Singaporean’s Thinking Is on the Asia-Centric Side

Can Asians think?

That simple, seemingly insulting question comes from an unusual source. “Can Asians Think?” is the title of a recent book by Kishore Mahbubani, the Singaporean diplomat who is the leading apostle of the so-called “Asian values” movement.

Mahbubani has tried to provide the intellectual underpinnings for an Asian challenge to the values of democracy and liberty. He accuses the West of hypocrisy in its dealings with Asia, and preaches the virtues of order and stability.

“The aggressive Western promotion of democracy, human rights and freedom of the press in the Third World at the end of the Cold War . . . is a colossal mistake,” he wrote in 1993.

Back then, Mahbubani’s thoughts seemed to capture the mood of the times. East Asia was increasingly prosperous, and America and Europe were thought to be in economic decline. The Clinton administration was threatening to impose trade sanctions on China, arousing the ire of business leaders on both sides of the Pacific.

The world seems different now. The U.S. and European economies have revived. East Asia, in the second year of its worst economic crisis in four decades, is no longer so confident of its destiny.

“The hubris of the early 1990s is gone,” admitted Mahbubani, Singapore’s ambassador to the United Nations, during a visit to Washington a couple of weeks ago. If he were writing about the values of Asia and the West today, he said, “my tone would be a bit different.”

Still, he presses on with the same themes he did a few years ago, obsessed with the supposed conflicts in political values between East and West. In a preface to the book, a collection of his essays, he writes, “The Asian mind, having been awakened, cannot be put to sleep in the near future.”

In wondering whether Asians can think, Mahbubani explains: “I am not asking this question about individual Asians in terms of limited thinking abilities. Clearly Asians can master alphabets, add two and two to make four, and play chess.”

Instead, he claims to be asking whether Asians can think as a society.

As an example of what he is worried about, he points to what he calls “Jewish society.” Jews, he notes, were forced to leave Palestine in AD 135 and had no country until the founding of Israel 18 centuries later.

“Will a similar fate befall Asian societies,” he asks, “or will they be able to think well and ensure a better future for themselves?”

Clearly, Mahbubani has an odd definition of “thinking.” He finally concludes that Asian societies may conceivably make it in the next millennium if they can free themselves of the domination of Western ideas and world views.

Of course, most of the people on the world’s largest continent regard themselves first as Chinese or Indians or Japanese or Koreans, not as Asians. In seeking to speak for “Asian values,” Mahbubani fits into the classic mold of outsiders seeking to forge a strong, coherent culture while they themselves remain on the margins, caught by competing influences.

His parents were Hindus who fled Pakistan at the time it broke off from India in 1948. The family settled in Singapore, where they were again minorities in a city-state dominated by ethnic Chinese. If Mahbubani has clung to the idea of Asia, it may be because there wasn’t any nationalistic culture to compete for his loyalties.

He seems scornful of any ethnic Asians who live outside of Asia. At one point, he refers to V.S. Naipaul, the British writer of Indian descent, as “an Asian child of the West.”

Mahbubani’s challenge to the West is tinged with irony. For decades, those who sought to speak up for Asia and to liberate the continent from Western ways of thought were populists in peasant garb, like Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Minh. Mahbubani, by contrast, is an elitist in a Western business suit.

In fact, Mahbubani’s beliefs--his love of stability and willingness to countenance authoritarianism--are ones that U.S. foreign policy often seemed to embrace in East Asia during the Cold War.

In his book, Mahbubani plausibly describes how American policy has changed. If America had pushed for democracy in Taiwan and South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, he says, their spectacular economic growth “would have been cut off at its very inception.”

What he leaves out is that, with American prodding, as these countries grew more prosperous, they opened up to a vibrant democracy that tolerates political opposition. By contrast, Mahbubani’s home of Singapore continues to harass and imprison political opponents, even though it is no less well off.

Nor does Mahbubani’s thought seem to encompass the many Asians who believe in democracy. South Korea’s President Kim Dae Jung is certainly no less Asian than Singapore’s founding leader, the British-educated Lee Kuan Yew.

Can Asians think? Of course. But after reading his book, I wasn’t too sure about Mahbubani.

Jim Mann’s column appears in this space on Wednesdays.