Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

CULTURAL RELATIONS AND THE NEW RICH 19
outside. A major thrust of their cultural production has been to ‘orientalise’ and
nationalise values like diligence, work discipline and merit, with the new rich as
their principal exemplars. While the Confucianist model of new wealth in Asia has
been promulgated by intellectuals in each of the island Chinese states of Taiwan,
Singapore and Hong Kong, it has been most assiduously developed as
authoritarian state ideology in Singapore. On top of its other claims and functions,
Confucianism in Singapore has been promoted as a source of national identity
(Chua 1995; Lingle 1996). Within this rubric, the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP)
has attempted to capture the country’s experience of economic growth, and its
people’s associated sense of ethno-national pride, both in reference to a past of
shared poverty and in counter-distinction to the West and the non-Chinese of Asia,
particularly in the neighbouring countries of Malaysia and Indonesia.
According to Chua (1995:36), PAP leaders see themselves, in the Confucian
tradition, as ‘a group of honourable men’. What remains unclear is whether, or to
what extent, others among Singapore’s new rich and, indeed, among ethnic
Chinese new-rich capitalists and professionals elsewhere in Asia constitute
themselves in this way.
Undoubtedly the politicians and intellectuals responsible for the Confucianist and
ethnic Chinese argument have exerted a significant influence on the self-perception
of many newly rich in Asia: both through the mass media and formal education,
most notably through business colleges, such as Manila’s Asian Institute of
Management, and a number of similar institutions in the West. Many of the
region’s technocrats, managers and professionals enrolled in such places have
been exposed to a growing volume of literature linking business management and
entrepreneurial skills to particular cultures and ethnicities, much of this literature
expressly celebrating Confucianism or some other variant of Asian Values. 28
Nevertheless, the presence and affects of such ideologies are clearly uneven. Chua
(1995:36), for example, argues that Confucianism has not taken hold among the
wider population of Singapore, notwithstanding the self-images of the PAP
leadership. Indeed, the irony, according to Chua (1995:27, 33), is that as state
ideology Confucianism was inspired by conservative Western academics, and
came after a period in which Singaporeans were lauded for their successes
through an ethos of individualism.
It may be revealing in some ways to highlight the broad correlation between the
ethnic Chinese and the new rich of East and Southeast Asia. Moreover, Chinese
ethnic self-consciousness is clearly important among many new rich. However,
Chinese business people are often selective in invoking ethnic attachments (Lim
1983), and as Young argues in Chapter 2, there are multiple Chinese ethnicities in
the region, which have been variously shaped by different national settings and social
relations with other ethnic groups. The social identities assumed by new-rich ethnic
Chinese are often more national than they are ‘Chinese’. 29 Indeed, Chua and Tan
argue in Chapter 5 that national and class identities are far more important to
Singaporeans than ethnic identities. In the case of new-rich ethnic Chinese
minorities elsewhere in Southeast Asia, ethnic identity may be best viewed as a