Page 17 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INTRODUCTION

in modern world history the West, ‘symbolically at the heart of global power’ (Keith
and Pile 1993: 22), faced the prospect of being outperformed by the East. The
spectre of a coming Asian Century – which would supplant the previous, American
Century – loomed large, symbolized most traumatically by the high-profile Japanese
take-overs of companies that represent the ‘soul of America’, Hollywood, in the
late 1980s (see e.g. Morley and Robins 1995, Chapter 8). In the transnational
corporate world, there was a flurry of interest in the success formulae of Japanese
management style, Chinese business culture and, more generally, in the principles
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behind the dynamism of ‘confucian capitalism’. At the same time, leaders of
previously ‘unimportant’ – due to their smallness and lack of visibility on the world
stage – Asian nations such as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia’s Prime
Minister Mahathir Mohammad had begun to boast about the superiority of
so-called ‘Asian values’: their societies were supposedly more harmonious, more
morally upright, and more efficient and disciplined than those of the West, which
they painted as increasingly violent, decadent and disorderly. In this discourse,
‘Asia’ – Asian capitalism, Asian modernity, Asian culture – is touted as the model
for an affluent, hypermodern future, not the residue of a traditional and backward
past, as classic Orientalism would have it. Some even entertained the – distinctly
postcolonial – fantasy that Asia, imagined as a fictive, civilizational historical
subject, would finally turn the tables on the West, as reflected in book titles by
high profile Asian leaders such as The Japan that Can Say No (Ishihara 1991), The
Voice of Asia (Mahathir and Ishihara 1995), The Asian Renaissance (Anwar 1996),
the provocative Can Asians Think? (Mahbubani 1998) and A New Deal for Asia
(Mahathir 1999). These Asians were telling the world that they were no longer the
deferential followers of the West, but have created alternative (and arguably, for
some, superior) Asian styles of modernity. In the West, the mood was mirrored
in the publication of Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington’s famous article ‘The
Clash of Civilizations’ in 1993, in which he projects a decline of Western power
and a ‘resurgence of non-Western cultures’, with Asia, in Huntington’s view, likely
to pose the most formidable challenge to the West in the first decades of the twenty-
first century (Huntington 1993; 1997).
Of course this whole scenario was dealt a severe blow when the successful Asian
economies were thrown into crisis in 1997, causing widespread chaos and hardship
across the region as the value of local currencies tumbled, unemployment rose and,
in the wake of economic downturn, long-standing political powers-that-be were
destabilized – the most dramatic of which was the forced resignation of President
Suharto in Indonesia in May 1998 after months of student protests and mass
rioting. The ‘Asian meltdown’ led many Western observers to claim that the very
basis of Asian economic success – represented by the dubious phenomenon of
‘crony capitalism’ – was unsound and that Western (read: US-style neoliberal)
economic policies were still superior after all. There is a triumphalist subtext to
such Western responses to the crisis: ‘Asian values’ could now be declared a myth
and the West has emerged, once again, on top (Fukuyama 1998; see also Sheridan
1999).

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