Asian Values vs. Children's Rights

It was former Singapore premier Lee Kuan Yew who first raised the banner of "Asian Values."

In 1992 Lee said in an interview: "For East Asian countries like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, group values and behavior have been extremely helpful in the process of 'catching up' economically. East Asian values, such as the need to sacrifice individual interests in pursuit of the group interest, have been a major impetus for the region's rapid development."

Group society

According to one survey, Asians are more likely than Americans to regard such things as "close family relations," "an orderly society," "respect for knowledge" and "maintaining group harmony" as important values.

At the United Nations World Human Rights Convention, China's delegate responded to the West's frequent criticisms of China's human rights record in the following terms: "The concept of human rights is a legacy of historical development, and is connected with a country's specific social and economic situation, as well as its history, culture and values. There are different human rights requirements at different stages of historical development. Countries at different phases of development, or with different historical traditions and cultural background, understand and deal with human rights in different ways, so the human rights standards of one country cannot be uniformly applied around the world, in the expectation that other countries will act in line with those standards.

From obligations to rights

From the viewpoint of East Asian societies, the West tends to over-emphasize freedom and individual rights, and this leads to serious problems. But from the modern perspective, the traditional values of East Asia are even less palatable.

In the traditional feudal society of China, the head of the family exercised unquestioned authority. Under the precepts of filial piety, children had neither free will nor the right to be independent entities.

One of the tales in the Yuan dynasty work 24 Paragons of Filial Piety records that in ancient times a man named Guo Ju, who was too poor to keep his mother properly fed, proposed to his wife that they kill their three-year-old son-since he was consuming a share of the old lady's food. This they duly did, digging a pit and burying the boy alive.

The legal code of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) stated that where parents brought charges against their offspring, the accused were automatically considered guilty and there was no need for a formal trial. And for most of the past millennium, Chinese criminal law provided that unfililal conduct-such as hitting or cursing a parent-could be accepted as just cause in the cases of parents who murdered their offspring.

Those old-time filial paragons and legal codes are wildly at odds with today's notions of children's rights, and basic human rights as a whole.

According to Tang Mei-ying, a professor of primary education at Taipei Municipal Teachers College, Confucian thought does include emphasis on human rights, such as the expectation that fathers should be "compassionate," sons "filially pious," a monarch "benevolent" and his ministers "loyal." What it doesn't do is propose ways of dealing with a father who is not compassionate and a monarch who is not benevolent.

Tang feels that Confucian thought basically stresses obligations, but that in modern society the idea of obligations is no longer a straightforward matter: when person A neglects to fulfil his obligations, person B can be said to have been deprived of his rights. But when we start out from the notion of rights, and support those rights with legal guarantees, we find it is better to have guaranteed rights than to depend on everyone fulfilling their obligations.

The best of both worlds

Neighboring places heavily influenced by "Asian values," such as Japan, Korea and Hong Kong, have a strong sense of how important it is to belong to "the educated class," just as we do here. As Tang Mei-ying points out, this means that parents expect their children to perform outstandingly well at school.

The importance that parents attach to education is of course a strong point for Taiwan, but one drawback of this is that parents often set their expectations too high.

At an age when most kids in the West are still playing every day, our children have already started shuttling about among supplementary schools for classes in English, computers, abacus and art.

Tang explains that although Western children seem to be playing about, they are also finding out what interests them, and they have plenty of chances to change direction. Here, however, the education system gives children hardly any opportunity for making choices, and education is foisted on them rather than being something they seek for themselves. Says Tang: "A lot of people these days hide themselves at graduate school, partly to put off confronting reality and partly to continue meeting their parents' expectations. Nowadays we even have cram schools for graduate school students."

However, the Western educational model, in which children are shown respect and allowed to decide and choose for themselves, is not without drawbacks. One American-who was pushing forty by the time he earned his PhD-says that when he was younger, whenever he had an important choice to make about his future and asked his parents for their opinion, the response was: "We'll respect and support you no matter what you decide!" Now he feels that he has squandered a lot of time because of vacillation and a lack of clear guidance.

Modern parents at a loss

With today's mingling of Eastern and Western values, and modern and traditional concepts, it is no wonder that parents find themselves at a bit of a loss. The difficulty is that they can't simply dismiss deeply ingrained traditional notions, but at the same time they need to adapt to the values of the modern age. The intellectual understanding is there but it hasn't yet been fully internalized, and this accounts for the gap that can often be seen between understanding and behavior.

An inkling of this can be seen in the results of a recent online ballot conducted by the Hsin Yi Foundation, asking parents about their "educational approach or concepts." The runaway leader, with 21% of votes, was the approach summed up in the sentence: "I praise my children with phrases like 'that's great!' and 'good boy/girl!'"

Chang Sing-ju, executive director of the Hsin Yi Foundation, points out that modern parents know how important it is to give children encouragement, and this shows there has been a lot of progress. But there are still pitfalls to watch out for. Chang says that many parents use praise without making it clear to the child just what he is being praised for, and this "cheats" the child rather than showing him true respect.

It's the process that counts

A child who is treated with respect won't stop studying on account of this. And a child who is free to make his own choices doesn't automatically turn into a delinquent. Experimental classes giving pupils the chance for self-motivated study are now being offered in some schools in Taiwan, and the results show that these children are happier and more positive.

Joyce Yen Feng, executive director of the Child Welfare League Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting the rights of children, says that there doesn't have to be a contradiction between granting children their rights and maintaining Asian values. In the past, too much emphasis on schoolwork and good grades encouraged the development of a society in which many are crudely obsessed with personal gain. Stressing children's rights is one way to change that mentality, and there is basically nothing un-Asian about using respect and enlightenment to pursue the very best outcome.

In other words, we need to draw on the strengths of both Eastern and Western culture, to show that Asian values are also global values. East or the West, we're all human and we share the same values, and this applies equally to the rights of children.

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In this transitional era, caught between East and West, traditional and modern, parents have to be ready to respond to new challenges all the time. (photo by Pu Hua-chih)