From History’s Fools: The Pursuit of Idealism and the Revenge of Politics (David Martin Jones, 2022) p13
The first premonitory snuffling of a moral and political rejection of the universal claims of liberal democracy in the post-Cold War era may be found in the writings of Singaporean scholar bureaucrats like Kishore Mahbubani, Chan Heng Chee and Bilhari Kausikan, Harvard neo-Confucians like Tu Wei Ming, as well as philosophically inclined authoritarian leaders like Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohamad.
In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Pacific Rim’s ruling elites rejected both the political practices and constitutional legacy bequeathed to them by their former colonial masters. Pan-Asianists like Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad, Japan’s Shintaro Ishihara, and Singapore’s Goh Chok Tong and Kishore Mahbubani considered that, without elite guidance, democracy, equal rights and civil liberties caused economic stagnation, inner city chaos and monstrous regiments of single parent families.
The translation of these Western values to Pacific Asia, moreover, constituted an insidious ploy to undermine, or, worse, recolonize, the recently developed states of the Pacific littoral. Instead, the Pacific Asian region placed its faith in what might be termed post-Confucian characteristics, adumbrated in South East Asia by a syncretic overlay of moderate Islamic and Buddhist values such as ‘social cohesion, subordination of the individual, bureaucratic tradition and moralising certitude’, which as the Sinologist Roderick Macfarquhar observed, offered a ‘potent combination for development purposes’.
Moreover, the successful translation of traditional high cultural values of Islamic, Buddhist and Confucian provenance into programmes of mass education and bureaucratic practice offered the intriguing illiberal prospect of a potentially enduring, but distinctively Asian modernity that effectively synergized the extended order of the market with the bounded governance structures of traditional culture.
The translation of these Western values to Pacific Asia, moreover, constituted an insidious ploy to undermine, or, worse, recolonize, the recently developed states of the Pacific littoral. Instead, the Pacific Asian region placed its faith in what might be termed post-Confucian characteristics, adumbrated in South East Asia by a syncretic overlay of moderate Islamic and Buddhist values such as ‘social cohesion, subordination of the individual, bureaucratic tradition and moralising certitude’, which as the Sinologist Roderick Macfarquhar observed, offered a ‘potent combination for development purposes’.
Moreover, the successful translation of traditional high cultural values of Islamic, Buddhist and Confucian provenance into programmes of mass education and bureaucratic practice offered the intriguing illiberal prospect of a potentially enduring, but distinctively Asian modernity that effectively synergized the extended order of the market with the bounded governance structures of traditional culture.
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