ABSTRACT
The “Asian values” debate is not a formally organized oral disputation between two sides advancing contrary answers to the same question. It is a large, diverse, and ongoing array of written and oral pronouncements and exchanges that share some relevance to a set of questions about “Asian values”— their existence, their contents, and the implications of the answers to these first two questions for policy and behavior. Images of democracy and dictatorship were central to this first stereotyping of Asia. The extreme understanding of “Asian values” as a unique set of preferences found only in Asia is untenable. But Asians do have some values, and certain Asians have identified certain values as characteristically Asian. In the more authoritarian Asian states, directly questioning large numbers of people about their opinions can be a sensitive exercise. Recent work on the popularity of censorship in Singapore suggests the operation of just such a pattern.
