The Open University
Yorkshire Region

Cultural Studies Research Forum
Reports and Abstracts 1995 -2000

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Framing identities and the Asian values discourse

Bernie Eccleston

The end of the cold war and the hubris surrounding high rates of economic growth in some Asian countries were key factors underpinning the development of a discourse which sought to establish Asian (actually East Asian) values as a positive symbol of difference from an apparently decadent West. Reversing the image in Said's Orientalism saw elites in South East Asia lead establishment scholars in a project to show the superiority of duty-based values over rights-based values said to be dominant in the West. The West was represented as suffering from atomised, competitive individualism which had sufficiently undermined the economic and social fabric to signify the end if Western hegemony. This representation was contrasted with an Asian alternative where group obligations encourage selfless individuals into a more harmonious, consensual social relations which would reproduce a more stable economic and social fabric into the next millennium.

Despite drawing on flawed generalisations about cultural fault line East Asia and the West, the discourse does seem to have been an important feature of attempts to forge collective identities within and between certain societies in East Asia to the mid 1990s. Thereafter sceptical voices within East Asia were heard casting doubt more loudly about generalising across such a diverse range of societies. Contemporaneously the social consequences of economic crises in East Asia after 1997 apparently laid waste the imaginary scenario of uniquely harmonious social relations.