ESSAYS IN PUBLIC POLICY

Continuity and Change in Popular Values on the Pacific Rim
By Alex Inkeles

1. Executive Summary
2. Essay
3. Notes only

Although the economic transformation of many nations in Asia is widely recognized, equally profound processes of social and cultural change in these same societies have gone largely unnoticed. Yet without knowledge of those changes we cannot fully appreciate the extent of the Asian economic miracle or adequately assess its significance for the future incorporation of the rapidly developing Pacific Rim nations into the emergent world order of the twenty-first century. This essay presents the first results of a continuing program to assess the extent and form of changing popular values and attitudes in a number of the most important of the growth engines in the area such as Taiwan, mainland China, Singapore, Korea, and their forerunner, Japan. The evidence is drawn from public opinion polls and social surveys covering a span of decades. To be sure, the region provides evidence of the persistence of tradition, and even of its actual strengthening, under conditions of modernization. Examples are the sentiment of filial piety and the value of hard work and frugality. Nevertheless, the main fact is that in a large number of domains popular attitudes and values have been changing profoundly and at a surprisingly accelerated rate. Within little more than one generation the approach to selecting a marriage partner, the ways of spending leisure time, and basic values about what one's goals in life should be have all undergone profound and rapid shifts. Communal responsibility has come to be replaced by individual expression; the present is increasingly stressed over the past and the future; consumption more and more displaces saving and accumulation. These are all the hallmarks of modernity. The diffusion of these tendencies in Asian populations increases the facility with which they can be integrated in a new blending of the cultures of East and West. But the same processes present great challenges to the traditional bases of social integration and political cohesiveness of these societies.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY | ESSAY | NOTES