Unmasking Asian Values

The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, edited by Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York. Hardcover $57.95, paperback $21.95.

US President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who often preach to Asians about human rights, would benefit from reading this pioneering yet plodding book. So would Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore and Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, who believe Asian values take precedence over Western concepts of human rights. Even North Korean leader Kim Jong Il would learn that democracies do not suffer the famines his nation has experienced for more than five years.

While the Asian and Western scholars who wrote and edited this volume are too polite to say so directly, their message is plain: All of you are wrong in the way you have framed and focused your running debate over human rights and Asian values.

Editors Joanne Bauer, of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, and Daniel Bell, of the University of Hong Kong, describe the book as a product of the first sustained dialogue on human rights and Asian values. This exchange took place between East Asians and North Americans in a series of conferences held between 1994 and 1998.

In their words, the book seeks to "sweep away the self-serving rhetoric of the 'Asian values' debate and uncover areas of commonality and difference between Asia and the West as well as within Asia itself. Culture is often no more than a convenient excuse deployed by authoritarian leaders to violate rights. But it is also a reality, a world view that shapes the way individuals and communities interact and give meaning to human rights."

A main point is that Americans, and most Westerners, fail to comprehend the deep legacy of anti-colonialism in Asia and Asian resentment against what they see as Western political and economic domination. Westerners also do not consider genuine cultural differences that influence Asian views of human rights.

Onuma Yasuaki of Tokyo University addresses this particular issue: "For those who have experienced colonial rule and interventions under such beautiful slogans as 'humanity' and 'civilization,' the term 'human rights' looks like nothing more than another beautiful slogan by which great powers rationalize their interventionist policies." Moreover, he decries a Western tendency to judge other countries while ignoring human-rights issues at home.

Some Asian governments, in turn, misuse the concept of Asian values to justify political repression in the name of economic development and social stability. Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew has argued for nearly four decades that people won't care about democracy if their government sees that they are properly fed, housed, educated, and given medicine for their children.

Those leaders also claim that Asian values are pervasive through their region when, in fact, there are marked differences. In South Korea, Confucian values have not prevented a democracy from emerging while those same values in Singapore have been used to preserve a semi-authoritarian regime. On a personal plane, President Kim Dae Jung in Seoul and Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore have clashed in public over their differing views on human rights.

For North Korea's Kim Jong Il, whose nation has been devastated by famine for several years, a finding by Amartya Sen of Cambridge University and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1998, should be startling. "One of the remarkable facts in the terrible history of famines in the world is that no substantial famine has ever occurred in any country with a democratic form of government and a relatively free press. No government can afford to face elections after a major social calamity, nor can it easily deal with criticism from the media and opposition parties while still in office."

Kevin Y.L. Tan of the National University of Singapore perceptively compares the evolution of democracy and human rights in Singapore and Taiwan. In his chapter of the book, Tan focuses on differing responses to a perceived internal threat from ethnic rivalries in Singapore and a conspicuous external threat from China to Taiwan.

"At the state-centric level, the leaders of Singapore and Taiwan disagree over whether there is an Asian version of human rights or whether there is a need to move toward a more liberal regime given the economic progress they have made," Tan writes. "At the societal level, disagreement exists between what the people feel and what their rulers deem necessary and expedient, especially in Singapore."

This book makes a compelling case that human rights are universal, while Asian values are held mainly by those who advocate them. For all its insights into Western and Asian views on human rights, however, this volume is at times marred by the ponderous prose written by far too many academics. The book does make a splendid contribution to the vital debate, but the awkward writing makes parts of it a slog to get through.

Richard Halloran, a former correspondent for The New York Times, writes about Asia from Honolulu.