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A prominent part of the Asean agenda hitherto has been to promote the so-called ‘Asian value’ of consensus. In foreign relations, this approach means compromise rather than confrontation. But the agenda is starting to look dangerously out of date. Consensus is not easy to reach with an increasingly assertive China which, like Asean, is translating its new-found economic muscle into increased military might. In the past few years China has made repeated naval incursions into Vietnamese offshore oil exploration zones (and it invaded Vietnam by land as recently as 1979); it has also occupied disputed atolls of the Spratly Islands off the Philippines, again in pursuit of its claim to almost the whole of the South China Sea; and it has alarmed Asean members such as Thailand and Singapore, as well as India, by developing close military and commercial ties with the Burmese junta. Asean was forced to confront the Chinese over the South China Sea incursions with un-Asean directness: they told the Chinese to stop. Asean members, especially the vulnerable island of Singapore, have had to acknowledge their continuing dependence on the security umbrella provided by the US, however unpalatable American views on democracy may be.
Asean has also espoused the ‘Asian value’ of communal (as opposed to individual) rights. It has rejected western complaints about human rights abuses or environmental damage on the grounds that political stability and economic growth for all are more important to developing Asian countries than the complaints of a few dissidents. But the populations of the Asean countries become more sophisticated with every year that passes, and younger Asians can no longer be relied upon to accept their governments’ definitions of right and wrong. Siding with Burma’s notorious military junta against the West in the interests of Asean solidarity is enough to test the diplomatic skills of even the most hardened adherent of ‘Asian values’. Asean thus risks being seen as a complacent clique of governments whose main aim is to keep themselves in power, a sort of ‘regime survival club’. Meanwhile, there are plenty of real dangers for the organization and its member states to avert if they want to proceed smoothly down the path of modernization. There are the problems on the fringes of Asean – the stand-off between North and South Korea, the assertiveness of China, the dependence of the whole area on oil and gas imported from the Middle East – as well as conflicts within it over secession movements, drug-trafficking, border disputes, piracy at sea, and the over-exploitation of natural resources. The south-east Asian states are quickly discovering that wealth and power do not merely confer the right to push forward one’s own views; the powerful must also share the burden of keeping the peace.
Chapter 7 looks at the ten countries in turn and analyses the part played by each in the modernization of politics and society. Like central America or southern Africa, south-east Asia sees itself, and is increasingly seen by others, as a distinct region. But it contains an exceptionally wide variety of races, religions, colonial experiences and styles of economic development. Each country is affected by the industrial revolution in different ways.
Modernization and the prosperity that comes with it, chapter 8 concludes, have nevertheless made life better for the overwhelming majority of south-east Asia’s 500 million people. Some have yet to benefit, a few are worse off than before, but many have moved from a hand-to-mouth existence in the countryside to the financial security of paid employment in the towns. South-east Asia today is no longer simply a place of golden temples and rice-farmers in emerald-green paddy fields. Those images are slowly being replaced by the modern reality of factories and city streets. Asian nations are becoming part of the industrialized world. To have this happen in one country is an achievement; to have it happen in ten neighbouring countries simultaneously is nothing less than extraordinary. But there is a long way to go. Some governments have convinced themselves that Asian political violence and social decay exist only in the imagination of jealous western observers, but they are wrong. More and more Asians recognize that there are big obstacles to overcome if the next twenty years are to be as successful as the last twenty. The biggest mistakes their leaders made in the 1990s were to try to suppress the popular urge for political and social change while boasting about their economic achievements in a mood of premature triumph.
ONE The rise and fall of ‘Asian values’ (#ulink_dca3ac0a-1da8-5907-ae15-10ea7662ad5b)
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.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.’
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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 sage, who lived 2,500 years ago and whose thoughts on government and morality are recorded in The Analects, at first seemed ideally suited to the task of uniting 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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 American newspaper columnists expressed outrage at the punishment, which can leave permanent scars. But many ordinary Americans, fed up with crime in their own country, thought Singapore was taking the right approach and told the Singaporeans – in the words of at least one caller to a US radio phone-in programme – to ‘whip his butt’. The Michael Fay affair played straight into the hands of Asian leaders who reject the idea that the US has anything to teach them about human rights. Lee Kuan Yew responded to US criticism by saying that America might be rich but it was also chaotic, and neither safe nor peaceful. ‘If you like it that way, that is your problem,’ he said. ‘But that is not the path we choose. They always talk about human rights. I think it is just a convenient slogan.’
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But only the most stubborn defenders of ‘Asian values’ would argue that they are immutable. Brigadier-General Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s deputy prime minister and the son of Lee Kuan Yew, commented recently on the failure of western policies on welfare and crime and the spread of social problems to countries such as Taiwan, and said: ‘If we do not watch the way we go we could become like the West.’ He said Chinese, Malays and Indians (the three main ethnic groups in Singapore) did have a different ‘world view’ from westerners. But when asked whether values could not change dramatically from generation to generation as they do in the West, he replied: ‘The answer is we don’t know. They are not unchanging. They will evolve, but if we can’t preserve the essence of them into the next generation then we think we are finished.’
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In the eyes of certain Asian leaders, ‘Asian values’ are not immutable but have a cultural basis – representing a different world view – and are worth defending in the name of social cohesion. Some of the ten values listed by Tommy Koh are unremarkable, and are accepted as good whether or not they are actually adopted in the rest of the world as well: frugality and hard work, for example. Others are more controversial. They suggest curbing the rights of the individual in the interests of society as a whole; they hint at tame trade unions and an uncritical press; and they support the idea of strong government. These are not just theories. They are put into practice by the authoritarian governments of south-east Asia. In Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Burma, independent trade unions and newspapers have been restricted, tamed or banned. Political systems are designed and controlled so that opposition parties can exist to preserve the image of democracy but not actually take power. Few of the region’s governments are embarrassed when challenged on these points. On the contrary, they cite ‘Asian values’ to support restrictions on individual freedoms. Economic growth and political stability, which benefit all citizens, take priority over failed ‘western’ concepts of individual rights, they say, especially during the early stages of industrialization when a smaller proportion of the population is educated sufficiently to take on the responsibility of voting. They also compare Russia to China, condemning Russian governments since the collapse of communism for causing chaos and poverty by democratizing politics before liberalizing the economy, and praising China for embarking on economic reform while maintaining firm political control. This kind of analysis often finds favour outside Asia as well. The corruption and poverty of African countries following independence from the colonial powers were held up by African authoritarians, and their supporters in the West, as reasons not to impose western-style democratic institutions on alien cultures where people are supposedly ‘not ready’ for democracy.
However, just as it is easy to find Europeans or Americans who sympathize with the concept of ‘Asian values’ because they bemoan the problems in their own societies, it is notable that there are plenty of Asians who bitterly oppose the whole idea. For these people, the ‘Asian Way’ is an elaborate fraud which does not stand up to serious analysis and whose main purpose is to provide authoritarian governments with a rationale for staying in power indefinitely. In south-east Asia, it is the leaders of Malaysia and Singapore who have talked loudest about ‘Asian values’. Others, including the governments of Burma and Vietnam and individual politicians and businessmen throughout south-east Asia, have followed suit with varying degrees of enthusiasm. But in the Philippines and Thailand – the two most democratic countries in the region – many influential people scoff at ‘Asian values’ and the people who espouse them.
The Philippines, which was one of the most advanced Asian economies after the Second World War, is the favourite target of authoritarians; they say it has lagged behind its neighbours and fallen prey to poverty and crime largely because of the government’s inability to take hard decisions – to raise fuel prices, for example, or enforce tax collection – in a US-style democracy notable for bickering, lobbying and countless legal challenges. Unlike the orderly streets of Singapore, those of Manila are congested by overloaded and unroadworthy vehicles belching black smoke. Instead of Singapore’s neat, high-rise housing estates, filthy slums sprawl around the city and its garbage dumps. Law and order scarcely exist: patrons of bars and restaurants are urged by signs to leave their ‘deadly weapons’ at the front desk, and policemen have been among those implicated in the frequent kidnappings of ethnic Chinese businessmen and their relatives. Perhaps it is not surprising that Alfredo Lim, the mayor of central Manila who cracked down on drug-dealers and cleared Manila’s streets of overt prostitution and go-go bars (they moved to another district of the Manila metropolis), is an admirer of Lee Kuan Yew.
(#litres_trial_promo) George Yeo, Singapore’s Minister for Information and the Arts, uses the Philippines as a salutary example of how things can go wrong without strong government to ‘keep the body politic whole’. He said:
Look at the Philippines – a few decades of mismanagement and what happens? Their womenfolk are being sent to the Middle East, to Hong Kong, to Singapore, to Malaysia. They become domestic maids – highly educated, very intelligent people – why? Because their own country, their own economy, cannot make use of the value they are able to add to the whole economy so they end up choosing other jurisdictions. It’s an absurd situation. I think all of us see that, all of us do not want to be like the Philippines of a few years ago. And they [were like this] despite the fact that after the war they were the most educated, the most literate, the best founded of any of the nation states newly independent in south-east Asia.
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Filipino democrats cannot dispute the facts. The Philippines has been badly mismanaged and its people do suffer the humiliation of going overseas as migrant workers. But they bitterly reject the Singaporean analysis that democracy is in some way to blame. The real problem, they say, is not democracy but the years of dictatorship they suffered under the late Ferdinand Marcos, who favoured his business cronies and entrenched protectionism and corruption in the economy. When Lee Kuan Yew himself came to the Philippines and told a meeting of Filipino business executives that their country needed discipline more than democracy, President Fidel Ramos – under whose leadership the economy had started to recover – had a tart reply: ‘This prescription fails to consider our ill-fated flirtation with authoritarianism not so long ago.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Corazon Aquino, who preceded Ramos as president after leading the democratic uprising which overthrew Marcos in 1986, was once so incensed by one of Lee’s lectures that she was heard muttering: ‘That arrogant bastard, I feel like kicking his shins.’
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Such feelings are not confined to the Philippines. When Suharto was president of Indonesia, he was happy to benefit from the increased international legitimacy afforded to authoritarian governments by the ‘Asian values’ argument without making any significant public contributions to the debate himself. ‘Indonesia,’ says Rizal Sukma, a researcher at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, ‘has become some sort of free rider in this debate.’ But he adds: ‘Among young intellectuals there is resentment about why the Singaporeans and Malaysians want to be spokespersons for the whole region. Not everyone agrees with Lee Kuan Yew’s formula.’
The disagreement extends to the ordinary citizens of Singapore and Malaysia as well. ‘It’s mind-boggling this Asian values thing. What are Asian values?’ asks Hishamuddin Rais, a Malaysian filmmaker and political dissident who has lived in exile but recently returned home after negotiations with the authorities. Rais – with his brown felt hat, beard and long hair in a bun – is a far cry from the typical Malaysian factory worker or bureaucrat. He accepts that there are cultural differences between Asians and westerners, but says ‘Asian values’ have become an excuse for totalitarianism and the stifling of free expression. ‘They say, “we want to develop economically first”, but this is a danger – develop until when? Have we started sowing the seeds of free debate? … Have you created a fertile ground, a field where ideas can grow? No, you haven’t.’
(#litres_trial_promo) As he was making these comments to the author outside a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, two men from the Malaysian police special branch were seen unobtrusively taking photographs of the meeting.
When the debate heated up in the 1990s, each side accused the other of misrepresenting their arguments. As Mahbubani of the Singapore foreign ministry complains: ‘The caricature of the Asian value position is that “Oh, this is purely a sophisticated way of justifying authoritarian governments. This is a very sophisticated way of saying the Asians are not ready for democracy, the Asians like to be ruled by dictators and so on.” That’s a caricature of what it’s all about. It reflects a western tendency to believe that Asians cannot have supple philosophical minds … in fact I would say a fair amount of thought is going into the “Asian values” position.’ Mahbubani says the ‘Asian values’ argument arose partly as a reaction to western arrogance after the collapse of communism. ‘At the end of the Cold War there was a sense – as part of the mood of triumphalism in the West – that history had ended and that the rest of the world would grow up and become copies of western societies. And that was basically what the Asian values debate was all about – to say … they might evolve into the kinds of societies that may not necessarily be clones or copies of what you find in the West.’
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For liberals, Asian and western, this explanation is itself a misrepresentation. The point for them is not whether they should have particular kinds of political or electoral systems, but whether governments are legitimate and people are treated justly. Certain rights, in other words, are neither western nor eastern but universal. As Marsillam Simandjuntak, an Indonesian political activist and former medical doctor, puts it: ‘If I want some kind of justice, being an Asian, isn’t that an Asian value? … I demand it because I need justice, not because it’s similar to what there is in the West.’
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An important weakness of the ‘Asian values’ argument is the difficulty of drawing sensible distinctions between ‘Asian’ and ‘western’ cultures, particularly during a period of rapid modernization in Asia. ‘Those people who said “let’s reject western values” said it while playing golf,’ comments Marsillam drily. ‘The problem with Lee Kuan Yew,’ adds Ammar Siamwalla, a political analyst at the Thailand Development Research Institute in Bangkok, ‘is that he’s not saying it’s a Singapore way; it’s an Asian way. The very term [Asia] was handed to us by the bloody Europeans!’
(#litres_trial_promo) Asians may be different from Europeans, but then the Thais are very different from the Vietnamese, just as the French are from the English. In fact there is more variety within the vast expanse of Asia than within Europe. The Indonesian archipelago alone is 5,000km from end to end and is home to about 200 million people. There are few similarities between a tribesman wearing a penis sheath in Irian Jaya and a businessman in a suit in Jakarta. Many of the nation states of Asia are recent creations, and a large number of their inhabitants are as likely to identify themselves with a clan, region, religion or ethnic group as with their countries – let alone a continent.
The same objection can be raised against the use of the words ‘West’ and ‘western’ to define the type of society which is supposedly the antithesis of ‘Asian values’. For the ‘Asian values’ argument to work well, it helps to believe in a homogeneous ‘West’ in social and political decline and apparently unable to reform itself. This means using state-controlled media to emphasize the bad, especially crime and poverty, while playing down the good – and gathering the bad news, it need hardly be said, from the independent western media in much the same way as Soviet anti-western propaganda operated during the Cold War. Thus Major Hla Min, a spokesman for the Burmese military junta, is able to compare Burmese housing policy favourably with the situation in the US. ‘There are people living in the United States in cardboard boxes,’ he says.
(#litres_trial_promo) That is the truth, but not the whole truth. And it is easy to demonize the thinking behind liberalism as well as its effects. In the words of Mahbubani: ‘To any Asian, it is obvious that the breakdown of the family and social order in the US owes itself to a mindless ideology that maintains that the freedom of a small number of individuals who are known to pose a threat to society (criminals, terrorists, street-gang members, drug-dealers) should not be constrained (for example, through detention without trial), even if to do so would enhance the freedom of the majority. In short, principle takes precedence over people’s well-being.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Many Americans would find the words ‘mindless ideology’ an offensive way to describe their belief in individual rights, especially when they are engaged in painful debates about how to improve a society which almost all admit has serious flaws.
Gloomy Americans and Europeans – harking back to a mythically crime-free, pre-industrial past – are almost as eager as south-east Asian leaders to condemn the social ills afflicting the West. Yet not all the news is bad. According to statistics on labour strikes from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, industrial conflict in the western industrialized countries fell in 1996 to its lowest level for more than fifty years.
(#litres_trial_promo) By 1998, the US was enjoying its seventh consecutive year of uninterrupted economic growth, and unemployment was at its lowest for twenty-five years. Again in the US, drug abuse seems to have stabilized; deaths from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) have started to fall for the first time since the epidemic began in 1981; and serious and violent crime has been declining for five years. Americans are far from being complacent about such trends; one newspaper even had the headline ‘Major Crime Falls Again, But Why?’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the longer term, sociologists believe that the West will benefit from a reduction in crime because of lower birth rates and the consequent increase in the average age of its populations – a characteristic of prosperous industrial societies – while south-east Asia may for a few decades suffer the opposite; the obvious reason for this is that it is the young, not the elderly, who tend to break the law. In short, it is as foolish for Asian leaders today to stereotype western societies as crime-ridden and amoral as it was for Europeans in the past to dismiss Asians as ‘sensual’ and ‘cruel’. As Edward Said wrote, ‘the answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism’.
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Even the proponents of ‘Asian values’ have difficulties explaining what they mean. Almost as soon as the term came into popular use in the 1980s and 1990s, their arguments were plagued by inconsistencies which seemed to be more than the growing pains of a new philosophy. ‘Flexibility’ and ‘pragmatism’, for instance, are supposed to be among the advantages of Asian societies in both politics and business. So whereas a western business person would insist on contractual obligations, an east Asian would rely on personal contacts and informal relationships that would allow the deal to be done quickly. Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether the informality is simply left over from an earlier age when business was less complicated, this notion was seized upon in various south-east Asian countries to justify the kind of ‘informal’ contacts which are otherwise recognizable as corruption. Westerners are told not to inquire too closely into ‘Asian’ business practices: they cannot possibly understand them because of their different cultural background. A Thai army colonel, quoted in a ground-breaking independent academic survey of corruption in Thailand, justified the frequent exchanges of favours between military officers, politicians and businessmen by saying that ‘in our society we are not so individualistic like westerners. Thai people live together like relatives. Favour requires gratitude in return. Today we help him, in future days he helps us. It may not be proper in the whole process. But it is necessary.’
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Such self-serving interpretations of ‘Asian values’ do not go unchallenged. Anand Panyarachun, a former Thai prime minister who has been active in both business and politics, recently lamented the decline of ethical standards in Asia and what he called the ‘grim’ role models presented to the public: ‘Military figures negotiating business deals, narcotics traffickers serving as parliamentarians, respected business personalities consorting with shady characters, professors offering snake-oil remedies to age-old problems, clerics caught under the covers – laughable, were it all not so deplorable.’ Anand went on to heap scorn on ‘the current wave of support for our so-called Asian values’. He said: ‘As if a long-hidden treasure-trove had suddenly been discovered, Asian values are the fashionable topic of the day. Without specifying what, precisely, is being referred to, political leaders region-wide have grasped this fashionable term as a useful rhetorical device. They have used it to champion special interests, to oppose foreign competition, to curry favour with an all-too-often gullible public.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Anand proposed his own set of ‘Asian values’ – good governance, ensured by visionary, vigorous and responsible leadership; moral integrity; and service to others. There was nothing about ‘flexibility’ or curbing the press.
Another problem with ‘Asian values’ is the very different characters of the people who espouse them. In politics, for example, it would be hard to find two people more different than Malaysia’s Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore – the two best-known voices of the ‘Asian Way’. They are rivals, not friends. Mahathir is dynamic but erratic and given to emotional outbursts, boasting of the superior qualities of Asians and particularly Malaysians when things are going well, but bitterly blaming foreigners for conspiring against Asia when they go badly – as he did during the south-east Asian financial crisis of 1997. Lee is much more calculating. In the 1950s, when he was pressing Britain to end its colonial occupation of Singapore, he said: ‘If you believe in democracy, you must believe in it unconditionally. If you believe that men should be free, then, they should have the right of free association, of free speech, of free publication.’
(#litres_trial_promo) After taking power, he and his followers carefully modified their views as they slowly built the edifice of the ‘Asian Way’. They emphasized the importance of cultural differences between peoples, stressing the need for Asian governments to be respected rather than suffer the noisy and unproductive harassment typical of debates in the West. Unconditional democracy was out. But Lee, a lawyer by profession, reads more widely and thinks more deeply than the energetic but unreliable Mahathir. He and other Singaporean government ministers do not take simplistic anti-western postures, and are usually ready to give credit where they feel it is due. They openly praise the US for having opened its markets to Asian exporters after the Second World War, an action which was a vital contribution to the Asian economic ‘miracle’. And, without embarrassment, they publicly support a continued US military presence in the region to ensure security.
For all the debate in Malaysia, Singapore and the rest of south-east Asia, there is little chance that a coherent value-system will emerge. The historical and cultural arguments for ‘Asian values’ are weak, and there is little popular support for a philosophy that seems to be the narrow preserve of governments. When the authoritative Far Eastern Economic Review published a series of profiles of its more influential readers to mark its fiftieth anniversary in 1996, it was remarkable how many Asians – business people, academics, bureaucrats – cited ‘Asian values’ as the greatest cliché about Asia before going on to say why they thought it was nonsense.
(#litres_trial_promo) And yet ‘Asian values’ still exert a powerful influence in south-east Asia, not just in the politics of individual countries (where these values are used to underpin the authority of particular governments) but also in the region as a whole: it is significant that the members of Asean pursue a coordinated foreign policy based largely on ‘Asian values’.
Asean foreign policy is supposed to operate on the basis of the ‘Asian values’ of consensus, by which it is meant that differences between member states should not be aired in public but resolved by governments behind closed doors; communiqués and public statements thus tend to be exceptionally bland, even by the anodyne standards of international meetings the world over. The search for consensus, however, does not apply to relations between Asean and the outside world. For Asean is eager to confront what its members see as foreign interference in the way they run their countries. The governments object to being told how to run their domestic politics and how to formulate laws on labour rights and environmental protection. In 1993, Asian governments, including Asean, even went so far as to qualify the notion of universal human rights. At a meeting in Bangkok before the UN World Conference on Human Rights, they implied that the UN standards to which most countries, including themselves, had formally subscribed were ‘western’. They argued that more attention should be given to an ‘Asian’ interpretation of human rights, which stressed economic growth and political stability for the benefit of whole communities more than individual freedom. Lee Kuan Yew endorses this view, belittling the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the grounds that it was drawn up by the victorious powers after the Second World War and that neither China nor Russia believed in the document they signed.
(#litres_trial_promo) The growing confidence of Asean governments in the early 1990s, and their desire to protect each other from challenges to their authority, made work increasingly difficult for local pressure groups on issues such as human rights and the environment. These groups, known as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), had never been popular with the governments they challenged; but now they found their meetings banned or restricted if they attempted to discuss human-rights abuses in another Asean member state. This occurred even in Thailand and the Philippines, the two most democratic Asean members and the two with the greatest respect for freedom of speech, when NGOs tried to discuss the Indonesian occupation of East Timor – a territory abandoned by Portugal, invaded by Indonesia with great brutality in 1975 and forcibly incorporated into Indonesia the following year. Just as China tries to force other Asian countries to refuse entry to the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, Indonesia, the largest Asean member, does not hesitate to put pressure on other member governments to suppress embarrassing meetings. In 1994, angered by a planned conference on East Timor in Manila, Indonesia temporarily withdrew from an economic co-operation programme with the Philippines and suspended its efforts to mediate between the Philippine government and Moslem rebels.
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The attempts by Asean governments to monopolize debate do not go unchallenged. NGOs, liberal politicians and academics in all Asean countries have vigorously re-asserted their belief in minimum universal standards of human rights and continued to protest against everything from poor factory conditions to environmental abuses in the region. In a car park outside a hotel hosting an Asean meeting in Bangkok in 1994, Cecilia Jimenez, a human-rights lawyer from the Philippines, complained about the Thai government’s decision to disrupt a human-rights meeting taking place in the city at the same time and bitterly condemned the Asean governments for ‘cultural relativity’. She said: ‘I think that’s so racist, so insulting to say that we Asians deserve less human rights than you guys from the West … The Philippines and the Thai government are under tremendous pressure from the Indonesian government. That’s why we object to the bully tactics of the Indonesian government.’
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The biggest test of Asean’s unity, however, is not Indonesia but Burma. It is one thing to use the concept of ‘Asian values’ to defend the rights of, say, Singapore and Malaysia to restrict personal freedoms in the interest of economic growth and political stability: such countries have been labelled ‘soft authoritarian’ by political scientists. But Burma is by no means soft. It is ruled by a military junta which has tortured and killed hundreds of its opponents, and which has condemned what should be one of Asia’s wealthiest countries – fertile, rich in minerals, attractive to tourists and home to fifty million people – to poverty and oppression. The junta was so out of touch with its own people that it was convinced it would win a democratic election it organized in 1990. When it was resoundingly defeated at the polls, the generals ignored the result and continued to rule. Meanwhile they kept Aung San Suu Kyi, one of the founders and leaders of the National League for Democracy, the party that won the election, under house arrest for six years. She won the Nobel Peace Prize. They eventually freed her, but went on to arrest many of her allies and soon re-imposed restrictions on her movements that were almost as effective as house arrest. All of this was hard for south-east Asian leaders to justify, even with the most extreme interpretation of ‘Asian values’.
Asean nevertheless welcomed Burma as a member in 1997, overcoming the reluctance of some of its own members, including Thailand and the Philippines, and overruling the objections of western governments and both Asian and western human-rights movements. (One Asian NGO, meanwhile, distributed a colourful poster asking the question ‘Should Asean welcome Slorc [the junta]?’ in six southeast Asian languages. It showed a fat, beaming Burmese military officer being greeted by obsequious officials of other Asean countries, all standing on a plinth made out of the Asean symbol, a stylized sheaf of rice stalks; a couple of the Asean officials were frowning as they looked down to where Burmese soldiers were standing guard over manacled prisoners and kicking a woman with a baby.) There were three main reasons for Asean’s decision to grant Burma membership. The most pressing was the need to counter the growing Chinese influence in Burma. The Chinese have been developing both military and commercial links with Burma’s military rulers. Second, the Asean governments, and particularly the Malaysians who were hosting the 1997 summit, wanted to expand Asean to include all ten south-east Asian countries to give the organization added authority in international negotiations – only Cambodia was excluded and this was at the last minute because of a coup d’état. Third, Asean wanted to help protect the increasing investments being made in Burma by both state-controlled and private south-east Asian companies.
Even Asean leaders who supported Burma’s entry into their organization, such as Mahathir, could not pretend that all was well inside the country. They therefore declared that they recognized the need for economic and political reform in Burma and would work quietly behind the scenes to achieve it. With unconscious irony, they labelled their policy ‘constructive engagement’. This was the phrase used by the US and Britain in the 1980s to describe their dealings with the white minority government of South Africa at a time when others – including developing countries in Asia – were demanding economic sanctions against Pretoria. ‘Constructive engagement’ was just as controversial when applied to Burma as it was when applied to South Africa.
(#litres_trial_promo) One Burmese man in Rangoon – whose punishment for being elected as a member of parliament for Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD was to be jailed in a ten foot by ten foot cell with several others – eloquently expressed the bitterness felt by Burmese democrats towards the junta’s regional allies after his release from prison. Asking to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, he spoke of his party’s regret about the rapprochement between Burma and such countries as Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. ‘Constructive engagement is not constructive,’ he said. ‘It’s destructive opportunism. We are in a time of trouble. When the government is oppressing its own people, they shouldn’t do it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Another Burmese intellectual declared: ‘There’s no Asian way. There’s totalitarian ways and democratic ways.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Singapore, as a big investor in Burma, a supplier of weapons and above all a public defender of authoritarianism, is particularly loathed by Burmese liberals. ‘Singaporeans are all set to make money,’ says Kyi Maung, an elderly and shrewd NLD leader and confidant of Suu Kyi. ‘They have no moral conscience at all.’
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Singapore’s defence against these accusations is twofold. It repeats that Singapore and Asean are in fact trying to introduce reforms in Burma, albeit through gentle persuasion rather than confrontation with the regime. Second, it deploys the ‘Asian values’ argument in favour of strong government: this means that the army is an appropriate institution to run the country because Burma is ethnically diverse and would be in danger of disaster under any other system. ‘Imagine what happens in Burma if you dismantle the tatmadaw [Burmese army],’ says George Yeo of the Singapore government. ‘What you have left will be like Cambodia in “year zero” [when the Khmers Rouges took over] because there is no institution in Burma which can hold the whole country together.’
(#litres_trial_promo) There is no question that Burma has problems with ethnic divisions – two dozen different ethnic guerrilla armies have fought against the central government since independence in 1948 – but there are doubts about the long-term effectiveness of the junta’s political strategy. The guerrilla armies fighting the regime have been either defeated by military force or persuaded to sign peace deals in exchange for the right to continue operating as drug barons in their own territories. Reconciliation and real national unity still seem a long way off. So the ideal solution for Singapore and Asean would be for Burma to combine political reform with continued military control. Under this so-called ‘Indonesian’ method (discussed in more detail in chapter 2), democratic-looking institutions are introduced and the army withdraws into the background while still retaining much of its influence.
Unfortunately for the supporters of ‘Asian values’, there have been few signs that the Burmese junta has any inclination to embark on even the mildest of reforms. Instead, they have turned Asean’s support for authoritarian governments to their own advantage, using it to justify the continuation of their regime. Major Hla Min of the Burmese defence ministry explained that the countries of south-east Asia understood Burma well because they had had military governments in the past and in some cases still had them. ‘Even Singapore – it’s a police state,’ he said. ‘Everybody admits it’s a police state.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This is hardly a ringing endorsement of the ethics of the ‘Asian Way’. But until now Asean, and Asian governments as a whole, have been surprisingly successful in promoting ‘Asian’ versions of human rights in international forums – or at least in stopping western countries imposing their versions on Asia. The reasons for the West’s diffidence are all too obvious. As Asian economies continued to grow, western governments and companies became ever more reluctant to jeopardize their commercial interests for the sake of their liberal principles. This often obliged them to adopt postures in favour of human rights at home for domestic political purposes, while appeasing Asian governments overseas. Confusion and hypocrisy were the inevitable result. ‘When they come here they [western politicians] talk about the environment, human rights and democracy in public,’ says Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, the former Indonesian minister responsible for the environment. ‘But in private they talk business … so we listen politely to their exhortations and then we do our own thing. Some of them are very insincere.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In the case of Burma, Asean governments rightly point out that it is hypocritical of the US to impose economic sanctions on Burma, which has a small and relatively unimportant economy, because of its human rights abuses, while simultaneously turning a blind eye to similar abuses in China because it has a very large economy. To which the honest, if unedifying, response from a senior US diplomat is: ‘Being a superpower means we don’t have to be consistent.’
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So successful were Asian authoritarians in promoting their own version of human rights that they almost turned the tables on the western countries they had accused of bullying them. Chris Patten, the last colonial governor of Hong Kong, said shortly before the territory was handed over to China in July 1997 that he believed the West should pursue both its commercial and political objectives energetically, but as separately as possible: trade, in other words, should not be a political lever. He added a warning: ‘If we are not to mix them up, then we should not permit Asian countries to play the same game in reverse, threatening that access to their markets can be allowed only to the politically correct, to those prepared to be muzzled over human rights. We should not allow ourselves to be demeaned in this way – with Europe played off against America and one European country played off against another, and with all of us treading gingerly around the sensitivities of one or two countries, deferring to the proposition that open and vigorous discussion should be avoided at all costs.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It is not only westerners who feel uncomfortable about the use of ‘Asian values’ in foreign policy. Asean defends its members’ human-rights policies – or lack of them – on the basis of supposedly distinctive Asian cultural traditions, but Thai and Filipino diplomats have complained that they do not share in these purported traditions: on the contrary, they regard their own democratic values to be at least as valid as the authoritarian ones of Singapore or Indonesia.
In 1993, at the height of the ‘Asian values’ debate, it was pointed out that one reason for doubting the widely-held view that the twenty-first century would be a ‘Pacific Century’ was the lack of a genuine Asian value system with international appeal. ‘A strong economy is a precondition for domestic health, military strength, and global influence,’ wrote Morton Abramowitz, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a perceptive analysis of Asian hubris. ‘But in an interdependent world, those that aspire to lend their name to centuries must also have political strengths and value-systems that enable them to project influence persuasively. Economic power without acceptance of the responsibilities and burdens of leadership ultimately engenders divisiveness and hostility.’
(#litres_trial_promo) For all the speeches and articles extolling ‘Asian values’, there is little sign of an emerging Asian ethic that appeals to the peoples of Asia, let alone the outside world. However, the search for a stronger value system, whether it is labelled ‘The Asian Way’ or something else, will doubtless continue. Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani says the debate has only just begun, and will continue for another hundred years or more. Anand Panyarachun, who was twice prime minister of Thailand in the 1990s, bemoans the greed and consumerism of present-day south-east Asia but has not given up the search for something better. ‘Asian values today appear to be glorifying personal interest,’ he said. ‘Yet the essential objective of any ethical society must be the realization of public aspirations. In that quest, ethics cannot be divorced from good governance.’
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When governments pursue immoral or foolish policies cloaked in specious ethics, it is not just nasty. It may be dangerous for the countries concerned. Take the environment debate in south-east Asia. In 1994, Christopher Lingle, an American professor at the National University of Singapore, responded to a rather triumphalist article by Mahbubani that extolled the virtues of Asia and belittled Europe for its inability to extinguish the ‘ring of fire’ on its borders caused by political upheavals. Lingle thought this image more appropriate for south-east Asia because – as he pointed out in his article – Singapore and parts of Malaysia and Indonesia were at that moment choking from the smoke from Indonesian forest fires raging out of control. More significant than the fires themselves was the refusal of south-east Asian governments to do anything about them or the consequent pollution affecting their citizens because members of Asean are not supposed to interfere in each others’ affairs. ‘These Asian states seem more interested in allowing fellow governments to save face than in saving the lives of their citizens or preserving the environment,’ he wrote.
(#litres_trial_promo) He went on to discuss the dangers of not having a free media. As it happened, Lingle fled from Singapore because he was taken to court over the same article for questioning the independence of the judiciary. But his comments on the forest fires proved prophetic. Three years later, the fires – an annual occurrence typically started by logging companies, plantation developers and slash-and-burn farmers – were so severe that vast areas of southeast Asia were shrouded in smoke and some people suffered serious breathing difficulties. In Sarawak, one of the Malaysian territories on the island of Borneo, visibility was reduced to a few metres, airports, offices and schools were closed and the government declared a state of emergency. President Suharto of Indonesia apologized, but there was no immediate sign of a change of attitude among the proponents of ‘Asian values’; according to them, neither foreigners nor environmental groups within south-east Asia have any business interfering with the rights of governments and their business partners to cut down forests at an unsustainable rate and sell the wood.
The myopia of ‘Asian values’ theorists is not confined to environmental issues. Tommy Koh of Singapore visited Cambodia in 1996 and returned, he wrote, ‘with fewer criticisms than other recent observers’. He acknowledged that Cambodia had a long way to go on the journey to democracy and the rule of law, but implicitly criticized Michael Leifer of the London School of Economics for saying that Cambodia had regressed politically since a UN-organized election in 1993 and for calling the Cambodian government ‘a strong-arm regime that intimidates opponents and lets unscrupulous foreign interests exploit natural resources’.
