The Return of Asian Values

For a few years in the mid-1990s, public intellectuals in Asia and the West engaged in heated debate around the idea of “Asian values.”

The advocates of Asian values, the most forthright of which included Singapore’s long-time Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, posited an interlocking set of propositions. First, they argued that there was a set of values common to many different Asian nations that differed in fundamental ways from the “individualistic” values of the West.

Second, they argued that these values helped explain the success of Asian societies, then undergoing a surging period of economic growth. Finally, they asserted the need for Asian political systems to reflect these values – and pushed back against Western attempts to promote democratic norms abroad.

As Lee Kuan Yew, who first used the phrase “Asian values” in a lecture in 1977, argued in 1994: “Eastern societies believe that the individual exists in the context of his family. He is not pristine and separate. The family is part of the extended family, and then friends and the wider society.”

You don’t hear much about Asian values these days. The idea prompted a powerful ideological counterreaction, including from many intellectuals within Asia, before the detonation of the Asian financial crisis in July 1997 brought the debate to a shuddering halt. Amid the rubble of the economic crash, Asian values were widely seen as discredited.

But the “Asian values” debate has recently returned – if it ever went away – in the context of escalating tensions between China and Western democracies. As the United States and European Union have hardened their positions toward China, decrying the country’s crackdown in Hong Kong and its treatment of minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet, China has responded with arguments that have a familiar ring. 

During recent talks with European officials, Chinese President Xi Jinping responded to criticisms about China’s human rights situation by arguing there was no universal path to human rights. “China does not accept human rights proselytizers and opposes double standards,” he said, according to Chinese state media service Xinhua. In a similar vein, a recent Chinese government White Paper claimed that “it is the right of every sovereign state to choose its own development path.” Whatever their reservations about China, these are both propositions with which Mahathir and Lee (were he still alive) would undoubtedly agree.

As many critics pointed out in the 1990s, the idea of “Asian values” was frequently vague to the point of incoherence, flattening out the differences both within and between Asian nations. It overlooked the fact that liberal values have a long lineage in Asian intellectual history, and continue to be advocated by many in the region. By claiming an “Asian” remit, it also flattened out the diversity of the world’s most populous region. Critics noted that the idea was all-too-convenient for those who advocated it, offering a ready-made excuse for their own illiberal or authoritarian brands of rule.

Yet the idea of “Asian values” has remained more durable than many of its opponents have been willing or able to admit. The reason for this is paradoxical. Despite the self-confidence of proponents like Lee and Mahathir, the assertion of “Asian values” in the 1990s was in certain key respects a defensive maneuver. Indeed, one of the reasons that Asian leaders felt a need to assert such an idea was the extent to which liberalism had assumed a hegemonic status in the years after the end of the Cold War.

It is hard to remember now, from within our own era of democratic crisis, but the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites briefly ushered in a world in which democratic capitalism was synonymous with modernity. In these heady years, as Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes wrote recently in the New York Times,

The major divide in the world was no longer between the “Free World” and Soviet Communism but between exemplary Western democracies and their struggling emulators in the East and South. The tacit assumption, at the time, was that the East would undergo a radical “transition” while the West would be cryogenically frozen in its victory laurels.

For all of its claims about the characteristics of Asian societies, the “Asian values” idea is more accurately seen as a hastily-erected bulwark against a missionary liberalism, spearheaded by the United States, that sought to remake the world in its own image.  The longevity of the “Asian values” idea turns not on its contradictory positive claims, but on its negative ones: The right to be free from Western models of development.

In this sense, the idea of “Asian values,” for all its evident shortcomings, can be situated in a longer tradition of post-colonial thought, in which Asian nations, reeling from the impacts of Western imperialism, groped about for non-Western alternatives to modernity. As the historian Anthony Milner argued in 1999, the Asian values project was one that involved “the systematic rejection of the West and a genuine search for alternative, internal value and culture resources.”

The former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani advanced a similar line of argument in his 1998 book “Can Asians Think?” Mahbubani wrote that Asian societies were involved in “an effort to define their own personal, social and national identities that enhances their sense of self-esteem in a world in which their immediate ancestors had subconsciously accepted the fact that they were lesser beings in the Western universe.”

In Southeast Asia, the region that was central to the original Asian values debate, this represents an important point of concord with a rising China that is otherwise viewed with distrust. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, both China and the Southeast Asian nations experienced the contusions of Western and Japanese imperial conquest, a legacy that has inculcated a fierce nationalism and an extreme allergy to any hint of outside “interference” in their affairs. The outcome of this today is predictable: When Southeast Asian countries have come under criticism from Western governments over democratic backsliding or human rights abuses, they almost always turn to China for economic and diplomatic support. When Xi Jinping asserts that “China does not accept human rights proselytizers,” many Southeast Asian leaders – if not most of them – agree with him.

This is important for Western governments to recognize if they are to establish a coherent strategy toward an increasingly assertive China. The original “Asian values” debate had relatively low stakes. This time, it forms the philosophical underpinning of an increasingly tense superpower rivalry.

In July, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo framed this rivalry in explicitly ideological terms, calling for “a new alliance of democracies” to root out the “the tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party.” In a speech delivered at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California, Pompeo harangued “the freedom-loving nations of the world” to close ranks against the threat of Chinese authoritarianism.

If the forgotten debates of the 1990s are any indication, this Manichean vision is unlikely to win much support among the Southeast Asian governments. All of them have reasons to fear and oppose China’s behavior – but few yearn for liberal prescriptions.