by [1] Dennis Shoesmith  

The recent history of mainland Southeast Asia is one of civil war, revolution, regional conflict and violent intervention by the major powers [1] .  Each of the five states of the subregion experienced powerful nationalist and revolutionary movements from the 1940s.  Their peoples were fatally entangled in the global struggle between the United States, China and the then-Soviet Union.  In the two decades between 1960 and 1980 the subregion endured saturation bombing and a major land intervention by the United States, civil wars and revolutions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, ethnic separatist struggles and military rule  in Burma, sometimes bloody military coups in Thailand, a proxy war between China and the Soviet Union fought through their Southeast Asian allies,  the genocidal extremism of the Khmer Rouge, and  wars between Vietnam and Democratic Kampuchea and between Vietnam and China.  

The unrest of the recent past, while extreme, is not entirely unprecedented.  Mainland Southeast Asia is a complex political and ethnic mosaic, a dangerous geo-strategic environment.  Each of the five states shares uncertain borders with more than one of its Southeast Asian  neighbours and three share a border with China. Their history has been a history of wars with each other and invasions from China and, in recent history by the western colonial powers and Japan [2] .  The  dismantling of colonial rule and the creation of independent nation-states has allowed deep-seated historical rivalries to resurface between Cambodians, Vietnamese, Thais, Laos and Burmans.  The creation of nation-states has also exacerbated conflicts between lowland majorities and ethnic minority populations which often straddle national borders.  

The political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s created one of the worst refugee crises of this century, displacing perhaps more than 11 million people in the subregion (Wain, 1981: 5).  Between April 1975 and July 1979.  

Nearly 1.7 million Indo-Chinese had sought refuge in another country: 320,000 Khmer  and ethnic Chinese and an estimated 200,000 ethnic Vietnamese from Kampuchea to Vietnam, 293,000 boat people from Vietnam to scattered points, 250,000 residents of Vietnam, 250,000 residents of Vietnam - 230,000 of them ethnic Chinese, 30,000 ethnic Vietnamese - to China, mostly overland but some by boat, 250,000 assorted hill tribesmen, Law, Khmer, ethnic Thai, ethnic Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese overland to Thailand from Laos, Kampuchea and Vietnam, in addition to 85,000 so-called 'new' Kampucheans, mainly Khmer and Chinese who crossed into Thailand after the capture of Phnom Penh (Wain, 1981: 79-80).

Wain estimates that perhaps another 110,000 people died during this exodus, many of them at sea.  

Curiously, in the contemporary imagination, this catalogue of human suffering already appears to belong to a receding past.  But it is only six years since the signing by the Cambodian factions of the Paris Peace Agreement in October, 1991 signalled the end of the era of the Indo-Chinese Wars.  While the Paris Peace Agreement did not mark the end of fighting in mainland Southeast Asia, it can be taken as the end of conflicts caught up in the superpower rivalries of the Cold War.  Cambodia still has its own problems but the 'Cambodian problem' which had divided Southeast Asia for thirteen years was over (Womack, 1996: 80).   The current agenda in mainland Southeast Asia in the post-Cold War era is economic growth, not revolution or counterrevolution.   The major powers, with the significant exception of China, no longer regard mainland Southeast Asia as strategically vital to their national interests.  

A Broad Approach to Refugee Populations  

Is the period of war and dislocation finally over?   Will the flight of millions of people never recur?   In this paper, I will offer a tentative response to these questions by estimating the level of risk in the five countries of mainland Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma) and that in adjacent southern China.   China is included because developments in southeast China will have an immediate impact on the Southeast Asian subregion.  I will  try to  project current political, strategic and economic developments into the next five years or so. I will avoid  immediate predictions (which could immediately be proved wrong!).   This will involve a country-by-country analysis of political and economic trends and an assessment of potential sources of conflict within the subregion and with external powers.  The assessment  will not be restricted to political and strategic trends; I will also attempt a broad-brush sketch of the  underlying demographic and socio-economic trends in the region which could translate, in a crisis, into the involuntary movement of masses of people.  

My subject is not the persecuted individual but the displaced community or larger population.  The level of analysis is national and regional (cf. Ferris, 1985: 11-13).  The paper  is not focussed on the issues of the rights of asylum seekers or the political responsibilities of countries of first asylum.  Rather, it is concerned with the likelihood or otherwise of the emergence of new refugee populations in the subregion. To predict the possibility of future refugee movements, I will briefly review the causes of the refugee exodus in the 1969-1979 period.  Some of these causes no longer operate: notably, the pernicious impact on the peoples of Indochina of Cold-War rivalry in Asia.  Some of them do still apply: regional rivalries and distrust, competition for control of natural resources, separatist movements and authoritarian regimes.  Then I will review the current strategic environment in the region, political trends in China and the five mainland Southeast Asian states and conclude with a summary of those political-economic factors which could propel the mass movement of peoples in the area.  

Refugee movements can be located in the context of the political and economic geography of mainland Southeast Asia.   I am not concerned here with the narrow legal definition of refugees (according to the 1951 UN Convention) but more broadly with the phenomenon of involuntary displacement of peoples by a variety of forces,  economic dislocation as well as political upheavals, war and natural calamities. In one sense, refugee populations are the extreme end of a spectrum of social disruption.  

The key defining factor in speaking of refugees is the issue of involuntary displacement.  In my very broad use of the term, refugees are people who are involuntarily and fairly abruptly obliged to quit their homes and seek  asylum from economic and environmental as well as political calamities.  Coastal southern China and some regions within mainland Southeast Asia have experienced extremely rapid growth by any international standard.  Other areas have stagnated or been environmentally and economically degraded. Some of the world's poorest communities in the subregion (Cambodia and Burma) live alongside some of Asia's fastest growing economies (Thailand, Malaysia).  These disparities as much as the unsettling impact of rapid growth itself are already provoking uncontrolled population movements in Southeast Asia and southern China.  

The stress on economic dislocation does not mean I accept the loaded term 'economic refugee'.  The distinction  can be made in principle between refugees who have fled their country owing to 'a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion' and those who flee poverty or economic injustice (Nobel, 1988: 26).  The line, however, is not clear.  Poverty and economic injustice may deprive the displaced of basic human economic rights, if these can be distinguished from political rights. The most glaring instances of economic persecution, such as the forcible dispossession of communities from their land without proper compensation, can sometimes satisfy the rigorous definition in international law of 'refugee', particularly if the affected communities have a separate ethnic, religious or national identity from their exploiters. But extreme  economic or environmental exploitation can contravene basic rights and threaten the individual's and the community's survival without satisfying the definition of 'refugee'.  International labour migration has become a global phenomenon since the 1970s when there were 'massive international labour flows from Asia to the Middle East'.  More recently, international labour migration within the ASEAN group has become a major but under reported development (Ogawa et al, 1993).   A significant proportion of migrant workers in the subregion are illegal.   When it suits the host government, it quietly takes advantage of a cheap guest worker force which by definition has no political or legal rights.  When economic conditions change, these workers can be rounded up and deported.  

A recent illustration of this new phenomenon is the crackdown launched on February 1 by the Malaysian government against an estimated one million illegal workers in Malaysia.  Most of the illegal workers singled out in the police and military operation were from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Burma.  Many fled into the adjacent province of Thailand to escape arrest and deportation.  An official report has estimated that 73,742 foreign workers had entered Malaysia illegally from Thailand and the Thais suspected the Malaysian Government of deliberately trying to push illegal workers back into Thailand (Bangkok Post, 3 February, 1997).  The issue created tensions in Thai-Malaysian relations and a problem for the Thais which is reminiscent (on a much smaller scale) of the problem created by the  refugee influx from Cambodia in the late 1970s.  Less visible but still significant are the estimated  5,000 Indonesian illegal workers who enter Malaysia each week.  The flow of illegal workers is identified by the Malaysian Government as one of the 'Three-Pronged Attacks on Malaysian society' (the others are drugs and western decadence) ('AM' ABC Radio, 30 January, 1997).  Southeast Asian internal and national borders are porous as are the borders with southern China.  As some areas boom and other areas languish, the pressures for intra regional migrations appear irresistible.  

These larger patterns of involuntary and semi-voluntary migration can encompass the sharper pattern of refugee movements.   Economic or social disruption of rural and urban communities or of vulnerable minority populations create the conditions for political crisis. Societies which produce large numbers of illegal migrants can rapidly produce large numbers of refugees.  The flow of rural poor to the big cities, the flow of young Filipinos, Indonesians, Burmese and Thais throughout Southeast Asia (and the world) seeking work can turn into a tide of refugees if the political situation deteriorates.  

The broader forces of social and economic change, then,  have to be taken into account if we want to  predict the likelihood of significant numbers of people in the region suddenly being impelled  to leave their homes and seek asylum in another.  Predictions should take into account the regional context as well as the political, demographic and economic profiles of the individual countries.  For convenience, I will list these factors as: demographic, political, economic, geographical.  

A Profile of Mainland Southeast Asia  

The geostrategic shape of mainland Southeast Asia seems designed to encourage ethnic conflict.   The Burmese, Thai, Lao, Khmer and Vietnamese peoples occupy core areas defined by the major riverine systems: the Irrawaddy, the Chao Phraya, the Mekong and the Red River delta.  The five capitals are located in these lowland core areas.  The surrounding upland zones are inhabited by other peoples and stretch well into China's southern provinces (Lim Joo-Jock, 1984).  Large ethnic minority populations, Karen, Kachin, Chin, Mong,  Shan and others, straddle disputed borders often in difficult terrain.  The Golden Triangle, where the Burmese, Laotian and Thai borders intersect is the most notorious example of a shared territory beyond metropolitan control.  Thailand has a 1802 kilometre border to the west with Burma, a 2574 kilometre border with Laos and Cambodia to the east, and a 515-kilometre border with Malaysia to the south (Prescott, Holier and Prescott, 1977).  China's border with Vietnam, Laos and Burma stretches for 2047 kilometres.  

The seas of Southeast Asia, from the Gulf of Thailand to the Sunda shelf,  are relatively shallow.   Typhoons that originate in the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean from April to October threaten shipping and Vietnamese fleeing by boat in 1979-1980 feared the northeast Monsoon which brings torrential rain and strong winds to the Vietnamese coast, Malaysia and Indonesia from October to March (Wain, 1981: 43).  But the exodus of refugee boats at that time,  although many lives were lost, demonstrated that large numbers of people in quite primitive craft can relatively quickly traverse the region.  

The 195 million people of mainland Southeast Asia make up an ethnic mosaic which rarely corresponds to national borders.   Hundreds of thousands of Khmers live in southern Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese live in Cambodia, there is a large Lao population in Thailand.  Five or six million ethnic Chinese add to the diversity.  The neighbouring Chinese provinces of Guangxi and Yunnan, with a population (according to the 1983 census) of more than 70,000,000 between them, also include major national minority populations such as the Zhuang people, living alongside the Han in their own autonomous region in Guangxi (Banister, 1987; New China's Population, 1988).  

Population growth in Southeast Asia peaked in the 1960s when it reached 2.5% per annum.  By the 1980s the rate had fallen but it was still 1.92%.  Mortality and fertility rates both decline as living standards rise, a phenomenon reaching a developed stage in Thailand (Ogawa et al, 1993).  Thailand's poor neighbours, Burma and Cambodia, continue to have high mortality and high fertility rates. This trend will create those economic push and pull factors which will persuade Cambodians and Burmese to migrate, illegally if necessary, to Thailand, as Burmese are now illegally migrating to Malaysia.  A political crisis or a natural calamity could turn this population movement into a refugee exodus.  

Country Profiles  

Let me now turn to a brief review of the political and economic conditions in two of the five mainland states, Burma and Cambodia, states with the highest risk of creating new waves of refugees.    

Burma  

Burma can claim the unenviable distinction of enduring the most oppressive and violent regime in the subregion.  The State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) was set up after a military coup in September, 1988.  The military junta is headed by a Chairman, Senior General Than Shwe who is currently Head of State, Prime Minister and Minister for Defence as well as Commander-in-Chief of the Defence Forces.   National elections in May 1990 for a constituent assembly,  saw the opposition National League for Democracy, led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,  win 392 of the 485 seats.  The junta refused to accept the result and banned opposition parties and imprisoned hundreds of its opponents.  The universities were closed.  Recently there have been some concessions to world opinion but human rights abuses, detentions and compulsory labour continue and 'few would doubt SLORC's willingness to react with all force necessary to suppress any challenge to its power' (Burma (Myanmar) 1996).  

The history of independent Burma has been marked by violent ethnic struggles.  The 1947 federal constitution did not in the event deliver political autonomy to the Shan, Karen, Kayah, Kachina and Chin peoples and between 1948 and 1952 separatist movements developed into a civil war (Thailand, Myanmar (Burma).   Many of the elements for ethnic conflict remain, sharpened by the authoritarianism of the military regime.   The most recent clashes in  forty years of fighting have been between rival factions of the Karen rebel group.  In early February, this year, pro-government Karen fighters in the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) crossed into Thailand to attack Karen refugees in two refugee camps  on the Thai side of the border (Straits Times, 1 February, 1997).  In a third attack, Thai troops, heavily reinforced, used heavy mortar barrages to drive the Karen guerillas back into Burma.   About 70,000 ethnic Karens who have fled the latest fighting in north-east Burma and  now live in refugee camps inside the Thai border (Straits Times, 4 February, 1997).  

Political repression and ethnic conflict are compounded in Burma by endemic poverty.  In a recent global survey of the extent of famine and malnutrition, two mainland Southeast Asian states are mentioned: Cambodia, which has experienced food shortages, and Burma, which is affected by chronic malnutrition (Jean, 1995).  The Burmese economy is growing (9.8% per annum by 1995-96, Burma (Myanmar) 1996) but per capita income is low (US$255) and inflation, at 25.2% is hurting the poor.  Income disparities have widened in urban as well as rural areas, and a rapidly rising cost of living, combined with massive forced relocations across the country and the extensive use of civilians for forced labour have placed heavy burdens on the  population (Asia 1996 Yearbook)  The prognosis for Burma is poor.  There are significant refugee problems at this moment consequent on fighting in the Karen territories in Burma's northeast.   The likelihood of violence and widespread disruption elsewhere and in the capital itself must be rated as high, despite the restraint exercised by the opposition.  In this situation, the seven ASEAN leaders have decided to admit Burma into the group along with Laos and Cambodia (Far Eastern Economic Review, 12 December, 1997).  The only positive aspect of this development is the obvious intention of the Thais and the other ASEAN members that whatever the internal conditions within Burma, conflicts between states in the region will be avoided.  

Cambodia  

Cambodia's people have experienced an unrelenting ordeal of war, invasion, bombing, terror and famine in the past thirty years.   Since the intervention of the international community through the United Nations and the elections of May, 1993, an uneasy coalition government of the party which won and the party which lost that election has overseen the uncertain program of national reconstruction.  The 1993 elections represented not so much a reconciliation between the Cambodian People's Party leadership, the group installed in power by Vietnam in January 1979, and its former enemy the republican FUNCINPEC leadership.  Rather, it represented the determination of the major powers to wash their hands of a war they had used for their own purposes in the 1980s.  The Cambodian combatants were obliged to come to terms with one another and accept a liberal democratic social contract drawn up in the Paris Peace Agreement (Lizée, 1996).  

The Royal Government of Cambodia, with Norodom Sihanouk reinstalled as king, faces a formidable array of problems.   The first is the destruction of Cambodian society during the war and the rule of the Khmer Rouge.  The country's infrastructure was destroyed and is still woefully inadequate.  Cambodians are among the poorest people of Asia and the effort to rebuild the economy depends almost entirely on foreign aid but the lack of an effective administrative apparatus raises doubts whether this aid can be effectively deployed (Lizée, 1996). Corruption is a major problem which subverts economic recovery.  The Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot survives although major groups have broken away and negotiated an amnesty with the government.   The extraordinary defection of Ieng Sary and his supporters from Pol Pot in 1996 and the inclusion of his Khmer Rouge guerillas in the Royal Armed Forces of Cambodia is a bizarre demonstration of the opportunistic dynamics of Cambodian politics.  

Immediate problems include the weakness of political and administrative institutions.  The legal system, despite the efforts of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) remains incomplete and ineffectual.   The human rights situation in the country has deteriorated and the expulsion of a former Finance Minister, the repression of critics of the government, and the imposition of strict press censorship indicate a disturbing trend.  There have been serious tensions between the two parties and Hun Sen has subjected first Prime Minister, Norodom Ranariddh to public  threats. Although the parties have decided to maintain the present coalition after the 1998 national elections, the alliance between the CAP. and FUNCINPEC is an unnatural one which if it does survive is unlikely to deliver either a democratic or a coherent program for Cambodia.  In such a fragile yet unaccountable system, the role of King Sihanouk is critical.  His weakening health and age introduce a destabilising element into national politics.  

The 1998 elections could prove crucial for the survival or collapse of the experiment begun by the international community in Cambodia in 1992-1993.   As US Secretary of State, Warren Christopher remarked during a visit to Phnom Penh in 1995, 'it is not the first, but the second election which really counts' (quoted in Lizée, 1996).  If the experiment does collapse,  Cambodians again will seek asylum and relief outside Cambodia's borders.  

China  

The peoples of mainland Southeast Asia have the largest neighbour in the world.  China has a two-thousand year history of intervention in Southeast Asia and well into the nineteenth century.  Thailand and Vietnam still acknowledged their tributary status to the court in Beijing (Chandler, 1992: 113).   China's intervention on support of the Khmer Rouge against Vietnam and the regime it installed in Phnom Penh in 1979 is very much in this tradition of Chinese overlordship.   China has a permanent and vital interest in the states which stretch along its southern border.   

China worries Southeast Asia. The expansion of the ASEAN grouping to include Vietnam and, eventually, all ten countries of Southeast Asia, is arguably a response to the perceived threat of Chinese ambitions (Lizée, 1996: 87). Singapore's Prime Minister, Goh Chok Tong, has warned that:  

In Asia, China's rising power and arms build-up has stirred anxiety.  It is important to      bring into the open this underlying sense of discomfort, even insecurity about the political   and military ambitions of China (quoted in Roy, 1996: 760).  

Southeast Asian participants in a conference in Singapore in 1995 on 'The New Asia-Pacific Order' expressed their concerns about China's long terms goals, its emergence as a great power, and its aggressive stance on the Spratly islands territorial dispute.  China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei all have claims to all or part of this disputed territory covering much of the South China Sea.  While the islands are small and mostly uninhabited, the stakes are high. Control of the Spratlys may secure rich resources of oil, gas and marine life; the competition for these resources could provoke serious military conflict.  In March, 1988, during a military clash over the islands  between China and Vietnam forces over 70 Vietnamese were listed as missing and 7 were confirmed dead (Catley and Keliat, 1996).   

Participants at the Singapore forum were concerned regarding considerable uncertainty regarding leadership succession,  the future role of the party and that of the military.   They were also concerned at growing problems in the agricultural sector and uncertainties regarding central-provincial relations, problems which could spill over into mainland Southeast Asia if they got out of hand.  Some of the participants believe that disintegration of the Chinese state is a 'serious threat' (The New Asia-Pacific Order, A Summary Report, 1995).   

There are contrary views. One China-watcher has argued that so long as the Chinese leadership follows the policies required for rapid growth, 'such fragmentation is extremely unlikely' (Overholt, 1993:  102).    Denny Roy reviews the arguments for and against the 'China Threat' thesis, including the debate over the significance of China's military build up, the perception of the Chinese leadership as 'bullies', and the anxiety that China is capable of inflicting on its neighbours what it inflicted on its own people during the Tiananmen massacre of 1989.  Roy notes China's 'massive environmental degradation', a process which could force mass movements of population.  

There are political and strategic dimensions to the uneasy relationship between China and Southeast Asia (best illustrated at the present by the Spratlys dispute), but there is also a demographic dimension which could impact on population movements and refugee flows. The Chinese threat to regional stability may not take the form of military or political intervention in Southeast Asia.  Klintworth observes that 'an economic or political collapse in China could upset regional stability by sending out large numbers of Chinese refugees or by tempting other powers to invade China. A strong China, on the other hand, could preclude these dangers...' (Klintworth in Roy, 1996: 765).   Serious disruption of rural southern China or a crisis in the densely populated and industrialised south-eastern coastal provinces could have major consequences for Southeast Asia.   

A factor which has complicated Chinese-Southeast Asian relations in the past is the presence in Southeast Asia of large populations of ethnic Chinese (Suryadinata, 1985).  At the beginning of the 1970s period, there were perhaps 12 million ethnic Chinese living in Southeast Asia, perhaps two million in Thailand, 1.5 million in Vietnam and 500,000 in Cambodia (Freedman, 1969: 435; Wain 1981).  By the end of the decade half a million or more ethnic Chinese had joined the refugee exodus, 260,000 from Vietnam in 1978-79 and 150,000 from Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 (Wain, 1981: 79-80; Shawcross, 1984: 94).  Vietnamese repression of mainly Chinese petty traders in 1978 provoked an exodus of Chinese boat people.  Another 130,000 Chinese refugees poured overland into Guangxi and Yunnan, the two provinces bordering Vietnam.  Assuming the role of 'protecting the interests of overseas Chinese', China accused Vietnam of 'ostracism, persecution and expulsion' (Wain, 1981: 62-63).  The refugee crisis helped trigger the 'punitive' invasion by China of north Vietnam in February 1979.  The one million or more Chinese who remained in Vietnam were subject to intense suspicion of disloyalty  (Frost, 1980).  

China's population grew extraordinarily from the late 1940s.  At the same time, there have been enormous disruptions to the Chinese population in this period - the Great Leap Forward (1959-1961) when  there was famine, internal migration and 'most women stopped giving birth to babies'.  There was a peak period 1968-1973 then a period of decline (1974-1984) with  the introduction of the vigorous one-child family planning policy (China's Population, 1988: 10-12).  The total population reached 1,034,750,000 by 1984.   'roughly one quarter of the world's population' (China Economic Handbook, 1986).  

Southern China is one of the most densely settled areas on the globe (surpassed only by Bangladesh. The eight most populous  provinces with over 300 persons per square kilometre are all situated on the fertile low-lying alluvial plains of east China formed by the Yellow, Huai, and Changjiang Rivers and associated tributaries.   Using the more revealing measure of total population per square kilometre of cultivated land, Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong are the most densely populated provinces in this south-eastern belt with 2,135, 2,015 and 1,864 people per square kilometre respectively (Banister, 1987: 300).   A breakdown in political order in China or a natural calamity could have drastic consequences for this massive population, consequences which would be felt across the long border with Vietnam, Laos and Burma.  

More significant than ethnic strains in China are the differences between the more prosperous coastal regions and the poorer interior provinces. Tensions between the urban, industrialised centres on the coast and the agricultural populations of the interior became acute in the 1980s after the market reforms of 1979.  Conflict between coastal prosperous Guangdong and rural  Hunan provoked demonstrations in Hunan against the 'export' of Hunan's raw materials to fuel the growth of Guangdong (which reaped all the foreign exchange benefits).   In the meantime, millions of Hunanese had migrated to Guangdong to work in the factories there and returned to Hunan with money and stories of prosperity' (Overholt, 1993: 102).  

China's extraordinary economic growth in the 1980s has been very uneven.  Deng Xiaoping's tour of booming Guangzhou province in 1992, 'invoked a new round of double digit growth' (Asia Year Book 1996)  The growth in real income by province has varied in the 1985-1991 period from 112 per cent in south-eastern Fujian and 108 per cent in Guangdong to 50 per cent Hunan (next west [province) and 30% Hubei and 20% Anhui.  China's interior provinces have  experienced stagnation at subsistence levels for generations.  Subsistence has often been interrupted by famine - for instance, in the Great Leap Forward of 1958-61 and during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. But while the people are still poor, there has been a remarkable improvement improvement in basic living standards.  Comparatively, however, living standards between the  rapidly growing coast and the rural interior may be widening and this could create unrest as well as rising internal migration.  There are other, more idiosyncratic factors at work along the Southeast Asian border.   Much of Anion's 108% growth resulted from the Burmese drug trade (Overholt, 1993: 106).  

Conclusion  

What then are the prospects for political stability or instability in mainland Southeast Asia?   We should avoid becoming caught up in compiling  catalogues of problems which confirm a doom and gloom analysis of the future.   There are major positive signs.    

The first of these is the military disengagement of most of the major powers from the sub-region and the normalisation of its strategic significance in the post-Cold War environment.  This change is most remarkable in Cambodia where, whatever the seriousness of present problems, life is better for many than it has been for three decades.    The consequences of the capitalist revolution sweeping mainland Southeast Asia and southern China are not all positive.  Economic growth is unequal and is exacerbating differences between countryside and city and between regions within countries and between countries. Poverty remains a huge problem.  The World Bank has classified 51% of Vietnam's population as below the poverty line, including 25% classified as 'food poor' (unable to meet their basic caloric requirement even if they spent their entire income on food).  In Vietnam, as elsewhere in the region, poverty is aggravated by regional inequalities: 71% of the North Central region in Vietnam is poor, compared to 33% in the Southeast (Womack, 1996: 75).  Cambodians and Burmese are becoming increasingly poorer than Thais.   Poverty and regional inequalities provide the conditions for mass population movements from countryside to city and across national borders.   Compounded by quite high population growth rates, these conditions can contribute to more specific political crises which provoke, in turn, refugee populations.  

A further negative factor which deserves more attention than it has received here is the degradation of the environment in southern China and mainland Southeast Asia and the consequences this will have on population movements and the creation of refugee populations.  The destruction of Thailand and now Cambodia's forests have a multitude of negative consequences for rural populations and for the ethnic minorities who traditionally have lived in the forested hill lands.  

A second encouraging sign is the expansion of ASEAN to include its former communist enemies, promising a moderation of bilateral relations between neighbours who have been  enemies as often as friends.  The inclusion of Burma in ASEAN may give comfort to a repressive military regime but it probably reduces the likelihood of violence between Southeast Asian states if not within them.    The possibility of military conflicts between the five states of mainland Southeast Asia cannot entirely be ruled out.   Cambodia and Vietnam have border problems.   The bad treatment of Cambodia's ethnic Vietnamese (there have been massacres again in recent years) could provoke a response from Hanoi.   

The political systems in all five states are flawed.  That of Burma is a rigid and violent military tyranny which depends upon repression to survive. Cambodia has an odd duopoly of former enemies poorly placed to push through a coherent and effective program of reform.  The Vietnamese  party leadership, whether it admits it or not, is confronted by 'the fundamental problem of reform communism, namely, the contradiction between the continued liberalization inherent in the reform program and the monolithic character of the communist regime .... if a crisis occurs, the leadership can be confronted suddenly with  an impossible choice between its policy commitments to reform and its institutional base in a monolithic system' (Womack, 1996: 78). The Lao Party leadership faces a similar problem.  The recently elected Thai government of Chavalit Yongchaiyudh is the most democratic in the sub-region but it is an imperfect democracy apparently more responsive to big business than to the needs of  its citizens (Far Eastern Economic Review, 19 December, 1996:  20).  

A third positive development is the apparent rise in basic living standards for some of the rural poor.   This is only comparative, of course.  The comparison is with a past disfigured by famines and starvation. The capitalist revolution well underway in Thailand is beginning in Vietnam. If  the wealth created by the growth of market economies is equitably distributed, if the rural majorities of these societies perceive that they are beneficiaries of this growth, then economic change may contribute more to political stability than instability in the subregion.   

The single most encouraging development in the region is the post-Cold War transformation of the larger strategic environment.  China's interests in Southeast Asia create anxiety.    Chinese interests in the contested Spratly islands has already resulted in armed clashes.  There is a fear in the region that China's growing economic and military strength will translate into political interference in a region traditionally regarded by China as subject to Chinese overlordship. It has been argued that China can exert a destabilising influence in Southeast Asia in at least three ways: by aggressive intervention in pursuit of regional hegemony or control of resources; by a crisis in Chinese politics which leads to a breakdown of political order and disturbs the populations adjacent to Southeast Asia;  or by an outflow of people provoked by economic or environmental crisis.  Despite the 'Chinese threat', a political risk assessment of mainland Southeast Asia in the 1990s must be more optimistic than one made of the subregion in the Cold War environment of the 1960s.   The 1970s were years of extremes, of unprecedented devastation.  Working with that standard of comparison, the risk in the medium term of a repetition of the massive refugee movements of the 1975-1979 period , while it cannot be dismissed, is unlikely.  

My final observations are that the positive factors will probably, in the longer term, work for a more stable and more bearable political and human environment in Southeast Asia and southern China.   In the medium term, however, we can expect more clashes and crises, disputes between the five states of the sub-region and tensions with Beijing.  We can also expect the entry into the political arena of new and disgruntled players, the new urban working and middle classes.  The political side-effects of rapid capitalist development are inevitable, however delayed.  If these crises are not sensibly managed, the region yet again could be the tragic setting for  mass movements of refugees.  

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