In Search of New Heroes

I’m not into hero worship. Never have been. As an ethnic Indian lad growing up in Hong Kong in the 1960s and ’70s, I belonged to no tribe, and so had no tribal chief to look up to as a role model. To the British and the Chinese, I was an outsider, while the Indians were too fragmented by religion and class to constitute a brotherhood. In my youthful experience and imagination, the high and mighty were haughty, intolerant or mercenary; no one appeared worthy of worship. I became even more cynical as a journalist. In our line of work, we see or hear about so much pain that it’s hard to have faith in humanity’s essential goodness.

Yet, as the preceding pages amply demonstrate, Asia does not lack for people who have done good unto others. Sixty years ago, when TIME launched in Asia, the region was backward, ravaged by a just-ended war, still suffering from a colonial hangover, and confronting a vicious new threat: communism, symbolized — and spread — by the old new China. To face down these daunting challenges, a host of strongmen (and a few strongwomen) arose — leaders such as Park Chung Hee, Suharto and Indira Gandhi. They, along with other far-sighted rulers, seized their moments to fight for independence, root out insurgencies, create wealth and, in some — but unfortunately too rare — cases, even lay down the foundations of democracy. Their citizens put up with their often harsh methods, in part because the problems were simply too great and too urgent to quibble over tactics. Today, Asia is rightly admired throughout the world for a vibrancy that owes much to these singular individuals.

But I cannot regard many of them, as well as many of their successors, as, in the noblest sense of the word, heroes. Perhaps it was insufficient courage or the seduction of power or a dogmatic disdain for opposing views — whatever the reason, while they took care of the basics, they did not go the whole nine yards. Consequently, though a lot is right about today’s Asia, a lot is wrong too.

Kim Dae Jung, who is not among the pantheon of heroes featured in this issue, is a sad example of this unfinished business. The South Korean dissident survived exile, imprisonment, a kidnapping and several assassination attempts to become his country’s President in 1998. By any yardstick, that was a monumental achievement against the odds. But while the first half of Kim’s five-year term saw a flurry of political and economic reforms to make the country more open and democratic, by the time he left office, his government was marked by corruption, inertia and a bankrupt policy of engagement with North Korea that has helped to sustain and embolden Kim Jong Il’s rogue regime.

This failure, or at least incompletion, of leadership is today being replicated across much of Asia. From Taiwan to Thailand, Pakistan to the Philippines, people are mad that the officials they entrusted with the privilege of governance have not delivered on their pledges to clean up and reform their nations. Too many of Asia’s leaders do not seem to realize that their citizens are no longer content just with having enough to eat and spend. They want more: for their governments to be transparent and accountable, their legislatures to enact fair laws, their judiciaries to be impartial, their media to be independent, their societies to be caring. In short, people want their institutions strengthened, so they are not vulnerable to the idiosyncrasies of an inadequate system, and so they can boot out leaders who go from hero to zero.

It’s not just politics. Asia is still, in many ways, a sick continent. A quarter of those newly infected with HIV last year were from the region. More than 60% of the world’s undernourished are Asian. Over half the region’s people do not have proper sanitation, and about a fifth do not have access to potable water. The number of illiterate folk in South Asia has hardly budged in the past 15 years. Millions still live below the poverty line. Breakneck economic growth has come at a terrible cost to the environment: of the world’s 25 most polluted cities, 24 are in Asia.

To tackle these challenges, and to move to the next level of development and maturity, the region needs new kinds of heroes. For too long, Asia’s struggle has been against some enemy — colonialism, communism, poverty. Now it should be for some equally vital causes. In a world in which tribalism and ideology have resurfaced — Islam versus the West, uniformity versus diversity, globalization versus protectionism — we need men and women of moral and spiritual, rather than political or military, authority: individuals who fight for justice not power, who not only create wealth but ensure its equitable distribution, who respect heritage, who transcend nationalism and are accepting of other faiths and cultures.

These are the people to take Asia forward. These are the people who would make a hero worshipper even out of me.