ABSTRACT
The economics of the Asian Crisis may be fading into history, but the same cannot be said of its politics. Post-Crash Asia finds itself at a fateful crossroads between liberal and authoritarian development. Unfortunately it all comes down to cash value, and the most dynamic Asian economy, on paper at least, has been the P.R.C. China’s record of recent years seems to prove what James Fallows was arguing back in the mid-1990s: that political repression can be a boon to economic growth. Nor is China the only Asian proving ground for this verdict. The case of post-Crash Thailand is even more compelling in that here a democratic development model was actually put to the test. This chapter will explore the reasons why Thailand so definitively flunked that test.
