Singapore and the Ends of Conservatism in Postwar Asia: Wu Teh-yao Across the Colonial, Christian, Cold War, and Chinese Worlds

This paper uses the career and writings of political philosopher Wu Teh-yao (1916-1994) to arque 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.

Kung Chien Wen is an Assistant Professor of History at NUS and the author of Diasporic Cold Warriors: Nationalist China, Anticommunism, and the Philippine Chinese, 1930s-1970s (Cornell University Press, 2022). His scholarship has also been published, or will be published, in Modern Asian Studies, Asian Ethnicity, the International History Review, the Journal of World History, and the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. With the support of a Ministry of Education Social Sciences and Humanities Research Fellowship, he is currently writing a book on how understandings of society, culture, and the nation in Singapore from the 1960s to the 1980s were shaped by persons and institutions' engagements with the Sinophone world.