Asian values
Asian values refer to a cultural and philosophical framework proposed in the 1990s, primarily by political leaders in East and Southeast Asia, to explain the region's rapid economic growth without embracing Western-style democracy. Proponents, such as former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, argued that traditional Asian virtues like thrift, communalism, and respect for authority contrast sharply with Western individualism and personal freedom. This perspective emerged as a response to criticism regarding the lack of democracy and human rights in these rapidly developing nations, asserting that Western standards were culturally specific rather than universal.
Critics of the Asian values argument contend that it often serves as a justification for authoritarian regimes and the suppression of democratic freedoms. They question how these supposedly long-standing values could suddenly emerge in conjunction with significant economic success in the late twentieth century. The discussion gained prominence as Asian economies thrived, but the narrative was significantly challenged by the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which demonstrated vulnerabilities in these economies and led to political shifts in several countries. Despite its diminished prominence today, the concept of Asian values continues to inspire dialogue about the relationship between culture, governance, and economic development in the region.
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Asian values
“Asian values” became a term of cultural debate in the 1990s when it was put forward by leading states people and thinkers in East and Southeast Asia as a way of explaining that region’s rapid economic development in the absence of Western-style democracy. The argument was that Asians traditionally value thrift, hard work, communalism, and respect for authority, in contrast to the Western emphasis on individualism and maximizing personal freedom. The idea was the subject of high-profile debates in the press and in scholarly circles for a number of years, until the Asian financial crisis of 1997 blunted the idea of unstoppable Asian economic growth.
Overview
The idea of Asian values was articulated most forcefully in the early 1990s by former Singaporean prime minister Lee Kwan Yew, who led his country for more than thirty years beginning in 1959. Lee oversaw stellar economic growth and increases in standards of living in his country, while maintaining fairly tight restrictions on political and social freedoms for his people. Along with Singapore, a number of other prominent Asian economies, including those of China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, achieved rapid economic growth in the latter twentieth century without the accompanying political liberalization that modernization theory predicted.
In response to criticism that their economic successes were undercut by their failure to adhere to universal standards of democracy and human rights, Lee and other Asian leaders began to assert that the standards in question were not in fact universal but rather a Western construct that was not necessarily valid in the Asian context. Asians, they said, were naturally more deferential to authority and knew that the individual could not be understood apart from the whole—that sometimes individual desires must be subordinated to the greater good. They also suggested that pressure to democratize was not part of some inevitable march toward freedom but just another form of Western imperialism. They claimed that it was strong government authority that had allowed them to modernize their economies and that introducing democracy and full political freedom threatened to derail that progress.
Other political and social commentators countered that authoritarian Asian leaders were adopting high-flown cultural rhetoric to justify arbitrary imprisonment of political opponents, harsh working conditions, and curbs on basic freedoms of speech and association for their people. They also questioned how supposedly centuries-old Asian values could suddenly manifest in rapid economic growth after decades of dormancy.
The Asian values argument attracted attention because of the region’s undeniable growth in economic power in the late twentieth century. However, scholarly counterarguments called the theoretical underpinnings of the idea into question, and then the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which had ripple effects across the region for years, undercut the argument for Asian values as a basis for Asian economic success. Perhaps most notably, the financial crisis led to the fall of Indonesian strongman Suharto, one of the region’s leading proponents of “authoritarian developmentalism,” and subsequently to the gradual implementation of democratic reforms in Indonesia.
Although not as prominent as it was in the 1990s, the idea of Asian values remains a topic of social, economic, and political discussion in the twenty-first century.
Bibliography
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