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ASIAN DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES

DE FONSEKA

The Asian-ness of Development Strategy in Asia

There is little distinctive Asian characteristic or flavour in the Development strategies of Asian nations. The proof lies all about us — in the terminology, categories and concepts of accepted Western-oriented economic and political thinking, as well as in the factual evidence of intricate technology, high rise buildings, needless consumer goods, highly capitalized industrialization, urban congestion, prostituted tourism, and artificial life ways — all insignia of Western models of modernization.

What we still have in fact — in what passes for Asian Development Strategy — is Western Development Strategy in Asia.

Is this because Asian nations have little of indigenous value to con- 1¦ tribute? On the contrary, Asia is reputed to be unique among the Regions for the richness, depth and durability of its ancient cultural heritage. Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism Confucianism, Islam (and later in the Philippines Catholicism) have engendered a profusion of indigenous value systems that have centuries guided the life ways and change processes of Asian people. One would expect that their Development strategies at the present time would bear at least some significant marks of the "Asian Values"

Yet they do not. Two contrasting examples, drawn from the two largest countries and the two dominant cultures of the Region — the Indian and the Chinese — may provide some illumination.

In India after independence, Gandhi outlined his "Constructive Programme" — in itself a comprehensive 18 point indigenous Indian Development Strategy, based on a reinterpretation of Indian religious and political thought. The directive principles of this Programme underlined the values of "ahimsa" (non-violent action); "Sarvodaya" (the welfare of all) as contingent on "antyodaya" (the upliftment of the least and the lowest); "lok niti" (the politics of the people) as against "raj niti" (the politics of the Power State); and the principles of collective village ownership of Land, and of Trusteeship for the People, and the other means of production. On the day before he died, Gandhi also proposed that Congress be disbanded as a political party and reorganized as a People's Servants Association ("Lok Sevak Sangh"). In this proposal, Gandhi had even begun to envisage a new

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Partyless democratic system for India in place of the imminent acceptance of the Westminster model of multi-party Parliamentary Democracy, which is still the conventional political paradigm of Asia and the World.

An authentic Indian Asian development strategy was beginning to emerge which could meet and come to terms with the imminent forces of Western modernization. With Gandhi's death soon after, the prospect of an authentic Indian mode of development receded, and succumbed to the West. Despite his own immense moral prestige as Liberator and Father of the Nation, and the later efforts of Vinoba Bhave and Jay Prakash Narain to sustain his inspiration, India's Constitution, political system and ruling development strategy have taken shape increasingly in the Western mode, not merely of the First World but latterly of the Second World as well.

Least of all, can "Asian-ness" be justified by the argument that through democratic political systems the people of Asia participate in decisions on the nature and direction of their processes of change? Democratic government which, in some form or other, continues as the bequest of Western colonial rule to Asia, has never been representative of, still less synonymous with the will of the People. In the exercise of the latter, the citizen voter's participation is limited to no more than a periodical ritual rendezvous with a ballot box. In this limited exercise, the voter abdicates his political will to a proxy whom he cannot recall or control till the next elections. He is influenced before he, himself, can influence opinions, attitudes, and choice of leaders are conditioned and manipulated by party machines. Voter sovereignty in politics is as much a myth as consumer sovereignty in economics, and are but two sides of the same coin.

At the beginning of the present decade, the curtain was rung up on that erstwhile "pariah" nation, China. The spectacle has begun to cause disarray and discomfiture in the dove cots of conventional development wisdom'. There is now much agonizing between conflicting desires: the lust to exploit through trade and business what is potentially the richest new market in the world; and the wish to destroy an apocalyptic new model of change that threatens the claims of "rationality", universality, and inevitability of the hitherto accepted models of Western modernization.

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The Chinese revolution has demonstrated — through the experience of 800 million members of the human species — that Western prescriptions of change, based on 5 spurious freedoms — the "free nation", the "free vote", the "free market", "free enterprise" and "free trade" — are not the only, or the best, or the "natural" laws of development they are claimed do be. The development strategy evolved (and applied) in China is radically different from that of the First World (the Euro-American) and the Second World (the Russian). The success of China's strategy in terms of the uniformly high levels of the security, welfare, productivity, and participation of the great majority of its people, has been warmly attested to — almost with one voice — by all those who have visited China. China's example is an evidence and hope that authentic Asian development strategies are realizable only when they are rooted in national historical and cultural situations, and when they serve, involve and benefit the majority of a nation's people.

The Anti-Development in Asian Development Strategy.

In terms of people and the human condition, what has most conspicuously developed in the Asian Region in the last 25 years is antidevelopment. Asia is now the home of more than twice as many human beings (2 billion) as in 1950, when "Development" began. Seventy to eighty per cent of this number live in rural communities, based on 80 million individual agricultural holdings. 400 millions enjoy an income per head- of less than $50 per year — the World Bank's norm for the Line of Absolute Poverty.

100 million people are compelled to live as shifting cultivators, on slash and burn agriculture, which is for them the only means of bare survival but in the eyes of their governments a criminal offence (FAO Regional Office Statistics). One head of an Asian government is reported to have said "if you can't stop them, shoot them".

It is estimated that between 10 and 20 million people die every year from starvation or from hunger related causes. (Far Eastern Economic Review 1976). FAO reports that a much larger number suffer from serious malnutrition.

The problem for Asian governments has been compounded in recent years by the fact that Asian countries are not only losing the capacity to feed themselves but lack the resources to buy food from the rich countries which are now the main food exporters. Over 90% of the exportable grain in 1975 was from the U.S. and Canada. (From the Statement of Dr. D.L. Umali, Assistant Director — General of FAO for Asia and the Far East to the ESCAP Annual Session, March 1976.)

An ominous correlation of a different kind between food production and big business is beginning to emerge. Asia is producing less and less of the food it needs. It must, therefore, increasingly import its food requirements, but has not the foreign exchange to buy them. Multi-national agri-business is therefore finding it more profitable to produce food more cheaply in the poor countries, which lack the means to produce, for export to and consumption by rich countries which have the means to buy. This process has

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already begun with vegetables, bananas, and other fruits in the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia. A particularly tragic example and warning is the recent fate of the Sahel in Africa. The pressures to expand this trend into the staple foods of rice and wheat are already in evidence in the veiled threats of food aid as a political weapon. Asian governments that are content to be captives in the Free World web will be under national pressures to feed their people and under external pressures to allow others to do it for them. U.S. Government Food Aid could well be the new U.S. Marines that will impose on Asia the imperialism of multinational agribusiness.

Another distortion of "free" market development is the gross imbalance between the emphasis on agriculture and industry on which the World Bank's own figures are revealing. Between 1961 and 1974, the annual growth rate of agriculture (the "need" sector) in developing Asia (excluding Japan and the People's Republic of China) was 3.3%, while the annual rate of growth in manufacturing industry (the "greed" sector) was 9.5%. In other words, the sector that comprises 25% of the people and serves much less grew at 3 times the annual rate of the sector that comprises 75% of the people and has to serve all of them.

What Strategies have led to this Kind of Development.

To use the world, "strategy" is to imply conscious, free, and controlled direction by a leadership authentically responsive to the people. Even in the infancy of post-war "independence", all the new nations had both opportunity and capability to exercise such direction. China, Tanzania, and — in somewhat different contexts — Cuba and North Vietnam are fortunate in possessing leadership which has shown that such direction was possible. But, by and large, among the newly independent nations, what constituted the motor for direction was a combination of external and internal compulsions. Subtly disguised by the myths of external and internal power politics, these compulsions resulted in the complex of pseudo-strategies that emerged as prescriptions for "Development".

The Western model of modernization has been usually analysed and exposed in terms of the Marxist analysis of capitalist ideology. It would be at least equally useful to attempt this exposure in terms of its own self-proclaimed ideology: the ideology of the Free World.

The new nations of Asia (with the exception of China, Vietnam and now Laos and Cambodia) having become committed subscribers to Free World ideology, became entitled to the impressive battery of privileges of the Club of Free World nations. The most important of the privileges are widely advertised by Free World economists and political theorists as the Free Market, Free Trade, Free Enterprise, (Free!) Aid, and the Free Vote. Freedom, we are told by Free World philosophers, comprises both rights and obligations. So it is considered natural that the battery of Freedoms comprising Free World ideology should carry both attractive privileges, as well as "reasonable" conditions of membership. The strategies of change in Asia accept these "Freedoms" and their operating principles of Profit, Self-interest and Economic Growth as Axiomatic and beyond question. To dare

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"to question them is to begin to throw light on how they have conditioned circumscribed, and warped the processes of change in Asia.

The invasion of Economic Development. Economics is the patron "science" of Development. Armed with its quantitative yardsticks (the Gross National Product, the Per Capita Income), its theories of planning and resource allocation, supply and demand, savings and investment, trade and aid, Economics prescribed Economic Growth as the prime objective of Development. The Economics of Growth claims to have blueprinted and monitored the phenominally successful engine of Development in the West, based on the principles of the Free Market and Free Enterprise, lubricated by science and technology, fueled by investment and driven by profit. Custom built to suit the requirements of the Economics of Development was the Politics of Development and the overarching ideology of the Free World. In the post-war conditions of the new Asian nations, Economic Development, flanked by its political outriders, swept in to fill the vacuum left by the departure of colonialism.

Growth through Industrialization. Industrialization is regarded as the hallmark of Economic Development. When reference is made to the rich world, "Industrialized countries" is now the most favoured "value free" descriptive term.

Industrialization was the main focus in the Plans of most Asian countries (the first and second Indian Five Year Plans, the Sri Lanka Ten year Plan, the early Pakistan, Malaysian and Burmese Plans). Early expectations failed to materialize. The local base and markets for industrialization were too weak. Employment absorption capacity proved to be very much exaggerated. Lured by hopes for job opportunities, there was an increasing influx of rural labour into the cities. The much trumpeted "spread effects" of industrial growth over the rest of the economy were insignificant, while its "backwash effects" seriously damaged indigenous small-scale industry, employment and morale.

Growth with Community Development. Another early strategy of change was the drive for Community Development as an early form of Free World insurance. Predictably, this also had its theoretical articulation and material support from American sources (the Tennessee Valley Authority used to be cited as a model prototype). Most Asian nations adopted one variant or other of the Community Development approach. In the earlier phases, attention concentrated on Government provision of social and cultural amenities and "help for self-help". This had (and still has) particularly valuable and quick pay-off for politicians in the free vote, multiparty democratic systems of the new nations.

Growth through Agricultural Development. The spotlight began to shift more closely on Agriculture. Western trained economists, always at home with industry, and never at ease with agriculture, struck on the brilliant notion of industrializing Asian agriculture. The political and landowning elites who controlled Asia's democratic Governments needed little persuasion to see the value to them of foreign imports of high horsepower tractors, heavy earth-moving machinery, and other sophisticated agricultural capital goods. The obvious unsuitability of these for Asian small holdings

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and small farmers was ignored in the greater Free World interests of maximising agricultural production through the capital intensive methods that had proved so successful in the West. Added to this, the benign concern of America's two largest Foundations financed the intensive research in High Yielding Varieties of wheat and rice, that launched the Green Revolution in Asia.

For a brief period there were exultant fears of global over-production of goods. These were soon put to rest when it was realized that the new HYVs were prohibitively expensive for Asia's small farmers in fertilizer, pesticide and other inputs; that the main beneficiaries were the rich farmers and land owners who alone could afford these inputs; that the rural rich and the foreign agro-industrialists were getting richer and the rural poor even poorer; that the price of land was rising and the resistance to land reform hardening; that the Green Revolution could soon turn into the Red Revolution — the bogey of Free World ideology; and that Agricultural Development without the Asian small farmer was as empty of meaning as "Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark".

The IRRI (The International Rice Research Institute) in the Philippines is commonly credited with being the source of the Green Revolution. Dr. Robert Chandler was the Director of the Institute from 1960-1972. When he retired he wrote a "Case History on IRRI's Research Management Record". The confession he makes in one para of this Paper is an illuminating comment on the relevance of such research to the farmer:

"On retiring from IRRI in 1972, the only real disappointment I felt (other than a reluctance to leave such an exciting adventure) was that somehow we did not understand sufficiently why the Asian farmer who had adopted the new varieties was not doing better. Somehow I felt that the rice scientist who had obtained yields of 5 to 10 metric tons per hectare on the IRRI farm still could' not explain why so many Filipino farmers (for example) obtained, on the average, less than one metric ton per hectare increase in yield after shifting from the traditional to the high-yielding varieties. All of us were a bit mystified as to why no more than 25% of the rice land in the less-developed Asian countries was planted to the new varieties."

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Growth with Social Justice is the formulation now most in fashion, for the latest major strategy of Development. At the verbal levels of conferences, seminars, workshops, and political rhetoric, admission of the relative failure of the Green Revolution and the influence of Asian socialist models, notably China, led to widespread clamour for a strategy with a radical new emphasis on Human Development, Social Justice and more egalitarian approaches in Planning and Policy. These are non-economic upstarts whose introduction into the charmed circle of Growth Economics is viewed with barely concealed distrust. But licking the wounds sustained by their egregious strategic failures of the fifties and sixties, economists and technocrats had no option but to learn to live with the new "non-economic" factors, and the policies proposed.

These policies include social and income equality, more meaningful farmer organization, appropriate technology, "bottom up" in place of "top down" planning, decentralization of authority, Integrated Rural Development and People's Participation. All these accompanied a new focus on that bugbear of conventional economics — the Small Farmer.

This concentration and these new policies signalled official recognition for the first time of the social, institutional and political implications of Development.

How far is income redistribution compatible with Growth policies that tend to rely on industrialization? Would not farmer organization threaten large scale farming production; send up the price of food and, therefore, reduce the incentive profits of industry in the cities; stimulate unrest, instability and subversion of "democracy"?

The exponents of Social Justice believe that these questions imply assumptions that need to be discarded. But the edge is still with the economists and technocrats for they share and bolster the ideology of the politicians. And political power still rests with an elite whose vested interests 'sustained both within and from abroad) determine their practice no mater "low fervently they proclaim new precepts. Power like profit will extract what the market will bear. And although the political market is no longer as passive as before, the people still remain "consumers of politics". Not until they themselves become "producers of politics" or until leaders arise who authentically reflect the interests of the majority — not until then is it likely that Growth with Justice can move from rhetoric to reality.

The earliest regular use of the concept and word "Development" appears to have been in the U.S.A.'s relationship with the Latin American countries, beginning in the mid-19th century. Born of historical circumstances, very different from those that created European-Asian imperialism, this relationship did not in general involve direct foreign conquest and metropolitan rule. Instead it was strongly business oriented and only covertly political, as it was obliged to be, between ostensibly "free" and "mutually dependent" partners.

Following the emergence of the U.S.A. as the dominant World Power after 1945, three closely associated trends made their appearance in Asia:

1) The extension by the U.S.A. itself of its Latin American model

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to its new relationship with Asian countries;

2) The adoption of this same model by the erstwhile European colonial powers in the changed relationship they had to find with their newly decolonized nations; and

3) The collaboration by the newly "free" countries themselves (more precisely by the elite and political leadership in these countries) with these two trends.

"Development" was (and still is) the expected outcome of trends 1 and 3 in the Latin American countries. In the post-war period, it is the promised outcome of trends 1, 2 and 3 in the Asian countries (as in other Third World countries) — with the considerably added subtlety, reinforcement, and assurance of a battery of new multilateral institutions — International Aid, the World Bank and IMF, the Regional Banks and the whole United Nations System.

In dominating the processes of change in Asia since the end of World War II, Free World ideology has made use of five principal instruments: 1) the manipulation of national political forces, 2) the inculcation of national neo-classical economic policies based on profit motivation, free market orientation and "free" enterprise, 3) trade, 4) aid, and 5) the Multi National Corporations. The first two cover the range of internal compulsions that have conditioned the nature and direction of development within Asian countries. The other three comprise the external compulsions of the conditioning process of Asian development. Some significant aspects of these are outlined below:

1) Trade. Beginning in the early fifties but with greater acceleration from 1960, "Free" Trade dependence of Asian nations on both Japan and U.S.A. increased sharply. By 1970, these two countries took in the bulk of the exports of South Korea (70%), the Philippines (79%), Taiwan (55%), and in return dominated the imports of South Korea (68%), Philippines (57%), Thailand (51%), Taiwan (69%). Asian economies are chained to U.S. and Japan by this dependency. This is further reinforced by the heavy and extremely profitable investment of these two countries in Asia. It needs to be observed that Third World countries that play the game of their masters will not necessarily benefit their people in the concessions they seek. It is still a competition between the First World in the Third World, and the First World. A distinction needs to be made between the First World elite in Third World countries and the Third World people in the Third World countries. The latter tend to remain unaffected and unrelieved by the chauvinistic horse-trading of the former with their partners of the First World.

2) Aid. The pretensions of "Aid" have been exposed in recent years for what it is, minus cosmetic and rhetoric — viz a means to backstop the trade and investment policies of the Free World. It is not without significance that of the $33 billion of the World Bank's lending since its institution, aid to agriculture amounts to 5 billion, while aid to Rural Development (to help the destitute 40% of the world) began only in 1968 and amounts to barely 1 billion.

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Experiments of great heroism and ingenuity continue — to make Poverty bankable. Since Aid has almost invariably to be repaid (with interest), and since debt breeds debt, the debts of the aided are a great source of profit to the aiders. By 1975, Third World debts exceeded $80 billion; and 75% of all new loans are used to meet payments due on old loans. Seven Asian nations (Indonesia, Malaysia the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, and Taiwan) saw their foreign debts rise from $2.1 billion in 1961 to $11.2 billion in 1971, while their annual service payments tripled to $731 million. The distinction made earlier between Third World people and Third World countries is applicable to Aid as well: the market for First World Aid is the First World in the Third World. Third World people in the Third World countries share only minimally in either the demand or the benefits.

3) The Multi-National Corporations. These constitute the latest and most ominous phenomenon of Development. Multi-National Corporations or "global enterprises are giant capitalist firms whose business horizons and mode of operation are truly international". Among the 211 global enterprises whose sales exceeded $1 billion in 1971, 127 were American, 18 West German, 16 Japanese, 15 British and 13 French. Between 1959 and 1973, US investment in East Asia increased by 600% to a figure of $6.6 billion.

In 1970, MNC investment in Asia was $200 million of which $2,400 million were repatriated as profits. Asia proving by far, more lucrative than the other two developing regions (Africa and Latin America) where also the MNCs are busily engaged.

More statistics of this kind can be quoted to build up a truly horrific picture. Far more ominous are the expanding scope and trends of global enterprise. Beginning with the mining and plantation industries, they added oil, banking and manufactured goods (capital and consumer). The tentacles have spread to agri-business. With rising costs and diminishing returns in food production in the rich countries, the final stage could well be cereal agriculture and animal husbandry in the great hinterlands now crowded by the masses of Asian poor. In the Philippines and elsewhere, fruit and vegetable agriculture has already succumbed. So long as the precepts of Free World ideology (the free Market, Free Enterprise, Free trade and Profit) remain sacred and unquestioned, the temptation always exists for the leaders of poor Asian countries to surrender the lands and bodies of their people to the great corporations in the interests of industrialized agriculture and high productivity. This could be the final confrontation — between the Multi-National Corporations and the People.

It is significant that the Asian Development Bank in a recent study, "South East Asia in the Seventies," has called on South-East Asian nations to abandon illusions of economic independence and to entrust their future for development to global enterprise and the international economy. There can be no more eloquent testimony than this document of the un-Asianness, the anti-developmentalism and the mal-strategy of "Asian Development Strategy".

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The China Model

The modem doomsayer has the great advantage of an alternative that he can now point to in a New Order taking physical shape before our eyes, in China, a developing country that is the most populous in the World. It has begun to teach us new lessons and new answers to old problems. Some countries have applied these lessons to their problems. The issue before us is how open we are to learn the new lessons and new answers, and how ready we are to apply them.

The single most fundamental characteristic of China is the deliberate, consistent and pervading bias it has built into its socio-political system in the interests of the peasantry and the land. The peasantry constitute 80% of the country's vast population (a population in one country that 200 years ago was the total population of the globe).

The peasant in this New Order is the foundation, the starting point — the point of reference, the criterion, the objective — of all thinking and action. Nowhere in the world has the poor peasant been accorded this overwhelming priority, recognition and concern, in state policy and action. In other words, the nature and design of the whole political system and every major aspect of economic and social policy can be tracted to a purposive orientation in service and support of the peasant and the man/land relationship.

Decentralization and Devolution of Power to the People.

The complex of rural organizations, comprising the People's commune, the Production Brigade, and the Production Team, constitute a uniquely successful mode of Decentralized and Integrated Rural Development. At these levels the people themselves organize their economic activities, and administer their own affairs on behalf of and under delegation by the State. Commune, brigade, and team officials are elected by the people at each level and their accountability is downward and directly to the people. Connection is maintained within the complex, and with the State by a felxible network of horizontal and vertical linkages.

The Production Team consisting of 15-50 households is the lowest level of decentralized rural production and management. It is significant that the most populous country in the world bases its administration and productivity processes on the smallest organizational unit in the world. The Production Team is the basic unit for economic planning organization, welfare and income distribution based on a collectively agreed system of workpoints (now universally used in rural China) designed to relate income to work.

The Economic System.

Another essential feature in the Chinese system is the consistency and comprehensiveness of the methods used by the State to control the market in the interests of the peasant.

Prices are therefore strictly controlled. Guaranteed prices for products

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are offered directly by the State through the decentralized rural machinery, each unit of the latter being assigned a production quota arrived at in agreement with the Production Unit.

The State tax appropriation from each production unit is a fixed quantity (not a percentage) of total production. Increased production therefore results in greater income to the collective unit. Calculated percentage wise, the agricultural tax is constantly diminishing. In the most productive units such as the Tachai Brigade the agricultural tax now works out at between 1% and 2%.

The terms of trade as between agriculture and industry (the agro-industrial farm units and basic farm consumer goods) have been made to improve progressively in favour of agriculture.

Social Transformation

Fundamentally, it is to the transformation of values and life ways that Maoism gives highest priority, and continuing attention. What are the characteristics of this transformation?

1) The highest degree of "political consciousness". This term outside China has connotations which inhibit our understanding of the Chinese meaning: Connotations relating to the participation in voting, elections, the multi-party system and the Western parliamentary process. For the Chinese it is at once simpler, more basic, and more profound. It connotes rather having a sense of the "polis" — the Greek word for the city, state, or community — as against a sense of oneself and one's own exclusive interest. Thus, to be politically conscious is to realize that authentic self-interest lies in commitment to, and work for the community. To put "Politics in Command" and "to fight self (two basic Maoist exhortations) are synonymous.

2) The non- material moral incentives for collective work, mutual aid and self-reliance which derive their motive power from the Party's massive and ubiquitous educational and informational campaigns using such models of excellence as Tachai and the Red Flag Canal, and individuals like Chen Yong Kuei, the Party Secretary at Tachai now (in 1975) elected a Vice-Premier.

3) Effective organization and management through Revolutionary Committees comprising political cadres, technicians, and peasant representatives, with linkages both horizontal and vertical to provide maximum solidarity, security and guidance for farmers. The Revolutionary Committees now function alongside the Party cadres and are intended to be People's Administrative Units.

4) Continuous processes of "democratic consultation" and democratic centralism in pursuance of the Maoist principle "from the masses to the masses", to such a point that in China more than anywhere there is an identity of interests between the political leadership and the majority of people (the rural peasantry).

Evidence that this is not merely a New Economic Order but a good one was amply provided as. much by what we did not see in China as by

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what we did see. We saw no signs of the economic crisis that is endemic in nearly every other part of the world. We saw no inflation, no shortages (except of the inessentials), no high prices. We saw no beggary, poverty, misery, starvation, mal-nutrition.

Basic to the New Economic Order is a New Political Order which somehow blends Centralized Power and the most enlightened standards of individual and social ethics, the content, pace and tone of which are set by the people's leaders. It strikes one with great force that Chinese democracy is a process in which the basic human needs of the majority are directly elicited, expressed, and satisfied, largely by themselves, with the guidance of a leadership that reflects the interests of this majority and aims to act as a "processing plant" for these expressed interests. Conventional Parliamentary Party democracy by comparison is a process by which the opinions of the majority are manipulated and expressed through the ballot to serve the greeds of an elite minority.

The relevance and replicability of the Chinese experience. How much of the Chinese example and experience is relevant to other developing countries? How far are Chinese practices and policies .replicable or transferable?

The usual reaction to such questions is negative, fearful, or even hostile. With many, the blinkers, prejudices, and vested interests are too strong, and the whole problem clouded by the ominous connotations of "Communism" and "Revolution", "only in a totalitarism system is all this possible" . .. "They violate the principles of democracy, freedom and free enterprise." "Chinese policies are integral to their system and we cannot import the policies without importing at the same time the whole system, and the latter is unthinkable ..."

This is confused and hysterical thinking, but the impracticability it asserts is true, if the problem is seen as an "en bloc" reproduction of Chinese modes.

If, on the other hand, we seek the underlying principle behind the Chinese experiment, certain possibilities begin to emerge. This principle has already been defined as the application of a consistent and comprehensive bias in the interests of peasants (the majority of the people), through the whole fabric of a nation's political economy.

Many governments in the developing countries have already applied such a bias in the form of subsidies, guaranteed prices, land reform legislation (and even implementation), land colonization schemes, market and price intervention, etc. The defect with all of these is that they are piecemeal or cosmetic measures which, offered with one hand, are withdrawn, eroded or nullified by the other in contradictory policies; or lack the necessary reinforcement or safeguards needed from other areas of the socio-economy system.

Some of the ways in which such action is possible are:

1) To move steadily towards a more comprehensive planning mechanism to replace the current system under which the allocation of resources and distribution of incomes is mainly determined by market forces

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and the profit principle.

2) To emphasize those forms of industrialization that have direct links with agriculture and can service agriculture.

3) To make allocation of quotas for raw materials, spare parts, etc. now needed by industry dependent on the degree to which an industry can support agricultural growth through positive urban/rural linkages. In other words, make industry in the developing countries earn its social keep but first helping to strengthen agriculture.

4) To work towards higher rates of saving and capital formation in rural areas through the motivation of farmers in self-reliant, collective work in their own communities.

5) Stimulating socialist values and authentic political consciousness and downgrading individualist values and partisan pseudo-politics.

6) Finding new methods and policies for decentralized decision making and work motivation of people, in consonance with their own cultural and traditional backgrounds. The importance of collective rather than individual incentives has been outstandingly demonstrated by China.

7) Finally, one of the most critical areas, finding, training and using dedicated field cadres or "change agents" (the counterpart of the Chinese political cadres) who can work with, organize, and catalyse the motivation and productive capacity of Asian peasants. One thinks of the voluntary agencies but especially of the potential being expressed now by the Catholic priests of the Philippines, and lying latent still in the Buddhist priests of Sri Lanka and Thailand.

The cynical comment is — will the Political Will of Governments be there to achieve all this? One answer is that the Political Will is constantly — but barely perceptibly — being moulded by the people; and can be moulded and pressured more substantially again in the last resort, only by the people. And who is to mould the people? Some part at least of the answer to that lies with some of you in the extra-governmental sector.

Conclusion: The Role of the Extra Governmental Sector

In Asia, the strongest and most organized elements of the Extra Governmental Sector are the Christian Voluntary Agencies. Yet, except in the Philippines, the great majority of the rural people whose "conscientization", participation and organization are essential to build up the pressures that change policies, belong to non-Christian traditions: the Buddhist, the Hindu and the Moslem, whose extra-governmental leadership is still weak, unorganized, short of resources, and relatively unoriented in the problems and tasks of development. They are beginning to awaken (as in Sri Lanka) to the role that, sooner or later, they must assume. The challenge that faces the strong but small Christian voluntary agencies is whether and how well they can learn to work with the leadership of non-Christian people, in a genuine multi-cultural partnership in which need claims priority over creed.

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SEMINAR GROUP

Development should be viewed wholistically — in all its dimensions: economic, political, social and cultural. The subject of development is people, all human beings, and the whole man — physical, material and spiritual. The process of Development is political: to make and keep human life human, and therefore, to create the ethos for fulfillment of man. Any definition of development should include an infra-structure of power, as equal as possible, making for a balance of participation by people, distribution of goods and a machinery to achieve it. Such an infra-structure will presume the promotion of suitable knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to enable the making of the right choices and to setting of the right priorities, for the largest common good.

Strategies:

Self-reliance as a long-term goal and strategy for Development was emphasised. Theories and strategies should be evolved through involvement with people, and engagement in actual struggles for justice. Models for development should be built from indigenous historical-cultural traditions and the inherent genius of the people (as for e.g. in China and Vietnam). Intellectual and cultural subservience to western ideas and ideals should be ended. A cultural revolution to promote ethics of hard work, social concern, community endeavour, national prestige and self-sufficiency should be initiated.

Land and labour are the primary assets of most Asian nations. These must be fully explored and capitalised. Investments should be redirected towards agro-industries (rural-based) and food production, including research on yield and resistance of food-crops. Labour-intensive technology and rural development should become priorities of development (considering that the major populations — 60%-80% — live in the villages). Land reforms and co-operatives should be encouraged.

Planning and implementation of development programmes should be decentralised.

An education for Development: to create awareness, equip people with adequate tools of analyses, and to promote attitudes, beliefs and values conducive for development should be actively promoted.

Engagement in people's organisation/mobilisation towards deciding priorities and acting for their own development should be encouraged.

Christian Role:

The specific Christian role in development should be to raise ultimate questions: of life, human nature and community, and to engage in ongoing dialogue with secular ideologies and other religious faiths towards evolving common ethical conduct and behaviour. Also, to evaluate the processes of development in the light of God's purposes and promises for the world and

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mankind, and his actions in history — thus, to resist and discourage absolutisation of ideology or the human personality.

Fuller humanity has to be measured in terms of the stature and manhood of Jesus Christ, the new man and the author of the new creation.

The prophetic task of the Christians calls them to a deeper fellowship with God and neighbour, and to do the work of righteousness (right relations) or reconciliation by the alienated communities, both at the political and ecclesiastical levels.

The Church as the kiononia, is a fellowship of maturity, in love. In her own life, then the Church should exemplify this life of maturity or new humanity, i.e. "the integrity through inter-relatedness which makes it possible for each individual member to be himself/herself in togetherness and for the organic whole to become a socialised unit of all human conduct and aspirations.