Singapore's intensely political engagement of China, apparent in the previous chapters, went into higher gear during the Asian values debate of the late 1980s and the 1990s. Singapore's international advocacy of Asian cultural exceptionalism, reflecting a conservative approach to democracy and human rights deemed to be beneficial to economic growth, paralleled its defence of Chinese political exceptionalism. Combined with an emphasis that emerged earlier on Confucian values, transmitted through Mandarin, as constituting a cultural ballast for Singapore's Chinese majority, the Asian values initiative provided an expansive ideological framework for Singapore's evolving relations with China. There, Confucianism had emerged as one of the strands of the new nationalism, which itself had arisen as a response to the Chinese Communist Party's experience of crises of faith in Marxism and Maoism since the 1980s; the need to protect China from disintegration brought on by economic decentralization; the need to reverse the worship of Western culture; and a sense of pride in a great tradition that had allowed the country to reform itself without breaking up, unlike the Soviet Union. At the national level, Confucianism could be a panacea for the familiar anomie of individuals in the industrialized West that now was seeping into post-communist China. At the international level, a pragmatic or mainstream Confuciannationalism, contrasted with the conservative and irrational strains of Confucian fundamentalism that once had made the Chinese backward-looking, would help China to find its place in the world. The nonantagonistic premises of Confucianism were preferable to the social Darwinism on which Western civilization rested; moreover, the fact that Confucianism did not possess a strong sense of salvation gave the civilization an advantage in a world where “relations between different religions are competitive because there is only one God”.

It is possible to detect in the Confucian revival in China a change in philosophical direction among members of the intelligentsia even as the state sought a new source of legitimacy in the rediscovery of a national past relevant to a post-communist future driven by the market. It would be questionable to claim that Singapore espoused Confucian or Asian values to advance its relations with rising China.