2016), ‘Japanese Public Opinion on Constitutional Revision in 2016’, Council on Foreign Relations blog, 1 August 2016, https://www.cfr.org/blog/japanese-public-opinion-constitutional-revision-2016 (accessed 21 Jun. 2019).
9 A Kyodo News poll of November 2017 showed that while the approval rating for the Abe cabinet had risen to 49.5 per cent following the autumn general election, more than half of those polled disapproved of the proposals for constitutional reform: those opposed to amending the pacifist clause in the constitution accounted for 52.6 per cent of respondents, while those in favour of doing so accounted for 38.3 per cent. When asked about the issues which the Abe administration should make a priority, the list was headed with welfare, healthcare, pensions, the economy generally and childcare policies. Japan Times (2017), ‘Abe’s Cabinet approval rating improves, but constitutional reform still unpopular, survey says’, 3 November 2017, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/11/03/national/politics-diplomacy/abes-cabinet-approval-rating-improves-constitutional-reform-still-unpopular-survey-says/#.XRCtHKB7nct (accessed 24 Jun. 2019).
10 McCrum, D. (2018), ‘Japan’s economic miracle’, Financial Times, 9 April 2018, https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/04/09/1523246400000/Japan-s-economic-miracle/ (accessed 24 Jun. 2019).
11 Current estimates are that the population – just under 127 million in 2019 – will fall to 108.8 million by 2050, and that the median age will rise from 48.2 to 53.2. Approximately 42 per cent of the population is expected to be over the age of 60 by that date. See Statista (2014), ‘Share of population of selected countries expected to be over 60 years of age by 2050’, https://www.statista.com/statistics/298800/population-share-over-60-china-japan-us/ (accessed 24 Jun. 2019).
12 O’Neill, J. (2019), ‘What Japan Could Teach Other Developed Countries’, Chatham House Expert Comment, 7 February 2019, https://www.chathamhouse.org/expert/comment/what-japan-could-teach-other-developed-countries (accessed 24 Jun. 2019).
13 Nilsson-Wright, J. (2017), ‘Park Geun-hye: How identity politics fuelled South Korean scandal’, BBC News, 10 March 2017, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-39228815 (accessed 24 Jun. 2019).
14 And indeed, during the previous financial crisis, in the face of such a slowdown, as with Kim Dae-jung, who took office in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, and during whose presidency the South Korean economy bounced back from a 5.8 per cent fall in 1998 to grow by over 10 per cent the following year: an example of where economic growth in a difficult climate brought political solidarity.
15 International Monetary Fund (2019), World Economic Outlook Database, April 2019, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2019/01/weodata/weorept.aspx?sy=1995&ey=2019&scsm=1&ssd=1&sort=country&ds=.&br=1&pr1.x=26&pr1.y=8&c=542&s=NGDP_RPCH&grp=0&a= (accessed 18 Jul. 2019).
16 On the level of public protest, see, for example, The Economist (2018), ‘Why protests are so common in China’, 4 October 2018, https://www.economist.com/china/2018/10/04/why-protests-are-so-common-in-china (accessed 24 Jun. 2019). This article quotes a Hong Kong-based NGO as identifying at least 1,300 labour protests in 2018, estimated to be approximately a tenth of the real number, as well as an increase in wage disputes and protests, many led by students, against illegal land confiscation and sexual harassment. An academic at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing is quoted as saying that the ‘astonishing’ number of protests has had ‘no impact on China’s political stability’.
17 This is also to a degree the case in Europe, as the EU has enlarged to include some of the former Eastern European states; but the existence of the Union and its institutions provides a very different environment within which to work through the political tensions that can arise.