Physically, this book has an interesting history for me. It arrived in a cardboard box postmarked New Jersey, and on the outside was printed "Our peanuts are 95 percent organic." As I knew no one in New Jersey, let alone anyone who might send me organic peanuts, I threw the parcel into a nearby pond and held it down with a stick until the bubbles stopped rising. Only then did I feel safe opening it, and discovered the sender was Princeton University Press.
Once dried out, however, the book proved a delight. With the subtitle Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia I had expected something rather heavy-going. This proved to be far from the case. Daniel Bell, who lectures in philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, has constructed an altogether delightful set of three dialogues that treat this serious subject in a witty and occasionally even light-hearted way.
The basic structure is a debate between a character he calls Sam Demo, an American human rights activist and believer in individualism, democracy and freedom of expression, and a series of three Asian opponents. First is Joseph Lo, a fictional Hong Kong specialist in economic and political risk-analysis with a past in local human rights activism. The two knew each other as undergrads two decades ago at (where else?) Princeton.
For his second protagonist, Bell takes the real-life Singapore patriarch Lee Kuan Yew. More of this special case in a moment. And thirdly, he invents a Beijing political philosopher called Professor Wang. This last dialogue is set in 2007, on 3 June, the day before a constitutional convention is set to meet to establish democracy in China.
Essentially Sam Demo plays the part of the somewhat naive innocent. His ideas are the unquestioned beliefs of Western society on the desirability of democracy worldwide. It's a takeaway package rather like a 7-Eleven lunch-box. His three debating partners all urge him, not always successfully, to question the relevance of these uncomplicated assumptions in the Asian context.
But playful and very entertaining though these dialogues are, the material that underlies them is well-informed and comprehensive. Footnotes refer to the author's printed sources for a wide range of the issues discussed, and for the examples from recent Asian political life cited. The result is that Daniel Bell has managed to create a look at the core issues in Asian politics that is simultaneously in-depth and highly accessible.
The model that lies behind these dialogues is, of course, Plato. His famous Dialogues, dating from the Athens of 4th century BC, saw Plato's teacher Socrates debating with a series of innocents on most of the major issues of human life. Socrates invariably came out on top, but the innocent pawn of his masterly intelligence was generally represented as being grateful for the enlightenment he had received rather than resentful at the superior sagacity of his opponent.
Something of the same is true of these latter-day dialogues, except that the situation is reversed. The permanent fixture of the debates, Sam Demo, is this time the one who often comes away embracing a broader perspective than he set out with. Hong Kong's government is less than wholly democratic, yet allows its citizens an almost complete range of human rights is, for example, one of the paradoxes he has to digest.
The situation is different for the Singapore section of the book. Daniel Bell, who previously taught at the National University of Singapore, has to tread carefully here. The procedure he adopts is to allow himself to invent opinions that Lee Kuan Yew could be reasonably thought to hold, but supporting these with actual quotations from published utterances of the man himself. Though the debates themselves are laid out like a dramatic script, the parts of Lee's speeches that are verbatim transcriptions are placed in quotation marks.
Generally speaking, Sam Demo more than holds his own with Lee. He refuses to accept that Singapore's democracy, though transparent on polling day, is fair to opponents of the ruling party at other times. This part of the book provides a convenient check-list of the history of democracy Singapore-style, many of the most important ingredients of which are set out either in the text itself or in the footnotes.
But something more fundamental lies at the heart of this book. This is the question of whether the mere counting of heads can really be thought to lead to the wisest government of any society. Daniel Bell is a philosopher, and as such he has a mind that is never quite closed to any opinion. To hold opposing views in balance, never entirely rejecting either one of them, is a mark of this kind of highly admirable mind. As a result, this book constitutes a meditation on the most profound issues at the heart of all political thinking, as well as being an enjoyable debate on contemporary political issues in Asia.
The best example of this is the book's final section. Here we are presented with an imagined future in which China, endowed with all the sagacity of its ancient traditions, is finally coming to its senses and setting up a decent and philosophically reasonable system of government.
How should Daniel Bell imagine this? Should it be a simple democracy on the American pattern (though in actual fact that is far from simple), or should it be something different?
The result, on which Sam Demo and Professor Wang are portrayed as agreeing, is the establishment of a two-tier governmental system. One house of the legislature is imagined as being democratic in the basic sense. The other, however, is imagined as being a House of Scholars, a senate of the wise and educated, set up as a counter-balance to the democratically elected chamber. The final point on which the two disputants eventually agree is that this House of Scholars ("House of Philosophers," you might think is the real intention) should in a crisis be subservient to the elected representatives.
This, then, is Daniel Bell's solution, not only to the future politics of Asia, but to all the debates there have ever been on how men and women should rule themselves. It's hard to imagine a better solution.
Publication Notes:
East Meets West
By David A. Bell
369 Pages
Princeton
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