Letter From the Editors

Democratic decline – the erosion of key principles of free speech, a free press, and a robust opposition – has become a pandemic. In this issue, we explore democratic backsliding in its myriad forms throughout the Asia-Pacific region. While U.S. President Donald Trump has, for many, come to embody the crisis, the problem is much broader. Disillusionment with “business as usual” in political systems, stemming from issues like corruption and economic inequality, has (ironically) fostered the rise of strongman leaders who promise to “fix everything” – if only they are handed absolute power.

In our cover story, Kishore Mahbubani – a distinguished fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute and author of “Has China Won?” – lays out the parameters of the great global contest of our time: The battle between the United States and China. U.S. democracy is viewed by many, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s return to power, as faltering. Meanwhile, Chinese governance is seen as steady. Trump, Mahbubani notes – echoing countless scholars – is a symptom of democratic decay in the United States, not its cause. In the ultimate contest between American democracy and Chinese governance, it’s important to make a clear-eyed assessment about the state of affairs: Is America as democratic as it claims? Is China’s authoritarianism a problem? What system does the world admire and seek to emulate?

India is lauded as the world’s largest democracy. But as Asim Ali, an independent political researcher, explains, the country’s 1.4 billion people are living in an democratic experiment that has trended far too close to authoritarianism on the back of an unsolved “crisis of representation.” India’s initial limited democracy evolved into a party democracy and more recently has transitioned into plebiscitary democracy, where a strongman is increasingly entrusted and empowered to take decisive action. That man, Narendra Modi, rules over a democracy disfigured beyond almost all recognition. But like Trump, he’s a symptom of a larger problem.

Finally, we turn to the Philippines, which stands as both a beacon and a warning after one dynast shipped another off to face justice at the International Criminal Court. On the one hand, the Marcos government’s arrest of Rodrigo Duterte and his transfer to The Hague stands at the end of a long battle by activists, lawyers, and civil society groups, as a vindication of their outcry; on the other, it was the result of political maneuvering by Duterte’s bitter rival just ahead of an election. As Nicole Curato of the University of Birmingham’s School of Government and Jonathan Corpus Ong of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst write: “Achievements of political accountability, as seen with Duterte’s arrest by the International Criminal Court, are never black and white and require degrees of complicity.”

We hope you enjoy these stories and the many more in the following pages.