Opposition politicians chided Tung for the cost of the event, estimated at more than US$ 130,000, at a time when many salaries are being cut or frozen and employees face layoffs. (3)
Patten is at his best discussing East-West differences. "Were it not for the ubiquity of the argument about Asian values, its convenience as an excuse for Westerners to close their eyes to abuses of human rights in Asia, and the extent to which it raises legitimate questions for every society about how to retain individual and communal identity, and social stability and coherence, in a fast-changing consumerist global economy, the debate would hardly be worth the effort. The case put for the invented concept of Asian values is so intellectually shallow that I rather suspect that even Lee Kuan Yew is keen to distance himself from what many people regard as mainly his, or Singapore's contribution to the discussion about Asia's future. Let us first consider what the case for Asian values appears to be, and why it began to be put so forcefully."
Speaking at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993, Singapore's Foreign Minister warned that "Universal recognition of the ideal of human rights can be harmful if universalism is used to deny or mask the reality of diversity." To which Warren Christopher, the U.S. Secretary of State, responded crisply, "We can't let cultural relativism become the last refuge of repression." These two statements neatly encapsulate the debate. The Asian values proponents believe that people like Christopher are trying to foist Western Standards and Western notions of governance on societies where they would be inappropriate or damaging. Asians benefit from a different culture with deep roots in Confucianism. They put more emphasis on order, stability, hierarchy, family and self-discipline than Westerners do. The individual has to recognize that there are broader interests to which he or she must be subordinate. As the Chinese Foreign Minister said at the same Vienna conference, "Individuals must put the state's rights before their own."
The West's post-Enlightenment emphasis on the individual, it is argued, has gone too far, Patten points out. It led over the last century to one-person-one-vote democratic government (a system of whose superiority over others Lee Kuan Yew has told us he is not convinced), which has produced all sorts of problems. Malaysian radio announced in 1993 that the Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, had "Asked Malaysians not to accept Western-style democracy as it could result in negative effects. The Prime Minister said such an extreme principle had caused moral decay, homosexual activities, single parents and economic stow-down because of poor work ethics." This sense of the decay and disordcr in Western society is an important thread running through much of the argument about Asian values.
