Democratization In Southeast Asia

State and Politics in Southeast Asia

Final Report

LIU, Wei

Student ID: 1023-27-9908

Topic: To discuss democratization in Southeast Asia from the aspects of economy and regime

Introduction

The countries in Southeast Asia are always with multi-ethnic, multi-language, and multi-culture. Many of them have the experience for being colonized, and hence, the politics and regimes of them have been changed a lot and became various. But one theme would always be the same – democratization.

In this paper, I will talk about democratization in Southeast Asia from the aspects of economy and regime, and mainly focus on Myanmar, Indonesia and Thai. I will discuss that whether economy and regime will

And I wonder how are other countries in Asia getting democratizing step by step. It will be more helpful to focus on the Asian country rather than Western country in this aspect, since Asian countries share some common cultures and suffer colonization or semi-colonization at some levels.

Democratization in Myanmar

Myanmar has been controlled under the military government since 1988. And in fact, the so-called Myanmar Socialism Regime which is from 1962 to 1988 is supported by the military force, so Myanmar can also be seemed as under one-party dictatorship during this period. In this sense, Myanmar is under a very special environment both in politic and economic aspect.

Although, date back to the period when Myanmar is under Myanmar Socialism Regime, the government tried a lot of ways to spur the economy, but none of them worked well. Finally, Myanmar was recognized as developed country by the United Nations in the end of 1987. And because of the stagnation of economy, a chain of campaigns of democratization came out in 1988. And in September of 1988, a new military government stood out and changed the economical policies, which makes the growth rate of GDP from 1992 to 1996 increased

This cause the people become supporting the government less and less. This became one of the reasons causes the National League for Democracy (NLD) which is lead Aung San Suu Kyi won the selection in 1990. But the government ignored the result of selection, and even worse, used a lot of method like ‘forced labor’ to make people exhausted and scared of government. (Another point is that, the people who are very related to the government officials became richer and richer, this also caused people feel unreliable to the