I just attended the first day of an East-West dialogue organized yearly in Barcelona. Among the speakers was UN Deputy Secretary General for Communications, Mr. Kiyotaka Akasaka, who talked about Asian values as opposed to Western values, citing examples related to job preservation in companies within a context of economic crisis in Japan, thus helping explain why unemployment has not risen substantially in a country that has been affected by underwhelming growth rates and deflation for more than 20 years. I think that Mr. Akasaka is right in the example he cited, but wrong in extrapolating such values to the wider East Asian region, and much less to the whole of Asia.
Before focusing on our argument, we should first clarify some terminology choices. It might be argued that, instead of using the term "Asian values" (or, more narrowly, "East Asian values"), we should be speaking of a set of values corresponding to group-oriented societies, as opposed to individual-oriented societies, mostly rooted in Calvinist and Lutheran Christianism and with the United States and the United Kingdom as paradigmatic and leading examples. However, here I argue that East Asian nations can not be considered as purely "group-oriented", a definition that would better fit, for instance, most predominantly Muslim societies.
Indeed, East Asian tradition, based on Confucianist, Sintoist and Taoist principles, dictates not only an harmonious social order, but also stresses the individual's ultimate responsibility to succeed (in order to lead the family in a virtuous manner, in the case of men, and to adhere by the rules and work hard within their sphere of influence, in the case of women). Therefore, we should in fact be speaking of a mixed societal model, combining group-oriented elements as well as some of the most extreme approaches to individualism. Consequently, it makes sense to differentiate those so-called (East) Asian values from Western (or, for that matter, Muslim ones).
It is this mixed character of East Asian values the one that explains its partial erosion coupled with economic development. However, as Mr. Akasaka somehow pointed out, there is an exception among the three developed countries in the region: Japan. Even though global trends are also affecting Japan's business culture and eroding notions such as lifetime employment, as well as affecting equality levels, the insular state still resists some extreme individualist tendencies that have already taken hold in South Korea and are creating a two-speed China, with a rapidly growing wealth gap between even richer urbanites and privileged classes (which are well known for not sharing their wealth with the wider society via charities or other social endeavors and that alledegly would not mind deserting their home country in order to enjoy their privileged lifes far away from pollution, food unsafety and cultural repression).
Younger South Koreans, for their part, are widely known for their extreme competitiveness, consumerism and individualism, as shown by the eroding support for national reunification on economic concerns. Moreover, the South Korean is one of the most unequal modern societies: while its GINI inequality index is far away from China's third-world levels, the country, ranking 15th on the recently released UNDP Human Development Index, sees how its privileged position turns into a not-so-brilliant 28th place when adjusting for inequality levels, in what means the sharpest drop among all nations not named United States of America (which falls from the 4th to the 23rd position when adjusting results for inequality).
Although a plausible explanation lies in the fact that Japan was allowed to keep its peculiar mix of modern-traditional culture after its defeat in World War II, thus allowing a smooth transition to a post-totalitarist social-democratic system, Korea had its national pride, economic system and cultural values shattered after the long Japanese invasion, the division of the peninsula in two and the subsequent Korean War, while China underwent a dramatic transformation under Maoism and the precepts of Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.However, there is another important factor that should not be overlooked when assessing this difference: timing in economic development. Japanese economy boomed during the 60s (over 10% average growth during that decade), kept growing strongly during the 70s and, by the 80s, it was already a world leading economy (prompting many U.S. analysts and intellectuals to warn about the Japanese threat to U.S. supremacy, helping the U.S. Government successful bid to force Japan's central bank to let the yen revalue against the dollar, thus accelerating the advent of Japanese economic stagnation). Continued growth during that decade was based on real estate and investment bubbles that burst by the end of the decade and prompted a lengthy period of subpar growth and deflation from which Japan seems unable to exit.
Japan's transition to a modern, world-leading economy took place during the 60s and the 70s, during the height of the post-World War II social contract, under the Bretton Woods system, the Western European social democracies and the growing social network in the U.S., which reached its apex during the Carter administration. In a global context of Cold War and with the existance of what was perceived as a viable economic and political alternative, Communism, ruling over the USSR and China, European and U.S. economic and political elites, fearing the spread of Soviet-sponsored revolutions across Asia and, above all, Western Europe, consented to the demands of workers and labor unions and installed a series of successful welfare states, where state-run companies amounted to a sizeable share of the total economic output and where inequality was restrained by means of high rates of progressive taxes and relatively high salaries for low- and mid-tier employees.
However, this unprecedented social contract began to crumble under the weight of Margaret Tatcher and Ronald Reagan. The first, after the undeniable failure of the country's finances and subsidy-based social policies under Edward Heath and Harold Wilson [1], and the second, decided to strike a decisive blow to a stagnating and overstretched Soviet Union after the progressive economic opening of Deng's China, allied to set the foundations of a new economic paradigm, neoliberalism. Fed by the technological revolution and the prompt end of the Soviet Union, it set the foundations of today's globalized economy while also sowing the deregulation seeds that flourished in the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent sovereign debt crisis.
It is in this more unstable context that South Korea consolidated its growth, from one of the poorest countries on Earth after the end of the Korean War (1953) to a technological and economic global power in the 21st century. The military dictatorships that ruled the country did not really kick-start and consolidate its economic growth until the 1970s, under Park Chung-hee. Growth continued strong during the 80s, by the end of which decade the country already enjoyed a democracy. The hiccups of the 1997 financial crisis notwithstanding, the technological advances and market globalization of the 90s and the 00s only consolidated South Korea's growth model, partially based on the Japanese family-run, state-sponsored big companies but with a far more individualistic and neoliberal approach (despite the obvious protectionism of its internal market) that reached its apex during the last few years, under President Lee Myung-bak.
China's case is even more extreme. As previously mentioned, China only started to open its previously quasi-autarkic socialist economy after Mao Zedong's death in 1976 and the innovation and reform policies introduced by Deng Xiaoping. In other words, China's race to the top started at the same time that neoliberalism made its appearance on the world scene, and picked up speed precisely when the current wave of market-led globalization took off, i.e. during the last two decades, exporting and expanding transnational company culture and elite-controlled investment flows all around the globe. It is within this context that values consumption and individual wealth that China, coming off 40 years of state-led socialist limitations to private entrepreneurship -- undeniably a strong psychological factor that gives even more sense to the conscious choice of many Chinese for a radical change of approach, for individualist wellbeing as opposed to common wellbeing --, has become the world's second economic power, although one with acute internal inequalities and still with the status of middle income economy.
Add to that the fact that rapid growth processes tend to lead to inequality, especially during the transition from a low income to a middle income economy, coupled with the material, physical and economic deprivation that both Chinese and Koreans had experienced for generations (unlike the Japanese, who enjoyed great power and a prosperous economy until, albeit partially based on cruelly oppressing their neighbours, their defeat in World War II) and we have a cocktail which is explosive enough to explain the erosion, at least on the social equality camp, of the so-called East Asian values in those countries.
[1] Although the pre 1979 Labour government almost needed help from the IMF, arguably it was because it had invested heavily in drilling oil on the North Sea. When Margaret Thatcher came to power, the first oil came ashore after 15 years of investment. The cost of oil exploration by British Petroleum and British Gas is why the UK needed financial help: oil proved difficult to find and banks pulled out. The British people used to own these two companies with profits going to the public purse. However, the Tatcher government quickly privatized them.
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