 You are clear for launch. And with that, shut down your visors, O2 on, and prepare for ignition to O2. You can copy that and um... Alright, Mr. Roush off here. So, so far in this unit, what we've done is we've looked at the physical characteristics of Southeast Asia and the factors that have combined to be able to shape its culture. In this lesson, what we're going to do is we're going to look at Southeast Asia today and some of the issues that it faces. Now, first of all, let's look at the governments of the region. Of the 10 Southeast Asian countries we've looked at, seven, at least on paper, have democratic forms of government. Myanmar, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines are all republics, and Myanmar, Singapore are a parliamentary type of democratic government. Now, constitutional monarchies are found in Cambodia, Thailand, and Malaysia, but what we find in Brunei is an absolute monarchy, and both Laos and Vietnam have totalitarian governments. So, if we look at the rates of freedom in each country, then we would expect that Brunei, Laos, and Vietnam would be at the bottom, right? And that's exactly what we find when we look at the economic, political, and the civil freedoms of each country. But what is interesting is that when we look at Myanmar and Cambodia, who have democratic forms of government, they have just as bad scores of freedom, if not worse than our non-democratic countries. So, what's the issue? Well, the issue is that politics in Southeast Asia is complicated. For example, Cambodia's government has actually been described as a vaguely free market state with a relatively authoritative coalition ruling over a superficial democracy. Now, that certainly sounds complicated to me. Cambodia has struggled even before the Khmer Rouge came to power in the 1970s. The ruling party in Cambodia's parliament and its prime minister, Hussain, have now been in power for the last 30 years, and there's a reason for that. We just have to look at the 2018 elections, which pretty much no one would say is the democratic process. First of all, who sends party basically started to attack the opposition? They then incarcerated the main opposing candidate, and then they outlawed the opposing party altogether nine months before the election. Not surprisingly, who sent one re-election with 80% of the vote? You gotta kind of wonder who the 20% was voting for. Now, in Myanmar's situation is not much better. In 1962, the country was seized by a military dictatorship. In 2018, a pro-democracy movement led by Aung San Suu Kyi was crushed when she was put on her house arrest for 15 years. Now, interesting, the next year, the military government actually changed the name from Burma to Myanmar. Today, while most of the countries of the world, including the UN, recognize the country as Myanmar, the official policy of the United States government is to call the government Burma. In 2015, there were new elections, which most people thought were fair and free, that actually rejected somewhat military rule. Things should have gotten better, but not quite. See, the military still gets to be able to select 25% of the members of parliament. In Aung San Suu Kyi, who actually won election as the state counselor, which is kind of like their prime minister, has pretty much allowed the military to call the shots in the country. In fact, in 2017, she sat back as Buddhists in the country began ethnic cleansing the Muslims. In Thailand, its government, although often caught in corruption charges, operated as a true constitutional monarchy until 2014, when its military took over the country. While none of the other Southeast Asian countries in Asia really do all that well in political and civil liberties, Singapore and Malaysia actually have a relatively high level of economic freedom. In fact, Singapore actually enjoys a higher level of economic freedom than we actually have in the United States. So, what does this all mean for the people of Southeast Asia? Well, first of all, let's look at the population demographics, and we see an interesting divide. Countries such as Totalitarian Laos has both the highest growth and infertility rates, clearly signaling that it is a developing country. And we see that when we look at the population pyramid of Laos. Now, if we look at the population pyramid of Cambodia, it also not only shows it to be a developing country, but it tells another story. We can actually see the effect of Pol Pot's reign of terror in three different ways. First of all, we see a reduction of the adult population during Pol Pot's reign. Second, we see a corresponding reduction in the number of children born during the time of the killing fields. And then third, we see the baby boom that resulted after Pol Pot was finally stopped. While many countries in Southeast Asia have a high population growth rate, we see Singapore, while still growing, has a very low fertility rate just 1.2. Now, Singapore's population pyramid tells us its future. The population today continues to grow due to the population bulge that we see between the ages of 25 and 40. However, with such low birth rates in just 20 years, Singapore will have a shrinking population as the majority of its population will be above 45 years old and outside the reproduction window for most people. Now, other demographics give us a picture of life in Southeast Asia. Our poorest countries not only struggle with poor education and poor sanitation, but they also have the lowest life expectancy. However, life in Singapore isn't bad at all. In fact, it actually has a higher life expectancy and better access to clean drinking water than we actually have in the United States. In fact, if we look at the Human Development Index, we see that Singapore's HDI is actually higher than the United States. We can also see that HDI in the other Southeast Asian countries, while it has improved, most are still in the developing or just industrializing. Now, economic systems of each country plays a major part in the development level of each of these countries. Agriculture is a major part of the economies in Southeast Asia. For example, nearly half of Cambodia's GDP is based upon either farming or fishing. Now, much of this farming is subsistence farming, which feeds into a traditional economy. This means that a large percentage of the population is dependent upon the summer monsoons that bring water to be able to support their crops, such as rice. But one of the reasons that Laos is so low in every developmental category we discussed is that it is one of the few remaining communist countries. Now, remember, communism is an economic system where the government makes all the economic decisions for the country, but Laos is not the only communist country in Southeast Asia. The result of the Vietnam War left all of Vietnam being a communist country. But this is changing. While the Communist Party is still the authoritarian body in Vietnam's totalitarian government, since 1986, we have seen Vietnam move from truly being a communist country economically to being a free market. So changing has this been Vietnam that today, 95% of the people in Vietnam believe capitalism is a good thing, and that's actually a higher percentage than we find in the United States. And for Vietnam, it has been a good thing. Since moving to capitalism, it has reduced its poverty rate from over 50% to around 7%. Now, this is not bad for a country that was created from a war against capitalism. Now, in Southeast Asia, we find that recent industrialization along with this important geographic location makes it a perfect example of globalization. And what is globalization? Well, there's lots of different definitions for it, but my best way to be able to define what globalization is is that it is the cultural convergence on a worldwide scale. It truly is the growing interaction and interconnection of the world due to the movement of products, technology, information, jobs, resources, and ultimately culture. Globalization is often described as a modern development, but we've seen examples of globalization throughout history. The Silk Roads trade connected China all the way to Europe and everywhere in between. The Roman Empire spread its culture throughout Europe and Mediterranean through both conquest and trade. And the Columbian exchange that started after Columbus sailed the ocean blue is described as the largest exchange of good people and ideas that the world has ever seen. And even the transcontinental railroad became a pull factor for both Chinese and Irish workers that come to America seeking for jobs. But today's globalization is not driven by conquests or sailing ships, but by much more recent technologies that has made globalization today truly global. First of all, the telephone has been a major contributor to our globalization. Nearly anyone in the world today can talk to anyone else nearly instantaneously, but technology just doesn't allow us to talk to people around the world. With the airplane, you can easily travel there. Philias Fogg's Around the World was measured in 80 days, but the same journey today with the airplane is measured in hours. In fact, about 45 hours. Then there's the internet. No other technology in the world has allowed for the nearly instantaneous exchange of ideas, customs, and even commerce around the world and the internet. Now these technologies have changed how business has conducted and has driven the expansion of global banking. Today financial institutions around the world really facilitate trade between all these different countries. In fact, the economies of the countries around the world have become so interconnected that the economy of one country, especially if it is China or the United States, it will impact the entire global economy. Now with global banking and these technologies, we have seen the growth of multinational corporations. No longer is a company just an American or a German company. For example, McDonald's employs over a million people in 100 different countries around the world. The German company, Daimler, who makes Mercedes, has production plants in 16 different countries in the world to include two factories in Indonesia. But the contributor to globalization that really involves Southeast Asia is the container ship. Today 70% of all consumer products have been shipped sometime by one of these ships. Now before container shipping was invented in 1956, goods actually had to be loaded onto ships individually. This was slow and expensive. Container ships changed all of this. Now what happens is a company will first pack its goods into a 20 by 40 foot container and then that container is what is put onto these ships. By the way, these containers are the same type of containers we see semi trucks pulling around on our roads. Now the impact on global shipping was enormous. While ports used to load just over a ton every hour, now at the same port can be able to load 10,000 tons of cargo in the same hour. This slash loading cost from nearly $6 a ton to just $0.16. Let me put this another way. The cost for Apple to ship its iPhones to the United States only adds just $0.07 to the price of your iPhone. Now what does this have to do with Southeast Asia? Well look at this visualization produced by Kilm. Each yellow dot is a container ship on its journey in 2012. Here you can see that all the ships that are moving between Europe and East Asia must pass through the Strait of Malacca. And as we zoom in, we see that all these ships seem to stop in Singapore. But Singapore has less than 6 million people. Why is Singapore so important? Well together with Indonesia and Malaysia, these countries serve kind of like a Walmart distribution center to the world. Here's what happens. When you go to buy a notebook at Walmart, the notebook company hasn't shipped out notebooks straight to your local Walmart store. Instead, the notebook company ships the notebooks for many different Walmart stores to one distribution center. At the distribution center, it takes all the products a Walmart store needs to include your notebook and then ships them on a separate truck to your store. This streamlines the shipping process and makes it more efficient. Well this is what the ports in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia do. Ships, for example, from China bring all their products. They drop those containers in Singapore and then other ships come and then pick up all the containers that are going to go to their country. Certainly this provides a great deal of revenue to the countries that are along the Strait of Malacca. But Singapore also caches in because it has built the world's fourth largest financial center. With so much international trade flowing through its ports, banks and insurance companies in Singapore provide the financial services to all this trade. But globalization has also created outsourcing. Remember, outsourcing is when a company moves its jobs over to another country due to its cheaper labor costs. Well, Southeast Asia is a major region where American companies outsource their work. For example, Nike was founded on the very idea of having all of its production done outside the United States. Today, 85 factories in Southeast Asia employing over 300,000 employees makes Nike shoes an apparel. Now, in addition to allegations of sweatshop at conditions or low wages, outsourcing of jobs along with rising industrialization provides Southeast Asia with several other unintended consequences. First of all, factors are normally in cities, so that's where the jobs are. This has actually led to a lot of urbanization into the region cities. In fact, by 2030, the urban population in Southeast Asia has nested in the growth by 100 million people. The problem is the cities are already stretched to be able to provide services to its citizens and this is only going to get worse. The international market for palm oil and other agricultural crops is driving deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia. Malaysia has lost 8,500 square miles of forest since 2001. That's bad, but Indonesia loses nearly that much of forest every year. Now, this not only destroys the habitat for animals, for example, the orangutan that only lives in Southeast Asia, but deforestation produces what is known as the Southeast Asian haze. The smoke from slash and burn agriculture produced palm oil blankets most of Southeast Asia every year between July and October and the smoke is clearly seen on the satellite images from sat nasa. Now, their pollution contributes to the death of a quarter million Indonesians each year, but that's not all. Over 3 million tons of plastic from Indonesia's waste finds its ways into the nearby seas. This threatens sea life, which is ironic because so much of the economy of Southeast Asia is dependent upon agriculture and fishing. Now, one of the major areas for fishing in the region is the South China Sea. However, five countries to include China actually have territorial claims to horse into the South China Sea. Not only has this led to conflict, this China has continued to expand into the sea, but with so many different countries fishing in the South China Sea, single enforcement of fishing quotas is almost impossible. Therefore, overfishing in the South China Sea is a problem as it is throughout the world. It is estimated that nearly 90% of the fish stocks in the world are either overfished or at their limit. This jeopardizes a major part of Southeast Asia's economy. Alright, so this completes our unit in Southeast Asia. You now should have a good idea on the region's physical characteristics, the factors that form this culture, and now the issues that they're dealing with every day. So until our next lesson, keep on learning.