One Mob, One Vote.(World Affairs)(street protests in Asia)

Tantrums rack Asia's new democracies, showing how bad old habits die hard.

Even as China and Burma have struggled recently to rebuild from the Sichuan earthquake and Cyclone Nargis, disasters have struck a number of other Asian states. But these are shocks of the man-made kind.

The countries in question, which include some of Asia's strongest economies, have suffered enormous street protests, parliamentary meltdowns, threats of military intervention and other forms of bare-knuckled politics. In South Korea, tens of thousands of angry demonstrators have paraded nightly through Seoul--the biggest protests in two decades--demanding the ouster of the new ...