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Asian political thought is political thought produced, shaped, and adapted to explain, justify, or reform political conditions within the cultures throughout Asia. These highly diverse traditions of political thought are contrasted with the rights-based political thought associated with the traditions of classical and modern liberal thought that has its geographical center in western Europe and North America. Whereas the rights-based traditions of the Atlantic community tend to emphasize the individual, democracy, and economic liberty, Asian political thought is viewed to favor the community, ruler-ship and guidance by spiritual or political elites, and social purposes over economic rights.

The richness of both the Asian and Atlantic traditions makes these generalizations the target of scholarly and political criticism, but some political elites and political scientists have found these generalizations useful for political, research, or explanatory purposes. An understanding of what Asian political thought means for modern political science can be gathered by exploring the approach Western scholarship has taken to Asian political thought, surveying the religious traditions behind Asian political thought, examining the encounter of Asia with the West and the impact of Western dominance on Asian political thought, chronicling the Asian reaction to Western imperialism and decolonization, and assessing the impact of globalization on Asian political thought.

Western Orientalism

Greek historian Herodotus made the first known mention of the continent of Asia in his writings. The Persians, the first Asians by this reckoning, were characterized as loving freedom too little in comparison with the Greeks. The general tone of Herodotus’ reflections would later reverberate throughout Western scholarship on Asia. The most notable thinkers who focused on Asia as a place lacking freedom were German philosophers Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel and Karl Marx. Hegel viewed Asia as the place where only the despot was free. Marx identified the Asiatic mode of production as being a mode of production that differed from feudalism based on the centralized control of the modes of production associated with irrigation agriculture. German American historian Karl Auguste Wittfogel built upon Marx’s theory. Wittfogel argued that the bureaucracies that were essential to Asia’s irrigation works and managing large hydraulic works crushed civil society and resulted in a mode of government he called “oriental despotism.” He contended that modern communist societies followed the model of oriental despotism and would be even more repressive.

Not all European understandings of Asian culture were so negative. Jesuit missionaries found much that was admirable in Chinese and Japanese society and tried to reconcile the secular religion of Confucianism with Christianity. The Vatican rejected these attempts; the Magisterium, the governing body of the Catholic Church, found ancestor worship to be incompatible with Christianity. The Catholic condemnation of Confucianism commended Confucianism to freethinking Enlightenment intellectuals such as German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz and French writer Voltaire as a nontheocratic source of ethical behavior and social order. French physician and writer Francois Bernier found within the Chinese tradition a model of an ethically justifiable and practical absolutist government that resonated with the European practice of absolute monarchy exemplified by Louis XIV. Interestingly, Bernier, who spent time in the Mughal Empire, characterized India as a plurality of what would today be described as kleptocracies.

Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said’s concept of orientalism addressed the tendency to idealize or demonize Asian societies. Said, a scholar focusing on western Asia, identified Western images of the Orient to be tools in an imperialistic project of domination. Owing much to French postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault, Said saw the process of knowledge production as intimately related to the quest for power. The image of the other, from this perspective, may have very little to do with the reality of the other, but is instead a reflection of needs of the one creating the image. According to this view, the accumulation of knowledge of Western societies about Asia may tell us less about Asian political realities than the role Asia played for Western societies as an enemy or an idealized other.

Bernard Lewis, a prominent scholar of western Asia who has been criticized as a practitioner of orientalism by Said, argues that Said is overblown in his characterization of Western efforts to produce knowledge about Asia as aiding and abetting imperialism. Instead of being rooted in the project of imperialism, the quest for knowledge about Asia is rooted in the project of humanism. A rejection of religious dogma lay at the foundation of humanism and opened the way to explore other cultures. Lewis characterizes Said’s efforts to bring into question the efforts of Westerners to understand other cultures as a form of intellectual protectionism that would reserve discourse about a culture to those within the boundaries of that culture alone.

Some political science scholars such as Lucian Pye and Samuel Huntington have tried to use political culture as a means of explaining political behavior. These efforts have roots in the Western social science tradition beginning with German sociologist and political economist Max Weber’s analysis of how different religious belief systems would either hinder or facilitate the development of capitalism. Weber found both Hinduism and Confucianism to contain aspects that worked against the rationalization process necessary for the development of capitalism.

From Weber and his intellectual heirs’ perspective, the ideas of a culture manifest themselves in the social psychology of a society and have serious impact on political and economic outcomes. For example, Pye has worked on a nuanced exploration of theories of power and authority to uncover how a preference for authoritarian government interacts with different family structures in various Asian cultures. From a similar perspective emphasizing culture, Huntington has attempted to develop a theory of global politics with civilizations at the center of managing world order. Huntington’s thesis brings into doubt the universal validity of Western conceptions of human rights and democratic governance. Concerns about limited government and individual liberty are construed to be the product of a unique Western political heritage.

In contrast to the line of reasoning pursued by the scholars mentioned above, Amartya Sen, an Indian Nobel Prize winner in economics, has been highly critical of the narratives that have associated Asian values with authoritarianism and Western civilization with freedom. He insists that a more careful examination of history will reveal lines of reasoning amicable with a universal value of freedom in Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and Islamic traditions. For Sen, universal values are possible, and Asian political thought is diverse enough that it is a misguided enterprise to characterize it as radically different from the political traditions of the West. Instead, Sen would have us seek the foundations of a universal ethic in the human quest for freedom.

The Roots Of Asian Order

Sen’s search for a universal ethic needs to contend with the great diversity of ontological and political assumptions contained within the traditions of Asian political thought. The briefest examinations of east, south, and west Asian thought reveal substantial differences in worldviews.

Many scholars, such as Roger Ames and David Hall, view Chinese political thought as being radically immanent. This approach to politics puts a premium on maximizing the value of the constituent parts of a political community without a transcendent source of order or appraisal, such as a God separate from the cosmos. Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism represent different ways of achieving political order within this radically immanent context.

Confucianism emphasized rituals, relationships, and humanity as the source of social harmony and contended that the sage must widen the cosmos by realizing humanity through creative actions. Taoism took a critical stance toward the artificial order proposed by the Confucians and taught that a path of not-knowing and not-doing would better preserve a harmonious social balance. The legalists approached the problem of order from a less subtle approach to social harmony and argued for the judicious use of punishments and rewards to secure political order.

Throughout Chinese history, a hybrid of Confucian and legalist principles dominated the massive bureaucracy put in place to administer the empire. Mandarins, scholarly elites selected through a competitive testing process, filled the positions of this bureaucracy from the Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) down through the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644– 1912). The Confucian ideology also made inroads into Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, forming an important part of the intellectual superstructure of those societies up to the present.

If the Chinese worldview is radically immanent, Hinduism can be appropriately classified as a radically transcendent worldview with some important consequences for the sociopolitical world. The Hindu faith focuses on the ultimate purpose of human life as being the achievement of moksha, or liberation from an endless cycle of rebirths. Rebirths are caused by karma that will bring one either closer or farther away from this ultimate goal. Following the dharma (law) of one’s varna (caste)—whether Brahmins (priests), Kshastriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (merchants, artisans, and cultivators), or Sudras (workers)—is essential to making progress toward liberation.

This transcendently grounded vision of Hinduism allowed for a highly realistic, power-centered approach to politics to emerge, exemplified by the political thinker Kautilya, the alleged author of the Arthashastra and adviser to Chandragupta, the founder of the Mauryan dynasty (322–185 BCE). Contemporaneous texts, such as the Bhagavad Gita, strengthened this bias by making it clear that a ruler must follow his duty wherever it leads him. This Hindu understanding of ruler-ship spread throughout Southeast Asia only to be blended with Buddhist and Islamic worldviews as a foundation for political authority.

Buddhism, a reform movement within Hinduism that minimized the importance of the caste system and focused more intently on achieving liberation from suffering through enhancing awareness, was the vehicle by which Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Southeast Asian, and Tibetan civilizations were exposed to a radically transcendent vision of liberation. The Chinese would prove to be exceptionally adept at adapting this transcendent message for the purposes of meeting the demands of the immanent world through the Mahayana variation of the Buddha’s path. This tradition, unlike Theravada Buddhism that became prominent in Southeast Asia, down-played the other worldly aspects of Buddhism along with monasticism as the sole source of enlightenment and emphasized finding enlightenment in the here and now through living ordinary life. The Buddhist message proved to be attractive and found wide acceptance in Japan and Korea. By providing a comprehensive approach to deal with the suffering of individuals, Buddhism in its various guises played a powerful role as a tool for quelling the discontent that could cause social disorder.

Unlike the Buddha’s path of liberation, an act of submission to a revealed authority grounds Islam. Muhammad, the seal of the prophets, disclosed through his actions, sayings, and recitation of God’s word revealed in the Quran, God’s will regarding the order of human community. The sharia, or Islamic law, spread itself through the swords and trade networks of the faithful. Revelation and the intimacy of God’s ruler-ship of his followers offered clarity of insight into the divine will. This insight into the divine will made conflict with idolatrous communities a religious duty rather than a simple question of political and economic gain. The interpretation of God’s law is the core of Islamic political thought.

The faith of Islam spread to South Asia and, through its encounter with the unyielding infidels, the Hindus, Islam learned a tolerance uncharacteristic of a purist application of God’s word. This tolerance facilitated the spread of Islam throughout Southeast Asia mostly through trade networks as opposed to the sword. Threats to Islamic and Hindu identities would result in a revival of conflicts as elites attempted to reassert their group’s cohesion.

The interactions of Asian belief systems demonstrate both plasticity and form. The dynamism of this process makes it difficult to assess the potential of a thought system’s ability to yield solutions to any set of emerging political problems and makes the study of the political effects of these traditions highly dependent upon context. Sometimes a lack of attractive institutional structures opened the door for another worldview to expand its influence as the earlier Buddhist communities did against a relatively ossified Hinduism. Sometimes the failure to adjust to a changing environment resulted in the elimination of a political community and worldview, as was the case of the Buddhist community in India during the Islamic invasions. Authority, community, and creative responses to challenges were central to the spread and survival of Asian political traditions.

Encounter With The West And Western Dominance

As the European states reached out to Asia in the sixteenth century, they encountered a world of greater wealth, population, and resources than the world from which they came. Trading outposts and missionaries would play an important role in giving Europeans access to the markets of China, India, Japan, and Southeast Asia, and thereby to the center of global power at that time, even as the core civilizations of the region looked upon the Europeans as barbarians from the sea.

Fragmented political organization allowed the Europeans to establish footholds throughout Asia, taking advantage of local rivalries as best they could. The Dutch established themselves in Indonesia; the Spanish established themselves in the Philippines; and the English, French, and Portuguese battled for influence in India. Dutch, English, and Portuguese interests initially penetrated Japan, but in response to a perceived threat from foreign powers, the Tokugawa Shogunate closed off contact with the European world with the exception of limited access for the Dutch. China’s great centralized bureaucracy effectively managed European relations on its own terms.

By 1800, European states had substantial influence over 35 percent of the globe. By the beginning of the twentieth century, European powers had gained control of 85 percent of the globe, with only Ethiopia, Iran, Japan, Siam, Turkey, and the nations of North and South America retaining independence. Political and religious divisions within India eventually enabled the British to incorporate it into the British Empire by the time Queen Victoria became Empress of India in 1858. The French gained a dominant foothold in Indo-China by 1857. China’s defeat by the British in the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860) and the establishment of a series of unequal treaties combined with a series of internal crises such as the Taiping, Muslim, and Bandit rebellions weakened the Qing dynasty so substantially that the dynasty collapsed by 1911. In 1854, Japan was opened up to Western trade by the Black Ships of Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States and began a path of modernization that would enable it to join the European powers in the game of imperialism.

Reaction To The West And The Search For A Modern Identity

China’s reaction to the challenge of the West was slow. Traditional Confucian teachings prevailed through the 1860s. Success in subduing the major rebellions threatening the Qing dynasty supported a belief in the effectiveness and vitality of the received tradition. From the 1860s to the 1890s, China embraced a toying reformism that emphasized preserving the essence (ti) of Chinese culture while using the contrivances (yung) of Western culture to strengthen the dynasty by building arsenals and railroads. The defeat by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) led to a movement focused on reinterpreting Chinese essence. Reformers such as Kang Youwei and his student, Liang Qichao, argued that the essence of Confucianism was the ability to manage change.

They led efforts to help China evolve into a constitutional monarchy, but an alliance of the empress dowager and a variety of conservative forces across the nation stopped these reform efforts.

The revolution of 1911 overthrew the Qing Dynasty and ushered in an era that would reject Confucianism completely in favor of Western ideas. The writings of Lu Xun, which characterized Confucianism as a form of cannibalism and embraced an evolutionary metaphor, capture the rejection of tradition. In his political thought, revolutionary Chinese leader Sun Yat-sen attempted to implement principles of government based on such influences as Charles Darwin, the British Fabians, Alexander Hamilton, Henry George, Abraham Lincoln, Marxism, and a variety of other Western and non-Western resources as a means of resisting Western imperialism. A decidedly nonliberal view played a more important role in formulating the ideology that dominated China’s future. Marxist-Leninist thinkers such as Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu played an important role in formulating this ideology.

Japan embraced Western ideas more quickly than China. This embrace had much to do with the quick overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the restoration of the Emperor Meiji as the center of the Japanese state. Thinkers such as Fukuzawa Yukichi laid the foundation of Western learning, but practical political leaders would imitate Western constitutional, industrial, and military institutions to set Japan on the path of modernization.

The Japanese defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 signaled to the colonized people of Asia that the Europeans were not invincible. Japan’s experiment with constitutional government wrestled unsuccessfully with military and industrial forces, setting the country on an ultranationalistic path. Kita Ikki, Okakura Kakuzo, and Shumei Okawa, as well as philosophers associated with the Kyoto school, framed this imperial path in terms of a Pan-Asian crusade against Western colonial powers. Japan’s efforts to build an Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, a regional order with Japan replacing the European powers as the center of authority, ultimately failed as a function of its own colonial mismanagement and the superior industrial and military strength of its enemies. A constitution of American design implemented with a Japanese sensibility replaced the emperor system that blended the Japanese traditions of Confucianism, Shinto, and Zen, with extreme nationalism.

English dominance of South Asia spawned a nationalist movement seeking to return to a genuinely Hindu identity. Figures in this movement included a wide range of political thinkers and actors such Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Savarkar, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mohandas Gandhi.The nature of this identity varied according to its interpreter. Savarkar focused on the revival of the warrior spirit. Rabindranath Tagore advocated a cosmopolitanism rejecting all nationalisms. Gandhi embraced the doctrine of satyagraha, a nonviolent approach to overcoming injustice. Gandhi’s philosophy played a central role in securing India its independence from Great Britain.

The separation from Great Britain did not separate South Asia from the political thought dominating Western political discourse at that time. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, embraced liberalism and socialism as a means of finding a way for his society to make progress. A commitment to humanism and science molded the secular state that Nehru played such an important role in constructing. Socialist theory similarly influenced the Muslim majority areas of South Asia, but Pakistan embraced firmly its Islamic identity instead of secularism. Islamic countries in Southeast Asia followed similar paths.

Socialism had influence throughout the emancipating colonial world, but the more revolutionary ideology of Marxism Leninism took center stage in various civil wars and wars of liberation. The victory of the communists in the Chinese civil war (1945–1949) empowered Mao Zedong to become a leading Asian Marxist theorist. Mao embraced a political pragmatism that enabled him to move from a Stalinist approach to heavy industrialization to an anarchistic decentralization during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Revolutionaries such as Cambodia’s Pol Pot, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, and Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh would wield Marxist concepts in a similarly creative fashion. These Marxist experiments to build new worlds had incredibly high human costs.

Academic theorists throughout Asia embraced more nuanced Marxist lenses to examine the problem of underdevelopment in the non-Western world. Japanese scholars such as Otsuka Hisao and Uno Kozo developed the foundations of world systems theory independently and simultaneously with the Western scholars Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein. Economic and political events weakened the intellectual attractiveness of Marxist thought throughout Asia.

The economic success of states such as Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, which embraced relatively liberal economic regimes, and the collapse of the socialist block in Europe raised serious questions about the effectiveness of socialism or Marxism to help developing countries to modernize. China and states in Southeast Asia began to experiment with market liberalization with positive effect. Though some of these states embraced democratization, China and Singapore, as well as others, remained skeptical about the value of the full range of civil liberties for social well-being.

Globalization And Contemporary Challenges

The end of the cold war opened up the world to greater economic, social, and political integration underneath the emerging liberal international order. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) argued that the triumph of liberal democracy had ended the search for a comprehensive political ideology and, with that end, ushered in the final universal ideology. Doubts about the desirability of Western-style liberal democracy are the beginning of modern Asian political thought.

Asian leaders such as Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew; longtime Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad; Singapore scholar and diplomat Kishore Mahbubani; and others critiqued Western cultures as being disrespectful of authority, destructive to the family, too contentious, too concerned about individual civil liberties and not concerned enough about the rights of the community, and too dismissive of the role of elites in creating the conditions that would serve the economic and cultural needs of the community. These critics believed Asian values could cure these Western maladies. The economic success of the East Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan), Japan, Thailand, and Malaysia made many in the West find much to admire in these Asian values.

The Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998 revealed some of the weaknesses of the authority/family/community-based paradigm previously credited for the strength of Asian societies and economies. Concerns about cronyism, the stifling of innovation, and the inability of economies to respond to market conditions replaced previous admiration for social order, family values, and harmony.

In recent years, strong economic growth rates in India and China and the need to provide social stability in the midst of economic development have led some to look to the traditional cultures of Asia as an anchor in a storm. China’s call for a “harmonious society” and its own “peaceful rise” in the global community most clearly owe a great deal to the traditional values of Confucianism. The role of Hindu nationalism in India, Buddhist nonviolence and social activism in Bhutan, Myanmar, Tibet, Thailand, and other historically Buddhist countries, and Islamic fundamentalism and the traditional and modern response to this phenomenon throughout Southeast Asia, just to name a few examples, make it evident that Asian political thought will continue to be an important and dynamic part of the Asian political landscape.

It is also important to note that Western scholars are mining the political traditions of Asia for materials to deal with contemporary political problems. Roger Ames and David Hall find common ground between the Confucian tradition and the thought of the American pragmatist and progressive John Dewey to help further a universal democratic project. Peter Hershock looks inside the Buddhist tradition and demonstrates the relevance of the conceptions of karma and emptiness for a full spectrum of public policy problems. Daniel Bell explores the different meanings of human rights in a Western and east Asian context. Richard Nisbett examines the foundations for how Westerners and east Asians perceive the world differently. His work lends scientific credibility to those who discern profoundly different approaches to political and social problems in the various cultural regions—even as he affirms the possibility of the convergence of Western and Eastern values.

Asian critics of the Asian values thesis, such as former South Korean president Kim Dae Jung and former Taiwan president, Lee Tenghui, give credence to Nisbett’s hypothesis about convergence. These advocates of democracy perceive the Asian values argument as a means of attacking fundamental human rights and perceive these rights to exist in the broader intellectual heritages of their respective civilizations. Coming into this debate at the liberal end of liberal democracy, Chinese political scientist Liu Junning perceives parallels between the Chinese philosophical tradition of Taoism and the Western classical liberal tradition. A growing classical liberal think-tank movement throughout the Asia Pacific region demonstrates the practical basis for such theoretical endeavors. Just as classical liberal ideas have Asian allies and advocates, progressive strains of Western thought focused on environmentalism and global justice find resonance among local activists such as Thai activist Sulak Sivaraksa, who argues that Buddhist ethical teachings require advocacy for the rights of indigenous peoples that are in alignment with these broader social movements. If the present multicultural intellectual climate is preserved, the cross-fertilization of political ideas likely will yield regionally interesting hybrids of Western and Asian political thought, even if it fails to produce a homogenous political thought grounded in a universal conception of human rights.

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