east Asians behind a common value-system. Like modern east Asians, he revered the power of education and preached filial piety. As early as 1977, the University of Singapore hosted a symposium on Asian Values and Modernization. Academics bemoaned the rise of juvenile delinquency and the increasing divorce rate and suggested that western values should be inspected – as if by customs officials – before being imported. They discussed the need to build an ethos based on supposedly Asian values such as ‘group solidarity’, ‘community life’ and the belief in extended families.8 By 1983, Singapore had established the Institute of East Asian Philosophies. Sponsored by Lee’s ruling People’s Action Party, it was designed to revive Confucianism and adapt it to modern life, and was explicitly aimed at countering the westernization of Singaporeans. A new theory of government based on harmony and consensus was outlined: debate and criticism would not take place in public but among members of the government behind closed doors. As one western academic put it in 1996, in Indonesia and Singapore ‘consensus means conformity with the wishes of the regime’.9
The appeal of Confucian conservatism is understandable, particularly in societies with pre-existing Confucian traditions such as Vietnam and among the minority ethnic Chinese communities widely spread throughout south-east Asia. At a time of tumultuous social and political change, Confucianism seems to offer clear guidelines for maintaining civilized values. ‘Criminality is on the rise, opium and drugs are on the rise too and morality is in decline – such things as would make the hair of the ancestors stand on end,’ says Huu Ngoc, a Vietnamese writer living in the capital Hanoi. For him, the chaos caused by modernization is damaging a community spirit based on the co-operative cultivation of rice – a spirit which he sees as spreading out in concentric circles from family to village to nation. The result, he says, is that ‘Confucianism – which is the basis for this community solidarity of family, village and state – is breached.’10
By the late 1990s, however, it was clear that Confucianism was an unsuitable glue for holding east Asians together in the name of ‘Asian values’. There were three main reasons for this. First, the non-Chinese who form the majority of south-east Asians could not identify with an essentially Chinese philosophy; just as Singaporeans found it impossible to espouse an ‘Asian Way’ linked to Japanese wartime imperialism, so Malays and Indonesians – who sometimes fear China as an external power and resent the Chinese communities in their midst – were unable to accept one so explicitly connected to China.
Second, it emerged that Confucianism was an exceptionally weak card for Asians to play against the West in order to proclaim Asian supremacy. This was because both western and Asian thinkers had for a century or more been blaming traditional Confucian values, with their rigid respect for hierarchy and disdain of commerce, for the failure of Asia to make economic progress following the European industrial revolutions. It was absurd for Asian leaders suddenly to attribute their success to Confucius when it had long been argued that he was one of the causes of Asia’s relative economic decline in the previous 1,000 years. For Max Weber, the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German sociologist, Asian values were inimical to economic success because they discouraged innovation and competition; it was the northern Europeans, with their ‘Protestant Ethic’, who were succeeding. Kishore Mahbubani, permanent secretary at the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs and one of the most forceful proponents of Asian values, is convinced that the region fell behind because Asian minds became ‘ossified’. ‘After centuries of inertia resulting from oppressive feudal rule,’ Mahbubani wrote, ‘the work ethic is coming back in full force in most East Asian societies.’11
The third, and perhaps most important, reason why Confucius was confined to the sidelines is that a close reading of Confucian texts reveals a philosophy not quite as politically convenient for present-day south-east Asian leaders as previously thought. It was not merely his dismissal of women, his snobbish disdain for manual labour or his anti-commercial instincts; neo-Confucianists had in any case embraced business from the sixteenth century. It was much worse. Although it was true that Confucius and his followers, such as Mencius, encouraged respect for authority, it turned out that they also insisted on good government and social justice and sometimes accepted the need for subjects to rebel against unjust rulers. Confucianism quickly became less popular with several east Asian governments.
But some of south-east Asia’s rulers still felt the need to unite their peoples behind a common set of ‘Asian values’, partly to promote stability in their own multi-ethnic region and partly to confront outsiders with a coherent philosophy that explains their actions and arguments when they are engaged in international negotiations. In 1993, Tommy Koh, a senior Singapore diplomat, outlined ten basic ‘Asian values’ in 1993 that still hold good for adherents to the ‘Asian Way’ today. They are: an absence of extreme individualism; a belief in strong families; a reverence for education; frugality; hard work; ‘national teamwork’ between unions and employers; an Asian ‘social contract’ between people and the state, whereby governments provide law and order and citizens behave well in return; a belief in citizens as ‘stakeholders’, for example through home-ownership – this only applied to some Asian countries; moral wholesomeness; and a free but responsible press. ‘Taken together,’ Koh wrote, ‘these ten values form a framework that has enabled societies in East Asia to achieve economic prosperity, progress, harmonious relations between citizens and law and order.’12
It is perhaps not surprising that many south-east Asian leaders should believe in a set of values that simultaneously justifies their own forms of government and suggests that they are culturally different from – if not superior to – westerners. What is remarkable is how many westerners agree. In a book urging European businesses to become more involved in the then fast-growing markets of south-east Asia, Corrado Letta, an Italian business consultant, drew up a table comparing ‘cultural values’ in Europe and Asia. Europeans were characterized by ‘reluctance to learn’, Asians by ‘willingness to learn/respect for learning’; Europeans had ‘complacency’, while Asians had ‘creativity’; Europeans liked ‘taking it easy’, whereas Asians preferred ‘hard work’; Europe was full of ‘doom and gloom’, but Asia enjoyed ‘booming confidence’; and so on.13 Letta is not alone. It is common to hear both westerners and Asians declare that Asians are more hardworking than Africans; more concerned about losing ‘face’ than Americans; or more gentle than Europeans. ‘Asians,’ wrote one western commentator bluntly, ‘believe in consensus.’14 This is about as meaningful as the nineteenth-century Orientalist generalization that Asians enjoy cruelty, and most such hard-and-fast cultural distinctions can be dismissed as neo-Orientalist.15
A more realistic view is that the people of south-east Asia – because they have only recently undergone or are still undergoing their rapid industrial revolutions – still retain some of the values of an earlier, pre-industrial age. Like many Asians today, Europeans and Americans used to live in extended families, work hard, show respect for their elders and live by stern moral codes. Western politicians often play to ordinary people’s nostalgia about this aspect of their past, and declare that there is much westerners can learn from those Asian societies which appear to be both prosperous (in a modern way) and law-abiding (in an old-fashioned way). This is why Margaret Thatcher was enthusiastic about ‘Victorian values’ and why Tony Blair, within weeks of becoming prime minister, invited Lee Kuan Yew to his office at Downing Street in London to discuss such matters as welfare reform and education. It is also why it was – in political terms, at least – so ill-advised of President Bill Clinton to take up his human rights cudgels on behalf of Michael Fay, an eighteen-year-old American sentenced in Singapore in 1994 to be flogged with a rattan cane for various acts of vandalism, including spray-painting cars. US administration officials and several
