National Observer Home > No. 46 - Spring 2000 > Book Reviews

Asian Values, Western dreams: Understanding the New Asia

by Greg Sheridan  

Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999, pp. 317 and index.

Mr. Greg Sheridan is a columnist for "The Australian" newspaper, and indeed his are some of the better contributions to that newspaper, much of the content of which represents Labor Party-oriented political correctness of poor quality.

"Asian Values Western Dreams" sets out to compare Asian attitudes and practices with Western hopes and expectations. It is clear that in many if not most Asian countries departures from Western democratic traditions are

Perhaps the main difficulty with "Asian Values Western Dreams" is that the author appears to have been unduly seduced by the Asian values that he discusses. He deals sympathetically and at length with the differing values of the different countries - for there is not one set of Asian values, but many, in many countries - and concludes that "the basic point is that the West needs to shake itself up in its perceptions of Asia". He disagrees strongly with the assessment by Mr. Christopher Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, who has said: "Asian values has been a shorthand for the justification of authoritarianism, bossiness and closed collusion rather than accountability in economic management." To this purpose the author quotes opinions by Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia's former deputy prime minister, to the effect that various Asian leaders and "founding

fathers" were "great democrats". Doubtless Ibrahim had his own reasons for making this curious analysis, but on reflection it must appear that Patten is correct, and the author incorrect, in their respective assessments. Significantly the author concludes, "No outsider really has the right to demand of China that it become a democracy. In any event, the demand is impractical."

The continuance of the various "Asian values" of which the author speaks enables such represseive regimes as those in North Korea and China and Burma to carry out policies which are acknowledged to have led to the deaths of many millions and the bare subsistence of hundreds of millions. If democratic structures had been entrenched in these countries, this would not have occurred. But instead the author states, in a parody of over-respectful analysis of one of the most barbaric of modern countries: "The encounter with China, the search for its wisdom, its artistic and literacy inheritance, the sheer scale of the Chinese experience, make it a crucially formative element in what we know of the human condition."

R.M. Pearce

 

National Observer No. 46 - Spring 2000