PACIFIC PULSE

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Indogate --
The Latest "Peril" From Asia

By Nick Cullather

Date: 10-31-96

Pundits, reporters and politicians agree that Asian money, channeled through an American subsidiary or collected in a Los Angeles temple, injects a virulent, insidious influence into presidential politics because it is Asian. While commentators disagree on the details, the plot has remained unchanged since Sax Rohmer penned his novel about Dr. Fu Manchu a century ago. PNS commentator Nick Cullather, a professor of history at Indiana University, is an expert on U.S.-East Asian relations and author of "Illusions of Influence".

Asian campaign contributions, says William Safire, are an "evil never visited on us before." Newt Gingrich labels them "an abuse of the American system," and the Washington Post says influence-buying is "standard procedure in Asia."

Have campaign contributions succeeded opium, smallpox and transistor radios as the latest Oriental threat to the American way of life? Yes, according to pundits, reporters and politicians commenting on the Riady affair. Since the Los Angeles Times broke the story that Mochtar Riady and his Indonesian conglomerate funneled over $400,000 to the Democratic National Committee, reports on the incident have carried the clear message that Asian donors are after a kind of influence different from that sought by their American counterparts.

Guanxi, the Chinese word for connections, is thwarting spellcheckers in newsrooms across the country. It describes "the central element in business success" for Asian moguls, an "insidious networking" between political strongmen and their business cronies. Riady and Steven Spielberg are both University of Southern California trustees, and both are major contributors to the Democratic National Committee. But only Riady is after guanxi.

Observers are divided over whether guanxi means straightforward bribery or a subtle scheme to undermine American political integrity. Gingrich and commentators in the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times see Riady's aims as decidedly scrutible. The multibillionaire owner of the Jakarta-based Lippo Group wants Clinton to overlook Indonesia's human rights abuses, particularly in East Timor, and to sell F-16s to the Suharto government. Riady's motives are narrowly nationalistic, befitting a crony of Indonesia's powerful ruling family. Stories in the Times stress his patriotism and close ties to President Suharto. But the Washington Post and the New York Times describe a more cosmopolitan financier, a member of a persecuted minority whose American connections were part of a trans-Pacific web of influence.

These newspapers present the Riady clan as an exemplar of the Pacific Rim's overclass, an ethnically Chinese family with interests in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, California and Arkansas. "Their network includes the highest and most senior people in the Asia region," one broker told the New York Times. But to reach these heights, the Riady family first had to survive Indonesia's fierce repression. After a wave of anti-Chinese pogroms in 1965, Lie Mo Tie and his son, Lie Zen, took the names Mochtar and James Riady. James was educated in Australia and sent to "forge American ties" by managing a bank in Little Rock. Connections to the Clintons compensated for the family's precarious status at home. The Riadys "were never as well connected as other ethnic-Chinese firms to Indonesia's powerful Suharto family," according to the Post. Nor would James Riady "have been instrumental-- or indeed interested" in stopping criticism of Indonesia's human rights abuses.

According to Times columnist William Safire, these socially-challenged globetrotting Riadys pose an even more sinister threat to the American way of politics. With their trans-Pacific banking interests and ties to China, they represent the opposing side in the "ideo-economic struggle going on in today's world" between self-reliant, American entrepreneurs and state-connected Asian megafirms. No room for Archer Daniels Midland in this picture. Safire slides easily from Indonesian money to tyranny in Singapore, money laundering Buddhists in Los Angeles, and bribery in China. All the symptoms of the Pacific Rim flu carried by the Riadys. "Clinton and Gore are importing an infection into the American political system," he writes. This is the dark side of guanxi.

Like Whitewater, the credibility of the Asian money scandal depends heavily on the setting in which it is placed. The bungling McDougals were unlikely villains until Troopergate and Gennifer Flowers turned Arkansas into a cross between All the King's Men and the Dukes of Hazzard. The same process is underway with Riady-gate, only this time the gaffers and key grips have not yet decided which makes the better backdrop: the tinpot dictatorship or the boardroom of Pacific Century Ltd.

In this game details are important, and fought over. Depending on who you read, Riady spent the late 1940s in school in China or fighting Indonesia's war of independence. His first business was either a bicycle shop or a bank. Arief Wiriadinata, the conduit for the money, is either a "gardener with a green card" or a landscape architect with a masters from Penn.

But the contradictions are unimportant because the story is so familiar. It dates back to the turn of the century, when Sax Rohmer saw a "tall, elegantly dressed Chinaman" stepping from a limousine in London's Limehouse district. Rohmer wrote a novel about Limehouse and its evil overlord, Dr. Fu Manchu.

The peril from Asia has a hundred variations but only one plot.