ABSTRACT
The revision of neo-liberalism in the 1980s and 1990s and the effort by the Japanese government to defend state-guided national development were paralleled by, and overlapped with, the emergence of culturally and racially oriented explanations for the East Asian Miracle inside and outside of the AsiaPacific. Linked to these approaches were increasingly strident concerns that the rise of East Asia, especially Japan (and latterly China) was a threat to the “West”.1 By the early 1990s, the notion of a “New Asian Renaissance” had emerged as a somewhat amorphous term that captured the dramatic economic, political and cultural changes transforming the region.2 For some commentators the New Asian Renaissance encompassed the many “non-Asian” nation-states and peoples in the Asia-Pacific, while for others it encapsulated a more exclusive Pan-Asianism.3 East Asian commentators and political leaders also increasingly held up Asian values and virtues as not only the key to the region’s success but also as a model for the West. This chapter begins by looking briefly at the question of culture and race in the debate about the causes of Japan’s post-1945 economic success. This is followed by an examination of the popular debate inside and outside of the region about the cultural roots of Asian capitalism generally. It then turns to a discussion of key strands of the narratives about Asian values and neo-Confucianism in the late Cold War and early post-Cold War era, looking particularly at Singapore and Malaysia, which were the sites for, and the sources of, the most influential and sustained articulation of Asian values and/or the idea of a New Asian Renaissance. This section ends with a short discussion of the possible re-emergence, in the wake of the Asian crisis, of the more exclusive Asian regional organization that many of the promoters of the New Asian Renaissance, such as Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, sought, unsuccessfully, to establish as an alternative to APEC at the very beginning of the 1990s. The final section looks at the significance of cultural nationalism in the economic rise of China after 1978. This chapter emphasizes that both the dominant East Asian-based narratives and many of the cultural explanations provided by commentators outside the region rested, and/or continue to rest on a dubious distinction between East and West and on generally fixed notions of culture/race. At the same time, the continued, but changing, salience of racialized politics, and fixed conceptions of culture in Asia, can only
be understood in terms of the dynamics of both specific national trajectories and their wider geopolitical and economic context. The deployment of Asian values and neo-Confucian ideas in the 1980s and 1990s, against the backdrop of new regional initiatives, reflected an important attempt by national elites in East Asia to reposition themselves and retain, or strengthen, the legitimacy of often authoritarian political arrangements in the context of the dramatic capitalist transformation of the Asia-Pacific over the preceding decades.
