Asia's Fate: A Response to the Singapore School
Mini Teaser: The economic success of East and Southeast Asia challenges the verities of Western historical uniqueness.
The economic success of East and Southeast Asia challenges the verities of Western historical uniqueness. It shatters the ethnocentric notion, which even Asian writers accepted as late as the 1960s, that industrialization is a reward for Protestantism. The East Asian Miracle is taking place within quite another ethic, and some of the practices within the region would have made a Victorian mill-owner blush. The signal questions about the phenomenon are: will it go on; what type of polity and society will eventually settle down alongside the Western world; and what will be the implications for the Third World of this other ethnocentrism: growth-through-Confucianism.
The Singapore School
Some East and Southeast Asian officials are busily dismissing aspects of Western culture, notably democracy and human rights. A "Singapore School" is arguing vigorously in Western newspapers and journals against what it sees as human rights campaigns mounted by a West which it thinks is spiritually, and to all intents and purposes financially, bankrupt. The "School" includes Lee Kuan Yew, elder statesman of Singapore, Bilahari Kausikan of the Singaporean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean diplomat. Their arguments are meant to apply to the whole of "Confucian" Asia and probably beyond, not merely to the prodigiously successful city-state of Singapore. Their attitude must concern anyone raised in the Western tradition, whatever our own backslidings, for they are insistent that we keep our noses out of what they see as solely their affairs. They rely on persuading us that the greatest good of the greatest number in Asia absolutely requires the use of repressive political methods.
Lee Kuan Yew expresses these ideas trenchantly and with a greater sense of the historical processes than most other leaders show. His pragmatism is seductive. We have however to be careful: the power of the arguments and the learning behind them invites, and properly invites, a closer scrutiny than the pontifications of more ordinary politicians would deserve. In debating terms, Mr. Lee and the Singapore School are the ones with whom we have to contend, but other leading figures throughout the region are the ones likely to practice on the grand scale what the Singaporeans preach. Lee Kuan Yew may influence them and rationalize their actions, but he cannot control those who may take his arguments as an invitation to an open-ended license which a close reading shows he does not intend.
Mr. Lee has given his observations on how the world is unfolding, together with opinions on the desirability of different approaches to growth and development, to interviewers for several Western newspapers and magazines. His ideas are complex--the subject is complex--and not easily summarized, partly because the interviewing mode tends to mingle historical observations and value judgements. The core of the position seems to be that values are learned differently in West and East, with one's mother's milk; that Asian leaders are right to put the reduction of material suffering first, even if they have to be brutal in order to attain that goal; and that, although Asian societies as they develop will inevitably induce more participatory politics, this will be extremely slow and its hastening should not be encouraged by outsiders, for fear of blurring goals and creating disorder.
Mr. Lee comes out strongly against brutality for its own sake but displays special sympathy for Deng Xiao Ping, on the grounds of the Chinese leader's personal suffering and the enormous difficulty of managing a population as large as China's, especially when parts of the economy are growing fast. It is possible to conclude that, although both he and Kishore Mahbubani deprecate the extent of the force used at Tiananmen Square, Mr. Lee comes uncomfortably close to an endorsement of current Chinese policing methods.
Interviewed by the New Political Quarterly (Winter 1992), Mr. Lee said that in China "there can't possibly be a policeman for every city block, so one must depend on the mass impact of [the televised executions of criminals] to bring about a semblance of order." But, on the contrary, the big population and low wages of China are precisely what might permit there to be a policeman on every block, if that is necessary. For all the genuine difficulties, it is not obvious that fear-inducing public demonstrations of ruthlessness are the only way such a country can or should be governed.
As to the West, Mr. Lee is well informed. After all, he knows English society from the inside. He is not sympathetic to Western governments who have failed to stem the worst social abuses and extreme indulgences. Why should he be? Nevertheless, the relevant issue is whether Western democracy is capable of a sufficient revulsion against its own excesses to expunge them. Mr. Lee seems to think this will happen, but only perforce. "I truly believe the process is Darwinian," he says. "If adopting Western values diminishes the prospects for the survival of a society, they will be rejected."
The suggestion that the indulgence of special interests will fatally weaken the whole of society is rarely entertained by the chattering classes in the West, but again the real issue is whether Western-style democracy or Asian-style authoritarianism is likely to prove the better antidote in the long term. As far as Asia goes, its problems and vulnerability on the road to riches mean, in Mr. Lee's view, that Western liberal ideas are inappropriate. Individual rights will simply get in the way of social progress. Do not indulge them.
While Lee Kuan Yew's opinions have the highest profile, all the Singaporean critics are tough and their views make uncomfortable reading for any Westerner. The most detailed version is to be found in Mahbubani's article, "The West and the Rest," in The National Interest (Summer 1992). Similar, though less subtle, assertions of East Asian exceptionalism can be found in the utterances of politicians throughout the Asian-Pacific region, from Malaysia and Indonesia to mainland China. We need to decide whether the claims that heavy-handed policies are indispensable in East Asia are Realpolitik or special pleading.
The authoritarianism of this region is not uniform, but then neither is Western democracy. Both philosophies may be seen as ideal types. The question is which of the two most often approaches its highest expression, the benign rule of a philosopher-king in one case, participatory democracy in the other. We may start with history, in which authoritarian regimes have repeatedly destroyed themselves, whereas much of the sound and fury in the democracies may surely be regarded as inherent in self-correction. Contrary to the Singapore School, we may be forgiven for thinking that democracy has historically shown more staying-power.
If, however, the efforts of that School succeed at insulating Asia from effective criticisms of its human rights' behavior, a new
species of society could arise in the Far East. The social form would be mass prosperity under authoritarian control. If they can guarantee growth, those in charge would be able to go on herding society this way or that by means of instruments of government ranging from muzzling the press to arbitrary arrest, forced labor, and public executions, as in China today.
Prosperity of itself supposedly justifies actions like these. It is a sufficient condition. It transforms arbitrariness into the "good
government" which, we are assured, is the choice of a populace made comfortable with authoritarian rule by its history, but which we are also told remains too uneducated to choose wisely for itself. Presumably only if growth fails will the Mandate of Heaven be removed from the wise rulers, the philosopher-kings.
There have been notorious totalitarian aberrations in the West but they were probably inherently unstable, and the rest of the West resisted and even struggled at great cost to eliminate them. Is the West (a better social than political catchall, of course) now to stand by while East Asia uses abhorrent methods to help it overtake in the fast lane of world trade? Are East Asian opinion-makers correct in arguing that the expectations and problems of their massive region, coupled with what they see as the self-interest and hypocrisy of the West, exempt them from moving towards representative government, independent law and individual freedoms? Are their acts of suppression truly "internal matters"? Are there really no universals?
To consider these matters, we will first examine the authoritarian case and then sketch three conceivable outcomes of the Far East's great experiment. Two of these futures will be unappealing to liberal Western eyes. The remaining possibility implies not merely that Asians are far from being as different from Westerners as their leaders declare, but that growth-with-authoritarianism may prove to be self-limiting.
If this more cheerful prospect obtains, the first East Asian generation to experience rapid economic growth, and its authoritarian
leaders, will have been but actors in a passing play. What happened to them will have been transient and historically contingent, not the working out of some indefeasible sinitic trait. Leaders who currently employ severe methods to reach the goal of growth may then still wish to claim that the end justifies the means, but success will have changed the context of political life. It will have had unintended consequences: on this showing, a generation or two down the track East Asia will have an evolved political clientele living amidst relative plenty. In this event, the most that will remain to be discussed will be whether one or two postwar generations should have had to suffer the chastisements of leaders chasing after growth. Such a debate will exude all the lack of urgency that surrounds, say, the dispute over whether the British standard of living fell during the early industrial revolution. East Asia will have the leisure for speculation like that.
Unfortunately the other two possibilities are more dire. Before we turn to them we should however dissect the authoritarian case in its own terms. For the moment it represents reality, and the assumptions and propositions involved throw light on its likely stability as well as its merits or demerits.
No Sunset Clause
The most prominent advocate of authoritarianism, then, is Lee Kuan Yew. He depicts human existence explicitly as a Darwinian struggle in which the West is close to eliminating itself through its private indulgences, proliferating special interests and slack leadership. The Singapore School is willing to debate the issue in these terms, which is novel for cautious people previously disinclined to traffic in abstractions. More significantly, Beijing has been consulting closely with Singapore (population 3 millions) in a search for the secret of retaining political control while permitting 1.2 billion people to get rich, or at any rate much less poor.
Should the authoritarian experiment come off, and especially if the West stands by without attending to its own social sores, moral as well as economic primacy may pass into East Asian hands. The proof of the pudding will be that "good" government, by which Mr. Lee's circle means its own hard-headed and unchallengeable control, will have delivered the material goods and will demand the moral reward: continued righteous authority. East Asia, then, will not simply dominate the world economy within a generation but become the model of choice for less-developed countries, in social mores as well as policies. The Less Developed Countries (LDCs) will look East, not West, in ways unwarranted since the early Ming dynasty.
Order is the touchstone of the Singaporeans' argument. Without order, they say, there can be no certainty or even probability of economic advance. If order breaks down, at least in China, there will be what China's rulers have always feared, turmoil, and maybe a resumption of the suffering, starvation, and warlordism that in any case lie only a couple of generations back. Rather than that, let the people feel the smack of "good" government and live under the sway of philosopher-kings.
These are not irrelevant matters. Shorn of the Singapore School's contempt for the West; shorn of specious appeals to an unchangeable sinitic personality and "4,000 years of Chinese history"; and even absent the self-interest of officials close enough to power to bathe in its glow, East Asia does indeed walk a tightrope over an abyss. With fourteen million additional unemployed peasants fetching up in China's interior cities every year, the authorities do have a duty as well as an interest in maintaining public order. The threat of turmoil among the masses, rather than student protest, was probably Deng's fear when he reacted in Tiananmen Square.
Less clear is it that detention without trial, a muzzled press and other unfreedoms arise from a similar threat in tiny Singapore. What is more, it has not been shown that economic growth would decelerate in places like Singapore given greater democracy and more popular rights. A distaste for what some individuals might do with their lives, given the choice, is being permitted to obscure the benefits of freedoms. Those benefits include wider, potentially self-correcting, public discussion of the methods and aims of policy.
The authoritarian argument is by no means fully persuasive. Were the case to be granted, safeguards to ensure a genuine intention of ultimately relaxing the grip would still be needed--since, whatever the justifications for control at present, it is disingenuous to
imply that Asians positively like regimes where political activity must take place beneath a Damocles Sword. It is dangerous to believe that Asians can be expected to remain quiet for ever under leaders who retain office by such means, at any rate without steadily increasing surveillance and policing. "Preference falsification" of the type that marked Soviet rule may make it seem so, but authoritarian rulers are likely to be told what they wish to hear.
Where, then, is the sunset clause? Lee Kuan Yew gives varying answers, suggesting that it may be one hundred years before Asians can be trusted with individual Western-style freedoms though claiming elsewhere that, whereas China, India and Indonesia's people will need ninety years to learn how to handle modernity in a balanced way, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore may need only thirty years. He thus foreshadows the emergence of "universal" values after a century even
in China. This seems to admit that individual rights will finally come, though with luck not yet, rather like St. Augustine's chastity, and that when they do they will not cause society to decay as it has in the West. There is no acknowledgement that the already-educated may be trusted to compete responsibly for the votes of the less educated.
The standing and motives of Western countries with respect to the promotion of democracy and human rights are not, for present purposes, much to the point. The supposed motives are dismissed by the Singapore School as commercial (attempts to raise labor costs in competing countries), culturally imperialistic, and hypocritical (given the social problems in the West itself and its willingness to indulge similar authoritarian behavior on behalf of the Saudi Arabias of the world). The Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir, calls for a Europe Watch, an America Watch and an Australia Watch, if there is to be an Asia Watch.
The tabescence of society in the West is indeed much as these people portray it. The record of unemployment, homelessness, beggary, and crime does not need to be rehearsed. Not the cost but a lack of will gets in the way of solutions; Western countries were poorer in the late 1940s and 1950s, but they were then more cohesive, safer, and more salubrious. The West's present faults do shame us. They erode, though they do not quite nullify, our right to carp at others. Even to many Western eyes the spectacle of a German leader bargaining for human rights in Beijing must seem ludicrous. The line-up for an Oxford lecture series on human rights, which includes one historian known for describing the executions of the French Terror as "glorious," must give rise to suspicions that this is another of those issues which underemployed Western Marxists would like to capture. At the other political extreme is the surely cynical "cautioning" of Washington by the Australian Prime Minister not to take a hard-line stance on Indonesian human rights' issues.
Defects of Authoritarianism
But two wrongs do not make a right, and the injustices in West and East remain incommensurable. Authoritarianism fails to address its own greater defects. Its proponents ask us to forget the processes of government and measure only by outcomes, defined as superior materialism and social order. The West is enjoined to keep its mouth shut and put its own shabby house in order. Admonitions and trade sanctions directed anywhere else are "interferences."
An inconsistency soon appears in what the Singapore School, at least, would wish the West to do. Withdrawing the American navy from the eastern seas would not suit it at all. The United States, then, must pay to hold the ring, for it has interests in open sea-lanes and Asian peace, but it must abstain from criticizing those for whom it thus bears the external shield. Presumably Asia may then get on with becoming still more competitive, without footing the bill for maritime policing.
The more central problems which the stated case for authoritarianism fails to address, beyond the lack of a clear statement of how and when its dissolution may be anticipated, are as follows. First, no guarantee is offered, nor of course can be offered, that the growth which it claims to engender will go on being delivered. Continued growth would require the leadership to be able always to resist pleas for bail-outs from special interests, ignore false signals, and place only winning bets on the industries it would like to promote or see wound down. The economic prospects which appear so good are actually
ambiguous. Serious miscalculations have been made, notably the Japanese persistence with mainframes when the United States shifted to personal computers. With industry policy, any mistake will be industry-wide. East Asia has been lucky, but if mistakes are made the non-market disciplines on its policy-makers may be too weak to offset them.
Authoritarian government has delivered economic growth in much of post-war island and peninsular Asia, but almost never did so
throughout the economic history of the Confucian world. "Old-style Confucianism of the wrong sort" is the Singapore School's response, but we may suspect that the circumstances of the post-war world have more to do with modern success than does a style of government which, as of old, involves the suppression of freedoms and an absence of impartial law.
Mr. Lee believes that guanxi (connections) substitute for law. Guanxi always have been a substitute for law in China, but incompletely. I believe that the lack of contract law was one cause of China's long history of expansion without real growth, and may yet restrict the market. The current enthusiasm for investing in China, though new in scale and sustained because the Overseas Chinese entered when the West and (less so) Japan were scared off by Tiananmen, is not entirely unprecedented. The Overseas Chinese could develop guanxi and make money by exploiting imperfections in Chinese markets. For Westerners, this virtual feeding frenzy should not obscure the remaining distortions and risks of investing in a country where personal and political contacts replace black-letter law.
A more abstract problem connected with the authoritarian style pertains to creativity. The emphasis on order, it is reasonable to
think, is mistaken: originality and novelty have typically flourished in individualistic, even disorderly, societies. At the moment the
instrumentalist approach which diverts so much Asian talent into engineering, computer science and the like is paying off. Overseas Chinese families need no encouragement to oblige their children to enter these fields; they know life is hard and livings have to be made. Harsh experience makes them risk-averse. Authoritarianism, with its pragmatic orientation, reinforces this trait, which however is a rigidifying one.
Technologically there is plenty of catching up to be done. There is such a backlog of unadopted technology that it is possible for the Chinese, in particular, to ride free on Western inventions, adding little more than the polish which can come, as it came in post-war Japan, from reverse engineering. But this will not do in the end. East Asia will not come to contribute its equilibrium share to world science and technology (the share proportionate to the size of its population) if it remains so defensive. It will not get back to the days when China was the world's creative leader, under that remarkable dynasty, the Song.
Wesley, Schumpeter, and Quebec
The emphasis in the last few paragraphs has been on historically conditioned current attitudes and behavior. Our expectations depend on whether we think that historical conditioning is hard to change, or whether fresh incentives can alter the behavior of rising age groups. The task for authoritarian governments may turn out to be managing prosperity's unintended enfeebling of motivation. Thinkers in the Western world long ago became anxious about such effects. John Wesley and Joseph Schumpeter worried, respectively, that nonconformity and capitalism would undermine their moral foundations through success. Why work as hard as your father if you are already well-off?
This is a test which has scarcely begun to confront the Confucian world. The Japanese are close to the brink, but their engrained
attitudes are being challenged in a recession which blurs the rise in consumerism and masks any softening of the work ethic. If we believe, as historians often do, in a kind of cultural fixity, we will discount the new tendencies and rely on inherent "Japaneseness" to predict what the Japanese may do. If, like economists, we expect people to respond to changing incentives we will anticipate that novel tides may wash over East Asia.
When such things start to happen, they can happen fast--with what are known as "Quebec Effects," after the rapid, unheralded decline of Roman Catholic observances in 1960s Quebec. We should note, too, a sizeable difference between modern East Asia and the West of Wesley's day or even Schumpeter's: East Asian incomes are rising across whole societies faster than anywhere or anywhen in history. The experiment as a totality is unprecedented. The consequences too may be bigger and quicker than ever before.
The Singapore School takes the culturist line. It thinks Asians and Westerners will go on being fundamentally different. It is
disinclined to accept that the so-called "Western" values of individualism are really universally wanted. In response we may urge
that Western societies have been able to express individualist and democratic values largely because, in comparative world terms, their history has been rather benign. The history of their political and legal ideas has also been distinctive, certainly, but this is too
much dwelt on in standard accounts. The special enabling feature was the experience of relative ease and prosperity, notably during the nineteenth century, which permitted democracy to evolve. The Singapore School has not faced up to the way in which the more successful parts of East Asia are already changing in similar directions, nor how much faster that evolution is likely to prove in the twin circumstances of faster growth than the West ever managed and the far greater integration of the modern world. Some groups are already tentatively exhibiting preferences for supposedly "Western" curiosities like multi-party elections, more leisure, and a cleaner environment. The prior existence of Western role models will speed up the process.
Just as authoritarian systems fail to specify how they will get down from the tiger's back, they also fail, almost by definition, to
answer the age-old question about forms of government, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?--or as Marc Bloch put it with respect to Europe's achievement, who will bind the ruler? This issue, then, is accountability, that is to say not only when but how rulers are to be made accountable. With respect to how and when the authoritarian task will be completed, Lee Kuan Yew admits that East Asian societies may become individualistic, here after thirty years, there after ninety years, but he does not say what will be the means. As to binding the ruler, the Singapore School is obliged to be silent, since authoritarianism would cease to be authoritarian if it submitted to restraint.
Related to these dilemmas is a third set. Who is to choose the leaders? How may a society ensure that one philosopher-king will be succeeded by another? Few societies are as fortunate as Singapore in having had as ruler a genuine philosopher like Mr. Lee and making the transition from his direct control so smoothly. But Singapore, for all its drama, is very small; generalizing its methods or replicating its luck on the scale of China cannot be easy, as Mr. Lee is the first to say. That, however, is the challenge.
Peace and order are certainly universal desiderata. Ironically, we may suspect that East Asians, whom we are told admire "good
government," may be placing a short-run bet in choosing the authoritarian route, since every so often--more often than in the
democracies--transition to a new leadership is likely to be nastily contested. Orderly succession is nowhere as satisfactorily guaranteed as in Western parliamentary democracies. Historically the competing nation-states of Europe out-performed any ancient or oriental empire, despite the economies of scale which favored empires. Democratic states also have a good chance of out-lasting authoritarian ones. Authoritarianism, like empires, may prove to be better on paper than in practice. Of course, if society is no more than the vector of a Darwinian struggle, no matter, and all these concerns are otiose. The fittest will announce himself, which however does not promise that he will turn out to be as much of a philosopher as he intends to be a king. We have yet to see whether the crown will be calmly and lastingly handed on after Deng dies in China or Suharto vacates his position in Indonesia.
The Limitations of Scenarios
To cast a cold eye on the quality of East Asian societies a generation from now we require more than a casual means of canvassing the future. Yet, as the world slides off the euphoric cusp following the Cold War, seeing ahead becomes chancier than ever. Business analysts are still riding the chariot of globalization whereas foreign policy analysts are starting to cry "whoa." Both offer forecasts and scenarios. Before coming to the different visions which the parties espy, how do these approaches differ?
Scenarios are forecasts made by people who do not trust their judgement. Why ever not? The reason seems to be that whereas it is possible to believe one has identified inner logics propelling society down particular tracks (the logic of the Product Cycle will
be handy for thinking about East Asia), no-one has found a way of telling when the train may jump the rails. Notice that whereas
foreign policy analysts leave room for shocks (like wars), business analysts often tend to imply that the mood of the moment will last indefinitely.
The timing of the system-breaks is what defeats us all. Thus an econometrician named Looney projected the national income of Iran through the 1970s and into the early 1980s but failed to predict the fall of the Shah in the midst of his series. Otherwise, no doubt, his model and data were to be relied on. The difficulty, then, is to convert scenarios into forecasts proofed against such shocks, given that international politics may snarl up the red carpet being unrolled by the business commentators.
The upshot is that we can suggest scenarios but only guess at forecasts, which is what will be done here. The entire East Asian
region is various enough to be experiencing disparate rates of growth and to have divergent interests, incompatible regimes, differences in culture, which make generalizing somewhat artificial. There are however some central tendencies with which we may make a start. Thus three startlingly different outcomes for East Asia as a whole over the next generation may be, first, a strategically-pessimistic outcome in which after some growth there is a breakdown into conflict, even war; second, an economically optimistic outcome in which growth occurs, the economies become still more competitive than they are already, but political cultures do not much change; and third, a politically optimistic outcome in which growth continues, slowing down as each economy approaches current average oecd levels, meanwhile softening those elements in Asian political life for which Western distaste is evident in the so-called human rights crusade.
This last scenario should not be thought of as "Westernization." Rather it would be the release, in conditions of prosperity, of a
latent universal demand for democracy and individual freedoms. Surprisingly, given the stereotypes and lacunae in the text-books,
Asian history does reveal traces of local democracy and at least one major movement, the self-governing movement in early
twentieth-century China. Circumstances regularly suppressed these "sprouts of democracy" and they never managed to capture the high polities, yet they did occur. East Asians may turn out to be different from other peoples chiefly in their different opportunities.
We are alluding to universal hearts' desires. In my opinion, Lee Kuan Yew's emphasis on a special and changeless China underrates the attractiveness of the values which the Chinese, like other peoples, have made occasional efforts to unearth from beneath the burden of contrary tradition. The Chinese may be expected to espouse these common values when circumstances favor them, at least as the age-groups most traumatized by earlier horrors fade away. The twenty-year olds in southern China are already consumerist; they did not share the hurt and do not retai
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