Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad has asked Malaysians not to accept western-style democracy as it could result in negative effects. The prime minister said such an extreme principle had caused moral decay, homosexual activities, single parents and economic slowdown because of poor work ethics.
– Voice of Malaysia radio, 29 May 1993.
Some people have the illusion that things are different in Asia because the spirit of feudalism still prevails and peasants are politically inactive. This is not true. Asians and Vietnamese are changing. They are desperate for democracy, freedom and development. Nothing can restrain them any longer and it is only a matter of time before the situation erupts. The political stability which appears to exist in Vietnam at the moment is a fake.
– Bui Tin, a former Vietnamese army officer and self-exiled dissident.1
For centuries, Europeans regarded Asia with a mixture of horror and jealous fascination. Schooled since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to believe in the power of reason and discipline, Europeans saw Asia as exotic, irrational, unreliable and decadent. To them, Asia was a world of cruelty and sensuality, of despots and harems. The real Asia was often submerged in the European mind by the fears and feverish imaginings of the Europeans themselves. These delusions later became known collectively as ‘Orientalism’ – a word used to describe the western habit of simultaneously glamorizing and demonizing the east.2 This is not to deny that the countries of Asia were very different from those of post-Enlightenment Europe, both socially and politically. Asians themselves – whether in power or in opposition – often sought to modernize their societies by emulating the commercial, administrative and social practices of the colonial powers with which they came into contact; King Chulalongkorn of Thailand, for example, is credited with turning his country into a modern bureaucratic state, complete with railways, roads and canals, during his rule from 1868 to 1910.
But in the 1980s and 1990s Asian leaders, especially in south-east Asia, decided to turn the tables on the West. Independence from the European powers had been won three decades before, and had been followed by a period of rapid economic growth in much of east Asia. Men like Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore declared that Asia was indeed different from the West. But this time it was the Asians who were disciplined, hardworking and moral, while the West was a place of unreason – a morass of crime, decadence and loose sexual habits. By the early 1990s a lively debate was under way in east Asia and among politicians and academics in the US and Europe.3
Supporters of the concept of ‘Asian values’ argued that east Asians, although ethnically diverse, shared certain core beliefs. They were loyal to their families and communities, whereas westerners were obsessed with the rights of individuals to the extent that their societies were starting to fall apart. Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore, its prime minister from 1959 to 1990 and now with the title of senior minister, told an interviewer in 1994 that he liked the informality and openness of American society. ‘But as a total system, I find parts of it totally unacceptable: guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy, unbecoming behaviour in public – in sum the breakdown of civil society,’ he said. ‘The expansion of the right of the individual to behave or misbehave as he pleases has come at the expense of orderly society. In the East the main object is to have a well-ordered society so that everybody can have maximum enjoyment of his freedoms. This freedom can only exist in an ordered state and not in a natural state of contention and anarchy.’4
The philosophy of ‘Asian values’, developed principally in Singapore and Malaysia, is much more than a set of abstruse social theories. From Burma to China and beyond, it has a direct bearing on everything from attitudes towards human rights abuses and film censorship to international trade negotiations and deforestation. After three decades of political stability and extraordinarily rapid economic expansion, some of Asia’s leaders feel that they have earned the right to run their countries according to their own rules. They have had enough of being lectured on how to run their political systems, look after the rights of their factory workers and protect their tigers and elephants by former colonial powers such as England and France, and by a United States made arrogant by its victory over communism in the Cold War. The coming century, they believe, will be the ‘Pacific Century’ – an era in which confident Asians will finally be able to discard the western baggage left behind by the colonial era.
Such emotions are most deeply felt by the older generation of leaders who remember colonial rule and who still hold sway in much of the region. Mahathir, the septuagenarian Malaysian prime minister who has led the country since 1981, has courted Japan in his efforts to advance the cause of ‘Asian values’, both because of Japan’s present influence as an economic superpower and because of its historical role in sweeping aside the colonial powers in south-east Asia during the Second World War. Although the British, the French and the Dutch returned after Japan’s defeat in 1945, the mystique of the all-powerful European was shattered for ever, and they soon departed again, leaving behind the newly independent countries of Asia.5 The forthright Mahathir has found favour in Japan by urging the Japanese to stop apologizing for the war and to take pride in the resurgent Asia of the late twentieth century. In 1995 he co-authored The Asia that can say No: a Card against the West with the right-wing Japanese politician Shintaro Ishihara, and in it he laid out the basic tenets of the new Asian philosophy: the West is suffering from ‘moral degeneration’ and hedonism in the form of incest, cohabitation, sensual gratification, avarice and lack of respect for family or religion; Asia is in the ascendant economically and morally; and the jealous West is therefore trying to stifle Asia’s growth. ‘Fearing that one day they will have to face Asian countries as competitors, some western nations are doing their utmost to keep us at bay,’ he wrote. ‘They constantly wag accusing fingers in Asia’s direction, claiming that it has benefited from unacceptable practices, such as denial of human rights and workers’ rights, undemocratic government, and disregard for the environment.’ For Mahathir, Asian values were not just different, they were better. The West ‘should accept our values, not the other way round’. Ishihara joined in with enthusiasm along similarly anti-western and anti-liberal lines. Among other declarations, he made the controversial assertion that westerners sought depraved sex and child sex in south-east Asia while Japanese visitors just wanted normal sex with prostitutes. More significantly, he aired the idea of ‘a new economic co-prosperity sphere’ for Asia, echoing the wartime Japanese concept of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ which justified Japan’s invasion of other Asian lands.6
All this harked back to Japanese Second World War propaganda about undesirable Anglo-American values – individualism, liberalism, democracy, hedonism and materialism – that should not be allowed to pollute the pure spirit of Japan.7 But the memories of Japanese atrocities against both prisoners-of-war and civilians meant that a new ‘Asian Way’ so closely associated with Japan was never going to be popular in south-east Asia, let alone China. Mahathir said the Japanese troops in Malaya had done nothing ‘improper’, but other Asians of his generation – including Filipinos and Chinese – remember all too well the gruesome massacres, rapes, torture and other atrocities committed by Japanese troops. Lee Kuan Yew has repeatedly mentioned the dark days of the Japanese occupation of Singapore and used it to warn his people of the need for constant vigilance. The idea of an ‘Asian Way’ for the 1990s with Japan taking the lead was further impeded by the reluctance of Japanese politicians more cautious than the swashbuckling Ishihara to antagonize their American allies.
Another way for east Asian leaders to cement ‘Asian values’ into a coherent philosophy was to summon the help of Confucius. The Chinese
