From mid-late 1994, politicians, journalists, and academics in Singapore, Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan came together in print and person to celebrate the life of Wu Teh-yao (1916–1994). Most recently a columnist for the state-run Lianhe Zaobao (LHZB) in Singapore, Wu died at 77 on 17 April while visiting Taiwan. Leading the way in remembering him were Ong Teng Cheong and Wee Kim Wee, the current and former presidents of the country that Wu had lived and worked in, at both the University of Singapore (SU) and Nanyang University (Nantah), since December 1971. In remarks that typified how Wu was remembered, Ong, a former Deputy Prime Minister, hailed Wu as ‘a man imbued with traditional values and great knowledge of both East and West,’ who had ‘played a significant role in promoting Confucianism and moral education in Singapore.’Footnote 1 Wee described him as a ‘humble but GREAT MAN’ who had lived, since his retirement in 1981, in a ‘very modest HDB [Housing Development Board] flat at Jurong East.’ After meeting him for the first time, Wee was convinced that ‘we had a sage among us in Singapore’ and was among the approximately 500 persons who attended Wu's memorial service at Orchard Road Presbyterian Church, which Wu had frequented for decades.Footnote 2 From Cambridge, Massachusetts, arrived a condolence letter from the Harvard New Confucian philosopher Tu Wei-ming. Tu had been a student at Tunghai, a private Christian university in Taichung, Taiwan, in the late 1950s and secured a visiting fellowship at the Harvard-Yenching Institute in 1962 with the support of Wu, Tunghai's president from 1957–1971 and also a Harvard PhD (in Government in 1946).Footnote 3 Tu described his former teacher as a ‘philosopher-king’ (zhewang) and ‘Mencian man of character’ (Mengzi de dazhangfu) who had ‘spread many virtuous seeds that helped enrich Chinese [huaxia] civilization’ (sabu le xuduo hongyang huaxia wenming de shanzhong).Footnote 4 A year later, Tu delivered the first Wu Teh Yao Memorial Lecture; the series continues today, biannually, under the auspices of the National University of Singapore's (NUS) Chinese Studies Department.
These and other retrospectives afford us glimpses into a peripatetic life that spanned British Malaya, Republican China, the United States, Taiwan under the Kuomintang (KMT), Singapore under the People's Action Party (PAP), and the colonial, Christian, Cold War, and Chinese worlds, across two-thirds of the twentieth century. They also encapsulate key aspects of Wu's 23 years in the country where his career culminated, he produced most of his writings, and he is best remembered — but not in scholarship on political, cultural, or intellectual history. As Ong and Wee's remarks suggest, Wu epitomised what his SU Political Science colleague Chan Heng Chee, in a 1975 article on typologies of Singaporean intellectuals, called a ‘legitimiser of the established order.’Footnote 5 Unlike other ‘Chinese émigré intellectuals’ and New Confucians such as Mou Zongsan, Xu Fuguan, and Tu Wei-ming whom Wu knew, Wu published no real scholarship in Political Science or on Confucianism.Footnote 6 His thinking was, moreover, never oriented solely towards his country of birth and, until the mid-1970s, citizenship. He was, rather, a political philosopher whose talents lay in popularising ideas that buttressed diverse state projects, all while never being fully subsumed into these states themselves.
Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s, through public lectures, essays, newspaper columns, and service on government committees and think tanks, no single intellectual contributed as much, discursively and administratively, in English and Chinese, to legitimising authoritarianism and social conservatism in Singapore. A believer in fundamental differences between ‘East’ and ‘West’, Wu was a throwback to thinkers such as Arnold J. Toynbee and Japanese Pan-Asianists in the early twentieth century who subscribed to what historian Eri Hotta calls ‘Asian commonalities in the vast philosophical dimension of Asian civilization.’Footnote 7 He judged ‘Western’ liberal democracy to be ill-suited to an ‘Eastern’ society such as Singapore and exhorted both colleagues and publics to respect hierarchy in the name of tradition. Deeply concerned with the ill-effects of ‘materialism’ on society, Wu tirelessly promoted Confucianism as a humanistic bulwark against moral decay and social instability, helping to advance the PAP's cultural nation-building goals in the process. Wu's Orientalist vision of politics, culture, and society, forged over decades through his experiences as a Chinese emigrant and Confucian-Christian Cold Warrior, found full expression in the PAP's authoritarian, paternalistic vision for the postcolonial nation-state.
This article uses Wu's career and writings to argue that PAP-ruled Singapore in the 1970s–1980s embodied crucial aspects of conservatism as a transnationally constituted ideological project in post-Second World War Asia, whether such conservatism was espoused by Asians or actors from beyond the region with an interest in it. The study of conservatism, Sinologist Benjamin Schwartz once remarked, ‘is a swamp which one approaches with reluctance’, for the term ‘will neither submit to the dogmatic criteria of meaning imposed by certain rigorous linguistic philosophers nor allow itself to be dismissed as meaningless’.Footnote 8 Rather than trying to essentialise it, as Schwartz cautions against, I historicise it as a useful category of analysis (but not necessarily a category of practice), elucidate what conservatives opposed and championed, and distinguish between its agenda and structures, all within the context of the Cold War and decolonisation in Asia.Footnote 9 This conservatism was a modernising ideology characterised, fundamentally and relativistically, by opposition to left-wing radicalism and social protests, from communism to student and labour activism. Its anti-radicalism was a broad tent that encompassed, as seen in histories by Reto Hofmann, Brian Tsui, and Bradley Simpson, former fascists and imperialists from Japan, Chinese social democrats, US advocates of military modernisation in Indonesia, and indeed the PAP itself — a democratic socialist party and, until 1976, member of the Socialist International whose power was predicated on suppressing supposed ‘communists’ from 1963 onwards.Footnote 10 Wu himself evinced a Cold War liberalism that critics have called ‘elitist and anti-democratic’.Footnote 11
Anti-radicalism was constitutive of a more general, but not unequivocal, wariness towards ‘foreign’ influences other than communism, such as liberal democracy and cultural Westernisation. A central problem for conservatives was how to mitigate the disruptive effects of capitalist growth on society without jettisoning capitalism entirely.Footnote 12 The answer lay in culture, particularly ‘Asian’ culture. As historian Jennifer Miller has shown, US neoconservative intellectuals appropriated the racially and culturally essentialist writings of Japanese scholars such as Nakane Chie and Doi Takeo to argue that Japanese culture helped mitigate the corrosive effects of rapid capitalist growth on the ‘traditions, especially religion, family, and community, that gave life meaning’.Footnote 13 More than that, conservatives sought to mobilise culture and tradition in support of a non- or anti-radical and less-than-democratic political and social order. These figures included Chiang Kai-shek and promoters of the Cultural Renaissance Movement (Zhonghua wenhua fuxing yundong) in martial law Taiwan, and rulers such as Ngô Đình Diệm in South Vietnam, and Thailand's Sarit Thanarat, whose dictatorships were underpinned, respectively, by the Catholic ideology of ‘personalism’ and ‘indigenous principles of state’ (lakkanmuang Thai).Footnote 14 Wu was not alone among Southeast Asian academics in the 1970s in advocating for the ‘Eastern tradition’ as helping to curb the excesses of capitalism and Western culture, and as the basis for authoritarianism. Filipino political scientist Wilfrido V. Villacorta, for example, argued in 1975, three years into martial law in his country, that Ferdinand E. Marcos's ‘New Society’ required a ‘value transformation’ which synthesised the ‘austere heritage of our oriental brothers’ and ‘our indigenous dispositions’ to ‘refine the competitive, aggressive, and acquisitive ethic handed down to us by the West’.Footnote 15
Asian conservatism, though directed primarily towards nationalist ends, was constituted not only internationally — that is to say, through inter-state diplomacy — but also transnationally, via networks established by institutions other than states, and through processes such as intellectual migration. Scholarship on Cold War and post-Cold War Asia by, for example, Hofmann, Mitchell Tan, and Els van Dongen explores how Japanese, South Vietnamese, and Chinese conservatives engaged with the region and beyond during this period through vehicles such as the Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League, the Moral Re-Armament Movement, and international conferences on Confucianism.Footnote 16 Their histories complement studies of left-wing intellectual connections across borders such as by Susan Bayly on Vietnamese and Indian postcolonial intellectuals, Matthew Galway on Cambodian Maoists, and Carolien Stolte and Su Lin Lewis on Afro-Asian political activists, over the mid-late twentieth century.Footnote 17 My work joins with the emerging literature on the transnationalism of conservatism in Asia, amplifying Singapore's significance to this phenomenon. Part intellectual biography and part social history of ideology, it uses Wu to explore how Singapore represented the realisation of a particular set of conservative ideas about ‘Asianness’ — commonly referred to as ‘Asian Values’ — and was constitutive of a wider conservative ideoscape structured by educational institutions, states, and intellectuals on the move.Footnote 18
In doing so, I also argue for rethinking the temporality and genealogy of ‘Asian Values’ discourse, particularly in late twentieth-century Singapore. The concept has come to refer to a series of controversial claims by Asian statesmen in the post-Cold War 1990s, especially Lee Kuan Yew, about the supposed cultural incompatibility between ‘Western’ liberalism and ‘Asian’ traditions, on the one hand, and the putatively positive relationship between the latter and East Asia's rapid economic growth on the other. In political scientist Michael Barr's view, although Asian Values has a pre-history stretching back to the nineteenth century, its ‘undisputed architect’ is Lee Kuan Yew, who launched the term in 1977.Footnote 19 Barr's account typifies the state- and Lee-centrism in social science scholarship on the PAP.Footnote 20 Yet, as historian T. N. Harper contends, ‘it is facile to conflate Asian intellectual thought — even the oft-profiled “Singapore school” — with the projects of the state’, for the relationship between the two is a ‘complicated affair’.Footnote 21 In the spirit of Harper's call for a more complex understanding of Asian thought, this article historicises conservative ideas in PAP-ruled Singapore. At a time when an ‘East versus West’ paradigm in cultural discourse was emerging, it shows that conservatism did not merely flow downwards from Lee and first-generation PAP leaders such as Goh Keng Swee, S. Rajaratnam, Ong Pang Boon, Jek Yuen Thong, and Lee Khoon Choy.Footnote 22 Operating between the state and the public, Wu Teh-yao played an essential role in the 1970s to 1980s in formulating and circulating what in the 1990s became reified as Asian Values, and hence in legitimising the state from beyond and within it.
Wu in the colonial and imperial world: China, Malaya, and the United States
Wu's understanding of the world as divisible into ‘East’ and ‘West’ and his concerns about the latter's effects on the former are traceable to his life as a Chinese emigrant who crossed national borders and straddled cultural boundaries both within and across states. Born in Nanchang, Hainan, in 1916, Wu emigrated at the age of nine to live with his uncle in Penang. The British colony was a site for both his Anglicisation and Sinicisation. He first attended two Protestant, English-medium schools and likely converted to Christianity before completing his secondary education at Chung Ling High School, a bilingual institution established by overseas Chinese businessmen. Wu's decision to transfer to Chung Ling stemmed in part from his rediscovery of the Chinese language, which his earlier English education had deprived him of. In a moralising article on ‘Courage’ written for a Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) youth magazine in 1979, Wu described a chance encounter in a Penang coffee shop that set his culturally deracinated younger self on the path to becoming a multilingual, cosmopolitan adult. Asked by the proprietor of the outlet if he could read a Chinese newspaper in front of him, Wu ‘blushed with shame’. Thereafter, if his self-fashioning narrative is to be believed, Wu transmuted that shame into the ‘courage to study the Chinese language’, which ‘changed his outlook, career and life’ by enabling him to attend first Chung Ling and then, from 1936–1940, the University of Nanking.Footnote 23 The university was one of four founding members of a consortium of US Protestant colleges in China known variously as the Central Office of the China Union Universities, Associated Boards for Christian Colleges in China, United Board for Christian Higher Education in China, and, finally, in 1956, after its constituent institutions had been nationalised by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia (UBCHEA).Footnote 24 Wu's adolescent mobility was thus profoundly shaped by the larger forces of Chinese overseas emigration and settlement, and by Anglo-American inter-imperial networks that enabled talented Asian youths to pursue higher education in imperial metropoles.
The same networks enabled Wu to pursue his graduate studies and then work in the United States for both his country and the UBCHEA. With funding from the US Committee on Wartime Planning for Chinese Students and the UBCHEA, Wu crossed the Pacific and eventually spent 15 years in the United States from 1940–1955. In 1948, two years after completing a PhD in Government at Harvard with a thesis entitled ‘The Balance of Power in the Far East, 1921–1931’, he became a Technical Assistant to the Republic of China (ROC) delegation to the United Nations. He even deputised for the Columbia-educated polymath P. C. Chang at the second session of the drafting committee for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).Footnote 25 Wu's takeaway from this episode paralleled Chang's concerns about the UDHR's overemphasis on individual rights. In a 1992 LHZB column, Wu regretted that the UDHR ‘only speaks of rights but not duties’ (zhi tan quanli er bu tan yiwu).Footnote 26 Chang, through Wu, sought to have the UDHR enumerate a list of such duties,Footnote 27 but Wu was told by the UDHR's co-author, French jurist René Cassin, that ‘Now is the time to talk about rights, not duties’. The eventual declaration only briefly mentions one's ‘duties to the community’ in its penultimate article. For Wu, in 1992 if not in 1948, Cassin's remarks epitomised a narrow, Western conception of human rights. As someone from the ‘East’ (dongfang), Wu questioned if Asians and Africans placed such rights above the basics of survival.Footnote 28 Throughout his professional career, Wu consistently stressed that Asians had to find a culturally suitable balance between individual needs and communal responsibilities.
Wu and the Chinese Cold War: Malaya, the UBCHEA, and Tunghai
For Wu, the UBCHEA became the means for him to fulfil such responsibilities to multiple communities, including the ROC, the United States, and particularly ethnic Chinese societies, in support of Cold War nation-building projects in East and Southeast Asia.Footnote 29 In 1951, at the height of the Malayan Emergency, the British colonial government commissioned Wu and the UBCHEA's Associate Executive Secretary, William Purviance Fenn — Wu's former literature professor at the University of Nanking — to write a report on Chinese education in Malaya in support of Britain's ‘Malayanization’ of the Chinese population. The Fenn–Wu Report spoke glowingly of the Chinese language, culture, and schools, but concluded by toeing the official British line that there could be ‘no place in Chinese schools, or indeed the life of the Chinese in Malaya, for China-centred political loyalties or controls’.Footnote 30 In 1952, with the UBCHEA's institutions in China under CCP control, Wu enthusiastically accepted Fenn's invitation to join the UBCHEA's Literature Program, a propaganda organ targeting Southeast Asians, especially ethnic Chinese. Wu believed that the programme was ‘motivated by the might of TRUTH and boundless faith in the dignity and worth of man’ and, via ‘the soundest approach free men have today … the democratic process … will lead to the voluntary recognition of TRUTH’ and lead to the ‘elevation of the stature of man which is being persistently threatened in that part of the world today.’Footnote 31
After joining the programme, Wu proposed that it issue a series of articles in the form of letters to Chinese youths in East and Southeast Asia and have these articles both published in local newspapers and periodicals and broadcasted over the radio.Footnote 32 In total, between October 1952 and September 1954, Wu and others composed a total of 286,000 characters, spread across 53 articles published in a variety of Chinese-language periodicals and magazines and reaching audiences in Singapore, Penang, Manila, Hong Kong, and Taipei.Footnote 33 On 1 January 1953, the Literature Program published its manifesto, ‘Our Twentieth Century,’ throughout the Sinophone world, including on the front page of Singapore's leading Chinese broadsheet, the Nanyang Siang Pau (NYSP), as part of a New Year's Day issue dominated by UBCHEA articles. The essay was in some ways a quintessential articulation of Cold War liberalism.Footnote 34 It sketched a vision of world peace and social order based not only on free trade and private enterprise, but even more importantly, on the ‘spiritual values’ that were necessary for the ‘development of individual initiative’ and, above all, the ‘dignity of the person’. It implicitly referred to communism by criticising ‘statism, materialism and ideology’ and misguided notions of economic utopianism as obstacles to the realisation of ideals that Confucius, Jesus, and Sun Yat-sen exemplified. Yet, the article also qualifies its near-universalist agenda by leveraging notions of cultural difference to express an anti-imperialism that would make it more palatable to readers. It posited an East–West divide not between the communist and capitalist blocs, but between Eastern and Western cultures. In language that was characteristic of Wu's rhetoric, ‘Our Twentieth Century’ cautioned against the ‘tendency of the East’ to ‘copy, and often superficially, the forms of Western political and economic institutions’. The ‘imposition of a political and social order entirely alien in thought and practice on a nation of Asia will fail’, as had happened before.Footnote 35
Wu had an opportunity to actualise the ideals explicated in this essay when he took up the position of Dean of Arts at Tunghai University in 1955 and became its second president in 1957. Despite having lived in the United States since 1940, Wu had never sought US citizenship because of what Fenn called ‘his conviction … that he should return when possible to serve his own people’. In 1955, Wu was on the verge of being granted permanent residency, but voluntarily withdrew his application in a symbolic parting of ways with the United States.Footnote 36 Tunghai, the UBCHEA's second venture beyond mainland China, after Chung Chi College in Hong Kong, was meant to provide a liberal arts education in Chinese and Western cultures to all persons in Taiwan, not just ‘mainlanders’ who had fled to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War.Footnote 37 Wu understood the raison d’être of a Christian university in China as a quest for truth, which was ‘God's own expression’ and in which God was revealed. He stressed the need to avoid proselytisation and for ‘honest, free and independent inquiry’ and ‘honest dissent and differences of opinion’ so that its graduates possessed a ‘firm spiritual foundation’ and ‘democratic values’ and could ‘withstand, reject and triumph over materialistic and un-godly utterances of men’.Footnote 38 Like many other non-communist Chinese intellectuals who had left China, Wu was also deeply concerned about the CCP's efforts to ‘eradicate Chinese cultural heritage on the mainland’. He believed that Tunghai had to actively promote this heritage.Footnote 39 As an expression of his personal determination to renew his Chinese cultural identity after many years in the United States, Wu spent half an hour each day practising calligraphy, and attended classes by his colleagues such as literary scholar Dai Junren.Footnote 40 Dai was among multiple prominent humanist intellectuals formerly based in China whom Wu recruited, including Mou Zongsan and Xu Fuguan.
Wu's thinking throughout his career resembled that of more well-known intellectual and political figures, even if Wu himself was never fully part of these persons’ circles or institutions. Thus, Wu broadly shared many New Confucians’ commitments to revitalising traditional culture, conviction in the continued relevance of Confucianism to understanding modernity, and opposition to communism, but never engaged directly with these thinkers in his own, minimally footnoted writings or speeches. Similarly, Wu was not a KMT member and, unlike many liberal intellectuals in Taiwan, never openly criticised Chiang Kai-shek or the party, and supported aspects of Chiang's policies that complemented his own anti-materialism and traditionalism. His promotion of the KMT's Cultural Renaissance Movement reveals how his thinking converged with KMT ideology and how he was adept at tailoring his public utterances in support of official initiatives. The Movement was launched in late 1966 in reaction to the Cultural Revolution in the PRC and as a spiritual successor to the New Life Movement in 1930s’ China.Footnote 41 As the anthropologist Allen Chun explains, it represented a systematic effort by the party to objectify and commodify ‘traditional Chinese culture’, through which it sought to cultivate a spirit of national solidarity and lead people into believing that the correct cultural consciousness was key to the fate of the nation in all other respects.Footnote 42
Wu articulated his interpretation of the Movement belatedly in a December 1967 speech to Tunghai students, having been in the United States when the Movement was officially launched at Tunghai a year earlier by ultraconservative KMT elder and former ROC Education Minister Chen Lifu.Footnote 43 In his speech, entitled ‘Speaking of Moral Integrity’ (Tan qijie), Wu asserted that the ‘moral integrity’ of Chinese citizens had become ‘extremely weak’ (feichang shuairuo) in the past decade, as evidenced by a general inclination towards ‘blindly worshipping the foreign’ (mangmu de chongyang). Wu blamed this attitude on ‘so-called Sinologists’ (suowei de Hanxuejia) from foreign countries who enjoyed ‘nitpicking’ (tiaoti) on the ‘small defects’ (xiao maobing) of Chinese culture or who ‘deliberately sought to overthrow the original historical values of Chinese culture’ (guyi yao tuifan Zhongguo wenhua yuanyou de lishi jiazhi). Students who studied overseas risked becoming influenced by such unnamed persons into opposing their own traditions. In a telling statement of his views on education, Wu criticised scholars for questioning the existence of the legendary sage-king Shun. The issue for Wu was not if Shun was a real person, but if the filial values that Shun symbolised and that had been sustained over millennia were still worth adopting in the present. In Wu's thinking, empirical evidence mattered less than values; the past was important insofar as it offered lessons and moral precepts for adoption by society at large. Only at the end of his speech did Wu directly connect his views to the larger, state-driven campaign that was unfolding by stating that the restoration of qijie was intimately linked to the renaissance of Chinese culture.Footnote 44
Yet for all Wu's rhetorical support for the KMT's cultural nation-building schemes, neither he nor Tunghai were fully in the KMT camp. Funded entirely by US philanthropic organisations such as the Henry Luce Foundation, Princeton in Asia, and Harvard-Yenching Institute, Tunghai had to consistently contend with the ideological imperatives of a party-state that suspected private educational institutions, especially Western ones, as potential sources of social unrest.Footnote 45 For this reason, the UBCHEA and Tunghai carefully cultivated links with party elites, such as through the election of Han Lih-wu, an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek who had just served as Education Minister, as Chairman of the Board of Trustees in 1953.Footnote 46 Wu himself leveraged native-place ties to cultivate friendly relations with his fellow Nanchang Hainanese and Western-educated Chinese Christian Soong Meiling, who may even have been responsible for relieving some of the KMT's legal pressures on Tunghai, according to one Tunghai alumnus.Footnote 47 Wu's aim, as evidenced by his oblique take on the Cultural Renaissance Movement, was to keep the state at arm's length by not antagonising it. Alumni remember Wu as a liberal who preserved Tunghai's academic freedom at the height of the White Terror by distinguishing between education and politics and not allowing political parties to be active on campus.Footnote 48 Ultimately, despite his fluency in multiple Chinese languages, enthusiasm for the Chinese classics, nationality, and hostility towards communism, he never felt at home in KMT-controlled Taiwan. Wu once confessed to Tunghai alumnus Hsiao Ting-fen, father of Taiwan's Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim, that the KMT did not consider him a ‘Chinese person’ (Zhongguo ren).Footnote 49 One senior KMT member at the time incorrectly recalled that Wu had Canadian or US citizenship and implied that Wu was insufficiently ‘Chinese’ compared with his predecessor as Tunghai's president, the great-grandson of Qing reformer Zeng Guofan.Footnote 50 For these and other reasons, Wu was on the move again in 1971. Having never felt that he belonged in either the United States or Taiwan, Wu described his emigration to Singapore in late 1971 as akin to the ‘return of a native son to his native land’, to ‘returning to the land of his youth’.Footnote 51
Wu in his ‘native land’: legitimising authoritarianism in the name of culture
Wu returned to his ‘native land’ during a period when relatively autonomous institutions that produced knowledge such as universities and newspapers were being brought under PAP control. Lee Kuan Yew had declared at SU in February 1966 that universities in newly independent countries had to produce ‘the people to do jobs in a modern civilised community’ and ‘even more important … lead thinking — informed thinking — into the problems which the nation faces’.Footnote 52 Three years later, Lee summoned all first-year students in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, as well as all staff from the departments of Philosophy, Sociology, and Political Science, to the National Theatre, where he cast aspersions on these staff, most of whom were not Singaporean, over the extent of their commitment to Singapore's future. Lee also railed against them for teaching their students ‘twaddle’ and for transgressions such as cracking jokes about government slogans and encouraging ‘permissiveness in manners of dress or hairstyles’.Footnote 53 To bring SU to heel, Lee appointed his right-hand man, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Science and Technology Toh Chin Chye, Vice-Chancellor of SU in 1968,Footnote 54 and it was Toh who invited Wu to lead the Political Science Department in 1971. Wu worked at SU from 1971 to 1975 and at NUS from 1980 to his retirement in 1981; from 1975 to 1977, he served as Dean of Graduate Studies and then Vice-Chancellor of Nantah at a time when plans were already underway to combine Nantah and SU because of the steadily declining enrolments of Chinese primary and secondary schools, Nantah's feeder institutions. In the absence of evidence, we can but surmise that Wu's ethnicity, Harvard PhD, proficiency in English and Chinese languages, experience as an administrator, contributions to education policy in Malaya, and ideological qualities all made him highly attractive to the Vice-Chancellor.
As head of Political Science at SU from 1971 to 1975, Wu was constitutive of a new wave of scholars, including a younger generation of Western-educated ethnic Chinese academics, whom the PAP recruited in the early 1970s. Among them were three persons who later became some of Singapore's most prominent social scientists: sociologist Eddie Kuo, economist John C. H. Wong, and his wife, sociologist Aline Wong, who later served as a PAP Member of Parliament (MP) and Minister of State. Wu, a more senior Chinese intellectual emigrant, was tasked with enabling what Toh Chin Chye called the ‘intellectual decolonization’ of SU.Footnote 55 This task was made simpler by an exodus of foreign faculty in the late 1960s and early 1970s who were tired of being harangued by Lee and who were unhappy with Lee's call for academics to ‘assist in the nation building process’ and to refrain from criticising the government at a time when it was ‘beginning to lay down certain foundations of the new nation state.’ With former Political Science head and Lee critic K. J. Ratnam (a Malaysian) having departed in 1970, Wu had to rebuild the department ‘from scratch,’ according to his department colleague, PAP MP Lau Teik Soon. Unlike its former members, and unlike foreign academics such as the famously left-wing Benedict Anderson (who refused to visit Singapore),Footnote 56 Wu happily lent intellectual and administrative support for PAP nation-building. Wu also ‘decolonised’ the department by orienting it towards East and Southeast Asia, with Singapore rather than Britain or other Western political systems serving as a ‘vantage point’ for studying the region and the world. This enabled closer coordination between the social sciences at SU and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, a government think tank that had been founded in 1968 by Minister for Finance Goh Keng Swee, another of Lee's lieutenants, and that more conservative foreign Southeast Asianists such as Harry Benda and J. D. Legge had played an instrumental role in leading. Lastly, in keeping with his more practical, nationally and regionally situated vision for Political Science, Wu helped ensure that its courses prepared graduates to enter the workforce and equipped them with ‘relevant’ knowledge for the civil service.Footnote 57 Where Wu had once fought to prevent one authoritarian political party from intruding upon a university campus, he now worked to realise another such party's vision of higher education. Until late 1976, Wu remained a citizen of the ROC,Footnote 58 but never showed similar enthusiasm for the ROC under the KMT.
Wu's first decade in Singapore coincided with a post-Cultural Revolution improvement in Singapore-China diplomatic relations, the decline of Chinese schools, and continued efforts by the PAP state to stamp out perceived articulations of leftism and chauvinism within the local Chinese community. Foreign Minister S. Rajaratnam and Lee Kuan Yew visited the PRC in 1975 and 1976 respectively and indicated a willingness to pursue closer ties as long as Beijing did not interfere in Singapore's internal affairs and respected its sovereign right to deal with its own ‘communists’ as it so chose.Footnote 59 They also stressed that Singapore was a multicultural and multiracial society to dispel any perceptions by PRC officials of Singapore as a ‘third China’ by virtue of its ethnic Chinese majority. Domestically, the institutionalisation of English as the language of science, commerce, and industry under the policy of ‘bilingualism’ and the declining popularity of Chinese-medium educational institutions (such as Nantah) that resulted from it, were part of a larger strategy of ‘de-Chineseness’ that lasted until the end of the decade.Footnote 60 The explicitly coercive dimensions of this strategy manifested Lee and PAP leaders’ longstanding belief, forged amidst their earlier struggles against the left, that advocacy on behalf of Chinese schools, the language, and culture was evidence of chauvinism. In practice, this term encompassed anything that the state might construe as advocating for the culture of Singapore's racial majority at the expense of multiracialism and multiculturalism. Chauvinism was also intimately associated with support for the PRC and seen as paving the way for the PRC to interfere in Singapore's affairs.Footnote 61 A highly problematic and politicised label, ‘chauvinism’ was inimical to national security, multiracialism, and political stability as envisioned by the ruling party. To this end, in May 1971, the state detained four senior employees of the NYSP under the auspices of the Internal Security Act, the same colonial law that the PAP had used to decimate the Barisan Sosialis during Operation Coldstore in February 1963. Like the 113 members of the Barisan arrested then, Lee Mau Seng, Shamsuddin Tung Tao Chang, Ly Singko, and Kerk Loong Seng were purportedly guilty of ‘implementing the [NYSP's] policy of glamourising the Communist system and also working up communal emotions on issues over Chinese language and culture.’Footnote 62 Further alleged chauvinists and communist sympathisers, including playwright Kuo Pao Kun and his wife Goh Lay Kuan, were arrested in the years that followed.Footnote 63
Unlike these detainees, with whom he shared an appreciation for Chinese culture, Wu entered into a productive relationship with the state. His social and cultural conservatism, shaped by experiences elsewhere, was translatable to fit into the ideological mainstream and institutional networks of his ‘native land’. Wu's example suggests that Chineseness in 1970s’ Singapore, rather than only being suppressed from above, as narratives such as ‘de-Chineseness’ imply, was resignified from within the ever-expanding ambit of the state itself. In censuring Kuo, Goh, Lee, Tung, Ly, and Kerk, the government incentivised other intellectuals to reimagine Chinese culture as compatible with its goals. Wu did not advocate for repression or denounce communism and chauvinism, but rather reworked elements of what might easily have been perceived as chauvinism in other contexts into an Orientalist justification for authoritarian rule in Singapore and Southeast Asian region. Take, for example, the article ‘Teaching Political Science in Southeast Asia Today’, which was published in both the Nanyang Quarterly in June 1973 and the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (JSEAS) in March 1974 amidst Wu's continuing efforts to ‘decolonise’ Political Science at SU.Footnote 64 This short piece was premised on his belief that Political Science in Southeast Asia was too Westernised and manifested longstanding anxieties about Westernisation that are found in earlier essays such as ‘Our Twentieth Century’. In his view, Southeast Asian scholars were becoming ‘Westernized Oriental Political Scientists’. In their gradual absorption of Western ideas and political values, they were comparable to persons injected with small doses of the ‘poison of the viper’ who developed an immunity to it over time. In a sign of his ideological affinity with PAP elites, Wu claimed in a footnote that his label for these scholars was inspired by Minister for Defense Goh Keng Swee's appellation ‘Westernized Oriental Gentlemen’.Footnote 65
The article contains no empirical evidence of over-Westernisation on the part of political scientists in Southeast Asia; it is better understood as an attempt to legitimise a particular, non-communist strain of Asian authoritarianism, particularly in Singapore, based on fixed notions of cultural difference, Wu's own intellectual methodology, and an awareness of the consequences for those critical of the political establishment. While working for the UBCHEA's Literature Program, Wu was actively involved in promulgating the ideas of philosopher-historian Arnold J. Toynbee — a favourite thinker of Lee Kuan Yew — and at Tunghai counselled students to adopt a ‘broad perspective and objective attitude’ (yuanda de yanguang keguan de taidu) in their studies, similar to that of Toynbee in A Study of History.Footnote 66 The Chinese classics aside, Toynbee is one of the few enduring intellectual influences on Wu that we have reasonably concrete evidence of. In his JSEAS article, Wu blends Toynbee's broad, civilisational approach and his own cultural leanings to prescribe certain political ends for Political Science as a Southeast Asian discipline. Wu stated that the ‘major task’ of Political Science was to ‘interpret the past and the traditional and relate them to the present’, and to ‘formulate and theorize on a polity that would embrace the traditional as well as the modern’. He explained, invoking a favourite reified phrase of his, that parliamentary democracy was alien to the ‘Eastern tradition’, whether Chinese, Japanese, or Malay, and adopting it ‘could lead sooner or later to a blind political alley’, as examples from Southeast Asia's recent past suggested. Elaborating on this tradition, Wu focused on Confucius. He argued that just as the Sage had adopted a ‘constructive and positive’ approach and avoided ‘direct criticism’, so should political scientists in this age of Southeast Asian nation-building. Employing ‘such political jargon as dictators or totalitarians to label those in power could be occupational suicide’. Instead, scholars should ‘apply the principle of self-restraint and refrain from making irresponsible, distractive criticisms to divert and divide the nation from attaining its national purpose’. Above all, Southeast Asian states required ‘political stability above all else’.Footnote 67 The Nanyang Quarterly version of this essay became the basis for a newspaper article highlighting Wu's call for political scientists to avoid criticising governments.Footnote 68
In this and other essays written while based in Singapore, Wu was particularly attracted to the idea that ‘Eastern’ polities from China to Singapore to Indonesia were defined by their cultural embrace of ‘consensus’ as a governing practice. If parliamentary democracy, despite its formal adoption, ‘does not seem to be suitable to the political culture of Southeast Asia’, how then were these countries governed? Wu suggested that these polities were ruled by the ‘power of consensus’ stemming from the ‘hierarchial [sic] pyramid, the President or Prime Minister’. He described how in such cultures, items placed on a parliamentary agenda were rarely debated and voted on; instead, parliamentarians simply issued statements that the ‘chairman’ summed up before declaring that the item had been passed. As an example, Wu cited a Singapore newspaper article on the recent 1973 re-election of the Indonesian military dictator Suharto to a second five-year presidential term with an ‘overwhelming mandate’ from Indonesia's 920-person supreme policymaking body. No vote was taken, and Suharto's re-election was simply ‘declared unanimous with Congress members shouting their agreement and applauding’. Another example was PAP-ruled Singapore, in whose parliament Wu claimed, without evidence, that similarly consensual exchanges of views took place in consonance with traditional political culture. In keeping with his call for political scientists to ‘formulate and theorize’ a polity that combined the traditional and the modern, Wu suggested that the discipline could help realise a ‘synthesis of the East and the West, to evolve a new polity which may be called a CONSENCRACY, a governance supported by the moral power of consensus but upheld by … a parliamentary form of government’.Footnote 69
This was not the first or last time that Wu enthused about PAP rule to a wider Singaporean audience. In June 1972, shortly after arriving at SU, Wu spoke about ‘Singapore – The Republic of the Twenty-First Century’ at a seminar on modernisation and the individual. This lecture is the fullest exposition of ‘consencracy’ — a neologism entirely of his own creation — in relation to a country that he had never lived in until 1971, but that he came to frame in world-historical terms. Wu began with a sweeping exposition on causation in history and the importance, though rarity, of the ‘getting together of the right men, in the right place and at the right time’ to ‘fostering and implementing a common political ideal’ and constructing ‘historical moments’. The history and development of Singapore, he explained, constituted such a moment. The fledgling republic had emerged as ‘the most self-reliant developing nation in the world’ and ‘one of the world's foremost, socially and economically progressive polities’. The ‘Muse of History’ had brought together ‘four major traditions of mankind's cultural heritage’ on a small island and given birth to a polity that ‘may well prove to be most unique in the history of mankind’. Implicitly invoking Hegel, Wu proclaimed that Singapore epitomised the synthesis of East and West in a world moving rapidly towards the ‘diffusion of ideas and values at all levels of human activity’. This was particularly evident in government. Although Singapore had inherited British parliamentary democracy, it was ‘ruled by one party’ with an ‘overwhelming mandate from the people’, in keeping with Asians’ propensity to ‘accept authority from above’. Seemingly oblivious to or uninterested in Singapore's recent history of radical anticolonialism, Wu proposed that students of politics question why newly independent countries should ‘blindly follow the West’ when its ‘social and political structure and ethos are different’. As a consencracy, Singapore was ‘embarking on and pioneering into this form of a synthesized polity of the future as the twentieth century fades and as the twenty-first dawns upon mankind’.Footnote 70
In the 1980s, after retiring from teaching, Wu became an editorial consultant and regular columnist for the NYSP and LHZB, newspapers that had been turned into organs of PAP nation-building. In total, he published 121 columns, from 1981 up to his death in 1994, on a wide range of topics — from contemporary geopolitics to his travels in countries such as the United States, China, and Taiwan to Singaporean society and culture. In his locally focused columns, he continued to make a cultural case for the PAP. One such piece favourably contrasted the ‘original’ (yuan) values of an Eastern society with the ‘current’ (xian) values of Singaporeans. He attributed society's lack of respect for authority to ‘ill political winds’ (zhengzhi de xiefeng) from the West that encouraged ‘resistance for resistance's sake’ (wei fankang er fankang) and persons to assume that all authority was bad and had to be overthrown. Wu feared that this attitude of ‘perverted democracy’ (biantai minzhu), if not rectified, would lead to mob rule, which Singapore as a young, small nation could not afford to experience. If Chinese-educated Singaporeans had been at the forefront of opposition to the government in the past, they had since reverted to the traditional position of respecting those in power who governed effectively. The present danger lay with the English-educated, who had absorbed the errors of Western ideology and lacked gratitude for those in power. Like bananas, their flesh (rou) was white, but their skin (pi) was yellow.Footnote 71 It is unclear if he was familiar with ‘banana’ as slang for excessively Westernised Asian-Americans.
Wu's attraction to and justifications for PAP rule thus had little to do with its economic development record or the supposed link between culture and the economy. A committed anti-materialist, he differs in this regard from US neoconservatives at the time who posited a link between economic growth and Confucianism.Footnote 72 Unlike his diasporic contemporary, the scholar-turned-‘Third Force’ politician Carsun Chang, who approved of the PAP's capitalist development strategy,Footnote 73 Wu was only interested in economic growth insofar as it was a source of materialism. Instead, Wu grounded his support for the PAP in a binary understanding of ‘East’ and ‘West’ as representing the conflicting forces of the spiritual and the material, which political theorist Partha Chatterjee argues was a fundamental feature of Asian and African anticolonial nationalisms.Footnote 74 Wu elaborated on this binary in an extraordinarily Orientalist four-part NYSP column in February 1983. In it, Wu described the East as inclined towards ‘inward exploration’ (neixin de tansuo) and ‘spiritual civilization’ (jingshen wenming). By contrast, the West, comprising Hebrew, Greek, and Roman cultures, was a ‘material civilization’ (wuzhi wenming) that ‘actively looked outwards in search of progress’ (jiji xiangwai jinqu). To buttress his point, Wu even quoted from Rudyard Kipling's poem ‘The Ballad of East and West’. Rather confusingly, Wu neglected to explain how Christianity fit into this dichotomy and also provided a less than convincing reason for discussing the ‘East’ almost entirely in relation to Confucianism. As his JSEAS article implies in its passing reference to Malay and Japanese cultures, Wu did not truly think that the ‘East’ was reducible to Chinese culture: Confucianism stood alongside Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam as one of four pillars of Eastern thought. The real synonymity he perceived was between Confucianism and Chinese culture. Yet, Wu focused on Confucianism in this article because it was the culture of the ethnic Chinese (huayi) that he had been immersed in since young.Footnote 75
Wu, moral education, and Confucian Ethics
Beyond his fellow political scientists, Wu was committed to encouraging others to behave in certain culturally appropriate ways, in particular students. At Tunghai, in keeping with his ban on the KMT, Wu did not believe that students should engage in political activities, only pay close attention to politics.Footnote 76 Paradoxically, this depoliticised, anti-radical vision of education proved adaptable to Singapore precisely because it was consistent with the ruling party's political goals. The city-state had been convulsed by protests and demonstrations in the 1950s and 1960s, much of it by left-wing students from Chinese-medium schools such as Nantah. Wu's own tenure at SU coincided with a brief upsurge in social activism by members of the Student Union in 1974–1975.Footnote 77 Both out of ideological conviction and a paternalistic concern for their wellbeing, Wu urged youths to serve their society and country, but leave politics to ‘more mature minds and in experienced hands’. He believed that higher education should be about the ‘nurturing of character and the absorbtion [sic] of life's high moral values’, as well as pre-professional training, but that students’ ‘first priority’ should be their studies.Footnote 78 In a conversation with pre-university students at a seminar organised by the MOE in 1972, he linked service to one's country to moral self-cultivation, in accordance with the ‘Eastern tradition’. Wu judged the world as one dominated by ‘materialistic civilisation’ and full of ‘conflicting “isms”’. When their countries were in ‘mortal danger’ or when societies were ‘decadent’, humble, respectful, sincere, and courageous youths could ‘take up the responsibility and challenge to save [their] country and help to turn the tide of decadence’.Footnote 79
Fears of social and cultural decadence and its deleterious effects on Singapore's struggle to survive as an independent nation-state were increasingly widespread among elites at the time. Spearheaded by the Ministry of Home Affairs under Ong Pang Boon, one of the PAP's first national campaigns after coming to power in 1959 was a ‘socialist cultural revolution’ — derived from the left — aimed at curbing the spread of pornography, prostitution, gambling dens, secret societies, and other elements of ‘yellow culture’.Footnote 80 When Wu scolded political scientists for being overly Westernised, he was riffing on a pejorative term that Goh Keng Swee used at a fundraising dinner in his constituency on 10 December 1972. As The Straits Times reported, Goh criticised the ‘brainless young, who follow Western fashions and wear long hair’ and declared that a ‘Wog [Western Orientalized Gentlemen] society has no survival value in Southeast Asia’.Footnote 81 By the 1970s, the PAP had become infamous for its puritanical campaigns against ‘yellow culture’ and Sixties’ ‘counterculture’ in its pursuit of economic growth and survival. One US observer described the eclectic manifestations of such cultures in 1973 as
unkempt hair, slovenly and skimpy or bizarre costume, bare feet or sandals, and beads, bands, and bangles … an addiction to pot if not stronger stuff, a predilection for loud rock music and wild rock musicians, self-indulgence in hedonistic practices … an allergy to work, a readiness to cheat and to defraud, irresponsibility with regard to established concepts of duty, rejection of all social discipline, and antagonism toward disciplinarians, including all constituted authority.Footnote 82
Wu shared the PAP's and other conservatives’ concerns, which dovetailed agreeably with his Confucian-Christian anxieties about materialism and decadence. In multireligious Singapore in which Christianity was a minority religion, Wu could not be too open about his faith. Instead, he sublimated his faith and Confucianism into a conservative moral vision of how youths should think and feel. From shortly after his arrival to the late 1970s, Wu served as an adviser to an MOE committee tasked with revamping the Civics curriculum. Civics was introduced in 1966 as a compulsory, non-examinable subject and replaced in 1974 in primary schools by ‘Education for Living’, a title that Wu coined.Footnote 83 Unlike Civics, Education for Living was taught in students’ ‘mother tongues’: Mandarin, Malay, or Tamil. Beyond producing ‘loyal, patriotic, responsible and law-abiding citizens’, it was intended to help students understand Singapore's history and geography, ‘the desirable elements of Eastern and Western traditions’, and ‘the relationship between man and society and … society and the world’ so that they could live in peace and harmony in a multiracial, multicultural society.Footnote 84 Wu, on his part, described Education for Living as a means of ameliorating a ‘breakdown of values … false notions and strange customs, “psychedelic” music and sensuous literature’. He believed that its most vital purpose was to nurture the ‘spiritual values’ that would enable youths to ‘withstand the external influences and temptations of materialism’.Footnote 85 To complement his MOE committee work, Wu wrote widely on morality to various audiences. In a series of highly didactic short essays for Prospect, a student magazine published by the MOE, he extolled the traditional extended family as the ‘moral-ethical foundation’ of society and filial piety as explicitly leading to greater respect for persons ‘who hold positions of honour in the state or society’.Footnote 86 In a newspaper column, ‘The Extremes of Individualism’ (Geren zhuyi zhi ji), he even recommended researching methods to ‘reward’ (jiangshang) and ‘punish’ (chufa) the filial and the unfilial, and those intellectuals who married and had children, and those who did not.Footnote 87
At the time of writing this column, Wu had become involved in a more ambitious moral engineering project, this one with specifically Chinese characteristics, that the PAP had launched to spread precisely the kinds of cultural values that Wu had long advocated for. In early 1982, three years after the publication of a Report on Moral Education that Wu had been consulted on, the PAP announced Religious Knowledge as a compulsory, examinable subject for Secondary Three and Four students, beginning officially in 1984. Students could choose between multiple electives representing Singapore's major religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism), and could also take Confucian Ethics (CE) in English or Chinese. CE was belatedly introduced at the suggestion of Lee Kuan Yew to Goh Keng Swee, then Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister. Unlike with other Religious Knowledge options such as Bible Knowledge and Buddhist Studies, the development of CE required turning to foreign academics because there were no local scholars — Wu did not count here — whom the government could rely on for expert advice. Thus, to help draft the curriculum, Goh invited eight ethnic Chinese scholars, seven based in the United States and one in Taiwan, to Singapore in 1982, including Tu Wei-ming and the Yale historian Yü Ying-shih.Footnote 88 These scholars doubled as popularisers of Confucianism to a Singapore public that harboured concerns about the ideology as ‘feudalistic’ and CE as anti-democratic and chauvinistic. Tu and others gave lectures, conducted seminars, and met with members of the public, MPs, and government ministers to reassure Singaporeans that CE was a moral rather than political project.Footnote 89
If Tu Wei-ming became identifiable as the ‘most fervent proponent’ of Confucianism in the Sinosphere during this period, as historian Arif Dirlik has suggested,Footnote 90 his former Tunghai Dean and President was the most well-known Singaporean expositor of this ideology. Wu chaired the MOE committee tasked with adapting the recommendations of Tu and the other foreign scholars to produce a workable curriculum. He also served for three years, from 1986 to 1989, as Director of the Institute of East Asian Philosophies (IEAP), another Goh Keng Swee-inspired think tank, which produced knowledge on Confucianism.Footnote 91 Under Wu's leadership, the IEAP and Confucius Research Centre in the PRC organised a joint conference in Qufu on Confucianism and East Asian economic development.Footnote 92 Like Tu Wei-ming, Wu was bilingual and adept at communicating with non-specialists and in front of live audiences. In 1982, for example, Wu participated in English and Mandarin television roundtables on Religious Knowledge that were chaired by PAP politicians and featured representatives from different faiths.Footnote 93 Wu became recognizable in public: a woman greeted Wu at a hawker centre near Wu's HDB flat in Jurong and said that he looked just as he did on television.Footnote 94 Besides in public lectures and on television, Wu expounded on Confucianism in his newspaper columns. On television, he assured viewers that Confucianism did not conflict with religions such as Christianity, quoting from Confucius and citing his own Christian beliefs as evidence;Footnote 95 in print, he explained that Confucianism did not ‘discriminate against those with different views’ (paichi yiji) and opposed territorial conquest.Footnote 96 In his expansive, idealistic worldview, Confucius's teachings transcended ages (shidai), regions (diyu), national boundaries (guojie), races (renzhong), and any person (renhe ren) because the Sage promoted a ‘human-centred harmonious world’ (renben zhuyi de datong shijie); in fact, he was the ‘founder’ (bizu) of human rights.Footnote 97
CE as a collective, elite, and transnational intellectual endeavour and moral education initiative was only indirectly about legitimising the PAP and inculcating patriotism. Sociologist Eddie Kuo posited that the government was aware of the sensitive nature of CE from the outset and hence sought to differentiate between Confucianism as an ethical system and as a political ideology.Footnote 98 Not government rhetoric, nor the public pronouncements of Wu and others involved in it, nor the curriculum itself suggest that political considerations were at the forefront of an elective that was, ultimately, one among several options for students. For instance, the Confucian virtue of loyalty (zhong) was absent from the Secondary Four curriculum.Footnote 99 What comes across strongly, in both public and private utterances, are many of its public supporters and intellectual architects’ social conservatism and admiration for PAP rule. Wu was not alone in this regard. In his report to Goh Keng Swee in August 1982, for example, the University of Pittsburgh historian Hsü Cho-yuan, one of the eight invited foreign scholars, took ‘great pleasure’ in confirming that Singapore was an ‘orderly well-governed modern state’ and contrasted it with the United States, where an ‘amoralistic attitude or neutralism of moral values’, or what he labelled ‘post-modern syndrome’, had become entrenched. The New York University political scientist James C. Hsiung sided with the government in his report to Goh by claiming that there was a ‘groundswell of spontaneous support among a large number of people’ owing to fears of moral and social decay; he dismissed scepticism towards CE as ‘fed by amateurish political speculation and inadequate understanding of the Government's policy intent’.Footnote 100 Of these scholars, Yü Ying-shih articulated the link between CE's socially conservative agenda and the political authoritarianism of the PAP the most succinctly. In his memoirs, Yü wrote that although CE had no political significance on the surface, in reality, the PAP hoped to use CE to achieve a ‘stable and peaceful’ (anding) society in which persons did not ‘rebel against superiors’ (fanshang zuoluan).Footnote 101
Everything that Wu wrote and did suggests that he subscribed to this vision of society, even on the few occasions when he dissented from the state. Most famously, Wu opposed the merger of Nantah and SU to form NUS in 1980, but without accusing Lee Kuan Yew of wanting to ‘destroy Nantah with all the tools at his disposal’, as historian Thum Ping Tjin writes, and setting Singapore down the ‘path of English supremacy’ to attenuate the value of a Nantah degree, as some Nantah alumni claim.Footnote 102 Instead, in the same ‘constructive and positive’ spirit that he preached, Wu argued in a February 1979 letter to the Director-General of Nantah that the university could ‘complement and compete with’ (jingzheng yu xiangfu xiangcheng) SU and play a role in society that SU could not, which was to ‘maintain a cultural balance’ (baochi wenhua shang de pingheng) between East and West.Footnote 103 In a second letter, this one an October 1979 missive to a British academic whom Lee had hired as a consultant on university education, Wu argued that Nantah could help train teachers to meet the demands of the recently-launched Speak Mandarin campaign and equip graduates with the language skills needed to do business with China.Footnote 104 He made both these correspondences public in the NYSP in March 1980, when merger had long since become fait accompli. Whatever misgivings Wu might have had about the merger of Nantah and SU did not translate into, and were not constitutive of, a more general hostility towards the PAP and Lee Kuan Yew. In the 1980s, the PAP's Sinic nation-building campaigns and policies, from Speak Mandarin to CE to ‘Special Assistance Plan’ schools for students proficient in both English and Mandarin, helped compensate for the closure of Nantah for many local Chinese elites. His years at Nantah now behind him, Wu threw himself into the task of championing Confucianism and Chinese culture.
Conclusion
The final years of Wu Teh-yao's life overlapped with what scholars conventionally think of as the ‘Asian Values’ moment in Singapore and the region. Indeed, one of the main texts of this moment, Singapore's 1991 White Paper on Shared Values, bears many of the hallmarks of Wu's thinking in its assertions that ‘[o]n the whole, Asian societies emphasise the interests of the community, while Western societies stress the rights of the individual’ or that ‘[n]o Asian society has successfully modelled itself upon a Western prototype’. Singaporean leaders’ own rhetoric during this decade resembles, even if it is not directly attributable to, Wu's. In January 1989, for example, in his address at the opening of Parliament, President Wee Kim Wee recapitulated a well-worn trope in Singaporean discourse in asserting that ‘[t]raditional Asian ideas of morality, duty and society which have sustained and guided us in the past are giving way to a more Westernised, individualistic, and self-centred outlook on life’.Footnote 105 In a 1994 interview with political commentator Fareed Zakaria in Foreign Affairs, Lee Kuan Yew drew implicitly from Wu's intellectual playbook in bemoaning the ‘breakdown in civil society’ in the United States and making sweeping claims about how ‘Asian societies are unlike Western ones’ and how ‘[i]n the East the main object is to have a well-ordered society’.Footnote 106 No intellectual in Singapore wrote or spoke nearly as much on these concerns as Wu did, in both English and Chinese. As this article shows, Wu is an important but ignored architect of a set of intellectually questionable arguments about cultural distinctions between ‘East’ and ‘West’ and the supposedly intrinsic preferences of Singaporeans and Asians for traditional political and social hierarchies. A ‘legitimiser of the established order’ par excellence, Wu joined with state organs such as Chinese newspapers and the Ministry of Education to disseminate and institutionalise ideas that endure until today.
Yet, Wu cannot only be understood within the confines of Singapore's history; Singapore as a conservative ideological project cannot be delimited as such either. Wu was, rather, an itinerant, border-crossing figure whose career traversed Malaya, China, the United States, and Taiwan across the mid- to late-twentieth century. His experiences of the colonial, Christian, Cold War, and Chinese worlds shaped a worldview that broadly converged with that of other conservatives in postwar Asia, from Japan and Taiwan to Thailand, South Vietnam, the Philippines, and Singapore, in its opposition to radicalism, scepticism towards liberal democracy and Westernisation, and Orientalist use of culture and tradition to legitimise social conservatism and authoritarianism. This worldview found expression in writings and speeches such as ‘Our Twentieth Century’, ‘Speaking of Moral Integrity’, ‘Teaching Political Science in Southeast Asia Today’, ‘Singapore – The Republic of the Twenty-First Century’, and numerous newspaper and magazine articles. It became manifest in Wu's work as a propagandist for the UBCHEA's Literature Program and advocate for the Cultural Renaissance Movement in Cold War Taiwan, and, most of all, as a promoter of consencracy, ‘Education for Living’, and CE in post-Cold War Singapore. Wu's trajectories, ideas, and projects, then, shed light on Singapore under the PAP in the 1980s as part of a larger conservative ideoscape. That Wu aligned himself with the regime is a testament to both the unusual pathways that he trod and to the attractiveness of the Singapore way to certain thinkers past and present.
