The Young Republic on "Asian Values":


A: Saw the sanest piece of writing in local media, in ages. Thanks XXX!

I'm constantly annoyed at how often the "Asian values" argument comes up.

What makes it worse is that my current employers seem to seriously entertain the assumption of some unified set shared by all Asians before the "White Man" arrived on our unified, harmonious, Asian shores. "Core Values"? Pffft.

B: It's still rather disconcerting that an ideology essentially cooked up by (western educated) politicians like Mahathir and Lee kuan Yew, and spread by ( western educated) apostles like Tommy Koh and Kishore Mahbubani, have once again become vogue arguments. Were they not supposed to have been killed off in that very Asian financial disaster of 1997-98?

C: Yeah, though Mahathir and Mahbubani both went to NUS...should they be considered Western-educated?

Anyway, I see the Asian values debate as a sign that we are entering a new age of nationalism, that if used well can actually be good for Asia. It is no accident, just one of those tide turns of history that happen every few decades. To me, if we can assign to "Asian" values bold new reinterpretations, we can create forces of good.

D: I believe The Rise Of India And China, that wonderful catch-all story for slow news days, has led to the re-awakening of int'l interest in Asia and hence has revived the Asian values argument. What I find particularly annoying is that publications which normally uphold normal journalistic standards of 'asking the tough questions' become transformed into passive goldfish sucking up every word which proceeds from the mouths of media-appointed gurus like Kishore Mahbubani and Lee Kuan Yew.

Not long ago there was a laughably silly article by Mahbubani on The Rise Of Asia which seemed to have been written by someone incapable of spouting anything more lucid than oft-repeated platitudes and generalisations. Mahbubani repeated the usual pieties about colonialism etc etc but I was very irritated by his claim that historians are puzzled by why, in his words, 'London not Beijing was the centre of the world'. Actually, historians aren't puzzled. In fact no one is puzzled. For Mr Mahbubani's information, there were these little things called the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. I trust these events are less mystical to Young Republic readers than they are to Mr Mahb. Mahb then went to on to mention that many Asian countries 'came to grief' as a result of 'experimenting' with 'Western' forms of government. These countries were obviously too numerous to be named, but my poor brain seems to be unable to name a single one! How strange! Mr Mahb must be so much cleverer than I.

This silly article was printed by Time Magazine as though it were the gospel truth on Asia, with no countervailing points of view to combat Mr Mahb silliness. This seems to me to be very bad journalism -- that is, even worse than what one normally finds in Time.

B: Or perhaps he was being very "asian" by not muttering "The Philippines". Which despite nearly two decades of freedom and democracy frankly hasn't been able to get its act together.

Moreover, in another sense ( although this might not have been what Mr Mahb meant), civil liberties and democracies did indeed 'come to grief' in many Asian and African states that inherited a Westminister parliamentary system.

I have little respect for Time magazine myself. As its name suggests, it seems to be staffed full of people trying to catch the prevailing intellectual disease of the day- the more headily sweeping the better, it seems.

D: Strangely, life in democratic Philippines seems to be much better than in the days of Ferdinand Marcos. I wonder why though. Perhaps it is because people find that shooting on unarmed protesters is rather frowned upon these days.

>Moreover, in another sense ( although this might not have been what Mr Mahb meant),
>civil liberties and democracies did indeed 'come to grief' in many Asian and African
>states that inherited a Westminister parliamentary system.

No, it wasn't what he meant. He meant that the Asian countries came to grief as a result of adopting democracy.

Me: The Philippines is a favourite counter-example for those espousing the joys of repression, but perhaps its ubiquity is an indication of the weakness of this argument.

By a curious confusion, some critics have moved from the proposition that there are exceptions which prove the rule to the proposition that exceptions *are* the rule.

Equally curiously, those espousing the joys of repression inevitably either live in non-repressive areas, or benefit from the fruits of repression, given that they are associated with or part of the machinery of repression.

Surely it makes more sense to compare a country as it transitions between and settles into different political stages than compare two different countries with very different politico-socio-economic contexts.