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An important weakness of the ‘Asian values’ argument is the difficulty of drawing sensible distinctions between ‘Asian’ and ‘western’ cultures, particularly during a period of rapid modernization in Asia. ‘Those people who said “let’s reject western values” said it while playing golf,’ comments Marsillam drily. ‘The problem with Lee Kuan Yew,’ adds Ammar Siamwalla, a political analyst at the Thailand Development Research Institute in Bangkok, ‘is that he’s not saying it’s a Singapore way; it’s an Asian way. The very term [Asia] was handed to us by the bloody Europeans!’25 Asians may be different from Europeans, but then the Thais are very different from the Vietnamese, just as the French are from the English. In fact there is more variety within the vast expanse of Asia than within Europe. The Indonesian archipelago alone is 5,000km from end to end and is home to about 200 million people. There are few similarities between a tribesman wearing a penis sheath in Irian Jaya and a businessman in a suit in Jakarta. Many of the nation states of Asia are recent creations, and a large number of their inhabitants are as likely to identify themselves with a clan, region, religion or ethnic group as with their countries – let alone a continent.
The same objection can be raised against the use of the words ‘West’ and ‘western’ to define the type of society which is supposedly the antithesis of ‘Asian values’. For the ‘Asian values’ argument to work well, it helps to believe in a homogeneous ‘West’ in social and political decline and apparently unable to reform itself. This means using state-controlled media to emphasize the bad, especially crime and poverty, while playing down the good – and gathering the bad news, it need hardly be said, from the independent western media in much the same way as Soviet anti-western propaganda operated during the Cold War. Thus Major Hla Min, a spokesman for the Burmese military junta, is able to compare Burmese housing policy favourably with the situation in the US. ‘There are people living in the United States in cardboard boxes,’ he says.26 That is the truth, but not the whole truth. And it is easy to demonize the thinking behind liberalism as well as its effects. In the words of Mahbubani: ‘To any Asian, it is obvious that the breakdown of the family and social order in the US owes itself to a mindless ideology that maintains that the freedom of a small number of individuals who are known to pose a threat to society (criminals, terrorists, street-gang members, drug-dealers) should not be constrained (for example, through detention without trial), even if to do so would enhance the freedom of the majority. In short, principle takes precedence over people’s well-being.’27 Many Americans would find the words ‘mindless ideology’ an offensive way to describe their belief in individual rights, especially when they are engaged in painful debates about how to improve a society which almost all admit has serious flaws.
Gloomy Americans and Europeans – harking back to a mythically crime-free, pre-industrial past – are almost as eager as south-east Asian leaders to condemn the social ills afflicting the West. Yet not all the news is bad. According to statistics on labour strikes from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, industrial conflict in the western industrialized countries fell in 1996 to its lowest level for more than fifty years.28 By 1998, the US was enjoying its seventh consecutive year of uninterrupted economic growth, and unemployment was at its lowest for twenty-five years. Again in the US, drug abuse seems to have stabilized; deaths from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) have started to fall for the first time since the epidemic began in 1981; and serious and violent crime has been declining for five years. Americans are far from being complacent about such trends; one newspaper even had the headline ‘Major Crime Falls Again, But Why?’.29 In the longer term, sociologists believe that the West will benefit from a reduction in crime because of lower birth rates and the consequent increase in the average age of its populations – a characteristic of prosperous industrial societies – while south-east Asia may for a few decades suffer the opposite; the obvious reason for this is that it is the young, not the elderly, who tend to break the law. In short, it is as foolish for Asian leaders today to stereotype western societies as crime-ridden and amoral as it was for Europeans in the past to dismiss Asians as ‘sensual’ and ‘cruel’. As Edward Said wrote, ‘the answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism’.30
Even the proponents of ‘Asian values’ have difficulties explaining what they mean. Almost as soon as the term came into popular use in the 1980s and 1990s, their arguments were plagued by inconsistencies which seemed to be more than the growing pains of a new philosophy. ‘Flexibility’ and ‘pragmatism’, for instance, are supposed to be among the advantages of Asian societies in both politics and business. So whereas a western business person would insist on contractual obligations, an east Asian would rely on personal contacts and informal relationships that would allow the deal to be done quickly. Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether the informality is simply left over from an earlier age when business was less complicated, this notion was seized upon in various south-east Asian countries to justify the kind of ‘informal’ contacts which are otherwise recognizable as corruption. Westerners are told not to inquire too closely into ‘Asian’ business practices: they cannot possibly understand them because of their different cultural background. A Thai army colonel, quoted in a ground-breaking independent academic survey of corruption in Thailand, justified the frequent exchanges of favours between military officers, politicians and businessmen by saying that ‘in our society we are not so individualistic like westerners. Thai people live together like relatives. Favour requires gratitude in return. Today we help him, in future days he helps us. It may not be proper in the whole process. But it is necessary.’31
Such self-serving interpretations of ‘Asian values’ do not go unchallenged. Anand Panyarachun, a former Thai prime minister who has been active in both business and politics, recently lamented the decline of ethical standards in Asia and what he called the ‘grim’ role models presented to the public: ‘Military figures negotiating business deals, narcotics traffickers serving as parliamentarians, respected business personalities consorting with shady characters, professors offering snake-oil remedies to age-old problems, clerics caught under the covers – laughable, were it all not so deplorable.’ Anand went on to heap scorn on ‘the current wave of support for our so-called Asian values’. He said: ‘As if a long-hidden treasure-trove had suddenly been discovered, Asian values are the fashionable topic of the day. Without specifying what, precisely, is being referred to, political leaders region-wide have grasped this fashionable term as a useful rhetorical device. They have used it to champion special interests, to oppose foreign competition, to curry favour with an all-too-often gullible public.’32 Anand proposed his own set of ‘Asian values’ – good governance, ensured by visionary, vigorous and responsible leadership; moral integrity; and service to others. There was nothing about ‘flexibility’ or curbing the press.
Another problem with ‘Asian values’ is the very different characters of the people who espouse them. In politics, for example, it would be hard to find two people more different than Malaysia’s Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore – the two best-known voices of the ‘Asian Way’. They are rivals, not friends. Mahathir is dynamic but erratic and given to emotional outbursts, boasting of the superior qualities of Asians and particularly Malaysians when things are going well, but bitterly blaming foreigners for conspiring against Asia when they go badly – as he did during the south-east Asian financial crisis of 1997. Lee is much more calculating. In the 1950s, when he was pressing Britain to end its colonial occupation of Singapore, he said: ‘If you believe in democracy, you must believe in it unconditionally. If you believe that men should be free, then, they should have the right of free association, of free speech, of free publication.’33 After taking power, he and his followers carefully modified their views as they slowly built the edifice of the ‘Asian Way’. They