Asian Governance

Values and Development Debates

Asian governance is part of larger debates about development and in particular the emergence of East Asia's “miracle economies” (Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong) and later the newly exporting economies of Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The term gained salience in the late 1980s and early 1990s because East Asia's economic growth challenged established theories of development. Questions about Asian governance arrangements also attracted attention because of both changing geo-economic and geo-strategic forces, in particular, sluggish U.S. and European growth and heightened post–Cold War attention to human rights concerns.

As an explanation for East Asian growth, Asian governance draws on both developmental state arguments about the necessary role played by interventionist states and cultural arguments about “Asian values,” especially Confucianism. The tremendous growth of these economies has posed a special challenge to dependency theorists who identify structural obstacles for later-developing economies moving up the global economic hierarchy and in from the periphery. Proponents of neoliberalism offered contrasting criticism for the role played by interventionist states and praise for East Asia's embrace of, and integration into, the global economy.

Those who use the term Asian governance often draw on ideas about culture and specifically Asian values to explain economic development and authoritarian governance in East Asia. “Asian values” are generally understood to be a cultural preference for stable leadership over political pluralism, consensus over dissent and confrontation, communitarian over individualist values, duties and responsibilities over rights, the primacy of order and harmony over competition. It has been argued that Asian values facilitate a more activist or interventionist state. Such cultural-relativist claims are perhaps most associated with Singapore's former prime minister and senior statesman Lee Kuan Yew. According to the “Singapore school,” Asian values provided a needed antidote against unrestrained capitalism of the West. In the early 1990s when Western economies were sluggish, those like Lee, comparing East Asia's dynamism with what they saw to be Western decline, further argued that Asian governance may be illiberal and authoritarian but at least it was governance that worked.

The relationship between culture and development is a contentious one, however, not least because it overgeneralizes a region that is extremely diverse. For example, Asian values are frequently associated with Confucianism despite the fact that states like Malaysia, which has played one of the more vocal and prominent roles in the Asian values debate, are not Confucian. Another common criticism is that if Asian values explain economic growth, then they must also explain periods of nongrowth and decline in earlier periods, for example, China during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

...