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Year of the Dog: One last look at Asia’s ‘best’ to ‘worst’

All eyes might be on the spectacle of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea, but what else has happened in the region away from the global spotlight?With more than a billion people across the Asia-Pacific region welcoming in the Year of the Dog, we take one last look at what made headlines and lit up social media in Asia in the lunar year that was

Curtis S. Chin and Jose B. Collazo (The Jakarta Post)
Bangkok
Thu, February 15, 2018

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Year of the Dog: One last look at Asia’s ‘best’ to ‘worst’

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ll eyes might be on the spectacle of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea, but what else has happened in the region away from the global spotlight?

With more than a billion people across the Asia-Pacific region welcoming in the Year of the Dog, we take one last look at what made headlines and lit up social media in Asia in the lunar year that was.  

This year’s selection draws from the concept of yin and yang — the Chinese philosophy of seemingly opposite but interdependent forces — as we upend tradition and name joint “winners” of Asia’s bad to good.

In the prior year, we gave “worst year in Asia” to the “United States pivot to Asia” as presidential candidates from Hillary Clinton to an ultimately victorious Donald Trump, made clear that Barack Obama’s’ Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal would not stand. Best year went to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte for disrupting the state of affairs — for good and for bad — at home and abroad.

In 2017, who was up and who was down? We bid a final farewell to the Year of the Rooster.

In 2013, Myanmar’s then opposition leader and democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi’s fall from grace began. The Nobel Peace Laureate did little to speak up against the persecution of the Muslim Rohingya minority as she kept her eyes on the prize of leading her majority Buddhist nation.

By year’s end 2017, her fall may well have been complete, with more than 600,000 Rohingya having fled into Bangladesh following rapes, murders and the burning of their villages — and journalists arrested for trying to uncover what happened.  

Whether a “humanitarian and human rights nightmare,” as described by the United Nations Secretary General, or a clear case of “ethnic cleansing,” the world has failed to effectively respond to Myanmar’s brutal treatment of an entire people.

Unfortunately, the year ahead doesn’t yet look any better for Suu Kyi or the Rohingya — sadly, the joint “winners” of worst year in Asia in the lunar year that was.

Across Asia 2017, it was not to be a year of an “Asia Spring” as incumbent leaders and parties in South, Southeast and East Asia solidified their lock on power, from India to Japan.  

An unfolding scandal the year before helped bring in Moon Jae-In to the Presidency of South Korea this past May, but for the most part, opposition parties had it bad in the year that was.

One party rule continued in China with renewed vengeance, as in Vietnam and Laos. And in Cambodia, the dissolving this past November of the only credible major opposition party may well help ensure the reign of Hun Sen as the world’s longest serving prime minister continues for some time.

Elsewhere, Thailand’s return to democracy remains on hold three years after a May 2014 coup. And in Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s party scored impressive election results, swamping the nascent party of popular Tokyo mayor Yuriko Koike. Incumbency does have its advantages.

The Year of the Rooster proved both good and bad for the 10-member Association of Southeast Asia Nations, whose 50th anniversary celebrations this November in Manila included a visit by US President Trump and a seemingly budding bromance between the US and Filipino presidents.

The Southeast Asian region, with a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of US$2.4 trillion, is now the seventh-largest economy in the world and on track to become the fourth-largest economy by 2050. That’s the good news.

But, 2017 also made clear that the association’s non-confrontational, consensus-building approach, deemed the “ASEAN Way,” may well be facing a mid-life crisis as the region’s embrace of Chinese investment continues.

As ASEAN has celebrated, some of the region’s most pressing problems, including the Rohingya crisis and territorial disputes in the South China Sea, have continued to fester if not grow.

Not everyone can be a Jack Ma, the storied Chinese billionaire and co-founder of Alibaba Group, nor can every company be an Ant Financial Services Group, the Alibaba-affiliated payments company described by The Economist as “the world’s most valuable fintech firm.”

But the Year of the Rooster proved to be a good year for Asia’s pioneers in fintech — a catch-all buzzword for the financial technology that is challenging and reshaping mainstream banking and finance companies — as ecommerce went increasingly mainstream, attracting both consumers and investors.

In third quarter 2017 alone, according to consulting firm KPMG, Asia was the global leader in fintech investment, outpacing Europe and the Americas, with more than $1.21 billion raised.

The majority of that investment went to China, including $220 million to Chinese peer-to-peer lender Dianrong.

And with companies like Alibaba, JD Finance, Tencent and others looking to serve the region’s “unbanked” — only 27 percent of Southeast Asia’s 600 million people have a bank account — what was a good year for fintech is likely to only get better.

“Best Year” in Asia goes to the leaders of the most populous nation, China, and arguably the region’s most frightening, North Korea.

In China, Xi Jinping solidified his rule as his nation’s most powerful leader in decades as this year’s Communist Party congress elevated the one-time Fujian governor to the same level of Mao Zedong, and enshrined “Xi Jinping thought” into the party’s constitution.  

The Year of the Rooster also saw progress on two landmark Xi initiatives — the “One Belt One Road” or “new Silk Road” development program to better link Chinese investment and products to key markets, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a Chinese-led rival to the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.

The major uncertainty in 2017 for Xi Jinping was the behavior of the man dubbed “Little Rocket Man” by Trump — North Korea’s President Kim Jong-un.  

With China the primary ally and trading partner of North Korea, Kim’s continued survival may well rest on China’s support more so than his nuclear arsenal.  

Kim is likely to know that an erratic North Korea is the price that China accepts for fear of a united, democratic Korea on its borders.  

As Kim’s sister Kim Yo-jung also showed during her appearance at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, some of the western media may well still be easily dazzled and distracted from the realities of his brutal regime.

And so, in a year that saw Xi Jinping emerge as a voice for Chinese-style globalization and Kim Jong-un survive, if not thrive, as a nuclear-armed provocateur, we give “Best Year in Asia” to a less-than-dynamic duo linked on the world stage: Xi and Kim, frenemies in the lunar year that was.

Now onward, in the Year of the Dog. For the long-suffering Rohingya and the North Korean people, let us hope it is a better year than the one that just ended.
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Curtis S. Chin, a former US ambassador to the Asian Development Bank, is managing director of advisory firm RiverPeak Group, LLC. Jose B. Collazo is a Southeast Asia analyst and an associate at RiverPeak Group.

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