Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [311]
East Asia and Australia
British policy ‘East of Suez’ still matters. Indeed, there is a strong argument that it will matter more and more. East Asia contains some of the fastest growing economies in the world. The newly industrialized countries of the Asian Pacific region, like South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia and Singapore — which, together with Hong Kong, make up the five ‘little tigers’ — have to be fully integrated into a global free-trading economy if our industries are to compete effectively. They will increasingly provide us not just with competition but markets. They would all welcome more European — particularly British — contact as a counterweight to the other dominant influences in the region — the United States, China and Japan. In the longer term it is still unclear if and when countries like (an eventually reunited) Korea and Indonesia (with the world’s fourth largest population — and the largest Muslim country) will develop wider political ambitions.
Britain has a traditional presence in the region. Australia should also now be considered at least as much a power in its own right as a partner in the Anglo-Saxon world. Individually and through the Commonwealth, Britain and Australia have an interest in nudging political development in the direction of democracy. So for all these reasons I was keen to visit the region so as to exert influence and drum up business for British companies.
I had had to postpone my visit to South-East Asia because of the miners’ strike. This put out some of the initial arrangements. So when I eventually departed on the morning of Thursday 4 April 1985 it was with a schedule originally devised for a fortnight but telescoped into ten days.
The first leg of the tour was Malaysia. We ought to have had better relations with Malaysia than we actually did. This was in part because the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr Mahathir, felt that in the past we had not treated his country with sufficient respect as an independent nation. It may not have been just chance that Britain always seemed to be at the bottom of the list when bids for contracts in Malaysia were considered. In fact, I got on rather well with Dr Mahathir and developed an increasing respect for him. He was tough, shrewd and practical. He had a refreshingly matter-of-fact outlook on everything that related to his country. Several years later, when, almost overnight, environmental issues had become all the rage in international gatherings, he put down some of the more extreme conservationists by saying that he was not prepared to keep tribesmen in his country living under conditions which promised a life expectancy of about forty-five simply in order to allow them to be studied by academics.
When I left Malaysia I felt that Dr Mahathir and I had established a good understanding, and so indeed it proved. When I first arrived he had been highly critical of the Commonwealth, seeing it as a kind of post-colonial institution. But I persuaded him to come to the next CHOGM. I had made a convert. Indeed in 1989, he himself hosted the CHOGM in Kuala Lumpur. It turned out to be the best organized I ever attended. Slightly less diplomatically beneficial were my talks with the very cultured, sophisticated earlier Prime Minister of Malaysia, Tunku Abdul Rahman. We found ourselves, as so often seemed the case in Commonwealth countries, discussing South Africa. I remarked that it would have been better if we had kept South Africa inside the Commonwealth, where we could have influenced her more effectively. Tunku Abdul Rahman looked surprisingly displeased. I soon learnt why. He told me that he had