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

CULTURAL RELATIONS AND THE NEW RICH 23
unity and division is evident in the kind of rhetorical anomaly one finds in Tai’s
account, in which he notes, on the one hand, that East Asia has achieved its new
wealth ‘while maintaining equality of income distribution’ (1989c:27), and, on the
other, that ‘oriental workers are willing to work hard, to labor for long hours and to
receive a relatively low pay’ (1989c:20). What Tai’s account, like that of many
others working within this paradigm, fails to address adequately is that the new
rich of Asia cannot be accurately described as whole nations or particular ethnic
groups. Just as anti-Chinese racists in Malaysia, Indonesia or the Philippines have
often seen the ethnic Chinese as synonymous with wealthy traders and business
people, thus ignoring the large numbers of exploited Chinese workers, so too do
many of the proponents of modern Confucianism. While it may be possible, as
Chua and Tan observe (Chapter 5), to describe Singapore as a society of new rich,
relative to the West and a past of shared poverty, Singapore is also, they argue, a
society differentiated by pervasive class inequalities.
In attempting to contain the disruptive potential of these inequalities, the
Singaporean leadership not only invokes Confucianism as a basis for collective
national identity, but also the Confucianist principles of paternalism and merit. How
ideologically effective these principles are among working and middle classes
remains a moot point. Chua and Tan’s chapter suggests that they do enjoy
considerable legitimacy, even if Singaporeans do not directly associate them with
Confucianism (see also Chua 1995). Yet among Singapore’s youth, they also
appear to arouse a degree of dissent (Chua and Tan).
The relationship between Confucianist ideology, the new rich and class relations
in capitalist enterprise is also contentious. One of the few detailed ethnographic
works to examine the operation of modern Confucianist ideas within corporate
Asia is Janelli’s (1993) account of a large company in South Korea. On the face of
it, he observes, the ideology of company managers conforms to the popular
culturalist image of Asian corporations, invoking both the great tradition of
Confucianism, as well as the little tradition of village social life. According to
Janelli, managers quite consciously and, even cynically, use these ideologies as a
rhetoric for imposing discipline and establishing authority. Yet they are not always
successful, and indeed, much of Janelli’s account explores the ways in which
professional and white-collar workers (many of them new rich) reject and resist
this managerial ideology.
The idea of merit as a source of legitimation of class and status inequalities is
clearly not peculiar to Confucianism and the ethnic Chinese. Throughout Asia
ascriptive principles are invoked in relation to ethnic or national Others, but the
emergence of the new rich represents an open challenge to the ascriptive privileges
of old agrarian elites within ethnic or national groups (Shamsul, Lakha, Pinches).
The expanding labour markets and public education that have been integral to
rapid economic growth have engendered the development of meritocracy as the
normative code through which internal social differentiation is often explained and
legitimated. Thus, on the one hand, for example, the newly rich Malay capitalists
and middle class stand ascriptively for the dignity of Malayness and of all Malays.