Do Asians Need Democracy?

For more than two decades, the challenge from East Asia to the United States has come with all the subtlety of a jackhammer. The region’s rise to economic power has wreaked havoc in industry and generated an endless series of acrimonious trade disputes. The friction, inevitably, will continue even escalate if Asian countries’ extraordinary economic transformation stays on track through the 1990’s
The next round of East-West tensions will be a fight over principles: whether “democracy” promotes social stability or erodes it; whether free speech is worth the cultural trash it produces in the West; whether the health of the extended group matters more than the unfettered freedom of the individual. And, finally, whether the West can remain friendly with the East, even if Asians don’t become “good Westerners.”
The “neo-Confusianists” make no secret of their disdain for Western assumptions about what makes “the good society.” The prize they eek is the hearts and minds of 1.7 billion East Asian citizens who have been on a three-decade economic roll and are now groping to define their place in the world.An ideological struggle? This is the last thing the West expected. The average American (not to mention the average policymaker in Washington) thought these issues were settled when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Most systems are prerequisites to economic success. It is time, the Asians are saying, to think again. Many Asians have come to reject an American view that “out of contention, out of the clash of ideas, you get good government” and a healthy economy. East Asia now brims with self-confidence. In places like Japan. Singapore and South Korea, literacy rates exceed 90 percent . Families stay together. There is virtually no violent crime. In their eyes, the United States is in danger of decadence.The East Asian neo-cons believe that unfettered individualism and democracy have caused America’s economic and social problems. The growing perceptions in East Asia is that Western-style individual freedom has degenerated into an anything-goes mentality that has resulted in massive social decay soaring rates of crime, divorce, teenage pregnancy and single-parent families.East Asia is by contrast a rock of stability, thanks mainly to its “neo-Confucian values.” These are defined variously as unshakeable commitment to education, hard work and traditional family structures (even if that means women don’t work). The state’s role is mainly to promote industrial development and economic growth and to educate its children. Period.