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Back to the Future
Changing Asian Values

The dilemma is posed by the changing value system in Asia. The economic and environmental crises in the Asian Tigers has raised questions about the validity of Asian values, particularly that individual civil rights must take a back-seat where national prosperity and social order are concerned. Human Rights Watch in its annual report of 4 December 1997 stated: “The lack of free debate… produced unaccountable governments whose policies exacerbated these crises. It became clear that freedoms of expression and association were essential to producing responsive governments.” The much praised attachment to family has become nepotism; the stress on personal relationships instead of formal legality has degenerated into cronyism; the emphasis on consensus has become corrupt politics; conservatism and respect for authority have turned into inflexibility and inability to innovate; educational achievements turn out to be rote-learning and uncritical kowtowing to authority figures. Zukermann argues that the paternalistic, authoritarian nature of the Asian model of leadership has proved fatal: “Without public scrutiny of the iron triangle of Bs—businessmen, bureaucrats and bankers—three Cs inevitably followed—complacency, cronyism and corruption.” Haley, while noting that hard work and loyalty are common both to the Protestant work ethic and the Asian ethos and that in both cases they have been the foundation of economic success, points out that while the West is characterized by directness and transparency, the East believes in circumspection and secrecy.[[1]12]

• Singapore has recorded a rise of 27% in juvenile crime in 1992-93 and an 18% rise in rapes and outraging of modesty between 1993 and 1997.[[1]13]
   

• In China the level of corruption is such as to elicit over the last decade repeated public exhortations from the top leadership urging eradication drives. Since 1983 there have been four Strike Hard campaigns with over 162000 arrests in 1996, over 6,235 death sentences and 4,469 confirmed executions, more than double of the 1995 figures. Between April and July 2001, China executed 1781 people, more than three times the rest of the world put together. Since 1990, China has executed some 20,000 people. 132,447 corrupt officials have been punished in 1999 including 17 at the ministerial level, 6 officials being executed in Guangdong province alone for evading $400 million in taxes. Chen Xitong, Beijing’s former Mayor, party secretary and eighth ranking Politburo member, has been sentenced to 16 years in prison for involvement in a corruption scandal (around $2 billion). Li Jizhou, Deputy Police Minister, has been sentenced to death for corruption. The former party boss of southern Guangxi, a vice-chairman of the national parliament and the former vice-governor of Jiangxi province, have been executed for taking bribes worth $5 million. 100 officials are on trial over a $10 million smuggling scandal in Xiamen.
  
  The Chairman of the Bank of China and of the China Construction Bank, Wang Xuebing, has been sacked for financial irregularities. Officials have been found milking the assets of sick state companies while denying workers and retirees their wages and pensions, leading to sacking of the police chief of Liaoyang city, the suicide of a deputy police chief, demotion of the city’s party secretary and several officials investigated for links to organized crime. China marked its annual Army Day in 1998 with the Liberation Army Daily calling on the military to oppose money worship, hedonism and extreme individualism and to fight against corruption. The appeal echoed President Jiang Zemin’s order for the military to pull out of business in the context of the massive economic interests it has developed in recent years, from karaoke bars at the local level, to huge trading corporations run by central departments. Judges and top civil servants have been made to sever their links with business. Discipline Commission chief Wei Jianxing is quoted as saying, “Rampant corruption has not been effectively curbed and the situation remains severe.” Prime Minister Zhu Rongji is on record that “if corruption is not tackled it will clearly threaten the government.”
   
  There is another quiet revolution causing grave concern: in September 2001 officials admitted that with 250,000 victims annually, suicide is a major national problem. But what is most startling is the fact that 55% of female suicides in the world are in China, most in the rural areas. Moreover, Chinese youth appears to be lost in a moral vacuum. Communist ideals have not worked and rapacious capitalism’s “ethics” have not yet filled the emptiness. Teenagers are dropping out of mainstream society (“I owe the world nothing” was the motto of a 16 year old who stabbed his teacher 40 times with a knife) and turning to crime. Forensic psychiatrist Sun Dongdong states, “There’s a deep gap between the values kids are taught and what they see around them. They form gangs to fight the emptiness.” Three out of every four youth crimes are attributed to gangs, many with connections to criminal syndicates. Between 1997 and 2000 offenders under 18 has risen to 12% of all those convicted, with rape and assault common (a gang of 15 boys aged 13 to 15 raped several middle school girls). Families, the bedrock of Confucianism, now suffer a divorce rate that has quadrupled in 20 years to 10%. Shan Guangnai of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences says, “With this many kids going bad, it looks to me like society is falling apart.”[[1]14]
   

• In South Korea former Presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae-Woo have been sentenced to death and to imprisonment for 22+ years respectively for, inter alia, taking bribes amounting to $628 million while 9 business tycoons have been jailed for up to 30 years, including the chairmen of industrial giants Daewoo and Samsung, for giving such bribes.[[1]15]
   

• In Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong the divorce rate has doubled since 1980 while in South Korea it has risen three fold since 1970. In China divorces have tripled in the last four years because of one partner in marriage becoming rich or finding a richer partner.
   

• Thailand and Japan, celebrating a continual festival of consumption, are bedeviled by the nexus between politicians, drugs and gangsters. Thaksin Shinawatra, prime minister of Thailand, has been indicted by the National Counter-Corruption Commission, becoming the richest and highest ranking person to fall foul of anti-corruption rules, concealing assets worth tens of millions of dollars while serving as deputy prime minister.[[1]16] Successive Indonesian Presidents have been thrown out by popular movements on the same grounds. The number of layoffs in Japan is steadily rising in a society where the workplace is regarded as an altar (1 million have been laid off since 1997), creating widespread consternation. 1 in 5 of the young is out of work. In Japan the number of psychiatric clinics for treating laid-off workers has increased ten fold over the last ten years and the number of suicides among school children has gone up because of the severe competitive spirit insisted upon. In general, suicides have risen by 53% since 1991 and are concentrated among men in the fifties rather than teenagers.
  
  The number of single-parent families has increased by half since 1970 and they constitute a disproportionate share of the poor. The elderly are so isolated from their children that they can now rent a family for lunch and three hours of conversation for $1130 plus transportation cost by dialing a telephone number in Tokyo. Hundreds of homeless men occupy railway stations and Tokyo’s posh Ueno Park.[[1]17] The Japanese Prime Minister, while apologizing to Parliament, has admitted to receiving substantial monetary donations from organizations linked to the bribery scandal involving the Ministry of Health and Welfare whose top bureaucrat has been arrested for taking bribes from a nursing-homes builder. A Finance Ministry official committed suicide while both the Finance Minister and his top deputy resigned, followed by the Prime Minister himself on his party losing the elections.
   
  The “iron triangle” is spoken of as the deep-seated problem “in which politicians get bureaucrats to distribute lucrative contracts to local companies; the companies provide money to politicians, and the bureaucrats eventually land plum jobs in the companies to which they have distributed largesse.”[[1]18] Retired bureaucrats, serving on till 80, reward themselves by shuffling from one public corporation to another earning $1 million or more in ten years in lump-sum retirement pay alone, half of which is exempt from income tax. The Economist’s “The World in 1997” writes (page 64): “The Japanese people have had their fill of the ‘iron triangle’ that has allowed politicians, special interest groups and officials to feed voraciously at the same trough at public expense…Lately public officials have shown themselves to be every bit as bungling and venal as their partners in crime.” Japan seems to have lost its bearings having reached economic parity with the West.
  
  “One of the world’s richest nations”, writes TIME, “is exhausted, bereft of imagination and incapable of seeing an alternative to a slow, elegantly coiffed collapse.”[[1]19] Fear besets Japanese society with food and drink in stores being poisoned by death cults and the worst recession since the second World War--the fourth in a decade--staring them in the face. Short-sighted, indiscriminate fishing has led to depleted yields, creating a crisis in the sprawling fishing industry. The cumulative bad debt of Japanese banks is of the size of the entire British economy! Mitsubishi and Sharp admit to having covered up serious manufacturing defects in their products that have led to serious accidents. Even the child crime rate is rising, with vicious fights breaking out in schools almost every week, teachers being threatened with knives or assaulted with baseball bats and schoolgirl prostitution. The school system faces a crisis of breakdown of communication between teachers and students. The mounting frustration of purposeless cramming for long hours leads to aggression steaming up and exploding in kireru (to cut— losing control and becoming violent). There is a vague sense that people need to return to simpler lives, cutting back on the consumerist life style that became the rage in the eighties.[[1]20]

Malaysia and South Korea complain of teenagers having too much money to waste. Family values are seen falling prey to the market. Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, feted by the West as the harbinger of capitalist economics, has been convicted and jailed for sodomy. Indonesia is witnessing an alarming rise in drug abuse, teenage pregnancies, AIDS patients and fights between students of different schools (12 children were killed in 1996) who complain that parents have no time for them and so they remain glued to satellite TV. Many East Asian governments, worried that the economic bulldozer is producing a rootless generation cut-off from its national heritage, are examining whether “edutainment” can be used to infuse traditional values that hold society together into the youth. We can see here a neighboring country going through what many western nations suffered in the 1960s, and draw lessons—if, of course, we wish to—so as not to repeat the same vicious circle.[[1]21]

– Pradip Bhattacharya
April 5, 2003

Back To The Future

–  Westerners on the West 
–  The New World  
–  The First World  
–  The Western Response  
–  The World Situation 
–  The Eastern Scene 
–  Changing Asian Values 
–  India Darshan 
–  Urbanization, Globalization and Consumerism
–  Possible Solutions 
–  Bureaucracy in India  
–  The Counterpoint  
–  India's Heritage  

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