Revisiting the 'Asian values' debate

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By Peter Y. Paik

In light of the rise of China and the severe divisions ― political and social ― afflicting the United States, it is instructive to reflect back on the “Asian values” debate of the mid-1990s.

That debate pitted Lee Kuan Yew, who had just stepped down as the prime minister of Singapore, against Kim Dae-jung, who, four years later, would be elected president of Korea. It was sparked by an interview given by Lee in 1994 where he defended the “soft” authoritarian regime he had established in Singapore against calls for greater freedom and democracy.

Lee held that it was necessary to restrict individual rights to preserve social and political harmony. Against Western individualism, he pitted the institution of the family as the essential “building brick” of society. He argued that political regimes come and go, dynasties rise and fall, but throughout these upheavals, the family serves as the “life raft” for preserving civilization.

The founder of Singapore thus reproached the West for adopting a worldview that he characterized as both naive and destructive. Western individualism is based on a fundamentally faulty philosophical premise, namely the illusion that society can thrive without a shared view of what is right and wrong. “There is a certain thing called evil,” Lee observed, “and it is not the result of being the victim of society.”

The severity of crime, illegal drug use, homelessness, and social disintegration in American society can be traced back to the decision of Westerners to “abandon an ethical basis for society” and to allow the individual to behave as he pleases, without regard for the common good, Lee argued.

Against Lee's defense of collective well-being, the future president of Korea, countered that Asian cultures themselves contain the roots for sustaining freedom and democracy. The philosophy of Meng-tzu, the teachings of Confucianism and Buddhism, and the “Tonghak” movement of the late Joseon period all stress the need for the government to be accountable to the people.

Permitting social mobility and equality of opportunity, symbolized by the civil service examination, was recognized by emperors and kings as indispensable to the legitimacy of their rule. In Confucian philosophy, criticizing the sovereign whenever he acts wrongly constitutes a “paramount duty” of the scholar-official. The aspirations of the people of Asia for freedom and equality are genuine, and find ample support in their philosophical traditions.

This debate unfolded against the backdrop of the end of the Cold War, when there was widespread confidence that democratization would be the wave of the future. The majority of Asian countries had then become democracies. Lee and Singapore struck many as being outliers on the wrong side of history. A regime based on invasive social engineering, where chewing gum was illegal, seemed an eccentric oddity when individual freedom appeared to be advancing everywhere, now that communism had fallen.

But what are we to take from this debate today, when an authoritarian state, China, is poised to overtake the U.S. as the world's top economy by 2030, when democracy has failed to take hold across the Middle East, and when the social disintegration Lee decried in the U.S. has grown so much worse?

Kim appears to have been correct in his view that Asian nations can become successful democracies. Indeed, in certain respects, democracy appears to be healthier in (South) Korea than in the U.S. There is an active culture of protest and a certain degree of respect for freedom of speech. While political differences evoke strong emotions among Koreans, the belief that it is necessary to censor views with which one disagrees is becoming less widespread among the public.

Thus, Lee appears to have been prescient in questioning the view that democracy, cultural diversity, political stability and economic prosperity automatically go together. When the differences in culture and viewpoint become too great, a society may well decide to sacrifice freedom for the sake of peace. Its economic well-being becomes curtailed as well, as more of its wealth must go towards providing security to the people.

But there is one area in which both Lee, the founder of an economically successful and ethnically and religiously diverse city-state, and Kim, the longtime fighter for democracy, would find themselves on the same side. Both espouse a basic moral principle that would make them targets of cancel culture if they had been Americans living today.

For Lee and Kim base their differing political views on the Confucian maxim, “Xiushen qijia zhiguo pingtianxia,” according to which, good government follows from the individual keeping himself and his household in order. But liberals in the West today reject any call for individual responsibility, insisting that it can only be a devious trick aimed at preventing the political changes that will save the oppressed.

One thus discovers what I argue is a sharp fault line between Asian culture and contemporary Western liberalism. Asians will wonder, how could developing a greater sense of individual responsibility and personal discipline ever be a bad thing, no matter what regime is in power? Would not cultivating moral and political virtue enable the oppressed to gain power and exercise it responsibly? Such common sense, however, is threatened in the West by what can only be considered a cultural revolution, which will be the subject of a future article.

Peter Y. Paik (

pypaik@gmail.com

) is a professor in the English Department at Yonsei University. The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.