Between Rising Powers: China, Singapore and India

VI. Asian Values

Asian Values 127 C H A P T E R VI ASIAN VALUES Singapore’s intensely political engagement of China, apparent in the previous chapters, went into higher gear during the Asian values debate of the late 1980s and the 1990s. Singapore’s international advocacy of Asian cultural exceptionalism, reflecting a conservative approach to democracy and human rights deemed to be beneficial to economic growth, paralleled its defence of Chinese political exceptionalism. Combined with an emphasis that emerged earlier on Confucian values, transmitted through Mandarin, as constituting a cultural ballast for Singapore’s Chinese majority, the Asian values initiative provided an expansive ideological framework for Singapore’s evolving relations with China. There, Confucianism had emerged as one of the strands of the new nationalism, which itself had arisen as a response to the Chinese Communist Party’s experience of crises of faith in Marxism and Maoism since the 1980s; the need to protect China from disintegration brought on by economic decentralization; 06 BRisingPowers Ch 6 8/1/07, 3:56 PM 127 128 Between Rising Powers the need to reverse the worship of Western culture; and a sense of pride in a great tradition that had allowed the country to reform itself without breaking up, unlike the Soviet Union.1 At the national level, Confucianism could be a panacea for the familiar anomie of individuals in the industrialized West that now was seeping into post-communist China.At the international level, a pragmatic or mainstream Confuciannationalism , contrasted with the conservative and irrational strains of Confucian fundamentalism2 that once had made the Chinese backward-looking, would help China to find its place in the world. The nonantagonistic premises of Confucianism were preferable to the social Darwinism on which Western civilization rested;3 moreover, the fact that Confucianism did not possess a strong sense of salvation gave the civilization an advantage in a world where “relations between different religions are competitive because there is only one God”.4 It is possible to detect in the Confucian revival in China a change in philosophical direction among members of the intelligentsia even as the state sought a new source of legitimacy in the rediscovery of a national past relevant to a post-communist future driven by the market. It would be questionable to claim that Singapore espoused Confucian or Asian values to advance its relations with rising China. However, the debate over values, in which Singapore participated eagerly, reflected the geopolitical contours of an era in which Asia’s economic growth and expectations, fueled in no small measure by China, made it possible for many Asian governments to advance their version of the possible. They did so against models that claimed to be universal but were rooted in the West’s historical experience and were 06 BRisingPowers Ch 6 8/1/07, 3:56 PM 128 Asian Values 129 transmitted globally through its dominance of the economic and ideological landscape. That Western dominance was being attacked by events and trends, from the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system and the oil price hikes of the 1970s to America’s retreat from Vietnam and the American overstretch required to maintain U.S. preponderance in the post-Cold War world. Paul Kennedy’s scholarly work on the rise and fall of the great powers became a popular bestseller in the 1980s by resonating with the anxious mood of the times in America.5 What caught the reading public’s attention was his assessment of the interaction between economics and strategy, of how the steady alteration of a great power’s position in peacetime is as important as how it fights in wartime. Grappling with the insecurities of decline, Americans and others in the West looked for the lessons that Kennedy had gleaned from half a millennium of history. Reassurance arrived when Francis Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy — victorious over the successively rival ideologies of hereditary monarchy, fascism and communism — might embody the end of human ideological evolution and constitute the final form of human government, heralding thereby the “end of history”.6 However, Fukuyama’s triumphalism was dealt a sobering blow by Samuel Huntington’s thesis that the West, far from enjoying victory at the end of history, faced a challenge to its very identity from a clash of civilizations.7 Huntington’s formulation encouraged interpretations of global trends focusing on cultural distinctiveness, particularly the distinctiveness associated with geographical regions. Asia, being transformed by...