Tuesday, Suharto, China

Reading the cover article and editorials about the death of present Suharto of Indonesia in Monday edition of WSJAsia I was immediately struck by the obvious parallels with and focus on China. The cover story by Richard Borsuk led with:

"Suharto, the autocratic leader who dominated Indonesia for 32 years, lifeted his country out of extreme poverty. But many Indonesians are more likely to remember Mr. Suharto, who died yesterday at age 86, as a stubborn strongman who blocked the development of democracy, repressed civil liberties and fostered a business culture tainted by patronage, nepotism and corruption..."(italics mine)

Inside, two editorials gave varying treatment to Suharto, drawing parallels between Suharto and Mao Zedong: "His government brought stability and prosperity, at a price" and Suharto and Deng Xiaoping: "he rescued his country from totalitarianism and poverty, and put it on the path to prosperity and a large measure of personal freedoms."

All of the articles make reference to economic corruption and nepotism in Indonesia, which I think has strong parallels to what is going on in a large portion of businesses in China, the mixture of money, politics, and family, permissible when the Indonesian economy boomed in the mid-90s, which eventually led to riots and turmoil after the Asian financial crisis of 97-98.

The main WSJ article also harps on Suharto for the media control during the 1980s, another place where Suharto's policies resemble the mainland China of today.

Wikipedia's entry on Indonesia's economy gives further examples of places where the business environments of the two countries resemble each other, chief among which are the large amount of state-owned enterprises and weak rule of law.

In the same issue was a short article about J Craig Venter, the biologist who deciphered the human genome. I recently saw a video of Dr. Venter giving the 2007 Dimbleby lecture, on genetics and synthetic genomics. He hopes to make synthetic bacteria which would be able to produce chemicals, or produce or absorb carbon.

I was just watching Goodness Gracious Me and Vic & Bob on youtube. Why does wikipedia link to youtube, but youtube doesn't link to wikipedia? It would be quite handy to be able to have two-way links...