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Are Asian Values a Justification for Repression?
By Jonathan Mirsky
The Asian Age
13 April 1998
 
London: When I worked in Hong Kong, the chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa,
frequently urged Westerners not to meddle with Hong Kong, whose
administration and society as a whole he said were underpinned by "Chinese
values." 
 
Sometimes he transmuted these into "Asian values." This was Mr. Tung's
list: "Trust, love and respect for our family and our elders; integrity,
honesty and loyalty to all; commitment to education; a belief in order and
stability; a preference for consultation rather than confrontation."
Sometimes Mr. Tung added "a preference for obligation rather than
individual rights."
 
When he was specially referring to Asian values, Mr Tung listed "hard
work, respect for learning, honesty, openness to new ideas,
accountability, self-discipline and self-reliance." "North American"
values, said Mr Tung, who spent a number of years in the US, are "freedom
of expression, personal freedom, self-reliance, individual rights, hard
work, personal achievement, thinking for one's self." 
 
Once during an interview with Mr Tung suggested that all these values
sounded Jewish to me. He beamed in reply.
 
Of course it's all garbage. I once wrote to Mr Tung recommending that he
stop telling foreign reporters, as he sometimes did when questioned at
news conferences: "You don't understand this. You are not Chinese." I
noted that in covering four governors, from Lord Mac-Lehose to Chris
Patten, I had never heard them or their officials say to a Chinese
reporter: "You don't understand. You are not British." It would have been
condemned as racism.
 
Mr Tung was not alone, however, in his interchangeable invocation of Asian
or Chinese values.
 
In democracies such as India, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, these
concepts are rarely invoked. When I interviewed President Lee Teng-Hui of
Taiwan last year, he said that the concept of Asian values was nonsense
and was used only to divide people.
 
The Asian valuers fears what they usually call "instability." They say
that their citizens value order and consensus. Like Mr Tung they disparage
the West's "immorality," and they gloomily point to the chaos of those
countries that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union as an example
of what happens when stability collapses.
 
This worship of stability justifies much. Mr Tung says that the worship of
"stability" justifies much while he values the free press, the media
should present government policies "positively," and that he was
considering whether criticism of the government on the radio might
constitute subversion. He notes without enthusiasm that demonstrations are
part of Chinese culture, but he wishes that everyone would pull together
for "the good of Hong Kong."
 
Mr Tung's fear of instability extends far beyond Hong Kong. "As a Chinese
man," he has said, he finds "intolerable" the nation of Tibetan, Muslim or
Taiwanese independence. He will introduce laws for Hong Kong that will
forbid advocating or- as Michael Suen, one of his officials, clarified
soon after the handover to China last July- even doing research on such
independence. This is to protect China's "national security."
 
Some Westerners, usually foreign investors keen to keep friendly relations
in the East, also claim that Asians are not interested in or fit for
democracy. Foreigners who confront Asian leaders on human rights make
things worse, in their view.
 
Members of American and other Western chambers of commerce in Hong Kong
and Beijing rarely say a public word about human rights, and the handful
who do are derided as wimps.
 
Apart from justifying repression, "Asian values" is a paltry concept. How
can you weave together Indian caste, Japanese Shintoism, animism in Borneo
and New Guinea or the multifarious cultures in the Indonesian and
Philippine archipelagos? How to compare marriages, funerals and eating
habits- forks, chopsticks, spoons and hands?
 
Champions of Asian values bang on about consensus rather than
confrontation. (Indeed, this is the bogus notion that Robin Cook and
Madeleine Albright have bought from Beijing to justify no longer passing
resolutions against China at the Geneva human rights meetings.)
 
Buddhist sects have fought it out in Japan and Tibet. State torturers
throughout Asia are no more interested in consensus than are their
counterparts in Israel and Yugoslavia. In 1965, thousands of people were
slaughtered in Indonesia, charged with being Communists; the real reason
for killing many of them was because they were Chinese. 
 
Cambodians died by the hundreds of thousands at the hand of their fellow
Cambodians in the Plo Pot years, and in China, where the old and
intellectuals are highly prized, the party has executed who knows how
many. During the cultural revolution, Red Guards ate "class enemies." We
westerners are sometimes told not to apply our values to other societies.
China especially refers to this as, first, arrogance and, second,
intervention in its sovereignty.
 
Beijing makes life very hard for "criminals" like Wei Jingsheng. He called
for human rights and democracy in 1977. What kind of "values" are these?
He is unquestionably an Asian who understands his own society very well.
"China's new Prime Minister, Zhu Rongji, admitted recently that his own 20
years in Maoist disgrace were so ghastly that he can not discuss them.
What world leaders will ask Mr Zhu about the circumstances, much less the
values, of the political prisoners in China's gulag and in Drapchi prison
in Lhasa?
 
The writer, a former East Asia editor of the Times of London, contributed
this comment to the International Herald Tribune. 
 
(This article also appeared in the International Herald Tribune of 10
April 1998.)
 
The Burma Info (CCN)
New Delhi.