Revisiting Asian Values

Asian Values discourse was widely criticized for its cultural inauthenticity and instrumentalism. However, its similarity to an early twentieth-century conversation about the values of “Eastern civilization” places it within a particular history of cultural assertion, which emerges when Asian experience defies expectations about the direction of future progress. Both discourses reformulate historically-central Chinese ideas in more general terms to carve out space between regional ethnocentrism and mimeticism of the West. Although sometimes co-opted by authoritarian elites, they nevertheless articulate “Asian” characteristics as challenges that transform, rather than traditional values which supplement, “Western” processes of modernization.