Though often declared dead, the discourse around ‘Asian values’ has had many lives. Authoritarian regimes have deployed culturalist arguments against liberal democracy since the 1990s, revealing continuities in the fight against liberalism in the region at a time when Western rightwing populists are showing increasing interest in these ideas.
In the — seemingly distant — early post-Cold War era, authoritarian leaders and government-linked intellectuals in Singapore and Malaysia provoked a global discussion on Asian values. They contrasted the supposed defects of ‘Western’ individualism and liberal democracy with the virtues of ‘Asian’ communitarianism and illiberal but meritocratic rule. Singapore and Malaysia used this culturalist defence of illiberalism at a time when a triumphalist United States and Western Europe were pressuring countries in Asia and elsewhere to democratise and democracy movements in the region were on the rise.
Southeast Asian countries’ rapid development also defied the supposedly ‘iron law’ of modernisation theory, which claims that rising wealth leads to greater political openness. While Malaysia began a democratic transition after an opposition alliance won the 2018 general elections, the country has since backslid, with a renewed crackdown on media freedoms. Meanwhile, Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party continues to ‘disavow’ liberalism, promising good governance in its stead.
Parallel narratives of Western liberalism as culturally alien to Asia often went unnoticed. These included President Suharto’s authoritarian ‘Pancasila-democracy’ in Indonesia, the military junta’s invocation of Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar and Philippine dictator Ferdinand E Marcos, Sr’s illiberal Tadhana (fate) project. This explains why the region’s liberals have often felt the need to ‘vernacularise’ democratic demands in religious terms while denouncing the myth of Asia’s anti-democratic values — ‘civil Islam’ in Indonesia, ‘Buddhist democracy’ in Myanmar or the ‘divine miracle’ of ‘people power’ in the Philippines.
Anti-liberal culturalism appeared to wither after the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis as so-called Asian values came to be associated with corruption and cronyism, not rapid growth and social harmony. Economic crisis seemed to be a particularly effective form of ideological critique.
But a subsequent wave of autocratisation in Southeast Asia has been accompanied by a revival of anti-liberal culturalism. After several rounds of debate over which political values are most appropriate in an ‘Asian context’, some recurring themes are apparent — the cultural alienness of liberalism, an emphasis on economic development over democracy and the welfare of the community over individual rights.
In Thailand, the military regime returned to familiar arguments of ‘Thai-style democracy’ with the King as head of state after the 2014 coup.
In Cambodia, the government justified the severe limits placed on civil liberties by claiming that opposition activities endangered economic growth, using an argument which ‘echoes the long-standing Asian values debate’.
In the Philippines, former president Rodrigo Duterte, who was extradited to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity on 11 March 2025, had earlier defied international criticism of the massive human rights violations involved in his ‘war on drugs’. His administration rejected a UN request to investigate the killings — which Duterte claimed were necessary to safeguard ordinary people’s safety amid a supposed drug-fuelled crime spree — as seeking to impose inappropriate ‘liberal Western values’ on the country.
Perhaps the most important revival of culturalist critiques of liberalism in the region is China’s 2023 Global Civilization Initiative. With its call for ‘the respect for the diversity of civilisations, the common values of humanity [and] the importance of inheritance and innovation of civilisations’, it is said to be China’s answer to the so-called ‘clash of civilisations’. For critics, it marks a further ‘effort by Beijing to eliminate universal values in areas such as human rights and democracy’. As Michael Schuman, Jonathan Fulton, and Tuvia Gering write — ‘In this future, China will be in the lead, and the international system will be friendlier to autocratic governments; sovereignty will come at the expense of individual liberties…’.
A key premise in an Asian values-style discourse is cultural relativism. Norms proposed as universal, particularly related to human rights, are, upon closer examination, actually Western in origin and applicability. Asia is radically divergent from the West because of its distinct historical and cultural background. What is commonly proclaimed as the universalist character of liberal democracy is said to be a Western regime form involving unbridled freedom and selfish individualism.
Yet the real issue is not Asia versus the West, but rather illiberal versus liberal modernity.
Conservative ideologues in 19th century Imperial Germany attempted to demonstrate that authoritarianism could go hand-in-hand with an advanced form of modern living by pointing to Germany’s communitarian Kultur as opposed to French claims about a rights-based universal civilisation.
After studying various Western political systems, the Meiji Japanese reformers chose to model their political system and ideological rejection of Western liberalism on Imperial Germany. In the interwar period, the controversial Kyoto School philosophers claimed modernity could be ‘overcome’ by a reliance on Asian cultural values. Japan was a model for many authoritarian developmentalist regimes in Northeast and Southeast Asia. Then South Korean president Park Chung-hee had served in the Japanese military, Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad coined the ‘Look East’ slogan and Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew launched the ‘Learn from Japan’ campaign.
Asian values-style reactionary culturalism has now gained influential supporters in the West. US President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has found much to admire in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. They follow the argument that ‘liberalism has gone bad, that ideas of the enlightenment like individualism, universalism, etc. are inherently wrong, and they lead to wokeness [with] identity politics [being] the natural end state of liberalism’.
Trump whisperer Steve Bannon has insisted that ‘the United States and Russia are both Christian and nationalist in their essence’, which ‘is a prelude to a new Republican conception of American identity based on rootedness and peoplehood rather than personal liberty and free markets’.
Commonly misunderstood as being about Asia, the Asian values discourse was from its beginnings in the early 1990s employed to delegitimise domestic liberal opposition and to fend off external democratisation pressures. It did not contribute to, or even take cognisance of a long-running ‘Asianisms’ discussion about common values in the region. It has instead offered an essentialised culturalist justification for illiberalism, which has recently resonated among Western right-wing populists as well.
Mark R Thompson is Chair Professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs, City University of Hong Kong. His latest book is “The Philippines: From ‘People Power’ to Democratic Backsliding” (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
This article first appeared in East Asia Forum Quarterly, ‘Asia’s politics now’, Vol 17, No 2.