The Trouble With Tigers: The Rise and Fall of South-East Asia

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 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.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 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.’16

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.’17

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.18 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.19

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.’20 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.’21

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.’22 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.’23

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.’24

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!’25 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.26 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.’27 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.28 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?’.29 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’.30