The unrepentant lefty in me glowed with shadenfreude at the cover of this week's edition of The Economist.

My cheap thrills aside, it made me think that I've always enjoyed editorial cartoons; especially political cartoons. When I was at university in Santa Cruz, lo, these many decades ago, I used to pick up the Santa Cruz Comic News every week. In my beer-addled state, news in pictures was often about all I can digest.

One of the things that I missed when I came to Asia was political cartooning. The Straits Times, Singapore's English broadsheet daily, had editorial cartoons. But, as you'd expect, they tended to keep a safe distance from the leadership, or even other ASEAN leaders. This is an enormous shame, as there was so much ripe territory for satire and, yes, caricature.

Naturally, China isn't an improvement on this. The China Daily does, of course, have editorial cartoons. Here is today's unintentionally ironic gutbuster:



Don't try too hard to make your point.

The China Daily has, in past, indulged in some national caricatures, as their periodic tilts at Japan show. But, needless to say, not a swipe at leadership or government policy is to be seen. Of course, as this would be a form of (horrors!) criticism, this reticence is expected.

I am convinced that political cartooning, and an ability to withstand caricatures of leadership, is the one of the defining signs of political maturity. One can argue about whether Asian values, or Confucian antecedents, or traditional respect for authority have something to do with the lack of caricatures of leadership. Not having lived in Japan, Taiwan or Korea, I don't have much in the way of developed Asian governments to make comparisons with. Hong Kong seems to do OK, but its press has British antecedents (as does more straight-laced Singapore) and how could you have had Tung Chee Hwa as your leader and not caricatured him?

I think it'll be a grand day for democracy and press freedom when real political cartooning sweeps this part of the world and begins mining the incredibly rich material. It can't come soon enough for the starchy assortment of government-managed pamphlets that pass for news in much of Asia. Meanwhile, we'll have to continue going to the international press (and blogs) for quality wit:



PS: The Asian edition of The Economist, the one I actually got in the mail, did not come with the Bush caricature. It came with an altogether duller "development irony" photograph of a poor Chinese peasant with the Shanghai skyline in the background (regional covers are often different). What a shame. Also, it brooks mentioning that although I like the cover caricature, the artist who did it also does The Economist's weekly editorial cartoon, which is seldom particularly funny. Good artists are not always good editorial cartoonists. And vice-versa.