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[Abstract: To refute recent claims by the Association of Muslim Professions (AMP) and Malaysian newspapers of Malay Singaporean marginalisation, the Singapore state issued a community progress report. Whilst statistics show that there is little evidence of systemic economic marginalisation, this article argues that the Asian values and Confucian ethics discourses pursued by the state in the nation-building process leaves little room for ethnic Malay discourse.)
The economic boom in the sixties experienced by the Newly Industrialised Economies (NIEs) of Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong, euphemistically known as the four mini-dragons, engendered a cultural explanation for what was known as the Asian Miracle. By setting the economic precedence in the region Japan further legitimised the notion of an Asian "modernity," which in turn, legitimised surrounding Asian political systems, most typically authoritarianism, in their ability to sustain and even perpetuate economic growth. With this emerged discourses on "Asian values" and Confucianist ethics. Though much has been written on the two discourses flexible applications by politicians, academics, journalists, both Asian and Western, have given them an interchangeable quality. At the most generic level Asian values have been described as an Asian strategy to negotiate a position in Eurocentric notions of modernity. This negotiation reminds of different cultures and societies in different stages of development and thus acts as an Asian, some may argue authoritarian response to the de rigueur of liberal democracy. Confucian ethics, on the other hand, is more conventionally espoused as a series of cultural traits responsible for relational organisation between structure and agency. Deployed to (re)contextualise high savings rate, strong work ethic, respect for authority, socialisation over individualisation, maximisation of time etc., a Confucian ethics discourse is not dissimilar from a Weberian-like explanation of capital reproduction. The fundamental role of the overseas Chinese in the region's economic growth provides fecund grounds for correlating certain cultural values to capitalism. Confucian teachings replaces Protestantism, societal morality replaces predestination neuroticism. Though a straightforward comparison is too "facile" for some, since Weber's original thesis on capitalism proposed "generic reasons for the development of capitalism," Confucianism offers a historically specific alternative in response to the different forms of capitalism sampled by varying cultures (Tu, 1996:3-4). For others, whilst translatable values such as thrift, self-help and pragmatism between...