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Singapore and the ends of Conservatism in Postwar Asia: Wu Teh-yao across the Colonial, Christian, Cold War, and Chinese Worlds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2025
Abstract
This article uses the career and writings of political philosopher Wu Teh-yao (1916-1994) to argue that Singapore in the 1970s–1980s embodied crucial aspects of conservatism as a modern, transnational ideological project in post-Second World War Asia. Wu opposed radicalism and was sceptical towards liberal democracy and Westernisation, all while promoting culture and tradition to legitimise a less-than-democratic political and social order. His worldview was shaped by a peripatetic life that spanned Asia and the United States and found expression in his propaganda work for the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia, presidency of Tunghai University, and, above all, contributions to nation building in Singapore. Indeed, during this period, no intellectual lent as much discursive and administrative support, in English and Chinese, to legitimising authoritarianism and social conservatism in the city-state. Both intellectual biography and social history of ideology, the article explains how Singapore represented the realisation of what we typically call ‘Asian Values’ and was embedded within a wider conservative ideoscape. It questions the conventional temporality and genealogy of Asian Values, arguing that they did not simply flow downwards from upon high, but were also produced and circulated by figures who operated between the state and public.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The National University of Singapore
Footnotes
I am grateful to Chan Cheow-Thia, Mike Montesano, Ngoei Wen-Qing, Seng Guo Quan, Joshua Tan, the journal's three anonymous peer reviewers, and participants in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences’ Brown Bag Seminar on 11 October 2023 for their questions on and suggestions for revising the first draft of the article. I also benefited from presenting on some preliminary ideas on Wu Teh-yao at a World History workshop at the University of Cambridge on 5 May 2023 organised by Rachel Leow. Finally, I would like to thank Jojo Abinales and Ben Blumson for sending me relevant reading materials.
References
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4 Hainan yidai zheren, p. 43.
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6 On these New Confucian intellectuals, see Kenneth Kai-chung Yung, Chinese émigré intellectuals and their quest for liberal values in the Cold War, 1949–1969 (Leiden: Brill, 2021).
7 Eri Hotta, Pan-Asianism and Japan's War 1931–1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 7.
8 Benjamin I. Schwartz, ‘Notes on Conservatism in General and in China in Particular’, in The limits of change: Essays on Conservative alternatives in Republican China, ed. Charlotte Furth (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 3.
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12 For a similar argument on pre-1949 China, see Brian Tsui, China's Conservative Revolution: The quest for a New Order, 1927–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
13 Jennifer M. Miller, ‘Neoconservatives and Neo-Confucians: East Asian growth and the celebration of tradition’, Modern Intellectual History 18, 3 (2021): 809.
14 Allen Chun, ‘From nationalism to nationalizing: Cultural imagination and state formation in postwar Taiwan’, Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 31 (Jan. 1994): 49–69; Mitchell Tan, ‘Spiritual fraternities: The transnational networks of Ngô Đình Diệm's personalist revolution and the Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1963’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies 14, 2 (2019): 1–67; Thak Chaloemtiarana, Thailand: The politics of despotic paternalism (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 2007), p. 100.
15 Wilfrido V. Villacorta, ‘Political development after martial law: An evaluation’, Philippine Political Science Journal 2, 2 (1975): 35. Villacorta later supported Corazon Aquino in 1986, and this article has disappeared from his resume. I thank Jojo Abinales for sending me the article and for the information on Villacorta.
16 Hofmann, ‘The Conservative imaginary’; Hofmann, ‘What's Left of the Right: Nabeyama Sadachika and anti-communism in transwar Japan, 1930–1960’, Journal of Asian Studies 79, 2 (2020): 403–27; Tan, ‘Spiritual fraternities’; Els van Dongen, Realistic revolution: Contesting Chinese history, culture, and politics after 1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
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18 I adapt the term ‘ideoscape’ from Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 36.
19 Michael D. Barr, Cultural politics and Asian values: The tepid war (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 3–8, 12–29.
20 See, for example, Christopher Tremewan, The political economy of social control in Singapore (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994); Beng-Huat Chua, Communitarian ideology and democracy in Singapore (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the culture of excess (New York: Routledge, 2007); Cherian George, Freedom from the press: Journalism and state power in Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012); Jothie Rajah, Authoritarian rule of law: Legislation, discourse, and legitimacy in Singapore (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Yeow-Tong Chia, Education, culture and the Singapore developmental state: “World-soul” lost and regained? (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); among many others.
21 T. N. Harper, ‘“Asian values” and Southeast Asian histories’, The Historical Journal 40, 2 (1997): 509.
22 Hong Lysa and Huang Jianli, The scripting of a national history: Singapore and its pasts (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), p. 97.
23 Wu, Man & Society / Ren yu shehui (Singapore: Educational Publications Bureau, 1979), p. 94.
24 Nancy E. Chapman, The United Board at 100: A centennial album (New York: United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia, 2022), p. 37.
25 Pierre-Étienne Will, ‘The Chinese contribution to the universal declaration of human rights’, in China, democracy, and law: A historical and contemporary approach, ed. Mireille Delmas-Marty and Pierre-Étienne Will (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 310.
26 Wu, ‘Shijie Renquan Xuanyan de lailong qumai’, LHZB, 16 Feb. 1992, p. 2.
27 Will, ‘The Chinese contribution to the universal declaration of human rights’, p. 367.
28 Wu, ‘Shijie Renquan Xuanyan de lailong qumai’, p. 2.
29 On the UBCHEA during the Cold War, see Joshua Tan, ‘Schooling free Asia: Diasporic Chinese and educational activism in the transpacific Cold War’ (Ph.D. diss., University of California Santa Cruz, 2024), pp. 97–116.
30 Chinese schools and the education of Chinese Malayans: The report of a Mission invited by the Federation Government to study the problem of the education of Chinese in Malaya (Kuala Lumpur: Government Press, 1951), p. 13.
31 Letter from Wu to Fenn, 16 July 1952, Record Group [RG] 11, Series 2, Box 76, Folder 2064, United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia [UBCHEA] Records, Yale Divinity School Special Collections.
32 ‘Suggested Program of Work 1952–1953’, 28 Sept. 1952, RG 11, Series 2, Box 76, Folder 2064, UBCHEA Records.
33 Tan, ‘Schooling Free Asia’, p. 100.
34 Ibid., p. 107.
35 ‘Our Twentieth Century’, RG 11, Series 2, Box 76, Folder 2067, UBCHEA Records.
36 Letter from Fenn to the American Embassy in Taiwan, 7 Feb. 1955, RG 11A, Series 4, Box 103, Folder 103A – 1434, UBCHEA Records.
37 Chapman, The United Board at 100, pp. 51–3.
38 ‘The challenges of a Christian university in China today’, RG 11A, Series 4, Box 103, Folder 103A – 1435, UBCHEA Records.
39 Letter from Wu to Mary Ferguson, 20 Mar. 1958, RG 11A, Series 4, Box 103, Folder 103A – 1440, UBCHEA Records.
40 Letter from Wu to Abigail Hoffsommer, 22 Jan. 1956, RG 11A, Series 4, Box 103, Folder 103A – 1436, UBCHEA Records; Chen Ruizhou, ‘Bianzhe de hua’, in Wu Deyao xiaozhang – Donghai ziyou xuefeng de bozhongzhe (Tunghai University, 1999), p. yi. This compilation of materials on and by Wu by the Tunghai University Library can be downloaded at https://sc.lib.thu.edu.tw/article.php?post_id=381.
41 On the KMT as a right-wing movement, see Maggie Clinton, Revolutionary nativism: Fascism and culture in China, 1925–1937 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017) and Brian Tsui, China's Conservative Revolution: The quest for a New Order, 1927–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
42 Chun, ‘From nationalism to nationalizing’, pp. 57–8.
43 ‘Wu xiaozhang xiujia chuguo, Tang jiaozuo daixing xiaowu,’ Donghai Daxue xiaokan 113 (2 Nov. 1966), p. 2; ‘Zhonghua wenhua yong buhui dao: siwei bade zhongxing shi lai’, Donghai Daxue xiaokan 114–115 (1 Dec. 1966), p. 1.
44 ‘Tan qijie’, Donghai Daxue xiaokan 122 (31 Dec. 1967), p. 6.
45 Chung-Ping Chang, ‘The United Board for Christian higher education in the Development of Tunghai University in Taiwan, 1955–1980’ (Ph.D. diss., Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 1982), p. 15.
46 ‘Agenda for the Ninth Annual Meeting, United Board for Christian colleges in China’, 4 May 1954, 34, Box 2, Folder 3, United Board for Christian colleges in China [UBCCC] Records, 1931–1959, Union Theological Seminary, Burke Library Special Collections.
47 Li Nanheng, ‘Jinian Wu Deyao xiaozhang’ (15 May 2012), p. 34, https://sc.lib.thu.edu.tw/magazine.php?mgz_id=1735.
48 Chen Ruizhou, ‘Haode, jinian xiaoqing wo hui huilai’, and Cai Qiqing, ‘Wu Deyao xiaozhang yu Donghai Daxue yongchui buxiu’, Donghai Daxue jianxun 1, 8 (27 Apr. 1994), reproduced in Wu Deyao xiaozhang – Donghai ziyou xuefeng de bozhongzhe, pp. 90-3.
49 Li, ‘Jinian Wu Deyao xiaozhang’, p. 42.
50 Lu Pao-ch'ien [Lu Baoqian] and Cheng Li-jung [Zheng Lirong], ed., The reminiscences of Mr. Huang Tong / Huang Tong xiansheng fangwen jilu (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1992), p. 495.
51 Wu, ‘Youth and contemporary society: Society understanding youth — Youth understanding society’, in Youth in our society: Seminar for pre-university students, 16–20 May 1972, Final Report (Singapore: Ministry of Education), p. 15.
52 ‘Speech by the Prime Minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, at the Opening of the Seminar on the Role of Universities in Economic and Social Development at the University of Singapore, February 7, 1966’, National Archives of Singapore [NAS], https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/lky19660207.pdf.
53 Roland Puccetti, ‘Authoritarian government and academic subservience: The University of Singapore’, Minerva 10, 2 (1972): 233. Puccetti was head of the SU Philosophy Department. I thank Ben Blumson for sending me this article.
54 Edwin Lee, Singapore: The unexpected nation (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2008), p. 380.
55 Toh Chin Chye, ‘Intellectual decolonization of the University of Singapore’, in Towards tomorrow: Essays on development and social transformation in Singapore (Singapore: Singapore National Trades Union Congress, 1973), pp. 49–54.
56 Patricio N. Abinales, ‘Yes, Benedict Anderson was a political scientist’, Washington Post, 21 Dec. 2015.
57 Lau Teik Soon Oral Interview, Political History of Singapore 1965–1985, Accession No. 001871, Reels 8–9, 8–9 Apr. 1997, pp. 72-6, NAS.
58 ‘Curriculum Vitae’, RG 11B, Series 2, Box 91, Folder 91 – 1378, UBCHEA Records.
59 ‘Speech by the Prime Minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, at the Return Banquet for Premier Hua Kuo-Feng at Peking on 13th May 1976’, NAS, https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/lky19760513a.pdf.
60 Eugene K. B. Tan, ‘Re-engaging Chineseness: Political, economic and cultural imperatives of nation-building in Singapore’, The China Quarterly 175 (Sept. 2003): 753.
61 Jason Lim, ‘“A tolerant society is the way forward”: Exposing Chinese chauvinism in Singapore, 1959–1979’, Translocal Chinese: East Asian Perspectives 15, 1 (2021): 75–83.
62 ‘Government Statement on Nanyang Siang Pau’, 22 May 1971, NAS, https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/SGPress_7_22.5.71.pdf.
63 ‘Exposed: The dark secrets of Sister Fong’, New Nation, 27 May 1976, pp. 12–13.
64 In this article, I cite the JSEAS version. It began as an ‘occasional paper’ for the SU Political Science Department. All versions are identical.
65 Wu, ‘Teaching Political Science in Southeast Asia today’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 5, 1 (1974): 125–6.
66 In 1952–53, the UBCHEA Literature Program issued three articles based on Toynbee's writings: ‘China among the World's great cultures’, ‘China and the West’, and ‘The World and the West’. See ‘Abstracts of some representative articles’, RG 11, Series 2, Box No. 76, Folder 2067, UBCHEA Records. On Toynbee's influence on Lee Kuan Yew, see Michael D. Barr, Lee Kuan Yew: The beliefs behind the man (Richmond: Curzon, 2000). Wu explicitly cites Toynbee as an intellectual model for Tunghai students in ‘Xin xiwang yu xin juexin’, Donghai Daxue xiaokan 51 (17 Jan. 1960), p. 3
67 Wu, ‘Teaching Political Science in Southeast Asia today’, pp. 127–9.
68 ‘Criticism of governments’, New Nation, 26 June 1973, p. 3.
69 Wu, ‘Teaching Political Science in Southeast Asia today’, pp. 129–30.
70 Wu, ‘Singapore: The Republic of the twenty-first century’, in Seminar on modernization in Singapore: Impact on the individual (Singapore, 1972).
71 Wu, ‘Xinjiapo — zai zhengzhi maodun zhong qiu shengcun’, LHZB, 12 Oct. 1986, p. 2.
72 Miller, ‘Neoconservatives and Neo-Confucians’.
73 Tsui, ‘The mutations of Pan-Asianism’, p. 195.
74 Partha Chatterjee, The nation and its fragments: Colonial and postcolonial histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 6.
75 Wu, ‘Dongfang wenhua xifang wenhua’, in Zhengzhi lishi wenhua gujin tan (Singapore: Seng Yew Book Store, 1987), pp. 54–6.
76 Wu, ‘Xin xiwang yu xin juexin’, p. 3.
77 Liao Bolun Edgar, ‘Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Student activism in the University of Malaya and Singapore, 1949–1975’ (M.A. thesis, National University of Singapore, 2010), pp. 72–89.
78 Wu, ‘The meaning and implications of social commitment in higher education,’ Occasional Paper No. 38, Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang University, Dec. 1977, p. 12.
79 Wu, ‘Youth and contemporary society’, pp. 16–17.
80 Hong and Huang, The scripting of a national history, p. 87. On the Anti-Yellow Culture movement in the 1950s, see Lau Yu Ching, ‘The Anti-Yellow Culture Movement, 1953–1961: Morality and the language of decolonising Singapore’ (M.A. thesis, National University of Singapore, 2016).
81 ‘Danger of becoming a nation of Wogs: Dr Goh’, The Straits Times, 11 Dec. 1972, p. 1.
82 Willard A. Hanna, Culture, Yellow Culture, counterculture, and polyculture in culture-poor Singapore (New York: American Universities Field Staff, 1973), p. 7.
83 Lau Wai Har [Liu Huixia], ‘Wu Deyao jiaoshou dui daode jiaoyu de gongxian’, LHZB, 30 Apr. 1994, p. 27.
84 Report on moral education 1979 (Singapore, 1979), p. 3.
85 Wu, ‘Education for living’, Workshop on the teaching of “education for living” (Singapore: Xinjiapo Shenghuo jiaoyu jiaoxue yantao hui, 1974). No page numbers are provided. I cite the given English translation of Wu's speech, which was originally in Mandarin.
86 Wu, Man & Society, pp. 18, 24.
87 Wu, ‘Geren zhuyi zhi ji’, LHZB, 25 Sept. 1983, p. 2.
88 The eight scholars were Tu Wei-ming (Harvard University), Yü Ying-shih (Yale University), James C. Hsiung (New York University), Wu Yuan-li (Hoover Institution), Tong Te-kong (City College of New York), Wu Chen-tsou (National Taiwan Normal University), Chin Chen-oi (University of Michigan), and Hsü Cho-yuan (University of Pittsburgh). Chin was the only woman and Singaporean in this group.
89 Eddie C. Y. Kuo, ‘Confucianism as political discourse in Singapore: The case of an incomplete revitalization movement’, Working Paper No. 113, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, 1992, pp. 6–7, 13–15; Tu Wei-ming, Confucian Ethics today: The Singapore challenge (Singapore: Federal Publications, 1984), pp. 132–97.
90 Arif Dirlik, ‘Confucius in the borderlands: Global capitalism and the reinvention of Confucianism’, boundary 2 22, 3 (1995): 254.
91 ‘Wu Deyao jiaoshou dui daode jiaoyu de gongxian’, p. 27.
92 van Dongen, Realistic revolution, p. 133.
93 ‘Religious knowledge in schools’, Accession No. 1997002622, 12 Feb. 1982, NAS; ‘Zai xuexiao jiaodao Zongjiao zhishi’, Accession No. 1997002623, 18 Feb. 1982, NAS.
94 Hainan yidai zheren, p. 78.
95 ‘Zai xuexiao jiaodao Zongjiao zhishi’, 33:30–34:45 min, NAS.
96 Wu, ‘Dongfang wenhua xifang wenhua’, p. 57.
97 Wu, ‘Rujia sixiang — shi gu bushi jin?’, NYSP, 9 Aug. 1982, p. 34.
98 Kuo, ‘Confucianism as political discourse in Singapore’, p. 15.
99 Koh Khee Heong [Xu Qixiong] and Ong Chang Woei [Wang Changwei], Xinjiapo Nanyang Kongjiao hui bainian shi (Singapore: Nanyang Kongjiao hui, 2014), p. 128.
100 Cho-yun Hsu, ‘A report to Dr Goh Keng Swee concerning feasibility of establishing education of Confucian Ethics at secondary school in the Republic of Singapore’, 31 Aug. 1982, and James C. Hsiung, ‘Preliminary Report’, 31 Aug. 1982, in Reports of the 8 Confucian Scholars who visited Singapore in 1982 (Singapore, 1982). This is a unpaginated, photocopied compilation of the reports made by the eight foreign scholars to Goh Keng Swee following their time in Singapore. It is available as part of the National University of Singapore Central Library's rare books collection.
101 Yü Ying-shih, Yu Yingshi tanhua lu (Taipei: Yunchen wenhua shiye gufen youxian gongsi, 2021), p. 197. Yü ironically employs an idiom derived from the Analects here to make his point.
102 Thum Ping Tjin, Foreword to My Nantah Story: The rise and demise of the People's University by Tan Kok Chiang (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2017), p. 17; Nanyang Daxue xiaowang shimo: huajiao kangzheng zhi lu, ed. Lin Wenshi (Selangor: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, 2018), p. 7.
103 Wu, ‘Yijian haishi liangjian daxue’, NYSP, 18 Mar. 1980, p. 3.
104 Wu, ‘Nanda qiantu beiwang lu’, NYSP, 17 Mar. 1980, p. 3.
105 White Paper on Shared Values (Singapore: Singapore National Printers, 1991), pp. 1–5.
106 Fareed Zakaria, ‘Culture is destiny: A conversation with Lee Kuan Yew’, Foreign Affairs 73, 2 (1994): 111–3.